Work Text:
“Is it odd?” he turned to his sister, always tending the hearth.
“Is what odd?” she asked, looking at him. “Will you not sit with me, Zeus?”
He looked around, but no one was there. Everyone had cleared off to their respective palaces and gardens and temples. He and Hestia were the only people around.
“It should have been me,” he said, in lieu of a real explanation. The circuitous route was far more comfortable here than the alternative. “My child, Hestia.”
“Your child instead of whose?”
His lip curled. He felt very juvenile all of a sudden, youth rising in him in a way it hadn’t in so long. They weren’t the great gods Zeus and Hestia yet, not Olympians, but just siblings trying to survive their father. “Who else but our illustrious brother?”
“You speak of Poseidon.” She poked a finger into the flames and a lot collapsed, a shower of sparks exploding upwards before they faded away.
Zeus sighed. It wasn’t a question. Though they had two brothers, full brothers, anyone who knew him knew that he would never call Hades illustrious, even in jest. “It should have been my child. He should have been my child.”
“Should?” she raised an eyebrow at him. “That’s not a reason. The Fates weave our lives thus. You have had one mortal child, the same as Poseidon, and your Roman self had another. And yet you want more.”
“My sons are the ones offered deification. If Perseus Jackson had been my son, if I had lain with Sally Jackson, rather than our brother, then he would have taken it. I would have made sure of it.”
“I do not see why you cannot make sure of it now.”
Food appeared between them, rich spiced meats, fat dripping from them, oily roasted vegetables with salt crystals gleaming. He picked up a bird’s leg and pulled the meat from it with his fingers. “He’s not my son.”
“No,” she said. “We have been over this, Zeus.”
“But he ought to be. The greatest hero of his generation, and that legacy belongs to Poseidon now, not me.”
“Your children bring you honour too,” she tried, but he laughed.
“The second Thalia took her vows, any legacy she made belongs to Artemis. I hear them in the agora praise her as a second Daphne, as the ideal maiden huntress, not as my daughter. Jason is dead.”
The fire crackled merrily, unknowing of the storm that dropped into the air. He coughed, and it cleared.
“You are not the only god to ever father great heroes,” Hestia said. Her voice sounded far away. He thought it might even be cold. “Theseus. Aeneas. Jason. Asclepius — whom, as I may add, also achieved apotheosis. ”
“They were heroes in the Age of Heroes,” he argued. “What heroes do you see now? What noble children of ours do you see rise up against our enemies now?”
She turned to him, her eyes black as coal, as reflective as the pit himself. Between his fingers, his food crumbled, falling to the ground. The meat he had consumed resolved to ash in his mouth. “I see no such being before me now, brother.”
He found some part of himself wandering through Central Park in Manhattan, the peak of Mount Olympus amongst its peers in the high rises and skyscrapers. As usual, the mortal disguise he’d assumed was a little taller and finer than average, but he was a god, he was the king of the gods. What else was he to do?
When he’d been forced to turn Thalia into a tree, he’d found himself down here a lot, in the green spaces, among the people, just a stranger on the street, not the king of the gods. He’d be damned before he ever admitted it, but it was what he needed.
Recently though, he hadn’t been here. He hadn’t needed to. Times were well, had been well since Apollo had defeated Typhon. There was no need for worry, nor unease. In this day and age, it was just unnecessary.
But sometimes he—
“Ow!” The person he’d managed to walk into jumped back, blinking, hands reaching for something in his pocket, before pausing. “Sorry.”
Zeus blinked. “Hello, Perseus.” To save the boy any kind of embarrassment over which god he might be, he edited his features, letting the ones that had fathered Thalia and so many of his children bleed through.
“Z— My lord,” he bowed stiffly, looking deeply ill at ease. He’d clearly inherited his father’s inability to disguise how he was feeling.
“Walk with me,” he commanded, letting thunder roll into his words like it was faraway at night, and only rain pelted the windows of a childhood bedroom. The danger could appear any minute, but for now it was only safe.
“I- I’m um, I’m kind of walking my dog right now?” he pointed his dog backwards, and Zeus spotted what he probably should have spotted a while ago. A hellhound, using the toilet at the side of the tree.
Perseus flushed a little, but his hand raised, and water from the ground pulled the pile completely away. “Groundwater table isn’t super far away here,” he explained.
“Your dog can walk with us also.”
He didn’t say anything for a good while as they strode through the various paths, past people of all walks of life on their way. Perseus didn’t either, his gaze fixed very firmly away from Zeus. Or perhaps just on his dog. Where exactly the boy had acquired such a beast, a tame one, or one that had been tamed by him, he wasn’t sure. Maybe he ought to watch a few of those recorded parts of Hephaestus TV he hadn’t caught up on in ages.
“So,” Perseus said eventually, his hands stuck into the pocket of his hoodie. “What brings you to Central Park?” And to me, was the unasked question that Zeus could hear bouncing around his head all the same.
“It’s peaceful,” he said.
“You enjoy peace?”
“Don’t you?”
He shrugged, “Three harpies tried to murder me this morning. I wouldn’t know what peace is. The only reason I haven’t been attacked here is because I’m with Mrs O’Leary, and I guess, you also?”
Zeus may not have been the boy’s father. He never would be. But the sting of paternalistic regret and guilt stuck through him right now. He wasn’t unrelated to how the boy’s circumstances were, after all. He had made the world, as much as Poseidon had made the boy to be put into it. Whose fault was the fate of Perseus Jackson.
He didn’t apologise. He didn’t say anything. When Percy turned to say something to him again, he wasn’t surprised to find a blank space where there had very briefly been a man.