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Chapter Text

The last thing Percy Jackson remembered was the cool, damp sheets of his father’s underwater palace, the quiet groan of the Atlantic deep, and the profound, soul-deep exhaustion that came from saving the world—again. Sleep had pulled him under like a gentle riptide.

He woke up to sand in his mouth.

Not just any sand. Gritty, sun-warmed, smelling of salt, thyme, and goat. He coughed, spitting, and pushed himself up onto his elbows. The sea—a brilliant, impossible blue—lapped at his ankles. The beach was a crescent of white pebbles and dark sand, climbing to scrubby hills dotted with olive trees. The air was cleaner, sharper than any he’d breathed before.

And it was quiet. No distant hum of traffic, no planes in the sky. Just the wind, the waves, and the bleating of a goat somewhere up the hill.

“Oh, you have got to be kidding me,” he groaned, flopping back onto the sand. 

His clothes were still the soft, modern cotton he’d gone to bed in. His sneakers were soaked. Riptide was a reassuring weight in his pocket. So, not a dream. Probably.

He stood, brushing off sand, and scanned the horizon. No signs of civilization. Just pristine, untouched coastline. “Great. Just perfect. Dad? A little help? A ‘Welcome to Whatever-B.C.’ sign would be nice!”

The sea only whispered back, a familiar chuckle in the foam. Poseidon was listening, but his silence felt… different. Intentional. Ominous.

“Fine,” Percy muttered. “Be that way.”

He picked a direction and started walking. An hour later, he found a path. Soon after, the path found a village.

It wasn’t a town. It was a cluster of maybe twenty whitewashed huts with terracotta roofs, centered around a well. A few fishing boats were pulled up on a smaller beach. The people stopping to stare at him wore simple tunics of linen or wool. Their faces were weathered, open, and currently, slack with awe.

Percy sighed internally. Here we go.

He raised a hand in what he hoped was a universal gesture of peace. “Uh, hi. I’m sort of lost. Any chance you speak English? Or… ancient Greek? The really ancient kind?”

A young woman carrying a water jug dropped it. The clay shattered. She didn’t even glance down. Her eyes, wide and dark, were fixed on him. Then she sank to her knees. One by one, the others followed—fishermen mending nets, old men in the shade, children who had been chasing chickens.

“Oh, for the love of—” Percy began, but an old man, his beard grey and braided, stepped forward. He wasn’t kneeling. He was staring with the fervent intensity of a scholar who’d just found a lost text.

“Daimon,” the old man breathed, his voice thick with an accent Percy’s brain somehow parsed. “Spirit of the sea. You have come ashore. Your form is… is…”

“Annoyed? Confused?” Percy supplied. “Seriously, please stand up. I’m not a daimon. I’m just a guy who took a wrong turn at the Atlantic.”

But his words seemed to have the opposite effect. The way he stood, the confidence in his voice, the strange cut of his clothes—it all fed their certainty. The old man’s eyes fell on the faint, just-visible trident scar on Percy’s forearm, a mark that sometimes glowed when he was angry or using his powers. He pointed a trembling finger.

“Son of the Earthshaker,” he declared. The village let out a collective gasp.

Percy opened his mouth to deny it, then closed it. Denying his dad never ended well. Explaining he was from the future sounded like a one-way ticket to a straitjacket—or a sacrificial altar. He defaulted to his base setting: deflection with extreme prejudice.

“Look,” he said, crossing his arms. “I don’t know what you’ve heard, but I’m not here to… bless your crops or curse your enemies. I just need some directions, maybe some food that isn’t sand, and possibly a timeline. What year is it?”

The old man blinked. “It is the time of the sowing, under the gaze of the Lord of the Silver Bow.”

“Right. Helpful. Very specific.” Percy ran a hand through his hair. A breeze kicked up, swirling around him, carrying the scent of the sea. Unthinkingly, he muttered to it in Greek, the language flowing naturally. “Could you not blow sand in my face?”

The breeze immediately stilled, dying down to nothing as if chastised.

The village fell so silent he could hear the blood pounding in his own ears. The old man’s face was pale. “You command the very breath of the world.”

“I asked it politely!” Percy exclaimed, exasperated. “It’s a family thing! Look, forget it. I’ll just—” He turned, intending to walk back the way he came, and tripped over a loose stone in the path. He stumbled, arms windmilling, and to stop himself from falling face-first, he threw out a hand. A spray of seawater shot up from a puddle he hadn’t even noticed, arching like a liquid hand to steady his balance before splashing back down.

He righted himself. The puddle was now dry.

He looked at the villagers. They looked at him, their expressions having moved past awe into sheer, unadulterated terror and devotion.

“That was an accident,” he said weakly.

It was at that moment the trouble arrived. Not divine trouble. Mortal trouble. The clatter of hooves and the jingle of poorly-kept armor announced the arrival of five men on horseback. Bandits, by the look of them—greasy, armed with spears and short swords, led by a man with a scarred lip and greedy eyes.

“Well, well,” Scar-Lip sneered, his gaze sweeping over the cowering villagers. “Making offerings to a new rock, old man? Hand over your grain and silver, and we might leave your hovels standing.” His eyes then landed on Percy. “And who’s this pretty one? A tribute from a neighboring village? He’ll fetch a fine price.”

Percy felt the familiar, cold calm of battle settle over him. The villagers’ fear was a tangible thing, sour in the air. These men were bullies, plain and simple. He’d had enough—of being lost, of being worshipped, of this whole stupid day.

He stepped forward, putting himself between the bandits and the villagers. “How about you turn those nags around and ride back to the hole you crawled out of?” he said, his voice deceptively light. “It’s past your bedtime.”

Scar-Lip laughed, a harsh bark. “The tribute has a mouth on him. I’ll enjoy breaking that spirit.”

The bandits dismounted, spreading out. Percy didn’t draw Riptide. They weren’t monsters. He just needed to make a point.

The first man lunged. Percy sidestepped, using the man’s own momentum to send him stumbling into the dust. The second came from the side. Percy grabbed his spear shaft, yanked him forward, and tapped him gently on the temple with his own fist. The man’s eyes rolled up, and he collapsed.

“You fight like my grandma,” Percy commented, ducking a wild sword swing from a third. “And she’s dead.”

He moved among them like the tide—fluid, inevitable, unstoppable. A twist of a wrist here, a pressure-point tap there, a foot hooked behind an ankle. In less than a minute, four men were groaning in the dirt. Only Scar-Lip remained, his face mottled with rage.

“Witchcraft!” he snarled, raising his sword. “You’re using witchcraft!”

“No,” Percy said, his green eyes darkening. “I’m just better.”

Something in his tone, the sheer, unshakable certainty, made the bandit chief hesitate. In that moment, Percy’s anger and frustration—at his situation, at the stupidity of violence, at the whole cosmos for dumping him here—boiled over. He didn’t shout. He didn’t roar.

He sang.

It was barely more than a hum, a melodic sigh of pure, concentrated exasperation that escaped his lips. The tune was an old, half-remembered song his mother used to sing when she was frustrated with Gabe—a bluesy, mournful riff.

The sound hit the air.

It was beauty woven with thorns. It was the sigh of a wave giving up its ship, the crack of a heart breaking, the whisper of truth too sharp to bear. It didn’t echo off the hills; it echoed in the chests of everyone present.

The villagers gasped, tears springing unbidden to their eyes, overwhelmed by a rush of personal longing and sorrow.

Scar-Lip didn’t drop his sword. He froze, his weapon shaking. His eyes lost their malice, filling instead with a childlike, gut-wrenching terror. “The… the well,” he choked out, a sob tearing from his throat. “I pushed my brother… I was eight… he wouldn’t give me his toy cart…” He fell to his knees, weeping great, heaving sobs of decades-old guilt, his crime dragged into the sun by three haunting notes.

Percy stopped, clamping his mouth shut, horrified. The sound cut off, leaving a ringing, emotional silence more profound than any noise.

“What,” he whispered to himself, his own heart hammering, “was that?”

The bandit chief was broken, babbling apologies to the sky and the memory of his brother. His remaining men, shaken and confused, dragged him to his feet and onto his horse, fleeing without a backward glance, their menace utterly dissolved.

Percy stood there, trembling slightly. He looked at his hands as if they belonged to someone else.

The silence stretched. Then, the old man, the village elder, approached. There were still tears on his weathered cheeks, but his eyes held no fear now. Only a profound, solemn gratitude. He placed a hand over his heart and bowed deeply.

“You have saved us,” he said, his voice thick. “With your strength… and with your truth-song. You are not just a daimon. You are a guardian.”

Percy swallowed, the strange power still humming under his skin like a second heartbeat. “I didn’t mean to… I don’t know what that was.”

“A gift,” the old man said simply. “Or a burden. The gods weave as they will. Come.” He gestured towards the largest hut, near the central fire. “You need rest. And food that is not sand.”

The villagers rose, their terror replaced by a bustling, reverent energy. They didn’t crowd him, but their glances were full of awe. The woman who had dropped her jug brought him a cup of cool water from the well. A young boy shyly offered him a strip of dried fish.

Percy, his bravado gone, felt exhaustion crash over him. The fight, the shock of his new power, the sheer reality of his predicament left him hollowed out. “Thank you,” he said, and the words felt inadequate.

They gave him a space in the elder’s own hut, a pallet of clean straw and a woolen blanket. As dusk painted the sky in shades of violet and gold, the village shared a simple meal—barley porridge, olives, goat cheese, and flatbread. They didn’t ask him questions. They simply honored him with their quiet care.

Sitting by the communal fire, the weight of the day pressing down on him, Percy finally voiced the request he’d been holding back.

“I need to find my way,” he said to the elder, who sat beside him. “I don’t belong here. In this… time. This place. I need to get to the sea, to a temple, to anything that might… understand.”

The elder studied him in the firelight. “You seek the gods themselves.”

“I seek a way home,” Percy corrected softly.

The old man nodded slowly. “In three days’ time, men from our village travel to the harbor at Pylos to trade fish and oil. It is a place of many peoples, near a great sanctuary of the Earthshaker. If any path exists for one such as you, it may be found there.”

Three days. It felt like an eternity and a heartbeat. Percy nodded, a fragile hope kindling in his chest. “Thank you.”

“It is we who thank you,” the elder said. He gestured around at the peaceful, secure village. The bandits would not return. The truth-song had seen to that. “You have given us safety. We will give you what guidance we can. Rest now, son of the sea. Your journey has only just drowned, and begun.”

That night, lying under a roof of thatch, Percy stared into the darkness. The strange power—the siren’s truth—sang a soft, silent note in his veins. He didn’t know what it was, only that it had come from a place of deep frustration, a place that felt connected to his mother, to the sea, to the very core of who he was.

Far away, on a sunlit mountain, a god who had heard the faintest, most intriguing ripple of a new melody on the wind plucked a thoughtful chord on his lyre. The hunt was not yet. But the scent of the song was caught.

And in a bronze-walled hall, a god of war heard a different report—not of music, but of a fighter who moved like a storm and broke men not with blades, but with a look and a whisper. His interest, sharp and bloody, was piqued.

But for now, Percy Jackson slept, unaware of the divine eyes turning his way, dreaming of a blue apartment in New York and the sound of his mother’s laugh, which, he now realized, had always held a little magic of its own.

Chapter Text

The next morning, Percy woke to the scent of baking bread and the low murmur of the village beginning its day. For a disorienting moment, he expected the groan of a Manhattan garbage truck. Then it all crashed back—the pebble beach, the bandits, the song.

He sat up, running a hand through his hair. The power felt dormant now, a sleeping sea monster in his gut. He shoved the unease aside. Freaking out wouldn’t fix anything. Doing something might.

Stepping out of the elder’s hut, he was met with a scene of quiet industry. Women ground grain at querns, men prepared nets by the boats, children chased chickens. But the moment they saw him, everything stuttered to a halt. Hands stilled. Chatter died. Eyes followed him with a reverence that made his skin crawl.

They were treating him like a porcelain statue on a shelf—beautiful, powerful, and utterly untouchable. The tension was thicker than the morning fog.

“Right,” Percy said to no one in particular, his voice cutting through the silence. “This is not going to work.”

He marched over to where a young man, maybe a few years older than him, was struggling to mend a large fishing net, his fingers clumsy on the cord.

“You’re twisting the line wrong,” Percy said, crouching down. The young man flinched as if struck by lightning. “It’ll just snap again on the next big catch. Here, let me show you.”

Before the stammering fisherman could protest, Percy took the net. His hands, trained by years of celestial bronze maintenance and surviving monster attacks, moved with sure, efficient motions. He demonstrated the proper knot, strong and flexible. “My friend back at camp, she’s a daughter of… a great weaver. She’d have my head if I did a slipshod job.”

He handed the net back. The fisherman stared, then at Percy’s encouraging nod, tried to replicate the knot. He did it perfectly.

A slow smile spread across the man’s face. “It… it is better.”

“Told you,” Percy grinned, clapping him on the shoulder. The man didn’t melt into a puddle of awe. He just grinned back, the fear in his eyes replaced by dawning camaraderie.

That was all the permission Percy needed.

He didn’t ask if he could help. He just saw what needed doing and did it. He hauled water from the well until the cistern was overflowing, the heavy jars feeling like nothing in his arms. He helped patch a leaky roof, his balance perfect on the rickety ladder. He even took a turn at the grinding stone, his powerful shoulders making quick work of the grain, which earned him a few surprised laughs from the women.

But his real focus was the kids. They trailed after him in a silent, wide-eyed pack until he finally rounded on them, hands on his hips.

“Okay, gang. Staring contest is over. You want to learn something useful or just watch me sweat?”

A brave boy, the one who’d given him fish yesterday, piped up. “Can you teach us to fight like you did?”

Percy considered. Teaching demigod-style combat to ancient Greek kids seemed like a recipe for disaster. But teaching them to not be victims…

“Alright. But rule number one,” he said, his tone leaving no room for argument. “We’re not learning to fight to be bullies. We’re learning to protect. Your home, your family, each other. Got it?”

They nodded, solemn.

He found some straight, sturdy sticks. “First, stance. It’s not about being strong; it’s about being rooted. Like a tree in a storm.” He showed them how to stand, how to move their feet. He corrected gently, praised often. He turned it into a game, having them try to push each other over. Laughter, real and unfettered, began to ring out in the square.

Later, as they rested in the shade, a little girl pointed to the markings on an amphora. “What does it say?”

Percy looked at the crude Greek letters. He realized with a jolt that for these village children, reading was as mysterious as his powers. “It says ‘oil’. Here.” He took a stick and drew the letters in the dirt. “Alpha, Rho… that’s ‘ar’. This is ‘elaion’, oil.” He taught them a few basic letters, their names, the sounds they made. Their concentration was absolute, a different kind of battle fought in the dust.

At noon, he sought out the elders, not as a deity, but as a confused traveler. He sat with them by the well, accepting a cup of sour wine.

“Tell me about this place,” he said. “The lands around, the gods here.” He listened, really listened, to their stories of local nymphs, of bad harvests, of offerings made to Poseidon. He asked about the bandits—a recurring problem. He didn’t offer grand solutions, but he nodded, his green eyes serious, making them feel heard in a way a distant god never could.

As the sun began to dip, the evening meal preparations started. Percy watched as a woman prepared the communal pot of porridge, seasoned with a few precious herbs and a bit of salt fish. It was functional. It was bland.

A memory surfaced: his mom, after a long shift at the candy shop, transforming cheap ingredients into something magical. The desire to do something normal, something his, was overwhelming.

“Can I… try something?” he asked the cook, a formidable matron named Elpis.

She looked skeptical. “My lord, the food is humble, not fit for—”

“It’s perfect,” Percy interrupted, already rolling up his sleeves. “I just want to help. I promise I won’t poison anyone. Probably.”

With a hesitant nod, she gave him space. Percy took over. He chopped onions and wild garlic with a speed that made her blink. He knew how to coax flavor from the dried fish, toasting it lightly first. He found a stash of dried lentils and barley and started a second pot, creating a hearty stew with the herbs, adding a surprising splash of the sour wine to cut the richness. He even persuaded a boy to bring him some mussels and clams from the shore, which he steamed open over the fire with a little water and wild thyme, the briny scent mixing deliciously with the stew.

The village gathered, drawn by the unfamiliar, mouth-watering aromas. When the food was served, the first spoonful of stew brought a collective pause, then a murmur of pure delight. It was simple food, but layered, hearty, and full of a care they hadn’t tasted before.

Elpis took a bite, her eyes wide. She looked at Percy, who was nervously wiping his hands on his tunic. “You… you fight like a daimon, sing like a muse, and cook like Hestia’s own handmaiden,” she declared, her voice thick. “What are you?”

Percy, flushed from the fire and the praise, shrugged, his down-to-earth self fully reasserted. “Just a guy who likes to eat well and hates seeing people go hungry.”

That night, by the fire, there was no tense silence. There was chatter, and laughter. Children vied for spots near him. The elders spoke to him like a wise young kinsman, not an oracle. He was no longer a statue on a shelf. He was the strange, capable, surprisingly useful young man who fixed nets, taught their children, and made the best fish stew they’d ever eaten.

As he lay down to sleep, the knot of anxiety in his chest had loosened. He was still lost in time. He still had a terrifying, unknown power inside him. But for now, in this small village by the sea, he had found a foothold. He had helped, and in helping, he had been given a place.

Unseen in the shadows beyond the firelight, a scarred crow observed the scene before taking wing, carrying a report not of a distant, terrifying demigod, but of a compelling, contradictory leader who inspired loyalty with a joke and a bowl of stew. Its message would find a very interested god of war.

And high above, a listener who tracked the melodies of the world noted the new rhythm of this village—the harmonious clatter of a community put at ease. The source of that harmony was a song he was growing increasingly impatient to hear up close.

~~~

Two weeks settled into Percy like the rhythm of the sea against the shore. He was no longer a visitor, nor a deity. He was… Percy. The strange, ever-helpful young man from the sea.

His days found a pattern. Mornings were for fishing. He had a knack for finding the schools—a whispered plea to the water, a shared secret from a naiad in a tidal pool, and the village boats would come back groaning with silver-sided catch. Afternoons were for teaching. The “stick lessons” for the kids had evolved into a proper, if chaotic, training ground. He taught them how to fall without breaking bones, how to use their smaller size as an advantage, how to read the intentions in an opponent’s eyes.

“It’s not about winning a fight,” he’d say, parrying a wooden sword thrust from the bravest boy, Lysandros. “It’s about ending it fast so you can go home for dinner.” He’d disarm the boy with a gentle twist and ruffle his hair. “Or in your case, so you can finish your letters.”

The reading lessons in the dirt had moved to charcoal on smoothed shards of pottery. A few of the older children could now spell their names and read simple words. The elders watched this miracle with tears in their eyes, muttering that the son of Poseidon had brought them the wisdom of Athena.

Evenings were for stories. Percy, seated on a worn stone by the central fire, would tell them tales—carefully edited. The Minotaur became a cruel bandit king in a maze-like fortress. The quest for the Golden Fleece was a sea voyage for a prized ram’s pelt. He spoke of loyalty, of cleverness, of friends who were your anchor in a storm. The villagers didn’t hear myths; they heard parables that made their own struggles feel epic.

He was mending a particularly stubborn net one afternoon, the sun warm on his back, when the village dogs set up a frantic barking.

A stranger stumbled into the clearing.

He was a wraith of a man, lean to the point of starvation, his chiton torn and filthy. Dust coated his skin and his eyes held the hollow, skittish look of a hunted animal. He flinched at the sight of the villagers, his hands raised in a universal gesture of helplessness.

“P-please,” he rasped, his voice raw. “A crust. A sip of water. I beg of you.”

The villagers paused, their expressions a mix of pity and wariness. Times were hard; hospitality was sacred, but so was survival. The elder, Leodes, stepped forward, his face grim.

Before he could speak, Percy stood up, dropping the net. The stranger’s eyes snapped to him, and the man recoiled as if struck. Percy, with his powerful build, sea-green eyes, and the unconscious air of command he’d never lost, must have looked like a young warlord or a vengeful spirit.

The man fell to his knees, pressing his forehead to the dust. “M-my lord! I meant no trespass! I’ll go, I’ll—”

“Oh, for Olympus’ sake,” Percy sighed, the sound weary and utterly human. “Get up. You’re not trespassing, you’re just in time for lunch.”

The man peered up, bewildered. Percy had already turned, striding toward the cooking fire where a pot of his fish and lentil stew—now a village staple—simmered. He ladled a generous portion into a wooden bowl, grabbed a hunk of yesterday’s bread, and filled a cup with water.

He walked back and crouched, placing the food and drink on the ground before the trembling man. “Here. Eat slowly, or you’ll get sick.”

The stranger stared at the steam rising from the bowl, his nostrils flaring at the rich, herb-scented aroma. He looked from the food to Percy’s face, searching for mockery, for cruelty. He found only a steady, green-eyed gaze and a faint, impatient frown that said, ‘Just eat the food, man.’

Tentative fingers closed around the bread. He took a small bite, then another, then devoured it. He sipped the water, then attacked the stew with a quiet, desperate intensity. As he ate, color began to seep back into his gaunt face.

When the bowl was empty, he set it down with hands that no longer shook. He looked at Percy, who was now back on his stool, calmly returning to his net mending as if feeding starving travelers was a daily chore.

Tears welled in the man’s eyes. He didn’t bow this time. He placed a hand over his heart, his voice trembling with a different emotion. “I… I have walked from the east. I have seen the cruelty of men and the indifference of the hills. I was told this coast was barren.” He looked around at the peaceful, prosperous village, the well-fed children, the mended roofs. “But here… here is a sanctuary. And you…” His gaze locked on Percy. “You are no mere lord. You are eudaimon—a spirit of good fortune. A blessed one. Your hands mend nets and fill bellies. Your presence brings safety and full fish-nets. May the Fates weave you a long and glorious thread. May the gods themselves sing your generosity.”

He broke into a traditional song of blessing, his voice, though weak, carrying a trained, melodic clarity that hinted he might have been a bard before hardship found him. He sang of hearths that never grew cold and fields that always yielded, his improvised verses clearly painting Percy as the source of this bounty.

Percy shifted uncomfortably, a faint pink tinting his ears. “Yeah, okay, don’t get carried away. It’s just stew.” He pointed a stern finger at the man. “You’re staying put until you’ve got your strength back. Leodes, can we find him a corner to rest in?”

As the traveler was led away, still murmuring praises, the villagers exchanged knowing, proud looks. The stranger’s awe wasn’t the fearful kind they’d first shown Percy. It was the awe given to a true marvel—a force of nature that chose to build rather than break.

That night, as the fire crackled, the traveler, whose name was Phemius, told his tale of woe. Percy listened, but his mind was elsewhere.

The man’s song, his absolute conviction that Percy was some benevolent spirit, settled on him like a new weight. It was one thing for the villagers, who had seen him work and sweat, to accept him. It was another for a complete outsider to take one look and see a legend.

It meant the rumor of him was spreading. The story of the strange, powerful youth by the sea who fed the hungry and taught the young. The story of a new kind of power.

He looked up at the star-dusted sky, so much brighter here without city lights. Somewhere out there, gods were listening. Ares would hear of a warrior who inspired loyalty through stew and spear lessons. Apollo would hear of a mortal whose mere presence inspired spontaneous songs of praise.

His rhythm in the village was peaceful, but it was also a drumbeat, echoing further and further out into the world, calling attention he wasn’t sure he wanted.

Percy poked the fire with a stick, sending up a shower of sparks. Let them listen. Let them come. He had a village to look after, nets to mend, and, as of tomorrow, a very enthusiastic former bard to help find a new trade.

He was Percy Jackson. And he was done being a prize. If the gods wanted to find him, they’d have to get in line behind the breakfast shift.

Chapter Text

The rhythm of the village had a new, unexpected thread woven through it: Phemius, the traveler-turned-bard. The man had sworn a vow of service to his "blessed savior," and no amount of grumbling from Percy could dissuade him. He couldn't fight or fish, but he could carve. Soon, the children had proper wooden practice swords, smoother and better-balanced than their old sticks. He carved bowls and spoons, and even started a simple flute for one of the little girls. Percy had to admit, it was useful.

Three days after Phemius’s arrival, Percy was at the rocky cove where the village harvested mussels. He was alone, prying the blue-black shells from the stone with a practiced twist of his knife, the crash of the surf a comforting roar. It was one of the few places he could just be, without being watched.

A sudden, profound stillness fell. The waves didn't recede; they simply froze mid-crash, like a sculpted emerald curtain. The roaring silence was deafening. The air grew heavy with the scent of deep ocean trenches, brine, and power.

Percy straightened up slowly, his knife held loosely at his side. He didn't need to turn around. The presence behind him was as vast and familiar as the sea itself, but ancient, untamed in a way his future father never was.

"An interesting rumor drifts on the currents to my halls," a voice spoke, resonating not in the air but in the water of Percy's own blood. "A son of mine, they say. A blessing to a forgotten village. Yet I have no memory of your mother, and I know all my children."

Percy turned.

Poseidon stood on the water's surface as if it were polished marble. Not the comfortable, salt-and-pepper-bearded fisherman Percy knew, but a god in his prime. His hair was a wild, dark mane like a storm cloud, his beard threaded with seashells and bits of coral. He wore a simple, draped garment that seemed woven from shifting kelp and seawater. His eyes were the colour of a hurricane-racked sea, and they studied Percy with intense, unnerving curiosity.

The god’s gaze traveled over him, from his windswept hair to his calloused hands. A frown touched his lips. "You bear my mark," he mused, his eyes lingering on Percy's trident scar. "You command my domain with an ease that speaks of deep heritage. And you are... divinely favoured in form. Yet you are a stranger to me. How is this?"

Percy's heart hammered against his ribs. This was it. The moment it all fell apart. But years of facing down immortals with more ego than sense had forged a particular reflex: when in doubt, deploy sass.

He shrugged, trying to look nonchalant as he wiped his knife on his tunic. "Maybe you should get a better filing system for your kids' pictures. Just a suggestion from the one currently covered in mussel goo."

For a long, tense moment, Poseidon just stared. The frozen waves trembled. Then, a sound like the sudden crash of a wave against a cliff erupted from him. He threw his head back and laughed, a booming, joyous noise that made the very pebbles on the beach shiver.

"A filing system!" Poseidon boomed, mirth dancing in his chaotic eyes. "Impudent. Audacious." He wiped a tear of saltwater from his cheek, his gaze now holding a spark of genuine amusement. "They also say your tongue is as sharp as that knife. And that you wield a ladle with equal skill. Tell me, are the tales of your food as miraculous as they claim?"

Percy blinked, thrown off balance. Of all the questions... "Uh. I don't know? It's just food. You take what you have and make it not taste like disappointment."

Poseidon's grin was sharp, reminiscent of a great white shark's. "A humble demigod. A novelty. We shall see. The village sings your praises to the gulls. Do not disappoint them—or me."

With that, the god dissolved into a shower of sea spray and mist. The frozen waves crashed forward with a roar, the world's sound rushing back in. Percy stood alone, soaked and sputtering, clutching his mussels.

"Just once," he muttered to the retreating tide, "I'd like a parental visit that doesn't involve cryptic threats about seasoning."

The day passed in a blur of heightened awareness. Every gust of wind felt like a divine sigh. When he seasoned the evening stew, he found himself second-guessing the amount of thyme. Was it miraculous enough? The pressure was absurd.

That night, exhausted, he retreated to his corner of Leodes' hut. A small oil lamp cast a warm, flickering glow. He had just pulled his blanket over his shoulders when the scent of storm and deep ocean filled the small space.

Poseidon was there, leaning against the wall of sun-dried clay as if it were a pillar of his palace. He looked more solid now, less like a force of nature and more like an imposing, terribly interested uncle.

"You are awake," the god stated, his voice a low rumble.

"You're in my bedroom," Percy pointed out, sitting up. "Kind of creepy, not gonna lie."

Poseidon ignored the jab. His eyes gleamed in the lamplight. "I find myself... curious. The mortals speak of your food with a reverence usually reserved for ambrosia. I have sampled the feast of countless kings. Show me this 'not-disappointment.'"

Percy stared. "You want me to cook for you. Now."

"I am here."

Resigned, Percy sighed the sigh of all long-suffering children everywhere. He got up, padded to the small hearth where embers still glowed, and blew them to life. The villagers had, in their gratitude, started leaving little offerings for him—a bowl of olives here, a wedge of cheese there. He rummaged through his small stash.

He worked in silence, Poseidon's heavy gaze on his back. It wasn't a grand meal. He sliced the last of the day's bread and toasted it over the coals until it was crisp. He crushed a clove of wild garlic with salt and mixed it with olive oil, brushing it over the warm bread. He sliced the salty goat cheese thin, seared a small fillet of the morning's catch quickly in a hot pan with a sprig of rosemary, and arranged it all on a simple wooden platter. The final touch was a handful of the olives and a few dried figs. It was simple, rustic, and made in under ten minutes.

He shoved the platter toward the god. "Here. Don't get used to it."

Poseidon took the platter. He ate with a deliberate slowness, his expression unreadable. He ate the garlic bread, the seared fish, the cheese, the olives, one by one. He finished the last fig and set the platter down.

For a long moment, he said nothing. Then he looked at Percy, and the smug, proud expression on his face was so achingly familiar it made Percy's chest tighten.

"A miracle," Poseidon declared, his voice soft with wonder. "Not of ingredients, but of essence. You take the humble bounty of my sea and my earth and you... you honour it. You transform necessity into a gift. This is a power I have never seen. A different kind of creation."

He stood, looming in the small hut. "My brothers scoff, saying I sire only monsters and tempests." A fierce, possessive pride shone in his eyes. "But you... with a fisherman's knife and a hearth ember, you perform a quiet magic that disarms kings and soothes the Furies themselves." He reached out and clasped Percy's shoulder, his grip like the deep ocean's pressure, solid and inescapable. "Any god—nay, any being in all the realms—would be proud to call you their get."

Percy felt his face grow hot. He wasn't used to this kind of praise, especially not from this primordial version of his dad. He ducked his head, mumbling, "It's just dinner, Dad."

Poseidon's laugh was a quiet rumble. He leaned in, his stormy eyes glinting with mischievous, ancient humour. "With skills like these," he said, his tone light but unmistakable, "you could make a fine wife for a fortunate deity. A thought to consider."

Then, he was gone, leaving behind the scent of salt and a single, perfect seashell on the empty platter.

Percy stood frozen in the flickering lamplight, his entire face burning crimson. His brain short-circuited, caught between profound embarrassment, a strange swell of filial pride, and utter outrage.

"WIFE?!" he finally hissed into the empty hut, his voice a strangled whisper. "I saved the world! I fought Titans! I—I control hurricanes! And he's over here drafting my dowry?!"

He flopped back onto his pallet, yanking the blanket over his head, as if he could hide from the absurdity. But under the embarrassment, a tiny, warm ember glowed. His father, the Earthshaker, was proud of him. Not for his battle prowess, but for his garlic bread.

Outside, the sea chuckled against the shore, a sound of deep, divine amusement. The game, for the Lord of the Seas, had become profoundly entertaining. And he was not the only player now taking a very serious interest in the board.

~~~

The village of Krokyleia had always known peace, but it had been a quiet peace, hard-won and edged with the ever-present fear of bandits, bad harvests, and the whims of distant gods. Now, they knew a different peace—a vibrant, secure, and strangely musical one. And at the center of it all was Percy.

To Leodes, the elder, Percy was a blessed paradox. He had the power to shatter cliffs with a thought, yet he spent his mornings patiently untangling a child’s knotted fishing line. He commanded the sea like a king, yet he took direction from old Elpis on how she preferred her herbs chopped.

"He is a gift not of conquest, but of care," Leodes would murmur to the other elders as they watched Percy from the shade of the communal fig tree. "The Earthshaker did not send us a weapon. He sent us a hearth-keeper with the strength of a typhoon."

To the children, especially Lysandros and little Agape, Percy was the Sun that played. He wasn't a distant, shiny god to be feared. He was the brother who let you hang off his arm in a test of strength, who turned spear drills into hilarious games of tag, who drew letters in the dirt with a focused frown before breaking into a grin when you got it right. His laughter was their favorite sound, and the surety in his green eyes made them believe no monster under the bed stood a chance.

To the adults—the fishermen, the weavers, the builders—Percy was the tide that raised all boats. His presence meant full nets, mended roofs, and a sense of safety so profound it felt like a physical warmth. They didn't worship him; they relied on him, trusted him in a way they’d never trusted anything except the sunrise. When he worked alongside them, hauling a boat onto the sand or hefting a roof beam, there was no deity and mortal. There was just shared effort and mutual respect.

But it was among the young men and women of the village that a particular, hushed fascination hummed. It was a topic discussed in whispers by the well at dusk, in giggles shared while spinning wool.

He was, quite simply, the most beautiful being any of them had ever seen.

It wasn't the polished, statue-like beauty of the gods in the tales. It was a living, breathing, disarming beauty. It was in the way his sea-green eyes crinkled when he laughed, holding a universe of mischief and kindness. It was the effortless grace of his movements, whether wielding a practice sword or flipping a fish in a pan—a lean, powerful strength that promised both protection and passion. It was the unruly black hair that always looked windswept, as if he’d just stepped off a thrilling adventure. His smile was a reward, his focused frown a captivating mystery.

“He moves like the sea itself,” sighed Daphne, the potter’s daughter, as she watched him demonstrate a disarming move to Lysandros, his tunic pulling taut across his shoulders.

“And his voice,” breathed Nikias, a young fisherman who had found himself staring more often than was perhaps wise. “When he is not being sarcastic, it is like… like dark honey and deep water. And when he sang that once…” He shivered, not from fear, but from the remembered, exquisite ache of it.

They had all heard Phemius’s new song, the one that spread like wildfire:

“The Blessed One of the Salt and Hearth, whose hands mend wounds and bring forth worth. With storm’s own grace and mercy mild, he looks upon us and he smiles.”

It was this combination—the devastating beauty, the immense power, and the profound, gentle kindness—that sparked a universal, whispered hope in Krokyleia’s heart.

Surely, the whispers went, such a being was meant for love. And such love could not be contained by one.

“He would need a companion worthy of that spirit,” old Elpis would say, not unkindly, while kneading dough. “A strong heart to match his.”

“Or several,” young Daphne would whisper later to her friends, her cheeks flushed. “To appreciate all the facets of him. A warrior to admire his strength, a bard to capture his spirit, a cook to share his hearth… How could one person hold all of that?”

The idea wasn't born of lust, but of a kind of awed, pragmatic reverence. He was so far beyond them, so clearly more, that the logic of mortals stumbled. If one precious artifact was a blessing, a temple full was a sanctuary. To them, Percy was a walking sanctuary. The concept of a singular, exclusive romance seemed almost… miserly for a being of his generosity.

They had, of course, heard him. When playful teasing from a bold young woman named Callidora had ventured too close to flirtation, Percy had gently, firmly shut it down with a kind but unmissable finality.

“My heart’s a little busy,” he’d said, his gaze drifting for a moment to the distant, endless sea, a shadow of an unimaginable homesickness in his eyes. “And my hands are full with all of you lot. No romance for me, thanks. Too complicated.”

He’d said it with a smile, but the message was clear as spring water. The village had respected it immediately. Their hopes were not expectations; they were daydreams, harmless and heartfelt, like wishing for an extra-long summer.

They saw how he softened when teaching the children, how his eyes lit with true joy when a new recipe worked. They saw the sheer, breathtaking capacity for love in him, in every repaired net and every shared meal. It seemed a cosmic waste for such a heart to remain unattended.

So they dreamed their quiet dreams. They hoped that someday, perhaps, a love—or loves—mighty enough and vast enough would find their way to their Blessed One’s shore. Someone who could make that distant look in his eyes fade, someone who could match the vast ocean of his spirit, and give back a fraction of the warmth he poured so freely into their small, pebbled beach of a world.

Until then, they would simply love him as they could: with loyalty, with laughter, and with an endless supply of olives for his next simple, miraculous meal.

Chapter Text

The halls of Poseidon’s palace were never silent. There was always the groan of tectonic plates settling, the chorus of whalesong from the abyssal plains, the ceaseless swirl of currents against coral columns. But today, the Lord of the Seas heard none of it. His entire being was focused on a single, brilliant, and terrifying point of light in the mortal world.

From his throne of living pearl and basalt, Poseidon gazed into a shifting scrying pool. Not with water, but with intention. The image was clear: his son. Percy.

The boy—no, the young man—was repairing a stone wall at the edge of the village, his movements efficient and strong. A human child, Lysandros, chattered at his side, handing him rocks. Percy said something, and the boy laughed, the sound a bright, mortal bell against the deep drone of Poseidon’s own realm.

His son.

The words echoed in Poseidon’s divine consciousness, a truth that was both an absolute joy and a profound mystery. Percy was undeniably his. The mark, the power, the very salinity of his blood sang to the deep. Yet, he was an enigma. No mother Poseidon could recall. A past shrouded in a mist even he could not pierce. And a future that shimmered with terrifying potential.

Poseidon watched as Percy, finished with the wall, wiped his hands on his tunic and accepted a cup of water from an old woman. His thanks were genuine, his smile easy. There was no arrogance in him, no divine posturing. He moved among them not as a god, but as a particularly capable neighbor. It was this, perhaps, that was most disconcerting.

For Poseidon could see the power in him.

It wasn’t just the mastery over water, which was instinctive and deep as a trench. It was the aura that clung to him—a magnetism that was part siren’s call, part heroic arete, and something else entirely new. It was the echo of that truth-song Percy had unleashed, a ripple of power that had vibrated the very fabric of the Moirai’s threads. Poseidon had felt it in his bones, a melody that could, if wielded with intent, unmake oaths and lay hearts bare before the throne of Zeus itself.

A cold tremor, ancient and unfamiliar, went through the god.

Usurpation.

The thought rose unbidden, and Poseidon did not dismiss it. He knew the scent of ambition. He had breathed it in the air of Olympus since Kronos was cast down. He saw it in Zeus’s wary eyes, in Athena’s calculating strategies. If this son of his, with his effortless power, his unnerving humility, and that soul-piercing song, ever grew weary of mortals and mending walls…

If he ever looked at the throne of heaven and found it wanting…

The seas would rise. The earth would crack. And Poseidon, God of Earthquakes, Lord of the Deep, knew with chilling certainty whose side he would be on.

Not out of paternal love alone, though that was a tempest newly born in his chest. But because Percy represented something raw and real that Olympus had forgotten. He was power without pomp. Strength that served. A sovereignty born not of dominion, but of care. To stand against him would be to stand against the tide itself—futile and ultimately destructive.

“He is mine,” Poseidon rumbled to the empty hall, the walls trembling in response. “My treasure. My most unexpected wonder.”

And he would protect him. The veil he had cast around that stretch of coast and the village of Krokyleia was not a simple mist. It was a geas woven from the primal depths, a barrier that whispered nothing to see here to the senses of gods and titans alike. It blurred Percy’s dazzling divine signature into the background noise of a thousand sea-washed rocks. Let Apollo chase faint echoes of song. Let Ares sniff at rumors of battle-joy. They would find only coastline and the simple prayers of fishermen.

But it was a temporary measure. A god’s direct, persistent gaze could eventually pierce it. Hera’s suspicion was a slow, poison-tipped vine. Zeus’s curiosity, once piqued, was a lightning bolt seeking a rod. They were already stirring. He could feel their subtle probes, like fingers testing the surface tension of his veil.

They would try to “see.” To assess. To judge.

A low growl emanated from Poseidon’s throne, a sound that sent eels burrowing into sand and caused nervous dolphins to leap. The thought of any of them—pompous Zeus, jealous Hera, even wise Athena—looking upon Percy and seeing a mere demigod, a fascinating pawn, a threat to be managed… it ignited a rage more profound than any he’d felt for centuries.

Beneath them. The insult was cosmic. His son, who could cook a meal that tasted of devotion and fight with the seasoned grace of a war-god’s dream, was worth more than all their shining arrogance combined. Percy had known war. Poseidon could see it in the way he scanned a horizon, in the economical violence of his movements when provoked, in the shadows that sometimes flickered behind his eyes when he thought no one was looking. He had seen and done things that would break lesser spirits. The thought filled Poseidon not with pride, but with a fierce, aching sorrow.

He did not want a warrior for a son. Not anymore. He had sired many of those, and their fates were written in tragedy and blood. He wanted this. The boy laughing with mortal children. The youth who seasoned a stew with a careful, focused frown. The unexpected miracle of his presence.

He wanted to bring him home. Not to this sunless palace, but to the warm, sun-dappled shallows of his private domains. To where Triton could be baffled by a brother who preferred mussels to politics, where Amphitrite could perhaps be won over by his honest eyes and startling culinary skill. He wanted Percy safe in the heart of his power, where no Olympian gaze could fall upon him without Poseidon’s knowledge and consent. He wanted to bask in the wonder of him, this son who was a mystery and a masterpiece.

But he knew, with the grim certainty of one who understands the nature of both storms and sons, that Percy would not come. Not yet. The boy was rooted in that village, bound by a loyalty so fierce it was itself a kind of power. To drag him away would be to break the very thing that made him shine.

So Poseidon would wait. And guard. The veil would hold. Let the others scheme on their mountain. His son was under the sea’s protection. Every whisper of wave on that particular shore was his ears. Every crab in the cove was his sentinel.

He watched as Percy, now surrounded by the village for the evening meal, told a story, his hands painting pictures in the air. The mortals were enthralled, their faces bathed in firelight and adoration.

A profound, possessive tenderness swelled in the god’s chest, vast as the ocean floor. Let them try. Let any power in heaven, earth, or the abyss below try to take this from him, try to harm a single hair on his son’s head.

The seas would rise. The earth would shatter.

And the Earthshaker would remind them why some treasures are best left undisturbed in the deep.

~~~

The air on Olympus was thin, perfumed with ambrosia and the cold scent of eternity. Sunlight, forever at a perfect golden hour, glinted off marble colonnades and gilded roofs. In the grand megaron, where the Olympians convened, the usual tableau of divine ennui was broken by a current of something novel: a shared, prickling curiosity.

Zeus leaned back on his throne of storm-cloud and platinum, a bolt of masterfully contained lightning crackling idly in his palm. His brow was furrowed, not with anger, but with the irritation of an incomplete puzzle. "A son of Poseidon," he rumbled, the sound echoing like distant thunder. "A powerful one, by all accounts. And yet, he appears as if from the very foam, unknown and unheralded. My brother grows ever more secretive."

Hera, seated beside him with the rigid poise of a marble queen, let a thin, cold smile touch her lips. "Or careless. To sow such potent seed and forget the harvest? It reeks of a plot. This... Percy. A name without history. A power without provenance. It is an imbalance."

Athena, her grey eyes sharp as owl's talons, steepled her fingers. "The reports are contradictory, and thus, intriguing. He is said to fight with the instinctive, brutal grace of a natural force—Ares’s domain. He teaches letters and strategy to mortals—my own. He commands the sea with a familiarity that speaks of deep heritage—Poseidon’s, unquestionably. And now, there are whispers of a... vocal power. A song that compels not obedience, but truth. That touches no domain cleanly. It is an anomaly." Her tone was analytical, but a spark of intense interest lit her gaze. A new variable in the cosmic equation.

Apollo, lounging artfully against a pillar with his lyre silent for once, couldn't suppress a radiant grin. "Oh, but the song! Have you heard the whispers of it? They say it's not music as we know it. It's not my perfect, structured harmony. It's... raw emotion given sound. It's the crack in a heart, the sigh before a storm. I've caught only the faintest echo, like a melody heard through a thick fog, but it's thrilling." He plucked a single, yearning chord. "I must hear it clearly. I must know its source."

Artemis, standing apart with her hunters a silent, silver-clad backdrop, rolled her eyes. "A boy who sings and cooks and plays with mortal children. He sounds like a distraction. My woods are silent on him; he does not trespass on my domains. I see no threat, only another of my uncle's messy, noisy offspring."

"Plays with children?" Ares’s voice was a grind of stone on bronze. He leaned forward on his war-worn throne, his expression one of avid interest. "He shattered a band of seasoned raiders without drawing a blade. He didn't just defeat them; he broke their spirit with a look and a whisper. That is not 'playing.' That is the pure, potent essence of conflict—breaking an enemy's will is the highest victory. I don't care about his lullabies. I want to see this power in the heat of a real war. I want to taste the battle-joy rolling off him."

Dionysus, swirling a goblet of wine that darkened from violet to deep crimson, snorted. "Oh, please. He sounds dreadfully responsible. Mending nets? Teaching? He'd be a bore at a symposium. Probably water down the wine and lecture about hydration." But even his disinterest seemed performative; his eyes, deep and ancient, held a flicker of assessment. A being who compelled truth could be very inconvenient—or very entertaining.

Hermes, who had been zipping from one side of the hall to the other in a blur of motion, finally skidded to a halt. "The mortal gossip is fantastic," he reported, his cadence rapid-fire. "They call him 'the Blessed One,' 'the Keeper of the Hearth and Sea.' They say he makes food that tastes like a memory of home. They're half in love with him, and the other half want to build him a shrine next to the chicken coop. The interesting part? Poseidon has the whole area locked down tighter than Tartarus. There's a veil—a serious, deep-ocean-grade obscurement. My messages bounce right off. It's not just hiding the boy; it's screaming 'KEEP OUT' in the language of tidal forces."

A ripple of displeasure went through the council. A veil from Poseidon was not a simple concealment; it was a statement of sovereignty, a challenge.

"He hides him as one hides a treasure," Hera said icily. "Or a weapon."

"He fears our judgment," Zeus concluded, his grip tightening on the lightning bolt, making it sizzle.

"Or," Aphrodite purred, speaking for the first time from her couch of rose and dove feathers, a secret smile playing on her lips, "he fears our... appreciation." She examined the sheen of her nails. "A demigod of such perplexing allure? Powerful yet gentle, fierce yet kind? Wrapped in mortality yet shining with a light that makes mortals compose hymns and gods lean in to listen? That is not just power, darlings. That is charisma. That is the stuff of which legends that last are made. And love... well." Her smile deepened, enigmatic. "Love is the most disruptive force of all. Poseidon may be right to be afraid."

A thoughtful silence fell, broken only by the idle crackle of Zeus's bolt. The disregard some had voiced was paper-thin, undercut by a humming curiosity in the divine air. He was a novelty, a disruption in their eternal, static drama.

"He cannot remain veiled forever," Zeus declared, his voice final. "A power of this potential does not belong hidden in a fishing village. He will be brought to Olympus. He will be seen. And he will be... assessed."

The decree hung in the perfumed air. It was not a question of if, but when and how. Apollo's fingers itched for his lyre. Ares's blood thrummed with anticipation. Athena's mind spun with strategic permutations. Hera's eyes glittered with cold scrutiny.

On his sunless throne in the deep, Poseidon felt the shift in the celestial currents, a pressure building against his veil. He bared his teeth in a silent, submarine snarl.

The hunt was formally declared.

And in a village by the sea, utterly unaware that his name had just been uttered in the halls of heaven, Percy Jackson was teaching a little girl how to flip a flatbread without burning it, his laughter mingling with the woodsmoke, a simple, luminous soul in the gathering divine storm.

Chapter Text

A month in Krokyleia had woven Percy into the village’s fabric as seamlessly as a thread in one of Elpis’s tapestries. He was their fixed point, their gentle storm, their miracle. But the villagers, who had learned to read the subtle tides of his moods, noticed a change.

The sass was still there, the ready smile for the children, the strong hands that never stopped working. But in quiet moments, when he thought no one was looking, Percy’s gaze would drift north and west, over the endless wine-dark sea, towards a horizon that held nothing but more water. A profound loneliness settled in his green eyes, a homesickness so deep it seemed to echo in the space around him, making the air itself feel wistful.

He missed his mom’s blue chocolate-chip cookies, the stale smell of the bus to school, the raucous noise of the campfire at Camp Half-Blood. He missed Annabeth’s stormy grey eyes and her impossible plans, Grover’s nervous bleating and his unwavering loyalty. He even missed the petty squabbles of the gods he knew—his dad’s grudging, modern-day affection, Dionysus’s perpetual annoyance. This ancient, brutal, beautiful world was not his. He was a sun-dial in a digital age, functioning but fundamentally misplaced.

The villagers saw the shadow in his light and ached for him. They tried to offer comfort in their ways—extra honey in his wine, the best cuts of fish, their quiet, steadfast company. But the sorrow was a knot they could not untie.

It was young Agape, only six, with eyes as big as moons, who finally gave it a voice. Climbing into his lap one evening as the community fire was lit, she tugged on his tunic. “Percy,” she whispered, the name now familiar on all their tongues. “Tell us a story from your home. A happy one.”

The request, so simple and earnest, struck him right in the heart. The villagers stilled, their faces soft with hope and sympathy in the flickering light.

Percy took a slow breath. “Okay, kiddo. A happy story.” He leaned back, Agape a warm weight against his chest, and began. He filtered carefully, turning Manhattan into a “great city of towering stone,” the Minotaur into a “bull-headed beast of terrible strength,” the Lotus Casino into a “palace of forgetful delights.”

But as he spoke, he wasn’t just narrating. He was remembering. He spoke of his mother, Sally Jackson, and her fierce, loving laugh. He described his friend Grover, a “satyr of great heart and clumsy hooves,” and their desperate flight to safety. He painted a picture of Camp Half-Blood—a “sanctuary for the lost,” where a grumpy wine-maker oversaw games of capture-the-flag that were literal wars, and a forge-god’s son fixed broken swords with a scowl and a hidden kindness.

The love in his voice was palpable, a tangible warmth that pushed back the night’s chill. The villagers listened, enchanted, seeing a whole new world in his words.

“And my other friend,” Percy said, a soft, private smile touching his lips as he thought of Annabeth. “She was… she is… the wisest person I’ve ever known. She saw a way through when all I saw were walls. She had hair like the sunlight on a wheat field and a mind that could out-plan the Fates themselves. We fought a lot,” he chuckled, the sound thick with affection. “But she always had my back. Always.”

The yearning swelled then, too big for words. It filled his chest, a tidal wave of loss and love for a time and people impossibly far away. The story faded. The words stopped.

And the song began.

It started as a hum, low and resonant in his chest, vibrating against Agape’s small back. Then it slipped past his lips, unbidden, a melody woven from longing. It was not the truth-song that compelled confession. This was the yearning-song.

It was the sound of a door closing for the last time. The taste of a favorite meal you can never have again. The echo of a laugh in an empty room. It was the sigh of the sea for the shore it can never truly leave, the cry of a bird for a nest a thousand miles gone. It was Percy’s soul, stripped bare and set to a tune of devastating beauty.

It floated on the smoke of the fire, twined with the sparks rising to the stars. It soaked into the earth of Krokyleia, and every villager felt their own private losses rise to the surface—not with pain, but with a sweet, aching catharsis. Old Leodes wept silently for a brother lost at sea decades ago. Elpis hummed along, thinking of her own mother. They were not compelled; they were joined. They shared his homesickness in a profound, silent communion.

And the song did not stop at the village borders.

It rode the night wind. It skimmed the waves. It climbed the very slopes of Olympus itself, piercing the eternal twilight of the divine realm as the gods sat at their evening feast.

---

On Olympus, the scene was one of decadent immortality. Nectar flowed. Ambrosia shifted shape to suit each god’s desire. Laughter and petty debates filled the air.

Then, the song reached them.

It washed over the feast like a sudden, cool tide.

Conversations died mid-sentence. Hands holding goblets froze. Zeus’s latest thunderous pronouncement hung unfinished in the suddenly still air.

Every god heard it. And every god felt it.

For a moment, there was only the haunting, mortal melody and the shared, shocking vulnerability it evoked.

Poseidon was the first to move. His golden goblet crumpled in his fist, seawater and nectar spilling over his fingers like tears. Pride, sharp and fierce, lanced through him—his son’s voice had silenced Olympus! But it was instantly drowned by a tsunami of dread. This was no controlled truth-song. This was an unconscious, soul-deep broadcast of the most powerful emotion in the universe: longing. No veil could hide this. The cat was not just out of the bag; it was singing an aria on the dinner table.

His eyes, storm-dark, swept the hall. He saw the shock, the fascination, the hunger on their faces. The secret was over.

Ares felt the song like a physical blow to the chest. It wasn’t about battle, yet it spoke of a loyalty worth dying for. It wasn’t about rage, yet it carried the weight of a pain so deep it forged unbreakable strength. He didn’t just hear the homesickness; he heard the heart of the warrior who endured it. A possessiveness, raw and primal, ignited in his gut. This one was not a brute to be wielded. This was a spirit to be conquered, a fierce loyalty to be won and owned. He wanted to be the reason that yearning stopped. He wanted to be the home that warrior returned to. The desire was a fire in his blood.

Apollo simply stopped breathing. His perfect, divine music was about order, beauty, and light. This… this was chaos and depth. It was the beautiful, terrible sound of a soul missing. It was art born of pure, unfiltered experience. It was the most exquisite thing he had ever heard. The lust it sparked in him was not merely physical (though the voice itself was an instrument of devastating allure). It was a creative lust, a possessive yearning to have that voice, that soul, as his ultimate muse. To duet with that raw power, to weave his own golden light with that deep blue longing—the thought was an obsession taking root. He would have the singer. He would claim that song and make it his own.

The other gods reeled.

Zeus’s brow was thunderous, but his eyes held a reluctant, stunned awe. Such power to evoke feeling in the immortal heart…

Hera listened, her face a mask, but her knuckles were white on her throne. This was no mere demigod. This was a disturbance.

Athena analyzed the song’s structure—there was none. It was pure emotional data, a vulnerability that was also a terrifying strength. The strategic implications were staggering.

Aphrodite let out a soft, shuddering gasp, a single tear of pure aesthetic and emotional pleasure tracing down her cheek. “Oh,” she breathed. “Oh, it’s true. It’s all true. That… that is the sound of a love that transcends time. Who does he miss like that?”

Hephaestus stopped tinkering with a tiny automaton. The song spoke of something broken and cherished—a feeling he understood all too well.

Even Artemis, who disdained the affairs of men, felt a strange pull in her immortal core, a recognition of a pure, steadfast heart.

The song faded, as gently as it had come, leaving a ringing silence in the heavenly hall that was louder than any noise.

Then, chaos of a different kind erupted.

“He is found!” Apollo declared, his voice vibrating with excitement, his lyre appearing in his hands as if by instinct.

“That,” Ares growled, standing up, his armor clinking, “is the sound of a soldier without a battalion. He needs a war. He needs a purpose.” His purpose, his eyes screamed.

“Enough!” Poseidon’s voice shook the foundations of the mountain, a real earthquake rumbling in the mortal world below. He rose, a towering figure of wrath and protective fury. “You heard nothing but a mortal’s fleeting dream! You will not touch him!”

But the command fell on deaf ears. The veil was shattered by the song itself. The curiosity had been transformed into a burning, possessive fascination.

Zeus regained his composure, his expression settling into one of imperial decision. “The time for hiding is past, brother. This… Percy… has announced himself to all Olympus. He will be summoned. We will look upon this son of yours who sings of other worlds and moves the hearts of gods.”

Poseidon met his brother’s gaze, a silent war raging between them. He saw Apollo’s artistic hunger, Ares’s possessive fire, the general, gleaming interest of the entire pantheon. His son was no longer his secret treasure. He was the prize of Olympus.

In the village, the last note of Percy’s song faded into the crackle of the fire. He blinked, as if waking from a dream, realizing what he had done. Agape was asleep in his arms, a peaceful smile on her face. The villagers looked at him with tear-streaked faces, not with awe, but with a shared, deep understanding.

He felt exposed. He felt seen in a way that had nothing to do with divinity.

And high above, two gods, one of war and one of light, stared down at the mortal world, their divine wills converging on a single, shining point on the coast. The hunt was over. The wooing was about to begin. And a storm was brewing that not even the Earthshaker might be able to calm.

———

The silence in the Olympian megaron was a fragile, brittle thing after Percy’s song faded. All eyes, gleaming with divine interest, suspicion, and hunger, were fixed on Poseidon. The Lord of the Seas stood before his brother’s throne, not as a supplicant, but as a defiant bulwark. The air crackled with the remnants of the song and the rising tide of divine pressure.

Zeus leaned forward, his expression a careful blend of brotherly ire and kingly command. “Explain yourself, brother. This… yearning that just caressed our very essence. This son you have secreted away like a pearl in a locked coffer. Who is he? What is he? And why have the Fates kept his thread hidden from us?”

Poseidon’s jaw was a line of granite. “He is my son,” he said, the words a low rumble of tectonic certainty. “That is all you need to know. His past is his own. His power is under my protection.”

Hera’s laugh was the sound of ice cracking. “Your protection? Or your ambition? A demigod who sings a lament that makes us pause? That is not a simple hero. That is a weapon. Or a catalyst.”

“He is no weapon!” Poseidon’s voice shook a column, sending a fine dust of marble sifting down. The possessive fury in his voice was palpable. “He is a boy. A young man. He mends fishing nets and teaches children their letters. He wants no throne, no war!”

Ares barked a laugh, stepping into the circle of confrontation. “A boy? A boy who breaks seasoned warriors with his eyes and a whisper? A boy whose homesickness feels like a spear to the gut? That is no simple boy, Uncle. That is a prize. A companion for the ages. I have felt his battle-spirit in the rumors. I would have him by my side.”

Apollo, unable to stay silent, swept forward, his lyre glowing. “His spirit is not for the battlefield alone! It is for the song! That voice… it is a new form of truth, a new kind of beauty. It is raw, it is real. He belongs with the Muses, with me! To cage such a voice in a village is a crime against creation itself.”

The competing claims—war and art, possession and inspiration—hung in the air, inflaming the tension. Poseidon saw the avarice in their eyes, the way they now saw Percy not as a potential threat, but as a coveted wonder. It terrified him more than their suspicion.

Athena, ever the strategist, spoke calmly. “Your defensiveness reveals his value, Uncle. You speak of nets and letters, yet you veil him with a power that could hide a Titan. What are his skills? His true nature? If he is as harmless as you claim, let us hear it from your own lips.”

It was a trap, and Poseidon knew it. But the combined pressure, the blatant desire from Ares and Apollo, and his own, overwhelming pride in his extraordinary son, created a volatile mix. The need to protect warred with the deep-seated godly urge to boast of one’s superior progeny.

“Harmless?” Poseidon scoffed, his chest swelling with paternal indignation. “You think my son is harmless? You, who value only cunning and thunder?” He took a step forward, his stormy eyes blazing. “Very well. You wish to know his skills? His value?”

He began to pace, each word a growing tide.

“He fights,” Poseidon stated, shooting a glare at Ares. “Not with the blind rage of a berserker, but with the grace of a hurricane—controlled, inevitable, devastating. He disarms and defeats without killing, a mercy you would not understand. He has known war, deeper and stranger than any you have witnessed. He bears its scars and its wisdom, not its cruelty.”

He turned to Apollo, his voice softening with a pride he could no longer contain. “He sings, yes. But he also cooks. He takes the humblest fare—a fish, a handful of grain, a wild herb—and transforms it into a feast that nourishes the soul as well as the body. It is a quiet magic, a creation that speaks of a heart that nurtures and heals.”

He faced the council, his voice rising to a roar that echoed in the vaulted ceiling. “He builds and he mends! He teaches mortal children not just to fight, but to read, to think, to be brave and kind! He commands loyalty not through fear, but through unwavering care! He is strength and gentleness woven together! He is a leader who serves, a power that protects!”

He stopped before Zeus, his final words dropping into a hushed, intense whisper that carried to every corner. “And if you have eyes beneath those thunderclouds, you have seen it. His form… it is not merely handsome. It is a divine artistry. The sea’s wildness and the hearth’s warmth made flesh. To look upon him is to see a new standard of beauty, one that disarms and commands in the same breath.”

A hushed, shocked silence followed the outburst. Poseidon had done exactly what he’d sworn not to do: he had laid Percy’s worth bare before the most covetous beings in existence.

Then, almost as if the final dam of his paternal pride had burst, he added, his tone shifting to one of fierce, challenging boasting, “And if any of you speak of claiming him, of wooing him, know this: his hand would be the greatest prize in any realm. A consort with the heart of a lion, the soul of a poet, the hands of a healer and a warrior? A spouse who could calm your fury with a word and inspire your people with a song? Who could stand beside you, not behind you? My son would be the best of husbands, a partner beyond any god or goddess’s wildest dreams. But he is not a bauble to be won. He chooses. And he would choose wisely.”

The statement hung in the air, shocking in its implication. Poseidon wasn’t just protecting a son; he was advertising his unparalleled suitability as a divine consort.

Aphrodite let out a delighted, breathy sigh, her eyes sparkling. “Oh, Poseidon… you have painted the most irresistible portrait.”

Ares and Apollo, far from being deterred, looked at each other, and for a fleeting second, a spark of understanding passed between them—a recognition of a worthy rival. The challenge had been issued by the father himself. The prize was not just a powerful demigod or a beautiful muse. It was, as Poseidon had so foolishly, proudly declared, the potential for the greatest partnership in eternity.

Zeus stroked his beard, all earlier ire replaced by a calculating, intrigued light. “A paragon, you say. A demigod who embodies the virtues of half our pantheon. Such a being cannot remain in a fishing village. He belongs where he can be… appreciated. Observed.”

Poseidon’s triumphant pride curdled instantly into cold, hard fear. He had played right into their hands. In his desire to proclaim Percy’s worth, to shield him from being seen as ‘less than,’ he had instead painted the brightest target imaginable on his back.

“He is mine,” Poseidon growled, the last bastion of his defense.

“He is Olympus’s concern now,” Zeus decreed, his voice final. “We will meet this paragon. We will… assess this value for ourselves.”

As the council began to buzz with plans and speculation, Poseidon stood rigid, a tempest contained in a god’s form. He had sought to protect his treasure by building a wall. Instead, in a fit of pride, he had crafted the most exquisite display case, and now every collector in the universe wanted to smash the glass and take what was inside.

———

The air in the throne room was thick with tension, a palpable hum of divine will pressing against Poseidon’s defiance. Athena’s request had been a quiet blade, slicing through the posturing.

“Words are but wind and foam, Uncle,” she said, her grey eyes cool and unrelenting. “You paint a portrait with boasts. Let us see the canvas itself. Show us this paragon. Let Olympus judge the truth of your… admiration.”

Poseidon’s teeth ground together. To refuse would be seen as confirmation of a lie or a weakness. To agree felt like the ultimate betrayal. Ares was leaning forward, a hunter scenting blood. Apollo’s fingers were poised over his lyre strings, poised to capture an image in sound the moment he saw it. Even Hera watched with icy, analytical interest.

“You have no right,” Poseidon growled, the sea’s fury in his voice.

“We have every right,” Zeus intoned, the final arbiter. “He has touched us with his power. He is a matter for the pantheon. Show us the son you claim is beyond compare.”

The pressure was a tsunami against his will. To continue to hide now, after his own boasting, would only guarantee they descended upon the village in force, a terrifying divine stampede. A controlled reveal, on his terms… perhaps it could still be managed. Perhaps seeing Percy in his simplicity would dampen their fever.

With a sound like a distant, reluctant wave crashing, Poseidon relented. He raised a hand, fingers splaying. From the air itself, from the moisture in the breath of the gods, from the very essence of his domain, water coalesced. It shimmered, flattened, and resolved not into a simple scrying pool, but into a clear, panoramic window hanging in the center of the megaron, as vivid as life.

The image focused on the sun-drenched cove of Krokyleia.

And there he was.

Percy.

He stood knee-deep in the shimmering surf, helping a group of fishermen haul a new, half-built wooden boat skeleton into position. He had stripped off his tunic, which lay discarded on a dry rock. The afternoon sun, Apollo’s own light, gilded him as if claiming him already.

The gods saw, and for a moment, the very machinery of Olympus seemed to pause.

He was sculpted not by a chisel, but by conflict and care. His shoulders were broad, the muscles of his back and arms flowing with a powerful, liquid grace as he strained against the weight of the wood. His skin was sun-kissed olive, gleaming with seawater and effort. Water droplets traced paths down the profound, defined planes of his bare chest, catching in the faint dusting of dark hair, before sliding over the hard ridges of his abdomen.

The narrow taper of his hips led to powerful thighs, corded with strength that spoke of running, fighting, surviving. He was lean, but there was no fragility in it; it was the leanness of a shark or a storm-wind, all potent, coiled energy.

But it was his face that truly stole the breath from the divine hall.

He was laughing at something a fisherman said, his head thrown back. His features were a breathtaking harmony of strength and beauty. The jaw was strong, but the lips were surprisingly full, curved in a smile of genuine, unguarded joy. His nose was straight, perhaps once broken and stubbornly reset. And his eyes… even through the water-image, they shone a startling, sea-green, lit from within by a brilliant, magnetic mischief. It was the look of someone who knew the world was ridiculous and dangerous and loved it anyway. Sunlight caught in his tousled, ink-black hair, wind-tangled and wild, a crown of chaos.

Then, they saw the power.

As the fishermen struggled to brace the boat against the incoming swell, Percy didn’t shout or gesture. He simply glanced at the water. The wave that should have crashed into them, soaking the wood and knocking them off balance, simply parted. It smoothed into a gentle, supportive swell that lifted the boat hull perfectly into place before receding as calmly as a breath. He wielded the sea with a thought, an effortless, unconscious sovereignty that was more awe-inspiring than any thunderclap.

He was a living contradiction: a being of immense, untamed power performing a humble act of community with joyful ease. The sweat, the sun, the sea, the strength, the smile—it was an utterly disarming, devastatingly alluring combination.

The reaction in the throne room was instantaneous and profound.

Ares felt a jolt go through him, sharp as a spearpoint. This was no painted vase hero. This was vitality incarnate. The play of muscle under sun-drenched skin, the effortless power, the confident joy—it was a different kind of warfare, a seduction of the senses. His possessiveness morphed into a raw, visceral want. He didn’t just want the warrior; he wanted the man laughing in the surf. The desire to have that strength under him, that loyalty focused solely on him, became a pounding need.

Apollo’s lyre slipped from his numb fingers, clattering to the marble floor unheard. His artistic soul was simultaneously ravished and ignited. Percy was a living masterpiece more dynamic than any statue, a symphony more moving than any he’d composed. The play of light on his skin was a song; his easy laugh was a melody Apollo ached to harmonize with. The possessiveness that seized him was an all-consuming fire. He must have him, not just to hear him sing, but to be the subject of his smile, to capture that light and call it his own.

But it did not stop with them.

Zeus’s eyebrows rose, his earlier calculation replaced by frank, stunned appreciation. Here was a demigod whose very presence commanded a room, even a room of gods.

Hera’s lips pursed, not in disapproval, but in reassessment. This was no clumsy, provocative hero. This was… something else. A threat of a more subtle, dangerous kind.

Aphrodite let out a soft, shuddering moan of pure aesthetic and romantic ecstasy. “The form… the spirit… the ease,” she whispered. “He is Eros and Ares and Apollo blended into one breathtaking mortal shell. No wonder my uncle is frantic.”

Hephaestus grunted, appreciating the functional, powerful build—a body that was a perfect tool, beautifully maintained.

Even Artemis, for a fleeting second, saw not a man, but a force of nature as primal and worthy of respect as one of her sacred beasts—beautiful, powerful, and utterly itself.

Dionysus actually stopped swirling his wine. “Well,” he muttered, a flicker of interest in his weary eyes. “He certainly doesn’t look like he’d water down the wine.”

Athena was silent, her mind racing. The intelligence in those green eyes was unmistakable, the strategic use of power, effortless. He was a puzzle with infinite, fascinating solutions.

Poseidon watched their faces, and his heart sank like a stone in a deep trench. His pride was there, burning fiercely—see? See what I have made?—but it was drowned in the cold, terrifying knowledge. He had not quelled their interest. He had poured nectar on a fire.

Ares broke the silence, his voice a husky growl that held no mockery, only stark desire. “Mine.”

Apollo recovered, snatching his lyre from the floor. His voice was not its usual golden cadence, but thrummed with intense fervor. “You have no claim, Brother. That beauty, that song… he is the muse I have waited eons for. He belongs to the light, to creation.”

Other mutterings began, a low hum of covetousness that filled the hall.

Poseidon slashed his hand through the air. The water-window exploded into a mist that vanished instantly, leaving only the memory of the sun-kissed demigod imprinted on every divine retina.

“ENOUGH!” he roared, the palace trembling. “You have seen. He is not a prize to be squabbled over! He is a person. My son. You will keep your distance.”

But his command rang hollow. The genie was out of the bottle. The image of Percy Jackson—powerful, beautiful, joyful, and profound—was seared into the consciousness of Olympus.

Ares and Apollo exchanged a look that was no longer just rivalry, but a mutual, grim understanding. The contest was officially begun. The object of their desire was now vividly, undeniably real. And both knew they would move heaven and earth to claim him.

Poseidon turned and strode from the hall, his rage a cold, building storm cloud trailing behind him. He had to reach Percy first. The wolves were not just at the door. They had seen the lamb, and they had found him to be a lion. And now, they were desperate to tame him.

Chapter Text

Percy felt good. The kind of good that came from honest work, salt-crusted skin, and the easy rhythm of Krokyleia. The boat was taking shape, a skeletal promise of future catches. The admiration in the villagers’ eyes had settled into something warm and familiar, not the overwhelming awe of his first days. He had found a pocket of peace in this impossible time.

He was showing young Nikias how to properly seal a hull seam with pitch, the boy watching his hands with intense focus. “See, you don’t just slap it on. You coax it in. Like… like convincing a wave not to crash.”

Nikias nodded solemnly, as if Percy had just revealed a mystery of the cosmos.

That’s when the first tremor hit.

It was a subtle shiver, a deep groan from the bones of the world. The water in the cove didn’t just ripple; it vibrated, humming a dissonant note that set Percy’s teeth on edge. The villagers froze, tools slipping from their hands, their eyes wide with a fear older than any bandit. This was not mortal trouble.

The earth heaved. A great fissure tore open at the tree line, spewing dust and the smell of ancient, rotten soil. From the wound in the world, it emerged.

It was a Teumessian Vrox, a monster so rare it was nearly myth even in Percy’s time. It had the body of a colossal, emaciated lion, but its pelt was not fur—it was shifting, jagged shale, grinding together with each movement. Its tail was a spiked chain of granite links, whipping and cracking the air. Its face was a nightmare parody of a lion’s, with glowing magma for eyes and a maw that dripped not saliva, but steaming, corrosive earth-blood. It was a creature of pure, seismic malice.

“Back to the village! Now!” Percy’s voice cut through the paralyzing terror. He didn’t shout. It was a command, cold and clear as winter tide. He shoved Nikias towards the others, his eyes never leaving the monster.

The Vrox saw him. Its magma eyes fixed on the demigod standing alone before the sea. It roared, and the sound was the crack of continents splitting. It charged, each footfall causing the ground to buck and shudder, sending villagers sprawling.

Percy didn’t draw Riptide. This thing was too big, too much of the earth. Water was his ally, but the sea was yards away. He needed a different strategy.

He ran. Not away, but parallel to the shore, leading the monster away from the fleeing villagers. The Vrox pivoted, its stone claws tearing great furrows in the earth. It lunged, a landslide given hunger.

Percy dove, the spike-tail whistling over his head. He rolled to his feet, and for the first time, he reached for the sea with more than a gentle request. He yanked.

A wall of water, twenty feet high, ripped itself from the cove and slammed into the Vrox’s side. The force would have pulverized a mountain, but the monster, born of the deep earth, only staggered, the shale of its body shedding water with a sound like collapsing cliffs.

It was furious now. It belched a stream of molten earth-blood. Percy dodged, the liquid stone sizzling where it hit the sand, turning it to glass. The heat was immense, searing the air.

Panic tried to rise. He was outmatched. This wasn’t a minotaur or an empousa. This was a force of nature.

Then, a strange calm descended. The same calm that had settled over him in the depths of Tartarus, in the heart of countless battles. Think like the water. Adapt. Find the weakness.

The Vrox was earth. Its blood was fire. Its eyes were magma.

Water. But not to smash. To cool.

As the monster prepared another belch of liquid stone, Percy didn’t summon a wave. He focused on the seawater soaking the beast’s rocky pelt, on the humidity in the scorched air. He focused on the concept of abrupt, absolute cold.

He sang.

It wasn’t the yearning song or the truth song. It was a single, sharp, piercing note—the sound of the deepest ocean trench, of pressure that turned water to ice in an instant, of a winter that stops a heart.

The note hit the steaming Vrox. The seawater on its body didn’t just freeze; it shattered the shale plates with explosive force. The magma in its eyes and maw met that focused cryogenic will.

CRACK.

A sound like a glacier calving. The monster’s roar cut off into a choked, grinding gurgle. The molten light in its eyes winked out, replaced by dull, black obsidian. Its maw, still open in fury, was now a cavern of rapidly cooling, cracking rock. The heat died, replaced by a wave of frigid air that rolled off the petrifying beast.

The Vrox took one final, shuddering step, its granite tail falling limp. Then it stopped, a grotesque, magnificent statue of stone and frozen fury, steaming gently in the sun.

Silence, broken only by the gasp of the sea and the ragged breaths of the watching villagers.

Percy stood panting, his hands trembling slightly from the effort. He was covered in dust and seawater. The sight was terrifying—the colossal, now-dead monster. But it was also, in a stark and brutal way, beautiful. The symmetry of its final, petrified rage, the contrast of warm sun on cold stone, the sheer, audacious fact of its ending. He had turned a volcano into a cairn.

He felt no triumph. Only a weary, hollow dread. This was not a random encounter. This was a message. A very expensive, very deadly message. Someone had sent this.

---

On Olympus, the scene was one of stunned silence, quickly shattered.

They had watched the entire encounter through various means—scrying pools, far-sight, the vibrations in the divine ether.

Hera’s face was a mask of cold fury. Her gambit had failed. Worse, it had backfired spectacularly.

A sudden, booming laugh erupted from Ares. “HA! Did you see that? He didn’t just fight it! He out-thought it! He sang it a lullaby and put it to sleep—permanently! A lion of stone! That’s not just power, that’s artistry in destruction!” His admiration was feverish, his desire now laced with a warrior’s ultimate respect.

Apollo was staring, his usual golden composure utterly shattered. “The note… did you hear the note? It was the perfect counterpoint! Not a song of creation, but of cessation! A melody of absolute zero! It was… it was devastatingly brilliant!” The creative lust in his eyes was now a burning inferno. To have that voice, that mind, that could devise such a solution…

“You sent a Teumessian Vrox, Hera?” Dionysus drawled, shaking his head with a smirk. “To kill a kid who cooks fish stew? That’s like using a typhoon to blow out a candle. Overkill, much? And he turned your typhoon into an ice sculpture. Bad form.”

Even Zeus looked at his wife with a mixture of reproach and dawning, uncomfortable realization. “You sought to kill a demigod who has done nothing but help mortals and sing of missing his mother? Because he garners… attention?” The pettiness of it, contrasted with the breathtaking display of power and courage they had just witnessed, made her actions seem small and vile.

Athena was nodding slowly, a spark of genuine, unadulterated appreciation in her eyes. “A flawless tactical response. He used the monster’s own nature against it. Hydro-thermal shock on a geologic scale. Inspired.”

Hera stood, her dignity in tatters, surrounded by the laughter and scorn of her family. “He is a disruption! An unknown! He must be—”

“He must be met,” Ares interrupted, his voice leaving no room for argument. He shot a look at Apollo, a fierce, competitive understanding passing between them. The time for watching was over. Hera’s clumsy attack had proven Percy wasn’t just a pretty face with a nice voice. He was a survivor, a thinker, a force to be reckoned with. And that made him infinitely more desirable.

“Indeed,” Apollo said, his voice regaining its musicality, but now edged with a possessive determination. “It is clear he is not safe from… misguided threats,” he added, with a pointed glance at Hera. “He requires proper appreciation. Proper guardianship.”

Zeus, seeing the direction of the wind, sighed. “Enough. Hera, your actions were unbecoming. The matter of this demigod will be dealt with, but not through assassination.” He looked at his two most obviously captivated sons. “If you are so… eager to make his acquaintance, you may do so. But with discretion. We do not need a war with Poseidon because you two cannot mind your manners.”

It was all the permission they needed. As the council broke into chatter, dissecting Percy’s every move, Ares and Apollo shared one last look before turning away, minds already racing with plans for a suitably dramatic, impressive introduction to the remarkable son of Poseidon.

In the cove, Percy placed a hand on the cold, dead stone of the Vrox. “Who sent you?” he whispered. But the monster was just rock now.

He looked up at the perfectly blue, indifferent sky, a chill that had nothing to do with his powers settling in his gut. The peace was over. The message was received.

Someone on Olympus wanted him dead. And from the feeling of unseen eyes suddenly pressing upon him with new, intense focus, he had a terrible feeling others had just decided they very much wanted him alive.

———

The hearth-fire in Leodes’ hut crackled, casting dancing shadows on the walls. Percy was focused on the pot before him, a rich fish broth simmering with leeks and wild thyme. Cooking had become his meditation, the one act that felt entirely his in this strange world. He was seasoning it with a critical frown, trying to block out the memory of the petrified monster looming on the beach like a grotesque monument.

The air in the hut grew heavy, thick with the scent of deep ocean trenches and ozone. The hairs on the back of Percy’s neck stood up.

“We need to talk.”

Percy didn’t jump. He just sighed, a long-suffering sound, and gave the broth one more stir before turning. Poseidon stood in the small space, looking even more massive and out of place. His stormy eyes were serious, etched with a paternal concern that was new.

“Let me guess,” Percy said, wiping his hands on a cloth. “Family drama. Upstairs style.”

Poseidon’s brow furrowed. “The attack today was not random. It was sent.”

“Duh,” Percy said, turning back to his pot to grab a wooden spoon for a taste test. “A Teumessian Rock-Lion doesn’t just pop out for a seaside stroll. Had Hera written all over it. Smelled like jealousy and bad decisions.”

Poseidon stared, momentarily thrown. His son’s casual, accurate deduction, the utter lack of fear or surprise, was disorienting. “You… know of Hera’s nature?”

Percy snorted, blowing on a spoonful of broth. “Lady’s got a few screws loose when it comes to her husband’s side projects. Classic move. Can’t handle the attention shifting, so she tries to smash the new toy.” He took a sip, nodded in satisfaction, and shot his father a wry look. “Don’t worry, Dad. I’m used to it. She tried to kill me when I was a baby too, according to the stories. Guess some things are timeless.”

The casual reference to his own attempted infanticide, delivered with the tone of someone discussing a annoying weather pattern, left Poseidon speechless. His son’s nonchalance in the face of divine malice was more terrifying than any cowering fear.

“It is not just Hera,” Poseidon managed, his voice grave. “Your display… your existence… has drawn other eyes. Hungrier ones.”

Percy’s shoulders slumped. He put the spoon down with a soft clack. “Let me guess. War Boy and Choir Practice?”

“Ares and Apollo,” Poseidon confirmed, a growl edging into his voice. “They see you as a prize. A fascination. They will come. They will try to… woo you.”

The word ‘woo’ hung in the air, absurd and terrifying.

Percy closed his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Oh, for the love of— I don’t have time for this. I’m trying to figure out how to get home. I’m trying to keep a village from starving. I do not need a divine dating show crashing my shoreline.” He began to mutter under his breath, a rapid, irritated stream. “Gods, they’re all the same. No sense of timing. No sense of personal space. Just ‘ooh, shiny, mine.’ Thousands of years and they never learn. Do I look like I want to be ‘wooed’? I want a cheeseburger and a bus pass.”

Poseidon listened to this incredible, blasphemous tirade with a mixture of awe and exasperation. His son was standing in a Bronze Age hut, complaining about the romantic attentions of Olympians as if they were pesky telemarketers.

“You do not understand the danger,” Poseidon insisted, stepping closer. “They are not mortal suitors. They are persistent, powerful, and possessive. They will not take no for an answer.”

“They’ll learn,” Percy said darkly, his sea-green eyes flashing with a familiar, stormy defiance. “I’ve said no to gods before. Usually right before I kick their teeth in. Metaphorically. Sometimes literally.”

He turned back to the fire, his movements brisk. He ladled a generous portion of the fragrant broth into a sturdy clay bowl, added a hunk of the day’s bread on the side, and thrust it toward his father. “Here. Eat. You look stressed. Probably from dealing with your idiot relatives all day.”

Poseidon, the Earthshaker, who had come to deliver a grave warning and perhaps spirit his son away to safety, found himself automatically accepting the bowl. The aroma was soothing, the gesture so mundanely, profoundly caring that it disarmed him completely. He sat on a low stool, the furniture groaning under his divine weight, and ate.

The broth was a miracle of simplicity—the essence of the sea, tempered with earth-born herbs and the unmistakable touch of his son’s care. Each sip seemed to fortify him, not physically, but in his spirit. As he ate, watching Percy move around the small hearth—checking the fire, cleaning the spoon, his brow furrowed in thought—a powerful, swelling conviction grew in Poseidon’s chest.

This is my son.

Not a weapon. Not a prize. A prince.

Look at him. He faced down the machinations of the Queen of Heaven with sarcasm and a soup ladle. He analyzed divine motivations with the weary expertise of a seasoned general. He wielded power that could petrify primordial monsters and used it to season a stew.

He was formidable. Not just in battle, but in will, in heart, in his unshakeable, grounding self.

The desire to protect him morphed into a fiercer, more urgent need: to claim him, officially, completely. To bring him into the deep, to have him by his side in the sunlit halls of his palace, where the politics of Olympus could not reach him. To give him a crown of coral and a title that would make even Ares and Apollo think twice. Percy Jackson, Prince of the Seas, Heir to the Earthshaker’s Dominion. The thought sent a thrill of possessive pride through him.

He finished the broth, the bowl empty. “This is… remarkable,” he said, his voice softer.

“It’s soup, Dad,” Percy said, but a faint, pleased flush touched his cheeks. He took the empty bowl. “Look, I get it. You’re worried. Thanks. But I’ve handled worse. If War and Music want to make fools of themselves, let them try. I’ve got nets to mend and a seven-year-old who’s about to master the letter ‘theta’. I don’t have time for their nonsense.”

Poseidon stood, looking down at his son. The fear was still there, a cold undercurrent. But it was now overlaid with a blazing certainty. This could not continue. This village was no longer a sanctuary; it was a spotlight.

“Be careful, my son,” Poseidon said, placing a heavy hand on Percy’s shoulder. “Their nonsense can become your reality all too quickly. I will not let them have you.”

There was a finality in his tone that Percy didn’t miss. He looked up, meeting his father’s ancient, stormy eyes. “I can handle myself.”

“I know,” Poseidon said, and the pride in it was undeniable. “That is what frightens me, and what makes you priceless.”

With a last, lingering look, and the scent of a coming storm, Poseidon dissolved into sea mist, leaving Percy alone with the crackling fire and the looming, unspoken promise: his father’s protection would now be as active and potentially smothering as the threats he faced.

Percy sighed, running a hand through his hair. He looked at the empty space where the god had been, then at his simple pot of soup.

“Prince of the Sea,” he muttered to himself, the words tasting strange. He shook his head, a small, defiant smile touching his lips. “Yeah, right. More like ‘Head Chef and Monster Repellent.’” But the smile didn’t reach his eyes, which were shadowed with a new kind of dread. The gods weren’t just watching anymore. They were making their move. And his dad was making plans of his own.

The peaceful rhythm of Krokyleia was about to be drowned by a divine tide.

———

The hut was dark, the coals of the hearth breathing a faint, red pulse into the room. Percy lay on his pallet of straw and wool, staring at the thatched ceiling. The scent of thyme and sea still clung to him, but it was smothered now by the heavy perfume of divine warning.

Sleep was a traitor, dancing just out of reach.

Every time he closed his eyes, he saw his father’s grim face. They will try to woo you.

“Ughhhhhhhh.”

The groan was muffled by the wool blanket he yanked over his face. He could still hear it, Poseidon’s voice, all doom-and-gloom. Like Percy hadn’t spent the better part of his life dealing with godly tantrums and their utterly messed-up family tree.

But this… this was new.

Woo.

The word echoed in his skull, ridiculous and horrifying. It conjured images so bizarre his brain stuttered trying to process them.

Ares. God of War. Bloodstained armor, that permanent sneer, smelling of sweat and bronze. What did “wooing” even look like for him? Showing up with the freshly severed head of a rival as a gift? Challenging him to a duel to the death as a first date? Taking him to tour the battlefield of Marathon like it was a scenic overlook? Percy imagined Ares trying to be “charming,” his smile a grimace, offering him a cursed sword as a corsage. “This blade has slain a thousand men. Its song is the last gasp of the weak. Do you… like it?”

Percy shuddered, pulling the blanket tighter. No. Nope. Absolutely not.

Apollo. God of the Sun, Music, and, apparently, Massive Ego. Golden boy. Perfect hair, perfect smile, perfect everything. His wooing would be a performance. A private concert on a sunbeam, probably a ballad he’d composed five minutes ago titled “Ode to Your Sea-Green Eyes (And My Own Brilliance).” He’d probably try to impress him with poetry, or by literally pulling the sun chariot around for a joyride. He’d gift him a lyre that played itself and never shut up. He’d talk about “harmonizing their essences” or some other pretentious garbage.

“Dates,” Percy muttered into the darkness, the word tasting foul. “What does a god even consider a date? Throwing lightning bolts at mountains? Turning mortals into dolphins for fun? A picnic on a cloud that’s really just Zeus’s irritable back?”

His brain hurt. It was a physical, throbbing pain behind his eyes. It was the sheer, unadulterated absurdity of it all. He was stranded millennia from home, trying to survive and help people who needed him, and the cosmic powers-that-be had decided to turn his life into some kind of twisted, divine romance novel.

He wasn’t a prize. He was a person. A tired, confused, homesick person who just wanted to know if his mom was okay, if his friends were alive, if there was a way back to a world that made a shred of sense.

The thought of either Ares or Apollo—or Zeus forbid, both—descending on Krokyleia with their idea of courtship made him want to dive into the sea and not come up until the Bronze Age was over.

He could just see it now. Ares crashing into the village square, scaring the kids and knocking over the water jars, all in the name of “showing his strength.” Apollo materializing in a beam of light, serenading him at dawn and disrupting the entire village’s sleep schedule.

“They’d probably start competing,” Percy groaned, rolling onto his stomach and pressing his face into the pallet. “Ares would kill a sea monster and dump it at my feet. Apollo would write an epic play about it and perform it right there, using the monster’s corpse as a stage prop.”

The mental image was so vividly awful he almost laughed. Almost. It was drowned out by the sheer, monumental annoyance of it all.

“Why can’t they just LEAVE ME ALONE?” he whispered fiercely to the indifferent night. “I’m not interested. In war, in songs, in… in any of it. Go bother someone else. Find a nymph. Write a war epic. Start a plague. I don’t care. Just. Go. Away.”

But he knew, with a sinking certainty, they wouldn’t. His father’s warning was proof. They’d seen him. They’d decided. And gods, in his experience, were the most persistent, entitled, oblivious creatures in the universe when they wanted something.

A fierce, protective anger bubbled up, burning away some of the dread. Fine. Let them try. Let Ares bring his battle trophies. Let Apollo serenade him until his golden vocal cords gave out.

He’d meet Ares’s “strength” with a well-placed wave to the face and a sarcastic comment about his form. He’d respond to Apollo’s ballads with a off-key rendition of the Camp Half-Blood sing-along classic, “This Pizza is On Fire.”

If they wanted to “woo” him, they’d have to get through a wall of sass, eye-rolls, and if necessary, a good old-fashioned demigod beatdown.

The thought was marginally comforting. He was Percy Jackson. He’d faced worse than unwanted divine attention. He’d looked Chaos in the face (sort of). He could handle a lovesick war god and a preening sun god.

Probably.

Maybe.

He groaned one last time, a long, weary sound that held all the exhaustion of the ages. “If they show up,” he vowed to the empty hut, “I’m kicking their shiny divine asses all the way back to Olympus.”

With that final, futile threat hanging in the air, he finally surrendered to an uneasy sleep, his dreams haunted by visions of Ares trying to hold his hand with a gauntlet and Apollo attempting to feed him ambrosia with a painfully sincere look in his eyes. It was, without a doubt, the most terrifying nightmare he’d had since arriving in Ancient Greece.

Chapter Text

The rhythm of Krokyleia was soft, woven from the scrape of nets, the laughter of children, and the scent of baking bread. For a few fragile days after the monster’s death, Percy had dared to hope the message had been received—by Hera, by anyone. He’d focused on teaching Agape more letters, on helping Elpis perfect a new way to smoke fish, on losing a very serious stick-sword tournament to Lysandros.

Peace. It was a flimsy thing, but he clung to it.

It shattered with the clatter of bronze and the grim cadence of marching feet.

Ten soldiers appeared on the ridge road. They were not bandits. These were professionals, their armor dented but serviceable, their spears held with weary competence. They carried the dust of long roads and the grim aura of a war looking for more kindling.

Leodes and the elders met them at the village edge, postures tense. Percy lingered near the well, a sense of cold inevitability settling in his gut.

The captain, a man with a tired face and a scar across his knuckles, spoke without preamble. “Men of fighting age. King Menestheus of Athens calls for levies. The rumblings in the east grow louder. Troy gathers her allies. Glory and spoils await those who answer the call. You will be fed, armed, and share in the plunder of a rich city.”

His eyes scanned the villagers—the fishermen, the shepherds. They were strong, but they were not soldiers. His gaze, dismissive at first, swept past the well and locked onto Percy.

The captain stopped. His eyes widened, taking in the powerful build, the easy, watchful stance, the sea-green eyes that held no fear, only a flat, assessing chill. Here was no simple farmer.

A slow, calculating smile spread across the captain’s face. He took a step toward Percy, his voice shifting from a general announcement to a personal pitch. “You. A man of your bearing… you were born for the front lines. With King Menestheus, a man of your… evident gifts would not remain a foot soldier for long. Command of a unit. A share of the choicest treasure. The favor of a king and the gods of victory. Your name sung in the halls of heroes.” He listed the benefits like a merchant hawging wares, his soldiers nodding along.

Percy said nothing. He just looked at the man. The hope and peace of the last few days curdled into something dark and heavy in his chest. Another war. Always another war. Troy. The name echoed in the hollow places of his memory, a story of pointless, decade-long slaughter.

The captain mistook his silence for interest. “Think of the honor! The tales they will tell of your strength!”

Percy’s voice, when it came, was quiet, but it carried like the first drop of rain before a deluge. It wasn’t loud. It was final.

“No.”

The captain blinked. “The spoils alone—”

“I said no.” Percy took a single step forward. He didn’t posture, didn’t clench his fists. But the air around him seemed to grow heavier, charged with the promise of a storm. The sea behind him, calm a moment before, began to whisper a little louder against the shore. “I’m not interested in your glory. I’m not interested in your spoils. I’m not interested in helping you burn a city and drag its women away in chains.”

The soldier’s face hardened. “It is the duty of men to fight when called! To defy a king’s call is—”

“To tell you to fuck off,” Percy finished, his voice dropping into a low, icy register that made the villagers behind him shiver. His eyes, usually bright with mischief or warmth, were the color of a churning, storm-ridden sea. “Take your war and march it somewhere else. This village is under my protection. You won’t be taking anyone from here. Not today. Not ever for your stupid, greedy war.”

The defiance, the sheer contempt in the demigod’s tone, was like a physical blow. The captain, used to obedience or desperate bargaining, was utterly disarmed. He looked into Percy’s eyes and did not see a hopeful recruit or a coward. He saw something ancient and unyielding. He saw the deep, cold patience of the ocean floor, and he knew, with a soldier’s instinct, that this was a fight he would not win.

He took a step back, his face pale. He gave a curt, sharp nod to his men. Without another word, they turned and marched back the way they had come, their earlier swagger gone, replaced by a confused, hurried retreat.

The village exhaled a collective breath they hadn’t realized they were holding. Relief flooded them, followed by a deeper, more fervent awe. He had turned away a king’s levy with a look and a few words.

But Percy felt no victory. He felt only a profound weariness, bone-deep and sour. He turned and walked away from the cheering villagers, back toward the empty cove. Troy. The pieces were clicking into place in this terrible timeline, and he was stuck in the middle of it. He wanted no part of it. The very thought of that bloody, famous stalemate made him sick.

---

The report that reached King Menestheus in Athens was a strange one. A captain, shaken, speaking of a village protected not by walls, but by a single man. A man of terrifying presence who commanded the very air and sea, who spoke of their glorious war with disgust, and whose “no” had felt like a natural law.

Menestheus, a shrewd and politically ambitious king, was intrigued. Rumors of a “Blessed One” on the coast had trickled in, tales he’d dismissed as peasant superstition. But this? A man who could deter seasoned soldiers? That was a resource. Or a threat.

He was not the only king hearing whispers.

In the well-ordered, strong-walled city of Troy, Prince Hector, the steadfast pillar of his people, also heard the filtered rumors. A divine stranger on the Achaean coast, who turned away armies and slew earth-monsters. A neutral power. A wild card. In the delicate, escalating tensions, such a figure was of intense interest. Could he be swayed? Could his strange power be turned to Troy’s defense?

And in sandy Pylos, the aged and wise King Nestor, a man who prized cleverness and new advantage, heard the tales from his traders. A demigod who taught children and cooked. A warrior who refused war. It was a paradox that fascinated him. Perhaps this one could be reasoned with, where force had failed.

One of them, driven by need, curiosity, or opportunism, would decide the rumors demanded a personal audience. A king’s persuasion, they believed, was greater than a captain’s. Gold, promises, flattery—these were tools that had moved mountains and men.

They did not yet understand that the stormy-eyed young man by the sea could not be moved by the things that moved kings. He had seen the end of their story, and he wanted no role in the telling. Their journey to recruit him would not be a negotiation.

It would be a lesson. And it would end in failure.

———

It was Nestor, King of Pylos, who came. Age had not dimmed his cunning, only given it a sharper, more polished edge. He arrived not with a military column, but with a small, dignified entourage: a herald bearing a gilded staff, two advisors in fine wool, and a cart laden with gifts—polished bronze tripods, bolts of richly dyed cloth, amphorae of the finest oil and wine. The message was clear: this was not a demand, but an invitation from a civilized power to a man of evident worth.

The villagers watched, awed and terrified, as the king’s party approached the central square where Percy stood, having been fetched from the shoreline. Percy wasn’t cleaning fish or mending nets. He was just… standing there, arms crossed over his chest, watching them come. He wore a simple, sun-bleached tunic, his feet bare on the packed earth. He looked less like a receiving dignitary and more like a bored sentinel about to order trespassers off his lawn.

Nestor, old but still sharp-eyed, took in the scene: the simple, prosperous village, the reverent, fearful looks the people gave the young man, and the young man himself. The rumors did not do him justice. Even in stillness, he was a vortex of contained energy. The king’s practiced, diplomatic smile widened.

“Hail, son of Poseidon!” the herald announced, his voice ringing. “Nestor, revered king of sandy Pylos, shepherd of his people and wise counselor to kings, greets you. He comes not with demands, but with respect, bearing gifts and an offer of friendship between a great king and a rising power.”

Percy’s face remained utterly blank. Not hostile. Just… blank. As if the herald had announced the weather in a language he only half-understood.

Nestor stepped forward, his manner avuncular, wise. “Young man, your fame spreads. To turn away a war-levy with a word? A remarkable thing. It speaks of a strength that should not be wasted on… fishing nets.” He gestured gracefully to the cart of treasures. “These are but tokens. Come to Pylos. Sit in my hall. Your wisdom and your power would be of immense value in the troubling times ahead. You could have a lordship, lands, honors beyond counting. Why linger here, when you could shape the fate of nations?”

Percy didn’t look at the gifts. He didn’t look at the king’s wise, expectant face. He looked past him, to the sea. His expression was one of profound, exhausted annoyance. It was the look of someone who’d been repeatedly woken up from a nap by a buzzing fly.

He let the king’s words hang in the warm air for a long, uncomfortable moment. The herald shifted. The advisors exchanged glances.

Finally, Percy spoke. His voice was flat, devoid of any inflection, any respect, any interest. “No.”

Nestor’s smile faltered, just a fraction. “My son, perhaps you do not understand the opportunity. The war coming… it will be the song of our age. To stand aside is to be forgotten by history.”

“I don’t want your history,” Percy said, his gaze snapping back to the king. The sea-green eyes were no longer blank. They were churning. “I don’t want your lands, your tripsods, or your war. I told the last guys. I’m telling you. Leave. Me. Alone.”

The finality was absolute. It was a wall.

Nestor’s diplomatic composure finally cracked, revealing the iron will of a king beneath. No one, demigod or not, spoke to him like this. “You are a power in this land. With power comes responsibility! You cannot simply hide!”

“Watch me,” Percy said, a spark of his old, defiant sasmoking back to life, edged with razor-sharp irritation.

The king drew himself up. “You will listen to reason. For your own good, and the good of all Hellas.”

That did it. The last thread of Percy’s patience, already frayed by divine suitors, prophetic warnings, and now this pompous, persistent mortal king, snapped.

His annoyed expression didn’t change. He didn’t snarl. He didn’t shout.

He just lifted his hand, palm out, toward the sea in a lazy, dismissive gesture, as if swatting the entire royal entourage away like the buzzing flies they were.

There was no roar, no grand incantation.

The sea simply answered.

A hundred yards offshore, the water bulged. Not a wave that built and crested, but a sheer, liquid wall that erupted vertically from a calm surface, as tall as three men. It hung for a split second, a shimmering, green-blue cliff, reflecting the sun and the stunned faces on the beach.

Then it fell.

It didn’t break. It smashed.

With the sound of a mountain collapsing, the wall of water descended directly onto the king’s entourage and the cart of glittering gifts. There was no time to scream, to run. One moment they were there—the herald with his staff, the wise advisors, the proud king, the symbols of mortal wealth and power.

The next, there was only a roaring, churning surge of white water rushing up the beach, soaking the square, and then receding as fast as it came.

Where the delegation had stood, there was nothing. No men. No cart. No gifts. Just wet, smooth sand, littered with a few bits of splintered wood and a single, dented bronze tripod being dragged back out by the frothy surf.

The villagers stood in stunned, dripping silence.

Percy lowered his hand. He looked at the empty, washed-clean sand, his expression unchanged—just that same deep, tired annoyance. He hadn’t killed them. He wasn’t a murderer. But he had, with a flick of his will, given them the most forceful, unequivocal “no” possible. They were likely half-drowned, battered, and deposited miles down the coast, their pride and their presents utterly destroyed.

He turned to Leodes, who was staring with his mouth open. “If any other kings, generals, or salesmen show up,” Percy said, his voice weary, “tell them the beach is closed.”

He walked away, back toward his hut, leaving the village to process the fact that their Blessed One had just dismissed a legendary king and his entire offer of glory with the same effort it took to shoo a goat.

Word of this encounter would spread differently. Not as a refusal, but as a cataclysm. A king had been turned away not with words, but with a casual, terrifying act of nature.

In his sunless hall, Poseidon would feel the surge of his son’s power and laugh, a sound of pure, proud thunder. In the war camps and palaces, the rumors would harden into a fearful, awe-struck fact: the demigod of the coast did not negotiate. He issued edicts with the tide.

And on Olympus, two watching gods would feel a fresh, violent thrill. Ares would see the brutal, effortless dominance and his desire would burn hotter. Apollo would see the breathtaking, casual artistry of the water-sculpture and his obsession would deepen. The challenge had just been magnified.

Percy just wanted to be left in peace. But with every lazy, world-altering gesture, he made that impossibility more and more remote.

———

The silence after the king’s watery dismissal was thick enough to taste. The villagers stood, dripping and shivering, not from the cold sea spray, but from a profound, collective awe that edged into fear. Not for themselves. They had long passed the point of fearing what Percy could do to them.

They feared what it was doing to him.

They watched him walk away, his shoulders set in a line of weary tension no one but them could see. He didn’t look triumphant. He looked drained. The lazy, cataclysmic gesture had not been an act of anger, but of final, exasperated punctuation. It had cost him something.

Old Elpis was the first to move. She wiped seawater from her face with a corner of her shawl and marched after him, her jaw set with a mother’s determination. Leodes and a few others followed, a silent, worried procession.

They found Percy not in his hut, but on the far side of the cove, sitting on a flat rock, staring at the now-placid sea as if demanding an explanation from it. He didn’t turn as they approached.

Elpis didn’t speak. She simply sat beside him on the rock, close enough that their shoulders almost touched. She pulled a round of fresh, soft cheese wrapped in cloth from her belt and placed it silently next to him. Leodes stood nearby, his wise old eyes clouded.

It was young Lysandros, brave and blunt, who finally gave voice to the question humming in all of them. He crept forward, his usual boisterous energy subdued. “Percy?” he asked, his voice small. “Are you… are you okay?”

Percy didn’t answer for a long moment. He picked up the cheese, but just held it, his gaze still fixed on the horizon. “I’m tired, kid,” he said finally, the words quiet and rough.

“Was it… hard?” Lysandros pressed. “Making the big wave?”

A humorless, soft chuckle escaped Percy. “No. That’s the problem. It wasn’t hard at all.” He finally looked at them, and the expression in his sea-green eyes made Elpis’s heart clench. It was a look of lonely burden. “It’s too easy. The water… it just listens. It wants to help. And sometimes, ‘helping’ looks like washing a bunch of stubborn, gold-laden idiots out to sea.”

Leodes stepped closer, his voice gentle. “They would have taken our sons. You protected us. Again.”

“I know,” Percy said, and there was no satisfaction in it. “And I’d do it again. But…” He gestured vaguely at the vast, powerful sea. “It’s a lot. It’s always there. And now everyone—kings, gods, monsters—they all see it. They see the big wave, the scary power. They don’t see…” He trailed off, looking down at the cheese in his hands.

“They don’t see the man who taught my grandson to write his name,” Leodes said softly. “Or who fixes my aching back by carrying the water jugs. Or who sits by our fire and tells stories that make us forget our fears.”

Elpis nodded fiercely, reaching out to pat his arm, a gesture so familiarly maternal it made Percy’s throat tighten. “You carry the weight of the deep in your soul, boy. We see it. We see how it pulls at you. You try to hide it with jokes and cooking, but we see the tide in your eyes when you think no one is looking.”

Percy was silent, stunned. He’d thought he’d been protecting them from the truth of his power, from the cosmic target on his back. He never realized they’d been watching him, reading the strain he tried so hard to conceal.

“We are not afraid of your power,” Lysandros declared, puffing out his small chest. “We’re afraid for you. Because… because it seems heavy.”

The simple, profound truth of it, coming from a child, broke through the last of Percy’s defenses. He let out a long, slow breath, the kind that carried true exhaustion.

“It is,” he admitted, the confession quiet in the salt air. “Sometimes it feels like I’m holding back the whole ocean all the time. And I’m so tired of people trying to poke the dam. Your king with his bribes. Other… beings with their… attentions.” He shuddered slightly.

Elpis’s eyes narrowed with protective ferocity. “Let them try. We may be mortals, but this is our home. Your home. They will have to go through us to add to your burden.”

It was a ridiculous, beautiful, hopeless sentiment. A handful of fishermen and weavers against gods and kings. But the sheer, unwavering loyalty in her voice, echoed in the firm nods of Leodes and the determined set of Lysandros’s small jaw, was a different kind of warmth. It wasn’t the flashy heat of divine obsession or the cold glitter of royal ambition. It was the steady, grounding heat of a hearth.

It didn’t lift the weight of the ocean. But for a moment, it felt like they were helping him carry it.

He managed a small, genuine smile, the first since the soldiers had arrived. “Thanks, guys. But let’s not pick any fights with sun gods, okay? I’ve got enough drama.”

He broke off a piece of the cheese and ate it. It was simple, sharp, and good. A real thing, in a world that kept trying to turn him into a symbol.

That night, as the village slept, Percy lay awake. The fear in their eyes earlier hadn’t been terror, but concern. They saw the cost. His father saw a treasure to be secured. Ares saw a weapon to be claimed. Apollo saw a muse to be possessed.

But the villagers saw him. A young man who was too powerful for his own good, who just wanted to go home, and who was trying his best not to drown under the expectations of eternity.

Their quiet solidarity didn’t solve anything. The kings would still covet. The gods would still descend. The weight of the sea would still be his to bear.

But as he listened to the gentle, familiar rhythm of the village at night—the soft snore from Leodes’ corner, the cry of a night bird—the loneliness that had been his constant companion since washing ashore receded, just a little.

He wasn’t alone. And for now, in the dark, that was enough to let him finally close his eyes and sleep.

Chapter Text

The forge of Ares was no place for patience or delicacy. It was a cavern of raw intent carved beneath a dead Thracian mountain, its ceiling lost in smoke and heat shimmer, its floor veined with molten slag that pulsed like an exposed artery. Celestial bronze screamed as it was quenched, not in water, but in the bound howls of fallen warriors, their souls stretched thin and sharp, wrung of their last defiance. The air was thick with sulfur and scorched iron, with the intimate, copper-sweet scent of blood that had soaked into stone over millennia. This was not a workshop. It was a body in constant violence with itself. This was where war dreamed.

Ares usually thrived here. The forge fed him. Conflict was his true art, and the world beyond the mountain provided endless inspiration. Siege designs. Collapsing alliances. Mortal tensions tightening like drawn bowstrings. Yet today, the obsidian war-table before him might as well have been blank.He paced, heavy boots ringing like distant thunder, crimson eyes fixed not on the glowing maps of the mortal world but on a single, radiant point along an Achaean coast. One presence burned brighter than any warfront.

Percy.

The name struck through him like a drumbeat against bone. It was not the idle want of a god bored with eternity. It was focused. Strategic. Devouring. Percy was not a passing indulgence or a beautiful distraction. He was a campaign worth planning, worth bleeding for.

Since that first vision on Olympus, Ares had not known stillness. He saw him everywhere: sea spray clinging to sun-warmed skin, salt tracing the lines of muscle earned through survival rather than vanity. Strength without display. Power without ceremony. A laugh that carried challenge in it, a mouth that spoke defiance as easily as humor. The ocean did not obey Percy because he commanded it. It followed because it recognized him.

That recognition gnawed at Ares in a way nothing had since the dawn of gods.

He stopped, fists flexing at his sides, nails biting into his palms as he stared into empty air and saw Percy instead. Saw the way the sea curved toward him, how waves softened when he stood in them, how destruction bent instinctively around his presence. That lazy, annihilating wave that had brushed aside a king like driftwood replayed itself in Ares’s mind until want coiled tight and hot in his chest.This was not lust in the small, mortal sense. This was a primordial pull. The desire of one force of nature recognizing another and refusing to let it remain untouched.

His mind, ever the tactician, began to shape the inevitable.

The Approach would be precise. No thunderous arrival. No rattling armor or banners snapping in the wind. Percy despised spectacle born of insecurity. Ares would come stripped down to his essence, contained but unmistakable. Dawn, perhaps. A solitary stretch of cliff where sea met stone and the world felt unfinished. He would let his presence seep into the air like pressure before a storm, sharp and electric. Not fear. Recognition. The awareness of being seen by something that understood exactly what he was.

Not prey.

Never prey.

Then the Offering. Not riches. Not titles. Percy had turned away from crowns before. No, Ares would give him something far more intimate. Truth. He would bring him to the edge of a war still young enough to be honest. No tangled politics. No hollow rhetoric. Just strength colliding with strength. He would let Percy feel it, taste it in the air. The brutal grace of a spear thrown perfectly. The sacred rhythm of shields meeting shields. The moment where life burned brightest precisely because it was being spent.Ares imagined standing beside him on a ridge above the chaos, close enough to feel the heat of Percy’s body, the way his power stirred when surrounded by violence. He would not ask him to fight. He would simply watch. Watch the tension coil in Percy’s frame, the way his gaze sharpened, the way the sea-green in his eyes darkened with understanding.

Because Percy already knew this truth, even if he denied it. Conflict was as honest as the tide. And like the sea, it answered him. When the battle reached its peak, when the air itself sang with impact and blood, Ares would turn to him. Not towering. Not commanding. Meeting him eye to eye. “You feel it,” he would say, voice low and grinding, intimate as a confession. “This is what you are. Not meant to stand apart. Meant to stand where the world breaks.”

He could already see Percy’s reaction. The sharp retort on his tongue. The defiance. But beneath it, that unmistakable pull. That fierce, wild recognition of something ancient and shared.

And then the Claim.

Ares would close the distance, not rushing, letting the moment stretch until tension hummed between them like a drawn blade. His power would unfurl, not crushing, but enclosing. Heat. Drive. Relentless purpose wrapping around Percy like a second skin. He would let him feel the forge, the war-drum pulse of his heart, the promise of endless forward motion.The kiss would not be gentle. It would be a challenge, mouth to mouth, breath to breath, carrying heat and salt and storm. A declaration rather than a question. He would taste the sea on Percy’s lips and something sharper beneath it, a power still caged, still mortal. And he would know, with absolute certainty, that it would not remain so. Because Percy was never meant to stay human.

Once claimed, once bound not by chains but by choice, Ares would see to the rest. Zeus could thunder all he liked. This demigod burned too brightly to be extinguished by time. Percy would be remade, not diminished. A god of something fierce and unyielding. The Roaring Shore. The Storm of Will. A power that stood where battle met tide.Together, they would be unstoppable. Two forces locked in perpetual motion. Not domination.

Symbiosis.

The forge shuddered as a low growl rolled from Ares’s chest, chains of captive spirits rattling in response. Apollo’s pretty songs and golden promises barely registered. Percy did not need serenading. He needed to be met, matched, taken seriously.

The God of War turned from his table, vision narrowed to a single, inevitable future.

Percy, son of Poseidon. Marked by battle and salt. Standing at his side. Powerful. Divine.

And irrevocably his.

———

High on Olympus, where the light was forever perfect and the air hummed with the latent music of the spheres, Apollo stood on his eastern balcony. Below him, the world was a tapestry of dawn’s gentle touch, but his brilliant blue eyes were not on the waking mortals or the rosy-fingered horizon. They were turned inward, fixed on a memory more vivid than any sunrise: the sea-green eyes of a demigod, brimming with a light no sun could replicate.

Since the moment Percy’s yearning song had pierced the halls of heaven, Apollo had been haunted. Not by a ghost, but by a living antithesis. Percy was not a creature of Apollo’s domain—not of ordered light, or measured poetry, or harmonic theory. He was chaos given benevolent form, a storm with a moral compass, a song that broke every rule of composition to reveal a deeper truth.

And Apollo, God of Truth, hungered for it with a desperation that was entirely new.

He retreated to his most sacred space: the silent, marble-walled chamber where he composed not for mortals or for praise, but for the cosmos itself. His lyre, the one strung with filaments of captured starlight, lay untouched. The parchments were blank. The melodies that usually flowed through him like a second heartbeat were stilled, drowned out by the echoing, haunting memory of Percy’s voice.

He did not just want to hear Percy sing again. He wanted to understand the source of that song. He wanted to crawl inside the storm of his soul and map its lightning.

His desire was not the brute, possessive campaign of Ares. It was an artist’s obsession, a scholar’s fixation, a lover’s desperate need to comprehend.

He saw Percy as Light itself, but not Apollo’s own clean, illuminating rays. Percy was the light that filtered through storm clouds—dappled, mysterious, charged with potential energy. He was the phosphorescence in the midnight sea—a cool, deep, self-generated glow from within the darkness. He was the first spark of life in primordial clay—a fragile, defiant illumination against the void. This was a light that did not banish shadow, but danced with it, defined by it, made more beautiful for the contrast.

And Apollo, who had thought he knew every spectrum of brilliance, was utterly captivated by this new, untamed wavelength.

His plan for wooing was not a strategy of force, but of revelation.

He would not crash onto the beach like a wave of war. He would arrive with the dawn, materializing from the sun’s own ascent, his form not blindingly glorious, but softened, gilded by the morning. He would find Percy not in battle or in a crowd, but in a moment of quiet creation—perhaps humming as he shaped clay for a pot, or with his eyes closed, listening to the wind in the olives.

Apollo’s first offering would be silence. Not the empty silence of absence, but the profound, listening silence of a master musician before a new, unknown instrument. He would simply be present, allowing Percy to feel the quality of his attention—not greedy or demanding, but rapt, reverent. He would let Percy see that he was not being assessed as a weapon or a prize, but witnessed as a phenomenon.

Then, he would speak. Not of glory or power, but of perception. “I have heard the music of spinning galaxies and the lament of dying stars,” he would say, his voice the soft, resonant hum of a perfectly tuned string. “But I have never heard a sound like the one your soul makes. It is not a melody I can write. It is a truth I can only yearn to hear again.”

He would offer not tripsods or kingdoms, but collaboration. He would bring forth his lyre and, instead of playing a composed piece, he would ask to listen. To truly listen. To Percy’s stories, to his frustrations, to the half-remembered songs of his mother. Apollo would then, with infinite care, attempt to weave those fragments into music—not to overshadow or appropriate them, but to reflect them back, to show Percy his own essence transformed into art. “This,” he would say, playing a few notes born from Percy’s description of a New York rainstorm, “is how your memory sounds to me.” It would be an act of profound intimacy, making the intangible tangible.

He imagined Percy’s face then—the guarded annoyance melting into surprise, then into a wary, fascinated curiosity. He would see the intelligence in those eyes, appreciating the complexity of the gesture. Apollo would hunger to trace the lines of that thoughtful face, to see if his skin was as warm as his spirit seemed, to learn if his laughter had a harmonic key.

But more than his body, Apollo hungered for his company. To have Percy beside him in this sunlit chamber. To have that chaotic, truthful energy as a counterpoint to his own perfected order. They would be the ultimate creative dyad: Apollo, the god of form and light, and Percy, the demigod of raw essence and depth. Together, they wouldn’t just make music; they would redefine it. They could compose paeans that could heal plagues, dirges that could calm earthquakes, love songs that could make mortals believe in divinity again.

The thought sent a shiver through him, a vibration along his divine core. To claim Percy would not be to cage him, but to provide the brightest possible stage for his brilliance. He would give him a place in the sun, a celestial platform from which his unique, storm-born light could shine for all eternity. He would make him a god, yes—but a god of what? The Compelling Heart? The Unvarnished Truth? The Keeper of Tides and Hearth? The domain would be forged from who Percy was, not what Apollo wanted him to be.

He looked at his silent lyre, his fingers itching. Ares saw a companion for slaughter. Apollo saw a muse for a new genesis.

A slow, radiant, and utterly determined smile spread across Apollo’s face. The hunger was a sweet, aching void in his chest, a space only that particular, storm-lit soul could fill.

He would go to the coast. He would approach with patience and artistry. He would listen, and he would create. And he would prove, through beauty and understanding, that he was the only one worthy of harnessing, of partnering with, of loving, such a rare and devastating light.

Chapter Text

The peace of Krokyleia, already frayed by kings and monsters, was severed by the rhythmic, ominous beat of oars on water. This wasn't a handful of soldiers on foot. This was a fleet. Five sleek, black-hulled Trojan galleys, their sails emblazoned with the red stallion of Troy, sliced through the calm morning sea and glided to a halt just beyond the surf. They did not land with violence, but with a disciplined, solemn purpose that was somehow more intimidating than a raid.

From the lead ship, a ramp was laid. The men who disembarked were not the lean, desperate levy-soldiers of Athens. These were the professional infantry of Troy's standing army, their bronze breastplates gleaming, their spears held in perfect, unwavering unison. And at their head walked a man who needed no introduction.

Hector, Prince of Troy, was like a mountain given human form. He was not overly tall, but built with a dense, formidable strength that spoke of unshakeable foundations. His face was handsome, but its beauty was in its solemnity and weary intelligence, not in the dazzling perfection of a god. His eyes, dark and grave, scanned the village and its gathered, terrified people, before coming to rest on the lone figure who had not retreated, who stood between the village and the sea.

Percy watched them come, his arms crossed. No sigh, no groan this time. Just a flat, observational calm. He’d run out of emotional energy for royal entrances. He recognized Hector instantly. The steady pillar, the doomed hero. A flicker of pity, unwanted and sharp, cut through his annoyance. This man was walking a path to a funeral pyre Percy had already read about.

Hector stopped a respectful distance away, his soldiers forming a silent, gleaming semicircle behind him. He raised a hand in a gesture of peace. "I am Hector, son of Priam, of Troy," he said, his voice deep and measured, carrying easily over the gentle shush of the waves. "I come not for conscripts or for war against this place. I come for you."

Percy raised an eyebrow. "Join the club. Seems to be the popular trip this season."

A faint, grim smile touched Hector's lips. "The rumors are true, then. You have no love for the gathering storm."

"I have no love for storms that get people killed for no good reason," Percy corrected, his voice quiet but clear.

Hector nodded, as if this confirmed a hypothesis. "You turned away Menestheus's men. You… discouraged Nestor of Pylos. Your power is real. And you wish to remain neutral." He took a step closer, his expression intensifying. "Neutrality is a luxury the coming war will not allow. Troy will fight for its existence. A power such as yours, standing aside, is a wound to our cause. Come to Troy. Not as a soldier, but as an honored guest. As a guardian. Use your power to protect the innocent within our walls—the children, the elderly. Help us ensure our cause is just, not merely desperate. Your strength could be a shield for mercy."

It was the best pitch yet. No talk of glory or spoils. An appeal to protection, to guarding the helpless. It was shrewd. It was almost tempting in its moral clarity. It was also, Percy knew, a one-way ticket into the heart of a meat grinder.

He met Hector's earnest, dark eyes. "I'm sorry, Prince Hector," he said, and he genuinely meant it. "But my answer is the same. No. I won't be a weapon or a shield for any city. This village is under my protection. That's the extent of my campaign."

Hector's shoulders, usually so square, slumped a fraction. Not in defeat, but in resigned understanding. He had seen something in Percy's eyes—not defiance of him, but a defiance of fate itself. "Then you leave us to our doom," he said, not as an accusation, but a statement of bleak fact.

Percy almost said, "Your doom was written long before I got here." He bit it back. Instead, he glanced at the sky, judging the sun. His stomach gave a traitorous rumble. The soldiers looked tense, weary from their voyage.

A bizarre impulse took hold. Maybe it was the pity. Maybe it was the sheer, exhausting absurdity of it all. Maybe he was just hungry and wanted to cook for more than five people.

"You and your men," Percy said, gesturing towards the galleys. "You've been rowing. You're probably hungry. The village has food. You can stay for a meal before you row back to your war."

The offer was so utterly unexpected, so disarming in its mundane hospitality, that even the disciplined Trojan soldiers blinked in confusion. Hector stared, nonplussed. "You would… feed the army you just refused?"

Percy shrugged. "Refusing to die for you isn't the same as wanting you to starve. It's just food. Simple stuff. Take it or leave it."

Hector, a man of duty and deep courtesy, was caught off guard. To refuse such a plain, peaceable offer after being denied a military alliance would be churlish. He gave a slow, bemused nod. "We… would be grateful."

What followed was the most surreal afternoon in Krokyleia's history. Fifty Trojan soldiers sat awkwardly on the beach, their spears stacked, while the village women, under Percy's direction, brought out baskets of flatbread, bowls of olives, and wheels of cheese. Percy himself took over the main fire pit. He had the fishermen bring the morning's catch. With a focused, effortless efficiency that was its own kind of magic, he filleted fish, seasoned them with wild herbs and crushed sea salt, and grilled them over the coals. He stirred a vast pot of lentil and barley stew, enriching it with dried fish and the last of the spring onions. The air filled with smells that made stomachs growl on both sides of the cultural divide.

When the food was served, the Trojans ate with the solemn reverence of men tasting something beyond their experience. The flavors were clean, profound, perfectly balanced—the sea, the earth, the fire, all harmonized. It was food that tasted of care, of peace, of home. For soldiers on the brink of a decade-long war, it was a bittersouth ache.

Hector ate beside Percy, away from the men. He said little, but his eyes spoke volumes as he tasted the stew, then the perfectly grilled fish. "This is… not simple," he said finally, his voice low.

"It's just what was available," Percy said, wiping his hands on a cloth.

"No," Hector countered, his dark eyes sharp. "It is a quiet power. A different kind of sovereignty. I understand now why they call you 'Blessed.'"

After the meal, as the Trojans prepared to embark, Hector approached Percy one last time. The formality was gone, replaced by a somber, man-to-man gravity.

"You have shown my men more kindness than any king has today," Hector said. "For that, you have my thanks. But a warning, in return for the meal. You have drawn eyes far higher than those of mortal kings. My father consults with priests, and they say the air around your name is thick with divine interest. They are not as… courteous as I have tried to be. When they come for you, they will not ask. They will take."

Percy looked past him, to where the endless sea met the endless sky. He thought of his father's worry, of the possessive heat in Ares's imagined gaze, the hungry light in Apollo's. He thought of Hera's pet monster turned to stone.

He felt no fear. Only a vast, tidal weariness, and beneath it, the unyielding bedrock of his own will.

He met Hector's worried gaze and gave a small, resigned shrug.

"Let them come."

———

The last of the Trojan ships had melted into the twilight, leaving behind the scent of salt, woodsmoke, and the faint, lingering ghost of grilled fish. The village of Krokyleia, exhausted by the day's surreal events, had retreated into a deep, grateful slumber.

Percy was alone by the central hearth, the only sounds the crackle of dying embers and the rhythmic slosh of water in a clay basin. He was washing the last of the shared meal’s dishes, his movements methodical and tired. The warm, soapy water was a grounding reality, a simple task in a world determined to be anything but simple.

That’s when he felt it.

A power, pressing against the quiet night. Not the brute, tectonic force of his father, or the seething, metallic anticipation of Ares. This was different. It was like the air itself had begun to hum, to resonate with a silent, golden frequency. It was warmth without heat, light without glare. Familiar in its divinity, yet strange in its specific, melodic signature.

He didn't look up. He scrubbed a stubborn bit of lentil from a wooden bowl. "You know," he said to the empty air, his voice flat with exhaustion. "Knocking is considered polite in most centuries."

A soft, delighted laugh shimmered into being behind him. "Most centuries don't have a demigod who turns away princes and feeds armies with a flick of his wrist."

Percy finally turned, drying his hands on a rough cloth.

Apollo stood there, and for a moment, the humble village square seemed to reshape itself around him. He wasn't in full radiance; that would have been an assault. He was toned down, as if filtered through a summer haze. He wore a simple, impeccably white chiton that seemed to hold the memory of sunlight. His golden hair was artfully tousled, his face a masterpiece of amused, benevolent curiosity. And his eyes—a bright, knowing blue—held a sparkle of pure, undiluted fascination as they drank in the sight of Percy, sleeves rolled up, surrounded by clean and dirty dishes.

He gave a slow, deliberate wink.

Percy stared back, his expression not one of awe, fear, or even annoyance. It was the utterly blank, unimpressed look of a night-shift diner cook facing a particularly flashy, overly confident health inspector.

He pointed a soapy finger at the basin, then at the stack of unwashed cups beside it. "You're blocking my light. Either help me clean up," he said, his tone leaving absolutely no room for debate, "or I will kick your shiny, golden ass and send you flying back to Olympus so fast you'll leave a skid mark on the constellation of Lyra."

The words hung in the warm, humming air.

Apollo's perfectly composed smile froze. The sparkling amusement in his eyes flickered, replaced by a split-second of genuine, profound shock. No one, in all his eternal existence, had ever greeted him with a threat of violence over dish duty. Prophets fell to their knees. Muses sighed in longing. Kings offered their finest treasures. This son of Poseidon offered him a dishrag and a promise of celestial battery.

Then, the shock shattered, and Apollo threw his head back and laughed. It wasn't his usual polished, performative laugh. This was a real, startled, booming sound of pure, incredulous delight that echoed off the silent huts. It was the sound of a god encountering something genuinely, breathtakingly new.

"Help you… clean up?" Apollo managed, wiping a non-existent tear from his eye, his gaze raking over Percy with renewed, intense hunger. The defiance was more intoxicating than any hymn.

"You heard me," Percy said, turning back to the basin and picking up a cup. "You showed up uninvited during my chores. You can pitch in or piss off. Divine prerogative doesn't get you out of KP duty."

Still chuckling, Apollo, the God of the Sun, Light, and Music, moved forward. He eyed the basin of soapy water with the analytical curiosity of an astronomer viewing a new planet. He then, with a graceful flourish of his hand, summoned a soft, glowing warmth that enveloped the remaining dishes. In an instant, they were not just clean, but dry, sparkling, and stacked in a perfect, gleaming pyramid.

Percy glanced at the magically cleaned dishes, then back at Apollo. "Show-off," he muttered, but there was no real heat in it. He finished the cup in his hand, dried it, and set it down. "Fine. That works."

Apollo leaned against the hearth's stone rim, his arms crossed, his expression one of rapt entertainment. "You are… entirely unprecedented," he mused. "You threaten a god, then put him to work. Why not simply call for your father? One word, and Poseidon would rise to defend you."

Percy shrugged, emptying the basin of water onto the stones where it steamed and vanished. "Yeah. He would." He met Apollo's brilliant blue eyes, his own sea-green gaze steady and serious. "And then he'd spend the next six months turning the Aegean into a boiling, impassable maelstrom hunting for pieces of you. He'd probably drag your chariot from the sky and beat you to death with your own sun-horses. It'd be a whole thing." He shook his head, as if weary of the very thought. "Way too much drama. Tartarus is a mess to clean up. Sending you home with a sore rear end is more efficient."

The blunt, casual assessment of his own potential annihilation at the hands of an enraged Poseidon, delivered with the tone of someone discussing clogged plumbing, left Apollo speechless for the second time in five minutes. The god wasn't offended; he was awestruck. This demigod saw the full, catastrophic consequences of divine conflict and found them… tacky. An unnecessary hassle.

Percy didn't fear the gods. He was unimpressed by them. And in that moment, Apollo's hunger transformed. It was no longer just a desire to possess a beautiful, powerful muse. It was a desperate need to be impressive to this singular, confounding mortal. To earn a look from those eyes that wasn't blank annoyance or weary tolerance.

"Efficient," Apollo repeated, the word tasting strange and wonderful. He pushed off the hearth, taking a step closer. The air hummed again, but softer now, like the vibration after a perfectly struck chord. "You see the world in such… practical terms. It is…"

"Exhausting?" Percy supplied, rolling his shoulders. "Yeah, tell me about it. Look, it's been a long day. I fed an army, did the dishes, and now I'm talking to the literal sun. I'm going to bed. The beach is that way." He jerked a thumb towards the darkness.

Apollo's smile was soft, genuine, and utterly fascinated. "Until next time, Son of the Sea."

"Make an appointment," Percy grumbled, turning towards his hut.

As he walked away, he felt Apollo's gaze on his back, not as a weight, but as a warm, persistent spotlight. He didn't look back. He knew, with a sinking certainty, that this wouldn't be the last time. The God of Sunlight had just been handed a dishrag and a threat, and he'd found it more compelling than any ode ever written in his honor.

The game had changed. And Percy, desperately wanting only to sleep, had just become the most intriguing puzzle in the universe.

———

Ares had watched the entire exchange from the thin place between moments, unseen but very much present, and by the gods, it had been exquisite. The Sun’s laughter still echoed faintly in the stones, that bright, ingratiating sound that always made Ares’s jaw tighten. Apollo flirted like he performed—loud, polished, desperate to be adored. And Percy… Percy had swatted him away with dishwater indifference and raw nerve. It set something feral loose in Ares’s chest. Not jealousy, exactly. No. Possession was quieter than that. He felt it settle in his bones like a truth long overdue. When Percy turned from the hearth and stepped into the shadowed edge of the square, Ares finally let the world feel him.

Not a divine arrival. No fire, no armor, no thunder. Just pressure. The kind that made lungs work harder and instincts sharpen. Percy stopped mid-step. His shoulders went rigid, every muscle aligning, not in fear but readiness. Ares smiled.

“Sunshine didn’t even make you flinch,” Ares said, his voice rolling out of the dark like distant war drums. “But you feel me.” Percy turned slowly. His eyes found Ares instantly, sea-green locking onto red with the steady focus of someone who knew exactly what stood in front of him and refused to look away. “Yeah,” he said. “You’re loud.”

Ares stepped closer. The air thickened, heat bleeding in without flame. He could see it now, the aftermath of the day etched into Percy’s body: the faint bruise blooming at his collarbone, the salt drying on his skin, the way his shirt clung damply to his back. Mortal fabric. Inadequate. Temporary.

“You let him talk to you,” Ares said, circling just enough to make his presence unavoidable. “You laugh at him. Threaten him. But you don’t dismiss him the way you do me.”

Percy snorted. “You’re not exactly subtle.”

“No,” Ares agreed, stopping in front of him. “I’m honest.”

The silence stretched, tight and vibrating. Ares reached out—not to touch Percy, not yet—but to the edge of his power, letting it brush against him like the first clash of shields. Percy inhaled sharply. His stance shifted, bracing, feet planting as if against a tide.

“See?” Ares murmured. “You answer me.”

Percy’s jaw set. “Don’t flatter yourself.”

Ares laughed, low and rough, and stepped in. Close enough now that Percy had to tilt his head back just slightly. Close enough to feel the heat rolling off him, the relentless forward pull of a god who did not ask permission. His hand came up—not gentle, not cruel—and caught the front of Percy’s shirt, fingers curling into the fabric.

“You wear too many layers,” Ares said.

He yanked.

The sound of tearing cloth cut clean through the night. The shirt gave way under divine strength, fabric ripping open and sliding uselessly down Percy’s arms. Bare skin met war-warmed air. Percy sucked in a breath, more startled than hurt, muscles instinctively flexing as he shoved the ruined shirt off completely.

For a heartbeat, neither of them moved. Ares’s gaze dragged over Percy’s exposed chest with open, unapologetic intent, like a general assessing a battlefield he already knew would be his. Sweat, salt, scars earned honestly. Strength that hadn’t been forged for display, only survival.

“Yes,” Ares said softly, reverently. “That’s better.”

Percy’s pulse thundered visibly in his throat, but his chin stayed lifted, defiant as ever. “You rip my clothes,” he said, voice steady, “you’re buying me new ones.”

Ares’s grin was all teeth and promise.

“Oh,” he said. “I intend to give you far more than that.”

Chapter Text

Ares did not touch him again. That, more than the torn shirt or the heat still licking the air, was what unsettled him. Percy stood bare-chested in the dim square, night wind brushing over skin still warm from work and gods alike. The village slept on, oblivious, while two forces that should never have been left unsupervised regarded each other in silence. Ares let it stretch. Let Percy feel the absence where pressure had been. War was not only the clash. It was the pause before the blow, the moment where breath was held and fate decided whether to move or break.

“You’re tired,” Ares said at last.

Percy barked a short laugh. “That’s your big insight?”

Ares stepped aside, breaking the direct line between them, and gestured toward the low stone bench near the extinguished hearth. It was an invitation, not an order. Percy eyed him suspiciously, then the bench, then rolled his shoulders with a quiet wince he probably thought went unnoticed.

He sat.

Ares followed, close but not crowding. The heat of him lingered regardless, a constant presence like banked coals. From this angle, Percy could see him more clearly without the weight of confrontation pressing in. No armor. No spectacle. Just a god built like conflict given flesh, scars etched into him like history that refused to fade.

“You fed an army,” Ares said. “You cleaned their mess. You sent the Sun packing. And you’re still thinking about sleep instead of triumph.”

Percy leaned forward, forearms on his knees. “Someone had to make sure they didn’t starve. And dishes don’t clean themselves.”

Ares watched the muscles in Percy’s back shift with the movement, strong and unguarded. He felt something unfamiliar tighten low in his chest. Not hunger. Not anger.

Respect, sharp and dangerous.

“Do you know why that bothers gods?” Ares asked.

Percy glanced sideways. “Because it’s boring?”

“Because it’s final,” Ares replied. “You don’t wait for songs. You don’t wait for permission. You finish things.”

Silence settled again, heavier now, threaded with understanding Percy didn’t quite want but wasn’t pushing away either. The sea murmured distantly, waves breaking in a steady rhythm that echoed Percy’s breathing.

“You ripped my shirt,” Percy said after a moment, clearly changing the subject. “That’s still rude.”

Ares huffed a laugh. “It offended me.”

“My shirt offended you.” Said Percy, deadpan. 

“Mortal fabric trying to pretend it can contain you?” Ares shrugged. “Yes.”

Percy shook his head, lips twitching despite himself. “You’re unbelievable.”

“And yet,” Ares said, leaning back slightly, giving him space while never truly retreating, “you didn’t tell me to leave.”

Percy opened his mouth, then paused. The truth hovered there, inconvenient and undeniable. He exhaled slowly. “You didn’t lie. Or threaten. Or try to impress me.”

Ares turned his head, eyes catching the firelight, softer now but no less intense. “Those are tools for men who need them.”

The quiet stretched again, but it was different this time. Not tense. Weighted. Like the stillness before dawn. Ares stood, the movement unhurried. He reached down, not to grab, not to claim, but to hook a finger briefly under the strap of Percy’s discarded shirt where it lay crumpled on the stones. He lifted it, examined the torn fabric with something like disdain, and let it drop again.

“Rest,” he said. “I won’t take what’s already worn thin.”

Percy looked up at him, startled despite himself. “That’s it?”

“For tonight,” Ares said, gaze lingering one last time on bare skin, on the steady heart beneath it. “War does not rush what is inevitable.”

The pressure lifted. The night loosened its grip. When Percy blinked, Ares was already gone, leaving only warmth in the air and the unmistakable sense that something had shifted—quietly, irrevocably.

Percy sat there a long moment before standing. He picked up the ruined shirt, snorted softly, and draped it over his shoulder.

“Figures,” he muttered, heading for his hut. “I finally get peace and quiet, and it comes with emotional warfare.”

Behind him, unseen, the sea laughed.

———

Percy slept, but it was not rest.

His dreams were usually fragments—a flash of his mom’s smile, the taste of a blue cookie, the feeling of wind over water as he rode a pegasus. Tonight, the dream had a texture, a pressure, a scent of deep ocean trenches.

He stood on the sea floor, yet he could breathe. Around him stretched an endless, silent forest of black coral and glowing anemones. In the distance, the Leviathan moved, a shadow against darker depths.

Before him, on a throne of living pearl and basalt, sat Poseidon. Not the version who visited his hut, but the God-King in his full, ancient aspect. His beard was threaded with the bones of sea dragons, his eyes held the chill of the abyssal plain. The weight of his regard was a physical force, pressing the water around Percy into something as solid as glass.

“You are making a habit of entertaining unworthy guests, my son.”

Percy, even in the dream, crossed his arms. The water didn’t hinder the motion. “You mean the ones who aren’t you? Yeah, well, they don’t take ‘go away’ for an answer. Must run in the family.”

A flicker of something like amusement passed through the god’s stormy eyes, but it was swallowed by a deeper, more turbulent concern. “Ares came to you. Touched you.”

It wasn’t a question. Percy felt a flush of irritation—and something else, a prickle of defensiveness he didn’t want to examine. “He ripped my shirt. Big dramatic statement. I’ve had worse from laundry machines.”

“Do not be flippant,” Poseidon’s voice boomed, a sound that vibrated in Percy’s bones. “He marked you with his attention. In the old ways, that is a claim as sure as a brand. Apollo lingers in your air like perfume. They circle you as sharks circle a beacon in the deep.”

“Let them circle,” Percy shot back, the dream-water churning with his frustration. “I’m not a beacon. I’m a person. I said no.”

“Your ‘no’ is a challenge to them!” Poseidon rose from his throne, and the entire seabed trembled. “You stand still in the current, Percy. You believe your refusal is a wall. To gods like them, to forces like us, it is not a wall. It is the eye of the storm. The most compelling thing in existence is a power that refuses to be moved. You are not just saying no to their advances. You are proving you have a will that might withstand theirs. There is no greater aphrodisiac to the divine than potential conquest.”

The words landed like depth charges. Percy wanted to argue, to scoff, but the terrible truth of them seeped into the dream. His stubbornness, his exhaustion, his very refusal to play their games… it was all part of what made him irresistible. He was the unbreakable wave. And every god with a taste for dominion wanted to be the one to finally make him break.

“It is not just the two of them,” Poseidon continued, his voice dropping to a grave, grating whisper. The water grew colder. “Athena dissects your every action in her mind, turning your kindness into strategy, your resilience into a fascinating new theorem of power. Aphrodite weaves your name into the gossamer of mortal longing, making the very idea of you a symbol of ultimate romance. Even Zeus watches, measuring your strength against his throne. Hera’s jealousy is a poison, but the curiosity of the others… it is a slow fire. They will all want a piece of the mystery. A taste of the demigod who told Apollo to do the dishes and made Ares rilled in his hunger.”

Percy felt a cold that had nothing to do with the dream-sea. It was the chill of inevitability. He was a rock in a stream, and the entire pantheon was the coming flood.

“I can bring you home,” Poseidon said, and for the first time, his voice was not a command, but an offer, layered with a desperate paternal need. “To my palace. The waters there are under my complete dominion. No god may enter uninvited. You would be safe. You could have anything you desire. Libraries of lost knowledge. Gardens of bioluminescent coral. You could rule as a true Prince of the Seas, and never again be troubled by the petty, hungry eyes of Olympus.”

The image was seductive. Safety. Privacy. An end to the endless pressure. He could almost feel the quiet of those sun-dappled underwater halls.

But then he saw other images. The villagers of Krokyleia waking to find him gone. Lysandros’s confused face. Elpis’s worry. The simple, solid weight of a well-mended net in his hands. The taste of bread he’d baked himself, shared.

He wasn’t just a prize or a prince. He was Percy. And Percy didn’t run and hide while people who counted on him were left wondering.

He looked up at his father, the god who offered him a gilded cage at the bottom of the sea. “No.”

Poseidon’s face darkened like a squall line. “You would choose a mortal village over your own safety? Over your rightful place?”

“I’m choosing to finish what I started,” Percy said, his voice firm in the watery dream. “I’m not leaving them to wonder where I went. I’m not trading one set of expectations for another, even if yours come with a fancier address.” He met the god’s turbulent gaze. “They’re my people now. And I don’t abandon my people.”

For a long, suspended moment, Poseidon simply stared. The pressure in the dream built to an almost unbearable intensity. Percy braced for an earthquake, a tidal wave of divine displeasure.

Then, slowly, the pressure eased. The God-King’s expression shifted from anger to something vastly more complex—a grudging, awe-struck, terrifying pride.

“You truly are my son,” Poseidon murmured, the words resonating with a note of fatalistic wonder. “Stubborn as the bedrock, loyal as the tide. You will not be moved. Not by fear. Not by flattery. Not even by me.” He shook his head, a massive, slow motion. “Then you must understand the consequence. By standing still, you make yourself the axis on which their world now turns. The suitors will come. The games will escalate. You have told the storm to come. And it will.”

The dream began to dissolve, the coral forest fading. Poseidon’s form grew translucent.

“Be ready, Percy Jackson,” his voice echoed, fading into the sigh of the deep. “You have chosen the weight of the world. Now you must learn to bear it.”

Percy woke with a gasp, not in panic, but as if surfacing from a great depth. Dawn was just a grey suggestion at the mouth of his hut. The weight of the dream—the warning, the pride, the terrible, freeing choice—settled onto his shoulders, heavier than any monster.

He had drawn a line. Not just for Ares and Apollo, but for all of them. For his father. For himself.

He was staying.

Let the gods come. Let them try their tricks, their threats, their grand romantic gestures.

He was Percy Jackson. He had faced Titans. He had turned down godhood. He had made a sun god do dishes.

And he was not moving.