Work Text
[swordfighting]
Percy breathes, shaking his sweat off and pushing against the dummy. He darts around it, disarming it quickly. He then turns around, feeling his muscles strain as he takes his first position and moves through his katas slowly. One, two, three, in. One, two, three, hold, stab parry. One, two, three, out. Repeat. He can feel Luke's hands on his, guiding him from his first to his second, parrying his sword and laughing in his ear. "Oh, come on, Perce." His boyfriend says, the ghost of his voice teasing in Percy's mind. "It hasn’t been that long, don't tell me you've gotten sloppy-""I don't get sloppy." Percy grunts, stabbing forward and trying his best to push the memories away. (He doesn't succeed.) "Yeah, well, if you don't get sloppy then how in Erebus are your forms so bad? It hasn't even been a month since you were training at either of the camps last, has it?" Luke's voice laughs, and Percy just knows it's at him. He pushes through it, even though it hurts. (His mind more than his body, but Percy's always been one for pushing through the pain-) Percy laughs, something bitter coiling in his stomach. The gods were responsible for Luke’s death, because they hadn't done enough- He stops thinking about it. (They’re trying, and Percy will have to hold the gods to their oaths. They’re only the lesser of two evils.) He looks down at his sword, feeling the way it rests in his hand. Luke would've been proud of Percy, of the way he'd finally - finally - mastered that sidestep-stab. He stops. Draws strength from the way Anaklusmos seems to breathe in his hand, then caps his sword and stows it in his pocket.Percy opens his satchel, rifling through it for his other blade. He finds it at the very bottom, and grins down at it. It’s wild, feral, and a little unfamiliar on his face; his undersea family (and the army of Atlantis) had taught him how to smile like that. Because why not. (Percy refuses to think of how Amphitrite and Triton and Dad would have reacted if they’d known about-)No one had known.No one can know.He won’t let them.Memories of blood splattering onto the wall, Luke’s - the prophecy’s - blade covered in red, a body dropping to the ground. Memories of everything that they felt, of everything they were, cracking to pieces and burning to ash in a single gold flash.The other seablade hums in his hands, Okéan-di for the cold waters of the depths of the oceans, for the way the pressure pushes on the seafloor and creates hard diamonds out of the carbon there.With Okéan-di, an ocean’s blade, in one hand and Anaklusmos (riptide, a surprise, a wave's current that forces one out to sea) in the other, Percy strikes them both into the dummy he’s been fighting and forces himself through this. Luke’s voice, as always, echoes in his ears. "It’s been six months, sweetheart," it’s nothing but a poisonous memory, he tells himself, murmuring words of love into his desperate ears. He controls poison, a god’s domain in a mortal body, and he doesn’t want to think about Annabeth’s glares when they were in Tartarus.He controls poison, and yet this isn’t something he can will away."I know, you bastard," Percy grunts, shoving the dummy away and turning on another one. He tugs at the water in the dummy - put there especially for him - and it explodes on instinct. "Shut up." "No." There’s a mildly manic giggle from the memory of his husband. "You know I never have and I never will, why do you always ask?" "I keep having hope, you bastard." Percy turns around. He’s alone. "You’re horrible to me, I don’t know why I married you."
"Because you love me!"
Memories dog at his every breath.
[laughter]
What most people seem to forget is that it hasn’t even been a year since Percy’s eighteenth birthday.In the span of eight months, he’s lost the love of his life, been kidnapped, journeyed to a land where his powers were unfettered and the gods didn’t exist, fallen into the depths of hell, torn his way out, and nearly burnt away his mortality.… He can’t laugh honestly anymore, if he ever could.Luke’s giggles haunt him mercilessly, flying through his brain in tandem with his pleading sobs, their mutual begging to be let go.Percy can’t bring himself to be wholly joyous the way he once was, anymore.He doesn’t feel human anymore.It hasn’t even been a damn year since he lost his husband, and yet he’s still expected to smile, and laugh, and raise a fucking glass to the gods that let him die. Percy sighs, tipping back the glass and swallowing. The vodka - snuck into camp by the Stolls - burns down his throat, a pale mockery of the Phlegethon.
[drinking]
Percy doesn’t normally get like this. He never drinks until he’s sloppy, never until he can’t fight anymore.… He doesn’t like to drink. The memories of Gabe - his drunkenness, his sloppiness, the way his breath had smelled of disgustingly cheap beer when he’d leaned way too close to Percy, the ache deep inside him and yet still somehow skin-deep, the scars he’d left behind - haunt him, maybe more than Luke ever will.Sometimes it helps, though, to feel the burn of the vodka down his throat. It doesn’t blur his senses - he’s a little too divine, a curse he can’t shake off, the wrong side of mortal - but it urges him to forget, reminds him, sometimes, of sweet kisses and sweeter bruises left by a man he used to love. He forces himself through it, fights off the nausea, makes himself walk through each day unfazed by the ghosts that haunt him.Percy’s always loved lying to himself. "Sweet Caroline," he hums to himself, "bum, bum, bum~ the good times have never seemed so good! So good, so good, so good!" Another sip; the Poseidon cabin’s walls swim around him in a mocking imitation of the waters it represents. "I’ve been inclined… to believe they never would- oh, no, no no." He draws the last no out properly, the world spinning around him.He loves the burn of the vodka, the ache of the memories as they slowly fade; everything fixes itself a little when he’s like this.He can’t stay, though. The camp relies on him, relies on his sword and his powers to protect them. They need him, need him to protect and lead and love them. It’s all he wants to be, now that he doesn’t have Luke anymore. "Was in the spring," he hums, thinking back to the first time they met. (Sparring, comfort, being glad to be loved even if it tore him apart.) "Then spring became the summer- who’d’ve believed you’d come along?" Percy hadn’t. He still doesn’t believe Luke had come into his life, even though he’s been left with nothing to prove it other than bones and ash and bone ash and bone- He takes a breath, lets it go, and tips the rest of the vodka into his mouth. The burn, at least, is easy for him. Masochistically familiar, almost. Everything else, he can deal with.
[breathing]
He turns eighteen with a knife buried in his husband’s side. He turns eighteen, gains a year to his life, and loses the purpose to his life. Percy’s stupid fucking husband, who kissed him breathless in his room and wished him happy birthday and hugged him close and cut into him and took his soul, takes Annabeth’s knife - cursed with a single broken promise to a younger sister - and-He turns eighteen on Mounth Olympus, promises of adoration shattering at his feet.Percy can’t take a breath, even when he doesn’t remember, without the ghosts of Luke’s kisses stealing them away. One after the other, making his knees weak, a year and a half of experience leaving Luke with the know-how to make him cry. He’d succeeded at doing it on and off the battlefield, in and out of their respective bedrooms, tearing him away from himself and pushing him to be better, faster, more than what he already was.He can’t take a breath without remembering Luke’s sword at his throat.It’s hard enough without crying all the
fucking time.