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"What next?" Sally asks. She's trying her hardest not to sigh, and not to cry, and not to break down screaming.
She's pretty sure she saw a dryad watching them in central park yesterday. She's dead certain that the polite voicemail left by Percy's school is about to be another expulsion.
Percy looks up at her from where he's carefully balancing three mixing spoons precariously over the bowl of batter. He squints at the recipe, and Sally's heart aches.
"Chocolate chips!" he reads, after a pause, grinning with his own success.
"How many?" Sally asks.
Percy blinks his huge blue eyes. She loves him. He's her son, her golden sea-child, and she loves him, and she refuses to let the myths have him. He's hers.
"All of them?" he asks, after a second.
Sally laughs. Her feet ache and her eyes are dry and itchy, remembering the tears she'd swiped away before Percy got home from school.
She hands him the box of chocolate chips and watches him tip them all in. It's too many, probably, but it'll work. They'll make it work.
She'd known from this start that this would not be easy. The Greek myths are full of heroes. Sometimes their mourning mothers get a few lines, too. Sally does not want that end. She'd named him after a hopeful myth, for what little power names hold: Perseus, who lived. Perseus, who slipped through the loopholes of prophecy. Perseus, sacker of cities, protector of his mother. Perseus, who came home.
Percy's hands drum on the bench when he's finished, a little flutter of excitement. Like the sea, her son never stops moving.
"Mom?" he prompts, and she startles. "Anything else?"
"What do you think?" she asks.
He peers at the recipe again. All that's left is to bake it, Sally knows.
"Blue!" Percy says.
Sally laughs. Her boy of seas. "Blue? Really?"
He nods, serious but grinning. "The blue is essential," he says, and he hugs her tightly as she adds a small amount of food dye in, his little heartbeat racing against her side.
He can't stay in New York City. She doesn't tell him that today. Instead, they scrape the mix into a cake tin and put it in the oven.
Sally does the washing up and calls the school's after-hours line, like the message told her to, and finds out that their "academic environment is not the right fit for Percy," and that they "don't believe in expulsion," but "it would be best if he found a new place for next semester."
It's only then that she realises that they made cookie dough, a bit too runny but still cookie dough, and they've baked it in a cake tin.
The oven timer goes off.
"Looks like we got a few things wrong," Sally tells Percy, taking it out of the oven. it's steaming and the crust is dark and solid, but when she manages to get a knife through it the inside is still soft and dough-like, brilliant blue and studded with melted chocolate chips.
"That looks soooo good," Percy says. He's grinning. "Look what we made!"
Sally can't help but smile back. It's a disaster, but it's their disaster.
It tastes good, despite all the odds. It tastes like sun and chocolate and how she'd felt when she'd first held Percy in her hands, weeping and alone in a hospital bed: like love.
"This is the best," Percy says, his mouth blue with crumbs. He means it. He always means it. "You're the best, Mom."