"When Fate Aligns" ~ A Percy Jackson/Heroes of Olympus Oneshot Collection

"How Far We've Come" (Written at Age 14)

How Far We’ve Come

Summary: Sometimes, he wondered when things began to change. Sometimes, he wondered when he stopped being that scrawny, timid boy. Sometimes, he wondered when he had grown up. [Percabeth; introspective oneshot]

Note: I only quickly proofread this instead of my normal epic revision, simply due to the fact that I'm so busy with school. Also, sorry if it looks like I vomited a dictionary on here... as I said, PSATs are evil. 

By the way, I hope you enjoy the last part. :) 

…………..

When he first met her, he thought she was scary. And how could he not, with her pretty gray eyes, swirling around like hurricane clouds brewing in from the sea, with the way she snapped at him whenever he unintentionally did something stupid.  After all, she was the daughter of Athena, his dad’s rival. She was scarily smart, with all she knew about the monsters and how she had set him up with Capture the Flag.

He tried not to like her, in fact, he tried to hate her. After all, she was like those mean girls in school; a princess, perfect, and always telling him he was stupid because he had dyslexia and ADHD.

But that was impossible once she had volunteered to go on that quest with him, to find that Lightning Bolt… when she had shown him that vulnerability in her eyes; that need to prove her peers wrong, to make her mother proud. And he understood.

Maybe that’s when he started to think of her as a friend, or back in when they were forced to ride that Animal Slave transport thing Ares made them go on. Or maybe it was before that, when she had freaked out at the Water Park because of the spiders, or maybe it was back when he had blown that bus up because of the Furies.

He doesn’t know when he became her friend, actually. It just sort of happened over time, he guesses.

After he had managed to get his mom (to this day he was thankful about that) out of the Underworld, and got the Lighting Bolt back, Luke decided to reveal his true colors with that Scorpion, and his world was turned upside down again and the colors bled into gray. After all, Luke had been one of the few people to accept who he was. He hadn’t made fun of him when he did something stupid, unless he was just teasing him and he knew it was a joke. He hadn’t called him stupid. He had been his first mentor, the one who had taught him how to use a sword.

But life goes on, as it always does.

She made amends with her father (kind of), he went back to school, and for a whole year nothing bad happened. He was even doing semi-decently… no Fs. Mostly Cs, a few Ds, and even a B- once.

Then Grover, his first and best friend, sent him some weird telepathic dream, and to this day he was a mixture of bewildered and amused (more amused though) at the satyr being in a wedding dress. A male satyr. But of course, it was for a grave reason: Cyclopes.

The mist still semi-worked on him back then, and so he didn’t realize that his half brother, Tyson, was actually a Cyclopes himself, until they were attacked by Laistrygonians.  

And maybe, just maybe, he was cursed, because after that, she, Annabeth, had decided to hail the taxi of Eternal Torment (he doesn’t care about the proper name, whatever it was. It was the taxi of doom. Really, they could have died!) and the crazy ladies with only one eye gave him a nonsensical list of numbers he later figured out were nautical coordinates.

And wait, that’s only the beginning of their trouble! Thalia’s pine tree had been poisoned, Chiron was sacked, and (of course) they got a director who was an idiot. A self-centered idiot. And that was saying a lot, coming from him.