The Awesome Mother of Demigods: Sally Jackson met Thalia when the girl was a half-feral fourteen-year-old. Sally could safely say that she was more baffled than terrified by the deadly weapon wielded with precision and accuracy against Gabe. Part of ATC, can be read as a stand-alone for the most part.
Notes: There were a few comments about how abnormal Sally's reaction to Thalia's busting into the apartment was. So…here's a few headcanons.
Contrary to popular belief, Sally's fling with Poseidon wasn't fast and sweet, or slow and deep, or even a whirlwind romance. It was an angry, bitter thing where both parties had someone to cling to while their respective lives fell apart.
Also, Sally knew that she was the infamous 'woman on the side'. Before she and Poseidon fell into bed, there was a lot of whining about Sally's absent, harsh, and now-ill uncle; and Poseidon's half-abusive, half-distant wife. There were a lot of coffee dates where Sally handed him a glass of water and a coffee that was more chocolate than caffeine. There were equally as many Chinese takeout dates and Blockbuster rental movies with Sally's night class homework essays sprawled across her tiny apartment's living room floor.
Then there were the disasters that do not deserve to be called dates where Sally broke down crying because she couldn't pay for her college and her uncle's cancer treatments and Poseidon wrapped thick, strong arms around the petite but strong woman and hugged her tightly in the middle of a New York sidewalk. There were other disasters where Amphrite followed Poseidon and Sally landed a left-hook harsh enough to make the goddess's head snap back and Poseidon's eyes widen and all three of them get kicked out of the restaurant for brawling.
There was the particular disaster where Sally got the news that Pittacus, Sally's uncle, had died in the night and Sally just sat there and confessed that she was glad that he was gone and she felt horrible that she was glad. The week after the funeral, Sally blew the rest of her money on a week-long vacation to Montauk.
Poseidon tried to pay for it. Sally said that she was starting her life over and to not fight her over it.
He woke her in the dead of the night on the fifth day, looking stricken. "Sally, you're pregnant," he said.
"Bleglelarg," she responded. She turned to look at the clock on the nightstand. "It's free—three—in the morning, 'Don," she mumbled. "Have your panic attack at some hour that's not ungodly."
Considerately, he waited until seven to wake her again, and told her again that she was pregnant. She stumbled into the little kitchen nook with the coffee maker, and then swore an oath when she realized that coffee was caffeine and caffeine was bad for the baby. She went and threw open the door to the freezing end-of-November air instead. She stood there for a moment, the wind coming off the ocean whipping around her sleep pants and long sleeve shirt and whirling through her tangled hair. After a long minute, she shut the door again and sat at the table.
"Okay," she said, now looking much more awake. Her eyes were the same shade as Poseidon's: an unearthly and brilliant sea green. "So I'm pregnant. Why are you waking me up to have a panic attack over it?"
So he sat and explained the Ancient Laws and his bastard of a brother's law and the Prophecy told at the end of World War II, and that the baby's life would be cursed from beginning to end. "The River Styx takes its own," he said miserably, "and it cannot have me, as I am immortal. It will take the baby."
She sat for a long while, their hands folded together over the small table. "Stay until the end of the week," Sally said after a moment. "And I promise you, our child will be protected until I no longer can."
"When you can't," Poseidon said, "there is a haven for children of the gods, quite near here. When we leave, I will show you the area that it is in. They will show the child how to defend itself."
"For the next two days," Sally said, "you will teach me."
Poseidon gave her a knife that would not harm her no matter if she stabbed it through her own heart, but would kill with a deep enough wound to anything that would seek to do the child harm. He showed her how to use it, how to sharpen it though she could not touch anything but the handle, and how to keep it in good condition.
He kissed her deeply on the eve of the seventh day, where Sally piled all of her junk back into her ratty car and he showed her where Camp Half-Blood was. Then he got out of the car at the camp and vanished into a sea breeze.
And Sally sat at the edge of the road in her beat up Honda that was older than she was and cried.
Sally met her first demigod not three months later. There was some sort of snake lady that could evidently smell the child growing in her, and thought that she was the tasty demigod. She had taken up night classes once more and the snake woman had sneaked in, evidently disguising herself as a fellow student. The monster had attempted to take a swipe at Sally, was surprised when her claws went right through her neck, and was even more surprised when Sally whipped out her knife and stabbed the monster in the chest.
The whole altercation took less than fifteen seconds and was utterly silent. No one even glanced in their direction, but there was a boy of about seventeen that was staring, wide-eyed.
Sally tuned back into her professor's lecture on Homer.
Peter Wright, son of Apollo, followed her out of the classroom when she jerked her head to the left while maintaining eye contact. He quizzed her on who her parentage was, and then was stunned when she told him that she was mortal but carrying a demigod.
"Powerful spawn ya got there," Peter said, impressed enough to have Brooklyn bleeding into his vowels. "Ya know who tha kid's parent is?"
"I do," Sally said, and when she said nothing more, Peter dropped it like a hot brick.
So Sally worked two jobs to keep a roof over her head and herself in at least one class. She waitressed in the early morning for a diner and was a sales clerk in the evenings that her class was not on. Her coworkers threw her a small baby shower as the due date moved closer.
Her water broke at six in the morning as the diner opened, and her co-worker, Annalisse, had her bundled back into her car and driven to the hospital so fast that Sally honestly couldn't keep up with what was happening.
The nurse that helped her deliver had very familiar green eyes and his coworkers called him Don.
Sally said nothing that could be suspect but she grinned at him through gritted teeth. "I'm having a baby," she told him.
"Yes, you are," Don said.
"I'm going to tell him of his father as he grows up," she told him, "and make sure that he knows his father is a good man."
The man's smile behind the surgical mask was evident. "He?"
"I'm having a son," she told him. "I'm naming him Perseus, after a hero who got a happy ending. Maybe that will offset some of the problems that there will probably be."
"I'm sure that he will be brilliant," (Posei)Don said.
About a year after Percy was born, Sally had to quit taking classes once more, juggle babysitters, and switch jobs. The most recent babysitter had just called to tell Sally that her little brother was ill and needed to wait three hours until her father was home to supervise her little brother.
She stood in the middle of her room, and said to thin air, "Poseidon, you're on babysitting duty an hour from now. It will last two hours. Get your godly butt over here."
"Mamamamamamama," Percy said.
And on a leap of faith, she went to work and left Percy unsupervised. When she got back and Jennifer handed Percy over, there was a letter in bold handwriting and the smell of the salty sea.
He is beautiful.
I love you.
ψ
She married Gabe when Percy was a precocious and trouble-attracting five-year-old (holy heavens, the snakes in his sleeping bag almost gave her heart failure). He exploded the sink into Gabe's face when he got a hint of what went on behind his back.
Thankfully, Gabe, being a very normal (if abhorrent) person, wrote it off to bad plumbing.
Then her son went missing at school two years later, and then he was returned hours later by a teenage girl in ratty clothing and a wildly fierce look in her eye who was threatening Gabe and his poker friends. There was a boy about Percy's age that trailed behind her with the same half-feral look in his eyes.
"Oh, please," she said as the girl efficiently got Gabe and all of his friends to back away from her son. "Call me Sally."
So I wrote this in about two hours, if that, so if you see errors, let me know.
I've never done anything extensive with Sally, and it's kind of awesome and thrilling to play with her character like this. We know a lot from Percy's dissertation about her in The Lightning Thief, but nothing ever goes anywhere with the knowledge: her parents dead when she was five because of a plane crash, raised by an uncle who made her drop out of college to take care of him, this is canon. This isn't even my special brand of fanon, this is actual canon, and until the last two sections, this can be based out of canon, too.
I am well aware that this made Sally very, very human, in that she whines and she cries and she does stupid things like blow her money on a vacation. That was intentional. She's human. She's the very best of humanity, where she cries in pain but does what's right and whines in frustration and wrangles her life to make it all fit. Even better, she throws wicked punches in revenge for being emotionally abusive, distant, or over-controlling. If you ever read what little there is to be seen about Amphrite, she's...not nice, let's put it that way. She and Poseidon were an arranged marriage that failed even more epically than Hades's folly with Persephone. In all honesty, there may be other versions of her, as there oft are in mythology, but I've only ever read or heard the ones where she's a harpy in the modern sense of the word.
Anyway. I hope you enjoyed this!
-Ruby