Do A Percabeth Someone Great Au But Blease Make It Happy In The End I Am So Fragile

5/31/20

I couldn’t sleep last night. It has been very difficult to be present lately. Every time I have thought about this situation in the past few days my heart begins to race and my hands begin to shake.

Being Black means a constant struggle between being informed and constantly enraged, or mentally shutting down in an attempt to maintain your peace and avoid mental exhaustion. For the past few days I’ve teetered between the two, having to choose between being involved and being calm. Now I feel numbness. From the day we are born, day in and day out we are being watched, surveilled, insulted, degraded, criticized, beaten down, and brutalized mentally and physically. Every move you worry about, worrying how it will be perceived by others. Am I walking too close to this person? Am I speaking too loud? Should I share that experience with that friend? What will they say, or what will they not say? We are taught by society to shrink ourselves and hate ourselves. We are taught what we say and believe does not matter. We are taught that we should stay down for fear of being taken out if we get up. We are taught we are not allowed to have and express feelings the way other people are allowed to. We have a knee on our neck at all times, choking us slowly. And when we muster the strength and the power to stand up and say something about the constant discrimination, mistreatment, brutality, and psychological torture that white supremacy imposes on our lives, people seem to always find a way to justify the injustices done to us.

⁃ “Maybe you shouldn’t wear dark colors next time you go out...”

⁃ “You know you shouldn’t drive such a nice car in that neighborhood...”

⁃ “Maybe you shouldn’t go to that school or major in that field, you know how it is...”

⁃ “If you would have just cooperated, things would not have escalated...”

⁃ “Well they must have done something to be treated that way...”

⁃ “Are you sure it was racism? How do you know? It could have been something else...”

⁃ “Maybe you should try not being so angry...”

I am thinking about my grandparents who are not even 90 yet and have had this happen, names known and unknown to them, thousands of times in their lifetime. I can not begin to understand the immense pain they must feel reliving the many traumatic experiences of their childhoods growing up in the 30, 40s, and 50s in the Jim Crow South. I am thinking about my parents seeing this for the umpteenth time, who were born in the late 60s, a time when some thought the country was beginning to progress. I am thinking about Black family members and relatives and friends who are as enraged, hurt, exhausted, and numb as I am. I am thinking about how we will likely have to live these things again and again in our lifetimes. And I am thinking about the people that exist alongside us on this Earth that see but do not protest or oppose our constant dehumanization and extermination.

For you Black people, I am wishing you love and care and light and safety as we all are battling this situation, both mentally and physically. I know all of us are inexplicably tired. You are not a soapbox or a political robot. If what is healthier for you is not to speak right now, do that. If what is healthier for you is to be out right now protesting or having difficult conversations with people, do that. I see and understand both of you.

For you non-Black people who are speaking up, sharing information, donating, and protesting with pure and genuine intentions. Thank you. Please continue standing in solidarity and challenging the anti-Blackness in your own communities. Continue to amplify Black voices and stand with us.

For those posting one quick reposted photo displaying opposition or engaging in “don’t break the chain” Instagram trends because everyone’s doing it or so they don’t look bad, and then logging off to go back to using or letting their friends and family use the N-Word, profiting off of and appropriating Black culture, speaking over or attempting to invalidate Black people and their experiences, supporting cops and other racist institutions, and/or refusing to challenge your racist and anti-Black friends and family members (and this list is by no means exhaustive): what good does this do? Your words and posts without change and action mean nothing. Appearing to be anti-racist is not for clout or for safety from persecution. Lives are at stake.

For those who are displaying opposition with the ridiculous expectation to get praise or points from people for doing so: being anti-racist is your only option in this day and age. It is basic human decency.

For those who don’t really understand what’s going on or why, I encourage you to seek out the many resources that are available online that can explain more in depth the immoral country we live in so that you can be more educated on the reality of the situation. Do your best not to reach out to Black people to do the emotional labor and exhausting work of trying to defend our humanity to you. Many of us are extremely overwhelmed at this time between the racism we experience daily and what we see playing out in the country, and it is not our job to do the work of educating people about this system of white supremacy that we did not create.

For those that are saying nothing at all, why? Aoki Lee Simmons said “My non-Black friends, I cannot begin to unpack your silence. I am scared of what it will tell me. The things you are here for and the things you are not, what do they say about you? About me for choosing you?” What do you want with me? Am I just another stamp on your diversity punch card? Do I exist to make you feel less guilty? How can you look me in the eye or call me friend knowing you do not actively challenge the systems and prejudices that kill people like me? It is shameful and disgraceful not to speak up and use your privilege when people need you the most. And I understand you do not have to post things on social media to care about things. But honestly, what the hell are you waiting for? If now is not the time to align yourself for the right cause, what is? Especially for those who know they have engaged in anti-Black prejudices, practices, and language. Isn’t now as good a time as any to prove yourself?

To all whom this applies: your lack of support, attempted justification for injustice, and chosen ignorance is a threat to my, my family’s, and my community’s lives and wellbeing.

We need to stop framing racism as something of the past. It is here, has always been here, and it has never left. White supremacy is the foundation of this country and all of its institutions. When the problem runs that deep, things have to be shaken up, flipped over, and burned down in order to change. If you’re putting more energy into calling protesters “rioters” or “thugs,” defending racist killer cops, justifying state-sanctioned murder, saying that “all lives/blue lives matter,” and demonizing Black people for reacting to the violently dehumanizing and fatal racism and anti-Blackness we face in this country... just admit that Black people demanding equal rights and equal treatment is disturbing to you. Just admit you are uncomfortable with disrupting your social position and the systems that keep you up there, and us down here. We have been peaceful, by the book, and complied with the law. We have taken a knee in peaceful silence. We have tried to have dialogue with you. We have resorted to violence. No matter which route we take, there always seems to be an issue. To racists and white supremacists, there is no “right way” for Black people to fight for their rights. Your respectability politics exists to control and surveil us. Stop telling Black people how to react to the systems that have created our pain, our anguish, and our trauma for hundreds of years.

I am talking directly to white and non-Black people of color. It is not enough for you to be neutral or simply “not racist.” We all must have strong values at this time, or we have chosen the side of the oppressor. It is not enough for you to post on social media. These things are important and do bring awareness, but with the brutality we are facing we need your monetary and physical support. We need your lifestyle and mindsets to change. Reflect on the prejudices that you hold and the ways you perpetuate or are complicit in racism and anti-Blackness. Stop making excuses for friends and family who are complicit as well. Explore the ways that you can educate yourself, others, and help. We need the world to actively and loudly value Black lives, Black well-being, and Black futures as much as they value Black culture.

If you know of any protests nearby and are well enough to go, I encourage you to. Please sign petitions. I have also included a few links of where you can donate to help the cause. (Please comment below any other petitions, campaign, resources, etc. I can amplify at this time!)

SIGN THE PETITION:

Justice for George Floyd | https://act.colorofchange.org/sign/justiceforfloyd_george_floyd_minneapolis/?source=dm_sms_optin_5-26-20

Justice for Breonna Taylor | https://act.colorofchange.org/sign/justiceforbre-breonna-taylor-officers-fired/?source=dm_SMS_shortcode_optin

Justice for Ahmaud Arbery | https://www.runwithmaud.com/

DONATE:

Campaign Zero | https://www.joincampaignzero.org/

Reclaim the Block | https://www.reclaimtheblock.org/home

George Floyd Memorial Fund Fundraiser | https://www.gofundme.com/f/georgefloyd

Black Vision Collective | https://www.blackvisionsmn.org/

Minnesota Freedom Fund | https://minnesotafreedomfund.org/donate

i made a college vine compilation b/c Suffering™️

(warning for loud noise in some of them)

if you're ever in the mood to hurt our feelings some more do you think we can maybe see the follow up conversation percy has w. sally 👀👀👀 for science and also for ripping out our hearts and stomping on them

who am i to deny you your whims, anon, who am i. so here’s the second part to this fic, which wasn’t supposed to have a second part, but you know me, parental emotions is my THING i love it SO MUCH. the trigger warnings apply, for anyone stumbling across this post minus context, those TWs are suicidal thoughts, discussion of that, and this particular part involves some description of picking at scars, so if reading about skin picking triggers you, do avoid that. i think i made it both worse and better. anyway! onwards.

Royal Flush

AO3

The car ride back was tense, and maybe it wasn’t the worst car ride Percy had ever had in his life, but it was up there. He felt rude doing it, but he slumped against the car door and closed his eyes and feigned sleep, the way he did when his mom checked on him in the night sometimes—the same low, deep breaths, the almost-sleep of people who couldn’t quite reach it. Percy didn’t sleep as much as he laid back and closed his eyes and tried not to think. It was a good excuse to stop being, for a moment, if he was asleep, or as close as he could get to sleep.

He knew it frustrated Annabeth that he spent so much of their time together half-present, but it was easier, than looking at her and the eyes she had that looked like stratus clouds and thinking I don’t know what I did right, and sometimes I think I didn’t do anything right at all. It was a good excuse to forget that he wasn’t passing a single class, and that it would take monumental effort to pull his grades up to passing at this point, and that the idea of doing anything at all made him wonder if he could pull the ace up his sleeve he’d used on Akhlys on his own self. His own throat, his own lungs, his royal flush the liquid sloshing in them, a kid who could breathe underwater dying by drowning on land. Feigning sleep was a good excuse to think about the ace up his sleeve, the drowning, the royal flush, the one shot that would hit home in six hundred thousand shots. Drowning had scared him once but he wasn’t sure he was scared of much, anymore, except headstones without his name on them.

 He knew it frustrated her, the way he knew Annabeth was crying in the backseat. His mom wasn’t mean enough to force her to talk in space where Annabeth didn’t have anywhere to escape to, and even if Percy could hold her, he didn’t think he’d be welcome to. He’d done enough for one night, and he was out of words to give her, words to reach her—his head pounded and his stomach throbbed and his muscles were all beaten and weak, and the idea of doing anything else for the rest of the night made him queasy. He wanted to sleep, or not-sleep, wanted to be done with the living for the day. But every time he heard Annabeth’s breath hitch, he thought about throwing himself out of the car, laying flat in the road and not getting up, not the short frenzy of drowning but the prolonged battering of being crushed into the concrete by inches. At some point Percy did fall asleep, genuinely, somewhere between the roadkill and the hum of the engine and the fact that—as much as he deserved it—he couldn’t listen to Annabeth cry for a second longer.

 So when the door crashed shut he shook himself and blinked, glancing to the side. His mom was settling into the driver’s seat, but hadn’t she been driving? He twisted and the backseat was empty, and his heart was already picking up its pace, thinking of Zeus’s thunderbolts and the glint of lightning on rain-slick horns and the way his mom had died in front of him, when she pressed a hand to his chest.

 “Parking garage,” his mom said. Her eyes were soft, in the intense way she could soften them, the way that made Percy sit still and listen without feeling like she hated him. “Annabeth’s inside, having casserole with Paul. I wanted to give you another minute. You look pretty tired, kiddo.”

 Percy scrubbed a hand over his face. “Oh,” he said, feeling a bit stupid. The minotaur and Half-Blood Hill and the horn that was almost too heavy for him to lift was years ago. Another lifetime. It was time to learn to breathe during thunderstorms and car rides, maybe, if he had the energy to figure that out.

 “It looks like the two of you had a rough night,” she said, lightly.

 “Kind of,” Percy said. He looked away from her and at the orange-cast concrete wall in front of them, the old stains, the gloominess of it. He was starting to think New York City was ugly; profoundly, horrifically ugly, the kind of thing people let grow because of interest in its suffering. Why the hell the kingdom of the gods was rooted in New York City, Percy couldn’t fathom it, because every inch of it was gray and every inch of it was grimy and there was a rat around every corner, and they’d had roaches in their apartment when he was a kid. He could barely remember defending it and that’d been a year ago.

 His mom’s hair was pulled back into a braid, loose just because her hair was too curly to hold anything much tighter. He’d tried, when he was younger; his mom taught him how to braid on her own hair, and then in the mornings while she got ready for work, she’d hand him a lock and let him try, and it had felt like helping. Percy knew now it was to keep him busy, and away from Gabe, because in the mornings Percy was easily excitable, and Gabe had hated it when Percy was excitable more than anything. Gabe had taught him what a royal flush was.

 “Pretty rough,” Percy said, weakly, tapping his fingers on his pants. He never remembered leaving clothes at Annabeth’s. She was kind of a clothing thief.

 His mom’s fingers worked over her wedding ring, twisting it around and around, the way she did when she was nervous. Guilt tasted like ash in the back of his throat. I’m sorry that when you get nervous you play with your wedding ring, and I’m sorry that you were married to a bastard because of me, and the other things he’d never say to his mom out loud. “How badly hurt,” she said.

 “There was a boar outside of school,” Percy said. “After tutoring. Calydonian boar, if you know it, I think, because it spat lightning. Avoided the lightning. Got a little… impaled.”

 “Well,” she said. “I’d planned to make pork chops tomorrow, but I’ll hold off.”

 Percy laughed, hard enough that it pulled the aching wound on his stomach, but he didn’t care. It felt good to laugh. It felt like it’d been a while, but he couldn’t remember. His mom always knew, somehow, inexplicably, when he needed to laugh; she’d always said laughter was a kind of medicine, and something about laughing with his mom felt better. It felt like approaching another life he almost had, one where that happened every day, so close but never fully grasping it.

 “I’m going to assume you’re at least mostly okay,” she said, pinning him with a look, and Percy nodded. He tried not to think about Annabeth’s bloody hands, tried not to think about her panic, the way she’d checked his pulse. He was alive because of her, and as much as he loved her, as much as he wanted to kiss her senseless sometimes to prove it, in that moment he kind of hated her more than anything.

 “Lot of ambrosia,” he said. “It’s… hot. It, er, burns you up. Internally.”

 She knows that, stupid, he thought.

 “Do you want to head inside?” she asked, brows pinched together. “I had the heater on full blast. It’s still toasty in here.”

 Percy hesitated. Annabeth was inside. He wasn’t sure he could look at her. “Not yet,” he said. “Not—not yet.”

 His mom’s fingers wrapped around his wrist, lifting one of his hands up and then cupping it. “Can I ask what you’re not telling me?”

 No, Percy wanted to say. His throat felt thick and cold, like pack ice, the pack ice Poseidon’s bears lumbered across. He scrambled for an answer that wasn’t I scared the living daylights out of her and I’m never going to forgive myself and settled on a small, mumbled, “I don’t know.”

 His mom tugged his hand over the center console, and then toyed with his fingers, carefully, like he was breakable—her hands were smaller than his, now, and he had a clear memory of pressing his palm to hers and understanding how tiny he really was, when he was a kid. He’d never do that again. “Sweetheart,” his mom said.

 “I don’t want to talk about it,” Percy snapped. “I don’t—I don’t want to talk about anything.”

 His voice was louder than he’d thought it’d been, too loud for a closed-off car, and his mom flinched backward. Percy watched her jaw work and her shoulders move as she breathed long and slow, deep intentional breaths, because it was like having razor wire pulled through his nerves, because he couldn’t feel his own heartbeat around how much his chest hurt. He’d forgotten that his voice had gotten deeper, that when he spoke harshly or loudly around his mom she remembered someone else.

 Can’t even say ‘no’ right, he thought, and then he tore his gaze away, because whatever reserves he’d had, he’d run through them. He registered his mom getting out of the car, the kneejerk good, leave me here, I’ll suffocate, and then the door beside him was opening, and his mom was crouched on the concrete beside of him.

 She squeezed his knee. “I’m okay, baby,” she said, and maybe that was what undid him, the okay. He twisted in the seat and almost fell on top of her, with how fast he reached for his mom. Her arms were around him in a second, in maybe the most awkward hug they’d ever had, because he was hugging her while halfway in the passenger’s seat and she was crouched outside, but she was holding him. He didn’t know how he ever thought he could make it, without that, without her hand running up and down his spine through his hoodie.

 “Sweetheart, baby, breathe,” she said, and Percy realized he was crying. Crying the way wounded dogs did, from the bottom of the barrel of their chest, that it was tearing at his throat and the wound in his side, and it felt a little bit like drowning on air.

 “Sorry,” he managed, the word muffled against her shoulder. “Sorry, Mom.”

 “Don’t you ever apologize to me, not for this,” she said. “C’mere, sweetheart.”

 He didn’t know, exactly, how long his mom held him on the floor of a parking garage—he knew that he couldn’t bring himself to stop, and that her hand ran up and down his spine constantly. He knew that at some point she started saying sweet, small things, the way she always had. He missed the days where he could curl into her side and fit perfectly, because it seemed simpler to Percy, that even if they’d been going through hell then, it seemed simpler to him that he should fit together with his mom like a puzzle piece. Now it was awkward and his back ached from bending over and his stomach ached because he’d had a hole through it just an hour and a half ago, and it was horrific, the way time marched forward before he got a chance to live it. Had he ever been a kid with his mother, or had he grown up on a highway, speeding through it all? Had it been that long, since he’d last laughed with her?

 He stopped long enough to hiss, because the ache in his side had built to a furious, stabbing pain. He wouldn’t be perfectly healed for a while, and event then, healing with nectar and ambrosia left phantom pains, almost like the wound healed too fast for the nervous system to keep track.

 “Inside,” his mom said, and Percy almost argued, but she was rising and pulling him out of the car. He tipped too much of his weight against her, forgetting both that he was a lot heavier and that he had to carry at least some of his own weight, and they nearly toppled into the neighboring car before he managed to stay unsteadily upright.

 His mom let him go when he was full-body-trembling but on his feet, and ducked into the car and pulled out the hand sanitizer wipes Paul left in the glove box. Paul thought more germs were spread around by kids during the fall semester, despite having no evidence and the trend being against him, so from August to December, it was reliable that there’d be hand sanitizer wipes in the car somewhere.

 “Duck a little,” she said. Her eyes were glassy and bright, but she hadn’t been crying, not nearly the way he had.

 Percy bent his head and his mom pulled a few wipes out of the bag, and swept under his eyes and down his face, the way someone would cradle a baby bird. She’d done this for his entire life. He remembered being seven and coming home from school with a bloodied face, a black eye, because he’d inherited his sense of control from the sea, and the sea couldn’t restrain itself for anything. She sat him on the kitchen counter and flicked on their deadbeat little radio, and businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen they dig my earth had crooned through the static. She’d hummed along while Percy sulked and she stopped up his nose and made an icepack for his busted head. She poured dish soap into plastic bags and froze them, because they conformed to the body better, and Percy had thought that she’d been so inventive, so clever, and she still was, but now it turned his stomach to think about. He wasn’t the only one who’d learned what a royal flush was, from Gabe Ugliano.

 She tossed the bag of wipes and the dirtied ones into the passenger seat, and shut the door. “I’ll get them later,” she said. “Or Paul can just deal.”

 Percy hooked an arm around her waist and pulled her against him and buried his face in her shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he said, voice raspy from the scream-crying, the crying the way wounded dogs on the euthanasia table did.

 One of her hands rose to cup the back of his head. “I love you more than anything, Perseus,” she said. “But don’t ever apologize to me for being hurt. Don’t you ever think I want you to hide from me. If you’re not comfortable, that’s one thing, but don’t you ever—you are my son. Before I’m anything else, I’m your mom. And that means I’m here for you.”

 Percy barely restrained himself from saying I’m sorry again, and then settled on, “Okay. Okay, I—thanks, Mom.”

 She pulled away, and then cupped his cheeks, thumbing his cheekbones. His fingers curled around her wrists almost by instinct. Her eyes were sharp—more blue than green, while his were more green than blue, but he could see where he’d gotten them from, part of where he’d gotten them from. Percy liked to think he looked like his mom, but every shade was just slightly off; his skin was browner, and his hair was darker, and his eyes were greener. But they had the same curls and the same cheekbone and the same jawline, and when he’d been twelve and all he knew of Poseidon was the god of the sea thought he was a mistake, he used to stare at the mirror and count the ways he was his mother’s son.

 “One more time,” she said. “What are you not telling me?”

 Percy’s heart crawled into his throat. “A lot,” he said, and it was, at least, the truth.

 His mom nodded, and offered him a small, watery smile. It helped. “Closer,” she said. “Why don’t we go inside, before we both freeze.”

 She walked him home. She kept her hand hovering over the small of his back, pressing him forward, and even if he no longer had the Curse of Achilles, it made him shudder—just the value of it, his mother’s love. That there was no one person on the planet that knew him better, that would ever know him better, and she was still here, walking him home. That whatever was left of him in the wreckage, at least his mom saw something worthwhile, something worth saving, something worth bringing home.

 They kicked off their shoes at the door—the kitchen was empty, but not for long, because Annabeth came around the corner almost instantly. Her hair was wild and wickedly curly, because it’d gotten wet in the shower, and her hair always curled up like that if she didn’t brush it after a shower. Her face was splotchy and bright red and she had changed clothes again, into a Spider-Man shirt four times her size and plaid pajama pants, both of which were Percy’s.

 His mom reacted faster than Percy did. She moved around Percy, who stood stock-still in the doorway gaping stupidly at someone he’d seen a thousand times, and took Annabeth by the shoulders and kissed her forehead. “We’re alright,” she said, warmly. “How was dinner?”

 “It was great,” Annabeth said, quietly. “I’m sorry, I—”

 “You’re fine,” his mom said, cutting her off. “Where’s Paul?”

 “Living room,” Annabeth answered. “He’s grading papers. His students, they’re—they write the funniest stuff.”

 Percy swallowed against the knowledge that his stepdad had been there for Annabeth when he hadn’t, that it was Paul who had been making sure Annabeth didn’t work herself into a fit the way she did when she was worried, that it was Paul drawing laughs out of her. The feeling of inadequacy wasn’t new to him but it burned in his throat all the same, and he looked away, whatever spell that had left him staring breathlessly at Annabeth broken by guilt.

 “If you want seconds, of course, there’s probably leftovers,” his mom said. She gestured to the fridge. “What’s ours is yours, if you’re hungry, please eat. If you get tired, you can take Percy’s bed, he doesn’t mind at all.”

 Hidden in that was the coded but leave us alone for now, and Percy knew that had to ache in Annabeth—she could never stand the thought of people holding conversations without her, of people intentionally excluding her. People who should have loved her had done that to her all her life. He was torn between the knowledge that he’d never get through a conversation with Annabeth in the room, and defending her right to be there, but his mom had a way of gently letting people down. She had a way of saying things in the kindest way, even if they were hard to hear, because Annabeth’s brows only drew together the slightest bit, and she nodded, and slipped only somewhat reluctantly back into the living room. Percy could hear the sound of Paul’s voice greeting her, welcoming her. Paul had always liked Annabeth a lot.

 His mom squeezed his hand. “Did you eat?” she asked. She left today off of the question, but it was implied, because she almost always asked him did you eat today when he got home. She had the sharpest eyes of anyone he knew. She knew he slept through his lunch period without bothering to eat anything, and she somehow knew it before Percy himself even consciously realized it had become an everyday thing, instead of an every other day thing. But in leaving today off he tried to remember the last time he’d eaten more than a little, and couldn’t. Couldn’t recall eating more than a few mouthfuls of dinner or snagging an apple here and there. He stood there and gaped at someone he’d seen a hundred thousand times. For the first time in a long time, he realized how profoundly little he enjoyed anything, and how profoundly bad it really was.

 His lack of answer was answer enough, and his mom guided him to a chair at the kitchen table in the corner of the room. “Scrambled eggs,” she said, and it wasn’t a question, either. Percy almost asked why she’d go through the trouble of making something new, when she could just reheat leftovers; but then, if he couldn’t figure out how long it’d been since he’d last eaten anything real, she had even less of an idea. It had to be something light.

 Annabeth skittered through the room while his mom whipped the eggs with a fork, darting around for a glass of water. She cut her eyes at him as she left, and he looked back at her, and he offered him a small smile, and it meant the world to him. The world and everything in it, in one person, one place, one moment. His mom made him eat slow, and down two glasses of water—eating had the opposite effect it should have, it made him hungrier, even if the uncomfortable weight of food in his stomach made him kind of nauseous. He rose and loaded the dishes in the dishwasher before his mom could, and when he turned she’d pulled the prescription pain medication he took sometimes for the lasting, twisting pain in his burn scars, out of the cabinet.

 “It looks like it hurts, dear,” she said, by way of explanation.

 Percy nodded, tightly, and knocked back the pills with another glass of water. His mom pressed her hand between his shoulder blades, warm and soothing the ache in the muscles there, the one that seemed to live in him these days. Then her hand crossed and tapped his shoulder. “Your scars look dry,” she said.

 Percy’s hand rose and scrubbed at the left side of his neck, and the scars scrawled there, and sure enough they were dry and hot and itchy. He’d gotten good at ignoring them, while on a quest across the world. He scratched absently and then his mom’s hand closed around his wrist and pulled it down, and Percy looked away; the first adjustment had been miserable, fucking miserable, because they’d hurt enough that he kept tearing them open over and over with his nails because he couldn’t handle the pain being under the skin, it had to pour out of him, too. Being fifteen had been a year peppered with the white bathroom light in the middle of the night, because he clawed himself bloody even in his sleep, and his mom learned to check in on him and shake him out of the nightmares of burning alive. She’d rubbed ointment into the splits of the skin, where it’d dried out and Percy had torn it open, and bandaged it, while their deadbeat radio crooned all along the watchtower, princes kept the view, and she hummed along and sopped up his blood at the same time. What had been miserable to him then was bearable now. He’d discovered all new lows.

 “Keep forgetting,” he said, quietly.

 “My bathroom,” she said, and Percy slouched off down the hall, on the familiar route to his mom’s room. He crouched on the edge of the bathtub and waited, and then his mom appeared in the doorway a few minutes later, a bottle of lotion and a towel in hand.

 “Sweatshirt off,” she said, jerking up with her free hand. She dropped the bottle next to the sink, and Percy pulled his sweatshirt over his head, looking away while his mom registered the bandages on his stomach and the dried bloodstains that hadn’t quite washed away.

 She started with his hand, because it was the worst of the scars, the two last fingers on that hand. She worked the lotion in carefully and smoothly—her hands knew where to go, where to work it in and where to pass over. He missed the radio, and the garbled sound of Jimi Hendrix fading through it. He hadn’t seen it in years.

 “I didn’t want you to worry,” he said. “But Annabeth said—she said I needed it.”

 Her hands pressed into the side of his wrist and flipped his arm over, spreading cool lotion on the gnarled swirls. “You do,” she said. “But that’s not just you. Everyone needs to be worried over, sometimes. Everyone deserves a little worry for their sake.”

 Percy swallowed. “I don’t like that.”

 “You don’t like taking up space,” she said. Her thumb worked into one of the ravines he’d left in his arm by his own hand, a day where he’d been sent home during math class because he’d pushed his hand underneath the other sleeve of his hoodie and dug, trying to stay awake. “You love people, and you love having them. But you don’t want to cost them anything. You don’t want them to think about you, and you want them to see you enough that you have them, but anything further—you don’t want that.”

 Percy’s eyes stung. He didn’t have anything to say to that, so he fixed his eyes on the linoleum, the rumpled shower mat, the way one of his socks was a dark gray and the other was a black.

 “Letting people love you means that they’re going to worry about you,” she said. “That’s not a problem. That’s something you deserve.”

 The wreckage, and whatever his mom saw in him, and rot bubbled up in his chest. “I killed it. The boar. And then I covered up and went to Annabeth’s dorm. And I got there and I thought I was gonna ask, you know, the way—I should have. She was so scared, Mom. She was so—she was terrified. Because I just sat down and didn’t—say anything. I didn’t want to.”

 He watched his mom’s face, then, because it was like swallowing liquid fire. It was nothing dramatic—his mom’s poker face was the best one there was—but her eyes closed briefly and her brows pulled tight together, and then she leaned forward and kissed Percy’s temple.

 “What happened after that,” she said, almost deathly quiet.

 Percy swallowed against the ice that was back in his throat. “She… patched me up. She was terrified. I—I didn’t mean to scare her. We talked, some, after, and then she… she called you. And now we’re here.”

 “And now we’re here,” his mom repeated. His mom’s hands had stopped moving over his arm, but she still held it in her grip. It was getting tighter. “Tell me what you told her.”

 Percy was silent for long enough that his mom started working again, calmly, but he could feel it, the steel in her. The strength she hid, the way she was indomitable, the way she’d expected him to come home from Mount Saint Helens and he had and she’d expected him to come back from Greece and he had. His mom didn’t pressure him for a lot, but the one thing she had always asked of him was that he be good, and the one thing he’d always tried to be was half as good as she was. He wasn’t sure how to tell her how completely he’d failed her. He wasn’t sure how to tell her that he wasn’t good enough to ignore the saltwater in him, that he was as violent as the hurricanes that beat the land were, that he was as violent as the earth was easily shook.

 “I’m not good,” he said, finally. “I try to be, but I’m—not. I shouldn’t have survived, when—other people didn’t. I can’t do what people think I can. I don’t help people the way I should. This isn’t the first time I’ve scared Annabeth. In Tartarus, I—I choked Akhlys, the misery goddess. I asked the water to drown her and it did. I wanted it to. I wanted her to suffer.”

 His mom had stopped working again. She had stopped touching him altogether, and was wiping off her hands on the towel, and it was her lack of response that spurred Percy forward. “I think about drowning,” he said. “I think I could do it to myself the way I did it to her. That’s what you do, when—when people are dangerous, you—”

 Euthanize, he supplied in his head, but he couldn’t say that out loud. “Royal flush,” he finished, weakly.

 His mom took his face in her hands, the way she’d done in the parking garage, but now she was rigid. She looked almost angrier than he’d ever seen her, and somehow it didn’t hurt to look at—it was deserved anger, maybe. When she spoke her voice was sharp. “It took me years to learn this. It should’ve been the first thing I taught you, because it’s the first thing you needed to know. When I tell you to listen, Perseus Jackson, you listen to me, are we clear?”

 He nodded, jolted, knowing his eyes were wide like saucers.

 She took a long breath before speaking. “What you do in self-defense doesn’t define you. It isn’t who you are. You’re not bad because you reacted to being hurt by hurting someone else to protect yourself, baby. The only person to blame is the person hurting you. Wanting people who choose to hurt you to hurt in return is how people normally think. You are not uniquely bad, and you’re not bad at all. You’re doing your best. And your best, sweetheart, is pretty damn good.”

 “What if you’re wrong,” Percy mumbled.

 She raised a brow. “You’ve never thought I was wrong for murdering my ex-husband. Why do the rules change for you?”

 Percy flinched, and his mom let him go, letting him pull away. “I don’t know,” he said, working his jaw, looking everywhere but at his mom. “I don’t know. I don’t.”

 “You’re a great kid. You’ve just had a bad run,” she said, softly.

 Percy scrubbed his face. “I’m—I’m—I’m tired, of that, of it, of having a bad run, I’m tired of that,” he said, rapidly. “I want that, that, over. I don’t want this. I don’t want it at all.”

 His mom’s hand worked through his hair, ruffling it. “Take a minute. Take a deep breath. You’re going to be happy, Percy, we’ll make it happen. But that takes time.”

 Percy screwed his eyes shut, at that, and schooled his breathing. His mom worked lotion into the scars over his shoulder, and somewhere along the way, she started humming All Along the Watchtower, in the crooked way she did; her voice hitched and even just humming she was out of tune, but it settled Percy like nothing else. She’d been doing it all his life. He tilted his head to the side, baring his throat to her, so she could lather up the scars there, and then she backed away and wiped her hands on the towel, bending over to pick up Percy’s hoodie and handed it to him. He pulled it on, and let his mom lead him into the bedroom with her hand pressed to the small of his back.

 “You don’t leave my sight, tonight,” she said. “You don’t—you don’t leave my sight.”

 Her voice broke, and Percy’s heart twisted. She settled in the bed and he settled beside her, feeling somehow better and worse than he had in a long time, and his mom pulled him closer, until his head was on her stomach and her arm was over his shoulders.

 “What about school,” he mumbled.

 Her hands ran through his hair, and he leaned into it, maybe a little embarrassed that he felt desperate for it, but not enough to keep him still. “Do you think I could convince Chiron to forge some doctor’s notes,” she said. “For the rest of the week.”

 Percy blinked. “For—for?”

 “I want to take you to Montauk,” she said. Her thumb brushed his temple. “I don’t know. Get you away from the city, for a bit. Give you space to breathe. I’m good about deadlines, I can have some pushed back, the once.”

 “That sounds,” he said, and he couldn’t speak, around the emotion in him. He couldn’t say that sounds like the best thing in the world right now, couldn’t say that he sometimes he just didn’t want to be a hero, a savior, or a monster, that he just wanted to be the one thing he’d been born to be; Sally Jackson’s son. “I can’t,” he said, finally.

 She leaned over and pressed a kiss to his shoulder. “You can,” she said. “I’m the mom.”

 “I’m—failing,” he said. “My classes. I’m—probably not going to—I’m sorry.”

 Her hand rubbed small circles into his back. “Baby,” she said, “I don’t give one singular flying fuck if you fail your classes this year. I don’t care. You can drop out and get your GED, if that’s what you want. I don’t care. I want my baby boy alive and happy. We can figure the rest out.”

 Percy closed his eyes. It was a little embarrassing, that he’d cried something like his bodyweight in water already, but he wanted to cry again—pressed against her and hearing that the things that had stressed him out enough he’d been sick over it, they didn’t matter to her. That maybe it didn’t matter if he thought he was good enough to be deserving of every sacrifice his mom had ever made for him, that his mom thought he was, and that was a good place to start.

 He drifted off, next to his mother’s warmth, because when he roused next it was because there was a squeak of laminate flooring somewhere behind him.

 Annabeth stood in the doorway, silhouetted in the blue lowlight. He could see her well enough to make out her face, and her swollen eyes. Are you okay, she mouthed.

 He gave her a small smile, and hoped it meant the world to her. Better, he mouthed back.

Mexico was painted purple by feminists today 🥰

Today, the feminist movement took the streets of mexico, with women marching for their rights and against the epidemic of feminicides that is taking place in the country 💕💓😭

When the march began to be organized in social networks, people were "worried" and critizised the lack of empathy (from feminists) with the women (specifically) who'd have to clean the streets after the marching - the cleaning ladies showed up to show their support tho 💖♀️

This was today and I'm filled with pride, I wasn't able to participate and it breaks my heart. However tomorrow is the mexican feminist strike - just like Icelandic women did in 1975 - tomorrow, Mexican feminist groups have called for a full on strike: no women in schools, work places or even on the streets. Women won't buy or sell anything tomorrow, or actively participate in the mexican society in any way, including social media. No internet tomorrow for us. So I wont see ya until the tenth. ✊✊✊

angst, 11, “why are you still fighting?” 😢

[canon adjacent I guess, I don’t really know]

The enemy encircles Percy, who is on his knees, bloody and beaten. Demigods and monsters alike sneer and spit at him, calling him every awful thing they can think of. The son of Poseidon doesn’t move. He keeps his chin held high and looks forward, still gripping his sword in his hand, as if waiting for one last battle to begin.

Before him, the crowd begins to part, and soon the prodigal son of Hermes appears in front of him. Luke’s stride is slow and confident, with his sword sheathed at his hip. He looks down his nose at Percy, an evil smirk pinning the corner of his mouth to his cheek.

“Well, Percy, I tried to warn you that it would come to this,” Luke says as he stands over Percy.

Percy takes a shaky breath, his grip on Riptide tightening. “I’ve never been great at listening.”

“How many of your friends have you watched die?” Luke asks, pity in his voice.

“Too many,” Percy answers, his voice hoarse.

“And how many more would you watch die before you just surrender?”

Percy’s jaw tightens and he swallows hard, his green eyes losing focus.

Luke surges forward to bend down and grab fistfuls of Percy’s shirt. “Why are you still fighting?” Luke shouts in his face.

Percy lets out a small laugh, but a tear runs down his cheek. “Because being angry isn’t enough for me,” he answers.

Luke pushes Percy away with a frustrated grunt, his face contorting in disgust. “You think I wanted any of this?”

“I think you want all of it,” Percy replies. “You want to see everything burn because you’ve convinced yourself that once it does, you’ll finally feel peace. But the thing about fire, Luke, is that it’s never satisfied.”

Luke scoffs. “Don’t tell me, son of Poseidon, that you’re using that corny metaphor to tell me you’re here to put the fire out.”

Percy smiles, and his green eyes shine in the light of the torches his enemies bare all around him. “That’s a little corny, even for me,” he admits. “No, I’m… I’m here to make things right, finally.”

“And how are you gonna do that?”

Percy looks down at his sword, tilting his head curiously. “We started this together. It only seems right we end it together.”

The crowd around them becomes quiet and tense, as nervous murmurs begin to replace overconfident cheers.

Luke draws his sword and twirls it in his hand. “You never could beat me in a sword fight.”

Percy smiles again, and, still kneeling, places Riptide’s point on the ground in front of him. “I came close a few times, though, didn’t I?”

“There’s no ocean for miles, Percy,” Luke taunts. “There’s no way for you to heal. I’m afraid close to beating me is all you’ll ever get.”

“Pop quiz, Luke.” Percy says, raising Riptide just above his head. “When my dad’s obnoxious titles get rattled off, what’s the first one people say?”

Luke only has a minute to register the question, answering under his breath. “Earthshaker.”

Percy drives his sword’s tip into the earth,  

and the ground 

                             around them

                                                     c r u m b l e s. 

PUSHING BOUNDARIES

Percy Jackson/ Annabeth Chase 25k words; complete

To think– none of this would have happened the way it did if Sally Jackson had been taught to knock. (OR) a swimmers au where they are friends with benefits forced to fake date but it's all really a trojan horse because it's a chance for Percy and Annabeth to face some of their mommy and daddy issues fr <3

t user lizzie jockpercabeth has returned xo

uh so i never do this but maui is quite literally on fire and there isn't nearly enough care or consideration for. you know. Native Hawaiians who live here being displaced and the land (and cultural relevance) that's being eaten up by the fire. so if ya'll wanna help, here's some links:

maui food bank: https://mauifoodbank.org/

maui humane society: https://www.mauihumanesociety.org/

center for native hawaiian advancement: https://www.memberplanet.com/campaign/cnhamembers/kakoomaui

hawai'i red cross: https://www.redcross.org/local/hawaii/ways-to-donate.html

please reblog and spread the word if you can't donate.

These difficult conversations are more important than ever. Here’s how to overcome the roadblocks.

follow @the-movemnt

HEY IF YOURE IN THE US. CONGRESS IS TRYING TO END ENCRYPTION SO THEY CAN POSSIBLY LIMIT OUR FREEDOM OF SPEECH UNDER “FOR THE CHILDREN” ITS BEEN AT THE START OF THE PANDEMIC AND NOW AT THE SENATE, CALL YR REPS AND TELL THEM YOUR AGAINST THE EARN IT BILL. TELL THEM ITS THE END OF FREE SPEECH.

PLEASE PLEASE SIGN THIS AND REBLOG! IF YR NOT IN THE US AND WANNA TRY* AND HELP. REBLOG THIS AND LET OTHER US CITIZENS KNOW. edit; i didn’t realize apparently signing if your not a us citizen invalidates it, so please DON’T sign it if youre not in the us. please reblog this version if you can. also the thing about this bill is it fucks over digital security in general as in you can get hacked easily, or hackers can gain access to things without encryption.