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The boy looked up at him, and Poseidon could see a thousand questions in his eyes.
The first time he had looked at him, he had been all of three days old, son of an exhausted mother — practically passed out in the bed beside him, he hadn’t had any of those looks.
He hadn’t known anything. Poseidon had had so many children. He could not have claimed to have been the best of fathers to them — standards of what a good father should be and what was possible and what he was willing to do ebbed and waned through the centuries and millennia.
Perseus was his first child in almost seventy years, and while he might not have been fully keeping up, he knew that by this century and country’s standards, his parenting had fallen woefully below the mark.
Fathers of the twenty first century were supposed to be in the house, to throw a ball, and be around. Poseidon had exactly zero for three in these respects.
And now that boy would hold the weight of the world on his shoulders, and decide for them. What would become of them.
It was a chilling thought.
His last children had been smote because of the prophecy that Perseus would now fulfill. And then die in the process of. No lifetime kleos for him. Only the hope of Elysium.
He had stood there, checking that Sally was still asleep, checking that the rats in the building would leave this apartment alone, and that the lead in the pipes would be cleared, as he held his son, and beheld him.
He had brushed downy hair off his tiny forehead in that two room illegal sublet, and watched as he smiled, unknowing about the danger he was in. Would be in for the rest of his life.
Poseidon had made a choice then. He continued to make that choice now. And he had been selfish.
Perseus Jackson would live a short, dangerous, and painful life. He could, or could not ensure the success of the gods for another generation. He might be their destruction. He might be their saviour. There was no way to know, as of yet. Not for anyone but the Fates themselves.
Poseidon might have doomed all the gods, his siblings and children, and wife, and kinsmen. Simply by having this child he could have ended it for all of them.
The prophecy would always be fulfilled. They might have outrun it from the end of the war till now, but they couldn’t hold it off indefinitely. One of the three of them was bound to break at some point. His only point of pride was technically Zeus had done it first. He was clear from blame there.
But nowhere else.
Perseus was his son, but the Olympians were his family. This was the society that they had all built and maintained and kept going and been worshiped by for thousands of years. To throw it all away on a boy who was only going to die in the blink of an eye, even if he lived to a hundred, was a fool’s game, really.
He had beheld that three day old, and thought about it. Genuinely. Human, and human adjacent children died for all sorts of reasons, didn’t they? Measles, and plague, and breathing problems, and just dropping dead for no apparent reason. It wouldn’t take much to still the boy’s lungs long enough to cut off the oxygen to his brain, to sever an artery somewhere, to just stop his heart outright.
Kinslaying was a sin against the gods, but he was a god. What consequences could he really face for this? Certainly none of his family would visit them on him if he had preserved them thus, by ending his mistake, his misdeed before he could grow up to cause any problems for them.
Perseus had never had an idea that that was what Poseidon had been thinking about him. Fates willing, he never would.
Because he had almost done it. He had raised his hand, ready to press it to his chest and slow things down, slow them again, and again, and again until they stopped.
And the boy had woken up. He had blinked open one green eye, then the other. Green eyes like the sea. Like Poseidon’s on the gentlest days back in the Mediterranean, where the tide only ever lapped at the shore.
He had looked at his father for the first time in his life, and he had smiled.
And that was when the decision was made. That was when things were put in the path that could never be removed again.
Poseidon had held him for an hour or two after that, humming a song old enough that he had often wondered if Rhea had sung it to him before his father had chosen to devour him, or if it were something Hestia might have used to comfort him in the early days in their father’s stomach. Perhaps.
This was the second time in his son’s life that he was with him. And he didn’t know what to say. The right words evaded him like a fish avoiding a hook.
He wanted him to know. He wanted him to understand. And he wanted him to realise that Poseidon was sorry, not that he existed, but that his fate was short, and sad, and painful. That his father was selfish. That he wanted now for him to achieve Elysium because there was nothing better for him in this life. That he hoped he was well, and that his mother was well, always, even if this could never be true.
He managed to express some of that, at least. In clumsy, inefficient ways. He’d learned to speak English fluently, as it shifted and changed over centuries, meanings as fluid as water at times, but he had never thought it was quite as good as any dialect of Greek he had been able to speak. There wasn’t as much depth to it, as he could cause to flow into Ionian, nor the level of understanding that Aeolic had always held for him. The less said about Attic, the better, but even that was better than this ill-suited tongue.
But he said what he could. He told him to know that he was his son. And that he should go to his mother. It was all that he could do for the boy now. They would all have to live with that.