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If you're anything like me, I'm sorry.
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i. Russian Doll / 2019-???, ii. ??? / UNKNOWN iii. Flatline / SOPHIA LORNIE, The Clock Mender / AVERY PALMER iv. Not Strong Enough / BOYGENIUS, v. Normal People / SALLY ROONEY, vi. Bones & All / 2022, vii. Ptolmaea / ETHEL CAIN
tw: mentions of child neglect & death
The Nine to Five
Every time a child of The Big Three is born, the Gods flip a drachma, and the world holds its breath to see how it will land. For Percy Jackson, it keeps flipping and flipping. And when he dies for the first time, precisely 2 minutes and 36 seconds after watching Elliot Rhodes fall in the Battle of Manhattan, he can't help but think it was always going to be this way.
It is only natural, after all, that the universe corrects its imbalances. And he could chalk it down to that day all those years ago, to the goosebumps on the bus and an image frozen of The Fates with their callous hands clipping blue yarn. When he was younger, he would sit crisscross at the bottom of chlorine pools, trying to see how long it would take before his breath snuffed out. He would break the surface with nothing detrimental to show for his time. No blood in his mouth and no stars in his eyes, it was...is hard for him to feel insignificant and inconsequential. He didn't understand that this was hereditary.
And now, at seventeen, he still doesn't fully understand it. The whole savior bullshit. It is strange how he is bound to pay for the sins of his father committed before his conception. Now, he has every scar embedded in his skin to prove that there is a thing called penance. The crux of the matter is, despite how everyone wants to see him, Percy Jackson is just as good as anybody and just as bad as anybody. But he keeps pushing the cycle, keeps running himself ragged with the only life he has ever known. Over and over and over again.
He saves who he can save...
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Taking the Night Shift
10 PM - 12 AM
There are parts of girlhood that never really leave you when you grow up. Elliot Rhodes thinks that all girls grabbed onto one warm feeling with both hands when they were children and never let go, so now she has these. These things, mannerisms that never really left her or gave her room to act like she was full. They sit right next to her godhood.
Elliot doesn't know what to do with it, the rage, the pulsing for blood. It is exhausting being angry all the time, and these days, Elliot finds it hard to react with anything but her fists first or her cruel tongue. It's everything she learned, or rather inherited from Natasha, before alcohol and secrets dragged her into the ground and wrestled her into an early grave. Natasha Rhodes always used to tell her daughter that she was a hard girl to crack, and it would make Elliot train every bone in her body not to flinch when she touched her shoulders with her cold palms. Because this is is the gift in which Natasha has succeeded in giving her: an anger that never truly bleeds out.
