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A Curse of Mortality (or something).
By Emparra
Percy.
Of course, in all the tumult of the last decade or so, he hadn't noticed.
Then again, trying to stay alive and present and not post-traumatic episodic and in school with decent-ish grades would distract anybody who had ADHD and monsters with personal grudges trying to collect on his soul. And, honestly, by this point, Hades might not even accept it, and send him back because any time he'd been in the Underworld so far, it had only been trouble.
Thanatos might be strongly encouraged to "Put that thing back where you found it or so help me!"
At some point, though, the wounds kinda' just... stopped sticking. Which was nice, but a little weird. It happened in a slow creep. Like injuries hurt a little less, it took a little more strength behind more powerful weapons to break skin- almost like Achilles' curse was taking him back one cell at a time. But even that was still fast enough that a few years did the job. Slow and steady, an unstoppable force. Like Styx herself had taken offence that a Roman river spirit had washed away her hold on the offering he'd made of himself, and was determined to take him back.
(And she did, because oaths made with the waters of Styx are not lightly broken; the River Goddess Styx does not forget.)
And he'd never noticed.
Not until one day when celestial bronze broke his skin and it wasn't red that welled up but shimmering gold.
The River Goddess didn't appear often. Millenia passed between the times she took form beyond her banks. She disliked rising, disliked disturbing the course she flowed eternally because consistency is what kept her there the way she had existed since the Beginning. But after the battle with Gaia, after the dust settled and the world was set to rights again, a wisp of a dream visited him in the deepest hour of the night, and when the dawn broke the darkness, Percy was sure he must have dreamed something important... if he could only just remember what that was.
A caress from a goddess was weightier than mortality, but that was always heavy, so how was he supposed to know?
Demigods always walked the line between human and divine. The lines were never unblurred, and children of Zeus, Hades, and Poseidon toed that line the most out of all of them. They straddled it the most often, too; so powerful, so young, and pressed by necessity to tap into it far more deeply than most.
How was he supposed to know?
Sally.
Sally Jackson's son had an interesting introduction to the world of the mythical and magical.
She named him after Perseus, because this mighty son of Zeus was the only hero who did not end in tragedy.
Ironic, since if the gods discovered her son, Zeus would assuredly smite him without a second thought. Then what would be the point of hoping for a happy ending if there was hardly even a beginning?
It took until her boy was twelve years old before the Mist couldn't hold the line anymore, before he was drawn in and there was no return.
"The way is shut, and no man can open it."
But demigods walk the line.
Her son had always been so painfully human, so devastatingly divine, he saw through the Mist enough (less than she did, and wasn't that funny?), and embraced the joys of humanity in a way she hadn't seen many mortals do.
(He's not fully mortal, though, is he?)
It's like he knew his time would be short.
From such a little boy, he knew he must savor each moment with her, just like every time she drew out the hugs where his head tucked under her chin and she put her nose in his curly hair, like he didn't want to miss the feeling of her embrace, because he'd only get so many to add up.
Percy was a strong little boy, went along as best he could as life turned this way and that, got on the busses, walked up the steps and away from his mother so many times, changed the uniforms, roamed the strange halls to find his new locker again, like the kelp that floated on the tide.
In and out. Back and forth. Over and over. Tethered on the bottom and tossed about on the surface.
Patient. Waiting.
(Waiting for what?)
Then their ship came in.
The irony, again, was not lost on her that this father "lost at sea" was the key to a much bigger life, one where her boy could thrive in his elements, even though it's a crucible more often than not.
The tide couldn't be held back any longer with Gabe and boarding schools.
The tide came in, and Percy met what it carried in head-on.
Poseidon.
The funny thing is - the funny thing is - Poseidon did not wield him like the weapon he was first thrown into the world of the gods as. The last resort (because he was), the trump card...
Poseidon gifted this half-blood son his own blade, long-since cursed, powerful and terrible, but one made perfect for his hand. The nature of his father's domain healed, strengthened, and soothed. It soothed. Not the nectar of the ambrosia, not the magic and the poultices, but the enormous and consuming, unbridled, unfathomable cold of the god of the sea soothed down to his soul.
It always made sense to Percy, in ways nothing else really did, because the sea was in him, a part of his nature; the storm and the soft spray, the hurricanes that spun up around him or calmed at his will... his father had passed to his half-mortal son what seemed to the the balanced part of his essence.
Diverse.
Powerful.
Gentle.
The lord of the waters of the earth interested himself in this son's life, his education, concerned himself with his well-being - maybe drawn to this extension of himself by reason of that unexpected gentleness - drawn in a way he hadn't been in a long time-such a very long time.
This impertinent little boy who bound the gods to their word to change their ways, to pay closer attention to their offspring, to keep track of and claim them all, every single one, and see them safely to camp, and he had them all swear upon the Styx, was most interesting to watch indeed.
Poseidon's laughter after that day, after fighting and struggling against primordials and titans for so long, after this slip of a boy turned down immortality, turned down godhood and a seat among the Olympians, after returning to his palace on the ocean floor, the god of the waters laughed and the seas danced with his gaiety!
Let Zeus try to restrain that son of the sea!
Ha!
The Olympians would not soon forget Perseus, son of Poseidon, son of Sally Jackson.
Annabeth.
He's a destroyer, all right.
Her walls, her anger, her resentment- he battered them down so softly, so devastatingly kind that she didn't understand how until after it was almost done.
She wanted to dislike him. In fact, she did for a while as she watched him blunder around camp.
It was easy.
Then Annabeth met Percy, walked the path of that first quest with him, and the grounds she stood on began to quake and everything she had banked on had to be re-founded. He's the son of the Earthshaker, and her world was tossed up like so much gravel in a wind-storm.
But he was also gentle, in a twelve-year-old boy way, and she found that she and Grover could rely on him.
Period.
It's not just them against the world anymore. It didn't have to be.
Percy was there because he chose to be, over and over again, never went far enough away that he wouldn't come back, gentle and persistent like the tide on the shore.
It's also easy to like him.
It might be easier than hate.
(It really was, but too many people like to argue about that. Kind people are easy to like.)
He didn't need a storm to overcome the strategies and defenses she had against everything that had hurt her soul, he didn't need to shake the ground to break her will and every expectation. She found that her cast-iron outer defenses had begun to crumble, in the way that the tide erodes the mortar of castle walls, like the salt rusts iron gates into dust, brittle and vulnerable to gentle pressure.
She crumbled, but not into so many pieces that couldn't be put back together. Before it seems that all the pieces were down, there were already pieces picked back up in gentle hands.
His hands.
Her friend's hands.
She had friends now, plural, more than one, more than two, friends she could trust with the pieces of herself that she tried for so long to hide away.
Where Percy wore away the breaking masonry, he left smooth cliff-faces that she could defend from. The wild tragedies that swirled around him simply because he existed were the same ones that blew away the wobbly, untethered things that hid mountain bones, the stuff you could build a castle on. He wasn't the sand that slipped out from underfoot in the tide. He was solid in a way most people didn't manage to be at their best.
It made sense that his fate was something greater.
One cannot possess the sea, after all.
Finess