Work Text:
Percy couldn't figure out exactly when things had become too much.
Maybe it was when someone at the next table in the mess hall pavilion laughed too loudly. Maybe it was when the sunlight hit his eyes harder than usual, reflecting off the swords during practice. Maybe when his t-shirt suddenly started to irritate him as if he’d put it on inside out and then spilled something sticky on it, even though it was perfectly clean.
Probably, it wasn’t just one moment.
Probably, it was all at once.
He sat on the bench and tried just to exist. Just to sit. Not to move. Not to think. Not noticing how the fabric on his shoulder touched his skin and irritated it. Not noticing how his hair fell onto his face. Not noticing how someone nearby spoke, and then someone else spoke, and then someone’s laughter mingled with the voices, and it all turned into one huge wall of noise.
His brain was trying to catch every detail.
Someone is walking down the path.
Someone is opening a bottle.
Someone is tapping their fingers on the table.
The wind is rustling the leaves.
Someone is calling his name.
Percy.
Percy.
Percy.
He could hear e v e r y t h i n g.
And that was worse than if he hadn’t heard a thing.
He pulled out his old mp3 player, which had long since needed replacing. One earbud was slightly quieter than the other, the skip button was sticky, and the battery died at the worst possible moment. But usually it helped. Usually, music was the one thing he could hold onto when everything around him became too much.
Today, even that was too loud.
The sounds didn’t just pass by—they clung to one another. Every drumbeat echoed somewhere inside, every note lingered in his head, mingling with thoughts that were already in disarray.
Flashbacks: monsters, battles, the voices of friends. The faces of those he had lost. What he should have done. What he hadn’t done. What he could have done differently.
Too much. Too close.
He looked at his hands and suddenly realized he’d been holding the mug for several minutes, yet he couldn’t feel it at all. Then he realized he was feeling it too intensely: the cold of the ceramic, the pressure of his fingers, a small unevenness on the rim.
He set the mug down. It fell.
Usually he would have laughed.
Usually he would have said something like, “Well, great, Percy Jackson has once again defeated his most dangerous enemy — kitchenware.”
But now no joke came to mind — he just stared at the broken object. And even that was too much.
He wanted to disappear. Not to die, not to vanish forever. Just to disappear for long enough that the world would stop pulling at every thread of him all at once.
Annabeth had told him a long time ago that this sort of thing happens.
She had been sitting next to him when it first happened, many years ago. Back then, Percy was younger and angry because he didn’t understand why he wanted to run away from a room where everything was fine.
“Sometimes your brain notices too much,” she had said then. “More than it needs to.”
He remembered her voice back then: calm and confident. As if it didn’t make him strange, as if everything was still okay with him. But now he didn’t want explanations. He didn’t want anyone asking what had happened. He didn’t want to see sympathetic looks.
He didn’t want to be a hero—heroes were supposed to hold it together, heroes were supposed to keep going, and right now, Percy just wanted some water.
So he left.
He went to the place where he knew no one would look for him — the lake.
The water had always been another world.
On the surface, everything was too bright, too exposed; too much was happening all at once. But as soon as he dove in, everything changed.
The sound faded away. Not completely, of course; the water still moved around him, his heart still beat, his thoughts were still there. But now they were farther away, as if someone had turned down the volume.
He sank deeper until the sand touched his feet. The cold water surrounded him, and for the first time all day, his body stopped resisting everything around him.
Here, his clothes didn’t bother him; here, his hair didn’t get in the way; here, no one called his name. He sat on the bottom and simply allowed himself to be.
A few seconds later, she appeared beside him.
That shark, which had somehow decided that Percy was its personal source of attention. She swam slowly around him, then nudged his shoulder with its snout, demanding attention as if Percy were obligated to remember that he had important duties.
For the first time that day, Percy almost smiled.
“Did you come too?”
The shark, of course, didn’t answer, just nudged him again.
He placed his hand on her back and began to stroke her. One stroke, then another. So simple and predictable, demanding nothing.
The water took it all: his fatigue, his anger, his fear. All the thoughts he couldn’t silence.
He looked up, where the surface seemed distant and calm.
There was the rest of the world: the camp, friends, responsibilities, some silly prophecies, expectations.
Here, there was only the blue light filtering through the water. Here, he wasn’t a weapon; he wasn’t the man who always had to know what to do.
He was simply Percy.
And perhaps that was the hardest thing of all — allowing himself to just be himself.
He thought about how his scars would never fade — not just the ones left on his skin, but the others too — the ones no one could see.
He knew all too well what it was like when people looked at you and saw only a legend. When they forget that inside that legend there is still a person who sometimes can’t stand the light, the sounds, and his own thoughts.
Blood is thicker than water. So they said.
That’s probably why everything connected to him was always so hard. But the water held him anyway.
And perhaps there was a strange kind of justice in that: what he had inherited from his father wasn’t always a storm; sometimes it was silence.
Percy closed his eyes and continued stroking the shark.
The world above hadn’t gone anywhere, and neither had the problems: tomorrow there would be training again, people again, too much of everything again, but right now he was here.
In the dark blue depths.
In a place where he wasn’t asked to be strong.
And for now, that was enough.