And Fighting All the Dragons There

The first time Percy ever tries on armour is at some museum his Fourth Grade class goes to on a field trip. There are thirty of them standing around in a big hallway, looking at a handful of looming suits of armour from Medieval times arranged in the shape of a person. There's nothing inside them but the wooden stand that holds the various segments up, so maybe it's not surprising that they look unnaturally stiff, but whatever the cause, they give Percy the creeps. When Mrs Cartwright tells the kids that they can try on the helmets and things that the museum keeps aside for school-groups, he hangs back uncertainly, prompting her to ask him why. When he says he doesn't feel like putting on a helmet or any of the other pieces that he's sure have names but isn't sure what they are, she gently cajoles him, saying it'll be fun and educational, until he does, and his head is duly encased in a heavy metal sphere with a pointed visor that clangs down over his eyes and leaves him almost blind.

He wrestles the helmet from his head, thanks his lucky stars that he wasn't born in the fifteenth century, and avoids the teacher's gaze for the best part of a week.

"Move it, punk," says Gabe, so Percy hurries through the door as fast as his legs can carry him. He's not sure which of them resents being stuck with the other more, but since he's only just got back for the end of the semester, with no keys and his mum on an emergency late shift, there's not really anywhere else for him to go – especially since he's had the weird feeling that he's being watched ever since he got off the subway.

Now it's finally closing time, and Percy's finally going to be able to go and reclaim his room from his stepfather. He waits outside the shutters while Gabe fiddles with the lock, but when he turns around he sees a huge, skeletally thin figure at the other end of the hallway. The other people in the area part around him as they walk like a stream flowing around a rock. There's something hanging from his hand that Percy can't quite see through the people in between them.

"That guy looks freaky," he blurts out. He wishes he hadn't said it instantly, but Gabe at least doesn't seem interested.

"Shut up, kid," he says.

Percy would normally do exactly that in order not to risk irritating his stepfather, but then he catches a glimpse of what it is the figure's holding in his hand. "He's got a club!" he almost shouts.

Then Gabe's waistline suddenly fills his vision as he takes Percy by the shoulder and spins him around, giving him a rough shove in the direction of home, and Percy's only too happy to let his stepfather stay in between himself and the ominous figure as they head in the opposite direction.

Capture the Flag might get off to a more auspicious start if Percy's armour actually fit him. His helmet wobbles constantly, leaving him looking like a bobblehead toy, an image not helped by the oversized blue plume on top, and when he turns to look one way or the other it only follows after a half-second delay. There's a cavity between his chest and his breastplate that he could fit a pillow into, so it dangles from the strap around his neck like a chimpanzee clinging to its mother. That's a problem which it must be said does not exist for whatever the things on his arms are, which the Athena girl – Annabeth – bound so tightly as she helped to prepare him that he'd be surprised if there was any blood circulating through his hands at all. Can you die from not having any blood in your fingers, or do they just drop off one by one like overripe fruit?

Somewhat surprisingly, he doesn't die in Camp Half-Blood's favourite activity, no thanks to the armour. Considering how dangerous everyone tells him the world outside is – something verified by his own experience fighting the Minotaur and the fury – he doesn't particularly like his chances of a long life if he needs to rely on there being a friendly creek nearby every time he gets into a fight. For most of that night in his new cabin, he sits on the unfamiliar bed, staring at the opposite wall or at the spot above him on the ceiling, waiting for something – perhaps a sign from his father.

He does, at one point though, find himself looking at the smooth skin that Clarisse had cut open earlier and marvelling at the magical protection his heritage offers him.

It takes Percy months to work up courage to put the question to her, half-afraid of the answer he might get and half-feeling that it's a gross invasion of his mother's privacy. But over the Christmas break, when he's home for the holidays and they're settling into their new apartment, still flush with the influx of money The Poker Player has brought them, he gets there: "Why did you marry him?"

She pauses before answering, half-way inside the fridge as she reaches for a leek on the bottom shelf. He's got better at noticing that kind of thing in people, but especially his mum. Before discovering he was a half-blood, he'd never really considered that she might lie to him sometimes, but now he can see her considering it the moment he's asked the question. But then her shoulders drop in a way that he thinks means she's going to be truthful, and he doesn't know how he'd have coped if she'd tried not to be. "To protect you," she says, and he knows it's true – but it's only a half-truth, and one that he knew already.

"Did it?" he asks. That's the question he really wants answered, the one he was trying to ask the first time around, and inside that question there's another, thornier one, that he thinks she knows is there as well: was it worth it?

She shuts the fridge and sits opposite him at the table. Is that where he wants her to be, or would he prefer it if she simply held him like he was a child and they didn't have to meet each other's eyes? "You're alive," she says. "I know he was awful, Percy, and you have to believe that I am so sorry for everything I put you through by being with Gabe. I don't know that I can ever make that up to you, but you are alive and I don't think you would be if I hadn't married him." She tries to take his hands in hers but he pulls them back reflexively and grips the edge of the table hard enough to turn his knuckles white. She tries and fails to hide the hurt at that, but doesn't say a word, waiting for his answer.

He's silent for so long, as he tries to for a sentence that means what he wants it to mean, that he can tell she's beginning to believe he's simply going to sit there and wait until she leaves, so to stop her from going he starts, "I think," and then falls silent again because he doesn't know what he thinks, doesn't even know that he is thinking. He's only feeling, feeling the loss of a life he never even knew he was missing until Gabe was gone: one where it was OK to watch what you wanted on TV and eat out at restaurants every once in a while and get home late and even just to live in a clean apartment. "I think he broke something in me," he says.

"Oh, Percy," she says, her voice barely a whisper and tears pooling in her eyes, and he's doesn't think he's ever made his mum cry before but he's got to go on because that's not the point, the point is that

"I think he broke something in you, too," he says.

"And… what do you think that was?" she asks. He can tell she's scared of asking the wrong question, as if he'd lash out at the wrong one, and that makes Percy unspeakably sad.

He thinks of his friends at camp. Every demigod comes from a broken home in one sense, but he knows that such a thing isn't as simple as whether or not your parents are together. Most of them are children of mortals who touched the divine and went mad from it, unable to carry on without it once they'd had a taste. "I think that you were okay after Dad left," he says. "He told me you turned him down. I think you fell in love with him but you were able to let him go, too, and you were alright. But I think that Gabe took what was normal about you from the moment we met him."

"Normal?" she asks. He's hurt her again, and she wants him to elaborate, but normal is a word with space inside it for many things, and Percy can't pinpoint which of them it is that he means except that he didn't intend to sound as critical as he did. And then, because her thoughts are always of him, even when they shouldn't be, she asks "Is that what he took from you?"

He shakes his head. He doesn't think there's anyway for a son to tell his mother what Gabe took from him, because it's all the things that aren't normal about Sally that Percy's missing, all the superhuman grace and kindness and patience and gentleness, and instead he's got a storm inside him like the storms that he knows his father brings on unlucky sailors, a rage that could rend the earth from end to end or pull a whole continent down beneath the waves. He can't say for sure where it comes from – maybe it is something he's inherited from the god of the seas – but he knows it's Gabe who made him want to use it.

It's not until he's lying in bed later that night that he works out that when he said 'normal', the word he'd wanted might have been 'happy'.

"If you need protection in race," Tyson advises him, giving him a watch, "hit the button."

"Ah, okay," says Percy, because now he's a respected veteran of two quests (even if he wasn't exactly supposed to be on the second one) and for the first time in his life doesn't have enough fingers to count the number of people he'd consider his friends, and the fact that he doesn't understand what his Cyclops half-brother is on about seems pretty trivial compared to fundamental things like the fact that he has a Cyclops half-brother who thinks the world of him – and, honestly, the feeling is mutual.

And yet, he doesn't really stop to think about how his life has changed until after the race, when the watch has transformed into a shield that might just make him the envy of camp. Even coming from Tyson, who Percy knows might be a little biased in his favour, the gift feels like an acknowledgement that he belongs in this world. It was made with the help of Beckendorf, the leader of the Hephaestus cabin and one of the most well-respected people at camp besides its directors, and Percy himself is in its designs in what Annabeth tells him is the black-figure style. That's not something he can claim to know much about, but it's easy to imagine that it would be familiar to the Greeks of millenia ago. In another two thousand years, will they study this shield and tell stories of the figures who adorn it?

That's not the only remarkable thing about the shield, though: it's actually a perfect fit. He still hasn't found armour at camp that fits him properly (apart from a breastplate when he was visiting at Spring break that he'd outgrown by the next time he tried it on), but the shield is just the right weight: perfectly balanced to wield alongside Riptide. The watch into which it collapsed when he wasn't in mortal peril was pretty nifty, too, with all kinds of extra hands that he was looking forward to figuring out the purposes of. It's a thing of two sides, mortal and mythical, totally distinct and yet totally inseparable.

Just like Percy himself.

There's a brief period when Percy feels like he has it all figured out. It's not like he expects his life to be easy, but… He's the best swordsman in camp. He's learning to control water, not just to take strength from it. Even school next year looks like it might be bearable. His mum is writing, and Paul Blowfish seems like a cool guy for her to have around. He doesn't flinch anymore when people stand up suddenly. The Stoll brothers sneak cheap alcohol into camp one night, because it's the kind of thing that fourteen year-old sons of Hermes do, and Percy lasts the duration of the party without locking himself in the bathroom to hide or feeling like he's going to throw up from the smell of it.

Things are getting better.

And then Thalia comes back to life, and overnight it's like the place Percy had made for himself at camp vanishes. The niche that he'd thought he'd carved for himself out of granite turns out to be quicksand. And when he rejoins the world of the gods for a quick rescue mission before Christmas, Annabeth goes off the edge of a cliff, Bianca leaves her brother for the Hunters, and Percy's shield is bent unrecognisably out of shape by Dr Thorn, a painful reminder that he's barely capable of defending himself, let alone anyone else.

Even as a statue confined to the Museum of Modern Art, Gabe still sneaks into Percy's mind at the most unwelcome moments. He's dancing with Annabeth on Olympus at the Winter Solstice, swaying slowly to something that could be sad or could be hopeful, when he realises that his mum had probably been the one pushing for Gabe to marry her rather than the other way around.

So, yeah, maybe there are one or two slightly romantic thoughts bouncing around inside his skull while he's holding his best friend, the occasional consideration of dating and courtship, and maybe, maybe some part of his brain decides that yep, this is the girl he's going to marry and settle down and have kids with. He quashes that quickly, because he's pretty sure Annabeth only sees him as a friend, and the fact that he has the brain of a hormonal teenager is not the same as actually being in love, but that's where the train of thought goes, and then he's thinking of other marriages he's known, and that means that he's thinking of mum and Gabe.

It doesn't make a difference, in one sense. The end result was the same, and it's not as if one way around is morally superior to the other, but knowing how utterly worthless of pursuit his stepfather had been, the sacrifice seems that much larger.

When he gets home, his mum is busy writing something for one of her workshops, and he's going to leave it until later, but she gets up anyway and makes such a fuss of him that he no longer feels like he's interrupting anything.

"Can we talk about Gabe?" he asks, and feels rather than sees her still next to him. He's grown so much in the last year or two that he's only about half an inch shorter than her now, and when she hugs him their heads rest on each other's shoulders, but in his mind hugging his mum will always mean pressing his head into her side and her arms wrapping around his head to form a barrier against the entire world.

She pulls back and holds his face in her hands, examining him. "If you think we need to," she says, and that calm acceptance is the neatest possible summary of why Percy loves her so much.

"I don't get why you didn't tell me he hit you."

"Straight to the point, huh?" she asks with a small smile that he doesn't feel able to return.

"I'm the son of a Greek god," he says weakly. "I could've done something."

"And once you knew who you were, you did," she tells him.

"But we could've done it years before, if I hadn't ignored all the signs, if I hadn't been so blind! He did it because of me."

"He didn't-"

"You married him because of me, and that means-"

"It means that I made a choice. And it was my choice and nobody else's, least of all yours, Percy. And his hands were his own – what he did to me was his choice, and you're not responsible for that, either."

The last time he tried to press her about Gabe he made his mum cry, Percy remembers, but this time it's his own eyes that are filling with tears. "I could have protected you," he tells her.

"You sound like your father, wanting to whisk me away to an undersea palace," she says. "Do you remember why I turned him down?"

She wanted a life lived on her own terms, on her own two feet. Percy remembers this, but it doesn't mean he likes the answer.

"If I'd told you, it's possible we could have got away sooner, and then both survived to this point anyway. But I chose your childhood, instead. I chose protect you from the worst parts of what it was like to live with him, because that's what a good mother should do for her son."

One of the first things that new campers learn is that their knowledge of the Greek world is what most puts them in danger. To know of the monsters is to be known by them. Is the same true, he wonders, of every kind of monster? "I don't think anyone should have to do that."

"No-one should be put in that situation, you mean. But I was, and I chose to put you first." She shrugs, like it was no big deal. "I hope you can forgive me for that, but I'd do it again in a heartbeat."

He kicks Nico and Paul out of the kitchen so that he can talk to his mum before they go to the River Styx. Paul goes calmly enough, but Nico protests that they're short on time and can't afford to lose any more. Tough, Percy tells him.

"The prophecy says I'm going to die," he tells her the second that they're alone, and then she's holding him in her arms even though he's taller than she is now and he's supposed to be the one protecting her these days, and for a moment he feels like he's a child again. "I mean, probably," he amends, hating himself for upsetting her again but feeling a duty to be as honest as he can. "It's hard to know for sure with prophecies, but it seems… likely." He's sure they both know that he wouldn't have mentioned it if it didn't seem like a certainty. She's only ever got the heavily sanitised, family-friendly versions of his quests from Percy's retellings, so careful is he to protect her from the realities of his life.

This, though, is something he has to tell her.

It's the same end that any self-respecting Greek hero meets: premature death at the hands of an inflexible fate. His soul being reaped and his days being ended. When he'd read the prophecy, though, once he'd got over the initial shock, he'd thought of his mum again. Gabe would have killed her eventually, he'd thought, too careless of the power in his hands and the weakness of any human body to realise that he was doing it until it was too late. Too drunk, too, most likely. He says as much to her now.

"It could have happened," she acknowledges, like it's something she's already thought. Did she spend those years with him the way he spends the days leading up to his birthday: wondering how it's to end, if there's any loophole through which an escape can be made?

"You shouldn't have married him," he tells her.

"Percy-"

"You shouldn't," he insists. "But thank you. I love you so much. It means so much. I don't think that's the kind of thing it's possible to repay."

"Oh my love, if-" she starts. He knows what comes after the word 'if' in this context: if this is the end, if you really are about to die. That's what she can't bring herself to say. "You have to understand," she says instead, "it's not the kind of thing you're supposed to."

They pull apart, and just like with every conversation they have about Gabe, there are tears, but this time both their faces are wet. "Blue lights around the Empire State Building," she charges him. "I'll be watching for them."

Becoming invulnerable the same week you're prophesied to die (and possibly cause the apocalypse in the process) feels like some kind of bad joke. Bathing in the River Styx makes his skin harder than diamond, but he doesn't deceive himself that it can save his life. If he's lucky, it might save everyone else's. And then wearing physical armour on top of that feels like overkill, except he wants to protect his mortal spot, and if he only wore protection on his back then that might make it a teeny bit obvious where any opponent would want to aim.

So any feelings of badassery or superheroism are all vastly outweighed by a general suspicion that he's being foolish, right up until the point when Annabeth takes a knife for him. He's not saved by iron skin or by celestial bronze, but by a friend who loves him enough to risk her life for his.

He sits with her for as long as they can afford in the midst of the Battle of Manhattan. He asks her how she knew. "I just had a feeling," she says, words that seem foreign coming out of the daughter of Wisdom's mouth.

It's not the kind of wound that nectar and ambrosia can fully heal in minutes, but she's determined to go out and rejoing the fighting, so Percy helps her to buckle on her armour. It fits her perfectly, like it was made bespoke for her, or perhaps like she was made for it. She lifts her ponytail as he tightens her breastplate, and when she turns to look at him, it surprises him again the way it has every time he's seen her for the last couple of years: wounded and tired as she is, with poison in her that hasn't fully worked its way out yet, Annabeth Chase is still just about the best-looking girl he's ever seen.

"Your armour is crooked," she tells him, and it's her turn to help him. A tug on a strap here and there, and it's corrected to her satisfaction. "But it fits you a lot better than it used to," she admits. It takes him a moment to realise that she's referring back to his first capture the flag, and another to realise that she's right. Having well-fitting armour is such an unfamiliar feeling it's almost scary.

"Since when did they stock armour in my size?" he asks.

"They always had a lot more suited for older teenagers and adults," she says. "The idea was that none of the younger kids should be going on dangerous quests or anything, so we didn't need it for anything other than capture the flag and sparring. Cabin six have been making a lot for the younger campers this last year, but… I think this is one of the older sets. You just grew into it, at some point. I guess we've done a lot of growing since we were twelve."

He tries to think back to his twelve year-old self, aeons ago. In Percy's own mind, he's still short, still scrawny, but he knows that it's not a strictly accurate self-image. He's taller than Annabeth, now, and the years of training and questing have managed to put at least a little muscle on him. "A lifetime's worth," he says.

"We don't know that for sure," she says, knowing exactly what it is that he means the way that only Annabeth ever does, but she's frowning, and her eyes won't meet his as she says it. Then she lifts a hand to the anchor point in the small of his back, slipping it under his shirt to touch the bare skin, and that's when she meets his gaze, when they're close enough to kiss and the world is busy ending. The spot is small enough for her hand to cover completely, and he knows that she's going to spend the battle to come trying to protect that one weak spot on his back, even if he'd rather she looked after herself.

"You look like a proper Greek hero," she tells him. Does she think of the connotation of tragedy that her words carry with them? Percy does, but for the first time since reading the prophecy, despite his best efforts not to get his hopes up, he finds himself believing that he might live to see sixteen.

"I'm better than any of the proper Greek heroes," he tells her, "because I've got you with me."

She raises her eyebrows. For all that she's the thing keeping him mortal after bathing in the Styx, for all that she's the weak point in his back that could kill him, because, somewhere deep down, Percy knows that Athena was right and he'd let the world burn if it would save her – for all of that, it's Annabeth who makes Percy feel truly invincible.

By the time they wind up back at home after the battle, Percy's got most of his tears out of the way, so it's mainly just Sally sitting and sobbing with relief that he's home and Percy, Annabeth and Paul worrying if they've got enough tissues in the house. There's a lot of catching up and explaining to, do, but there comes a point in the evening, when Paul and Annabeth are chatting in one room, when Percy and his mother are alone once again.

"A few days ago," she starts quietly, so that the others won't hear, "you said I shouldn't have married Gabe."

"I did," he says cautiously. He can't remember that she's ever been the one to start a conversation about his first stepfather.

"Do you still think that?"

He smiles ruefully. "It was always going to come down to what happened on my birthday, wasn't it? I guess… I'll never like it. I'll never be happy about it. But I get it."

"I can't see the future, Percy. I just had to gamble that it was the right thing to do."

He smiles weakly and makes small jazz hands. "Jackpot," he says, and that raises a shaky laugh out of her. "I've been so angry about him," he confesses. "For years. I couldn't think of him without getting so angry I could barely speak. I'm still angry, but… I don't think about him all the time now. I don't need to talk about him. I think I've stopped making him welcome in my head."

Sally takes his hand. "Perseus," she says, and the word is half a statement and half addressing him. "Named for a happy ending. Do you think we've got there?"

To correct an earlier statement, Percy thought he'd got most of his tears out of the way, but his eyes well up all of a sudden and if he's going to answer her it needs to be quick, while he can still form coherent words.

"Yeah," he says. "I think we have."

this was 1500 words about literal armour and then suddenly it was 5000 words about recovering from Gabe trauma, hope you liked it.

all reviews very gratefully received.

title from A.A. Milne's excellent children's poem 'Knight-in-Armour' which is I guess just a little more light-hearted than this fic.

cross-posted on ao3.