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Sometimes he’ll look at Estelle, laughing away with a joy he never quite had and he’ll get why Luke did what he did. Sometimes he’ll look at Annabeth, the sunlight glinting through her curls, making her glow and he won’t get Luke at all.
Most days Percy wakes up, and there’s always a dark-haired boy with a scar just watching - Waiting for the moment in which Perseus Jackson snaps and tears Olympus to the ground.
It was easier in the beginning, easier before the wars and the deaths and Tartarus. It was easier before he had more scars than happy memories, before Percy had stopped counting the children he had burned. It was easier when he looked at his father, and there was still love.
Then came a hell he survived, and it only hardened him. He stopped flinching, he lost a gentleness he didn’t know he had. Percy survived, and most days he thinks it was for the worst. But he didn’t die in the first war, or his second.
No, he lived and years later he’s found peace in New Rome. It isn’t any easier. Because despite the promises, despite the lack of ominous prophecies, despite his father’s reassurances - he knows that it’s only a matter of time.
Before the Gods piss off a deity again and someone has to clean up their mess. Before another immortality weighed down being shows up on his doorstep and asks him to fight. (He had said no, and Jason did not live to eighteen. Demigods do not live long lives.)
It’s only a matter of time until the next fight comes around, and Percy Jackson, ever the loyal soldier and son, picks up his sword again and fights. And this time he won’t come back, or at least not as he was.
He’s learned, like he’s learned that Demigods die young and Gods do not care, that it’s either death or godhood. There is no other option, not for him. Percy either dies in a blaze of glory, of senseless violence in an endless cycle, or -
Or the barely constrained divinity in his blood burns too brightly. The hunger, the desperation clawing at him will finally win. And like Icarus beneath the sun, it will burn and burn until there is nothing mortal left about him.
(Ascension rests on his tongue like a death sentence. Annabeth would call it Fate, or maybe she would look at him with those haunted eyes and whisper, We can’t run from this.)
Percy Jackson is the most powerful Demigod of his time, and perhaps ever. With every day, every battle, every death he is more and more his father’s son. He is nineteen, bordering on twenty, when he first truly gets Luke’s hatred.
He’s nineteen when he shatters the mirror because his father’s eyes stare back. It is little comfort that his cracked knuckles are red, because he swears the blood slipping down his hand is gold-flecked.
Annabeth finds him on the bathroom floor, curling into himself and keening like a wounded, feral animal. She holds him tightly, and in the light, their grey-streaked hair looks the same. They both look far too old, too tired for their age.
(Greek Tragedy - the fate of the protagonists, who suffer from their own weaknesses and the will of the Gods.)
(“We were just kids.”
“When has that ever mattered?”)
Estelle runs around the beach without a care in the world. Her feet sink into the foam, and she giggles when it curls around her feet. She is eight, and she has never known loss so painful it carves out a piece of her heart.
Percy smiles, and with a flick of his wrist, the water splashes her. Her laughter floats on the air, she is eight and she will never know what it is to burn a child her age. She will never stand unbreaking beneath her grief, she will never raise a burning torch, her hand perfectly still as a golden shroud is eaten by the flames.
Estelle tosses back her hair, which has Paul’s darkness and their mother’s curls, that is not grey streaked. She will never know hell, will never know why Annabeth wakes up screaming or why their mother woke him once and had bruises on her wrist for a week.
He’ll never forgive himself for that.
His little sister, who begs to be carried, and always plays with his beads. Estelle, who makes even Nico smile, who knows the names of every species of shark and thinks he’s an utter idiot for getting a blacktip reef and a blue shark mixed up. It’s in the name Percy.
Estelle who fights with him, and has never once flinched back. Who has never once curled into herself, hands raised and protecting her head. Who has never once doubted the fact that he would throw himself back into Tartarus before hurting her.
Estelle who is good, who is kind, who is both everything and nothing like the kids at Camp. Because they laugh like her, but Isa is a year younger and she carries a dagger everywhere with her. Zeke is twelve and burn scars curl around his waist, a mark from his survival and his sisters' death.
Percy looks at his little sister, and not for the first time he gets why Luke did what he did. Because it is so unfair, so wrong that his teeth ache, that every bone in his body screams. Percy looks at his little sister, and he sees all the dead kids he couldn’t save, he sees the children who were damned from the moment they screamed, covered in their mother’s blood, divinity flickering through their veins.
He sees the children who will die young. Demigods do not live long. And he gets Luke, he gets his hatred, his snarl, and barred teeth. The youth that still clung to him in the beginning, the way he spit in his father’s face and did his damn best to tear the godliness from his blood.
Percy remembers, “Ethan, me, all of the unclaimed…don’t let it happen again.” The children in Camp, unclaimed and too used to pyres and the smell of smoke and iron. The Gods' consistent apathy. All the ways he failed.
Somedays, most days if he’s being honest, Percy looks toward Olympus, to the faint pull in his bones, a call to power, and he thinks about how easy it would be to kill them all. It’s not something he would ever breathe to life, but he thinks about it.
He thinks about Akhlys, and how just like the poison, Percy could feel her blood. The golden ichor of the Gods had thrummed beneath his fingertips. And if it wasn’t for Annabeth’s fear he would have torn her apart, ripped the gold from her veins, and turned the world a shade of light. He would have made hell a little bit quieter.
He thinks about how the Gods do not change, they cannot change even when their children are slaughtered before them. Then he thinks of Zeus pinned to his throne, his blood boiling, working against him. He thinks of Olympus cracking beneath his feet, gold-soaked, the end of the world and the beginning of a new one.
Luke had told him once, and these days he can’t even remember when, but his eyes had been alight with something new. He had smiled, and it hadn’t hurt, “You and me, Percy? We’re more alike than you know. You’ll get that someday.”
He hadn’t believed it then. Percy had tried so hard to ensure that Luke was wrong, that he was more his mother’s son than his father’s. He had tried so hard to be good.
And as everyone knows, the best of prophecies are the self-fulfilling sort.
Annabeth is the only thing that stays his hand, she’s the only thing that keeps him tethered to this earth. After Tartarus, after his slip and the desperate want that had filled his hollowed chest, she is one of the few good things that he still believes in.
Percy likes to watch her work, hunched over some new plan or the next, her hands covered in ink. Her curls pulled back in a ponytail with a few stubborn strands constantly falling over her face. It’s the few times she’s relaxed, the few times her face isn’t haunted by the horrors they’ve seen.
In moments like these, he can almost pretend that they’re normal. That they met in school, and she hated him but they fell together, like that too was its own inveitability. They never had to fight for their lives, or endure hell, and instead the worst thing they lived through was moving day to their college.
And then Annabeth leans back, stretching and rolling her neck and he’ll catch sight of scars tripping down her back and he’ll remember. Or the light will catch right and a set of grey curls will look so out of place in her hair, and he’ll know.
He’ll remember and the hatred will grow and Percy knows that the only reason the Gods are still standing, the only reason he hasn’t torn this world apart and finished the ancient cycle of son kills father kills son kills father is because of her.
Because Annabeth is so damn tired, because she had flinched back from his rage in Tartarus, because she doesn’t want another war. Because she is good and smart and beautiful, because he stopped believing in Gods a long time ago but she is the one thing he has faith in.
Annabeth is the one thing he prays too. And she always answers, she always knows and he stopped questioning it a while ago.
So he answers his father's calls, and he braves the storm and he does not fall to his knees and scream as the world cracks around him. Percy bends the knee and he’s good and he buries children and he moves on and he goes to fucking college.
Percy lives and it’s almost enough to forget, almost.
Somewhere after the first time his world ended, and before the second time it did, he sits with Luke under the stars. It’s quiet, and in the silence only broken by a crackling fire, Percy looks over at Luke. He’s flat on his back, staring up at the stars with this haunted look of awe.
He looks young like that, he looks hungry and unafraid. (Hubris Annabeth would say if she was here. He looks like hubris incarnated.)
Percy doesn’t speak, young enough to hold his tongue, and so it’s Luke who speaks first. His voice wraps around the trees, it floats in the air, and it fits Hermes' son. “Do you believe in the prophecies?”
Not the prophecy but prophecies. Percy had turned, Luke still looking at the stars as if he’d never see them again. “I mean yeah? Aren’t they Fate and all that, everyone else thinks that.” Somehow he felt like that was the wrong answer, that it wasn’t the full truth, and Luke knew that too.
He turned, sitting up, and the fire flickered across his scar. “I don’t care what everyone else thinks, what do you think?”
And Percy remembered his mother’s stories, the Fates with their golden thread, the Oracle of Delphi, and her cryptic truth. He remembers the power in words, and he speaks carefully. “I think that prophecies are what we make them,” Hercules and Achilles and the trail of broken heroes, “And I think that we play into their hands out of fear or hatred.”
The world stilled, and he had forgotten that there were powers older than the Gods, “I think we make prophecies, and in our own madness we fulfill them.”
Luke didn’t speak, but something had shifted in him, something had changed. He nodded, and without a word fell back against the ground. This time when he looked at the stars the hunger was gone, and there was only an emptiness left behind.
Percy would almost call it resignation, or maybe acceptance.
May Castellan has her son’s eyes, and in the brief moments when she’s not trapped in her fractured future, she has his terror. Luke dies, he lives and he hates his father, he loves Annabeth, he is kind, and he is a monster. And for as long as his mother lives he’s everything and nothing.
He’ll still the boy who ran away and the one who took on Kronos. He’s still alive and angry, he’s dead and cold on Olympus. As long as May Castellan is alive, forever haunted by the twisted spirit of prophecy, Luke can never be free.
He can never be forgotten.
Percy doesn’t know anymore if that’s a blessing or a curse.
He sees Luke in the corner of his eye, on the training ground of New Rome, watching the kids train. He sees Luke in a younger daughter of Mars, fuming with her anger and the spitting image of Clarisse if she wasn’t grief-soaked. He sees Luke in Nico and his easy rage, the way he no longer flinches from the Gods.
He sees Luke in Annabeth, in her bad days when she can’t pick up a pen. When he finds her holding her dagger, and when she meets his eyes she’s thinking of all the ways she could kill him before she remembers who he is - who she is.
He sees Luke in her back, in the black lines that form names and symbols. The sprawling olive tree, names curled into the dark pits of the olives, each and every one a dead child her Mother will not mourn - the weight she carries.
He sees Luke in the living and in the dead, the ones he couldn’t save, could never have saved. Clarisse's dulled anger, the fifteen-year-old in charge of the Apollo Cabin because there is no one older. The quiet of a camp with half its occupants gone.
Percy sees Luke everywhere, the constant pull, the anger that has never left him. He sees Luke everywhere, and when he’s given up on lying to himself, he knows that it’s only a matter of time.
That one day the Gods will go too far, or they’ll do absolutely nothing as they always have, and he will not scream, he will not cry. Percy will simply break, and Mount Olympus will crumble beneath him, soaked in ichor.
He learned two things from Luke. One: All Gods can die. Two: History always repeats itself.
(The cycle has yet to be broken, and Percy is too tired to break the wheel.)
(Percy never had another Fate. It just took him this long to realize that.)