Sorry it's taken so long to update; got sucked into a Tawainese drama (which is WONDERFULAMAZINGWOW) which ate fifty hours of my life before I'd fully realized I'd invested so much time in watching it. And then of course I had to go back and watch it again...
Anyway! More Sally/Poseidon goodness, at long last. Next installment shouldn't take nearly as long to finish. Yep.
[nope.]
These modern mortal women were impossible. All this new-wave feminism and misandry and equal rights haberdashery.
What he wouldn't give for the Good Old Days, when it was more than acceptable to pop into a girl's bedroom, proclaim his godhood, and make with his Divine Fornication Privileges. These days he had to…ugh, try.
There was this whole tedious wooing business to bother with now, and though he'd long ago developed a crude sort of formula for going about it, even fancied himself something of an expert at the craft, that by no means meant he liked it.
On the one hand, he rarely gets bored anymore of the pursuit, now that there's actually pursuit required. The prospect of challenge, of battle, makes each new lady uniquely enticing, each flower worth plucking. And in this modern world where he and the rest of the pantheon seem to be becoming increasingly obsolete, he'll take his action wherever he can get it. (When he thinks about it, he acknowledges this reality for what it is: desperately, grievously pathetic. Consequently, he's diligent about not thinking on his shrinking importance.)
On the other hand, like any of his immortal relatives, he's never going to become accustomed to such concepts as patience, forbearance, nor the taxing exertions of genuine, sustained effort. When you have (literally) the entire world at your immediate beck and call, laid out before you to do with whatever you damn well please, it's difficult to reconcile yourself to such things as waiting and trying.
Even more vexing in this changing game is this new-fangled notion of rejection, which prior to the advent of the twentieth century, had been so inconceivable a notion as to have never so much as crossed his mind. Now, to date, he's been turned down twice, once with disastrous consequences for the poor mortal girl caught up in the turbulent storm of his affections. He'd grown since then, of course; he made a solid effort not to destroy things (homes, careers, cherished family pets) when females made it apparent they weren't interested.
Other fish in the sea and all that.
Until he meets Sally Jackson, that is.
Poseidon follows her for the better part of a week and half, learning her routine, her habits, memorizing the gliding tread of her feet on the surf, the auburn aspect of her dark hair in the sunlight, the pastry-rich perfume of her skin bleeding into the briny-tart fragrance of his ocean.
He prefers to call this from-afar-investigation Necessary Reconnaissance. His son, Triton, insolently names it Stalking. (Impertinent little bastard.)
Curiously, her run-in with Davy does not appear to have diminished her obvious fondness for the water. For three or four days, she does seem somewhat…on edge, maybe a bit cagey and definitely careful not to swim out past the shoals. But then, when it becomes apparent that no ancient horrors are going to emerge unbidden from the depths, he watches, rapt, as she loses herself in the ocean, face breaking periodically into joyous amazement as she swims aimlessly for hours on end, as she snorkels and splashes about with friends nearer to the sandbank, all but a creature of the sea herself.
When at last he has tired of merely studying her, he appears to her at last, emerging from the waves as a child of no more than eight or nine mortal years, garbed in floaties and swim trunks that cling, sopping, to his flesh. She's some distance back on the beach, watching the waves crash against the shore as Apollo slips behind the horizon with the sun and darkness descends.
Poseidon flops down beside her like he has every right and reason in the world to be there, and she blinks at him for a moment before something shrewd and sharp in her gaze alerts him to the fact that she's very probably not fooled by the façade.
"And who are you?" She wonders, voice playful. The sound of it is nearly as soothing as the lapping undulations of the sea.
"I'm here for the summer festival with my parents." He fibs, artlessly avoiding the actual question. She graciously lets it lie.
"Oh? And where are your parents, kiddo?" Poseidon doesn't suppose telling her he chopped his father into tiny little pieces and condemned him to an eternity in Tartarus would be the appropriate way to break the ice, so instead he says,
"They're…around." Then, before she has the chance to ask anymore prying questions, "What're you doing out here all alone?" She looks very much like she wants to ask him the same question, but intuition apparently allows her to roll with this unusual circumstance, because she turns her keen smile away from him, focuses it back on his namesake, exhales,
"I love the sea." Poseidon thinks this bodes well for him. "When I'm here, it's difficult to pull myself away from it. It's all noise and smoke and machinery in the city." She pauses, lost to private musings for a brief spell. "I only get to come here to Montauk for the summer months; my parents…" Sally loses steam for an instant or four, and he perceives a deep sadness in the dispirited slump of her shoulders, heavy with untold tragedy. "My…my parents used to bring me, but for several years now I've just been coming up with friends from school. It's tradition, and the sea is…peaceful. Don't you think?" It occurs to him that she isn't speaking to him the way most mortal adults speak to children, with an unconscious air of insipid condescension, with an obvious awareness of the disparity in age. Instead, she's addressing him like an equal, the angle of her reflections bent with maturity and substance.
He likes that she knows that he isn't what he seems, and wonders what it is she Sees when she looks at him.
"I do. I, too, love the sea." He abandons all pretense of being a child, forsaking the miniature model for one more fully-developed, becoming in the blink of an eye a version of himself more closely matched in age with hers, which he estimates is around sixteen or seventeen.
"Well." She chuckles, remarkably unruffled about his Mighty Morphing Powers. As if she were used to people miraculously changing shape before her very eyes. "I should say," she begins, picking up the conversation wherever it was they'd left it, "I love the sea when giant tentacle monsters aren't trying to eat me for swimming in it. That was…unpleasant." Poseidon explodes with mirth, deep, booming laughter smashing into the empty air. The ocean rolls further up onto the beach in response, skimming their toes, soaking Sally's beach towel. "Although some people seem peculiarly well-adjusted to the phenomenon." She anchors a pointed look in his direction.
"What can I say? I've got an affinity for giant tentacle monsters. And Davy wasn't trying to 'eat you,' you just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time."
"'Davy?'" She echoes, incredulous.
"I could introduce you, if you'd like. She's really quite endearing." She tilts her head to one side, wry expression settling onto her face.
"Are you asking me if I want to come and see your giant tentacle monster?" There is nothing innocent about the way she phrases the question, and nothing naïve or uncertain in the blue-green ocean of her eyes. He likes this very, very much.
"If I were?" He hedges, drawn to her by a gravity he can't explain.
"Then I'd say I'd love to," Sally prefaces, before all the air goes out of her and she turns to give him her profile, "if I weren't…it's just that...I'm sort of seeing someone, actually. We haven't, hm…officially gone out, but I promised we would before the summer was over. And it, it wouldn't be fair if I turned around and changed my mind just because I met some guy on the beach with superpowers." Her smile is this coy-brilliant glide of lips, somehow heartening around the diffident contrition in her eyes, soft and gray and profoundly empathetic.
Poseidon's first thought is that he's going to have to visit some old-fashioned Divine Wrath upon some hapless mortal boy unaware of the treacherous wrong he's inadvertently committed. Then he remembers he's evolved past the Vengeful Destruction phase of his existence, and takes a deep, steadying breath.
"Miss Jackson," he breathes, pulling her toward him by one sun-kissed elbow, and she just sort of lets him, anxious but unafraid, unfazed by his knowledge of her name, despite his never having asked for it.
"Yes?"
"Would it help if I refused to give you a choice in the matter? If I deny you volition, how can you possibly be held responsible for reneging?" He's slipping into grandiloquence, he realizes; something he only ever does when he's angry or very, very nervous.
"U-Uhm…I don't, I don't think it works like that…I couldn't, not in good conscience…" Is what she's saying, though her eyes, shifting now from bright and luminous to a darker hue, belie the substance of the words.
"Right, then." Between one startled yelp and the next, he's jerking her to her feet, scooping her deftly into his arms, and making determined strides toward the ocean, which hurries up to meet him, washing over his ankles to usher him home. He slants her a sly, winning smile, which she reciprocates with a resigned sigh he thinks sounds rather feigned.
"Just so you know, I don't put out on the first date, Fish Breath." His smile develops a sinister aspect while he quietly processes the improvised epithet. "Even if the first date is twenty-thousand leagues under the sea."
"We'll just see about that." Sally Jackson's laughter rings clear and jubilant as he immerses them, cutting as fluidly through the water as if it were thin air. "Off we go."
And with that, they vanish into the depths.
(This is the only fish in the sea, as far as he's concerned.)
Next chapter: Zeus is all like, 'wtf?' And Triton's all like, 'daaaaaaaamn.' And Apollo's all like, 'my GOD, I'm pretty.'
mmmmmmm tuna sammiches.