Author's Note: This is my first attempt at fanfic in a long time, and the one I'm most proud of. Please review if you like it, but only constructive criticism, please, flames just get in the way of things. OOC will sometimes happen because it's an AU, but if you think it's too much just notify me. I'll mostly try to keep it canon, but world building must get in the way of that sometimes. And there will be lots. There will be romance, but hold your hippogriffs, action and world building comes first with me because sword fights and castles are cool. And, of course, since Percy is the king of sass, bad jokes will be interspersed throughout. Lots of OCs will happen, most of which will be bastard children. Sometimes swearing, because it's a staple of my fanfics, but most of the time it will just be a bunch of "bloody hell!" because everybody is secretly British.
Disclaimer: PJO is in no way mine. It's Rick Riordan's. If it was mine, I would be stinking rich right now.
"Day's over! Pull in your nets and hand over your largest to Chiron!"
Percy attempted to pull in the net of fish as quickly as possible, but the massive load made it extremely difficult and made his rather skinny arms feel sore. He wiped the sweat off his head, before setting to work again. This time, the fish were much easier to reel in, they seemed to just give up trying to flail around and realize their death to a hungry mouth somewhere in the kingdom. About time, really.
"Good work, Perce!" yelled a crooked smile from somewhere in the crowd. He would recognize that voice from anywhere, his only friend, Grover.
In general, you wouldn't expect Grover to be among a bunch of extremely heavyweight fishermen. He was scrawny, walked with a limp - due to his legs being crushed and barely mended after a horse trampled them in an ambush of assassins or something. He was always changing the story to something else - an arrow in his thigh that he barely managed to pull out, a dagger misplaced that he later found in his knee, but the assassin story was the most recent. Really, they were much too dramatic for a person who was scared of rabbits - once, Percy saw him running from an overly large tuna. But he was really his only friend, the only person he could talk to without fear of embarrassment.
He flashed a second's smile to him, before returning to his work. This net was particularly bad; he had made it out of weak rope and used some pretty clumsy knotting for it, but it technically still worked - just not for overlarge fish. A final tug brought the net to shore, and he stared down at his work. It was a pretty fine catch, better than most, just five small fish out of fourteen in the net. Those small fish would make a fine dinner for tonight - a stew of some sort, perhaps. Nobody ever bought small fish, and they were usually all he and his mother had for dinner.
"Well done, m'boy!" exclaimed Chiron. He was a kind man, in general, but the fact that he was lame stopped him from going to greater pursuits than being a simple fish monger, but the few times Percy had seen him swing a sword to slay something or another had made him think that perhaps the man had a history with the army, or at least fighting. "Those are some mighty large fish you've got in there," he told him, tipping a good few coins into his hand in the process of taking the net from him, and dumping out all the fish but the tiny ones. Percy gladly accepted them in his cloth sack. Tonight's dinner would be better than most nights, at least, even if it was comprised of five tiny fish that were little more than squints. Not fare for nobles, but food good enough for peasants. Because that was what he was. A peasant. Simple-minded, carefree. Fancy things were for the rich to care about, not him.
Placeau's ground was hard to walk on, because it was so muddy. It was known as the mud village for a reason. However, at one point, that mud turned to perfect dirt and to perfect sand and then to perfect waters teeming with fish, reasons why so many people made their lives here. That, and the fact it was so close to the capital. Nobody liked walking too much in Atlantica. If you wanted to travel, you did it by boat. And since nobody bothered with boats much because they were too poor or too lazy, you usually stayed in your home village your entire life. And that was exactly what Percy intended to do.
He reached his house inshort time. It was tiny, one-roomed, mud and brick, and smelled like fish and salt, but it was home. "Ma!" he felt the flowered cloth they used for a door brush over his forehead, tickling him a bit, greeting him as he passed into the safety of the four walls around him. "I'm home!"
She dropped her sewing to greet him. His mother was a lovely woman, in short - she smelled like sugar and lemon, a nice blend of sweet and sour scents, and a bit of spices too - to match her ability to somehow pick up any bow and pierce a man's neck. Shame he didn't inherit that ability, but they weren't much alike anyways. His black hair looked nothing like her brown streaked with grey, and their eye colours were nowhere alike - a piercing ocean green for him, with a slightly bad right eye that he kept shut most of the time, and the light colour of the blue flowers that occasionally popped up in the town for her.
"Oh, Percy!" she tsked, taking the bag of fish from him. "You're soaking wet! What did I tell you about getting your clothes wet?"
"But, ma, work-" he stopped himself, knowing what she would inevitably say, and rolled his eyes and quickly whipped his shirt off and kicked open the wooden trunk near their beds. Most of the furniture in the house was old, very old, and usually broken. He grabbed the cleanest and topmost, and forced it over his head. Rough cloth that itched his skin, unlike the silk that he saw nobles in when one happened to cross through the village. And that was often. Why did they get such wealth when everybody around them were starving?
Dinner was a silent affair, mostly fish stewed with salt and cheap market vegetables. It wasn't entirely edible - he thought he might have seen some organ of some sort still in there, but it was still food. He picked at it slowly, feeling quite awkward, listening to the quiet of it all. He decided to break the silence, but he just simply had to do it in the most awkward way possible - "What happened to my father?"
The clatter of a wooden bowl as it hit the ground vibrated through the room. He knew he shouldn't have asked that question, but he did anyways - stupid him. Why, oh why must he have done that? He knew better than to discuss his father in front of his mother. It was a particularly touchy subject for her. His father had disappeared at sea, she had said. Disappeared. Never dead. She also never did say taken up by sirens or swayed by false claims of treasure or sentenced to death by the king or gone back to his wife and proper family, not his bastard son he fathered with a poor village girl.
She sighed, and picked up her bowl again and stabbed at her fish with more force than needed. "Percy, it's like I've told you since you were a child. He disappeared at sea. That was what happened. There's nothing else to the story."
"I'm not a child anymore, ma. I'm nearly sixteen. I deserve to know the full thing. Please, ma…" he pleaded with her, knowing it was useless to argue with her. He would never get the full thing, that was it.
He coughed, and took his bowl and his mother's, which were both empty at this point, and picked himself off the ground. "Ah, nevermind… I'm going down to the well for water, alright?" he bent over to kiss his mother on the forehead, and crept out of the door.
The well was generally crowded with people, though today, there was only one person there, a carrot-haired girl he recognized as Nancy, the younger sister of Henry, one of the people he worked with. Henry was alright, despite the fact that he rarely spoke except to make a comment about the weather, but he generally disliked Nancy for her rude and uptight behavior despite being one of the lower class - meaning that she expected to be waited on hand and foot for everything. That showed even at the well, with her turning her nose up to him and stalking away as he walked by with his heavy bucket.
He thought of all his foolishness as he lowered the bucket down, which was a painstakingly long process due to the handle being rusted and creaky. Why, oh why must he have asked that question to his mother? He knew it had been a touchy subject for her, and yet he still pressed on. He pressed his hand to the well, and sighed, pushing up his sleeve with his other hand. He was an idiot. The biggest idiot in Atlantica, maybe even the entire continent of Olympus. He closed his eyes, listening to the waves.
His nose started twitching - something was wrong. It smelled like... flames. Smoke and flames.
As quickly as possible, he pulled his bucket back up from the well, and ran back the direction of his village, expecting perhaps some thieves or a common beast, but no, that was not what was happening at all. The village was being attacked by firebirds - terrible little fiends from Ironglade, the kingdom to the east built on a giant volcano and home to creatures made entirely of them, firebirds being one of them. Firebirds almost always seemed to be attracted to Placeau, and they weren't nice to the villagers, either - almost every building was on fire, but luckily, they shared a weakness with fire, something Atlantica was surrounded by. He thought about his mother, panicking, and he ran as quickly as he could to his house, cold water sloshing over his bare and muddy feet. The well water was almost always freezing, and his feet were numbing as more and more of it tipped out of the side of the bucket and on to his legs.
He placed the bucket just outside the house and rushed in, to see his mother gathering her bow and arrows out of the trunk. She tossed him an old sheathed dagger that had been a family heirloom of some sort, and he caught it in midair. This was something they prepped for, waiting for when, not if, it would come again. The last time it had been a year and a half ago. This was unusually late in the year for it to happen. Pulling on his old, worn leather boots that he usually saved for these things, as he didn't want to step on a flame, he tucked the dagger, with the sheath on, of course - and he ran out the door, and grabbed his bucket with his mother, just as a firebird dropped a few embers on the thatched roof as a small parting gift. Glancing around, he saw the line to the well was astronomical now, and he ran as quickly as he could into the village center, where the market was, and where the flames seemed to be the worst.
"Percy! Over here!" he ran to the village woman that was shouting his name, and handed the bucket over to her. He quickly darted, trying to find a place he could help, but there really was none. Everybody was occupied trying to fight off the firebirds with what little weaponry they had, running to the well for more water, or rolling on the ground because a firebird had pooped fire on them. He was going to go to the well along with all the others for more water, but something stopped him.
There was drool. On his shoulder. He yelped, jumped back, and realized something was breathing on him. Something... as in not human.
The thing was a gigantic bull. A gigantic, walking bull. Panicking, he pulled his dagger out of the sheath in his boot, and waved it, trying to be threatening, but a roar made him jump back to the ground and make a small yelp and knock the dagger out of his hand.
"PERCY!" he heard his name being shouted, then out of the corner of his eye, he saw a sword. Flying. Towards him.
He tried to catch it, and barely escaped getting cut - before noticing that he had actually been cut, and pretty badly, a gigantic gash on his arm. He tried to ignore the pain as best as he could, but it stung. Hard. He got up, just as the beast roared, in his face. He wanted to run away like the idiot he was, but somehow, the sword was... giving him strength? He couldn't describe it, but it made him feel... powerful.
He closed his eyes, gripping it with his two hands. And then he swung. Just one swing, one quick swing. And it was a good swing, unlike anything he'd ever felt before. It was thrilling.
Something seemed to take over him at that point, something indescribable. All he could feel was water. Water, cold, unforgiving. He could see nothing, but he could feel it under his fingers.
Then all he could feel was pain, his arm cut. And his mother screaming. And the breath of the bull creature, again.
And horse hooves. Horse hooves. How odd, for his conciousness to fade to the sound of horse hooves...