Chapter Text
Look, I didn’t want to be a vigilante.
A few months ago, all I wanted was to spend the rest of my life alternating between living in New York with my mom, Camp Half-Blood with my friends, and New Rome with Annabeth. I might’ve even sprinkled in some time in Atlantis with my dad, if he kept up the semi-good parent shtick he currently had going on.
But no, the fates can’t spare me for even a moment. Gods forbid I be happy for two seconds.
For anyone who might not know, my name is Percy Jackson.
I’m seventeen years old. I’ve fought gods, made my way through Tartarus, and saved the world from certain destruction at the hands of Titans and Primordial beings. Twice. The gods offered me immortality when I was sixteen years old, but I refused. They’re still careful around me, nervous that I’ll someday ascend to godhood of my own accord–against my will, mind you.
(Right. The gods. I’m the son of Poseidon: god of the sea, earthquakes, horses, and tacky Hawaiian t-shirts, which will probably help explain my entire life before this and some of what’s coming up. Not entirely, but at least somewhat partially, which is good enough.)
And yet somehow, after watching so many of my friends be murdered by powers beyond the comprehension of most mortals, I stayed loyal. I fought the gods’ fights, bled on their behalf. I was their soldier for five years.
I was hoping to finally get the chance to stop soon, go to college with my girlfriend, start a life that didn’t involve me risking my life 24/7 for a pantheon that was split between killing me without remorse or using me as a demigod battering ram against whatever forces came at them.
But then my mom died. That’s what finally broke me.
You would’ve thought it would have been fighting a literal war on my sixteenth birthday, or maybe having my memories erased by a goddess and sent across the country like a box marked “NOT FRAGILE, DROP EVERYWHERE”, or even having a nosebleed that awakened one of the most dangerous beings in all of creation. But no, I could handle that. What I could not handle was the sickening crunch of a truck slamming into the hood of my stepdad’s car. What I could not handle was the screams that were gutted out of my mom and Paul’s throats as their bodies were crushed. What I could not handle was being dragged out of my mom’s car by three police officers, kicking and screaming, my eyes trained on her corpse in the driver’s seat.
I can handle the end of the world.
I couldn’t handle the end of my world.
It was my fault. After I got home from fighting Gaea, my mom decided she couldn’t stomach the idea of me being involved in any more godly conflicts. She couldn’t stand to see me get put in lethal danger again. So she packed up everything we owned, stuffed the boxes into the trunk of Paul’s Toyota Prius, and planned out a life for the three of us in the one place in the continental United States that the gods can’t reach: Gotham City, New Jersey. Home of the Batman. I was supposed to stay with them for a year, just until I graduated high school and went to college. Once I was an adult, the gods have a slightly lesser authority to put me in life-threatening situations as if it’s just another Tuesday. Mom was planning on reaching out to her cousin, some guy named Bruce Wayne, who she hadn’t seen since before her parents passed when she was five. Apparently he was a big name, but I’d never heard of him. To be fair, demigods are cut off of most of the world for a good chunk of our lives, since we can’t use a lot of tech without becoming a beacon for monster attacks. But he was supposed to be a great help to us. Mom said he was a philanthropist, so I was hoping for cash or check. But we didn’t even get the chance to call him like we meant to once we crossed the state border. Just after we crossed the border into New Jersey (ew), some guy driving 103 miles per hour on the highway crashed head-on into our car.
All I could do was scream in terror. I hadn’t done that in years. But as I watched the front of the car compress, crushing two of the most important people in my life, it was like all I was and would ever be was screaming. I don’t think I stopped until some highway patrol officers got me into their car, trying their best to comfort me. The rest of that godsforsaken night is mostly a blur. I remember them saying how it was a miracle I survived, how the damage seemed to stop just in time to leave me relatively unharmed, how it must have been some welcome divine intervention. That almost made me laugh. Divine intervention, sure, but absolutely not-fucking-welcome. The gods almost killed me dozens–no, hundreds–of times over the years, and now they choose to spare me? And they didn’t even save my mom? It would’ve been almost ironic if I wasn’t completely and utterly devastated. Some cops showed up, splitting up between the attacking car, my mom and Paul’s car, and me, slumped over in the backseat.
I was asked some questions: my name, age, who the “victims” were to me. That one nearly made me fight. They weren’t “Victim One” and "Victim Two”, that was my mom and stepdad. My mom wasn’t a victim, she’d never been a victim. She was a fighter. She’d never lost a fight, physical or mental. Not in any way that mattered. I refused to accept that she’d broken that streak. The cops quickly backed off of it after I practically snarled at them, the Mist allowing them to see that I was just enough of a threat that they wouldn’t push me much farther. They left for a while, then came back with my backpack–blue, of course, with fish printed all over it. Mom and I got a kick out of it. She had a matching one in the trunk, except hers was pristine. My fish had faces drawn onto them with Sharpie by the little campers. I snatched it out of the cop’s hands, holding it to my chest tightly enough that my knuckles turned white.
The guy put his hands up in mock surrender, revealing that he was holding a piece of paper with familiar handwriting on it.
“Hey, kid, I promise I’m not stealing your backpack,” he said, walking over to the other side of the car and opening the door for me. I glared at him, not exactly willing to talk, but climbed out. He shut the door, giving me a comforting smile. I glared. “Officer John Willson,” he stuck out a hand for me to shake, which I did not. “Newark Police Department. First of all, kid, I am so sorry for your loss. I can’t–”
This is the one part of the night I can remember clear as Atlantis waves. I put up a hand, cutting off his words.
“Don’t,” I growled, glancing to my right. Conveniently, the Hudson River was nearby. If I just angled myself right… the water was disgusting, but I could make it work for a couple hours. “What do you need?”
“You want to get right into business? Alright, that works for me,” Willson nodded, leaning against the highway patrol vehicle. “That was your mom, right?” He didn’t wait for confirmation, unfolding the paper in his hand. “She left this in her glove box: “Bruce Wayne, (856) 123-4567. Wayne Manor, 1007 Mountain Drive, Gotham.” Any clue why his name and info in particular? He your guardian?”
“Her cousin,” I said, shuffling towards the edge of the cliff just a few feet away. “They haven’t seen each other in years. We were moving to Gotham so she could be close to him. He’s her only family left.” At this point, I was practically catatonic. All I could think of was my mom, who she was, what she wanted, and the water below, calling me to fall in and never come out.
“Uh-huh,” Willson pulled out a pad of paper and a pen from his utility belt, scribbling something down. “Do you have another guardian you can stay with? I can see that the two of them were married, so he’s either your father or step-father.” He raised an eyebrow, watching me expectantly. This guy was not great at comforting the mourning. He just wanted to get it over with, that was clear by the way his eyebrows stilled, his shoulders stayed loose, his eyes didn’t crease. This was just a job to him. My mom’s life was just another thing for him to cross off of a checklist.
“Yeah, I can go stay with my dad for a while,” I said, taking a few more steps. Almost there… “Paul is my stepdad.”
“Woah, kid, can you come back on over here?” Willson hurried over, reaching out a hand to pull me back towards the car. “Sorry, but since you just had such a life-altering event, standing so close to the Hudson might not be such a—”
“Good idea?” I finished for him, dodging his hand and taking one final step. I looked down at the churning river below. I’d made farther distances before. This would be a piece of cake. I paused for dramatic effect–come on, let me have my fun–before mockingly saluting Willson with two fingers. “Good thing I don’t get a lot of those. This’ll just fit right in.”
And then, before he could grab for me again, I sprinted off the side of the cliff and dived, my fishy backpack clinging to my shoulders as I splashed into the water, choosing to immediately sink to the bottom and let my tears mix with the water completely surrounding me.