Chapter Text
The transition from the void to the vessel was not a singular event, but a slow, agonizing coagulation of consciousness. For an indeterminate period, there was only the thrum—a heavy, subterranean beat that vibrated through their liquid world. It was the sound of a heart that did not belong to them, a biological clock ticking away the seconds of their gestation.
They did not have a name yet. In the life before, they had been many things: a victim, a survivor, a shadow. That life had been a landscape of jagged edges and frozen winters, a place where the air always felt thin and the hands that reached out were more likely to strike than to soothe. Death had been a quiet exit, a sliding into the grey that felt more like a homecoming than an end.
Then came the pressure. The world, once a warm and muffled suspension, began to contract with a violent, rhythmic intent. It was an efficiency of biology that they found insulting. To be squeezed, pushed, and forced through a narrow passage into a world of sensory assault was the first of many indignities.
When the air finally hit them, it wasn't the breath of life; it was a cold, biting intrusion. Their lungs, previously filled with fluid, spasmed and burned. They did not cry out of distress or a need for comfort. They cried because the physical mechanism of their new throat demanded it—a reflexive siren to announce the arrival of a new predator in the nursery of the world.
Awareness returned in fragments. For the first few weeks, the reincarnator existed in a state of forced observation. Their eyes, milky and unfocused, could initially only discern the play of light and shadow on a cracked plaster ceiling.
Reincarnation, they concluded while staring at a water stain that resembled a distorted skull, was a deeply flawed system. If the universe intended to grant a "second chance," it was a cruel joke to house a fully formed, cynical consciousness within a body that could not even support the weight of its own head. They were trapped in a cage of soft meat and fragile bone.
They spent their days in a state of detached analysis. The world was a chaotic roar of stimuli—the screech of brakes from the Manhattan streets below, the clatter of pipes in the walls, the smell of old grease and floor wax. To a normal infant, this would be a terrifying bombardment. To them, it was data. They cataloged the sounds of the apartment building: the heavy, stumbling footsteps of the neighbor three doors down; the high-pitched trill of a telephone; the muffled arguments of a couple in the unit below.
They learned the geography of their confinement. The crib was a wooden construct, painted a fading white, with bars that looked like the ribs of a bleached whale. It was a prison, but a safe one. Outside the bars lay the apartment—a cramped, one-bedroom labyrinth of peeling wallpaper and mismatched furniture.
It was a place of poverty, or at least, of precariously held stability. They could see the way the light caught the dust motes dancing in the air, swirling in the draft from a window that didn't quite close right. The apartment smelled of the sea—a constant, briny undertone that shouldn't have been so prevalent in the middle of a concrete jungle. It was an anomaly they noted and filed away for future investigation.
Then, there was the woman.
Sally Jackson was the sun around which this small, dingy universe orbited. The reincarnator watched her with the clinical gaze of a taxidermist. She was young, her face often lined with a weariness that spoke of long shifts and short nights, but her eyes... her eyes were a problem.
They were filled with a terrifying, unconditional devotion.
Every time she leaned over the crib, her face illuminated by the soft glow of a moth-eaten lamp, she looked at them as if they were a miracle rather than a biological byproduct. She spoke to them in a low, melodic hum, narrating her day as she folded laundry or stirred a pot of blue-dyed food.
"You're so quiet today, my little sea-bread," she would whisper, her finger tracing the line of their jaw.
They did not respond. They did not coo, nor did they reach out with chubby, uncoordinated hands. They simply stared. They looked into her eyes and saw a depth of emotion they could not comprehend. In their previous life, love had been a weapon—a carrot dangled to ensure compliance before the stick was reintroduced. But Sally’s love seemed different. It was a heavy, suffocating blanket of warmth. It was irrational. It was inefficient.
And yet, they found themselves fond of her.
It wasn't a daughter's love or a son's love. It was the fondness an architect might feel for a sturdy foundation. She was reliable. She provided the caloric intake necessary for their development. She maintained the temperature of their environment. She was the barrier between them and the harsh, indifferent world outside.
More than that, she was the only thing in this new existence that felt real. The rest of the world was a blur of grey and noise, but Sally was vivid. When she held them, the phantom pains of their past life—the memory of cold floors and sharp words—seemed to recede into the back of their mind. They didn't love her, but they decided she was theirs. An asset to be protected. A constant in a sea of variables.
As the months bled into one another, the reincarnator began to map the silences of the household. The most profound silence was the one left by the father.
There were no photographs of a man on the mantelpiece. There were no extra shoes by the door, no masculine scent lingering in the hallway. Sally never spoke of him with bitterness, but rather with a haunting, bittersweet reverence that made the reincarnator’s metaphorical skin crawl.
They contemplated this absence with a cold, logical curiosity. In their previous life, "Father" had been a title held by a man who used his size to dominate and his voice to diminish. To have no father was, in their estimation, a net gain. A missing variable was better than a hostile one.
However, the absence was loud. It was present in the way Sally would sometimes stop mid-motion and stare out toward the East River, her expression lost in a localized fog of memory. It was present in the way she checked the mail, looking for letters that never came.
The reincarnator deduced that the father was likely a transient—a man who had drifted in on a tide of charm and drifted out when the reality of a child became too heavy to carry. They felt a flick of disdain for the man, not because he had abandoned them—they preferred the solitude—but because he had left Sally to carry the logistical burden alone. She worked double shifts at the candy shop. She came home with aching feet and eyes red from exhaustion, yet she still found the energy to sing to a child who never smiled back.
The father was a ghost, and the reincarnator had no time for spirits. They were too busy focusing on the mechanics of their own growth. They practiced moving their fingers with precision. They tracked the movement of the moon across the sky, calculating the passage of time. They were a mind of thirty-odd years trapped in a brain that was still busy knitting its neurons together.
They struggled with the concept of "self" in this new world. Sally called them "he" and "him," dressing them in blue onesies and tiny socks. The world would look at them and see a boy.
Inside the shell of the infant, the reincarnator felt a profound sense of neutrality. They were not a man. They were not a woman. Those were labels for people who felt a connection to their biology. To the reincarnator, this body was merely a vehicle—a biological suit they had been forced to wear. They didn't feel the need to correct Sally, nor did they feel a kinship with the gender she assigned them. They were an it. A consciousness. A static hum in a frequency the rest of the world couldn't hear.
They looked at their small, soft hands and felt a sense of revulsion. These hands would grow. They would become strong. They would eventually be capable of the same violence that had ended their previous life.
The memories of that past life were a great, never-ending wall of pain. It wasn't just the abuse; it was the drabness of it. The way the world had been stripped of color until everything was a shade of slate. They had been a shadow in that life, moving through the world without leaving a footprint, trying to be small enough to be forgotten.
Now, they were the center of Sally Jackson’s world.
It was an uncomfortable position. They didn't know how to be a "person." No one had taught them how to exist without the constant threat of a shadow looming over them. They were a creature of the dark, suddenly thrust into a room full of light, and their first instinct was to squint and find a corner to hide in.
They watched Sally sleep in the chair beside the crib one night, her head lolling to the side, a strand of hair falling across her face. In the silence of the apartment, the reincarnator felt a strange, cold sensation in their chest. It wasn't warmth. It wasn't heart. It was a calculation.
This woman is the only reason I am not currently starving or cold, they thought. She is the only one who looks at this shell and sees something worth nurturing.
The passage of time for a developing human is a biological sludge, but for a mind already tempered by the friction of a previous existence, it was an agonizingly slow crawl through a sensory swamp.
By the time the body reached six months, the entity within had mapped every crack in the ceiling of the Upper East Side apartment. They had cataloged the precise frequency of the radiator’s hiss and the exact number of steps it took for Sally Jackson to cross from the kitchenette to the crib.
It was during this period of forced physical inadequacy that the label finally took root.
"Percy," Sally would say, her voice a soft anchor in the chaotic sea of the city. "Percy, look at the blue cookies. See? Just for you."
The entity—the reincarnator—stared at the cookie. It was a defiant, vibrant blue. It felt like a quiet act of rebellion, a splash of color in a life that was otherwise a grind of gray shifts and mounting bills.
Percy.
They rolled the name around the silent corridors of their mind. It felt like a jagged stone. In their previous life, names had been things used to summon them for punishment or to identify them in a ledger of grievances. They hadn't been a "person" back then; they had been a utility, a punching bag, a silent witness to their own undoing.
To be called "Percy"—a diminutive, a soft-edged sound—was a psychological dissonance they found difficult to reconcile. It was a name meant for a child who laughed, a child who skinned their knees and ran to their mother for a bandage. It was not a name for a cold, analytical observer who viewed the world through the lens of crystal defined detachment.
They lay on the rug, ostensibly playing with a wooden block, while their mind drifted back to the Wall.
In their internal landscape, the previous life was represented by a Great Wall of Pain. It wasn't a singular event, but a cumulative architecture of misery. They remembered the smell of stale beer and the sound of heavy boots on floorboards. They remembered the way the air would turn cold with anticipation before the shouting started.
They had been a shadow in that life. A genderless, formless thing that existed only to survive. No one had taught them how to love, because love was not a currency used in that house. They had learned instead the mechanics of the flinch, the geometry of the hiding spot, and the chemistry of the silent scream.
By the time death had claimed them, they weren't a human being anymore. They were a machine designed for endurance. They had survived the unsurvivable, but the cost had been their humanity. They had emerged on the other side of the veil as a creature of ice and calculation.
And now, they were "Percy."
There was a profound, simmering irritation in their chest as they watched Sally hum a lullaby. If the universe was going to reincarnate them, why leave the memories? Why leave the blueprints of the old, broken machine? If they had been born a blank slate, perhaps they could have actually been the boy Sally saw. They might have felt the warmth of her hugs instead of merely measuring the caloric transfer. They might have smiled back instead of mimicking the facial muscles of a happy infant to ensure their primary caregiver remained stable.
The memories were a poison. They were a constant reminder that this new life was a farce.
The body was a constant source of frustration. They were a he. They dressed it in overalls and tiny sneakers. But the reincarnator felt no kinship with the concept of masculinity, nor did they feel the pull of femininity. They were an it. A consciousness that happened to be occupying a male-shaped meat-suit.
They hated the way people looked at them in the park. Strangers would lean over the stroller and remark on "his" big green eyes, "his" messy black hair. They wanted to tell these people that there was no "him" here, only an observer recording their banal interactions.
They practiced speech with a clinical precision that unnerved Sally. Most toddlers babbled; Percy spoke in deliberate, clipped syllables when they chose to speak at all.
"Mama," they would say, testing the word. It was a functional vocalization. It produced a specific, positive hormonal response in the woman.
"Oh, Percy! My smart boy," Sally would gush, pulling them into a tight embrace.
The reincarnator would go limp in her arms, resting their head on her shoulder. They didn't feel the "spark" of maternal bond that books described. What they felt was a sense of ownership. Sally was the only creature in two lifetimes who had offered them something without demanding a pound of flesh in return. She was a curiosity. A soft thing in a hard world.
They decided to protect her. Not out of love—they weren't sure they were capable of that—but out of a sense of tactical necessity. If the world was a cold, grey wall, Sally was the only splash of blue.
As they grew mobile, they began to analyze the apartment with more scrutiny. It was a fortress of the working class. The walls were thin enough to hear the neighbors' televisions, and the plumbing groaned like a dying beast every time someone flushed a toilet.
The living situation was a direct result of the father’s absence. Sally worked herself to the bone to keep this tiny box of space. She took extra shifts at "Sweet on America," coming home with the cloying scent of sugar clinging to her skin.
The reincarnator—Percy—would sit on the floor and watch her soak her feet in a basin of warm water. They saw the weariness in the slump of her shoulders, the way she counted out crumpled dollar bills on the kitchen table to see if they could afford both the rent and the "good" milk.
The father... was a deadbeat. Those were common in the world.
Percy didn't feel the hole in their heart that most fatherless children were supposed to feel. They felt only a cold, simmering disdain. To leave a woman like Sally to struggle in this concrete hive while he presumably ran free from responsibility, a tactical failure and a moral bankruptcy.
One afternoon, Sally was folding laundry while the radio played a low, buzzing jazz tune. Percy was sitting in a patch of sunlight, staring at their hands.
The past life was trying to bleed through again. They remembered a cold winter, a hand wrapping around their throat, the feeling of being absolutely, utterly alone. The pain was so vivid they could almost taste the copper of blood in their mouth.
They squeezed their eyes shut, forcing the memories back into the dark.
"Percy? You okay, baby?" Sally asked, her voice filled with that incessant, beautiful concern.
Percy looked up. They saw the sunlight catching the grey strands starting to peek through her dark hair. They saw the calluses on her fingers.
They realized then that they were no longer just a shadow. They were a shadow with a name. A shadow with a blue cookie and a mother who would walk through fire for them.
The irritation flared again. They didn't want to be different. They didn't want to be "Percy." They wanted to be the cold, unfeeling thing that had died in the grey. Because that thing didn't have anything to lose.
But as Sally reached down and ruffled their hair, a small, involuntary shiver ran through the reincarnator’s body. It wasn't fear. It was the terrifying realization that they were beginning to adapt.
The name "Percy" was starting to fit. Not because they liked it, but because Sally loved it. And in the nihilistic void of their soul, that was the only logic that mattered.
They looked at the wooden block in their hand—a simple cube with the letter 'P' burned into the side. With a slow, deliberate motion, they threw it across the room. It hit the wall with a satisfying thud.
"P," Percy whispered, their voice raspy and strange to their own ears.
Sally beamed, her face lighting up with a radiance that almost made the reincarnator flinch. "Yes! P is for Percy!"
No, the entity thought, staring at the block. P is for Predator. P is for Pain. P is for the Puppet I am becoming for you.
They allowed a tiny, ghost-like smile to touch their lips. It was a lie, but it was a lie that made Sally happy. And for now, that was enough. They would play the role of this new existence afforded. They would wear the name like a shroud.
But deep inside, behind the green eyes and the messy hair, the shadow was waiting. It was counting the days until it was big enough to reach out and grab the world by the throat.
The night was a heavy, humid shroud draped over the Upper East Side. Inside the apartment, the air was stagnant, smelling of overheated radiator pipes and the faint, lingering scent of the blue dish soap Sally used. Outside, the muffled roar of New York City—a cacophony of sirens, tires on wet asphalt, and the distant, rhythmic thumping of bass from a passing car—served as the white noise to Percy’s existence.
Percy—the entity currently inhabiting the soft, pliable ribcage of an eight-month-old—lay in the crib, staring at the ceiling. Sleep was an inefficient use of time for a mind that didn't truly tire, but the infant brain was a demanding master, prone to shutting down without warning. Tonight, however, the biological imperative was overruled by a shift in the atmospheric pressure.
It started as a tension in the inner ear, the sharp, popping discomfort one feels when a storm is miles away but moving with predatory intent. Then came the scent. In a landlocked apartment, miles from the nearest clean coastline, the room blossomed with the smell of the deep Atlantic. It was not the brine of the docks or the rotting kelp of a city beach; it was the sharp, ozone-heavy scent of a brewing hurricane and the ancient, crushing cold of the abyss.
Percy did not move. They did not cry. They simply turned their head toward the center of the nursery, their green eyes—unnervingly steady for a child—tracking the displacement of air.
The man did not walk through the door. He simply was. One moment the shadows were empty, and the next, they were displaced by a figure that made the very molecules of the room hum with a low-frequency vibration. He was tall, dressed in a weathered windbreaker and shorts, looking like a man who had stepped off a fishing boat and into a nightmare. He glowed—not with a light that illuminated the room, but with a presence that seemed to push back the reality of the peeling wallpaper.
Percy watched him. Their analytical mind, honed in a previous life by the constant need to track a predator’s shadow, went into overdrive. This was not a human. The geometry of his face was too perfect, the stillness of his posture too absolute. He was a hole in the world, a gravity well pulling at the edges of Percy’s consciousness.
The man stepped closer. He didn't lean over with the clumsy, cooing affection of a human faced with the rounded eyes of a child. He stood like a monument.
"You look like me," the man whispered. His voice wasn't a sound; it was a resonance felt in the marrow of Percy's bones.
Percy didn't blink. They stared back with a flat, predatory intensity. They were looking for a weakness, the 'tell' that every abuser in their previous life had possessed. But this thing was seamless.
A creak, hinges rusted and plied with layer upon layer of paint that failed hide the aging and waning of the building.
The door didn't just open; it yielded to the atmospheric shift that had already claimed the room. Sally Jackson stood in the threshold, a silhouette of domestic fragility against the encroaching divine. She didn't drop the glass of water in her hand, though her knuckles were white enough to rival the porcelain of the sink she had just left. She simply stood there, her chest heaving with a rhythmic, stuttering breath that Percy—the entity in the crib—analyzed with clinical detachment.
"Poseidon."
The name was a heavy stone dropped into a still pool. Percy watched the man—the thing—turn. The movement was fluid, lacking the microscopic hitches of human musculature. When he looked at Sally, the room didn't just smell of the sea; it felt submerged. The pressure against Percy’s eardrums intensified, a physical manifestation of the mancreatureentity, attention shifting from the spawn to the lover.
"Sally," he replied. His voice was a low-frequency vibration that made the slats of the crib rattle against Percy’s fingers.
"You shouldn't be here," she said. Her voice was a fragile thing, yet it held a core of steel that Percy found fascinating. She walked into the nursery, her stride purposeful. She didn't go to the man; she went to the crib. She stepped directly into the line of sight between the God and the infant, a biological shield standing against a cosmic storm.
Percy noted the tactic. It was an instinctive move, a maternal gambit, but in the cold theater of Percy’s mind, it was also a data point. Sally Jackson was willing to die for this meat-suit. She was protecting the asset, even if she didn't realize the asset was a hollowed-out shadow of a person.
"I had to see him," Poseidon said, his voice echoing like waves in a sea cave.
Sally looked down at Percy. Her face was a landscape of exhaustion, her eyes rimmed with the red of sleepless nights spent worrying about rent and milk and the strange, silent child she had birthed. "My boy," she croons, devastated, loving, “my strange son. My love, mine, all mine.”
Percy listened, their mind a whirring engine of conjecture. The name Poseidon wasn't just a label; it was a key. In the previous life, the grey world had been governed by the laws of physics and the cruelty of men. Here, the laws were being rewritten in real-time.
Poseidon. The Greek God of the Sea. Earth-shaker. Storm-bringer. Father of Monsters.
The pieces began to fall into place with the sickening clarity of a puzzle being solved in a fever dream. If the man was a God, then the biological vessel Percy inhabited was a hybrid.
The entity in the crib felt a surge of nihilistic amusement. In a universe that had already seen fit to drag them back from the peaceful void of non-existence, why wouldn't it throw them into the center of a divine blood-feud? They weren't just a child; they were a biological anomaly, a bridge between the eternal and the ephemeral. A tragedy once told, another ready to unfold.
"He is a half-blood," Poseidon said, his voice dropping an octave, sounding like the grind of tectonic plates beneath the ocean floor. "And not just any. He is mine. My brother will kill him if he finds him. The monsters... they are already gathering at the edges of his scent. He is a beacon, Sally."
Half-blood. Percy processed the term. It was a clinical designation for a mutt. A creature that belonged to two worlds and was welcomed by neither. The mention of "his brother" was another piece of the map. If this was Poseidon, his brothers were Zeus and Hades. A triumvirate of power, locked in a stalemate that apparently involved the infanticide of their own nephews.
The concept of "scent" was the most troubling. It suggested that this body was biologically marked, a lighthouse for predators. They weren't just living in a cramped apartment; they were living in a bunker that hadn't been reinforced.
"I know," Sally whispered, her hand gripping the rail of the crib. "I’ll protect him. I’ll hide him. I’ll do whatever I have to."
"You cannot hide the sea," Poseidon countered. The light in his eyes flared, a sudden surge of bioluminescence that cast long, distorted shadows across the nursery. "He will grow. His power will manifest. And when it does, the world will shake. He carries the weight of a storm he does not yet understand."
Percy watched the exchange with the detached curiosity of a scientist observing two different species interact. They watched the way Sally looked at the God—with a longing that was physically painful to observe. It was a hunger for something that couldn't be held, a devotion to a disaster.
And Poseidon? He looked at her with a mix of pity and a distant, divine sorrow. It was the look a gardener might give a flower they knew would be crushed by the coming winter. He didn't see her as an equal; he saw her as a tragedy he had authored.
"He doesn't even know his name," Sally said, her voice cracking. "I call him Percy, but he doesn't answer. He just... watches."
"Perseus," Poseidon corrected, the name echoing with the weight of ancient bronze. "The one who survives. A name of hope."
Percy’s mental lip curled. Hope. Hope was the lie people told themselves when they were too weak to face the reality of their own destruction. They didn't want a name of hope. They wanted a name that sounded like a warning.
"Hold him," Sally begged. It was a desperate, jagged plea. "Please. Just once. You might never get the chance again. If the gods... if the laws you keep talking about... if they take him, I want him to have known his father’s touch."
The God of the Sea recoiled. It was a microscopic movement—a shifting of his weight, a tightening of his jaw—but to Percy, it was a thunderclap.
"I cannot," Poseidon said. His voice was thick with what a human would call emotion, but Percy saw it for the self-indulgent rot it was. "If I hold him, I will not be able to leave. And if I stay, I bring the wrath of Olympus down on this house. It hurts too much, Sally."
It hurts too much.
The words were a cold blade in Percy’s mind. They analyzed the God’s posture. He was vibrating with a localized grief, a divine indulgence in his own suffering. He was choosing his own comfort—his own "pain"—over the simple, human act of acknowledging the life he had created.
He was a coward.
Percy felt a familiar sensation settling into their gut. It was a phantom echo of the previous life, the feeling of watching the "Father" apologize for a black eye while reaching for another bottle. It was the recognition of a man who used his own feelings as a shield against his responsibilities.
Surely Poseidon had known the rules. He was a God; he had existed for eons. Surely he knew these laws, the jealousies of his brothers, and the fate of half-blood children. He had entered into this union with Sally Jackson with full knowledge of the carnage it would cause. He had sired a child he knew would be hunted by monsters, and now he was playing the victim because the reality of that choice was standing in a crib in front of him.
He had placed a bullseye on Sally’s back. He had condemned Percy to a life of being a "beacon" for predators. And now, he was standing in a dingy apartment, glowing with the power of the tides, claiming it "hurt too much" to touch the son he had essentially sentenced to death.
Percy’s gaze didn't waver. They didn't feel the sting of rejection; they had died long ago to such human weaknesses. Instead, they felt a profound, icy clarity.
This was their father. A king of the world who couldn't handle the weight of a seventeen-pound child. A negligent, powerful, selfish entity whose whims dictated the lives of those beneath him. He spoke of "wrath" and "monsters" as if they were external forces, ignoring the fact that he was the catalyst.
"Go then," Sally said. Her voice had gone flat, the hope drained out of it, leaving only a cold, hard exhaustion. She turned her back to him, her shoulders shaking with the effort of not collapsing. "If you won't hold him, then go. Don't make it harder."
Poseidon reached out a hand, his fingers trembling with a shimmer of sea-foam. For a second, it looked like he might touch her hair, but he pulled back. The air in the room became heavy, saturated with the smell of salt and the pressure of the deep.
"He will need to be strong," Poseidon whispered, more to himself than to her. "He will need to be the sea. The sea does not break, Sally. It only changes."
With a sudden, violent rush of air that smelled of ozone and ancient depths, he was gone. The room returned to its normal dimensions. The glow faded, replaced by the flickering orange of the streetlamp outside. The radiator began its rhythmic, metallic hiss again. The only evidence of the divine was a damp patch on the carpet and a lingering cold that seemed to have settled into the very walls.
Sally collapsed into the chair by the crib, her face buried in her hands. She sobbed quietly—not the loud, wailing grief of the dramatic, but the sound of a woman who had been holding up the sky and had finally let it crush her.
Percy lay in the dark, watching her.
They thought about the God. They thought about the "monsters" that were supposedly gathering. They didn't have the full picture—but they understood the mechanics of the situation.
The entity in the crib reached out a tiny, uncoordinated hand and gripped the railing. Their knuckles were white, even in the shadows. They looked at the damp spot on the rug where a God had stood and felt nothing but a cold, simmering disdain.
I am not your son, Percy thought, the words a silent vow in the dark. I am the consequence of your selfishness. You wanted the sea? You wanted something that doesn't break?
They watched Sally cry, and for the first time in two lives, the reincarnator felt a flicker of something that wasn't just calculation. It was a sense of debt. Sally Jackson had stood between a God and a crib. She was the only thing in this universe that didn't want something from them.
I will be the storm, Percy decided, their green eyes tracking a moth as it fluttered near the lamp. But I will not be your storm. I will be the one that drowns the world you built, just to keep her safe.
They didn't cry. They didn't coo. They simply waited for the morning, already analyzing the physics of their own body, calculating how soon they could walk, how soon they could strike, and how many ways a shadow could kill a king.
The sea, Poseidon had said, does not like to be restrained.
Percy agreed. But the sea also doesn't forget. And it certainly doesn't forgive.