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“What?” He asked incredulously, he turned towards her, bewildered. “I’m not self destructive.”
She spares him a look, a pregnant pause stretched a thousand molecules between them as she holds him in her steady, searching gaze. “You're joking, right?” She finally says. She tucks an ebony strand behind her ear and looks at him seriously, an unfamiliar expression on her familiar features. “Dude, like, no offense, but you're the most self destructive person on the planet.”
He doesn't say anything, deciding to let his confusion speak for him instead. She rolls her eyes, exasperated, “You always ruin shit for yourself.”
“I do not!”
“Yes, yes, you do. You are so terrified of being happy.” He starts walking again, guard up as he dismisses her, “I'm not afraid to be happy, Thalia.” She takes two long strides to catch up to him, grabs his elbow and pulls him around to face her. This is one of those things you observe about a person and never mention it to him. She knows very well That she's treading dangerous waters, and she knows the dismissal was her queue to drop it, but she's watched everything he's ever wanted slip out of his grip too many times from the sidelines.
“You're right, it's not happy you're afraid of. It's being happy and having it snatched away from you.” He opens his mouth, a string of defenses lined up at the tip of his tongue, but she's not finished. “So instead you ruin shit for yourself, so you don't have to lose it later.”
He's offended, she knew he would be. It clear in the way his body stiffens under her hand and his narrow ever so slightly at her. “I ruin shit for myself?”
She mistook angry for offended, his words are harsh and biting. “You know, that’s funny considering every single time shit hit the fan it was the gods doing, not mine.”
“Oh,” she scoffs, “I'm not talking about that and you know it.”
Percy raises his eyebrows. Oh, do I?
She takes a deep breath, patience was never one of her virtues. She needs him to understand. She needs him to know that he deserves happiness, because Percy has always been way too fucking hard on himself and whatever tragedy throws itself his way, he'll find a way to rationalize it. He'll convince himself it's punishment for whatever he thinks he did wrong, which is often never the case, but try telling him that.
Stubborn as a mule. Always has been.
“I know the gods fuck shit up for you, like, ninety percent of the time and that's not your fault, but the ten percent,” she tells him, “ the ten percent that you can help you fuck up - you always find a way to fuck it up.”
He's not looking at her, she sees his jaw clench and unclench, like he's carefully chewing on the words he wants to say next, taking his time to see how every one of them taste on his tongue.
“Maybe,” he says quietly, but his voice carries and it's the most hollow sound she's ever heard. “The reason I fuck up that ten percent is because I know it's only a matter of time before the ninety percent comes along and does it for me.”
He's staring at her now, glaciers for eyes and a voice cut from broken glass, “Because, Thalia, ninety percent is still ninety percent and maybe just maybe I want to keep it from becoming a hundred percent.”
His chest is heaving, the words are tumbling out, tripping over one another, gushing like a broken faucet before he thinks to shut them back in his mind, where no one will ever believe their existence.
“At least this way, I can still function under the delusion that I still have choices. That everything in my life wasn't decided for me before I was even conceived. And I'm not an idiot, Thalia,” he shoots her a dark look, “contrary to popular belief.”
She feels a trickle of guilt over all the times she has mocked him for it, she knows he not dumb and it was always good-natured, but she supposes that even the roughest rock erodes in the smoothest water, given enough time.
Still, she pushed it down and manages a low, “Percy, you do realize how ridiculous this is?” It's putting her on edge, seeing him like this, he was always optimistic. Always giving people the benefit of the doubt. Always assuming the best. It was, unsettling, to say the least, to see him in this state, hear him talk this way. It's like finding out Santa isn't real and mommy and daddy are the ones who wrapped the gifts and put them under the tree.
He blinks at her, a wide, mad grin stretches across his face. “My stepmother’s a mermaid,” he says out loud, “my best friend’s a goat. My teacher’s a horse and my brother is a one-eyed giant.”
She wants him to stop, there's a reason demigods don’t discuss the logistics of the Greek world, all it does is drive you in circles till you've gone insane.
“Perc-” But he wouldn’t be stopped.
“My other brother is a flying, talking winged horse. I have a creature of the night as a pet. A beast from hell!” He throws his hands indignantly into the air. “A hell, might I add, that I've seen. And don’t even get me started on our parents.” He looks at her then, looks through her with more truth in his words than the world is prepared to hear.
“Tell me, which sounds more ridiculous to you?”
She has no answer for him, and it's not for a lack of trying, her mouth gapes and shuts a myriad of times thinking of something more intelligent than I don’t know to say.
“This way,” he says for the third time that caught Thalia's attention in a way the other two hadn't. He's not just trying to convince her. “When the wind blows in that inevitable direction I get to say, ‘go fuck yourself, I was headed there anyway’.”
“Or you could want more.” Thalia’s not sure when the words finally untangled themselves from her brain, words that are only making themselves known as they tumble out of her mouth. “It's your life, you can-”
“Enough.” Her voice died in her throat. He's angry again and she doesn't know why. The only explanation he's provided her with is “don't patronize me.” She narrowed her eyes at him. I'm trying to help you, you idiot! But her intentions are lost on him. She doesn't get it. Percy’s the most willful person she knew, if there was anyone who can root himself like a tree and tell the world, no, you move, then it was him.
“You do not get to be one of those people,” he whispers to himself more than to her.
“What?”
“Thalia, I really hate those people.”
She blinks at him, utterly confused. He scowls, “ you know the hypocrites who have shit and tell others who don't not to sweat it? Like, you have an incredibly good looking person telling the butt-ugly person who no one ever looks at that looks aren't everything. No, like, I get it, they're not everything. But it sure would be nice not to have people recoil when they look at you, or even approach you in a conversation and not the other way around and don't tell me that not everyone is like that. Ok? I know not everyone is like that, but people are vain! They are cerebrally stimulated and I dare you,” he barks out a harsh laugh, “I dare you to put a hot chick and an ugly one in a room full of guys and not have every single one of them choose the cute one first.”
Thalia is even more confused than when he started, what does any of this have to do with anything. Obviously, she didn't voice out her confusion. The outcome, she was sure, would be ugly.
“Or when a rich person tells a poor one that money doesn't buy happiness,” he huffs out, gesturing wildly with his hands. His voice raising. “Maybe not happiness, but it sure as fuck buys safety, it buys education, and a roof over your head, food on the table, and new clothes when you outgrow the old ones!”
There’s a point in there somewhere, Thalia thinks irritably, get to it.
And then it comes, as if a genie was nearby and heard her thoughts, the conclusion to this rant that Percy was very uncharacteristically on. It wasn't what she expected. She got sucker punched by him hard enough to be speechless a good half hour after he said it. That's when she'd realized something about Percy, something so contradictory to what she believed of him before. She recalled how they constantly mocked him for the filter that he doesn't possess between his thoughts and his mouth. He was always ready with an errant word, a rash one. Never thinking through what he says before he says it. But now Thalia realizes bitterly that that was all a lie. He does have a filter, and despite what everyone might think Percy does hold himself back a lot. People always believed, and Thalia was no exception, that Percy has no inner censor. But listening to him now, spewing words from a wretched cup of long term bitterness that she's hasn't tasted since the days on the run with Luke she realized that he's careful about what he says. And nothing in it is never unintentional.
“You,” he says to her, voice hard, words unapologetic, “you escaped fate. I didn't.”
He lets her guilt hang in the space between them for a heartbeat. “You will do tomorrow what you're doing today. You will do again in a hundred years, a thousand. Your entire life is accounted for. I'm a speck of a millennium.” And this she will never forget.
“An atom in a sea of nothing. Don't presume to tell me how to live my life.”
His words stung, as they should, that was the intent after all. She'd seen Percy be funny, impulsive, rude, snarky, inappropriate, you name it. But she’d never seen him being mean for the sake of being mean - just to prove a point. Because when he wanted to hurt someone, she realized, he knows exactly where to prod the hot poker.
She dropped the prophecy on his shoulders the first chance she got. It was something she had always meant to apologize for but never knew how to approach.
She swallows thickly, “I-"
“No,” he says forcefully. “I will not hear it. Not from you.”
So, she didn’t say anything