Demiurge: Percy V A.K.A in the skate park

The world had ended, or at least it is what it felt, what it seems with the dark rumbling skies above hiding the brightness of the sun, with the sound of the ocean, the seas and the likes seemingly angrily raging at everything not a part of them, with the sight of cratered Earth, of broken asphalt, abandoned cars and broken looted stores, bloated and contradictorily dehydrated corpses littering the neighbourhood they had chosen at some sort of pit stop.

Soon, they would leave.

Soon, they would continue, going onward in this quest that didn't feel like one anymore.

Soon but that time had not come yet and this was why, he, Percy Jackson, son of Poseidon and Sally Jackson, most wanted 12 year old in all human history was skating in an empty skate park on a skateboard literally made of ice.

The origin about the skateboard made of ice began with his older brother Chrysaor's idea of training.

He had wanted in his own words for Percy to "have control and not only brute power," when it came to using the powers over water, liquids and the like he had inherited from their dad.

It had sucked at first.

Sure, ice was just frozen water and thus as the son of the god of the sea, that should have been easy peasy and it kinda had been but it still didn't feel as when he controlled normal water.

It was like wearing another t-shirt over your usual clothes and while not bad, it was new and weird.

Chrysaor had wanted him to keep on doing so until they left and this is where Percy had to put his foot down because sure he was okay with listening to his immortal older brother's instructions and all but he still got ADHD and staying in the same place doing the same thing was as close to hell that it could ever be for him.

This was why he was in the skate park.

He had been able while learning to not only control but make ice which how cool was that to also shape it.

All those things put together and one thing led to another and after convincing Chrysaor, someone he probably would have failed to do without the help of Annabeth and Grover, here he was in an empty skate park.

The board beneath his feet hummed—not with sound but with something he felt in his bones, in the marrow where his blood sang sea songs. Each push forward sent him gliding across concrete that had seen better days, cracks spider-webbing across its surface like the lines on an old man's hands. The ice shouldn't have worked, not really, not with friction and physics and all those things Mr. Brunner used to talk about in class before everything went completely sideways. But it did work because Percy willed it to work, because somewhere between being a regular kid who couldn't read right and being the son of a god, he'd learned that sometimes wanting something bad enough made it real.

He carved left, then right, the frozen board responding like it was part of him—like his feet had always been meant to stand on crystallized water that refused to melt even under the pressure of his weight and movement. The wind pushed against his face, cooler than it should've been in the middle of whatever season this was supposed to be. Time got weird when you were running for your life. Hours blurred. Days became irrelevant. All that mattered was the next monster, god or whatever else, the next fight, the next impossible thing they had to survive.

But not here. Not now.

Now there was just the smooth glide of ice on concrete, the way his body knew exactly when to shift, when to bend, when to let gravity do its thing while he did his.

He approached the lip of a half-pipe, knees bent, arms out for balance—not because some book told him that's what you were supposed to do but because his body just knew.

The board lifted, caught air for a second that stretched like taffy, and then he was coming down the other side, the world tilting and righting itself in a way that made his stomach flip but in a good way, in a way that made him feel like maybe, just maybe, he was more than the sum of all the terrible things that had happened, that he was just Percy and nothing else.

He pumped his legs, building speed, the board singing beneath him in a language only his bones understood. Another ramp, another launch, and this time he grabbed the edge of the board—his fingers found purchase on ice that should've been too slippery—and pulled it with him through the air. For a heartbeat he was flying, really flying, not falling with style or getting thrown by an explosion but actually soaring like those old myths about Icarus except he wasn't going to crash because the sky wasn't the limit, it was just another challenge and he'd already fought worse things than gravity.

The landing jarred his teeth, sent vibrations up through his ankles and knees, but he rode it out, stayed upright, kept moving because stopping meant thinking and thinking meant remembering and remembering meant—

No. Not yet. Not while he had this.

He built momentum again, raced toward a rail that bisected the park like a scar, and at the last possible second jumped, board and all, landing with a grinding scritch that would've been horrible for a normal skateboard but his ice just reformed itself, adapted, became whatever it needed to be. He slid down the length of metal, sparks that weren't really sparks but tiny ice crystals catching what little light filtered through the apocalyptic clouds above, and kicked off at the end, spinning once, twice in the air before touching down again.

His heart hammered against his ribs like it was trying to escape, like it wanted to jump ship before things got bad again, but Percy held on tight to this moment, to this feeling of being twelve and alive and doing something just because he could, not because some desperate need said he had to or some god decided it would be entertaining.

He rolled to a stop near the bench where Annabeth and Grover sat watching, both of them looking at him with expressions he couldn't quite read—something between amazement and sadness and maybe a little bit of jealousy, the good kind, the kind that said I want that too.

"Thanks again for the help with Chrysaor," Percy said, stepping off the board and letting it dissolve back into water that soaked harmlessly into the broken ground.

"Always man," Grover said, his voice carrying that particular quality it got when he meant something deeper than the words suggested.

Annabeth's lips quirked into a soft smirk. "Praise me more, mortal."

Percy felt his own face shift into a sardonic, mocking smile. "Of course, your headachelence."

"It's not a word."

"It is one now and it is a mix of headache and excellence. You know what, I should have called you your excellent headache."

Annabeth's eyes narrowed but the smile stayed. "Oh, so we're inventing vocabulary now? What's next, are you going to claim you discovered a new element? Jacksonium, perhaps? Highly unstable, incredibly dense, and prone to explosions when combined with common sense?"

"Hey, dense? Really? At least I don't walk around acting like I memorized the dictionary just to make everyone else feel stupid."

"I don't act like it, Percy. I actually did memorize the dictionary. Well, most of it. The important parts anyway. Unlike someone who probably thinks a thesaurus is a type of dinosaur."

"I know what a thesaurus is!" Percy shot back, feeling heat crawl up his neck even though she was grinning now, clearly enjoying this. "It's like... a book of words that mean the same thing. Which honestly sounds pretty useless when you could just say the first word that comes to mind."

"Spoken like someone who has exactly three adjectives in his entire vocabulary."

"I have more than three!"

"Oh really? Name them."

Percy opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. "Cool. Awesome. And... really awesome?"

Annabeth laughed, the sound bright and sharp like broken glass catching sunlight. "You literally just used the same word twice. That's two adjectives, Jackson. Two."

"Fine, Miss I'm-So-Smart-I-Count-Everything. What about you? Bet you can't skateboard. Bet you'd fall on your face in like two seconds."

"I never claimed to be athletic, just intelligent. There's a difference. Though I suppose to someone who solves most of his problems by hitting them with a sword, the distinction might be lost."

"It's a pen first," Percy protested, even though he knew she knew that, knew she was just winding him up because that's what they did, had been doing since they met, this weird back-and-forth that felt like fighting except it made him want to smile instead of punch something. "And hitting things with swords—or pens that turn into swords—has worked pretty well so far. Can't logic your way out of a monster's teeth."

"No, but you can plan your way around them. Strategy, Percy. It's what separates heroes from monster food."

"Pretty sure what separates heroes from monster food is not being eaten. Everything else is just details."

She rolled her eyes, but she was still smiling, still looking at him like maybe he wasn't completely hopeless. "You're impossible."

"Yeah, well, you're insufferable."

"Insufferable. Good word choice. See, you can learn."

"I knew that word before you came along!"

"Did you though? Did you really?"

Percy grabbed a piece of broken concrete—nothing big, just a pebble really—and tossed it at her. She caught it without looking, because of course she did, because Annabeth was the kind of person who could probably catch a bullet if she tried hard enough and had the right calculations.

"You throw like a child," she observed, examining the pebble like it was an interesting specimen.

"I am a child. We're both children. We're twelve."

"I'm thirteen in—"

"Almost thirteen doesn't count! You're still twelve right now, same as me, which means we're both equally childish."

"Except I act my age."

"You act like you're forty and angry about it."

"And you act like you're seven and just discovered mud puddles."

"Mud puddles are great! You're just mad because you never got to jump in any because you were too busy reading architecture books or whatever."

Annabeth's smile faltered for half a second, something flickering across her face that Percy almost missed, would've missed if he hadn't been looking right at her, if he hadn't started to learn the tiny ways her expressions changed when something hit close to home.

"I read engineering books, thank you very much," she said, but the energy had shifted, gone from playful to something more careful, more fragile, like they were suddenly walking on ice that might crack. "Architecture is different. Though I read those too."

"See? This is what I mean. Normal kids don't—"

"We're not normal kids, Percy."

And that was it, wasn't it? The thing that sat between all the jokes and insults and friendly banter. They weren't normal. Would never be normal. Normal kids worried about homework and acne and who liked who. Normal kids got to do stupid stuff like jumping in mud puddles and reading comic books and complaining about being bored.

Normal kids got to be kids.

Percy sat down on the bench beside them, the concrete cold even through his jeans. Nobody spoke for a minute, maybe more. The silence wasn't uncomfortable exactly, just heavy, full of all the things they'd seen and done and survived that twelve-year-olds—thirteen-year-olds, sorry Annabeth—shouldn't have had to see or do or survive.

"Would you believe that it's my first time in a skate park?" Annabeth said quietly, her voice smaller than usual, like she was confessing something important, something she'd kept locked away in whatever internal filing system her brain used to organize the world.

She continued before Percy could respond, words coming faster like she needed to get them out before she changed her mind. "Of course, I know what is a skate park and I won't go so far to say that it is my first time I see it in real time but it is the first time I've taken steps into one."

"Why?" The question came out softer than Percy intended, curiosity mixed with something else, something that felt like sadness except it wasn't his sadness, it was borrowed, reflected, shared.

Annabeth gave a smile that didn't reach her eyes, didn't even try to reach her eyes. "I don't like talking about it because talking means remembering but why not at this point. The world is already ending. When I was younger and I had to leave my father's home, when I had to flee, when there were monsters coming after me at every moment, where I could have been eaten alive by them, killed by them, when nowhere was safe, the only thing I was fixated about was survival. I wanted to do cool things like I saw at the TV. I would have liked to skate or continue going to school or the like but sometimes especially when you're a demigod, you learn that needs trump wants."

She tried to reassure them with a smile, one that Percy saw straight through as what it was—false, painted on like those masks people wore at masquerade balls in movies, pretty and empty and hiding everything that mattered.

"Stop looking at me like that Grover, Percy. It was not all bad you know. This is how I met Thalia. This is how I met Luke. This is how I met my family and by family, I mean not one of blood only but of choice, of care, of love and I know it's cliché and all of that to say it but it is true."

She looked wistfully at the skate park, her eyes tracing the ramps and rails like they were hieroglyphics she was trying to decode, trying to understand. "Before all of this, in the end, things like going to a skate park don't matter much."

"I'm sorry," Grover said softly, his voice cracking around the edges. "I'm sorry Annabeth!"

Percy looked at Grover's face.

Oh. Grover was crying.

Tears tracked down his cheeks, cutting clean lines through dust and grime that had accumulated over however many days they'd been traveling, running, fighting. His lower lip trembled and Percy felt something twist in his chest, something hot and painful and wrong because Grover shouldn't cry, Grover who was always trying to make everyone else feel better, Grover who hummed nature songs when things got scary and talked about tin cans like they were gourmet meals.

"You did nothing wrong, Grover, it's not your fault," Annabeth said softly to the satyr, reaching out to touch his arm.

She tried to joke, the words coming out awkward and forced. "I mean, it's not as if you were the reason why I never went skating."

"But I am the reason why the family you gained, the one that made you feel so... contented isn't whole." Grover's voice came out strangled, each word fighting its way past the tears. "You didn't have the skate park but you had Thalia and Luke and because of me, you don't got Thalia anymore. Because I was stupid. Because I was not a good protector. Because in the end, I was more a hindrance than the help you needed, Thalia had to die, Thalia turned into a tree fighting against hordes of monsters trying to kill us all so yes, it is my fault Annabeth and I am sorry and will always be."

Annabeth's face did something complicated, folding in on itself like origami, like those paper cranes people made except instead of paper it was grief and guilt and love all mixed together until you couldn't tell where one ended and the other began.

"Nothing I say would make you think otherwise, isn't it?"

Percy didn't know why but it felt even if it was not the case that the daughter of Athena was crying too, not on the outside where anyone could see but somewhere deeper, somewhere in whatever place people kept the tears they couldn't afford to shed because once you started you might never stop.

Grover gave a tearful smile that was somehow worse than the crying. "Sorry."

Percy looked at the sky above, at the dark clouds rumbling like gods having an argument, like the heavens themselves were angry at what had become of the world below.

He didn't know why but at this moment, they felt like a part of him, an extension, dark and ugly and pouring as it began to rain.

The first drops hit the concrete around them, fat and heavy and cold, the kind of rain that soaked through clothes in seconds, that turned streets into rivers and made everything miserable. But Percy and Annabeth and Grover stayed on the bench, three kids who'd seen too much sitting in the middle of an abandoned skate park while the world ended again, slower this time, quieter, one raindrop at a time.

The rain fell in a circle around the three of them in a way that should not be possible, in a way that defied every law of physics and meteorology and common sense, drops hammering the ground two feet away on all sides but not touching them, not even coming close, like there was an invisible umbrella stretched over their heads except Percy knew there wasn't, knew it was him, knew it was his power doing what it always did—protecting the people he cared about even when he wasn't thinking about it, even when he was thinking about everything but it.

He didn't want the rain to touch them and thus the rain didn't touch them, continuing battering heavily the world around them, turning the skate park into a miniature lake, filling the half-pipes and drowning the rails and washing away layers of dust and debris that had accumulated since... since whenever the world had decided to give up.

Percy still looked at the clouds above, not turning toward Annabeth or Grover, not wanting to see their faces because if he saw their faces he might not be able to say what he needed to say.

"I have a stepfather and I hate him. I hope he's dead to be honest, that I would never see him again, that my father specifically did something so that he was extra dead or something."

The words hung in the air between them, ugly and true and necessary. Percy could feel the gazes of Annabeth and Grover on him yet he continued talking, pushing through the discomfort, through the shame that came with admitting you hated someone, through the guilt that came with hoping they were dead.

"Before coming to camp, I didn't understand why, why did Mom have to get with him, with such a piece of—" He stopped himself, changed tracks. "—when she could have done much better. He was disgusting so he could not be his looks or something like that. He barely brought money so it couldn't even be because he had money. He literally took the money my mom gave him for his at-home poker party he always lost which meant that I had to sell journals and do little odd jobs and the like that I really didn't want to do because I wanted to have some money without making my mom worry even more. He drank, drank and smoked too much and made the apartment smell suffocating with the constant odor of alcohol and cigarettes."

The memories came back sharp and bitter, invasive like the monsters except you couldn't fight these with a sword, couldn't defend against them because they lived in your head, in your nose, in the phantom sensation of a hand grabbing your shoulder too hard, fingers digging in until bruises bloomed purple and yellow.

"I think the reason why I don't like Mr. D is because of how he reminded me of Gabe. I can already imagine what you're thinking, why didn't tell your mom Percy. I tried twice and twice like he had promised, he had punched my lights out."

He heard Grover gasp, sharp and wounded, heard Annabeth's breath catch in a way that meant anger, the cold calculating kind that was somehow scarier than the hot explosive kind because it meant she was thinking, planning, figuring out ways to hurt someone who wasn't even here.

Percy finally turned to look in their direction, needing to see their faces, needing to confirm that they understood, that they got it.

Grover looked at him like he'd just announced the sun was cold and the moon was made of cheese, like reality had fundamentally broken and needed to be reassembled from scratch. His eyes were wide, too wide, pupils blown out with shock and hurt and something that might've been betrayal except directed inward, at himself for not knowing, for not seeing, for not being able to fix it.

Percy gave an apologetic smile to Grover, small and crooked and probably not very convincing.

Annabeth was looking at him differently, as if he was a puzzle she had thought solved and only realized she had put the pieces in the wrong places, had forced things to fit that didn't fit, had missed crucial parts of the picture because she'd been so focused on the edges and corners that she'd forgotten about the middle, about the heart of it.

"Now, I know why Gabe was around due to camp, due to everything I learned, I was taught that it was because my mom wanted to protect me." The words tasted like ash, like smoke, like all those cigarettes Gabe used to chain-smoke while yelling at the TV. "She hated Gabe, probably had to do and smile at a lot of things she hated just for me and just thinking about it, I feel simultaneously angry and sad and loving her even more. Still, when sometimes, it felt as if I couldn't take it anymore, when I needed an out, I went outside to the skate park near our apartment. There I could be as messy as I wanted. There, I could stop thinking about Gabe, about changing schools each year, about being Percy Jackson, about being me and just be me, a skateboard under my feet and sharp lines and angles."

He looked at both of them, really looked, taking in Grover's tear-stained face and Annabeth's careful expression, the way she was holding herself together through sheer force of will, through that incredible stubbornness that made her who she was.

"Everything is so much more complicated right now. A lot of things sucked and still suck but right now, that doesn't matter."

Percy stood up, the bench creaking slightly as his weight left it.

He stepped forward, out of the dry circle, and allowed the rain to fall on him, cold and shocking and real, soaking through his shirt in seconds, plastering his hair to his forehead, running down his face like the tears he wouldn't cry, couldn't cry because if he started he didn't think he'd stop.

He looked at Annabeth and Grover, at his friends, at ironically his first ones, the ones he'd chosen or that had chosen him or maybe both at the same time.

"We still got some time before we have to go which means I got some time to teach the both of you how to skate."

Annabeth was looking at him in shock as Percy extended his hands toward the two of them, palms up, offering something he didn't have words for, something bigger than skateboarding or rain or the apocalypse happening around them.

At his feet, according to his will, raindrops coalesced, gathered, froze in mid-air and formed themselves into two frozen skateboards, perfect and crystalline and impossible, defying reality because Percy Jackson was the son of Poseidon and water did what he told it to do, even when what he told it to do was ridiculous.

"This is my first time doing this," Annabeth said, staring at the ice-board like it might bite her.

Grover spoke up, voice uncertain. "Percy, have you seen me? I trip on my own feet so imagine on a board!"

Percy felt a smile spread across his face, genuine and bright and uncomplicated, the kind of smile that belonged to a different version of himself, a version that maybe could've existed if the world was kinder, if gods didn't exist, if monsters were just stories in books.

"You'll probably fall a lot but there is something in me that tells me that it'll be alright as long as the two of you for a moment stop thinking about what could or could not be, as long as you just try and don't stop trying."

Annabeth studied him with those calculating grey eyes, weighing and measuring and analyzing. "What is that thing that makes you think so?"

Percy answered her with a bright smile, with honesty that cut cleaner than any blade.

"Faith.”

Until the last minute before departure, before being called back by Chrysaor,  the world and its matters outside the skatepark stopped existing to be replaced by laughs and joy.

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PS: this is one of the two chapters I was able to write this week. Hope y’all like