Somnium semper remotum: chapter 8: And nothing of value was gained

It would be a comforting, simple lie to say that Sally Jackson had never thought of herself as a woman of poor judgment. This was, despite the considerable and mounting evidence to the contrary, a lie she had never quite allowed herself to believe. To believe it would be to admit that the architecture of her life—a precarious, leaking structure built on the swampy ground of good intentions—was founded on a fundamental flaw in the bedrock of her own character.

So, naturally, she had always thought of herself as right. Or, at the very least, not wrong. There was a distinction there, a fragile, hairline fracture in the marble of self-perception that, once struck, could spiderweb into a complete shattering. She was the wakes up at 4 AM to scrub cigarette stench out of the carpet before her son gets home kind of right. The kind of right that was born not from arrogance, but from a desperate, grinding necessity. The kind whose greatest ambition was to get through the day without having to add another item to the long, invisible list of her failures.

As a young girl who had only thought of love in the safe, black-and-white lenses of old movies and the brittle, perfumed affection of her parents, the kind that was demonstrated through quietly paid tuition and the distant pressure to marry well, she had imagined her life as a series of neat, orderly choices. A leads to B, leads to a comfortable, quiet C. A life of small, manageable joys and even smaller, manageable sorrows.

In every sense, you could say she was hitting levels of naivete that should have been criminal.

Everyone else, of course, would have disagreed. They saw a girl with a future, a pretty face that promised pleasantries, and a mind sharp enough to carve a path through the soft wood of ordinary expectations. Her whole life stretched ahead of her on a clean, suburban sidewalk. In academia, her keen eye for the hidden structures of stories would either see her to a tenured position, or, perhaps, a celebrated novelist, a household name for a certain type of reader. In life, her quiet resilience and stubborn heart would surely see her to a good man, a safe home, a family that was everything her own was not.

For god’s sake, she had even been born with a fighting chance.

A less charitable stranger, smelling of cheap beer and cheaper cigars, would describe the slight, perpetually weary slump that had settled over Sally’s shoulders as a life of hard luck. They might, if being of a particularly loose-lipped persuasion, call it a self-inflicted wound. Upon hearing such a thing, Sally Jackson would have nothing to say. What was there to say? Arguing with the verdict was a luxury she had no currency for. The evidence was all around her, in the suffocating infirmary of camp half-blood, in the sleeping form of her son, in the very air she breathed.

Or, she could simply turn and walk away.

She’d liked the latter idea.

Her country’s police, statistically, could be persuaded to examine the cases of domestic disturbances in the surrounding areas and then reasonably conclude that it would be simpler to ignore, dismiss, and silence the hysterical woman first before gathering evidence.

That was the sort of person the world saw her as. A remarkably patient, painfully ordinary sort of person who, despite all her disadvantages and hardships, had grown into someone who preferred to endure, silently, definitively, and exhaustively, those who garnered her fear. Or when she wanted to protect the one thing that mattered.

It could be said that Sally Jackson was a too-seeing woman who saw the consequences of every choice laid out before her like a tangled skein of yarn, and still, somehow, always managed to pick the one that led to the knot.

Choices. The word sat in her mind, heavy and inert as a tombstone. It was the foundational lie of humanity, this idea of free will. Worse than the choices forced upon you by circumstance, by fate, by the cruel whims of gods, were so very often the ones you made yourself, with both hands on the wheel, eyes wide open, convinced of your own righteousness. Those were the ones that carved the deepest canals of regret, because you could never fully outsource the blame. You had to live with the architect.

The first great choice: the plane.

She had been right, of course. So terribly, gut-wrenchingly right to refuse that last-minute trip to see her mother’s ailing cousin. A high school exam, a burgeoning sense of her own independence, a silly fight about a boy her father didn’t like. A constellation of small, adolescent reasons that coalesced into a single, monumental no. She had stood her ground, proud of her burgeoning adulthood.

The plane fell out of the sky. A mechanical failure, they said. Quick. They were probably asleep.

And Sally was left. Right. Alive.

She had thought it was the responsible choice. The adult choice. Now, years later in the perpetual twilight of a bad marriage, breathing air thick with the smell of stale poker chips and cheaper beer, she wondered. There was a part of her, a small, shameful, hidden part that she kept locked in a deep-freeze vault in her soul, that thought Death would have been a cleaner ending. A united front. A family, whole in its obliteration. Instead, she was given a life that felt, on so many days, like a protracted, messy, and lonely aftermath. She had chosen life, and in doing so, had been sentenced to it.

The second choice: the sick uncle.

He was all she had left. A kind, fading man with eyes that held the same ghost of her father’s smile. She had thought herself right, proper, even noble, to shelve her acceptance letter to the community college, to put the dreams of a literature degree on a high shelf where they could gather dust. It was the least she could do. It was family.

She gave up her days to the slow, grim work of caretaking. Changing sheets, spoon-feeding broth, reading aloud from his favorite detective novels until her voice grew hoarse. She gave up her nights to the terror of the phone ringing, the sound of a cough from the other room. She gave up her youth, the fragile, ephemeral thing it was, on the altar of duty. She sacrificed it all on the pyre of a hope that he would get better, that her love and her labor would be enough to tip the scales against the indifferent machinery of cancer.

He died anyway. As if her sacrifice was a pebble thrown into a deep, dark well, producing not even a satisfying splash, just a faint, swallowed tock before the silence returned, deeper and more profound than before.

She was left with an empty house, a depleted bank account, and the hollow, ringing certainty that her choice had bought her nothing but a front-row seat to a tragedy. She had been right, and her reward was a masterclass in futility.

Then, the third choice. The one that defied all her previous, careful arithmetic. The one that felt less like a choice and more like a tide coming in.

Poseidon.

With retrospective, that god-like lens of perfect hindsight, she could pick apart the seams of that summer in Montauk. Maybe she should have been more cautious. Maybe she should have asked more questions. Maybe she should have seen the storm in his eyes for what it was—not just the weather of a mortal man’s passion, but the literal, primordial chaos of the sea itself. But in the end, she knew with a certainty that felt carved into her bones, she would have done it all again. Every whispered secret, every touch that felt like a brand, every moment of a happiness so sharp it bordered on pain.

Because Poseidon gave her Percy.

Her son. The one, single, unequivocally right thing in the entire catastrophic ledger of her life. Her son, who slept now in the same room, his face smooth and untroubled by the Minotaur, by gods, by the scent of a monster in this very camp. Her son, who was the living, breathing, beautiful sum of all her wrong choices, and the only thing that made them bearable.

And that led to the fourth, the most damning choice of all. The one born of that stubborn, foolish, deeply ingrained pride. The pride her mother had instilled in her, a rusted, useless heirloom: Never depend on a man, Sally. Be your own person. Stand on your own two feet.

When Poseidon, his voice the rumble of a distant tsunami, had offered her everything—a palace under the sea, immortality, a queen’s title, safety and glory beyond mortal comprehension for her and for their son—she had refused.

She had been right, of course. It was the principled choice. The independent choice. She would not be a kept woman, even by a god. She would not lose herself in the shadow of his power. She would be Sally Jackson, mother of Percy, and they would make their own way.

Her refusal was a monument to her values. And like all monuments, it cast a long, cold shadow.

The shadow was named Gabriel Ugliano.

To mask her son’s divine scent from the things that hungered for it, she had to marry a man whose own spiritual stench was so profound, so humanly vile, that it acted as a miasmic shield. She had to take a worse kind of monster into her home, into her bed.

She had to—

The scent of him,

                                  cheap cologne and cheaper sweat, a thick miasma that clung to the curtains, the furniture, her skin, her hair, until she felt she would never be clean again.

The sound of his voice,

                                              a grating demand that was neither a question nor a request but a foregone conclusion. The touch of his hands, not violent, never violently, just… present.

A possessive, clammy weight.

The feeling of her own mind, a small, bright room she was slowly walling up,

                                               brick by brick, placing each one carefully,

                     mortaring it with a smile, a quiet ‘yes, dear,’ the lie of a pleasant wife.

The flicker of a memory: the cold linoleum of the bathroom floor,

                                    the sound of the shower running to mask the sound,                        the way herown breathing hitched, how she would count the tiny, hexagonal tiles until the numbers                  

                        lost all meaning and she was just a thing, a shield, a container.

She had to—

She stopped. The thought, a live wire, snapped and sizzled into silence. She pressed a hand to her mouth, her knuckles white.

A sound escaped her, an ugly, choked thing that was half-laugh, half-sob. She had to go through that. All of it. That particular, grinding hell. She had laid herself down on that altar, offered up her peace, her dignity, her very body as a burnt offering to the gods of safety.

And for what?

For monsters to come anyway. For a Minotaur to materialize on a summer family trip. For her son to be forced to watch his mother unable to truly do anything, to watch as everything was almost ripped away from him the same way if not worse than it had been with her, to be a part in a game he never asked to play. All her sacrifice, all that filth she had endured, had been for nothing. It had bought them time, but it had not bought them freedom. It had been the wrong choice. The most catastrophic miscalculation of her life.

And for once, she wasn’t the only one on the chopping block. Her son was there with her, his neck on the same block, and the axe was being swung by the very world she had tried to hide him from.

A desperate, shameful thought slithered through the cracks in her resolve. Maybe she could try begging. Find a way to get a message to the sea. Maybe her body, the memory of Montauk, the fact of Percy’s existence… maybe it would be enough. Maybe Poseidon would relent, would sweep them up and place them in that undersea palace, a belated salvation.

But the thought curdled as soon as it formed. She was so tired. Not the good tired of a day’s work, but a soul-deep exhaustion, the kind that made bones feel like lead and hope feel like a childish fantasy. She was tired of always choosing wrong. Tired of being a leaf blown by the hurricane of fate and her own poor judgment. For once, she didn’t want to be saved. She didn’t want to be given a better cage.

She wanted to feel the weight of the key in her own hand. She wanted to change things, instead of being perpetually changed by them.

That was why, when she looked at Allen, she felt not fear, but a terrifying, exhilarating sense of recognition.

He was a god, or something so close it made little difference. But he didn’t carry himself with the untouchable majesty of Poseidon. He looked… tired. In a way that mirrored her own exhaustion. He had the vibe of someone who had held everything and lost it, or perhaps had nothing and was trying to build it from scratch. He was a reflection of her at her worst—a person with almost everything to lose, staring into the abyss and deciding, instead of falling, to try and fill it.

She had seen him fight. Not with the grand, elemental fury of a god, but with a focused, terrifying precision. A spear in one hand, a sword in the other. He had struck the Minotaur, and the world itself had seemed to pause. The rain stopped. The monster, a myth made flesh, didn’t just die—it un-wrote itself, disintegrating into motes of nothingness as if it had never been. He had erased a problem from reality.

And that same impossible, powerful man, he had turned to her, his strange, ancient yet young eyes holding no promise of palaces, no easy solutions. Only a question. A proposal. To try and change things with him. To build a new myth. An impossible made possible.

Her gaze drifted back to the sleeping form of her twelve-year-old son. Percy’s face was soft in the dim light, the fears and triumphs of the day smoothed away by sleep. He was everything. The only thing.

Yes.

For once, she wanted her choice to be right. Not right in principle, not right according to some dusty, human moral code, but right in its result. She wanted her son to have everything she never could—safety, power, a life unchained from the fear of monsters and the whims of neglectful and wrathful gods. She wanted him to have more than Poseidon could ever offer, more than any single Olympian could grant. And she, Sally Jackson, the woman who had chosen wrong her entire life, wanted to be the one to give it to him.

She wished, with a ferocity that burned away her weariness, that she would never have to compromise again. That she would never have to watch her brilliant, brave son have to lower his head, have to swallow his pride, have to endure a Gabe for his own survival.

A shift in the air.  She didn't need to turn. She didn't know why but knew that it was him. She felt him there. Allen. He had arrived on the corner of her eye, a silent silhouette in the doorway. He didn't speak, didn't intrude. He simply leaned against the doorframe, his posture a clear, wordless message. I am here. Take all the time you need. I am not here to rush you.

It had been a very long time since a being of power had ever given her space.

Sally leaned down, the floorboards creaking a soft accompaniment to her movement. She pressed a kiss to her son’s temple, breathing in the scent of him—sea spray and shampoo and the simple, human sweetness of a child. Her voice was a soft whisper, a vow woven into the quiet of the room.

“I’ll make things better,” she promised, the words a seal on a new contract. “I swear to you. Everything that happened before… the Minotaur, the monsters, the gods, fate, this entire world… I’ll change it all. For us. For you. So just… give me a little more time.”

She stood up, her body feeling both lighter and more solid than it had in years. She gave her son one last, long look, memorizing the curve of his cheek, the way his hair fell across his forehead. A strange, cold feeling trickled down her spine. This felt like a goodbye. Not a permanent one, not like the others, but a goodbye to the life they had known, to the woman she had been.

She turned and walked toward the door, toward Allen. He watched her approach, his expression unreadable but not unkind.

“I found our third partner in crime,” he said, his voice low, devoid of grand pronouncements. It was a simple statement of fact. “Let’s go so I can introduce the two of you.”

Sally Jackson, who had chosen planes and sickbeds and gods and mortals, and had been wrong every time, nodded. She stepped past him, over the threshold, and into the hallway.

She truly hoped it was not a fucking goodbye.