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In June, Clarisse deploys to South Africa.
She's the only soldier he knows who will volunteer for three tours in a row, in active war zones. He tells her this in no uncertain terms at least twice, and she just grins at him, cracks some joke about madness and this being Sparta, and willingly (willingly!) lets him hug her outside the security checkpoint at La Guardia. Granted, it's the world's most awkward hug, with stiff necks and a lot of patting, but there's nothing funny about it when Percy pulls back and says, "Try not to die over there, okay? We're an endangered species."
"I'll try not to," she replies, and lest it sound too much like caring, quickly adds, "And what are you going to with yourself while I'm gone? I can't imagine you can manage much, but I should ask."
He drags the back of his hand across his face with a groan. "There's a new summer intern starting today. Have I mentioned how much I hate those kids?"
"Ha!" she barks with laughter. "The first true words of wisdom I've ever heard from you."
He punches her shoulder good-naturedly, and she walks off, plane ticket and military ID in one hand and the other raised in farewell.
+
At work, they call him Lucky, because once, some years back, a gas station attendant with a sawed-off shotgun sent three bullets, point-blank, into his chest. Percy not only survived, he chased the guy down immediately after and shot him, first in the leg with improbable aim and then in the shoulder, disabling him. Eye-witnesses said it was the most amazing thing they'd ever seen.
Supposedly, he's got scars, but at the summer beach keggers with the task force, he claims shyness and never shows them.
He gets to work just as things start to pick up; walks in from the parking garage to the sound of ringing phones and the whining fax machine. Police work is 95% unglamorous paperwork and getting headaches behind a desk. The stereotype of cops and doughnuts is there for a reason -- there's no better incentive for putting up with the morons in the civilian world and the morons in the bureaucracy than the promise of Krispy Kreme at the start of the day.
Coming up the stairs, he sees Abigail struggling to balance two dozen doughnuts, a cardboard thing of coffee, and text someone on her Blackberry at the same time, which is generally how Abigail operates. The NYPD secretaries, for the most part, have a bigger take-no-prisoners attitude than even the cops do, so he makes sure to ask first, "Do you want help with that?"
"Yes please," is Abigail's instant reply, and then, "Oh, you cheat," when he helpfully liberates the Krispy Kreme from her and sneaks one of the sugar-glazed ones.
"I need it. I get to babysit the new intern today," he justifies it.
Abigail makes a face. She's a big-boned black lady with a solid four inches on Percy and even more when she's in heels, and he's seen her reduce six-foot-five wife-beating factory workers to tears with her sharp tongue. He kinds of dreads the day the military tries to recruit her for their interrogation programs. "Why do they call them interns, anyway? They're just teenagers who get to get underfoot for six weeks in the name of real life experience."
"Well said."
"Hey, Lucky, that'd be him, over there," she gestures with her chin to the row of chairs backed up against his cubicle. "The blonde kid with the backpack."
Percy turns around, and drops the doughnuts.
+
His name, this time around, is Ishmael Lucien Page.
But. Wanting for forestall any and all Moby Dick references, he encourages people to call him by his middle name, which everyone agrees is a little girly, so it, in turn, gets shortened to Luke.
Of course.
He's sixteen years old, a junior in high school, and he wrote a fantastic essay on why he wanted to shadow a New York City police officer. He has a history of being a problem kid, which is exactly the kind of person NYPD is supposed to be reaching out to, so Percy figures if he tries to talk to the head of the department about moving the kid anywhere else, he's going to get a lecture on civil politics and a suck it up, you pansy.
Luke, he learns within the first thirty seconds of conversation, comes up to New York every May for summer camp, is dyslexic, and has ADHD. Of course he does, because if life was going to make things easy for Percy at any point, he wouldn't have been born a half-blood.
He is freaking identical, right down to the puckered white scar just to the right of his eye socket -- although he claims to have gotten it from a poorly-timed argument with his mother's lawn mower when he was twelve; offers the information without even being prompted, the second time he catches Percy staring at it.
He is the exact replica of Luke Castellan, like he'd walked out of the yellow-faded pages of Percy's memory, sixteen years old and smiling, cocky and self-assured and about two minutes away from stabbing them all in the back, and Percy's mind calmly and rationally explains to him that they're completely different people, they have to be, but his eyes keep jumping to him whenever he slides into his peripheral, the shock of it thrilling right down to the ends of his fingers. It's Luke. It's Luke. This is what it must be like for those people on Ghost Hunters, he gathers; to have physical proof of being haunted.
+
He'd known that Luke was going to try for reincarnation -- three lifetimes of good to make up for a lifetime of bad, in order to gain eternal rest in the Elysium Fields -- and he'd been at peace with the idea; there wasn't anything he could do for Luke Castellan, but in the end, it wasn't his choice. He couldn't save Luke; Luke had to choose to save himself, and he'd do it by living three lifetimes.
He's fine with this, but he was under the impression that this reincarnating business would happen sometime else -- like, after he was dead and he didn't have to deal with it.
He's thirty-two years old; there are lines starting to deepen at the corners of his eyes and his mouth, but there isn't even any grey in his hair yet, and the Fates have seen fit not only to call up Luke's number immediately, they think it's some amazing cosmic joke to throw them together for six weeks this summer. Then again, the Fates are very fond of the "let's watch Percy Jackson go absolutely batshit insane" channel ever since they first tuned in, so he shouldn't be surprised.
"I know who you are, officer," Luke tells him in a humming baritone, at odds with his thin, tanned face and sweat-frizzed hair. "Percy Jackson, hero of the century. You can't blame me for being curious and wanting to meet you. Nobody's told me what you did."
No, Percy thinks, staring at him. They wouldn't.
He hasn't been back to Camp Half-Blood. No half-blood ever goes back; it's an unspoken rule. Either you die, or you learn everything you can learn and you take it with you into the mortal world and try to survive. So there wouldn't be anyone at camp who remembers Percy, sparing Chiron, Hestia, and Mr. D, and considering nobody bothered to tell him the whole truth about the Great Prophecy that'd been cast over Maria di Angelo's dead body, fifty years before his birth, he doubts anyone's going to mention to Ishmael Lucien Page that he just happens to be the reincarnation of the half-blood that did a pretty good job of almost single-handedly destroying the world.
The first night, he calls Luke's mother; a sweet, perfectly lucid woman in Massachusetts named April who answers his questions bemusedly, and only laughs at him when he calls her May by accident.
+
He doesn't call the new Luke by his name; any name, Luke or Ishmael or otherwise. If he talks to him, he calls him 'kid', because Percy is literally twice his age, and it helps keep that line marked clear in the sand, between the one he knew and the one he's getting to know, both wearing the same face.
And the thing is, is that he never really got to talk with Luke Castellan. He remembers, vaguely, like it's on the other side of warped glass, that Luke was the only one who was truly decent to him when he was eleven, freshly-claimed and ostracized for it, but Percy was eleven and didn't even know how to appreciate up from down yet, and any conversations they had after that point were marred by the whole Kronos thing.
So, frankly, this is all new to him; a Luke that's relaxed and boneless next to him in his squad car, knees spread apart, pointing out vanity license plates while they're stuck in traffic. He dresses in the tight-fitting, gauzy fabric that's fashionable these days (completely backwards to how things were when Percy was his age) without coming off as overly-trendy. His blonde hair's a curly riot and he wears the familiar corded necklace around his neck, but the beads themselves are unfamiliar. When he laughs, it's always a startled sound, like it catches him by surprise, and it always fills whatever space he's in. Percy heard the old Luke laugh, like, three times. It's not an unpleasant sound.
He complains in no uncertain terms about how boring Percy's job is. ("Why don't you, like, solve murders or something?" "Because that's Homicide's job and I'm not in Homicide. I'm just the grunt that pushes paperwork around and occasionally gets to blast around town with my sirens on, but only if I've been really good." "Aren't you dyslexic?" "Sure am, kid. It's a good thing nobody actually reads police reports, then, isn't it? I have no idea what mine say.")
So it comes as a surprise to him, the day he takes Luke with him when he makes rounds with the parking meter people, handing out tickets to the civilians that park on the wrong side of the "do not park" sign -- because come on, everyone's done it.
He's punching numbers into the little hand-held machine that'll churn out a ticket for this Jeep Wrangler whose parking meter expired -- the Jeep driver himself is ten feet away, arguing loudly with the meter maid and gesticulating wildly about it, and Percy is definitely not tactfully retreating to inside his cruiser to wait it out -- when Luke abruptly and out of nowhere says, "I think they need us."
Percy glances over at him; he's curled up with his feet propped up on the dashboard, his seat belt cutting across the fabric of his shirt. He chews absently on his thumbnail.
"The gods," he continues without prompting. "They need us. Everyone says things would be so much easier if they just stopped having illegitimate children, but they can't. With the exception of that freaky cult in Greece, nobody believes in them anymore. We're their only link left in the mortal world. They need us to believe in them. Otherwise, they're powerless."
Percy opens his mouth to say something, and what comes out is -- "You know, that actually made sense."
Luke shoots him a look, half-amused, half-insulted. "Don't sound so surprised about it."
+
Growing up demigod isn't like believing in Santa Claus or the tooth fairy. You don't stop attracting mythological monsters just because you've gotten older. You've just gotten better at handling them, and there are days (usually in January, which suck consistently, or during tax season) when Percy's day consists of eat breakfast, slay obnoxious monster trying to jump turnstiles in subway, grab coffee, talk to Abigail about filing, etc.
So he's half-expecting it when, two weeks in, they stop at a gas station on the outskirts of town so Percy can check up with the attendant who'd been robbed at gunpoint the week previous (nothing new to report on either front; things have been quiet since, and the cops are not a single step closer to finding the culprit, which is usually how these things go) and when he steps back outside, it's to find the passenger side door of his cruiser wide open and Luke half-way down the block. A little bit further down, a hydra wraps itself around a light pole and hisses hungrily at a little girl it has pinned against a fire hydrant. The girl can't be older than eleven or twelve, and the look on her face when she stares up at the creature tells him this isn't the first time she's seen through the Mist.
He takes the time to heave a sigh and wonder where her satyr is, and by then, Luke's pulled his weapon -- a mace, which is kind of medieval but Percy isn't going to complain; the resemblance to the old Luke is uncanny enough without the attraction to swords -- out of his backpack, swinging it in a wide arc. The sunlight catches off the bronze spikes, attracting the slit-eyed gaze of two of the hydra's heads.
With a yell, Luke throws himself at the monster, and Percy heaves another sigh for good measure. While a mace isn't going to decapitate a hydra (which he should be glad for, except he doesn't actually mind Monster Donuts' coffee and wouldn't argue if one opened closer to where he worked) it's not going to kill it, either, and at best, Luke's just going to make it very, very angry. Still, it distracts the hydra enough that the half-blood girl has time to slip sideways and dart away.
He ducks inside the passenger side's open door, popping open his glove department and retrieving his gun. Not the same gun that's in his hip holster, but a different one -- one that's not licensed, which doesn't matter since mortals can't see it anyway. He props his arms up on the hood of his cruiser, aims, and with three shots, has the hydra bursting into golden dust.
He waits until Luke returns, mace still swinging on the end of its chain at his side. "What the crap was that?" he demands.
Percy twirls the gun around the end of his index finger. "Celestial bronze bullets, kid," he says by way of explanation. "Your way is old school, no doubt about it; mine's just quick."
"Huh," says Luke, going for unimpressed, but really -- Percy just shot a hydra thrice in the rib cage at fifty yards. "Bit showy, though, yeah?"
Percy rolls his eyes, but the expression concealed in Luke's eyes unsettles him.
This is Luke, who looks at him sometimes with a mixture of awe and wonder and respect, like Percy is someone he genuinely looks up to, and that just strikes him as wrong.
+
"I could feel the change in meteorology from half-way down the block," Percy goes on a Monday morning, voice dry, as he opens the driver's side door and slides inside, handing Luke a cup of coffee over the console. "Why so stormy, kid?"
He gets a sharp-shouldered shrug in reply, which is the clearest possible indicator that something's up. He pops the lid off his coffee and blows on it, pointedly not putting his keys in the ignition. Luke scowls out the passenger side window, his own cup still in his lap.
"It was a real bad Solstice," he says eventually, too loud and too flat, and Percy realizes with a jolt that yesterday was June 21st. It's just an ordinary day to him now. "With everyone pointing fingers and bickering over this and that and whining and ugh, gods, I would love it if the just got something done for a change." He swivels around, his blue eyes snapping bright and furious. "Do you know what it's like, being the oldest kid still at camp who hasn't even gone on a proper Quest? Everyone looks to me like I'm a role model, and I've nothing to show for it."
"Ow," says Percy, and, "burned my mouth," he explains when Luke raises an eyebrow. He probes the roof of his mouth with his tongue; having never swallowed any of the River Styx, his mouth and throat were not protected under the invincibility clause.
Luke sighs and goes back to facing the window. "We were all hoping this would be the Solstice where they'd give us something to do. We've been asking for a summer Quest for, like, years now. And instead they spent the whole time arguing over ... who had the remote last or something, I don't know."
"That sounds like them," Percy puts in, deliberately mild, because it does: it sounds exactly like how the gods had been before Kronos. At least they held out for sixteen years.
"I thought," says Luke, in a much smaller voice, "That at the very least, my mom would think of something. I mean, she's the goddess of wisdom. If she can't think of something, who can?"
"Your -- wait, what." Percy forgets about his still-too-hot coffee. "Your mom's Athena?" But wasn't ... no, no, Luke had never actually said who his Olympian parent was. Percy'd just assumed -- "But April, she's your mortal mother. How does that ... Oh," he goes at Luke's very pointed look. "Oh. Um. Okay then."
"Brain children!" he sounds practically cheerful about it, having successfully made this conversation awkward. It doesn't last long, though; the storm cloud reappears over his head in a matter of moments. "She needs to grant me a Quest, and soon," he goes, less and less like he's actually talking to Percy. "I'm more than ready to prove myself. Enough with these stupid peace-time Quests. I want an actual challenge."
Percy's eyes slide sideways, catching the glittering hard expression on Luke's face, the scar stretching over his humorless smile.
The sense of deja vu strikes him hard in the gut, sudden and nauseous.
He's seen that look before; destiny, prophecy, pulling down on him like gravity.
+
He keeps his apartment clean, having learned somewhere between his mother and Annabeth that kicking things under other things and spraying Febreeze around the place at random intervals does not actually work, nor does it bode well for his chances of getting laid, oh, ever. Still, the first time he brings Luke home with him, he's nervous about it, which is ridiculous because there's nothing to be nervous about, but when they're here, it's harder to hold onto the fiction that they're Officer Jackson and his intern, and then it just feels sordid, a thirty-two year old man taking a sixteen-year-old boy upstairs.
"No girlfriend?" Luke asks cheekily, when they're inside.
"Ah, no. Stay there, this will only take a moment." Veering into the other room, he drops onto the couch and wakes up his laptop, going to hunt down a spreadsheet he'd made for himself ages ago, regarding the trafficking habits on the piers.
Luke doesn't stay, of course, meandering into the room a half-minute later, eyeing everything curiously. "Was there ever a girlfriend?"
Percy gives him the fish-eye, waiting for his desktop to load. "... Yes. Longer ago than I care to admit, especially to you."
"I won't think less of you just because you haven't gotten laid in, like, a decade," Luke says stoutly, which, oddly enough, doesn't make Percy feel better.
"Her name's Annabeth," he offers after a moment, and knowing the question forming on Luke's lips without looking over, continues, "She's a half-blood. A child of Athena, like you."
"What'd you do to her?"
Smart-ass. "Nothing. She's fine, as far as I know. She's almost twenty, I think," he says, offhand, and pauses to let that sink in, grinning when it absolutely wipes the smirk off Luke's face. "After we defeated Kronos, she got commissioned to help rebuild Olympus. Time moves differently up there. At first, we didn't think anything of it, but the more time she spent on Olympus overseeing construction, the older I got down here, until, before we knew it, she was still a senior in high school and I'd already gotten my degree in criminal justice. It was very amiable, as far as break-ups went."
"And there hasn't been anybody since then?" There's something in Luke's voice at that, something strange and intent that takes all the teasing right out of Percy.
He tries not to tense up, because Luke would sense it in a second. "I really don't think you need to know."
He scrolls down through the spreadsheet too quickly, forces himself to ease off. The sooner he gets this schedule, the sooner they can go back to safely being the cop and the kid, out on a routine arrest of deadbeats. But there's no way he can ignore it when Luke says, whispery soft, "You keep watching me."
His heart trips, forgets to beat. "... what?"
"You do," Luke says, with the slow watchfulness of someone about to poke a snake in the eye. "I can't not notice it. When we're at stoplights or when you're tired and never when anyone's looking, you stare at me a lot."
"I do not," Percy replies instantly, emptily, because he watches Luke all the time, his heart telling him he's a friend and keep him close, his sense memory telling him he's an enemy and keep him closer. Then, "Why are you asking me this, Ishmael?" The use of his first name is not accidental. He stares at him, hard. "What could you possibly get out of provoking me?"
There is a pause where Luke shifts his weight forward onto the balls of his feet and almost hovers there, looking like he doesn't know whether he's going to fall or fly, before he's moving forward, quickly but not quick enough that Percy can't move away if he doesn't want to.
Percy holds still, lets him come closer. Luke balances himself on the sofa, his knee a hard press into the side of Percy's thigh and his fingers digging into his shoulder. "What do you think?" he says, voice low, a blush of heat across his cheekbone.
"Luke --" he starts, hopelessly, one hand at his chest to push him away -- and stops. Beneath his fingers, Luke's heart is racing, fast and terrified; a mortal heart with only so many beats. It's a hero's heart, scared of consequences of wanting what it can't have, but wanting anyway. For a second, features so close to his face that they've blurred into dots and golden-colored lines, Percy cannot tell the difference between Luke Castellan and Ishmael Page, between himself and a self sixteen years gone. Their hearts beat the same under his palm.
Possessiveness flashes through him, so powerful it makes him ill.
He surges up, straight into the kiss.
+
He wakes up three minutes before his alarm clock is set to go off, the way people do when they've had the same schedule for too long.
He's disoriented for a second, blinking against the edgy silvery lines of his bedroom at dawn. The moment he remembers is the same moment he hears the murmur of Luke's voice, talking low in the hallway. He sits up, discarded and sleep-warmed sheets twisting around his ankles, and he catches a glimpse of Luke through the half-open door, plucking at the phone cord wrapped around him. He laughs something, still quiet, and says a good-bye.
He pauses in the doorway when he sees Percy's awake, fingers curled around the doorknob, his hair and shoulders limned with light. In that moment, everything about him is golden, and Percy forgets how to breathe, forgets his own question.
"Sorry," goes Luke, completely unapologetic, and the spell is broken. He comes to stand at the foot of the bed, his grin white and catty in the dark. "I had to call camp and tell them I didn't get chopped to little pieces. They tend to worry when you're not in your cabin by curfew."
"What did you tell them?"
"That I met a pretty girl," is Luke's instant, tart reply. Percy rolls his eyes, and gets a taunting, "Well, what did you want me to say? Did you want me to tell them the truth?" He leans forward, mattress dipping under the weight of his hands and his voice sliding low and husky. "That I didn't come home last night because I was too busy making Percy Jackson, hero of the century, come his brains out?"
There's nothing that could have stopped the moan that escapes Percy's lips at that, and he reaches out, fingers snagging on Luke's wrist. With a yank, he tumbles him into the bed with him, rolling them over and pinning him back into the mattress. The sheets are still warm but their bodies are warmer, and Luke's mouth the warmest of all, pliant with arousal and tasting of him. The heated rush of the kiss fades into a sleepy languidness, without direction, trailing fingers down sides and tangling them in hair, stroking and pulling.
Percy doesn't make a habit of taking strangers home; most of the people he falls in bed with are his friends, half-bloods who've known him from his prophecy days, and this is both like that and completely alien.
"Is that what you want me to tell the folks at work?" he murmurs when the kiss ends. "That I didn't clock out at six like I was supposed to because I was --" he licks at the underside of Luke's chin to an appreciative shiver. "Sucking off a sixteen-year-old boy in my living room?"
"It wasn't as vanilla as you totally just made it sound," Luke says, tone breezy, and Percy would buy it if he hadn't felt the way his throat bobbed helplessly. "It was hardly my first time."
Percy snorts at that. "Which reminds me. You guys really need to get some new hobbies. Back in my day, we were too busy with evil Titans crawling out of the woodwork to have time for that kind of stuff."
Luke laughs, his abdomen jumping underneath Percy's palms. The corners of the kid's mouth are unmistakably cracked raw and red from stubble, his lips burning and swollen, and when Percy whispers, "Luke," his voice is fragile and fine and it strikes him, all at once, that he can say Luke's name like this, possessive and wanting and familiar, so familiar, like he's known him all his life. He can.
+
"I was thinking of making a sword," Luke announces later that day, standing too close in a nondescript hallway at the jail, watching as Percy fills out paperwork on the bail some crack head's wife just put up to spring him out. It always works like this, and he hates it: the pick up some dealer, someone else gets him out, he goes on trail and gets sentenced to a measly amount of time and some community service, and the whole cycle starts again. He makes some noncommittal noise, too busy fuming over this guy, and lets Luke continue.
"I could ask one of the Hephaestus kids make it for me, but I kind of want to do it myself. A double-sided sword, maybe, half celestial bronze, half steel, so it'd work on monsters as well as mortals."
Percy's blood freezes in his veins. He swears his head makes some creaking noise as it slowly turns. "What?" he goes when he's found his voice. "Why would you need it to work on mortals?"
Luke frowns. "I --" he begins, then shuts his mouth, a furrow deepening between his brows. "I don't know. I just thought it'd be a cool idea, but I guess it's a little dumb, right?"
Something must still be in Percy's face, because Luke steps closer, heat and worry flickering between his eyes in equal measure. "Hey," he goes, leaning in to mouth at the starchy fabric at Percy's shoulder. "Hey, no, just an idea. It's not important. Right now -- right now, I'm thinking of licking you. All over. Do you think that could be arranged, officer?"
"Hnnnn," is Percy's reply. Then, "I forgot how insatiable you kids are when you're bored," as he tucks the clipboard under his arm and walks Luke backwards to the nearest storage-closet looking room he can find, his mind spinning, fractal bright.
There are only so many ways this can end, and he's running out of choices.
+
The lines in the sand are blurring. The whole point, the whole point of reincarnation was so Luke could redeem himself, and here he is, bridling with the same impatience and resentment for the gods, the brimming frustration of a half-blood who knows why he has to suffer his whole life, but hasn't ever had the opportunity to prove himself, to make it worth it. It's a dissatisfaction that lingers, and it's not something Percy can work or cajole or kiss or fuck out of him, hard as he tries.
"He needs something to fight," Clarisse tells him, voice patchy through the shitty Internet connection they get in the hell that's left of Johannesburg. "That's how I felt, too, before they pointed to the Andromeda and said, that. That's what you have to get. Then it all started falling into place."
Percy nods, and there must be something on his face that she identifies even with bad pixelation, because she goes, "Hey, be careful, all right? We're an endangered species."
"No, I know," he replies, words empty, because there are no other options left.
+
He visits Rachel in her apartment in Soho, where she likes to pretend she's earning her way as a starving artist on the days she's not at the Big House, making unhelpful, cryptic prophecies for attention-starved preteen demigods.
If he wasn't sure before, he's sure now -- it's in her silence and the pale of her eyes, when she buzzes him in and opens the door to him as he comes up the landing. She shows him the painting in the backroom, dark-colored and gloomy and horrible like the ones sixteen years previous, and he nods at her, slowly, knowing that this is what he's going to do. This is what he has to do.
"There's a reason you don't hear of any famous half-bloods living beyond the age of forty," he tells her, and she looks sick.
She can't be allowed to stop him, though, and the tenets sigh and nod to themselves later and say that she's such a nice young girl, and isn't it horrible that she fell down all those stairs? She'll get out of the hospital someday, though, they're sure. The damage might not even be permanent.
+
He turns in his resignation the next morning, licking the envelope with a certain kind of calm that comes with knowing the inevitable, and leaves it in the department head's paper tray.
"You can't do this," Luke tells him with a wooden voice, like he feels he needs to say something. He trails after him as he makes his way back to his cubicle, where he already has a mailing box waiting.
Percy fills the box with things from his desk, movements stiff and perfunctory. Everything here is valuable in its own right -- a framed photo of his mother, a small woven mat Clarisse had gotten for him the tour before last in Venezuela, an old newspaper clipping he keeps at all times of Mt. Olympus glowing blue -- but little of it is worth keeping.
"I can't do this," he agrees, means, I can't be a cop anymore. Before the chips fall, though, he looks up, knuckles planted on his desk top as he rocks forward. "Luke, why'd you pick me?"
Luke leans against the cubicle wall, his arms folded across his chest, and for all that he's going for unconcerned, his face is confused and young. He shrugs, "You know what they say. You never forget the people you want most to be like."
It's easy, then, right then, to step around the desk and cross the small space to him. So easy and impossible not to want this for as long as he can have it. He catches Luke's face between his hands and kisses him, bumping him back against the flimsy partition. He cards his fingers through Luke's hair, curling their tongues together, and he clings on so tight Luke cannot say no, cannot do anything but kiss back with an ease that's already familiar. There is a spark, a thrill, to be doing this where everyone can see; there is a shiver of it in Luke's smile on his mouth, the rabbit-beat of his heart against his. Luke, who thinks he's in love with a hero.
His eyes are closed, lost in the sensation of tongues licking against tongues, but Percy's are open. Everyone is watching; the cops in the other cubicles, the civilians sitting in chairs, Abigail with Blackberry forgotten in her hand. He lets them see. This is his true resignation. He can give away his title with a piece of paper, but he gives away his name with a kiss.
Later, they will shake their heads and say they should have seen it coming. That Percy Jackson, there was always something a little off about him, from his background to the fact that at his age, he still hadn't found a nice woman and raised a few kids, like good cops do to set the example. There was always something a little off about him. Remember that time we saw him kissing that boy? Kid was barely even old enough to drive. Who knows what else he might have been doing. Shh, no, doesn't bear thinking about.
There was just something wrong with him. What could we have done?
Later, they will remember this moment, and all they will see is a Percy so dark there is no room in Luke for anything but light.
+
He slips his badge into Luke's pocket when the kid isn't paying attention, and he doesn't know why. It seems wrong to just leave it next to the stapler and it's easier than saying good-bye.
He thought it would be hard, forgetting that he ever swore an oath to protect and serve.
Turns out, it's not hard enough.
+
There is only one Olympian he can think to ask for a blessing on this.
He kneels before her in her temple in the Hamptons, enduring the bone-freezing silence until he finds his voice. "You will help me with this, my lady."
"I will not!" Hera snaps in a voice that is beautiful and terrible in her fury. She shivers all over, and everything in her magazine-perfect mansion tries to straighten itself up, except nothing's crooked. The carpet underneath Percy's knees hasn't seen dirt since it was put in, and the lampshades couldn't match the drapes anymore if they tried. It's the penultimate home.
Above him, the queen's eyes blaze with god-light. "Do you understand what you're telling me, Percy Jackson? You, of all people --!"
"Do you understand?" Percy fires back recklessly, his head snapping up. "Don't you see what's happening? It's barely been sixteen years since I made you swear on the Styx that you were going to behave, and you're already fighting amongst each other again. It's never going to fix itself! Lady Hera, your family needs something to fight. You can't stand shoulder to shoulder with nothing to face."
She stares at him, pearl necklace cold at her throat and hair swept back into a careful bob. In her 50s sweater vest set and starch-ironed skirt, she's more imposing than all the school principals and hard-nosed employers Percy's ever had, but he does not bow his head to her.
"No one cares about your family more than you," he says softly. "If there's something for them to fight, they won't fight themselves."
Something flashes in her eyes at that, and, very slowly, she pulls a key from her pocket.
+
"I thought I was supposed to lay low for a couple hundred years," Prometheus remarks casually, rubbing his wrists where the shackles had been. His eyes flicker over Percy, bright and curious and eager as a child on holiday, watching him as he tucks Hera's key back inside his jacket. "What brings on the sudden change of heart?"
No one knows how to quicker get the attention of the gods than this Titan, and Percy is going to have to move fast. "I owed you a favor. You gave me a gift once, and you guys are big on reciprocity."
Prometheus looks thoughtful. "Yes," he muses after a pause. "I do think you'd look good in bloodstains."
+
It's a beautiful little town on the South Carolina coast, full of lazy children in tattered flip-flops and dogs chasing each other down the streets and the smell of summer barbeque. When Percy razes it to the ground, it doesn't stop the lawn sprinklers from going off or for the church bells from ringing, and the sound and scent and sight of it will stay with him forever.
He kills the naiads in the slow stream and the dryads in the oak trees first, so they can't stop him, and moves on to the townspeople. They fall easily to the double-edged blade that Prometheus forged in the memory of Backbiter, and they always go with that look of surprise on their faces, like they didn't see him coming. He wonders if it's the Mist, trying to hide him like it does the monsters. They start screaming, eventually, once the hellhounds come to help him. He leads the charge, sword swinging loose from his wrists and coiling whips of water snaking around his feet.
He doesn't stop at women and children -- he can't afford the mercy. The red-haired elementary school teacher who's been Zeus's paramour for almost a year now doesn't make a sound as he strikes her down, and on his way out the door, he almost misses the whimper that comes from her closet. She'd been trying to shelter three of her students there, and when he yanks the door open, one of them comes at him with fists flying, yelling, "I'm not afraid of you!"
And Percy laughs at the absurdity of it, snatching the kid's face between his palm and wrenching his neck. It snaps like a wishbone.
+
He spares one, just one. Her name's Tamara, and she's dressed in corduroys, a fake paper lei around her neck, but he still recognizes her as the little half-blood girl Luke had saved from a hydra in Manhattan. He tosses a golden drachma at her feet and says to her with a smile, "You will tell them. I cannot be killed and I will not be stopped, and I will come for them."
She goes, and when she is nothing but the mote of a girl, Percy's knees give out, and he vomits onto the sidewalk.
By the second town, it's already gotten easier.
The potential has always been there, and by the fifth, it feels a lot like a game.
+
The half-bloods meet him with an army of the undead.
He sees the bone soldiers and wonders who conjured them -- a child of Hades or a child of Ares, and it occurs to him with a vague kind of indifference that once he would have known. He doesn't know a thing about any of the campers now.
Whatever. He'd been expecting them sooner. Moving up the coast, trashing temples and laying waste to towns with hellhounds, empousi, and a host of assorted monsters at his beck and call, he'd thought the gods' retaliation would have come swifter than this.
As is, they still send children to do their fighting. That, at least, never changes.
With a laugh, he dives into the fray, meeting the skeleton soldiers head-on. Just like that, he's sixteen again, newly-invincible and demolishing Hades' army single-handedly. There is nothing that compares to this; the weight and balance of a sword in his hands, strike and blow and parry and rinse and repeat. His body never forgot this, even when he traded it for a police uniform and a gun.
He counts four small figures in armor in between the soldiers and the trees, but it still surprises him when he turns around and comes face-to-face with the pale skin and too-wide eyes of a half-blood. She throws herself into the fight, flinching at the sound of their swords meeting and the metallic scrape as they slide away, but not backing down from it. She pushes him back, three feet, four, before he gets a hand up under hers and disarms her.
"No, wait --" she starts, but he doesn't wait, can't wait, and whatever she's going to say next is lost in the sickly sound of his sword sliding into her chest from in between the straps in her armor.
He steps over her body as it falls, meeting another soldier mid-strike.
By the time he's annihilated the undead and two other demigods, they've corralled him against an overhang. His heels are inches away from thin air as he tosses the last skeleton over his shoulder, and when he looks down, he's tempted to laugh. It'd been a good strategy, he's sure, but there's a river roaring down below him. They could have thought this through a little better.
Movement in his peripheral; his last opponent, a half-blood in armor. Percy swings his sword, and it meets Luke's with a clash above their heads.
They stay locked like that for one heartbeat, two, their breaths coming short and hard. Then --
"Percy," whispers Luke, and that's all it takes. They reach forward with their free hands in the same movement, grasping each other's elbows and reeling the other in. They meet in the middle with a kiss like a strike, hot flesh and breath and violent urgency, swords still in hand. Luke pulls him as close as possible, wrestling a hand free to grab the back of his neck, holding him still while he thrusts his tongue as deep as it can go into Percy's mouth.
It takes them a long time to break apart; when one makes a move to pull back, the other follows, so that one kiss becomes two becomes three, four, five, delaying this as long as possible.
But it ends, eventually, and Luke's voice falls in the space between them. "Why?" he asks, like he knows no other word, like it's all he can say.
Percy licks his lips, red and swollen, and the blood on them isn't his. "This is your chance to prove yourself," he breathes, like fate in motion. "You asked for this. If you don't stop me, nothing's safe -- not mortals, not half-bloods, nobody. I'll march on Olympus."
"You can't." Luke's voice is a whisper, a plea, and oh, gods, was he ever that young?
"So stop me." He leans in, kisses him, a glancing blow. His mouth is bruised like an apple, smeared with the blood from Percy's. He moves to murmur in his ear, where Luke's hair brushes against the bridge of his nose, intimate and close. "Be a hero, Luke, and stop me."
Then. He steps backwards -- dropping into empty space. As the water closes in over his head, he thinks he could get used to this: fleeing from a battle with sword in hand, Hera's blessing, Prometheus's monsters, and the taste of Luke still upon his lips.
+
Great heroes are made by greater challenges.
This isn't his destiny. This was never his destiny. But it's not about him anymore.
He kidnaps April Page in the middle of the night, and with a creak, the cycle starts again.
-
fin