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Percy held the sky, and the sky, apparently, held a grudge.
That was the first thought, once thoughts became things he was capable of having again. Before that there had only been weight - impossible, absurd, mountain-and-then-some weight - and a voice underneath it that might have been Ouranos, or might have been his own ribs, filing a complaint.
"Great-grand, I really think you're overdue for a gym membership."
He was fairly sure he hadn't said that part out loud. He was wrong, as tends to happen in this sort of situation, and with Percy's particular luck - which in hindsight had been a mistake roughly on the scale of taunting a hurricane. The weight had not appreciated the joke. The weight had, in fact, increased - sharply, personally, like it had opinions about comedy - until increased stopped being a useful word and Percy had no better one to reach for.
Somewhere in there he stopped being scared and started being simply present, the way you are present for weather. He thought about his mom, and that he hadn't said goodbye properly back at Westover Hall. He thought he would be back home soon. He thought, with the small, petty clarity you get right before something enormous happens, that he really hadn't wanted his last words on Earth to be an insult about his great-grandfather's waistline.
The Fates are going to be so smug about this.
And then the sky came down, and Percy Jackson did not think anything at all.
"Who dares to touch what is mine?!"
Poseidon cried it out loud, followed by an earthquake of the seabed, storming into the room - a god who had spent three ages of the world learning that anything precious to him would eventually get taken - before his mind caught up with what was in front of his eyes. Then the rest of the thought died in his throat, and he was glad of it. This was not a moment for that particular truth. Not here. Not with them.
He was alone, grieving in the vast, empty throne room - mourning yet another child who had turned into seafoam - when they entered the workshop. Which should have been impossible. Nothing entered his halls that he did not permit. And yet the three of them were simply there with him, as though the ruler of Atlantis could be casually summoned to witness the end of their work, like any mortal.
The statue stood at the heart of the fountain, exactly as he had left it - a boy on the edge of running, one foot lifted, one arm flung toward a future he hadn't reached yet. It had taken the better part of a year. Nine months of coaxing pearls with his divine powers up out of the dark until they rose taller than any mortal man could stand; the rest spent cutting them down with his own hands, his own power, layer by careful layer, until a face - still soft with childhood, not unlike the one he'd been carrying in his chest since the last battle on Mount Othrys - looked back at him in white stone. Since the curse had reached into his line and closed its fist, and every child thereafter turned into foam before he could manage to take the infant into his arms.
He had built it for Kekropia. He had built it, if he let himself admit it in the smallest, most private room of his mind, for himself. At least to make something that would not end up as seafoam. At least one thing of his own that could endure, even in stillness.
The Sea King watched Clotho reach out and draw a thread up out of nowhere - maybe out of the sea, out of the air, out of some seam in the world Poseidon had never learned to see - a single bright filament, sea-blue shot through with gold. It was, he understood without being told, a life. A new one, just about to enter the realm of the living.
Lachesis took it from her sister's hands and wound it, once, twice, three times, around the pearl throat of his statue, and tied it off the way you might tie off a wound, or a gift.
Atropos raised her shears.
Every instinct Poseidon owned - three ages of the world's worth of instinct, ocean-deep, older than most of the gods currently perched on his brother's mountain, much older than his own nieces and nephews lounging on their thrones up there - told him to move. To put his own body between his work and that blade. He was the sea. He had swallowed navies. This was his, meant to stand a thousand years and be looked at, and every inch of him wanted to close a hand around three old women who had not asked permission.
He did not move.
Just a statue, he told himself. He could make another. It was easier to believe that than to name what actually kept him rooted to the floor - something with teeth in it, something that felt, uncomfortably, like fear. He would go on calling it patience for a long time. A storm rose far above his palace. Sailors prayed for mercy, but were ignored.
Atropos cut the thread.
It did not fall. It flared instead - one bright, terrible beat of blue light, then turned completely golden, there and gone, the way a wave crests and is already becoming the next wave before you've finished admiring it - and where it had been wound around white pearl, the material split. Not shattered. Cracked, fine as hairline fractures in old porcelain from the Far East, blooming out from the throat in a collar of golden-lit fissures. The cracks healed almost as soon as they opened, leaving nothing but pale blue scars on skin gone suddenly, impossibly olive.
And then the statue moved. Clumsy. A single step, like a newborn duckling's first - and he swayed, and would have fallen.
The Fates were already leaving. They went the way they'd arrived, without ceremony, without so much as a glance back at what they'd made, three old women stepping out of Atlantis as easily as they'd stepped into it. Poseidon barely registered them going, because -
Because the boy on the pedestal had opened his eyes, and they were sea-green, and full of a divinity that was his.
A child.
His child.
He crossed the workshop floor faster than thought, the way water moves when nothing is left to hold it back, to stop this precious thing from hitting the floor - and did not remember deciding to reach out - only that his hands were already there, already closing, gently, so gently, he had never once in his whole existence needed to be this gentle with anything, around a shaking, impossibly present weight that was, for all its size, smaller than him by every measure that mattered.
It made no sense. The Fates had never intervened this way before - not once, not for anyone. Poseidon turned that over exactly once, and found he did not have a single complaint to make about it. Let the histories say what they liked about the manner of it. He had a son. That the making of him had required the whole terrible machinery of Fate itself only meant that Fate, for once in all the thousands of years since Poseidon was born - and was immediately swallowed by his own father - had finally done something right by him. That at least once, he had been given something he deserved.
Someone. At last, after all these years -
A son. He had a son. Taller than any mortal who had ever lived, and still - still - no larger in a god's hand. Small enough to be gathered up, knees to chest, and held there like something washed ashore, still deciding whether the shore could be trusted.
Poseidon laughed - he couldn't help it, it came out of him like a wave breaking, too big for the room - and felt, distantly, the whole weight of the sea lurch with him, swells rising on shores an ocean away, now much friendlier, ones that would bring boats back home, back to their own children - whether or not mortals deserved such a gift. Prayers of gratitude reached his ears. Poseidon did not care. He refused to give mortals even the smallest fraction of his attention now.
There was the most precious treasure in his hands. His own kid. His son. Poseidon laughed again. The boy in his hands had flinched at the sound. Poor thing. That must be a bit too loud for his small gentle ears. Maybe even a bit uneasy. Poseidon tried to calm his boy by gently - so gently - petting that lovely pearl-white hair on his head. That seemed to work.
He had not thought to soften his shape. How foolish of him.
In his defence, there had been no one to soften it for. No wife these past years, no living child, nothing to school his face into the calm, sun-warmed, faintly amused thing he wore while sharing his will with his most devoted followers, or with the occasional favoured lover.
Alone, he was simply what he was: skin like deep water that never sees light, dark and moving even when nothing in the room stirred it; too many eyes, or eyes that would not sit still long enough to be counted, scattered like phosphorescence across a face that kept almost being a face and then reconsidering; hair with its own private tides. Barnacle and coral crusted along one shoulder the way scar tissue crusts along an old wound. A mouth that was, at the moment, entirely too full of teeth, because he was smiling, and he had forgotten - in all this time of having no one to smile for, save his siblings and their children, who were no better at it than he was - exactly how many teeth that face was meant to have.
But now Fate had blessed him. Whatever hunger had lived in him all these lonely centuries went quiet - for now, at least. He was a father. He had a son. A precious creation of his own divinity. His. Only his.
The boy scrambled - up, back, away, two broad hands finding no purchase on wet god-skin, feet slipping - and for one instant very nearly launched himself clean off the edge of Poseidon's palm and into the open waters of his workshop. Something in Poseidon that had no business calling itself a heart went cold with fear. A fall that would have meant nothing to him could mean everything to his son. Newborns were so fragile. So easy to hurt. To die, seconds after being born.
Poseidon's other hand came up on reflex and folded around his beloved child before he'd finished deciding to do it, a second wall of palm and fingers closing him into a cupped, half-lit dark.
Safe now. Safe in his father's hands, where nothing could hurt him. His precious child would stay happy, and - more important than anything - alive. A gift from the Fates themselves. The one gift Poseidon would not trade for every treasure the world had to offer.
So lively. Poseidon turned him this way and that, marvelling. Look how he wanted to explore already. That's his boy. So curious. Unaware of the dangers of this world, and he would have no need to learn them, because his father would see to every one of them first.
Poseidon brought him closer. And it was there, cradled in both hands not two metres from a face made of tide and too many teeth, that the boy went still in an entirely different way - not scrambling now, not fighting, just staring, wide-eyed.
That was good. Safe. But the next second, Poseidon almost wanted to strike himself for his own carelessness. There was the single most precious thing in the world resting in his hands, and here he was, letting his own obliviousness unsettle his child further. His son was newborn. All of this must be so overwhelming. He must be exhausted already.
The extra eyes folded away into two. The moving dark settled, centimetre by centimetre, the way a storm settles once it's decided the ship isn't worth sinking after all, into something with a jaw, a brow, a mouth that fit its teeth. Sea-green eyes surfaced last - the exact green the boy's own eyes were, because of course they were, because this was his son, and a son ought to have his father's eyes.
The boy's whole body went rigid again, more rigid than before, and this time there was no scrambling in it at all. Something closer to shock. But shocked by what? His new form, surely - his child had only ever seen him true and unhidden, all at once, with nothing eased into. His little blessing must be overwhelmed by this softer shape. Poseidon longed to look more like his child, truly - but perhaps it was better not to rush. To his son, his own father had just turned into a stranger. That alone must be shocking enough, especially when the boy had no idea yet what either of them looked like.
Poseidon remembered, with a small jolt, a promise he'd made to no one in particular, centuries ago: that if he were ever given a child of his own, that child would never have to ask him for anything. He would know. He would provide it long before a single sound ever left those precious lips.
And now here was his son, and Poseidon had failed that promise three times in the same hour.
He did not take it as a reason to give up. He would simply have to be better. Poseidon only hoped his son would forgive his initial ignorance. Fate had blessed him; he would prove worthy of the blessing. Poseidon would be the finest father this world had ever produced, and nothing - not even the Moirai themselves - would take that away from him.
The boy's mouth opened. Poseidon watched it happen with the fond, unhurried attention of someone about to be handed a crown - expecting anything at all. Perhaps his son would even call him dad, though Poseidon would never have dreamed of pressing him toward it. Whatever he had to say would be precious simply for being his, and would be received with far more grace than any decree a king had ever given.
Nothing came out. Not a word. Not even breath shaped like one. The boy shook his head and tried again. Still nothing. His throat worked, once, twice, the little collar of pale scars at it catching the workshop light, and his whole body strained forward around the effort of it, and still there was nothing. Only the shape a scream makes when the sound has already been taken out of it.
Slowly, he raised one hand and touched the scars at his own throat.
For the second time, something in Poseidon - his heart - that had no business existing went rigid, and then broke. He could almost hear it shatter. Or perhaps that was only the waves, tearing apart some coastline, some city mortals had built too close to the water. He couldn't bring himself to care which.
The curse. It was still there - not the way it had taken the rest of Poseidon's children, not seafoam, not the swift return to nothing that had claimed every sibling this boy would never meet. This was something else. Something that might have suited a child of his nephew Apollo better: a child of music, born without a voice. Of course the curse was still there. The Fates had simply redirected it, just enough to let his child live.
And that was what mattered most. His child was alive. Poseidon would take care of the rest.
"There, there," he murmured, in the gentlest voice the sea had ever produced for anyone. "I'm right here, little one."
The competition for Kekropia was entirely forgotten. Athena could have the city. Poseidon had already won a prize worth far more.