Drowning in the Siren's Song -II

Chapter 17

The clearing had gone quiet in the particular way it only did around gods, when even the wind seemed to understand that something was shifting and chose silence over song. Percy sat back down on his rock, the ache in his shoulders a pleasant kind of tiredness, and watched Apollo settle across from him with none of the earlier looseness in his limbs.

He really did envy the godliness of the gods. Why didn't he look like his bones were on fire? And yet, the playfulness was still there, technically. It just wasn't leading anymore.

"You did well today." Apollo said it plainly, without the theatrics he usually wrapped his compliments in, which somehow made it land harder than if he'd made a production of it. "Both times."

Percy's cheeks reddened without him noticing, his face a blank canvas. He did accept the words without dismissing them, an old habit of Grandma Oak's he'd never quite shaken, take a compliment the way you'd take water offered in a drought, gratefully and without argument. "Thank you, sir."

"I mean it." Apollo tilted his head, gold eyes catching the last of the afternoon light and holding it somewhere behind them, like a coal that had caught the first spark. "You don't need me to tell you that, though. You already know."

He did. It didn't stop the words from settling somewhere warm in his chest anyway.

There was a pause after that, the kind Percy had learned to recognize on Lupa's training grounds, the held breath debating before the decision whether to say the harder thing sitting underneath the easy one.

"I could tell you about him." Apollo said it carefully, testing the shape of the words before committing. "Your father. I know things about him that few gods do. Small things. The kind that don't make it into any hymn."

Percy's jaw tightened before he could stop it.
"No."

He didn't soften the word, didn't dress it up the way he usually tried to with gods who could, in theory, incinerate him for looking at them wrong. Some things didn't deserve softening. If he died for a single syllable word, so be it.

"I don't want anything to do with him." He kept his eyes on the dirt between his feet, on the small green shoot pushing up through a crack near his shoe, persistent, stubborn, growing in the wrong kind of soil anyway. "He wasn't there. He isn't now. I don't need a hymn's worth of 'small things' to know that."

He expected pushback. He'd built himself for pushback, the way he built himself for most conversations that touched too close to the parts of him he kept locked away with the rest of his Greek self. But Apollo only nodded, slow and unhurried, and something in Percy's chest loosened at the lack of a fight.

"Alright." A beat. A look. A squit.

"I won't ask."

"Alright." Apollo's mouth curved, not quite a smile but close enough to be its cousin. A third cousin. "But I'll be here regardless. If that changes."

Percy didn't answer that. There wasn't a version of himself yet that knew how to.

The silence that followed wasn't uncomfortable, exactly, though it carried a weight Percy could feel gathering at the edges, the way the air thickened before a storm broke over the reserve. Apollo was choosing his next words with more care than Percy had seen from him all day, turning them over like stones before setting them down.

"There's something else." Apollo's gaze drifted past him, toward the tree line, toward something Percy couldn't see and wasn't sure he wanted to.

"A road with more thorns than flowers awaits you. I won't pretend I know exactly what shape it takes, but prophecies rarely announce their own intentions." He exhaled, and for a moment he looked less like a god and more like an older brother bracing to deliver bad news.

"But I don't think it's one you'll be able to avoid, no matter how well you hide, or how far into the reserve you bury yourself."

Percy's stomach dropped, though he kept his face carefully still, the way Lupa had drilled into him. Never let them see the crack before you've decided whether to hide it or use it.

He had been twisting Riptide over his finger. "Tell me."

So Apollo told him.

He spoke of a hero's choice at sixteen, of a single decision that would either save Olympus or bring it down, of a child of the Big Three whose very existence tipped the scales of an old, uneasy peace. He spoke carefully, the way someone might describe a fire from a safe distance, close enough to feel the heat of it but distant enough not to be burned. Percy listened, and with every word, felt something in him go very still and very cold, the way the sea did in the moment before a wave broke.

He was not the child of Poseidon or Neptune in any way the world recognized. He was different. A siren, a forgotten, impossible existence. He'd made sure of that. And yet here was a prophecy that seemed built for exactly the kind of child he'd spent years refusing to be.

"I'm not part of that." Percy said it the second Apollo finished, quick and sharp, before the words could finish settling in the space between them. "Whatever that hero is supposed to be, it isn't me. I never claimed him. I won't start now because some prophecy says I should."

"I know." Apollo didn't argue, didn't try to talk him into a destiny he clearly wanted no part of. "That's not why I told you."
"Then why?"
"Because you deserve to know what's coming, even if you refuse to walk into it." Apollo's voice had none of its usual golden warmth now, only something quieter and colder. A voice befitting the god of prophecies. "Because pretending it doesn't exist won't stop it from existing."

Percy turned that over, feeling the truth of it settle uncomfortably against everything he'd built himself to be. He thought of the reserve, of Delilah and her plants, of Blackjack's steady wingbeats and Keria's sharp, watchful eyes. He thought of the nature spirits who trusted him without knowing what he was, only that he was theirs in some small, essential way.

"I don't care about Olympus." He said it plainly, the way he'd say a fact about the tide. "I don't care who wins whatever war is coming, not really." He thought he would feel something saying such words, but it seemed as if he had been harbouring such thoughts long enough that they seemed friendly.

"I care about the trees getting burned. I care about the rivers drying up because some god decided the world needed reminding of who was in charge." His hands curled into loose fists on his knees. "If it comes to a war, I'll fight for what doesn't hurt the things I care about. Nothing more or less."

"And if that happens to align with what Olympus also wants?"

"Then we fight as comrades." Percy shrugged, though there was nothing careless in it, casually suggesting to fight on par with one of the 12 olympians.
"I'm not choosing a side because it's the right one by some god's measure. I'm choosing the one that doesn't burn any of my homes down."

Apollo studied him for a long moment, gold eyes unreadable in a way they hadn't been all afternoon. Whatever he saw seemed to satisfy something in him, because the tension along his shoulders eased, just slightly, like a held breath finally let go.

"That," he mused, "might be the wisest thing anyone's said to me about this whole mess. And I've spoken to actual prophets."

Percy huffed, some of the weight in his chest easing at the small, familiar joke. "Low bar, apparently."

"You have no idea." Apollo got to his feet, brushing dust with a theatrical flourish that felt, for the first time that day, entirely genuine rather than performed. "Go on. Get some rest, little prince. You've earned it, and gods know I need to nurse my pride somewhere private."

Percy watched him go, watched the light bend and fold around him until there was nothing left but a faint warmth lingering in the clearing, and let himself breathe out slowly, fully, for what felt like the first time in hours.

The prophecy sat heavy in him still, a stone dropped into still water, ripples he couldn't yet see the edges of. But underneath it, something steadier had settled too- a decision made, simple and solid as bedrock.

He didn't need to know the whole shape of the war to know where he stood.

He would stand with the trees. With the rivers. With the animals. With the dryads and the nymphs and Delilah's careful hands in the soil.

Everything else, the gods could keep.