Chapter Text
5+1 times Percy has a situationship,
… and the one time it’s true love.
I. Calypso
Calypso is the first.
He washes up on her shores after blowing up a mountain.
At first he thinks he’s dead, all things considered, but he’s already been to the Land of the Dead once, and unfortunately, he knows it doesn’t have blue skies or pretty girls. Pretty girls who like him. Even though Perseus is fourteen, almost fifteen, he’s pretty sure a girl’s ever liked him before, so his teenage mind is a bit reasonably blown when an immortal goddess sets her eyes on him.
Calypso is beautiful, but more than that, she’s kind. Calypso is nice. Calypso is good. She’s patient and her healing magic does wonders. Once he’s back on his feet, she gives him a tour of the island and he happily agrees. Ogygia is a paradise away from the rest of the world. Here, there is no death, no suffering, no prophecies. They’re both functionally immortal as long as they stay on its shores. If he stayed, he wouldn’t have to face the prophecy, he wouldn’t have to die. He would never turn sixteen.
And the offer is more than tempting, it would be a lie to say he hadn’t considered it– but he can’t. He can’t leave his mother and he can’t leave his friends to fight the war on their own. He doesn’t want any part of it, but he’s not going to abandon them either. It’s just not in his nature, even if he wants nothing more than to stay here with her in Ogygia, their little paradise away from the rest of the world.
Calypso’s warm hand stops in his hair.
Her nails dance against his scalp and he resists a shiver. She looks down at him and her soft pink lips tug down into a frown. It’s unnatural against the rest of her delicate features. Her almond eyes search him for a moment, glimmering with something unreadable. “You are troubled.”
He opens his eyes slowly. The afternoon sun is blinding and it takes a few seconds of blinking for the black spots in his eyes to go away. When they do, he’s greeted with the sight of the most beautiful woman he thinks he’s ever seen. As far as he’s concerned, Aphrodite had nothing on her.
Aphrodite was too ethereal, too unreachable, but Calypso was grounded. Calypso was real. There’s nothing about her that sets him on the edge the same way. The only thing that betrays her age is the slightest tinge of an old ancient on her tongue.
Aside from that, she seems fifteen. She has a youthful face and warm wide eyes. Her long hair is loosely braided down her back, a rich warm brown which sparkles in the sunlight like caramel and smells faintly of cinnamon. He’s still trying to wrap his head around the idea that someone like her likes someone like him.
He gives her a crooked smile, admiring her in every sense. “Just thinking,” he says, pushing his worries aside. He drags his hands through the sand next to them and feels his eyes grow heavy. Calypso’s warmth, the soothing wind, and the gentle rhythm of the waves had already lured him to sleep and were threatening to again.
Calypso purses her mouth, unconvinced, and continues to stare down at him, displeased. Her lips twitch and her eyes glimmer sadly, barely holding back tears. He’s immediately struck by guilt and briefly questions his decision to go.
She blinks back tears, “You’re going to leave,” she sniffles. It’s not a question, it’s a statement– and Perseus doesn’t deny it.
He says nothing for a moment. He pushes himself up and out of her lap. Her well-manicured hands fall in his place. He holds on to one, too small and perfect in his hand. There is a tight knot in his chest that might be something like love. “I’ll come back.”
She snatches her hand from him, hurt. He ignores the pain in his heart. I don’t want to leave, he wants to argue. He wants to stay here with her, but in her mind, it makes no difference. He is leaving all the same.
She scowls. “No one comes back.”
“I will,” he repeats, again.
He likes her a lot, or at least, he thinks he does. Perseus has had crushes in passing growing up, but none of them were particularly deep. Calypso is different, he knows, but part of him isn’t sure if it’s because it’s her or if she’s the first to reciprocate.
Calypso says nothing. She says nothing for the rest of the day, not during dinner or breakfast the next morning. When he tries to approach her, she glares at him and stores off. With a resigned sigh, he has the raft ready to leave by lunch before he can talk himself out of leaving. He still waits for her to say goodbye, watching the waves with a distant expression.
She’s prepared a small bag for him, full of clothes and snacks. She stands in the gentle noon wind, chiton and hair drifting gently, the prettiest girl he’s ever seen.
His eyes light up the moment he sees her. “You came.”
She wipes the tears from her eyes with the back of her hand. “I didn’t want you to leave on a bad note,” she says, quietly, offering the bag to him. He accepts it gratefully. His heart does a little flip in his chest.
He can’t resist smiling. “Thank you.”
She looks to the ground, stubbornly. “Yeah.”
He reaches out to grab her hand. This time, she lets him. He grips it tightly. “I mean it,” he states. “I’ll find my way back. I’ll get you out of here.”
Even if he had no incentive, he would. She’s been isolated for thousands of year, for what? The crime of siding with her father? Yeah, Atlas wasn’t gonna win any brownie points for father of the year, but he understands. Sometimes he thinks the only reason he sides with the Olympians is because Poseidon is his father.
Her eyes trace him sadly, soaking in every bit of him, tender adn whole. Then she kisses him with such meaning, he sees stars. When she pulls back, it’s because he needs the air. All he can do for a few seconds is stare at her, gobsmacked. She smiles. “Goodbye, Perseus.”
He kisses her back, sweetly and shortly. “I’ll see you again,” he promises, refusing to say goodbye. He pushes the raft into the shore, pulling himself onboard. They wave until she’s just a dot in the sand. He meant what he said.
He keeps his promise.
The war ends, Olympus is saved. They celebrate their victory and bury their dead. The gods offer him immortality and he accepts under the condition that he’ll keep them in line. It’s not like he could trust them to keep their word alone, after all. However, even by the savior of Olympus standards, he was asking for a lot. There was one condition to one of his particular demands.
He and Calypso are married the next month in the biggest wedding the gods had seen in millenia. Something about raising spirits and commemorating a new era. One thing about ancient Greek weddings: they really know how to party. A three-day celebration with all the stops pulled out: elegant garments, exotic flowers, and every beauty beyond the mortal imagination. They’re thrown between elaborate ceremonies and rooms of food until even Percy’s newly immortal body is threatening to burst.
The final night is concluded with a chariot ride to their new abode, a small mansion tucked in the hills of Olympus. His father’s finest horses lead the procession, with gorgeous long manes and silver hooves. The chariot itself is a dark navy like the ocean, with white paintings of marriage and love. Gods, nymphs, satyrs, and campers line the streets, showering them in fruits and music. The remaining Camp Half-Blood campers and Chiron are amongst them.
And as he passes him, Poseidon gives him a long, knowing smile. He seems awfully proud of himself. He knocks Zeus in the shoulder to force him to clap more.
Calypso is smiling wider than he’s ever seen her, ear to ear, practically bursting with joy as the day she’s been dreaming of finally comes to fruition. Freedom and love, all she’s ever wanted. But the nagging feeling in his stomach remains, like a stone dropped in his gut, or a hand suffocating his windpipe. The persistent this is wrong.
He’s a hero. He’s a newly married man with one of the most beautiful goddesses attached to his hip. He no longer has to fear the same death and despair he witnessed to his peers. He has the gods’ favor (mostly). His father is proud of him. He should be happy.
(He isn’t happy.)
He can’t help but feel guilt, like he’s marrying her under false pretenses. The only way the gods would release her Ogygia was if he took her as his bride. The only way she could be free was if he married her. And that shouldn’t be a hard pill to swallow, but it is. Ancient Greek weddings were hardly ever about love, the dual existence of Hera and Aphrodite proved that, but he wanted to spend his immortality with someone he loved. And he cares about Calypso truly, deeply, he’s just not sure… he’s just not sure she’s the one.
(He doesn’t want to marry her.)
II. Rachel (Rhoda)
Okay, that was a lie. Rachel was the first.
In his defense, he actually doesn’t get somewhat serious with Rachel until after Ogygia. Yeah, yeah, call him his father’s son, but she was there for him when he needed it the most. That summer before his sixteenth birthday was the hardest, with his mother’s fatal illness and the impending prophecy of his own death. Rachel was the reason he got through a lot of that.
He actually mets her a year before in Athens when he was trying to hide from some freaky skeletons. Imagine his surprise when the weird, slightly rude, frizzy-haired girl who could see through the mist was the princess of Crete. She ends up helping him navigate through her family’s labyrinth and he owes her for his life more times than he can count. She’s actually pretty cool considering she’s descended from King Minos and all.
“What type of name is Rachel anyways?” he complains, swinging his torch around to investigate their surroundings better. The walls are tiled and painted despite being at least 50 feet underground. Beautiful and intricate paintings of the gods dining and dancing.
She steps over a skeleton that he would’ve tripped over, then grabs the back of his chiton before he can smack into a hidden wall. She looks over at him and grins deviously. “My real name is Rhoda, actually.” she turns away and continues navigating. “It’s pretty lame. Rachel sounds way cooler, doesn’t it?”
“Rachel” sounded weird and unnatural, foreign to his tongue and the way he shaped vowels, but he wasn’t about to argue with the person leading him through the world’s worst maze. Whatever she says goes. “If you say so,” he shrugs.
Rachel is weird like that. She has freaky visions of the future, half of which Perseus is pretty sure she’s just saying to pull his leg. Death, rectangular mountains of metal, flying humans, some second great prophecy– please. A bunch of jargon he doesn’t understand, but freaks him out plenty. She essentially dumps him to become the new Oracle of Delphi. Apollo is ecstatic, Percy less so.
He tries to check in on her every so often (without eliciting Calypso’s suspicion), but time as a god is weird. He had always wondered how his father could miss so many important events in his life, but for him, years were merely seconds, decades only hours. Even though his life was now longer, it was like suddenly everything was much faster.
“Why are you moping on my doorstep?”
She swats him with his broom, trying to sweep him away like dust. He grumbles, scooting over on the step to avoid her aim. She tilts her head, quirks a bright red eyebrow, and laughs, a beautiful laugh that seems ingrained in his mind. “Are you sulking?”
She seems to take pride in his misery these days and he doesn’t have the will to feel shame. He grumbles into his hands. “It’s not funny.”
“It’s a little funny,” she admits, grinning at him crookedly, and leaning against the broom handle. Her eyes glimmer mischievously. “She can’t be that bad, can she?”
She’s a little older now, twenty-five~ish, the age he would’ve been, and the years have suited her well. She’s stunning, a beauty known across the Mediterranean. Many people come for their prophecies and to catch a glimpse of the former princess. Just as many suitors have thrown themselves on Mount Parnassus and begged her to leave the Oracle for them. Percy’s pretty sure Apollo’s cursed them all, but the god still lets him hang around her without much complaining for some reason.
He huffs, muttering under his breath. “She’s just clingy.”
Calypso is a good wife, a great wife, better than he deserved, but that didn’t change her dependency. Sometimes he just needed space. He knows she’s worried he’ll leave her, but come on… The gods don’t exactly believe in divorce.
(Was that something he could do? Become the god of divorce?)
“The joys of marriage,” she teases with a sideways grin. And yeah, she’s gorgeous, but he’s always enjoyed her spirit and the sharpness of her mind, a soul just as playful as him. “Maybe should’ve thought about making an enemy out of the goddess of marriage before getting married, huh?”
He moans, sprawling against the steps dramatically. His head throbs. He can’t imagine spending another day married, let alone the rest of eternity. He could relinquish his immortality, but it’s more likely Zeus would force him to keep it to watch him suffer. (Gods, he is in a trap of his own making.)
He throws an arm over his eyes and considers joining his uncle in the Underworld. Sure, the guy was kind of creepy, but at least he’d be free. “Just leave me here,” he moans.
“Aye,” she complains, smacking him with the broom lightly. He resists a smile. It’s a testament to both his kindness and his affection for her that he has the power to blast her, but doesn’t. He still lets her tease him like they’re fourteen, like they’re still mortal children. She tries to sweep some dirt into his face, but he closes his eyes. “Get off my temple steps or I’ll call Lord Apollo.”
“Please,” he finally cracks an eye open. “I’m his favorite! He wouldn’t hurt me.”
She raises an eyebrow.
He laughs, “Probably.”
She laughs too and he hides his smile behind his arm. The greatest downside to being a god was having to deal with the other gods for the rest of eternity.
Honestly, he’d like to see him try. Sure, Perseus wasn’t an Olympian, but he wasn’t something to sniff at either. Minor god didn’t quite fit him, considering he could win against gods when he was just a demigod. Just think of what he could do now.
The sun finally dips beneath the horizon, turning the sky a brilliant orange. Rachel lowers her broom, joining him on the step to watch it. He admires her with a distant smile, her sharp features against the fluffy clouds. Her hair is the same color as the sky.
He lets himself wonder for a second. A world where he and Rachel make it, where he’s not married to Calypso and he spends every day of the rest of his life laughing. She’s the funniest person he’s ever known. She made everything easy with her witty mind and sharp humor. She always kept him on his toes. With her, there was never a boring day. If he was married to her, he thinks he wouldn’t mind facing death.
“The sunset is beautiful, isn’t it?” she says suddenly, startling him out of his daydream.
It takes his mind a few seconds to catch up with the present. He looks between her and the sky, blinking. His mouth feels impossibly dry. “Yeah. Yeah, it is.”
He wants to say something cheesy like “Not as pretty as you”, but with his luck, his wife will smite them both.
Would it have been different if he had realized his feelings sooner? (Would he have still married Calypso if they had?)
She kicks him with her foot lightly. He looks up at her, smiling. “What?”
Her lips twitch into a grin, “Thinking about your lovely wife?”
He rolls his eyes sarcastically, “You’re hilarious.”
“I am,” she agrees.
He sighs woefully, flopping over. He turns back to her, eyes sparkling like the sea. He grins at her dorkily. “You think I should join you and become a maiden?”
She barks a laugh. “You’d rather be a woman than be married to your wife?”
He scoffs playfully, avoiding the question. “You don’t think I could do it?” I’d rather be a woman with you, he doesn’t say. Maybe if he was a little braver, he would’ve.
She stands up again, picking up her broom from the steps. “You’d get bored.” she leans on her broom again, assessing him. “Aren’t you bored now?” her eyes seem to challenge him. He forces himself to swallow the lump in his throat.
“I’d be a great maiden,” he argues for the sake of arguing.
She smiles. “You’d be a beautiful maiden,” she agrees.
—-
Truthfully, he was beginning to think he was broken. He has a beautiful wife, a literal goddess at home, and he cares for her certainly, but he can’t bring himself to love her in the way he should. And it’s not fair.
Calypso hasn’t done anything wrong. She’s a great wife. She could easily put Hera to shame. She cooks all his favorite meals and laughs at all his bad jokes. She puts up with him, helps him in allying himself with other gods. She’s probably the only reason he’s made decent progress in the past few centuries with them. But no matter how hard he tries, he can’t change how he feels. Nothing stops that irritating nagging tugging at his heart strings, that deep yearning that craves for something more.
She doesn’t make his senses fuzzy, doesn’t make him smile or giddy to be around like she once did. Her presence doesn’t make him any lighter. If anything, it makes him heavier. It drags him down. His worry for her is ever-lasting, a never-ending tick that’s always itching at the back of his mind. What would Calypso think? But would Calypso disapprove? It’s suffocating, like water in his lungs, or like being strangled, like a dog held too close by their leash. He feels trapped, skittish, nervous and clawing at the walls, begging to be freed. He doesn’t like the banquets, the shallowness of the gods, but this was the sacrifice he made for the people he loves and he feels it tearing at his sanity.
The sea does not like to be restrained, his father had told him once. And though Perseus had certainly inherited Poseidon’s unpredictability, he was hoping to avoid the adultery altogether. Even if he was conceived from it, it just hurt too many people. And even if he doesn’t love Calypso in the way a good husband would, he still doesn’t want to hurt her.
“Why do you hate me?” Perseus complains, Aphrodite ignores him.
She continues studying her appearance in her vanity mirror. Her long dress pushes up her breasts too high and her hair is curled too tightly around her face. She likes to change with the beauty standards of the time and they’re in Paris now, the city of love, what better place to ask? Or so he had thought. She’d been in an awful good mood the past few decades and he was hoping a favor wouldn’t be too hard to come by.
Aphrodite lets out a beautiful, wonderful laugh. Soft like bells or the blustery summer wind. A true wolf in sheep's clothing. Her eyes sparkle. “I don’t hate you, Perseus.”
He looks at her flatly. “You’re out to get my marriage.”
She hums, tapping her nails against the vanity. She smiles, all sparkles. “Am I?”
An act that may have worked when he was a young, naive demigod, back when he mistakenly believed she was one of the weaker gods, but he’s seen her curse too many people since then to make the same mistake. Sure, she couldn’t drown an entire village in an instant like his father, but she could just as easily ruin all of their lives without so much as blinking. If anything, Poseidon was mercy. You had to live with love.
“Don’t play dumb,” he accuses. Love wasn’t dumb, but it wasn’t exactly smart either. It had no logical reasoning, no explanation for the way it was. No, it was something worse than smart. Something more vicious and unforgiving, wild and untamed. “You promised me back at Hephaestus’s junkyard you’d make my love life interesting.”
And she’s been suspiciously quiet since. Too quiet. In fact, aside from his own internal anguish, his love life for the past hundred years has been painstakingly boring. Rachel was the most interesting thing so far and she had passed centuries ago. (It still hurts when he thinks about her.)
She hums again, that soft little tune that could lull a mortal to their demise. “You won’t find love where you look for it,” she turns back to her mirror. She puffs her hair. “It finds you where you least expect it.”
If he thought Chiron was bad, Aphrodite was worse. She had a frustrating tendency to speak in rhymes and ominous warnings, and unlike Chiron, he couldn’t pry the answer out of her.
He resists the urge to curse her out. He supposes he should just be glad she hasn’t made him fall in love with a sheep or something.
Aphrodite watches him through her mirror as she reapplies her makeup, which is weird because it doesn’t look like she's wearing any. She puffs her face with enough powder to smother someone, but the moment it touches her face, it disappears. He wonders what she looks like to herself.
To him, her form was confusing, indecisive, and constantly shifting, fuzzy at the edges like it couldn’t decide what to be. Right now, she looks somewhere between Calypso and Rachel, his mother, and a theater actress he found attractive when he was young. Bright red hair, warm almond eyes, pouty lips, tan skin, and a splash of freckles. It was an odd mix, but being Aphrodite, she pulled it off.
He decides to pivot techniques and shakes his head. “I don’t even know why you bother. You always look perfect.”
It’s true, kind of creepily almost. She was like an alien in a way. Too human, even too godly for gods.
Her eyes dart to him in the mirror and her lips tug into a sharp smile. “Oh?”
Her grin is wolfish, hungry, like a predator waiting to pounce, a lion about to swallow its prey. There’s an unspoken challenge somewhere between them. Something about Perseus challenging her to do her best, but he’s been around long enough now to know Aphrodite’s best is everyone else’s worst. Even the gods weren’t safe from her.
Her eyes sparkle dangerously, “Trying to win brownie points now, are we?”
He shrugs. “Is it working?”
“It never hurts,” she agrees, turning back to her makeup. “If you must know, you can’t force herself to love her, you’re not meant to love her.”
He actually laughs for a second in disbelief. She can’t be serious. “I’m not meant to love my wife?”
She’s serious.
“Marriage of convenience,” she reminds him, tutting her tongue. “And I don’t think Hera is doing you any favors.”
He flinches, reminded of Rachel’s words. Okay, yeah, so maybe accusing the queen of the gods and marriage that she was shallow and only wanted a perfect family after she had led him to his future wife wasn’t the smartest of ideas, but he was honestly just frustrated and tired of Nikos, the son of Hades, being casted out. So sue him for standing up for a friend.
He crinkles his nose. “Marriage, yeah, but love is your thing.”
“It’s a joint effort,” she shrugs. “Sometimes we agree, sometimes we don’t. The heart wants what it wants, and I’m a simple guide,” she winks at him, turning back to her vanity, “for the most part.”
He closes his eyes. He can feel the waves thrumming against his veins, the hurricanes on his nape. He has to remind himself that fighting the gods won’t help his promise to Loukas.
He squeezes his fists, sighs, and reluctantly opens his eyes. He folds his arms over the chest. “I’ll do a quest for you.”
“Bah!” she cries, waving him off with one well-manicured hand. She grows impatient with his presence. “You’re not even a demigod anymore, where’s the fun in that?”
Fun in…. His eyes narrow and he has to resist a growl. “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”
They never change, do they?
She laughs, “Can you blame me? The great hero of Olympus! Begging for my help!”
He scowls, “I wasn’t begging.”
Even if he wasn’t as weirdly prideful and arrogant as the other gods, begging was still a sour spot. Mainly because he didn’t like bowing to anyone. Admittedly, this was an issue he had as a demigod.
“I just want to know,” he mutters. “She doesn’t deserve this.”
Calypso had been through enough in the past few thousand years, watching all of her lovers leave for others and never return. Now she was finally free, finally married to the man who saved her, and she still didn’t have his heart.
She was still the other woman.
Aphrodite sighs finally, woefully, like he’s killing her. She seems to come to the understanding that he now has the ability to bother her for all of eternity. The sea was persistent. (If she thought he was bad as a demigod, just wait.)
She drums her nails against the vanity, thinking. Her eyes– Calypso’s eyes– dart to him, but they’re too sharp to truly belong to her. She sighs, again. “If I help you with a nymph, will you leave me alone?”
All he can do for a few seconds is blink dumbly. “A nymph,” he repeats, echoing, trying to process the words himself. “You mean, like, someone else? I don’t love her, but I’m not cheating on her!”
She looks him up and down. “Are you sure you’re your father’s son?”
“Har-har.”
She turns to face him fully. For a second, he worries she’ll turn him into a swan or dove, but then he’s reminded he’s immune to that sort of thing now. Nice. Being a god did have some perks. “A word of advice, little godling, immortal relationships work differently than mortal ones. There’s a reason why only dearest Hera is monogamous.”
His skin crawls. He has an uncomfortable idea of what she’s getting at, but he doesn’t want to start with it. “What are you saying?”
She grins at him one last time, that beautiful wolfish smile that could blind anyone. She sets her makeup down. “You know what I mean,” she winks. “Toodles!” she shouts, and before he can protest, disappears in a puff of roses. The scent is blinding, overwhelming his senses. For a second, all he can see is pink. The vanity disappears, the light in the room seems to deem, and Perseus is left with his thoughts and the lingering scent of perfume.
