But It Makes Me Hurt - Blog Posts

if you're ever in the mood to hurt our feelings some more do you think we can maybe see the follow up conversation percy has w. sally 👀👀👀 for science and also for ripping out our hearts and stomping on them

who am i to deny you your whims, anon, who am i. so here’s the second part to this fic, which wasn’t supposed to have a second part, but you know me, parental emotions is my THING i love it SO MUCH. the trigger warnings apply, for anyone stumbling across this post minus context, those TWs are suicidal thoughts, discussion of that, and this particular part involves some description of picking at scars, so if reading about skin picking triggers you, do avoid that. i think i made it both worse and better. anyway! onwards.

Royal Flush

AO3

The car ride back was tense, and maybe it wasn’t the worst car ride Percy had ever had in his life, but it was up there. He felt rude doing it, but he slumped against the car door and closed his eyes and feigned sleep, the way he did when his mom checked on him in the night sometimes—the same low, deep breaths, the almost-sleep of people who couldn’t quite reach it. Percy didn’t sleep as much as he laid back and closed his eyes and tried not to think. It was a good excuse to stop being, for a moment, if he was asleep, or as close as he could get to sleep.

He knew it frustrated Annabeth that he spent so much of their time together half-present, but it was easier, than looking at her and the eyes she had that looked like stratus clouds and thinking I don’t know what I did right, and sometimes I think I didn’t do anything right at all. It was a good excuse to forget that he wasn’t passing a single class, and that it would take monumental effort to pull his grades up to passing at this point, and that the idea of doing anything at all made him wonder if he could pull the ace up his sleeve he’d used on Akhlys on his own self. His own throat, his own lungs, his royal flush the liquid sloshing in them, a kid who could breathe underwater dying by drowning on land. Feigning sleep was a good excuse to think about the ace up his sleeve, the drowning, the royal flush, the one shot that would hit home in six hundred thousand shots. Drowning had scared him once but he wasn’t sure he was scared of much, anymore, except headstones without his name on them.

 He knew it frustrated her, the way he knew Annabeth was crying in the backseat. His mom wasn’t mean enough to force her to talk in space where Annabeth didn’t have anywhere to escape to, and even if Percy could hold her, he didn’t think he’d be welcome to. He’d done enough for one night, and he was out of words to give her, words to reach her—his head pounded and his stomach throbbed and his muscles were all beaten and weak, and the idea of doing anything else for the rest of the night made him queasy. He wanted to sleep, or not-sleep, wanted to be done with the living for the day. But every time he heard Annabeth’s breath hitch, he thought about throwing himself out of the car, laying flat in the road and not getting up, not the short frenzy of drowning but the prolonged battering of being crushed into the concrete by inches. At some point Percy did fall asleep, genuinely, somewhere between the roadkill and the hum of the engine and the fact that—as much as he deserved it—he couldn’t listen to Annabeth cry for a second longer.

 So when the door crashed shut he shook himself and blinked, glancing to the side. His mom was settling into the driver’s seat, but hadn’t she been driving? He twisted and the backseat was empty, and his heart was already picking up its pace, thinking of Zeus’s thunderbolts and the glint of lightning on rain-slick horns and the way his mom had died in front of him, when she pressed a hand to his chest.

 “Parking garage,” his mom said. Her eyes were soft, in the intense way she could soften them, the way that made Percy sit still and listen without feeling like she hated him. “Annabeth’s inside, having casserole with Paul. I wanted to give you another minute. You look pretty tired, kiddo.”

 Percy scrubbed a hand over his face. “Oh,” he said, feeling a bit stupid. The minotaur and Half-Blood Hill and the horn that was almost too heavy for him to lift was years ago. Another lifetime. It was time to learn to breathe during thunderstorms and car rides, maybe, if he had the energy to figure that out.

 “It looks like the two of you had a rough night,” she said, lightly.

 “Kind of,” Percy said. He looked away from her and at the orange-cast concrete wall in front of them, the old stains, the gloominess of it. He was starting to think New York City was ugly; profoundly, horrifically ugly, the kind of thing people let grow because of interest in its suffering. Why the hell the kingdom of the gods was rooted in New York City, Percy couldn’t fathom it, because every inch of it was gray and every inch of it was grimy and there was a rat around every corner, and they’d had roaches in their apartment when he was a kid. He could barely remember defending it and that’d been a year ago.

 His mom’s hair was pulled back into a braid, loose just because her hair was too curly to hold anything much tighter. He’d tried, when he was younger; his mom taught him how to braid on her own hair, and then in the mornings while she got ready for work, she’d hand him a lock and let him try, and it had felt like helping. Percy knew now it was to keep him busy, and away from Gabe, because in the mornings Percy was easily excitable, and Gabe had hated it when Percy was excitable more than anything. Gabe had taught him what a royal flush was.

 “Pretty rough,” Percy said, weakly, tapping his fingers on his pants. He never remembered leaving clothes at Annabeth’s. She was kind of a clothing thief.

 His mom’s fingers worked over her wedding ring, twisting it around and around, the way she did when she was nervous. Guilt tasted like ash in the back of his throat. I’m sorry that when you get nervous you play with your wedding ring, and I’m sorry that you were married to a bastard because of me, and the other things he’d never say to his mom out loud. “How badly hurt,” she said.

 “There was a boar outside of school,” Percy said. “After tutoring. Calydonian boar, if you know it, I think, because it spat lightning. Avoided the lightning. Got a little… impaled.”

 “Well,” she said. “I’d planned to make pork chops tomorrow, but I’ll hold off.”

 Percy laughed, hard enough that it pulled the aching wound on his stomach, but he didn’t care. It felt good to laugh. It felt like it’d been a while, but he couldn’t remember. His mom always knew, somehow, inexplicably, when he needed to laugh; she’d always said laughter was a kind of medicine, and something about laughing with his mom felt better. It felt like approaching another life he almost had, one where that happened every day, so close but never fully grasping it.

 “I’m going to assume you’re at least mostly okay,” she said, pinning him with a look, and Percy nodded. He tried not to think about Annabeth’s bloody hands, tried not to think about her panic, the way she’d checked his pulse. He was alive because of her, and as much as he loved her, as much as he wanted to kiss her senseless sometimes to prove it, in that moment he kind of hated her more than anything.

 “Lot of ambrosia,” he said. “It’s… hot. It, er, burns you up. Internally.”

 She knows that, stupid, he thought.

 “Do you want to head inside?” she asked, brows pinched together. “I had the heater on full blast. It’s still toasty in here.”

 Percy hesitated. Annabeth was inside. He wasn’t sure he could look at her. “Not yet,” he said. “Not—not yet.”

 His mom’s fingers wrapped around his wrist, lifting one of his hands up and then cupping it. “Can I ask what you’re not telling me?”

 No, Percy wanted to say. His throat felt thick and cold, like pack ice, the pack ice Poseidon’s bears lumbered across. He scrambled for an answer that wasn’t I scared the living daylights out of her and I’m never going to forgive myself and settled on a small, mumbled, “I don’t know.”

 His mom tugged his hand over the center console, and then toyed with his fingers, carefully, like he was breakable—her hands were smaller than his, now, and he had a clear memory of pressing his palm to hers and understanding how tiny he really was, when he was a kid. He’d never do that again. “Sweetheart,” his mom said.

 “I don’t want to talk about it,” Percy snapped. “I don’t—I don’t want to talk about anything.”

 His voice was louder than he’d thought it’d been, too loud for a closed-off car, and his mom flinched backward. Percy watched her jaw work and her shoulders move as she breathed long and slow, deep intentional breaths, because it was like having razor wire pulled through his nerves, because he couldn’t feel his own heartbeat around how much his chest hurt. He’d forgotten that his voice had gotten deeper, that when he spoke harshly or loudly around his mom she remembered someone else.

 Can’t even say ‘no’ right, he thought, and then he tore his gaze away, because whatever reserves he’d had, he’d run through them. He registered his mom getting out of the car, the kneejerk good, leave me here, I’ll suffocate, and then the door beside him was opening, and his mom was crouched on the concrete beside of him.

 She squeezed his knee. “I’m okay, baby,” she said, and maybe that was what undid him, the okay. He twisted in the seat and almost fell on top of her, with how fast he reached for his mom. Her arms were around him in a second, in maybe the most awkward hug they’d ever had, because he was hugging her while halfway in the passenger’s seat and she was crouched outside, but she was holding him. He didn’t know how he ever thought he could make it, without that, without her hand running up and down his spine through his hoodie.

 “Sweetheart, baby, breathe,” she said, and Percy realized he was crying. Crying the way wounded dogs did, from the bottom of the barrel of their chest, that it was tearing at his throat and the wound in his side, and it felt a little bit like drowning on air.

 “Sorry,” he managed, the word muffled against her shoulder. “Sorry, Mom.”

 “Don’t you ever apologize to me, not for this,” she said. “C’mere, sweetheart.”

 He didn’t know, exactly, how long his mom held him on the floor of a parking garage—he knew that he couldn’t bring himself to stop, and that her hand ran up and down his spine constantly. He knew that at some point she started saying sweet, small things, the way she always had. He missed the days where he could curl into her side and fit perfectly, because it seemed simpler to Percy, that even if they’d been going through hell then, it seemed simpler to him that he should fit together with his mom like a puzzle piece. Now it was awkward and his back ached from bending over and his stomach ached because he’d had a hole through it just an hour and a half ago, and it was horrific, the way time marched forward before he got a chance to live it. Had he ever been a kid with his mother, or had he grown up on a highway, speeding through it all? Had it been that long, since he’d last laughed with her?

 He stopped long enough to hiss, because the ache in his side had built to a furious, stabbing pain. He wouldn’t be perfectly healed for a while, and event then, healing with nectar and ambrosia left phantom pains, almost like the wound healed too fast for the nervous system to keep track.

 “Inside,” his mom said, and Percy almost argued, but she was rising and pulling him out of the car. He tipped too much of his weight against her, forgetting both that he was a lot heavier and that he had to carry at least some of his own weight, and they nearly toppled into the neighboring car before he managed to stay unsteadily upright.

 His mom let him go when he was full-body-trembling but on his feet, and ducked into the car and pulled out the hand sanitizer wipes Paul left in the glove box. Paul thought more germs were spread around by kids during the fall semester, despite having no evidence and the trend being against him, so from August to December, it was reliable that there’d be hand sanitizer wipes in the car somewhere.

 “Duck a little,” she said. Her eyes were glassy and bright, but she hadn’t been crying, not nearly the way he had.

 Percy bent his head and his mom pulled a few wipes out of the bag, and swept under his eyes and down his face, the way someone would cradle a baby bird. She’d done this for his entire life. He remembered being seven and coming home from school with a bloodied face, a black eye, because he’d inherited his sense of control from the sea, and the sea couldn’t restrain itself for anything. She sat him on the kitchen counter and flicked on their deadbeat little radio, and businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen they dig my earth had crooned through the static. She’d hummed along while Percy sulked and she stopped up his nose and made an icepack for his busted head. She poured dish soap into plastic bags and froze them, because they conformed to the body better, and Percy had thought that she’d been so inventive, so clever, and she still was, but now it turned his stomach to think about. He wasn’t the only one who’d learned what a royal flush was, from Gabe Ugliano.

 She tossed the bag of wipes and the dirtied ones into the passenger seat, and shut the door. “I’ll get them later,” she said. “Or Paul can just deal.”

 Percy hooked an arm around her waist and pulled her against him and buried his face in her shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he said, voice raspy from the scream-crying, the crying the way wounded dogs on the euthanasia table did.

 One of her hands rose to cup the back of his head. “I love you more than anything, Perseus,” she said. “But don’t ever apologize to me for being hurt. Don’t you ever think I want you to hide from me. If you’re not comfortable, that’s one thing, but don’t you ever—you are my son. Before I’m anything else, I’m your mom. And that means I’m here for you.”

 Percy barely restrained himself from saying I’m sorry again, and then settled on, “Okay. Okay, I—thanks, Mom.”

 She pulled away, and then cupped his cheeks, thumbing his cheekbones. His fingers curled around her wrists almost by instinct. Her eyes were sharp—more blue than green, while his were more green than blue, but he could see where he’d gotten them from, part of where he’d gotten them from. Percy liked to think he looked like his mom, but every shade was just slightly off; his skin was browner, and his hair was darker, and his eyes were greener. But they had the same curls and the same cheekbone and the same jawline, and when he’d been twelve and all he knew of Poseidon was the god of the sea thought he was a mistake, he used to stare at the mirror and count the ways he was his mother’s son.

 “One more time,” she said. “What are you not telling me?”

 Percy’s heart crawled into his throat. “A lot,” he said, and it was, at least, the truth.

 His mom nodded, and offered him a small, watery smile. It helped. “Closer,” she said. “Why don’t we go inside, before we both freeze.”

 She walked him home. She kept her hand hovering over the small of his back, pressing him forward, and even if he no longer had the Curse of Achilles, it made him shudder—just the value of it, his mother’s love. That there was no one person on the planet that knew him better, that would ever know him better, and she was still here, walking him home. That whatever was left of him in the wreckage, at least his mom saw something worthwhile, something worth saving, something worth bringing home.

 They kicked off their shoes at the door—the kitchen was empty, but not for long, because Annabeth came around the corner almost instantly. Her hair was wild and wickedly curly, because it’d gotten wet in the shower, and her hair always curled up like that if she didn’t brush it after a shower. Her face was splotchy and bright red and she had changed clothes again, into a Spider-Man shirt four times her size and plaid pajama pants, both of which were Percy’s.

 His mom reacted faster than Percy did. She moved around Percy, who stood stock-still in the doorway gaping stupidly at someone he’d seen a thousand times, and took Annabeth by the shoulders and kissed her forehead. “We’re alright,” she said, warmly. “How was dinner?”

 “It was great,” Annabeth said, quietly. “I’m sorry, I—”

 “You’re fine,” his mom said, cutting her off. “Where’s Paul?”

 “Living room,” Annabeth answered. “He’s grading papers. His students, they’re—they write the funniest stuff.”

 Percy swallowed against the knowledge that his stepdad had been there for Annabeth when he hadn’t, that it was Paul who had been making sure Annabeth didn’t work herself into a fit the way she did when she was worried, that it was Paul drawing laughs out of her. The feeling of inadequacy wasn’t new to him but it burned in his throat all the same, and he looked away, whatever spell that had left him staring breathlessly at Annabeth broken by guilt.

 “If you want seconds, of course, there’s probably leftovers,” his mom said. She gestured to the fridge. “What’s ours is yours, if you’re hungry, please eat. If you get tired, you can take Percy’s bed, he doesn’t mind at all.”

 Hidden in that was the coded but leave us alone for now, and Percy knew that had to ache in Annabeth—she could never stand the thought of people holding conversations without her, of people intentionally excluding her. People who should have loved her had done that to her all her life. He was torn between the knowledge that he’d never get through a conversation with Annabeth in the room, and defending her right to be there, but his mom had a way of gently letting people down. She had a way of saying things in the kindest way, even if they were hard to hear, because Annabeth’s brows only drew together the slightest bit, and she nodded, and slipped only somewhat reluctantly back into the living room. Percy could hear the sound of Paul’s voice greeting her, welcoming her. Paul had always liked Annabeth a lot.

 His mom squeezed his hand. “Did you eat?” she asked. She left today off of the question, but it was implied, because she almost always asked him did you eat today when he got home. She had the sharpest eyes of anyone he knew. She knew he slept through his lunch period without bothering to eat anything, and she somehow knew it before Percy himself even consciously realized it had become an everyday thing, instead of an every other day thing. But in leaving today off he tried to remember the last time he’d eaten more than a little, and couldn’t. Couldn’t recall eating more than a few mouthfuls of dinner or snagging an apple here and there. He stood there and gaped at someone he’d seen a hundred thousand times. For the first time in a long time, he realized how profoundly little he enjoyed anything, and how profoundly bad it really was.

 His lack of answer was answer enough, and his mom guided him to a chair at the kitchen table in the corner of the room. “Scrambled eggs,” she said, and it wasn’t a question, either. Percy almost asked why she’d go through the trouble of making something new, when she could just reheat leftovers; but then, if he couldn’t figure out how long it’d been since he’d last eaten anything real, she had even less of an idea. It had to be something light.

 Annabeth skittered through the room while his mom whipped the eggs with a fork, darting around for a glass of water. She cut her eyes at him as she left, and he looked back at her, and he offered him a small smile, and it meant the world to him. The world and everything in it, in one person, one place, one moment. His mom made him eat slow, and down two glasses of water—eating had the opposite effect it should have, it made him hungrier, even if the uncomfortable weight of food in his stomach made him kind of nauseous. He rose and loaded the dishes in the dishwasher before his mom could, and when he turned she’d pulled the prescription pain medication he took sometimes for the lasting, twisting pain in his burn scars, out of the cabinet.

 “It looks like it hurts, dear,” she said, by way of explanation.

 Percy nodded, tightly, and knocked back the pills with another glass of water. His mom pressed her hand between his shoulder blades, warm and soothing the ache in the muscles there, the one that seemed to live in him these days. Then her hand crossed and tapped his shoulder. “Your scars look dry,” she said.

 Percy’s hand rose and scrubbed at the left side of his neck, and the scars scrawled there, and sure enough they were dry and hot and itchy. He’d gotten good at ignoring them, while on a quest across the world. He scratched absently and then his mom’s hand closed around his wrist and pulled it down, and Percy looked away; the first adjustment had been miserable, fucking miserable, because they’d hurt enough that he kept tearing them open over and over with his nails because he couldn’t handle the pain being under the skin, it had to pour out of him, too. Being fifteen had been a year peppered with the white bathroom light in the middle of the night, because he clawed himself bloody even in his sleep, and his mom learned to check in on him and shake him out of the nightmares of burning alive. She’d rubbed ointment into the splits of the skin, where it’d dried out and Percy had torn it open, and bandaged it, while their deadbeat radio crooned all along the watchtower, princes kept the view, and she hummed along and sopped up his blood at the same time. What had been miserable to him then was bearable now. He’d discovered all new lows.

 “Keep forgetting,” he said, quietly.

 “My bathroom,” she said, and Percy slouched off down the hall, on the familiar route to his mom’s room. He crouched on the edge of the bathtub and waited, and then his mom appeared in the doorway a few minutes later, a bottle of lotion and a towel in hand.

 “Sweatshirt off,” she said, jerking up with her free hand. She dropped the bottle next to the sink, and Percy pulled his sweatshirt over his head, looking away while his mom registered the bandages on his stomach and the dried bloodstains that hadn’t quite washed away.

 She started with his hand, because it was the worst of the scars, the two last fingers on that hand. She worked the lotion in carefully and smoothly—her hands knew where to go, where to work it in and where to pass over. He missed the radio, and the garbled sound of Jimi Hendrix fading through it. He hadn’t seen it in years.

 “I didn’t want you to worry,” he said. “But Annabeth said—she said I needed it.”

 Her hands pressed into the side of his wrist and flipped his arm over, spreading cool lotion on the gnarled swirls. “You do,” she said. “But that’s not just you. Everyone needs to be worried over, sometimes. Everyone deserves a little worry for their sake.”

 Percy swallowed. “I don’t like that.”

 “You don’t like taking up space,” she said. Her thumb worked into one of the ravines he’d left in his arm by his own hand, a day where he’d been sent home during math class because he’d pushed his hand underneath the other sleeve of his hoodie and dug, trying to stay awake. “You love people, and you love having them. But you don’t want to cost them anything. You don’t want them to think about you, and you want them to see you enough that you have them, but anything further—you don’t want that.”

 Percy’s eyes stung. He didn’t have anything to say to that, so he fixed his eyes on the linoleum, the rumpled shower mat, the way one of his socks was a dark gray and the other was a black.

 “Letting people love you means that they’re going to worry about you,” she said. “That’s not a problem. That’s something you deserve.”

 The wreckage, and whatever his mom saw in him, and rot bubbled up in his chest. “I killed it. The boar. And then I covered up and went to Annabeth’s dorm. And I got there and I thought I was gonna ask, you know, the way—I should have. She was so scared, Mom. She was so—she was terrified. Because I just sat down and didn’t—say anything. I didn’t want to.”

 He watched his mom’s face, then, because it was like swallowing liquid fire. It was nothing dramatic—his mom’s poker face was the best one there was—but her eyes closed briefly and her brows pulled tight together, and then she leaned forward and kissed Percy’s temple.

 “What happened after that,” she said, almost deathly quiet.

 Percy swallowed against the ice that was back in his throat. “She… patched me up. She was terrified. I—I didn’t mean to scare her. We talked, some, after, and then she… she called you. And now we’re here.”

 “And now we’re here,” his mom repeated. His mom’s hands had stopped moving over his arm, but she still held it in her grip. It was getting tighter. “Tell me what you told her.”

 Percy was silent for long enough that his mom started working again, calmly, but he could feel it, the steel in her. The strength she hid, the way she was indomitable, the way she’d expected him to come home from Mount Saint Helens and he had and she’d expected him to come back from Greece and he had. His mom didn’t pressure him for a lot, but the one thing she had always asked of him was that he be good, and the one thing he’d always tried to be was half as good as she was. He wasn’t sure how to tell her how completely he’d failed her. He wasn’t sure how to tell her that he wasn’t good enough to ignore the saltwater in him, that he was as violent as the hurricanes that beat the land were, that he was as violent as the earth was easily shook.

 “I’m not good,” he said, finally. “I try to be, but I’m—not. I shouldn’t have survived, when—other people didn’t. I can’t do what people think I can. I don’t help people the way I should. This isn’t the first time I’ve scared Annabeth. In Tartarus, I—I choked Akhlys, the misery goddess. I asked the water to drown her and it did. I wanted it to. I wanted her to suffer.”

 His mom had stopped working again. She had stopped touching him altogether, and was wiping off her hands on the towel, and it was her lack of response that spurred Percy forward. “I think about drowning,” he said. “I think I could do it to myself the way I did it to her. That’s what you do, when—when people are dangerous, you—”

 Euthanize, he supplied in his head, but he couldn’t say that out loud. “Royal flush,” he finished, weakly.

 His mom took his face in her hands, the way she’d done in the parking garage, but now she was rigid. She looked almost angrier than he’d ever seen her, and somehow it didn’t hurt to look at—it was deserved anger, maybe. When she spoke her voice was sharp. “It took me years to learn this. It should’ve been the first thing I taught you, because it’s the first thing you needed to know. When I tell you to listen, Perseus Jackson, you listen to me, are we clear?”

 He nodded, jolted, knowing his eyes were wide like saucers.

 She took a long breath before speaking. “What you do in self-defense doesn’t define you. It isn’t who you are. You’re not bad because you reacted to being hurt by hurting someone else to protect yourself, baby. The only person to blame is the person hurting you. Wanting people who choose to hurt you to hurt in return is how people normally think. You are not uniquely bad, and you’re not bad at all. You’re doing your best. And your best, sweetheart, is pretty damn good.”

 “What if you’re wrong,” Percy mumbled.

 She raised a brow. “You’ve never thought I was wrong for murdering my ex-husband. Why do the rules change for you?”

 Percy flinched, and his mom let him go, letting him pull away. “I don’t know,” he said, working his jaw, looking everywhere but at his mom. “I don’t know. I don’t.”

 “You’re a great kid. You’ve just had a bad run,” she said, softly.

 Percy scrubbed his face. “I’m—I’m—I’m tired, of that, of it, of having a bad run, I’m tired of that,” he said, rapidly. “I want that, that, over. I don’t want this. I don’t want it at all.”

 His mom’s hand worked through his hair, ruffling it. “Take a minute. Take a deep breath. You’re going to be happy, Percy, we’ll make it happen. But that takes time.”

 Percy screwed his eyes shut, at that, and schooled his breathing. His mom worked lotion into the scars over his shoulder, and somewhere along the way, she started humming All Along the Watchtower, in the crooked way she did; her voice hitched and even just humming she was out of tune, but it settled Percy like nothing else. She’d been doing it all his life. He tilted his head to the side, baring his throat to her, so she could lather up the scars there, and then she backed away and wiped her hands on the towel, bending over to pick up Percy’s hoodie and handed it to him. He pulled it on, and let his mom lead him into the bedroom with her hand pressed to the small of his back.

 “You don’t leave my sight, tonight,” she said. “You don’t—you don’t leave my sight.”

 Her voice broke, and Percy’s heart twisted. She settled in the bed and he settled beside her, feeling somehow better and worse than he had in a long time, and his mom pulled him closer, until his head was on her stomach and her arm was over his shoulders.

 “What about school,” he mumbled.

 Her hands ran through his hair, and he leaned into it, maybe a little embarrassed that he felt desperate for it, but not enough to keep him still. “Do you think I could convince Chiron to forge some doctor’s notes,” she said. “For the rest of the week.”

 Percy blinked. “For—for?”

 “I want to take you to Montauk,” she said. Her thumb brushed his temple. “I don’t know. Get you away from the city, for a bit. Give you space to breathe. I’m good about deadlines, I can have some pushed back, the once.”

 “That sounds,” he said, and he couldn’t speak, around the emotion in him. He couldn’t say that sounds like the best thing in the world right now, couldn’t say that he sometimes he just didn’t want to be a hero, a savior, or a monster, that he just wanted to be the one thing he’d been born to be; Sally Jackson’s son. “I can’t,” he said, finally.

 She leaned over and pressed a kiss to his shoulder. “You can,” she said. “I’m the mom.”

 “I’m—failing,” he said. “My classes. I’m—probably not going to—I’m sorry.”

 Her hand rubbed small circles into his back. “Baby,” she said, “I don’t give one singular flying fuck if you fail your classes this year. I don’t care. You can drop out and get your GED, if that’s what you want. I don’t care. I want my baby boy alive and happy. We can figure the rest out.”

 Percy closed his eyes. It was a little embarrassing, that he’d cried something like his bodyweight in water already, but he wanted to cry again—pressed against her and hearing that the things that had stressed him out enough he’d been sick over it, they didn’t matter to her. That maybe it didn’t matter if he thought he was good enough to be deserving of every sacrifice his mom had ever made for him, that his mom thought he was, and that was a good place to start.

 He drifted off, next to his mother’s warmth, because when he roused next it was because there was a squeak of laminate flooring somewhere behind him.

 Annabeth stood in the doorway, silhouetted in the blue lowlight. He could see her well enough to make out her face, and her swollen eyes. Are you okay, she mouthed.

 He gave her a small smile, and hoped it meant the world to her. Better, he mouthed back.