Chapter Text
Song of the Chapter: Run Boy Run - Woodkid
"Run boy run! They're trying to catch you... Run boy run! This race is a prophecy."
At first, I didn’t believe it either. For a long time, I tried to convince myself that the world was just a series of random, shitty coincidences. I wanted to believe the monsters were just shadows cast by my own restless, hyperactive mind. But the Gods of Olympus are real, and their legacy isn’t just written in history books. It’s written in the blood of the children they leave behind.
Half human, half god. Half-bloods.
I’m Percy Jackson. Son of Poseidon, God of the Sea. Which basically means I have a permanent target on my back and a life expectancy that is, well… statistically speaking, pathetic.
Six years ago, long before I ever set foot in this mess of a world, three of the gods' children were running for their lives toward Camp Half-Blood with a young protector. The only place on this godforsaken earth that’s actually safe for our kind.
Only three of them made it.
The rain was coming down in freezing, horizontal sheets, turning the Long Island hillside into a graveyard of slick mud and jagged thorns. The air tasted like ozone and the sharp, copper tang of blood.
“We’re almost there! Just a little further!” A young Satyr's voice shouted out, cracking with a terror that couldn't be masked. His hooves slipped in the muck, his breath coming in ragged, desperate hitches as he struggled to keep his balance.
A blond boy led the way, his face young and unmarked, trying to project a confidence he clearly didn’t feel as his eyes constantly darted toward the treeline with every crack of thunder. A bronze sword hung tight in one hand, while the other white-knuckled the hand of a much younger, curly-haired girl, dragging her through the downpour. He glanced back. The shadows at the base of the hill were shifting—massive, snarling shapes with eyes like dying embers.
“Behind us! Move!” The young blond roared as he practically dragged a small girl with him.
Their desperate attempt to put distance between predator and prey was cut short when the Saytr went down hard. A root caught his leg, and he sprawled into the mud with an echoing cry.
“Grover!” The blond boy skidded to a halt and turned toward his fallen friend, his bronze blade flashing in the dark.
“Luke! My leg—it’s stuck! I can’t get it free!” The Satyr, Grover, scrambled, his fingers clawing at the earth. But the monsters were closing the gap. Their breath’s a foul, sulphuric rot that choked the air.
“I’ve got you,” The blond boy, Luke, grunted, throwing himself over the satyr, his eyes scanning the treeline where the now visible monsters, the Furies, were beginning to circle like vultures, their leathery wings snapping against the wind.
“Thalia, help!” The young girl cried.
Another girl stood at the crest of the hill, the wind whipping her black hair around her face like a halo of storm clouds. She looked at the glow of the camp in the distance, so close that the torchlight reflected in her blue eyes. Then she looked back at her group. At her closest confidante, a terrified little girl and a satyr who couldn't stand.
The reality of the situation became all too real. They weren't all going to make it.
And with that known, she made her decision.
“Keep going!” Thalia’s voice rang out over the thunder, hard and final. “I’ll hold them off.”
"No, Thalia! They’ll tear you apart!" Luke screamed, lunging toward her as she closed the distance. He tried to reach for her, but the look she gave him—cold, hard, and final—left no room for argument.
“Go, Luke! Help Grover, take Annabeth and go! I’ll be right behind you!”
It was a lie. A beautiful, selfless lie.
"Over here!" Thalia roared, the air around her ionizing with the ozone scent of a brewing storm. Her six-foot spear hummed, arcing with jagged blue electricity as she planted herself firmly between her friends and the lunging wall of Furies.
She levelled her spear at the first Fury, a lethal grin sharpening her features. "You want a piece of a god? Then come and get it."
Annabeth remained rooted to her spot beside Luke and Grover, her hair plastered against her skin by the relentless downpour. Rivulets of rain and tears traced jagged lines through the dirt on her face, as her eyes were fixed on the scene before her.
Luke’s hand clamped back onto Annabeth’s arm, his knuckles white. He looked back at Thalia, vibrating with the agony of a choice he hated—torn between the urge to run to her and the cold necessity of her command.
"Annabeth, come on!" he yelled, his voice raw.
He didn't wait for her to move. With one last, jagged look at the girl standing firm in the raging storm, he hauled Annabeth and a limping Grover over the crest of the hill before his own desperation made him turn back.
“No! Thalia! Don’t leave her!” Annabeth’s scream was the kind of sound that stays with you forever—the sound of a world breaking. She fought him, kicking and scratching, but Luke hauled her over his shoulder and began the desperate descent toward the glowing lights of cabins.
"STAY BACK!" Thalia commanded, her back to them. She couldn't afford to turn around; if she saw their retreating frames, her own resolve might falter.
The first Fury finally descended on her. Thalia spun, her spear shearing through a leather wing, and causing it to recoil, but the other two were already on her. A claw tore through her jacket, dragging her down into the mud—momentarily knocked off balance, but not giving up yet.
From the mud, she lunged upward. Lightning arced from the tip of her spear, a jagged white-hot branch that caught the second Fury square in the chest. The monster was blasted backward with a bone-shaking crack, its wings scorched and smoking as it spiralled into the dark night, screeching in agony.
She stood at the crest of the hill, a blur of silver and lightning, fighting with a ferocity that made the gods look small—but there were simply too many of them. As she fended off the two remaining Furies, more monsters surged from the shadows: hellhounds with eyes like coals and the lumbering weight of a Cyclops.
Caught off guard, a talon caught her shoulder, spinning her around, and the light in her eyes started to flicker. She was being buried under a mountain of teeth and fur. She didn't scream. She just kept stabbing, kept fighting, even as the darkness swallowed her whole.
“Thalia, no!” Grover’s scream tore through the rain from the base of the far slope, near the glowing cabins. Luke held him back with a pained, iron grip, his own face pale and slick with free-flowing tears.
“NO!” Annabeth shrieked. She lunged for the hill, but Luke’s other hand caught her arm like a vice, anchoring her to his side with a desperate, crushing strength.
Thalia Grace made her last stand that night, surrendering her life to save the three people she loved. As the light began to drain from her, broken at the crest of the hill she had refused to abandon while defending her friends, her father, Zeus, was too late to save her. But the god found another way for his daughter to endure.
A bolt of white-hot lightning slammed into the earth. When the smoke cleared, the monsters were gone, and Thalia was no longer a girl. She was a gift. A towering pine tree, its roots drinking in her final breath, its branches pulsing with a barrier that would protect half-bloods from meeting her same fate.
Every day, the story of Thalia’s bravery inspires me. And her tree protects my home and my friends.
But it doesn't always protect my head.
THWACK.
The dream shattered as my skull made violent contact with the hardwood floor of my bedroom. I groaned, the scent of rain and ozone replaced instantly by the smell of stale laundry.
“Fuck,” I muttered under my breath, rubbing the side of my head as I kicked free from the knot of bedsheets tangled around my legs.
I stayed on the floor, ignoring the cold floorboards and just staring at a dust bunny under the bed, waiting for my pulse to stop redlining.
It was the last week of school. Any other teenager in Manhattan would be stressing about their algebra final or obsessing over the fact that summer was finally within reach. I should have been thinking about the drive to camp or the fact that I was about to see my best friends for the first time in months. I should have been relieved.
Instead, I just felt more on edge than ever. It was like there was this prickly, localized feeling at the base of my skull that wouldn't go away. It had been getting worse the closer I got to summer break. I had a funny feeling that something big was about to happen… which was unusual considering that my tenth-grade year had been a weird, surprisingly quiet experiment in "normalcy.”
Meriwether Prep was one of those progressive, "find your own light" schools in downtown Manhattan. No grades, no uniforms, and a curriculum that felt more like a series of polite suggestions than actual education. For most of the students there, it was a joke. I didn’t really care, so long as I was able to mind my own business and get through the day without any trouble.
On a surprisingly decent note, I actually managed to make a new friend. Enter Tyson: a six-foot-six "charity project" the administration had taken on to make themselves feel better. I felt for the guy. His situation was clearly rough, and the school was footing the bill for his tuition and board just to keep him around.
He was massive, quiet, sensitive, and had all the social grace of a bull in a china shop, which naturally made him a magnet for the school's privileged assholes. So I spent most of the year playing bodyguard, which was objectively hilarious given he had five inches on me and could probably bench press a Toyota. But I genuinely liked the big guy. In return for the protection, he became my shadow at school and my constant companion on the afternoons he’d come over to hang out.
The guy was a total blank slate when it came to anything pop culture related, so I made it my mission to fix his nonexistent taste in music. We spent hours with me trying to walk him through the essentials of alternative and indie rock, though it was an uphill battle. I’d be mid-lecture on why a specific Strokes riff changed lives, and he’d just look at me with those huge, earnest eyes and ask if "The Arctic Monkeys" were actual monkeys that played the drums, and if so, did they have enough blankets to stay warm in the North Pole? I didn’t have the energy to analyze why a guy was in the tenth grade with the academic level of a fifth grader, but who was I to judge? I was the king of getting kicked out of schools. Between the two of us, I wasn't even sure who had the better claim to being "educated."
We’d really become the school’s premier misfit duo.
Oddly enough, I’d actually managed to make it through the year without a single monster attack, zero exploding toilets, and a suspicious lack of near-death experiences. For nine months, I’d let myself believe (stupidly, probably) that I might actually survive a school year without being expelled or "politely" asked to never darken the door of the premises again.
But as I walked home on the eve of the last day of school, having miraculously passed my chemistry final with both eyebrows still intact, the city felt different. The air was thick and stagnant, vibrating with a tension I couldn’t quite put a name to, but it was enough to make the hair on my arms stand up. The sensation at the base of my skull was back and humming. Whatever was brewing, I wasn't about to hang around in the open like a sitting duck to find out.
I climbed the stairs of our apartment building two at a time, and when I finally jammed the key into the lock at 4:15 PM, I was expecting the usual—the low hum of the radio or the smell of dinner already starting on the stove.
But, instead, I was met with silence.
"Mom?" I called out.
Nothing. I checked the living room, her bedroom, and the kitchen again – no one was home. I checked the clock on the stove: 4:20.
My mom and I had rules. They weren't just about being polite; they were about survival. Ever since the absolute shit-show with the Master Bolt and the "congrats, you’re a demigod" revelation, I’d become a high-frequency beacon for every monster within a fifty-mile radius.
To keep ourselves from spiralling into total paranoia, we’d developed a system: be home when you say you’re going to be home. Period. Since a cell phone was basically a GPS tracker for monsters, we relied on a steady stream of scrap paper to bridge the gaps: “Off to the grocery store, back by 5:00,” or “Mrs. Roberts needed help with her dresser. Come down when you’re in.”
Usually, we were spot on. But on the rare occasions one of us was even five minutes late, the air in the apartment would get so thick with stress you could practically carve it. Walking through that door meant either a sigh of relief or a heart attack. And I could already feel my chest start to tighten.
She’s fine, I told myself. She just stayed late at the school library.
Sally was working and attending NYU to pursue her dream of becoming an author. I didn’t know how she did it all—balancing work, classes, and raising a son who was, let’s be honest, a lot harder to handle than your average teenager. I opened the fridge, grabbed a blue Gatorade, and took a large gulp.
It’s fine. She’s fine.
5:00 PM. I paced the living room. For the first half hour, I tried to sit down and turn on the TV to relax. That lasted all of five minutes. I tried to tell myself it was just the R-train. The R-train was a piece of shit. Everyone knew that.
5:30 PM. Rush hour was in full swing, and the incessant chorus of blaring horns and screaming cabbies from outside the thin apartment walls was setting my teeth on edge. My heart rate was beginning to redline. Every footstep in the hallway outside made me twitch, and every groan of the building’s floorboards felt like a threat. I had to consciously stop my hand from diving into my pocket, fingers twitching for Riptide.
6:00 PM. Two hours. She was two hours late. My breathing was getting shallow, and I was starting to lose my grip. They got her, I thought. Ares came back. Or Hades. Or some nameless thing from the pit. They took her because of me. The walls of the apartment felt like they were leaning in. The silence was screaming. I was pacing by the front door, the bronze blade of Riptide in its full form, vibrating with the tremors in my hands.
6:15 PM. The lock finally turned.
I was at the door in a blur, the blade levelled from my chest, a snarl already tearing out of my throat. Whatever took my mother was coming back, and I was ready to slash and cut and kill until it told me where she was.
I was seeing red when suddenly, words cut through the haze.
"Percy! It’s me! Put that down!"
My mom stood in the doorway, clutching a bag of her school supplies, her face pale. She saw the three feet of celestial bronze inches from her chest and didn't flinch—she just looked at me with a terrifying kind of concern. Concern for me.
"The train," she panted, her voice shaking. "A power failure at 14th Street. We were stuck in the dark for two hours. I’m so sorry, honey. I’m so, so sorry."
I didn’t realize how much I was shaking until I tried to cap the sword, the bronze shrinking back into a ballpoint pen. The relief was a violent, sickening wave. "I thought... I thought you were gone," I croaked, my voice sounding like I’d been swallowing glass.
"I know. I know." She stepped inside and pulled me into a hug. I was taller than her now, but I still felt small in her arms.
“It’s okay, you’re okay now. I’m here,” she whispered, her voice soothing the jagged edges of my nerves.
I wish I could say that I was fine for the rest of the night.
Surprise! I was wrong, as per usual.
***
I woke up in the middle of the night, gasping, the image of my mother’s final stand against the Minotaur searing the back of my eyelids. My brain was reliving my worst memories on a loop. I looked at my clock: 3:00 am. I stumbled into the kitchen to get a glass of water, but halfway there, the floor seemed to liquefy.
Suddenly, the hum of the refrigerator sounded like a roar. The shadows in the corner weren't just shadows—they were monsters waiting for me to blink. I tried to take a breath, but the air had turned to liquid, and I was drowning. My lungs were burning, but no matter how hard I gasped, nothing went in.
I hit the floor, my back against the fridge, my hands clawing at my own throat. Something is in here, I thought, my mind racing in frantic circles. An invisible curse. The air is being sucked out of the room. I’m dying. I’m dying, and I’m alone. My vision began to tunnel. My heart was a frantic animal trapped in my ribcage, clawing to get out. I couldn't even make a sound; I was just a ghost in a kitchen, suffocating on nothing.
"Percy!"
The kitchen light flooded the room. I flinched, a ragged, pathetic sob escaping me as I tried to crawl away from the brightness. Sally was there, kneeling on the floor in an instant.
"Percy, look at me! Breathe with me!"
She grabbed my hands—they were ice-cold and shaking so hard I thought I was having some type of seizure. She pressed them flat against her chest.
"Feel that? Just follow my breath. In. Out."
I couldn't. My throat felt like it was fused shut. I stared at her, my eyes wide and wild, begging her to find the monster that was doing this to me.
"There's no monster, Percy," she whispered, her voice a firm, grounding anchor in the storm. "It’s just you. It’s just your brain. Breathe. Follow me."
It took forever. Slowly, the weight in my lungs began to evaporate. The room stopped spinning, and the "monsters" in the corner retreated back into simple shadows. I slumped against her, my forehead on her shoulder, drenched in a cold sweat.
"I’m… I’m okay…" I whispered, the words trembling. "I... I couldn't breathe."
"I know," she said softly, not letting go of my hands. "It's another episode, honey. A bad one. It was probably triggered by earlier."
"It felt real," I croaked.
She sat back on her heels as I rested my back against the fridge, her eyes searching mine in the harsh fluorescent light. She brushed a stray hair from my forehead. We were quiet for a while. The only motion in the room was my chest rising and falling in a slow, deep rhythm, and my mom rubbing my shoulder in a comforting, maternal way.
I stared at the linoleum, trying to force the phantom tightness in my chest to loosen its grip. It was pathetic, honestly—I’d stared down gods and monsters, but let my mom run late or leave me alone in a room that was a little too quiet, and suddenly my own lungs decided to go on strike. It wasn't new, though. Back when I was a kid, before I knew about Olympus and the Gods, I’d had these "episodes." They’d written it off as weird anxiety or stress, and after a few years, they’d mostly faded into the background. I thought I’d outgrown the suffocating panic.
Last year had ripped the scab right off, and now, my brain seemed convinced that danger was hiding behind every mundane shadow. It was incredibly annoying, having a mind that couldn't tell the difference between a high-stakes battle and the silence of my own living room.
"Maybe... maybe when you get to camp, you should talk to someone. Chiron, or maybe even Annabeth?"
I let out a harsh, dry laugh. "Yeah, right. 'Hey Chiron, hey Annabeth. Glad to see you, by the way, I’m losing my mind.' That’ll go over great." I deadpanned.
"They would understand more than you think," Sally whispered. She gave me a small, sad smile that actually managed to warm my chest, and she reached out to help me off the floor. "Come on. Let’s get you tucked in."
I nodded, feeling like a total child, and we walked together back to my small bedroom. I climbed into the twin-sized bed and pulled the blankets up to my chest like a shield.
"You’re safe, Percy. Just try to remember that." She kissed the top of my head and lingered for a second before finally backing out of the room.
I stared at the ceiling, listening to the floorboards creak as she walked away. I’m safe. My mom is safe. There are no monsters here.
I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to force the mantra to stick. Just one quiet night, I prayed to whatever god—if any of those assholes were actually listening—for just one dreamless rest. Give me that.