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Percy is nineteen, not quite twenty, when his mortality burns away, and the pain makes the lava he survived in Mount St. Helens seem like a cooling balm.
It feels like an eternity, as the divinity in his veins immolates every last cell in his body, reshaping him into something inhuman. Something transcendent. Something he never wanted to be.
Afterwards, Grover says it was only minutes, his brilliance turning every monster in the area to dust. Grover’s fur is singed and his is skin lightly burnt.
The poison sits around him in small puddles, but every last drop of it is gone from his friends’ bodies, and that’s what matters.
Percy wants to cry. The jagged thing in his gut that he felt crack in Tartarus is gone now. It cannot be put back together or smoothed over this time.
Percy wants to cry, but he can feel every drop of liquid in his strange, new body, even the tears as they form in his ducts, and it’s so disconcerting that he almost throws up instead.
Annabeth and Nico and Will are alive, the poison pulled from their veins.
All it cost was Percy’s mortality. At the end of the day, it’s a small price, and one he does not regret paying.
…
When he drags his quest-mates back to Camp, Rachel and Chiron are waiting.
The old centaur takes one look at him and bends his knees dipping into supplication before Percy can protest.
Rachel gives him a bitter smile, her eyes full of tears that Percy can almost taste on his tongue.
“Hail Perseus,” she announces as the campers who have known him for years fall to the ground, bowing, “god of loyalty, poisons, purified waters, and natural disasters; patron of demigods.” Then, she, too, gets on her knees.
Only Dionysus stays standing, a can of Diet Coke raised in a mocking toast, the purple flames in his eyes almost glowing in the dusk light.
It barely takes a thought for Percy to crush the can and spray soda all over his smug face.
…
For years, Percy ignores his ascension, or, he tries.
He’s got a baby sister at home and a half-finished degree in marine biology going at New Rome University.
It’s hard to feign mortality, though, when every desperate demigod on a quest has a direct line to his brain via prayer.
Percy becomes better at splitting himself into parts than he is at identifying algae. He knuckles through the rest of his bachelor’s degree out of sheer stubbornness, but by the end of it, he feels even less human.
He’s at a graduation dinner and he’s in the Labyrinth with a scared thirteen year old in orange and he’s in Nevada as a sixteen year old in purple faces a bevy of venti. He’s lending strength and saving lives and mercifully ending others, and he’s laughing and mourning all at once.
He tries to eat the steak in front of him, smiling at his mother and Paul as he reaches over to tickle Estelle, but all he tastes is ash, his body craving ambrosia.
…
Ten years on, Dionysus looks at him after he’s carried yet another too young, too small, too hurt demigod child over the borders of Camp.
The feverish little girl is in the arms of Cabin 7’s best healers now, and Percy prays to Apollo and Asclepius that she will pull through. He pulled the poison from her wounds and kept her injuries from bleeding out, but he’s no doctor.
“You care too much,” Mr. D says, almost sympathetic if not for the heavy layer of bitter sarcasm. “You’ll get over that sooner than you think.”
“Fuck you,” Percy snarls back. “I’ll never stop caring.”
“Give it couple of centuries. We all stop caring, kid. It’s the only way.”
“I won’t,” Percy swears.
He barely notices when Dionysus leaves, a plate of ambrosia in his wake. Percy’s divine body reminds him that he is weak and hungry, and he eats, anger and worry like fire in his veins.
The little girl survives, and as Percy watches the symbol of Nemesis appear over her head, he thinks about Ethan Nakamura, and he hopes that he’s doing enough.
…
When Dionysus leaves Camp Half-Blood at the end of his punishment, Percy takes his place in the Big House.
He is the patron of demigods, and he lives in Camp Half-Blood and Camp Jupiter and he lives next door to every mortal parent desperately trying their best to care for the divine blessing left with them. He is everywhere, but home is the Big House now.
…
He’s not proud of the earthquakes and floods that come when Frank dies.
By the time they lose Leo and Piper, Percy has a bitter grip on his grief, but the world still howls with him.
Slowly, surely, he loses his friends, his family, and the heroes he tried so hard to safeguard.
Annabeth’s passing wrecks him, no matter how peaceful it may have been.
Nico hangs on for most of a century, but even he dies eventually, and then Percy has so little left to tie him to the life he lived before.
He’s been a god so much longer than he was ever mortal, and it will only get worse.
He refuses to let it turn him bitter.
Day after day, he dons a mortal guise, slightly too small and too tight, and he lives and works among the mortals.
He’s the teacher who listens—the one who fights for adaptive educational plans. He’s a social worker, removing kids from abusive homes and settling them with the network he and Rachel built with Hera’s help.
He’s the stranger on the bus, making babies smile and he’s the ghost of a guardian, blessing the half-blood children who are too young for Camp but old enough for the school and social systems to be failing them.
He gives and he gives and he lives.
He takes lives and saves them. He rewards and punishes, and he keeps walking among the mortals, refusing to grow out of touch with culture and language as it shifts and grows and morphs into a thousand bright and colorful tomorrows.
He lives on prayers and nectar and ambrosia, and it’s enough.
He makes it enough.
…
Percy kneels on the battlefield, tears streaming down his face as he holds the mangled body of a ten-year-old in his arms.
More dead and dying children surround him, and rage stirs in his veins, echoed by a hurricane off the coast and a volcanic eruption across the world.
He’s furious down to the marrow, and even Ares hangs back as Percy rises.
“War is inevitable,” Ares says, and it’s not a taunt, it’s a dirge. An apology. Ares closes eyes and places drachma over them, telling Charon to give these kids priority on their way to the judges of the underworld.
“It shouldn’t have to be,” Percy says at last, his voice burning like lava and quiet like the razed earth.
He ensures the funeral rites of each demigod—each child—and then he takes up his anger with their parents.
Dionysus finds him outside of the throne room about five years into Percy’s crusade.
“You know, I did not say it to be cruel,” he offers. The twins jets of fire in his eyes are almost as soft as Hestia’s hearth. “I know just how hard eternity can be, little cousin.”
“I know.” Percy has lived through enough to understand that now. He looks up at the elder demigod-turned god. “But I still won’t stop.”
Dionysus shakes his head. “When your mind snaps, I’ll be waiting.”
Percy laughs, but it’s humorless and scrapes like coral.
…
It takes almost a decade of fighting and bargaining and oaths and treaties, but Percy finally succeeds.
The non-interference laws are reduced, and under-trained children can stop fighting proxy wars for their uncaring parents.
Percy has no children by blood, but every demigod is his, and any godly parent who fails to respect their children knows that Percy will take them instead. And that is a threat.
The first time he adopted a child, overwriting Nike’s claim on her young son who shattered his leg after pushing through the pain one too many times, it shook Olympus to its core.
The cabin built in his honor, only years after his ascent, is never empty.
And yet, over time, Percy makes the gods change.
They learn to see their children as more than mere tools or worshippers.
The numbers in his cabin dwindle by the time Percy turns five hundred.
He does not mind.
…
Percy raises thousands of children over the centuries. He loves them all, and he mourns them all, eventually.
He understands Chiron better these days than he ever did as a mortal child, but he never lets himself build a wall. He never keeps the children out.
They are his, and he loves them. They are his, and he knows them.
After seven hundred years, one of his surrogate children falls into Tartarus. Percy tries to follow, but Poseidon and Hades hold him back.
“Perseus, they did not survive the fall,” Hades murmurs, a placating hand like a vise around his bicep. “It is a mercy,” his uncle says, sympathy in his voice, and he knows for a moment that they are both thinking of Nico.
“You didn’t let me try,” he sobs.
His father holds him close even as he thrashes and struggles, stirring up disaster for the mortal realm.
He hears the campers on the west coast pray, and he desperately tries to quell his rage. His grief still floods the world.
“Percy, oh my son,” Poseidon murmurs, “I am sorry, but even the gods cannot go there.”
“I survived once,” he snarls. “I was mortal then. Now I could—“
“No,” Poseidon interrupts. “Now, you would go there and you would become a god of the Pit, and then all of your children would be without you. You cannot leave them.”
The breath he doesn’t need hitches in his lungs. He wants to protest, but somehow he knows his father is right. The fight leaves him.
Poseidon kisses his hair, and no matter how old Percy may be, he knows his father will always see him as his baby. His embrace is crushing.
“I know just how terrible it is to watch your child fall and to be unable to follow. I am sorry.”
Percy lets his head fall onto his father’s shoulder. “I was not an easy child.”
“No,” his father agrees with a subdued chuckle. “I blame the gray in my hair entirely on you, child.”
Percy protests, “You can change your appearance!”
“To an extent, but it often reflects my emotional state, and you have caused me a great deal of worry.”
Percy sighs, exhausted and grief-stricken, and Poseidon rubs his back.
“You have raised more demigods than I have,” his father muses. “It is a wonder that more of your hair is not gray.” He flicks the streak from the Curse of Atlas.
“Give it a few centuries.”
…
A thousand years into godhood, Percy stands on the porch the Big House, watching the children play.
The countries and cultures have changed, but the children are still his, and he knows each one by name. He knows their hopes and dreams and fears. He helps them with homework and swordplay. He watches Apollo and Artemis teach archery each Sunday. He watches Ares and Athena lead capture the flag each Friday.
Zeus visits seasonally and listens to the Council of Demigods while Percy moderates.
Hera blesses weddings, Hermes plays gentle pranks on the kids, and Demeter teaches gardening classes while Triptolemus lectures on farming techniques.
The gods are more present and more worshipped than they have been since the decline of Ancient Greece.
Percy watches it all with a smile on his face.
Dionysus appears at his side, a goblet of wine in one hand, a blue Coke in the other.
Percy takes the offered can and clinks it against the goblet.
“You won,” Dionysus says after a long sip.
“Of course I did.”
His cousin laughs, and Percy’s smile turns mischievous.
“I gotta admit, I didn’t think it could be done.” Dionysus turns to face him. “I should have guessed that you would find a way.”
“I cared,” Percy says. “And I listened and I learned. I never assumed that I was done listening or learning. They are the future of Olympus.”
Dionysus looks at him for a long moment, and Percy can almost feel the thought he does not say. “Whatever you say, Peter Johnson.”
Percy laughs hard enough to shake the earth.