I tried to ignore the thoughts that were running through my head as I sat with my new neighbor on the dinky New York subway. Sure, this was just a day to relax and have fun, do normal things that normal people do on normal days. And even though there wasn't really much that could go wrong from me just following Percy around to who knows where, I was still on edge. First of all, I'd noticed that the boy could be a bit of an idiot. But, though I knew that he was a good person, I didn't completely trust him.

I tried to push down all my fears, forcing the voices in my head to stop listing all the ways that this simple train ride could end up with me having to fight some stupid supervillian who wanted me dead. Way to be optimistic.

My eyes drifted to the window of the train again, trying to figure out where we were just by the streaked stains on the concrete walls outside. Not that it would actually work. Percy was grinning, probably excited by the prospect of blind adventure.

Soon, the train jerked to a stop, swaying every passenger synchronously. The doors hissed open, provoking many of the people to exit onto the platform outside.

I looked to Percy, asking the unspoken question of whether or not this was our stop.

"Pick a number," he said quickly in response.

"What?"

"Just pick a number."

I raised an eyebrow, but gave him an answer, "Okay… 11?"

Percy nodded, "11 more stops it is."

The subway doors closed, and I sighed, trying to get comfortable.

It didn't take long for us to reach the next platform, and the next, and the next, each arrival signaled by the opening of the train doors and the shaking of Percy's head, indicating that we were in for another ride to the next stop. I didn't know the exact amount of time we'd spent on the train, but by the time Percy was finally satisfied with one of the platforms, my feet were starting to ache from standing still.

Percy and I stepped off the train and into the bustling city. The complete change of the sounds of whistling wind and small talk from the train to the sounds of thousands of footsteps and all the people of the city was immediately apparent, but it was familiar. It felt like home.

"I found something," Percy exclaimed triumphantly, waving me over to where he was standing a few feet ahead of me

"What?" I asked, a bit confused; we were just standing in front of a graffitied wall. As cool as the art was, I was pretty sure that it was frowned upon, and honestly, "Percy, we are currently looking for a way to spend our day, and I am not going to do it staring at a painted wall for hours."

"But Peter, would you consider spending hours looking at painted walls?" Percy asked as we rounded a corner.

Presently, I noticed the multitude of gratified buildings, walls upon walls of art surrounding us; the most beautiful, weird, and colorful scenes were depicted on them. Hallway-like alleys led off from here, art coloring their walls, too.

"You know what, I think you did find something," I said, probably sounding a bit dazed due to the fact that I was busy staring at the pictures and colors surrounding me.

He hummed in agreement, "This is the Bushwick Street Art, I forgot it was here to be honest. All the art's changed since the last time I came, but I used to be here a lot a few years ago. My old school is only a few blocks away."

I had no idea how long we were wandering through the streets, just enjoying the art. For the most part, the pair of us were silent, sometimes having short conversations about the paintings, or just making offhanded comments about what we were observing.

"Hey, come look at this!" Percy beckoned, grinning widely.

I followed him between the two walls of some small buildings, noticing the bright colors burning at the corners of my eyes. Percy meandered through the rows of murals, ducking around corners and across streets.

"Poor mermaids," he told me, frowning at a large painting. I looked at it with him, enjoying the artist's work. Two mermaids floated in the picture, if you could even call them mermaids. Each one only had part of their body still intact, the rest gone to show only the milky bones underneath. The first looked almost completely dead, with its skull morphed in a ghost-like expression, though its entire turquoise tail looked lively and bright. The second mermaid still had skin on her pale face, and instead of having a fully scaled, live tail like the first, her tail was only bone, as the first mermaid's torso had been. She stared down on him, her face like an alien's with ornate colors and shapes decorating it. She held something in her hand, a bright pink fish perhaps.

I looked over at Percy, who was now starting to move onto the next mural. I followed, keeping my eyes on the painting until I was too far to keep my head turned.

There were lots of beautiful and sophisticated pieces, landscapes and portraits (Percy seemed to enjoy a specific painting of the ocean), but I really liked the ones that seemed more than just a bit crazy.

Some were painted scenes, with stories that you could make up in your head to go along with, but others were so completely strange that it was hard to match a narrative with them. Instead, all I had to do was laugh along with the kookiness.

"What do you think about this one?" I asked Percy, eyeing a strange piece of art. He titled his head as he took in the scene. A toucan was in mid flight in the picture, its wingspan stretching longer than a car. A multitude of animals hung from its back, and colors and other objects were also along for the ride.

"Looks like the animals missed their flight and had to resort to this poor guy," Percy stated.

"I'm surprised that he agreed, that's a lot of luggage. The passengers must be paying," I responded, nodding to the objects spilling over the sides of the toucan's body and through the sky on their descent to some bright purple landscape below.

"I really doubt it," Percy told me, one of his eyebrows raised. "See that look on the monkey's face? He's definitely up to something."

"Maybe he just stole the pig's suitcase, it looks pretty angry."

"Either way, he's untrustworthy…"

I smiled.

We didn't stay for too long after, the sun had started to beat down on the streets (of which I was getting pretty tired of walking on in the first place). But before we could go, I found my favorite mural of the day.

We had started heading back to the subway station, in for another (and hopefully shorter) train ride. We still stopped to look at some of the art, and one in particular caught my eye. It was of Spider-man… me. A grin spread across my face as I drifted over to the wall.

The Avengers seemed to be a recurring theme in the art around here. It made sense, and it wasn't surprising to find a painting of the Avengers Tower, colors exaggerated so that everything almost seemed to be a kids cartoon, or artistic depictions of Iron Man, Thor, and most of the other superheroes that were known for protecting the city. But there hadn't really been any pictures of Spider-man. I didn't mind the lack of recognition in the artwork in the slightest, but I had to admit that it would have been cool to have someone paint a portrait of you.

And here I was, standing in front of a huge painting of Spider-man. I'm still in awe at the artistic talent that some people are gifted with. I was crouching in the mural, elbows on my knees. I stared out over the city that never sleeps from my spot on top of what I assumed was a building, the bright lights reflecting off of the wide white eyes of my mask. Everything about it amazed me, but out of everything, the thing that did the most was the fact that this person had captured everything so well. Like they had been right next to me, painting a picture of my stance. Everything was so on point, and I could almost feel myself on that roof, the wind against my costume-covered skin, and the sounds of the city washing over me. The one place that I loved the most.

I finally tore my eyes away from the Spider-man drawing, but not before taking the cellphone out of my pocket and snapping a few photos just to remember the feeling of the art. It was only paint on a brick wall, but yet it had such a beautiful effect that I had to preserve the memory.

I looked around the street, ready to actually finish the short walk back to the station so that we could catch a train to wherever we were going next. But Percy didn't seem to be anywhere nearby, at least from what I could see. I furrowed my eyebrows, not looking forward to having to find him in the maze of winding streets and sporadically placed buildings. I walked over to the nearest corner, a wide opening between two small buildings. Luckily. Percy was there, already running to catch up to me.

"Where'd you go?" I asked him.

"Just looking at some of the art down there," he told me as he casually pointed behind him. I nodded, and we made our way back to the trains.

As I'd hoped, the second round on the subway wasn't nearly as long. After only the first or second stop, we got off. If it had been any longer, I'd've probably called it and we would be on the way home right now.

A mass of greenery appeared in front of us as we left the station, everything was bright and colorful under the summer sun, and the clumps of trees provided the perfect amount of shade. It was nice and cool under the shelter of their leaves, and I was grateful for it.

Percy started to walk ahead of me. He looked curious, like he hadn't been here a million times before (which I bet he had). I followed him farther into the green scenery ahead of us. It was loud out with a combination of scuttling animals, shouting children, and just the regular walking and bike-riding of the ongoers.

Percy was focused on a bird to his left, completely ignoring the maze of people ahead of him, but still managing to navigate his way blindly. The bird was eyeing a group of people having a picnic, a mix of a few kids and adults. It was a pretty typical setup, they had a large blanket spread beneath them, and were all eating what looked to be sandwiches as they talked among themselves. The kids were in a heated game of rock-paper-scissors.

But the bird ignored all of it, keeping its focus on the large bag of corn chips to the side of the blanket. It had a target. Quickly but carefully, it made its way over to the snacks, keeping alert as it snuck. I snapped my head towards Percy as I heard him start humming the Mission Impossible theme song under his breath, almost like a cheerleader for the bird. Finally, the animal made it to the bag of chips, but just as his beak clamped over the foil of the package, the hand of one of the people at the picnic reached to grab a chip. Surprisingly though, the bird didn't fly away, and instead used all its strength to drag the bag away. A fight seemed to break out between the bird and one of the smaller kids at the picnic.

I grinned at how funny it all was. At how invested I was in something so small and a bit stupid. Percy still stood, mesmerized by the scene. Both of us had stopped walking to watch from afar.

"Let's go Percy," I said, waving my hand. "We're starting to seem kind of creepy staring at them." He didn't budge, instead tilting his head to the side and scrunching his eyebrows together curiously at the bird.

He finally tore his eyes away, and from what I gathered, the bird had started a pretty heated fight. It was surprisingly aggressive, and soon a few of its friends had joined it in stealing the food. And they succeeded, dragging the large bag of chips away from the group of people.

We kept walking, and I could see Percy's eyes darting from place to place, never resting. Until something finally snagged his attention.

He grinned, starting to jog, "I'm getting ice cream, Peter!" He didn't look back at me, but as I started to walk over with him, he chuckled and yelled back to me, "Slow poke!"

He still made it to the cart first, purchasing a bright blue popsicle and immediately starting to turn his teeth blue by devouring it. I was curious to see how bright blue his face would be by the time he was finished.

"You want some? I have a bit of money left," Percy told me, bringing a five dollar bill and a few stray coins into his unoccupied hand. The syrup of the popsicle dripped down onto the bill, leaving little colored spots on it. Percy seemed to notice, but he also didn't really seem to care.

"I'll get my own, thanks though," I told him, shaking my head at money and digging out my own (not blue-stained) bills.

"Suit yourself," he responded as he shrugged, continuing to eat his popsicle.

I looked at the list of options on the cart, and low and behold, there was a Spider-man popsicle. Today was a good day. I couldn't hide my wide smile as the vendor handed one to me.

My smile faltered a bit as I unwrapped the packaging, though. It was pretty deformed, the red white and blue mixing into each other to create something unidentifiable… but it was still Spider-man, and any Spider-man was better than no Spider-man. And now I was going to eat my own face, my own very deformed face.

"What is that?" Percy asked, side-eyeing the popsicle in my hands.

"I could ask you the same question," I responded, defending the work of art that I held.

"It's blue! no explanation needed," Percy told me, describing his popsicle.

"I'm surprised that you haven't turned into a smurf yet," I said sarcastically, still amazed by the amount of blue that he surrounded himself with every day.

"Hey! I don't eat that much blue food," he paused. "But you don't actually think I would turn into a smurf, do you?"

"Oh, you definitely would," I said, feigning seriousness.

Percy made a show, widening his eyes visibly, and looking down at his popsicle, betrayed. "Oh whatever, it's worth it," he finally gave in and kept on eating.

I laughed and went to take a bite of my own.

We kept on walking, and by the time we finished our popsicles, we had made it somewhere. A large brick archway decorated with intricate statues stood in the park.

"You seem to be our tour guide, so which path are we taking?" I asked Percy.

He looked up at the structure, trying to read off of a rusted plaque. He squinted, but couldn't seem to make it out. It made sense, the plaque was discolored and splotchy, hard to read. I tried my best to take a close look at it, and read it aloud, "Central Park Zoo."

"Hmm, I prefer aquariums, but we can work with this," Percy said, mirth evident in his voice, as he eyed the brass animals on top of the arch.

He stepped towards the gate, but I stopped him. "Percy, you look like you murdered a smurf," I told him, gesturing to the blue all over his face and shirt.

"No! Not my own brethren! How dare you make that accusation," Percy replied, hands crossed across his chest.

But we found a bathroom anyway, and Percy rinsed the blue from the surprising amount of things that he'd gotten it on. Finally, he finished up, dripping with water, and we headed back over to the zoo.
Percy and I got into line at the ticket booth. There wasn't an insane number of people, but there were still enough to require a decent wait. And with the approximate 15 minutes that we spent cramped between two groups of people in the snaking line, I learned that Percy was not good at waiting.

He groaned at the pace the line was moving, his expression annoyed. And to go along with his impatience, he would never stay still. Mostly, he would play with the retractable belts keeping the line in order, pulling it out just to watch it snap back. I couldn't blame him, though, those things were pretty fun.

Finally, we made it to the front of the line (well, it wasn't actually that long, but it feels like forever when you're stuck with nothing to do). Percy and I had to pool our money -he hadn't brought much, and had already spent a good percentage of his own on his ice cream- but we managed to get by with two tickets to the zoo and a few cents in change.

"Whew," Percy sighed, wiping a hand across his forehead, "that wait was horrible."

"It was only like 15 minutes, Percy," I replied, but I secretly agreed. Who wouldn't?

I held the tickets up and Percy grabbed one, holding it between two fingers.

"Perfect, thanks Pete," he said, and started off towards the actual entrance. I followed.

There weren't any problems with getting in, and we made our way towards the animals. Percy was leading the way still, that seemed to be how today was going to go. But I mean, going in without a plan is sometimes the best plan there is.

"Have you ever been here before?" I asked Percy as he navigated through a few crowds of people.

"Nope," he threw back, looking around with a grin.

"Yeah, me neither," I said, squinting my eyes at everything.

"Well, when all else fails... you go look at the fish," Percy told me matter-of-factly, smiling as he tilted his head to get me to follow. He marched off and I suppressed an exasperated smile, snagging a map from a small wooden holder at the zoo entrance. I kept my eyes trained on Percy, though, as he continued to stride through the crowds into some unknown part of the zoo. I jogged to catch up with him.

"You sure that you want to see the fish?" I asked, looking at Percy skeptically.

"Of course I'm sure," he told me seriously, crossing his arms.

"How about we go see the snow leopards instead, I heard they're the most popular...," I offered, trying to sway him.

"No, the fish are the best," he stood by his decision. I personally didn't agree that they were all that interesting.

"Fine," I settled, and Percy immediately continued on his way over to the fish. Not that he actually knew where he was going.

"Hey Percy," I called, "the fish are that way." I had glanced down at the map, and pointed in the direction of the snow leopard exhibit.

Percy raised his eyebrows, probably embarrassed that he hadn't even gotten a map for himself. But he nodded, following my directions.

"So we have to take a right at the toucan exhibit here," I instructed after a minute of walking, still looking down at the map.

"We already took that turn," Percy informed me.

"Oh, okay, then we have to take a left here..." I replied.

Finally, we made it to the spot on my map that I had been marking with my forefinger. I looked up, but not to a sight that I was expecting. Instead of being in front of the exhibit of a regal predator, I just saw Percy, nose pressed up against the glass of a large fish tank.

How'd we get here? I'm not that bad at reading maps, am I? I asked myself, tilting my head to the side as Percy and one of the fish behind the glass seemed to be in a staring contest, the fish's mouth gaping open. Was it Percy? It was hard to believe that the boy in front of me had masterminded a plan to steer me away from the snow leopards, without even knowing that I was trying to go there. But how else could we have coincidentally ended up in the exact place that he had wanted to go?

"Percy..." I trailed off, not really knowing what to say. Instead, I just laughed with Percy at the fish in front of him, who was currently putting on a show.

I sighed, maybe the fish were interesting enough. The one in front of Percy was blue, yellow, fairly small, and very energetic. It looked very excited. But then again, all the fish did. The interior of the glass buzzed with the movement of a hundred colorful animals.

"Hey, look at that one," I said to Percy, pointing to one of the fish inside the tank

We spent the most time staring at the fish than any other exhibit, it was probably Percy trying to get as much of an aquarium experience as he could. Finally, though, we got to walk to see the snow leopards. It was definitely interesting, but for some reason, I had to agree with Percy that the fish had been better. It was almost as if they'd decided to dance for us, creating a colorful performance for me, Percy, and all the other people there.

Eventually, we somehow ended up at the children's petting zoo. About a dozen kids stood around, parents holding them by their shoulders as they held out handfuls of food pellets to the animals. I was pretty eager to go in and feed the animals along with Percy, and so we both scrounged for loose change and paid for a handful of treat pellets.

I made my way over to a large sheep. Running a hand over to the wool on its back and sticking my hand out so that they could eat the pellets. It was an interesting interactive experience.

And that's when Percy ran by, a terrified expression on his face, and a very angry goat right on his tail. He raced around the petting area, the feed that had been in his hand spilling onto the hay covered floor and creating a trail of food pellets behind him. I couldn't tell if the goat chasing Percy was just playing with him, or if he was genuinely mad at Percy. But then again, I wasn't too surprised that Percy had managed to somehow make a goat deemed 'child friendly' angry enough to chase him around the exhibit.

Percy looked over at me, eyes wide. "Peter!" he shouted, dragging my name out desperately. I raised my eyebrows at him, a little scared myself of the creature causing Percy to run as fast as he could in loops around the petting zoo. It was only about a foot tall, but it looked absolutely murderous.

Percy looked exasperated when I didn't move to help him, and for a moment he slowed down, just enough for the goat to catch up to him. Percy winced and covered his head like there was an earthquake, bracing himself for a vicious goat attack. But instead of leaping on him and sucking his blood or something that some angry demon goat would do, it just stood next to Percy, chewing on the hem of his jeans absentmindedly.

Realizing that the goat was in fact not out to get him, Percy slowly opened his eyes and put his arms down. "Huh, that wasn't as bad as I was expecting," he said, shrugging. The goat seemed to get upset by that, chomping harder onto the denim. "Okay, okay, you're a very scary goat," Percy settled with, going in for a pat on the animal's head but withdrawing quickly as the goat snapped at his hand. The whole thing was very confusing.

"What just happened?" I asked Percy, utterly clueless.

"I don't even know," he responded.

One of the staff had finally come over to help wrestle the animal off of Percy. Apparently, they'd been stunned by the sight just as much as I had. The person working there apologized furiously as they finally worked the goat off and got it to go away.

Percy relaxed, exhaling a laugh as he watched the goat - now restrained to a pen - give him the evil eye as it chewed on something. I don't think I'd ever seen an animal look at a human as hatefully as that goat did to Percy.

Finally, breaking eye-contact with the extremely disturbing goat, Percy started to walk away. He crossed his arms, "Yeah, I think that that's enough zoo for one day..."

"Agreed," I replied. We had started to make our way out of the park entirely, but I had no idea where it was that we were heading. "So, what's next?"

"Meh, I dunno," Percy told me, shrugging.

"We should do something else that's really tourist-y, get the full New York experience."

"Yeah, 'cause the kids who've lived in New York all their lives definitely need to become tourists in their own city," Percy said, rolling his eyes.

I ignored him, "We could go see the Statue of Liberty... or go to the top of the Empire State Building."

Of course, I'd been to these places a million times- and with a much better view. But maybe on an observation deck looking down at the city was as close as we could get to web-slinging above it without actually putting on the suit. If only we could've done that today. It definitely would've been memorable for Percy.

He laughed. "And then at the end of the day we could get matching 'I heart New York' t-shirts," Percy said sarcastically. "You can't get any more tourist-y than that."

"Well okay, fine, what do you wanna do?" I crossed my arms, raising an eyebrow at Percy.

"Anything but go to the top of the Empire State Building," he responded, genuinely sounding repulsed at the thought.

"Good, now we know what we're not doing."

I quickly grabbed my phone out of my pocket, tapping the screen with the pad of my finger. Percy craned his neck, trying to see what I was doing from his place across from me, but to no avail. After a little bit of typing and many more of Percy's attempts to see what I was doing (each without success) I stored my phone away again and started off walking down the path we'd been standing on since we left the zoo- and the weirdly crazy goat within.

Percy started to follow me, a quizzical expression on his face. "Where're we going?" he asked as he turned completely to face me. His steps moved, too, accommodating to allow him to walk sideways.

"I'm not gonna tell you," I responded, taking on the voice he'd had when he had said the same thing to me earlier that day.

"Why?" he persisted.

"Because you didn't tell me this morning."

"That was different," he said, stating his case seriously as he crossed his arms.

"How?"

"Because I didn't know either."

I sighed, jokingly glaring at Percy. "Fine."

I avoided his smirk, looking upwards. It was late afternoon, the sky just starting to take on the soft orange colors that would later blossom into streaked sunset.

"We're going to Coney Island."

Happy new year! It's technically only 8:55 pm on December 31st for me, so I'm just gonna speak like it's not 2021 yet to try and avoid confusion…. As you can probably tell, things didn't really go exactly to plan. I did not mean for this chapter to come out so late, especially since I started writing it so long ago. First off, a huge thanks to booksy. bumble. bee (formerly AlexDare in the comments) for helping me so much with both the planning and editing of this chapter. She has her own story called From Bad to Worse which you should definitely check out. We also wrote a PJO one-shot together for Christmas called On Your Go Sergeant Santa Snowball, so I'm just gonna promote that here too…. If you want a long explanation for my absence, then read on.

Basically, I got really sick around the beginning of September. I hardly ever get sick, but these times are really unpredictable, and it hit pretty hard. I literally did nothing throughout the entire duration of me being sick, including writing, and any schoolwork. I was completely out of it for around 2 or 3 weeks, so when I came back, I had a lot of schoolwork on my plate. I promised myself that I wouldn't finish this chapter until I caught up with school. And surprise, surprise, I'm still not completely caught up. So I decided it'd been long enough and came back to writing. But it was just so… disconnected when I came back to it, and I didn't really have any inspiration. And so I just didn't know what to do. You can only do something for so long before you get bored of it. But here it is, finally finished, and I hope that I can get back into my regular schedule soon.

Thank you so much for being patient, I hope you enjoyed the chapter and will leave a review. Until next time (which hopefully isn't 4 months like it was this time…). See you next year!

-Z

P.S. I'll do reviews soon. I just can't right now, I'm literally hiding in the bathroom of my hotel finishing this because I'm not allowed to have my computer...

Words: 4,693

Published: 12/31/20 (December 31, 2020) Happy new year!