Chapter Text
After being adopted—half-jokingly, half-seriously—by the Todoroki siblings, Percy had slipped into the chaotic rhythm of the family with surprising ease. He and Shouto had become inseparable in their quiet way, and Fuyumi doted on him like she was making up for lost years.
But Natsuo... Percy realized he barely knew.
So one day, after a class study session and baking a double batch of blue cookies, Percy tugged on his hoodie, stuffed some wrapped cookies in a bag, and texted Natsuo with a simple:
“Hey, can I come hang out?”
…
The knock at his door was soft—too soft for a delivery, too tentative for a neighbor.
Natsuo opened it to find Percy standing there, hoodie sleeves pushed up, curls wind-tousled, and a plastic bag in hand.
“Hi,” Percy said with a grin. “I brought cookies.”
Natsuo blinked. “Uh. Hey. Yeah—come in.”
He stepped aside, and Percy shuffled in like a polite storm cloud, trailing sea-salt and sugar in his wake. He looked around the small apartment with quiet curiosity but didn’t comment on the stacks of textbooks or the fading medical diagrams pinned above the kitchen table.
“I realized we haven’t really hung out much,” Percy said, dropping onto the couch with all the grace of a contented cat. “I know I kind of crash-landed into your family, and I wanted to, you know… not be just the disaster sibling.”
Natsuo’s lips twitched. “I don’t think you’re the disaster sibling. We’ve got competition for that.”
Percy laughed, and something in Natsuo’s chest loosened.
He moved to the kitchen, made tea for himself and pulled out some cold soda for Percy—he remembered from a passing conversation that Percy didn’t like hot drinks—and sat across from him.
They talked.
About Natsuo’s med school rotations. About Percy’s weird run-in with a flying villain who accidentally dropped a live goose into a shopping district. About sea monsters and dorm cats and hero bureaucracy. Hours passed without either of them noticing.
And then, the conversation took a turn.
“You ever think about what it means to fix things?” Percy asked, his voice low, a little wistful. “Like… not just physically. I mean people. The way society works. The way it’s broken.”
Natsuo looked at him, really looked at him, and saw the weight Percy always carried in his eyes. The kind of weariness that doesn’t come from physical strain—it comes from loss. Too much, too young. From watching the people you love fall apart and not being able to stop it.
“I do,” Natsuo said, voice quiet. “All the time.”
He found himself talking more than he usually did—about patching Shouto up after those brutal childhood lessons, about watching his siblings fracture and not knowing how to glue them back together. About the support groups, the outreach work, the nights he stayed up rereading the same three sentences on trauma therapy because they might help someone tomorrow.
Percy listened like no one ever had. Not just hearing him—but understanding.
When Percy offered to help with the support groups, Natsuo blinked in surprise.
“Really?” he asked. “You want to… help?”
Percy nodded. “People need someone who’s survived to tell them they’re not broken. And I can bake blue cookies.”
Natsuo laughed. A real, honest laugh that shook something loose in him.
As the night wound down, Percy curled sideways on the couch, flipping through a medical textbook on reflexive nerve pathways with all the fascination of someone discovering magic. And Natsuo sat back, studying him from the armchair.
This kid, he thought, this reckless, glitter-wielding sea-brained chaos gremlin… is family now.
And not the kind of family that fades with distance or fractures under pressure. The kind you fight for. Bleed for. Keep safe, no matter what.
Percy was kind. Not the naive kind. The battle-worn, relentless kind that sees darkness and still chooses light.
Natsuo swallowed thickly and set his tea down.
I’d die for this kid. No question.
But more than that, he wanted to live for him. Be the kind of brother who shows up. Who listens. Who keeps blue cookies stocked in the cabinet and never lets Percy face his battles alone.
Later that week, when Percy showed up to the support group with a glitter-covered badge labeled “Hope Crew – Trainee,” Natsuo only laughed and let it slide.
They were family.
And Percy had a way of making people want to be better—just by existing.
…
Percy decided the other stop on his to-do list would be getting to know Fuyumi better.
He had noticed the way she’d linger at the edges of every Todoroki family gathering, smiling a little too brightly, offering tea or snacks, always checking on everyone—especially Shouto and Touya. She seemed like the kind of person who poured herself into others, not because she didn’t matter, but because she wasn’t sure she was allowed to.
And Percy understood that kind of quiet desperation too well.
He’d heard she was a kindergarten teacher. That she had a reputation for being soft-spoken, patient, and kind in the classroom. The kind of teacher Percy had wished he’d had growing up—someone who would look at him and see a kid, not a problem. Someone who wouldn’t have rolled their eyes when he couldn’t read the board, or lost patience when he got frustrated.
But Fuyumi made him nervous in another way too.
There was something in the way she clung to the idea of family. The way she smoothed things over like she could tape the fractures back together if she just tried hard enough. It reminded him too much of Luke—his old friend and brother in arms turned enemy. Luke had wanted family so badly, he’d twisted himself around the lie that Kronos could give it to him. He charged forward, dragging his broken dreams like armor, ignoring the truth until it shattered everything.
Fuyumi wasn’t like Luke, not really. But that same ache lived behind her smile. And for a long time, Percy didn’t know how to face it.
Still, he knew he had to try.
…
He found her one quiet afternoon in the Todoroki home’s kitchen, arranging little bentos into animal shapes—rabbits and bears and sleepy cats with rice bellies and tiny seaweed eyes. It smelled like sesame and miso and sweetness, like comfort in a house that had known too little of it.
“You pack lunches like a champion,” Percy said, easing in, careful not to startle her.
Fuyumi looked up, surprised—but pleasantly so. “You think so? These are for tomorrow’s class. I have two kids who hate mushrooms, and one who insists I give every rice ball a different name.”
“That’s adorable,” Percy said honestly. “You always been a teacher?”
Fuyumi hesitated, wiping her hands on a towel. “Not always. I wanted to be something else once. But... I like this. I like being the safe place for them.”
Percy leaned on the counter, thoughtful. “I get that. I used to work with a lot of little kids back at camp. Some of them had lost their parents, or never knew them. Some were demi-gods, like me. Scared, confused, dealing with powers that hurt more than helped.”
He looked at her. “I used to tell them stories. Let them braid my hair. Made s’mores with magic fire. Tried to keep them safe.”
Fuyumi’s expression shifted—something warm and sad in the same breath. “That sounds like a lot to carry.”
“Yeah,” Percy said quietly. “But it was worth it.”
They sat together after that. Percy helped her shape rice balls while Fuyumi told him about her class—how one boy used his quirk to accidentally freeze juice boxes, how one girl grew moss when nervous and now the windowsills of the classroom were green and thriving.
Percy laughed. Fuyumi did too.
At some point, she grew quiet. “I used to think… if I could just make things perfect, if I tried hard enough, we’d all be a real family again. That I could fix it.”
Percy glanced at her. “And now?”
“I think maybe… we are a family again,” she said softly. “Not because it got fixed. Just… because we stopped pretending. Because we’re still here. Choosing each other.”
Percy swallowed, something tight catching in his chest. “Yeah. I think… I get that.”
There was silence between them—comforting, not awkward. And when Percy helped her carry the bentos to the fridge, she ruffled his hair gently and said, “You’re a good little brother, Percy.”
He froze a moment.
Then smiled.
…
That night, he fell asleep with sea salt still in his hair, a bento box in the fridge with his name written in perfect penmanship, and a feeling—small but powerful—that he was finally, truly, part of something.
A family.
No pretending. No fixing. Just being.
And that was enough.
…
Percy had come into this world having lost his family.
He had arrived bleeding and aching, heart hollowed out by grief, torn from the people he loved most. No Annabeth. No Sally. No Thalia or Nico or Grover. Just gone.
He hadn’t expected anything to replace that.
But now?
Now, he had too many people to count.
He had the Todorokis—Shouto, who saw too much and said too little; Fuyumi and Natsuo, who had wrapped him in warmth and called him brother like it was the easiest thing in the world; and Touya—Dabi—who still hovered like a fire-damaged shadow but had slowly, stubbornly started to let the light back in.
He had Aizawa and Hizashi—an exhausted eraser and a human megaphone who somehow balanced each other perfectly and treated him like their own.
He had Bakugo and the rest of 1-A, a chaotic mess of power and heart and friendship that burned hot and loud and bright.
He had Hawks and the League of Villains—former enemies, now found family. Somehow.
He had Emiko and Eri.
And his family just seemed to keep growing—each one finding a place in his heart and taking root, stubborn and unshakable.
He had people he loved so much that even seeing them every day didn’t stop him from missing them. Like his soul was still catching up, still afraid it would all disappear again.
…
It didn’t take long for a new problem to surface.
After one too many accidentally aged apples (one rotted instantly, one became a tree in the middle of the kitchen), a patch of glowing blue tulips that refused to die, and a run-in with a floating toy that turned into a solid stone, Percy noticed what everyone else was beginning to realize:
Eri and Emiko’s quirks were getting stronger. Fast.
Eri had more control than she used to, but her power—the ability to rewind biological time—was still dangerous in a way that made adults speak in careful, quiet voices. Now, even her emotions seemed to trigger it in small bursts. One time, she sneezed and the goldfish in the common room de-aged into eggs.
Emiko, meanwhile, had started influencing time in stranger ways. Flowers bloomed or withered under her touch depending on her mood. Toy blocks sometimes floated—then collapsed into dust. Once, a fruit Emiko had thought was magical disappeared, and five minutes later a version of it showed up again… with tiny bite marks and a note that said “Yum” in Percy’s handwriting.
Everyone was baffled.
Some teachers had tiptoed around the idea of them learning to suppress their quirks—burying them for safety.
One look—just one—from Aizawa and Percy had shut that down.
Two matching glares. One from a battle-hardened underground hero. One from a demigod who’d stared down gods.
The subject was not brought up again.
Still, training the girls was hard. Aizawa had tried, but he couldn’t find a way to help Eri access her powers gently, and Emiko’s abilities didn’t follow any logic he understood.
Percy finally offered to take over.
“I’ve done this before,” he said, “at camp. With satyrs and dryads and half-bloods who explode trees when they get mad. Trust me.”
…
Training started as play.
Always disguised as fun.
Percy turned the empty dorm courtyard into an obstacle course of color and texture—soft things, living things. He handed Eri a potted plant and said, “See if you can make it older. Not all the way. Just a little.”
She furrowed her brow, biting her lip. “Like… grown-up older?”
“Yeah,” Percy said, crouching beside her. “Let’s try to make it bloom.”
The first time she tried, nothing happened. The second time, the plant turned gray. But the third time—it worked. A single bloom unfurled. Pink and shy and trembling.
Emiko cheered so hard she fell over.
Later, Percy gave Emiko a pile of rocks and asked her to feel the time in them. Not force it. Just let her energy move through them.
One by one, she pressed her hands to them and whispered stories—what the rocks had seen, what they remembered. Percy couldn’t hear it, but he could feel it. Something humming under the surface, ancient and curious.
They played tag and the world shifted. Leaves aged and crumbled mid-air. Moss crawled back up a tree. A broken chalk line reformed across the sidewalk in slow, glowing reverse.
Eri started laughing more.
Emiko started glowing—not literally, but almost.
And Percy… Percy felt like he’d found part of himself again. The counselor. The big brother. The kid who wanted to build a better world.
…
By the end of the week, Eri could hold a flower and make it bloom or close with a whisper. Emiko could create a bubble of slow-time that held a feather mid-fall for over five seconds.
When Percy saw them high-five and laugh like it was nothing—like they weren’t children who’d once been broken and afraid—he smiled so wide it hurt.
They were learning not to fear their power.
They were learning control through trust.
They were becoming heroes.
…
It had become a ritual.
Every morning, Percy was up before sunrise. Not by choice—his internal demigod battle clock refused to let him sleep in, no matter what universe he was in. But he didn’t mind. Not anymore.
He’d curl into the window nook just above the dorm’s common room couch, a mug of blue cocoa in hand, hoodie slung over his shoulders, and Nemo perched loyally on the windowsill.
The cat always found him. Always.
One morning, Bakugo stumbled in for his pre-run protein bar and caught the scene—Percy half-asleep, Nemo purring in his lap, the whole sky behind them glowing lavender.
Bakugo blinked.
“…You’re disgustingly soft.”
Nemo yawned in agreement.
Percy just sipped his cocoa and smirked. “You love it.”
Bakugo grumbled. But he scratched behind Nemo’s ears before stomping out.
…
Midterms hit harder than any villain attack.
Jiro passed out on her notes. Kaminari was chewing a pencil in his sleep. Even Todoroki looked mildly frazzled. Percy had offered to quiz everyone, but Mina had thrown a pillow at him after his sixth “impossible Greek hero pop quiz.”
So Percy, being Percy, baked.
Blue cookies. Sea-salt brownies. Something he swore was ambrosia-safe.
While trays cooled, Nemo jumped from lap to lap, curling against tense shoulders and silent stress. He ended up sleeping on Iida’s legs while the poor guy recited physics formulas in his dreams.
“That cat,” Yaoyorozu said from behind a mountain of flashcards, “has improved morale by thirty percent.”
Nemo blinked at her from the couch, then rolled onto his back.
Percy grinned and slid a cookie toward her. “All hail our furry overlord.”
…
It was a bad night.
Percy didn’t talk about why thunderstorms made his hands shake sometimes. He just curled tighter into his blankets, eyes distant and too dry, not a drop of water left in his veins despite the rain lashing the windows.
He’d slipped into the common room, thinking it would be empty.
Nemo padded in ten minutes later.
No words. Just a quiet jump onto the couch, a slow crawl into Percy’s lap, and a steady, warm weight pressing into his chest. Purring like thunder was nothing. Like the world was safe.
Percy buried his hand in the soft orange fur and didn’t move for hours.
By morning, he was still there.
When Shouto came down to find him, he didn’t say anything. Just sat beside him with two mugs of tea and rested his hand gently against Percy’s shoulder.
Nemo stayed curled between them, tail flicking rhythmically.
…
It was a disaster. Eri had a sugar crash. Emiko had tried to age the classroom snacks into cupcakes and ended up with a pile of mold. Two students were crying, one was painting the wall with yogurt, and Percy had glue on his nose.
“Okay,” Percy muttered, trying to wrangle chaos with a glitter-stained towel.
Then Nemo walked in.
He had no right being that composed. He strolled through the mayhem, meowed once, and leapt onto Eri’s chair.
She gasped. “Nemo!”
Everything stopped.
By the time Percy had cleaned the last of the yogurt, the girls were giggling again—Emiko was playing with Nemo’s tail while Eri quietly brushed his fur with a glittery hairbrush.
“That cat,” Aizawa said from the doorway, sipping coffee, “is a miracle worker.”
Percy didn’t disagree.
…
Nights in the dorms had become a soft sort of magic.
Movies. Bickering over what to order. Percy baking while Kaminari and Mina made popcorn and Todoroki experimented with fruit tea.
And always, Nemo.
Sometimes perched on the couch’s backrest like royalty. Sometimes curled up on Percy’s lap as he braided Eri’s hair or helped Iida fold laundry. Sometimes napping with his paws over his eyes as Emiko read him stories.
He didn’t speak. Didn’t fight. Didn’t judge.
But he was there.
Every night.
And Percy couldn’t help but think—maybe it was silly, maybe it was just a dorm cat being a cat.
But it felt like home.
Like healing.
Like love that didn’t need to be big or loud to matter.
Just warm. And soft. And constant.
Just Nemo.
…
It was just past midnight when Percy crept up to the UA rooftop. The moon was high and pale above the city skyline, the wind soft as it played with the edges of his hoodie. A bottle of sea-salt soda sat beside him, untouched, condensation dripping slowly down the glass.
The city shimmered below. Alive. Buzzing. So loud and so different from the waves he used to fall asleep to.
He curled his knees in close, resting his chin on them.
“Are you there?” he whispered, not aloud, but from the quiet space inside his chest. “Dad?”
It wasn’t like a phone call. There was no sudden voice, no pressure change in the air. Just a stillness—like the ocean when it listened.
Then, gently, like a thought brushing the edge of sleep:
“I always hear you, my son.”
Percy exhaled, tension easing slightly from his shoulders. His eyes slipped closed.
“I miss home.”
“I know.” The voice was calm and deep, laced with tide and thunder and something ancient. “And they miss you.”
There was a long silence between them.
“I’m scared I’m forgetting the sound of her voice,” Percy admitted. “And Annabeth’s laugh. Nico’s snark. Mom’s hugs. I’m scared they’ll move on, and I’ll be stuck here trying to save another world when I couldn’t save my own.”
“You did save it.” Poseidon's voice was unwavering. “Many times over. And you paid the price heroes always do.”
Percy didn’t answer. His fingers dug into the sleeves of his hoodie.
“Why this world? Why me?”
“Because you still had more to give. And because this world called out for healing the way the other once did. You were always a child of both war and peace.”
Percy’s throat tightened.
“They needed me. I was… theirs.”
“And now you are theirs, too,” Poseidon murmured. “You are a bridge, Perseus. A tether between two broken places. You carry their memory with every step. That is not forgetting. That is honoring.”
Percy didn’t cry. Not really. But the wind took the moisture from his lashes all the same.
Below, the lights of the UA dorms flickered gently. He could see Emiko’s window glowing faintly with night lights. He knew Nemo was probably curled up against someone’s chest. Somewhere down there, Dabi was likely pacing in half-sleep, Shouto was brewing tea for a late-night walk, and Bakugo had already set an alarm for their run tomorrow.
His people.
“Are you proud of me?” he asked quietly, afraid of the answer.
There was no pause.
“Endlessly.”
Percy closed his eyes again.
The stars overhead looked a little more familiar now.
…
It became a routine, almost by accident.
After patrol. After training. After healing scraped knees and comforting Emiko after a nightmare. After Dabi fell asleep sitting upright on the couch. After Shouto refilled his tea without a word and Bakugo insulted Percy’s run time like clockwork.
When the dorm lights dimmed and Nemo curled against his side purring, Percy would slip away to the rooftop.
There, under the open sky, he reached inward—no offerings, no spells, no prayers.
Just a soft: “You there, Dad?”
And Poseidon always was.
…
Second Night
“You said I’m a bridge,” Percy murmured, wind threading through his curls. “But what if I break trying to hold everything together?”
“Then I will remind you that the sea does not break, my son. It bends. It crashes. It endures.”
Percy stared at the horizon, where the city met the stars.
“What if they find out I’m not as strong as I pretend to be?”
“Then they’ll love you more honestly. Because strength is not pretending you don’t bleed—it’s choosing to rise anyway.”
…
Third Night
He came up carrying one of the little hero badges he made for Eri and Emiko. The trident pin caught the moonlight, its surface chipped from play.
“They trust me so much,” he whispered. “Sometimes it feels like I’m their whole world.”
“And are they not yours?”
Percy smiled faintly. “I guess they are.”
“Then you already understand what it means to be a god.”
The words lodged somewhere deep in his chest, both terrifying and comforting.
…
Fourth Night
The conversation started in silence.
Then Poseidon asked, with that quiet ocean-deep wisdom:
“What weighs on you tonight?”
Percy clenched his fists.
“I still don’t know if I belong here.”
“But you fight for it anyway.”
“Does that make it right?”
“It makes it real. Home is not built by blood—it is shaped by choice. You keep choosing. That is enough.”
…
Fifth Night
This time, he brought saltwater with him—filtered from the UA pool, purified and held in a bowl. He set it beside him and dipped his fingers in.
It calmed him.
“I think I’m falling in love with this world,” he admitted. “Not just the people. The way the sky smells after rain. The tea Shouto makes. The way Eri sleeps with her arm over Nemo’s tail. It’s… it’s good. And it hurts.”
Poseidon didn’t speak for a long moment.
Then:
“Let it hurt. That pain? That ache? It means your heart is growing. It means you’re living.”
Percy pressed his palm to the surface of the water. It shimmered with soft bioluminescent light—something impossible. Something familiar.
“Will I ever stop missing them?”
“Would you want to?”
He didn’t answer.