An AU in which Grover is on the Argo II as protector instead of Hedge, because I say so. He and Percy get to have an actual conversation about the aftereffects of Tartarus + that godawful conversation with Jason.
Percy is tired. That’s what he tells Grover when he asks how he’s doing (and Grover asks often).
I’m just tired.
Saving the world for the fifth summer in a row gets tiring, you know? I’m gonna go nap. Wake me up when I’m on watch.
It’s nothing. Just haven’t been able to sleep. Since the world is ending again.
Everyone else has stopped asking.
It’s not for lack of caring. Percy’s loyalty outweighs his self-deprecation; he can’t think lowly enough of the people around him to claim they don’t care about him. He just makes it easier for them to forget. Indifference is more comfortable than concern. How can Percy explain himself to Jason, Piper, and Leo, who don’t know him; to Frank and Hazel, who admire him; or to Annabeth and Grover, who love him? He tried with Jason after the incident with the poison, and the guy gave him that hard-pressed grimace—lips pulled tight and to the side—before dismissing the topic entirely. Jason paused, perhaps to think, and Percy heard rejection in the silence. It was just like when he set fire to the band room at Goode: Percy was standing with his face sooty and his skin torn apart by debris, looking out at the horror and disbelief on the faces of his peers. So he did with Jason what he did then. He ran.
Maybe Jason truly thought nothing of it. The guy was raised by wolves, after all. He doesn’t seem like the type to sit in his emotions. Maybe the conversation took a turn down a road Jason can’t walk either; maybe he’s a runner, just like Percy.
Tired gets everyone else off his back. Annabeth narrows her eyes with that analytical stare that used to break Percy, but even she can be fooled. That stare worked when his problems were smaller—the weight of the world instead of the weight of himself. After a lifetime of shouldering impossible burdens, the thing that makes his legs shake is getting out of bed in the morning. Just the weight of sixteen years, of five straight summers being a hero. If he lives to see a time where the world doesn’t need a hero—when it doesn’t need Percy—who will he be? Childhood turned to dust alongside the first monster he plunged Riptide into. What story will he write when it comes time to put down the sword and pick up the pen?
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read on AO3