Chapter Text
The last thing Percy remembered was collapsing on a wooden porch, looking up at a ceiling fan circling above, moths flying around a yellow light.
Next thing he knew, he was awake on an itchy patch of dirt underneath a large pine tree. "Ughh..." he mumbled, running his hand through his hair, realizing his head was sticky with a thick, metallic-smelling substance.
Weird memories (had it been the night before?) danced through his head, along with dreams of barnyard animals, some threatening, some harmless.
Percy tried to sit up, but exhaustion overtook him and he drifted back to sleep, waking only briefly each time before passing out again.
The next time he was lucid, he realized he was hungry. not just regular hungry, ravenous.
When he finally looked around, he realized his surroundings were weird and that he was definitely not on a porch.
He was sitting under a large tree, pine needles poking him in the back and the face. His tongue felt dry and nasty, and every single one of his goddamn teeth hurt.
Then it all clicked into place. Grover. His mom. The minataur. Saving Grover and being dragged along the grass. Percy looked down at his hands, which were covered by dried blood.
"No. No, no, no, no NO!" he said weakly.
His mom had to be alive, and Grover. Where was he? Next to him was a black-and-white bull's horn, the base jagged from a break, the tip splattered with dried blood. It hadn’t been a nightmare. Percy wanted to sink into himself and never come back.
He looked across at the neighboring trees, one beautiful bluejay was singing on a branch. His mother was gone. The whole world should be black and cold. Nothing should look beautiful. Minaturs existed, and maybe Grover wasn't really human. But none of that mattered right now.
But he was too miserable to care that Minotaurs existed.
All that meant was his mom really had been squeezed into nothingness, dissolved into yellow light.
He was alone. An orphan. He would have to live on the streets. He would pretend he was seventeen and join the army. He'd do something. He suddenly felt dizzy, His vision swimming.
First, he had to get out of this Goddamn forest.
Picking himself up dizzily, he dragged his feet across the ground, trying to make sense of what he was going to do next. Percy's legs felt wobbly trying to walk that far.
He needed to find a bus, or a train, maybe the LIRR would do, yes, he could take a train to Grand Central Station, and go back into the city where opportunity awaited him.
Shoring himself up, he prepared to walk back to the main road. He paused, "wait..... that's not right," he thought as he saw the road. "Where's the place we left the car?"
He rubbed his eyes. Everything felt weird. different. out of place.
And the worst part was that he couldn't put his finger on what it was that was different, other than the fact that the skid marks from the car going off the road were gone. Dizzily, he sat down.
He needed a plan, but his head throbbed so hard it was difficult to string thoughts together. At that moment, a truck came down the road out of nowhere.
Percy scrambled into the bushes, nearly tripping as his vision swam. His fingers shook when he shoved them into his pocket. Weird, he thought, feeling the crumpled bills. “I didn’t have a hundred dollars in here before.” His hands were clammy, pale, and he could feel his pulse hammering in his ears.
Luckily, the pen, Riptide, was still there. He looked up with sad eyes, blinking against the dizziness as he stared out over the treeline to the sea. Where was this place his mother had been so afraid to send him? He couldn’t see anything in the trees. Had her sacrifice been for nothing? His stomach growled so hard it hurt, and the world tilted again just as the eighteen-wheeler came to a slow stop.
The driver reached over and through the glass of the cab, searching the glove box. Percy squinted, forcing his eyes to focus through the pounding in his skull.
The truck had a sign on the back, reverse-printed white on black — easy enough for his dyslexic brain to catch: CENTRAL PARK ZOO: HUMANE ZOO TRANSPORT. WARNING: LIVE WILD ANIMALS.
He looked at his pen, then back at the truck. “Percy, no. You’re kidding.” He crouched lower, his knees trembling.
“You have got to be kidding,” he muttered, head swimming as he crept toward the back of the truck.
About an hour later, a walrus stared balefully at him from its tank. Percy swayed on his feet, stomach hollow, head pounding. A wave of water sloshed over the edge, and he felt a strange tug in his gut — a flopping in his stomach, a tingle starting in his fingers.
In a split second, he threw his hands up to protect himself, and the water froze mid-air. He blinked, disbelieving, his vision blurring at the edges. The floor was dry, but the water pulled at his hands, draining what little strength he had left.
Gods. He was controlling the water. The walrus looked miserable, and Percy was in shock.
With a weak push, he sent the water back. It splashed into the cage, and the tug in his gut eased. His legs shook so badly he thought he might collapse. He was never going to forget that.
That night, Percy was miserable. He slipped out the side door of the transport near Central Park at a stoplight, before the truck disappeared underground. He staggered into an alleyway, pale and shivering, hiding behind a dumpster in a clearing littered with cigarette butts and soda cans. His head still throbbed, and every breath felt shallow.
He tried to come up with a plan, but his thoughts kept scattering. 1. Go back to his house and get his stuff — no, he might run into Gabe. 2. Go to a library and read about forging documents? No, bad idea. He’d end up on a watchlist. He needed something more solid.
There was always the Salesian mission, right? Pretend to be a holy little non-water-controlling freak who definitely believed in Jesus. Nope. Scratch that. He wasn’t sure how he felt about priests.
He sighed, dizzy again. One option left: living in an alley for a long time. It wasn’t so bad, he figured, if he could survive the hunger gnawing at his insides.
All he had to do was find a subway vent to sleep on and a shady place to claim he was seventeen and get a job.
Yeah, he liked that one. Maybe he could even upgrade to the subway tunnel alcoves. Warm, no police, access to platforms if he was careful. Downsides: electrocution by the third rail. And rats. Percy would just have to learn to love them.
A few hours later, he was climbing down a ladder into the subway, head pounding with every rung.
He found a shady little neighborhood, a place called Delmar’s Finest Subs that looked dingy enough to hire him, and a subway vent with a loose cap.
He grimaced, knowing he’d probably have company down there. But it was the best he could do.
another week passed without comment
Percy finds himself in a minor crisis when his boss closes the shop to celebrate a minor Jewish holiday.
He loses access to the biggest meal of his day, which is starting to become an issue, as Delmar allows him one sub a day as part of his paycheck. His stomach feels hollow, and even when he eats, the ache in his chest doesn’t fade.
He’s already losing weight; his metabolism is still churning away at a high speed, even though he’s learned to ignore the hunger. His ribs are starting to show, and his hands tremble when he ties his apron.
Percy leaves the subway alcove on Saturday afternoon (he will never get used to the fucking subway trains roaring past him at nighttime, and the pounding in his head makes sleep nearly impossible). Luckily, Delmar doesn’t seem to notice.
The walk there is as hair-raising as it was when he first stumbled through it, with many of the men along the way watching him as he avoids eye contact, hands just above nondiscript bulky shapes in their sagging pants. His legs feel wobbly, but he manages to look just miserable and poor enough to avoid the attention of the gangs loitering on the street. None of them even gives him a second look. Thank God.
When he gets in, Delmar tosses an apron his way. “Busy day today.” Like always, Percy nods, though the motion makes his vision swim. "Yes, sir."
Percy has worked before; odd jobs, mostly chores for his mom. He winces, rather not thinking about that.
In about two weeks, he's picked up the particulars of quick sandwich making. It’s easy work, except when you have a line of customers out the door like Delmar always does. By the end of the day, he’s exhausted, pale, and thirty dollars richer.
No way that’s the minimum wage, but Percy keeps his mouth shut. It’s his job, and the only thing that matters is that he has it.
Delmar meets him at the door, pressing a carryout bag into Percy’s hand. “Here. Can you make it tomorrow?”
Percy nods, "Yeah, man. Absolutely.” Delmar seems to frown at being called "Man," but he claps Percy on the back and sends him out the door, back into the street.
Another day, another dollar.
As he climbs down into his tunnel, sandwich in one hand, the only thing he regrets is how tired he is and how much school he’s missing out on. He may not love reading, but Latin and Greek? Man, he misses those.
Maybe the priests would have been a better idea.
Percy wakes up to a steady, freezing rain on a Saturday. The temperature has turned ridiculously cold, plunging the air down to near freezing. On an empty stomach, he pulls on his shirt, noticing he can see his ribs. His skin looks grayish in the dim light, lips pale.
That was definitely not on his bingo card for this year. Not good, he thinks, and then heads to Delmar’s before his shift starts. He slips into the restaurant with a quiet greeting to Delmar, slips on his apron, and gets to work.
After a few hours of serving guests and washing dishes, Percy hangs up his apron on its hook and decides it’s time to pay a visit to the library.
He’s got an agenda. Library card. Finding a school to go to, preferably an inner city one, and then showing up there and pretending he’s always been there. He gets to the library and manages to switch to the dyslexia font helpfully provided by the system, but even that is a bit hard to read. His head aches, and the numbers blur. Weird. This computer is reading 1999 as the year.
It’s gotta be him, Percy thinks, but he usually doesn’t have trouble with numbers. "Relax," he mutters, though his hands are shaking. "I’m very relaxed."
Not wanting to go ask, he leans over and views another computer. Same thing. He was really hallucinating — it was definitely 2003 when he left, meaning that somehow either his mind was wrong or he had time-traveled. Biting back a worry that he smells disgusting (he hasn’t washed in over three weeks), he proceeds to research public schools in the area.
He’s homeless, penniless, and close to helpless. Unfortunately, the lady at the front desk seems to notice.
Quietly shutting the gates of the library with a soft click, a soft red light flashes slowly as she puts the library under lockdown. Percy is so tired that he doesn’t even notice how quiet the library has gotten, nor the cars pulling up outside. He doesn’t look up until a man’s thick Bronx voice sounds behind him, "Son?"
An older man in a suit, wearing a tan overcoat, stops beside him. Everything about the man screams cop: from the flat haircut to the graying mustache and the way he carries himself. Not a crappy cop, either. Someone higher up in the ranks.
Percy mentally cannot believe his luck. The ONE time he goes to a library, CPS got themselves involved. Typical.
The man eyes him, twisting his mustache. "Son, I'm gonna ask you to come with me"
He gestures towards the map of the city and points at a school helplessly. "I go... there." The man doesn't seem to buy it, which leaves Percy with one other option. run. Bad idea, but he's done worse in his 14 years. The man eyes him seriously.
"I can check that in the database and drive you home," Percy almost said, "stranger, danger," but he bit it back, nodding.
"And I'll be needing your name, son," the man said mildly. "Oh, you know what," Percy said, "I'll just call my mom and..." He lunged, uncapping my sword, ran to the other side of the desk, and barrelled straight for the door. The man almost grabbed him, but stopped, slack-jawed.
He turned faster than Percy was expecting, and before he could swing his sword at the door, the cop ran in between Percy and the door. Percy weakly swung with the back end of his sword, and that was his fatal mistake.
The edge of the sword he was holding on to cut deep into his hands, and the butt of the metal glanced harmlessly off the man's bulletproof vest under his coat. He tried regaining his balance, but the man had a Taser out.
"I won't prosecute you for that, son," said the cop, "but you're gonna need to come with me." Percy nodded, thinking he could get out of this later, and dropped the sword.
"I don't know what you thought you were going to do by stabbing me with a pen, but it looks like you gouged your hand pretty bad. Percy looked at him, then back at the sword, slack-jawed.
If the man didn't see the weapon, he wasn't going to argue. He might as well take his chances with this old guy. Percy allows the guy to take him by the shoulders and follows him to the car, sitting beside him. "I’m Jim Callahan," the man says.
“Percy Jackson,” Percy says. “Do you usually get kids from libraries or, uh...”
“The train Yard?” Gordon finishes. “ Yes, sometimes; and to your other question, no, not usually. That nice librarian made a call. That’s why I came along.”
Percy slips his pen into his pocket and caps it, which is funny because the guy doesn't seem to see.