Chapter Text
“All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.” - James Baldwin
High school isn't all cliches, but the way that the boy's locker room smells after athletics practice lets out at the end of the day is a kind of universal evil, a stereotype of questionable hygiene that is - unfortunately - very much rooted in reality.
Though most boys have learned to use deodorant by the time they make it to high school, by the end of a long, sweaty practice, it almost doesn't matter if they put it on that morning or not. The funk of decades of overheated bodies crammed into a too-small room has already wormed its way into the wood of long, battered benches and stiff plastic shower curtains, and even if one happens to find themselves in there alone, something foul always seems to linger.
Percy, toweling off after a particularly exhausting day in the pool, was trying very hard to limit the amount of time he spent breathing in the toxic sludge that was emanating from his classmates - not all of which was coming from their pores.
"...did you see Maya's tits when she got out of the pool at the end of that last set?"
The obnoxiously loud voice of Aaron Tarleton rose above the general cacophony, and Percy scowled in disgust as he turned and saw his fellow swimmer - and potentially least favorite classmate - mime groping the body of one of the girls on their team. The boys around him snickered, and Tarleton, never one to ignore the opportunity to perform for an audience, did it again, now making the movement of hands and hips exaggerated and crude. The snickers became full blown laughter, cruel and hungry, and some of his friends began adding their own commentary.
"You gonna tap that, bro?" Called Lance Cruz, another of the guys on Percy's personal shit list. "I hear she doesn't have a prom date yet, bet you could probably move in on her."
Tarleton paused his show to flash a cocky grin. "Probably? Man, who do you think you're talking to? One look at my new car and that bitch'll be begging me to bend her over the hood."
Percy had been enjoying overhearing - and overseeing - exactly none of this conversation, but now his hands clenched involuntarily around the towel he was holding, and he had to fight down the urge to wrap the damp fabric around the other kid's throat. Slowly, he took a deep breath and forced himself to stay seated, trying to relax tight muscles and calm his rapid heart rate. It was March, nearly the end of the swim season, and he had successfully avoided strangling Tarleton this long. He could hold out a little longer.
You can handle this without absolutely annihilating that creep, he reminded himself after a few slow breaths meant that he could think a little more clearly.
After all, this wasn't actually his fight, and he could do something useful without getting too involved. He didn't know Maya that well, but he was friendly with her best friend, Desireé, another girl on the swim team. The rational thing for him to do would be to ask Desireé to warn Maya about Tarleton's intentions, so that she could decide for herself what she wanted to do about him.
He desperately hoped Maya had more sense than to say yes to this asshole if he actually decided to ask her to prom, but he didn't know what she liked, and Tarleton was one of the few guys at AHS whose family had money. Would he actually try to buy her interest? Percy definitely wouldn't put it past him, and he felt a little sick thinking about Tarleton taking advantage in that way. As a kid who had grown up poor, he knew plenty about the ways that rich folks used their resources to exploit those with less.
Taking one more deep breath, Percy finally managed to drop the now very crumpled towel into his gym bag and pull the rest of his clothes on. But before he could gather up his remaining belongings and go find Desireé, a shoulder knocked into his, hard.
"Wake up, dipshit!" said a voice.
He had successfully managed to tune out the rest of the conversation that was happening behind him, so he'd also missed the still half-dressed Tarleton straddling the bench next to him, and Cruz leaning idly against the locker on his other side. Apparently, they'd been trying to get Percy's attention for a minute, if the number of eyes trained on the three boys was any indication.
He had also nearly managed to successfully force his tight muscles to unclench and his heart rate to return to normal, but all of that effort went out the window as he slowly turned to look at Tarleton's smirking face. Gods, it was just so punchable.
"What do you want, Tarleton?" Percy said flatly. He hadn't been a part of that conversation for a reason - the reason being ew - and he really didn't want to get dragged into it now.
Tarleton's grin became a mischievous leer, and he leaned forward, elbows on towel-covered knees. "I was asking if you were gonna bring that fine piece of ass you're always meeting up with to prom. We're all dying for a closer look, man."
As though the other boy's words had flipped a switch in his head, two competing parts of Percy's brain suddenly started battling for control of his mouth.
The part that often spoke in Annabeth's voice immediately said They're not worth it. Don't rise to it. You're better than this! Count to ten and ignore them. You don't want to get kicked out of another school this close to graduation, do you? And what have I told you about getting into fights over me?
But the problem was that that eminently reasonable, cool-headed version of himself was not the only internal voice that had something to say.
Percy wasn't quite sure what voice the second part spoke in, but it was much harsher, much more primal, and was utterly disdainful of the measured approach to anything. He'd deserve it if you hurt him, that second voice whispered. And you could, so easily. The world would be so much better off without him. It would be so satisfying to finally show him that real power has nothing to do with money.
As his brain fought with itself, his body joined in, fingers flexing - though this time, unless he gave in to that darker voice, they had nothing to hold on to but air.
Oblivious to Percy's internal struggle not to punch his face in, Tarleton grinned wider, utterly misinterpreting that gesture. "Yeah man, I'll bet it's a pretty sweet handful. What's she got going on under the skirt of that uniform?"
"Fuck off," Percy snapped, hands now curling into fists, despite his best efforts. He knew what voice he needed to listen to, but it was so hard to listen to that voice when Tarleton wouldn't shut up.
The other kid finally seemed to pick up on Percy's mood, because he leaned away from him and held up his hands placatingly…though his eyes narrowed, calculating and mean. "I bet you don't even know, do you?"
Percy scowled at him even more fiercely, biting down hard on his tongue. There was a lot he could say to that - most of it even true - but he really didn't think that Annabeth would be happy with him for telling this random, stupid, bullying mortal just how far he'd made it around the bases.
To add insult to injury, any accusation that he didn't know his girlfriend rankled, because, setting aside all of the terrifying, death-defying adventures that had tightly welded their hearts together, they had spent so many quiet moments with their bodies curled around each other that he was confident that no one else knew her quite like he did. That level of intimacy, still steadily deepening as days passed, wasn't something he could easily explain, and he didn't even want to try to with someone whose outlook on relationships was entirely physical and transactional.
But, if he didn't say something, Tarleton would think he was right, and worse, would spread his new belief about the unexplored nature of Percy and Annabeth's relationship to anyone who would listen. It was a shame that Tarleton was one of the few guys at AHS who never seemed all that intimidated by his iciest glares, because he had never been above shutting his most frustrating classmates up with a well-placed dark look.
Wrestling back just enough control to stop himself from doing something truly regrettable, he unclenched his hands for the second time that afternoon and returned to throwing the last of his things into his gym bag, maybe a bit more forcefully than he otherwise would have done, knowing he needed to leave ASAP.
"Wasn't it you who told me not to give shit away for free, Tarleton?" He finally ground out coldly, giving the other boy a last glare as he stood and tossed his bag over his shoulder. "And the cost of that information is more than even you can afford."
He knew that if he lingered in the steamy swamp he'd also be tempted to comment on Tarleton's chances with Maya, so, out of respect for her and her alone, he spun and stalked towards the door without a backward glance, ignoring the shouts that erupted behind him as he did.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Winter sports might be nearly over, but Spring sports were about to begin, and somehow Sarah Lafayette had been given the unpleasant task of delivering the lists of the students who were on academic probation to the various athletics coaches, breaking the bad news that some of their stars weren't going to be eligible for tryouts unless they brought their grades up.
It was exhausting having that many of her colleagues mad at her at once, and whenever she found out who had volunteered her for this miserable job, she was going to make sure they had to do it next time.
(Her ears were still ringing from the shrieks of the soccer coach, whose fury had gotten so high pitched that Sarah wondered if she might start accidentally summoning stray neighborhood dogs.)
Sighing, she looked down at the final paper in her hand. Just the girl's track coach was left, and she was, mercifully, a friend.
Quickening her pace, Sarah strode toward the hallway that led toward the rest of the women's wing of the gym. The sooner the paper was delivered, the sooner she could leave. It had been a long, confusing couple of weeks, and she was relieved that she had nothing planned for her Friday evening other than opening a well-deserved - and decidedly uncomplicated - bottle of wine.
However, as she turned down the hallway, she was brought up short by the sight of a gaggle of students at the other end, right in front of the door to the girl's locker room, two of which seemed to be in the middle of an argument.
She suppressed a sigh. Breaking up fights was one of the parts of her job that she could really do without, and she'd been hoping to make it home without needing to stop at the corner store for another ice pack. She was still nursing bruises from the last time she had gotten between two angry freshmen, and unfortunately, these students looked big enough to be seniors.
But as she got closer, squinting through contacts dry from an exhausting day, she found that she couldn't actually keep that suppressed sigh from escaping.
Why, why, why was she always finding Percy Jackson in places he shouldn't be?
The source of much of the confusion of her past few weeks was surrounded by a group of girls - all basketball players by the look of their uniforms - and though she wasn't yet close enough to hear what he was saying to them, he was holding his empty hands up in front of him in supplication, and he seemed to be trying to persuade the girl directly in front of him of something.
It didn't look like it was going well. The girl had her back to Sarah so she couldn't see her face, but she was almost as tall as Percy, her arms were crossed over her chest, and she had one hip popped out. Sarah was willing to bet that whatever look she was giving him was unimpressed at best, and probably hostile at worst.
"...look, fine, I get that you don't want a guy getting too close to the girl's locker room, but if someone could just tell Desireé that I want to talk to her, I'll be gone!" He said entreatingly.
"Not until you tell me why, Jackson," the girl snapped. "I don't know you like that. I don't trust you. And I'm not about to put Desireé into some kind of a situation with you."
"What's that supposed to mean?" Percy said, sounding a little exasperated. "She does know me! Just let her decide if she wants to talk with me!"
If anything, the girl's stance became even more stubbornly unhelpful, and Sarah could only imagine that the expression on her face became that much more mulish. If she was trying to protect her friend, then Sarah could sympathize, and understand why the girl was being so obstinate. She truly believed that all of her students deserved a good, compassionate education, but that didn't mean that there weren't certain students that she knew that she shouldn't be alone with.
Percy, however, was not one of those students - and to even think about putting him in that category honestly insulting - so she had to wonder why this girl seemed so convinced that he was up to no good.
"Goddamnit Brittany, I just want to tell her something I overheard in the guy's locker room just now, okay? I think she'll want to know about it!" Percy was getting frustrated now, and judging by the colorful, not-school-appropriate language, he'd also lost any patience he might've originally had with this conversation. Had they been fighting for awhile, or had something happened in the boy's locker room that might be contributing to his short temper?
The girl - Brittany, Sarah supposed, though she wasn't one of her students - snorted disdainfully. "Nothing that comes out of a boy's locker room is worth listening to."
Sarah tended to wholeheartedly agree with that statement as a general rule, but if Percy thought another student ought to hear something he'd heard there, he had to have a reason, right?
"It is if it's a warning," Percy snapped back, fixing her with an irritated look.
Well. That was certainly a reason that demanded further explanation.
Brittany bristled, unrolling her arms and taking a step closer to Percy, and Sarah's carefully honed teacher's instincts whispered that if she didn't step in now, someone was probably going to end up throwing a punch.
It was always better to stop a fight when it was still verbal, so stepping closer, she raised her voice, keeping her tone mild and even. "Is there a problem here, y'all?"
The reactions of the little knot of students varied by person, but were - amusingly - universally surprised. Sarah hadn't realized that she was being so quiet, but then, Percy and Brittany had been very absorbed in their argument, and the onlookers had probably been captivated by the unfolding drama.
Brittany jumped and turned to face the teacher, eyes widening first in shock, and then with something like victory.
"Ma'am, Percy is trying to get into the girl's locker room!" She said, quickly, before Percy even had a chance to speak.
He hadn't looked nearly as surprised to see her as the others had - was he, too, resigned to meeting her in odd moments and places, or had he sensed her presence somehow? - but now his mouth fell open, and he seemed just as shocked as Brittany had been a moment ago, before his surprise morphed into outrage.
"What?" He yelped. "I would never!" He turned to Sarah, a little bit of desperation tightening the skin around his eyes. "Ma'am, I swear, I was only trying to talk to one of my teammates! I was asking if someone could get her for me, I wasn't going to go in myself!"
Even though they were both now facing Sarah, Brittany put her hands on her hips and rolled her eyes, shooting him a sidelong nasty look. "You can keep saying that, but we all know you're lying. Stop bothering her - she already has a boyfriend!"
Percy's mouth opened and closed like a fish on a hook gasping for air, which would have been funnier if he hadn't clearly been appalled by that accusation. "You…you think I'm trying to get between her and Rob?" He spluttered. "Why the hell would I do that? I have a girlfriend!"
"In Brooklyn!" Brittany shot back. "You think I don't know guys that have a girl in every borough? I've seen you trying to chase Desireé down after biology, I know you're trying to add her to your line-up!"
"I talk to her after class because she's my project partner!" Percy cried, throwing his hands in the air. "I'm trying to not fail, not trying to make a move!"
He sounded totally flabbergasted and deeply offended, so Sarah decided to take pity on him. She'd seen how he acted with Annabeth - besotted was a good word to describe it, as were any relevant synonyms - and found Brittany's accusations to be laughably misguided, but probably, unfortunately, sincere.
"Thank you - Brittany, is it? - for expressing your concerns. I will take charge of him from here," she said calmly, modulating her voice into a soothing tone in an attempt to placate the girl. "I will not be allowing him into the girl's locker room. You can go back to practice, or head home if you're already done."
Percy's shoulders slumped, and the girls around him smirked as they picked up bags and gear and began to disperse. Whether their intent in surrounding him had truly been a protective instinct or whether they'd been trying to start something with him - something she'd have to investigate further on an afternoon when she was less exhausted - they seemed satisfied with this outcome.
"Busted," Sarah heard Brittany whisper, knocking her shoulder against one of Percy's arms as she hurried after her friends.
As soon as they were out of sight, Percy looked up, an odd mix of trepidation and lingering irritation clear on his face. "Am I busted?" He muttered quietly, sounding a little uncertain.
Fair enough. If he didn't know where he stood with her right now, then at least that made two of them.
Sarah tried to keep her face impassive as she gestured for him to follow her away from the door to the girl's locker room, deciding to deliver her last list first thing Monday morning. She was pretty convinced that he hadn't actually done anything wrong, but she also didn't want him to loiter in this part of the building. As he himself had seen, it did his reputation no favors. "You tell me, Mr. Jackson."
Resettling his swim bag on one shoulder, he hurried after her. "Ms. Lafayette, I swear I really wasn't trying to get into the girls' locker room, and I wasn't gonna bother Desireé. I just wanted to tell her about something I overheard that I thought she should know about. I wasn't trying anything weird! You…you believe me, right?"
He sounded tentatively optimistic, like he had gotten used to telling the truth and not being believed…but that he was maybe hopeful that this time it might be different.
Sarah felt a tiny blossom of warmth in her chest. She'd been trying to give him reasons to trust her ever since what she was calling 'the first aid kit incident' - just small things, little moments of having his back or giving him just a bit more grace in class than the situation might otherwise have called for - and it seemed that her preliminary efforts were starting to pay off.
"I believe you, Mr. Jackson," she responded calmly, looking over at him as they approached the main hallway and trying to communicate that that was true in more ways than one. "Even if I don't particularly care for the language you were using to articulate yourself." Percy winced, blushing, and she suppressed a smile, holding up a hand to forestall an apology she didn't need to hear. "However, I do think you need to tell me what you overheard that has you so concerned. Was it a threat?"
Sarah could imagine plenty of unpleasant things that he could have heard, and normally she just didn't want to know - sometimes she needed plausible deniability, after all - but anything that had (a potential superhero? no, that wasn't a helpful line of thought right now) concerned was something that she probably needed to be aware of.
For a moment he looked relieved to not be in trouble for swearing, before the second part of Sarah's statement sunk in. His face twisted in another uncomfortable contortion, and the flush rose higher in his cheeks as he raised his head and looked around them warily.
Ah. She should have realized this before she asked. He probably didn't want his fellow classmates to know that he was telling a teacher what he had heard. One of the earliest lessons Sarah had learned as a teacher at AHS was that no one appreciated a snitch, and that there were often real, physical consequences for students who tattled to teachers.
(Not that real, physical consequences seemed to have a lasting effect on Percy, but again, she didn't want to think about that right now.)
"Um. I don't know if I'd call it a threat…" he hedged. "Just some guys being gross about who they want to ask to prom. Probably nothing to worry about."
Sarah frowned, considering. That certainly could be nothing, but it could also be a lot more than nothing. Some of Percy's classmates spewed misogyny like it was going out of style (which it was, thank goodness), and she knew for a fact that people he cared about deeply had been on the receiving end of it more than once. She shot him a sharp look, hoping to gauge how serious this particular episode was, and he smiled weakly in return, still looking around uneasily.
Maybe he'd elaborate if she could guarantee that he wouldn't be overheard? Her classroom wasn't that far from where they now stood, in the school's entrance hall. Would he follow her back there? She didn't want him to feel trapped into a conversation with her, and she never wanted to make him think he had to be alone with her, but she also wanted to give him a space and an opportunity to be honest, if he so chose.
"Alright, but think on it and make sure, okay?" She said, holding his gaze until he nodded. "Though while you're here, I did want to speak to you about your poetry project. Do you have a moment, or is someone waiting for you?"
That was as good an excuse as any - he was signed up to present on Monday, but he hadn't actually indicated anywhere on the sign-up sheet which poem he had chosen. Perhaps she could also give him some guidance if he needed it, killing two birds with one stone. Or maybe three? Might he also take the opportunity to be honest about the other, stranger, more complicated things if she asked?
Assuming she could (or should) ask, anyway.
Percy glanced down at his watch, a simple, bronze metal face on a very battered leather band. "Um, yeah. My step-dad is picking me up today, but he isn't going to be here for another 15 minutes at least," he said. He looked back up, eyebrows scrunched in slightly suspicious confusion. She hadn't fooled him, but then, she really hadn't expected to. "What about my poetry project?" He asked, shoving his hands into his pockets as he turned to follow her down the quiet hallway.
And despite her resolution not to dwell on their past encounters, as they walked Sarah found herself struggling harder than ever not to think about the last time she'd found him in a questionable part of the building outside of school hours.
It had been two weeks to the morning that she had followed a trail of his splattered blood to the dark of the pool, and had then watched him do (at least) six impossible things before breakfast. The questions raised by his injuries and subsequent miraculous healing had consumed her, and she had walked through the next few days in a giddy daze of theories and speculations that she was just now starting to come out of.
This was always how it went, after all; she would see something that shouldn't be real, or shouldn't have happened the way that it did, and something in her brain just couldn't let it go, even when forgetting would have been more useful. As a little girl, she'd been told she had an overactive imagination. As an adolescent, she'd just been called a liar. But by the time she'd become a teenager, she'd gotten enough weird looks from classmates (who already thought she was strange) to know to keep her mouth shut, no matter what.
Moving to New York City had initially tested her ability to keep her observations to herself - because there was just so much more to see in a city of millions - but she'd tried to leave all the oddness that seemed to follow her around back in North Carolina, and she was bound and determined to not let it affect the new life she was building for herself here.
Sarah had hoped for a long time that whatever it was that kept her eyes wide open when everyone else's were shut tight would eventually just…go away, and for a while, it seemed like it had started to fade. She didn't see so many odd figures out of the corner of her eye on the subway, always gone when she tried to get a closer look, and stopped noticing strange faces in the rain and the wind of the nastiest storms. Focusing on the human beings in her life became so much easier when that was all that she saw, and for the past few years, she had wondered if this was what it was like to be 'normal.'
But that had before she realized that those elusive beings, whatever they were, might be able to look more human than she'd ever expected they could. Because if Percy Jackson didn't claim the label of superhero - and he might not, even though it was still her best guess - were there other identities that he did lay claim to? Ones that tied him to all of the bizarre things that she'd spent her life seeing?
Three days after that strange and wonderful and terrifying day, her seething curiosity about who (or what) he was had gotten the better of her, and she'd joined a group of her fellow teachers on the bleachers of a rival school in East Manhattan, craning her neck and squinting to try and spot Percy in the crowd of swimmers as the district swim meet had gotten underway.
Almost (but not quite) unbelievably, the vicious slashes that the griffin had carved into his side a few days prior were only thin, slightly raised pink lines, and as far as she could tell, no one on the team had even given them a second look as he had casually shucked his shirt and stepped up to the block for his first race. Sarah wasn't sure if that was because his torso was already so heavily scarred that a few more lines just blended into the pattern of it all, or if most people just couldn't even see them to begin with, but both of those options made her heart clench uncomfortably and her mind begin to bubble anew with hard-to-answer questions.
Percy had set a new school record at the meet that day, and as she watched him punch the water with a wild, victorious yell as the announcer had declared his time, she was struck anew by his intensity, especially as compared to the exhaustion of his young competitors. She'd always thought he carried himself differently than the average teenager, but she had initially attributed that to standard human trauma - if such a thing existed. Now it was very clear that there was something else going on, something that made him constantly able to perform at a very high level of skill and athleticism - even after just having been violently mauled by a creature that most people didn't know existed.
Was he that way because he had to be? Would being less strong, less fast, less aware be a death sentence for someone like him?
Of everything, those were the questions that made her heart ache the most, and made her hope that she'd done enough to convince him that she was a person who was worthy of his trust and confidence. If his school records were anything to go by, it seemed that very few adults in his life had ever been deserving of those labels, and that he was used to being dismissed, disbelieved, and discarded by those who should have known better, and done better by him. How many times had he been hurt in the past, and had no-one to rely on but himself?
The door of her classroom suddenly appeared before her eyes, and too late, Sarah realized that she had fallen into the exact trap she had been trying to avoid falling into: thinking too hard about the perplexed (and perplexing) teenager walking quietly at her side.
She shook herself as she unlocked the door to her classroom. She hadn't brought him here to interrogate him, she'd brought him here so he would feel safe sharing, if he so chose, about anything that was bothering him. Perhaps his poetry project. A conversation overheard in a locker room. Or maybe, just maybe, a little piece of the larger secret that was his life.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Ms. Lafayette's classroom was dim in the grayish afternoon light, and Percy heard a distant rumble and the soft plink of rain beginning to hit the gutters outside as she flicked the light switch on for them.
"Door open, or closed?" She asked, one hand on the worn wooden frame, as he slid quietly into a seat at one of the battered desks in the row right in front of her desk.
"Um," Percy said, dropping his bags onto the floor and trying to think through his lingering frustration and confusion. It was nice of her to ask, but he didn't really know what he wanted the answer to be? It kind of depended on what they were going to talk about.
"Closed, I guess," he decided. If she wanted to talk about his poetry project, he really didn't care about anyone overhearing. But if she wanted to hear more about the locker room conversation, or if she wanted him to say anything about anything else…
His heart had been beating fast ever since that dumb fuck Tarleton had opened his big mouth, but the reason it's pace hadn't slowed even after Ms. Lafayette had rescued him from what felt like half of the Amazons that made up the girl's basketball team was that he had been waiting for her to do something like this for weeks.
And he really couldn't blame her, even if his weak knees and sweaty palms were making him feel like the subject of an Eminem track. How many teachers, when confronted with very persuasive evidence that one of their students was not entirely human, would have kept quiet about that knowledge as long as she had?
His niggling hunch that she wanted to talk to him about a lot more than what poem he'd decided on for his presentation Monday - which, oops, he still needed to pick one - only became stronger as he watched her close the door, walk over to him, and then lean back against the front of her desk, hands tightly clasped in front of her.
Thunder rumbled again, this time louder and closer, as heavy as the air between teacher and student.
The sound seemed to shake Ms. Lafayette out of the slightly nervous silence that she'd fallen into, because she visibly relaxed her shoulders and cleared her throat, offering him a small, somewhat strained smile that he awkwardly returned as her tone became matter-of-fact. "So, your poetry project. I noticed that you didn't indicate which poem you are planning on presenting on the sign up sheet. Does that mean you haven't decided on one yet?"
Talking about schoolwork must have gone a long way towards helping her feel more comfortable, because the knowing look that she fixed him with made Percy want to squirm out of his chair. Why were teachers so good at that particular look, and why was he so totally powerless to it? He was sure she could read his guilt all over his face, which didn't help at all with his comfort.
"I…I'll have something to present on Monday, ma'am," He mumbled, dropping his gaze. That at least wasn't a lie, and kept him from having to admit that he wasn't entirely sure how he was going to fulfill the parameters of the assignment.
Pick a poem he identified with and present it to the class? Percy didn't think he'd ever identified with a poem, and in general, he didn't tend to like them: they reminded him too much of prophecies, and he wasn't about to present the prophecy that he most identified with. He might sometimes have a tendency toward self-flagellation, but he didn't want to send himself into a war flashback in the middle of English class.
But deciding on a poem that didn't make his skin crawl too much was a Sunday problem, and it was still only Friday. Plenty of time left to figure something out.
Ms. Lafayette raised an eyebrow at him. "I have no doubt that you'll have something to present. But I suppose that's not quite what I'm asking, Mr. Jackson."
Percy frowned, eyes flickering back up to meet hers. Her usually business-like tone had softened, and her eyes looked almost…sad?
Uh oh.
"What do you mean?" He said slowly, feeling his brow furrow and his own gaze sharpen as he stared back at her. The sadness in her eyes had yet to fade, and there was also concern, and a hint of that earlier nervousness.
"Some students find it hard to find a poem that they identify with," she said simply, even tone belying the gravity of the look she was giving him. "I…I can imagine that you, perhaps, might be one of them."
For a moment, he just stared back at her, heart now thumping almost painfully fast as he tried to decide how to respond to that. She was right of course, but now that the moment he'd been waiting for had definitely arrived, was he really prepared to do this? Just because he'd sort of suspected this was coming didn't mean he was actually ready for it.
"Are we talking about poetry?" He finally asked, mouth dry, as though he didn't already know the answer to his own question, "Or are we talking about…something else?"
"You tell me," she responded, again letting him decide how the conversation would proceed.
Percy figured she must have been trying to look and sound passively collected, but he could practically feel her trying to restrain herself from saying more. On more than one level, he appreciated the courtesy, but he almost wished she'd just come right out and say whatever it was she wanted to say to him.
Not that he knew what he'd say if she did.
He'd spent so much time pacing around his room, stressed about what she would do if she decided to confront him about all the preposterous things she'd seen him do lately, that his mom had taken to pushing his jacket into his arms and telling him she'd rather him wear out the soles of his shoes than the floor of their apartment. Over the past few weeks his wandering feet and worrying mind had taken him all over the city, and more than once he'd come home with hair dusted gold and new slashes in his jeans from monsters who tried (but always failed) to take advantage of his distraction.
As far as he could tell, she hadn't told anyone else about whatever suspicions she might harbor about him, and she did always seem to have his back in critical moments, which made him more inclined to trust that she wasn't interested in going on the TODAY show and exposing him to the world if he decided to tell her that he wasn't quite what he appeared to be.
And he still didn't know what he would have actually done if he'd been found bleeding half to death in the pool by anyone but her. He couldn't think of those fuzzy, painful moments without feeling profoundly grateful to her for allowing him to remain anonymous while simultaneously providing the first aid supplies that he had desperately needed. That was a lot more than most other mortals had done for him when he got caught holding the line between the mundane and mythological worlds, and Percy didn't take that kind of quiet support lightly.
So, he figured he probably owed her some answers. He wasn't sure how much she'd actually seen, but it had to have been enough for her curiosity to have been piqued, right? But…where would he even begin?
He cleared his throat self-consciously and gathered his courage, hands sliding forward on the weathered, graffitied desk as he met his teacher's eyes again. Time to at least try for a bit of honesty.
"That's, um, kind of the problem. I'm just…I'm not actually sure what to tell you," he managed to get out, keeping voice soft. He hadn't said anything that weird yet, but still, he didn't want their voices to catch the ear of the janitor whose cart he could hear squeaking its way down the hall. "Who I am is, well, it's…complicated. And I don't have a lot of practice talking about it, so I don't know if I'll even make sense if I try and explain. I…it's hard to know where to begin."
Ms. Lafayette nodded once, an abrupt movement for a body otherwise perfectly still. "Is the truth such a difficult place to start?" She inquired carefully, matching his volume but keeping her face impassive.
"The truth?" He repeated quietly, tipping his head to the side and turning to stare out the window at the growling storm, sheets of rain now washing away the haze of pollen that had covered them.
Um, yeah, that actually was a difficult place to start. He remembered what he had told the crotchety old river god a few weeks back - I contain multitudes - and while that was true, he'd also kind of been dodging the question. He thought his English teacher would appreciate that reference, but beginning with it now probably wouldn't help her to unravel the snarled up, knotted thread that was the reality of his life.
Especially because that thread was so hopelessly tangled with so many other threads that even he had a hard time differentiating himself from the beings and the events that had shaped his past five years. And if he couldn't figure out who he was in all that mess, how could he ever hope to truly explain himself to her?
But she was waiting patiently, eyes soft as she watched him internally wrestle with words and thoughts and feelings, so turning back to look at her, he tried a different angle.
"I guess the truth is that I…I exist in this world, but I also exist in another world, a world most people don't know about," he said, watching her closely for signs of panic, or polite concern for his mental health. It's not like that was in any way a normal or intelligible statement to make.
But her calm expression didn't waver, and she remained silent, listening intently, so he took a shallow breath and continued, trying to remember how all of this had once been explained to him.
"And I…mostly live in the space between the two worlds. I affect both, and I'm affected by both, so sometimes it's hard to keep the balance between them," he admitted. "And that leads to, uh… incidents, let's say."
"Incidents?" She repeated cautiously. Her expression hadn't changed in any obvious way, but Percy thought the set of her shoulders looked wearier. "You mean…the field trip? The…first aid kit?"
He nodded, mouth still so, so dry. He wanted to dig his water bottle out of his bag for some relief, but he also didn't want to break the fragile moment that he found himself suspended in. He felt oddly vulnerable, a new and powerful feeling in an afternoon full of strong emotions, and doing something so human felt wrong.
"I'm sorry," he blurted out instead, because that was always his go-to, and also, because he was. He hated it when his own problems became other people's problems, and he knew Ms. Lafayette well enough to know that she had probably been shaken by it all. "I know that I've made your life a lot more difficult lately, and that you've probably got a million questions that I don't know how to answer, and even when there isn't something weird happening I still am always messing up, and…"
As she had done earlier, she held up a hand, and he clamped down on what would probably have been an embarrassingly emotional torrent of words that wouldn't have helped or explained anything. It had never been easy to tell mortals about who he was, but he hadn't remembered being so out of sorts when he'd had to tell Rachel about the mythological world.
"Percy," she said, voice now so gentle he almost couldn't look at her. "You have nothing to apologize for."
He remained silent, but gave her a sidelong skeptical look, noting that she was using his first name again. Why? He could think of several more things to apologize for…but it seemed she didn't want to hear it?
She lifted an eyebrow at him. "I mean that, young man," she said, voice still soft, but now with more of her usual edge. "No one - in any world - is perfect, but it seems to me that you have less reason to apologize than most. Do I need to remind you that you saved my life a few weeks ago?"
Percy blushed, and sank down in his seat, now officially not looking at her. Okay, yes, he had done that, she wasn't wrong. Sure. But he probably wouldn't have had to do it at all if she hadn't been his teacher, because it had been his presence on the ferry that day that had pissed off the spirit of the Hudson River. He could live with being a danger magnet if he was the only one who got hurt, but when others got caught in the magnetic field? It tore him up worse than any monster ever could.
And she didn't know about all the other things that he'd done that he still hadn't been able to forgive himself for. Before he could clamp down on them, some of those memories flashed behind his closed eyelids, bright and burning like acid, and he felt a shudder run up his spine as adrenaline surged through his body.
Get it together, Jackson!, he thought desperately, knowing that he was on the verge of panicking.
"Percy, breathe." There was new, sharper concern in Ms. Lafayette's tone, and he snapped his eyes open, inhaling sharply through his nose. His hands had been gripping the worn wood of the desk, and as he caught sight of the worry in her gaze, he tried - for the millionth time that day - to unclench them.
It took a few seconds, but when he finally pried them free, he and Ms. Lafayette both saw why it had been harder than before. New divots and grooves exactly the size of his fingers had appeared on the desk, cratering the scratched surface.
"Oh, shit," Percy muttered before he could stop himself, shoving his hands under his armpits. "That's new."
In the stunned silence that followed, the chuckle that burst out of his teacher took them both by surprise. Her hand flew up to cover her mouth as the chuckle turned into the kind of inelegant snort that made a tiny grin break out on his face too.
"Well, someone's needed to take a sander to the tops of these desks for a while now," she said after a moment, lips still twitching slightly with amusement. "Are you alright, Mr. Jackson?"
Percy only nodded, blushing a little. It had been awhile since he'd unintentionally broken furniture, but at least this wasn't so bad. And Ms. Lafayette's laughter had helped shake him out of the weird freak out he'd been working himself into.
Her stare had become piercing again, but this time, she didn't follow-up with another question. "Maybe this is just a sign that we ought to cut this conversation short, for now," she said. "I'm sure your stepfather is almost here?"
Oh right, Paul. He would probably sit in the Prius waiting for a while before he got actually concerned, but Percy didn't want to worry him. He nodded automatically and stood, picking up his bags from where he'd dropped them a few minutes - had it really only been a few minutes? - ago.
"I know you don't want an apology," he said, not looking at her as he gathered them, but also not wanting to leave the conversation dangling. "But I am sorry I don't know how to explain myself better."
"It seems to me like you are trying to figure out how to explain the unexplainable, Mr. Jackson," she said, voice more understanding than he'd expected. "Quite the herculean task."
He grimaced. That guy. Why was it always that guy? He really thought he had him beat for shitty luck at this point in his life, but Ms. Lafayette, who was looking at him curiously, didn't know that. And if he didn't want to keep Paul waiting, then he didn't have time to explain why he thought 'persean' should really become the new default descriptor for difficult tasks.
"Yeah," he said instead, resolving to find another time and another way to put all of this into words. "Something like that."
She considered him for a long moment, before nodding and sitting back down at her desk, where it looked like a stack of papers waited. "I'll be here when you decide the time is right. Now, do we need to talk about what happened in the locker room before you go?"
Oh, he'd almost completely forgotten about stupid Aaron Tarleton and his stupid, sleazy plan. A residual bit of anger flared in his chest as he thought of him, and he tossed water on the spark before it ignited. "No, I really don't think you need to worry about that, Ms. Lafayette. I can handle it."
The look she shot him as she began to gather up the papers was as skeptical as the one he'd sent her earlier, but she seemed determined to keep her thoughts to herself. "If that changes, I expect you to tell me." He nodded as obediently as he could - he would not be involving her unless he absolutely had to - and she continued, voice softening again. "And Percy…please try to be safe this weekend, won't you?"
"Oh, I always try, Ms. Lafayette," he said, unable (despite everything) to stop a tiny, crooked grin from appearing on his face. "It's succeeding that's usually a challenge."