"You shouldn't be out here, sir."
"Then why was my door unlocked all week?"
The two troopers who came to confront him looked back and forth at each other after Percy's response, their identical faces showing the same confusion. His door really was just unlocked.
"We'll have to inform the General," one of them spoke.
"Go ahead," Percy couldn't help but scoff. "She likely already knows. Knew probably the moment I stepped out of my room. If she had a problem with this, she would be out here dragging me back in."
He didn't care to see how they reacted. Instead, he watched the horizon line. A storm was coming.
"We cannot have you wandering, sir," one of them demanded.
The waves below him seemed to reach out for his hands that lingered over the edge, daring to give him a handshake.
"I'm just watching the waves out here."
"Sir, you'll have to come with us," the soldier demanded. "This isn't a suggestion."
"Ego," a familiar voice intruded. "Leave him be. You and Sloth can head inside and go grab dinner."
"Yes, ma'am."
He heard the two troopers leave behind a sliding door as their mumbling was cut off. While his gaze lingered on the sea, she finally approached him and joined him at the railing. He turned his attention to her. Shaak Ti had finally intruded upon his outings. Took her a while. This was the fourth time today that he had meandered around the science facility.
"Is this the part where you tell me to follow you somewhere?"
"No, not yet." She told him. She stood there looking out to the rampaging sea. "There is no rain after all. We can chat here."
"Am I in trouble?"
"Do you feel as if you are?"
"Yes?"
"If I didn't want you able to leave that room, you would never have. A guard would have been at your door also if I was concerned about you breaking out and being a problem."
"So, why are you here now?"
"Can we not talk?"
"I mean, I guess," he shrugged. "I don't have any tall tales to bore you with."
"You have not bored me once this week that you have been here."
"Even when I slept?"
"You mumble in your sleep."
"Great," Percy rolled his eyes. "Hopefully, it isn't too embarrassing."
"Does the name Annabeth ring a bell to you?"
Annabeth…?
He thought about it for a moment. The name Annabeth did not ring any bells. Yet, if he was saying it in his sleep, they had to be someone…. Someone that likely mattered to him. Were they the one he was protecting in his only memory? It was his best assumption since it was the only thing he could even loosely remember.
"I have an idea, but nothing solid. I think it was her. The girl I was fighting for."
"Anything else?"
"I really don't know. Nothing has really come back to me since I first got here. It's all quiet outside the sea and storms."
"Hmm…" She pondered. The two sat listening to the waves for a moment. "The medical scans, as you know, showed no damage to your skull or brain. Your memories, however repressed as they are, are likely related to the trauma of the situation. They could come back any day or never," she guessed. "They could come back through a similar episode in which you lost them. We sadly do not know."
He sighed. The local alien doctor had already given him that rundown six days ago. Low hope of recovery, anticipate nothing. He didn't want to deal with that reality just yet.
"I already knew that."
"Apologies. I do not mean to rehash the issue."
"It's fine. I mean, you are just trying to help. I appreciate that at the end of the day."
A distant crash of thunder echoed off in the distance. He could see the edges of the storm clouds approaching.
"Do you still wish to jump in the water?" She asked, and he couldn't help but chuckle.
"You know, I do, but you keep looking at me like I am crazy for saying that."
"This water is far from shallow or calm. I am sure you see that yourself."
"Obviously."
"So, that begs the question of why you wish to jump in such fierce waters. It is a less than stellar idea."
"It feels right."
"It feels right?" She repeated, chewing on the words.
"See," Percy turned to her, letting his back rest against the railing, "that's what I mean. You act like the water is full of toxins and that I am going to die if I jump in."
"It's not me questioning the act. I am questioning what tells you that it feels right."
"My gut, my instincts. The very sea. It just calls to me. That I could just jump in and be welcomed."
"Most peculiar. Perhaps, when we have a better understanding of where to go forward with you, perhaps I will let you take a swim. Monitored, of course."
"You're too kind," he bemused, letting his eyes drift upwards. The forefront of storm clouds began to hide the overhead sky.
"The rain approaches. Shall we head inside?"
No… I need a moment alone like I came out here for.
"I want to feel the rain for a moment. Then I'll join you inside."
"Very well, Percy Jackson. I have much more I want to say."
He only nodded as he heard her walk away. The noise of a door sliding open and closing.
He was alone once more just as the first raindrops began to hit the buildings and pathways of the floating city. A dull repeating thrum compared to the pattering and crashing of the water and rain moving at sea level. Then he felt it; the first drops that graced him landed on his cheeks like teardrops.
It felt like the comforting hands, ghosts of the memories he could not place. It felt like what he imagined Annabeth's love would feel like. Tears of joy from the news she would never deliver to him splashed on his cheeks. A future worth fighting for with her… dripping away, lost in the monsoon.
A drop in the endless.
A life forgotten.
The rain tracked down his cheeks, hiding tears of desiderium.
He walked away from the edge as the rain thundered on. Waves crashed and roared below. Yet, he moved forward. The sliding door slid open for him, and there Shaak Ti waited patiently just inside.
She was forward.
Even with the voice being quiet since the first day he arrived on this new planet, new galaxy, he understood what it wanted for him to do. What he needed to do for himself.
He was to go forward. There was a purpose for him to be here. There had to be. The voice knew. Whatever deity or thing that could whisper such thoughts had tied his fate to the alien woman before him. It was all he had to go off of.
It was his way forward.
"I want to show you something, Percy," she began walking forward. If she noticed his watery eyes, she did not comment. "You have spent the week showing me who you are. I wish to show you something of who I am."
"Where are we going exactly?"
"To the command center of this facility, and consequently the planet. I have begun a growing idea of why you are here before me. The realities of how frighten me, if I can be honest. Yet, I believe you are the key to absolving all of it: all my fears and worries. Only your willingness to act will determine if I am right."
"I've got a bad feeling about this."
"Do you? That's good," she smiled. "It means what I think about you may very well be true."
"Lovely."
The two walked onwards.
White bleak walls gave way to a glass hallway where identical men in identical clothing gathered and enjoyed a meal. There were thousands of them, the clones as they were called. A scientifically made warrior mass-produced for the galactic war effort. The weird reptilian giraffe people with holographic tablets, Kaminoans, managed all the science of it. Well, at least that is what he had picked up on when he left his room unsupervised. The hunchbacked man was very nice. Ninety-Nine or something? He should have remembered.
This place, this planet, where he had landed and found himself was the breeding ground of an army. Shaak Ti, the representative of her side of the war, was apparently his way forward in it all. He would have been detained by now if he was actually a foe, but Shaak Ti must not think of him as that anymore. His door had been left unlocked. He had been given some freedom if he could just roam the facility. You don't give that accessibility to someone you think is up to no good.
Shaak Ti would be recruiting him for the war. He knew that. It was only a matter of what degree of service he would be expected to provide for her. He wasn't really looking forward to the proposition. He would rather find his way home.
"You are plagued by thoughts," the horned lady spoke. "Air them out."
They had stopped a few meters from a standing guard and closed door. The hallway was bleak white again. She was staring at him expectantly.
"You want me to fight again. This is a war facility."
"In short, yes."
"And I just want to find my way home…"
She reached across the distance between the two, placing her hand on his shoulder, "I know."
"The two notions," he shrugged off her arm, "conflict. Fight or go home."
"Do they? You said you were fighting in your memories. War was ever-present wherever your home is."
"Sure, but I think we both know I don't belong here. You didn't even recognize my planet or even my galaxy."
"No, I did not," she turned away from him and began stepping toward the guards. "Yet, I think I found it all the same."
He practically lunged to fall in step, "What?"
"Do not raise your hopes, however. We shall discuss it more inside the command center."
Don't raise his hopes? How could he not if she found a way home?
"Just through these doors," she gestured. The four-armed clones stood guard, only watching him but holding a salute to the General. Upon getting close enough, one of them broke the salute to hit a button on the side, and the doorway split down the middle revealing what he could only describe as a room full of advanced technology and holographic screens. He didn't understand any of it. More clones, out of armor but in uniforms, commanded stations of tech, all each busy with something, yet, as Shaak Ti entered, they all stood at attention for her.
She really was a general here. He didn't see a gun on her. Did she not carry?
"At ease, gentlemen. Continue with your work, and do not mind us."
"Yes, ma'am," the room chorused as one.
She motioned for Percy to follow her to a large table in the middle of the room, where a glowing green grid served as the top of the table. She activated something, and he watched as the grid extended into the air and became a collection of spheres. Not spheres, planets. Nine of them, all circling a star.
That was… She really found it.
"Before I begin, this is the central command center for all of the planet Kamino. State-of-the-art equipment, scanners that can detect any life form in the water, and messaging capability to contact the center of the galaxy in a mere moment. That said, I had little to no basis on where for your home planet. So, I looked to the Force," she spoke. "It guided my efforts to find this system." She gestured to the one on the "table screen." "Does it seem familiar?"
It was familiar. It was home. He knew that.
"Yes," he whispered. "Mercury," he pointed to one of the orbs, "the fastest planet in orbit around the Sun, the King's messenger. Venus, the second one, is the most beautiful of the King's court. Then Earth… That is where I am from."
"And the other five?" She gestured to the rest of the solar system.
"It's actually six," he smiled.
"Six?" She took a moment to study the map, even zooming it out a bit. "Are one of the moons of this large one or the ringed one counted as its own body?"
"No, you see the tiny one there," he gestured to a small blimp furthest from the Sun. "A bit bigger than asteroids, but that's Pluto, one of the three Kings. He was the King of the Underworld. It counts."
"And the ones in between? I wish to mark them in the database."
"That is Mars, the blood of war in the sky. Jupiter is the biggest and the King of all. Saturn, the ringed one. Father of Jupiter. Uranus, father of Saturn. Then Neptune. King of the seas. He's my father… No, Poseidon was my father. I think…"
"That is new. Your father is a planet?"
"Uh, no," he replied dumbly. Then words came to him, and without thinking of what he was saying, they just flowed from his lips. "Earth, at an older point of time, we looked to the heavens for worship, and they would see the same beacons in the sky or something. They saw them as the gods watching, but it was just these planets. Then sometime later, when men could see the actual planets with tools, the names stayed as identifiers."
"And you said your father was Poseidon. Was he a god or King to your people?"
He didn't know for sure…
"That was the name that I knew of him as. A god or King? I couldn't tell you. But, Poseidon and Neptune are alternate names for the same being."
Could one be half-god?
"Perhaps, that is why you wish to be in the sea. You are a prince of the sea."
The two shared a small smile. Prince of the sea, that would be crazy.
"Huh, you know, I think you might be on to something," he played into it. "Maybe that's why I ended up on a planet full of water. Come to take the throne of this planet for myself."
"I shall warn the Mon Calamari then. They are an aquatic race on their own sea planet. Maybe they'll build a statue of you or try to kill you."
"Please don't. I am trying not to cause problems with people right now. I am just trying to recall my memories."
"Worry not," she placed a hand on his shoulder while giving him a smile. "With time, you will remember. You can bore me with tall tales then, your highness."
He groaned at the title, "That's if you can stop me from boarding a spacecraft home."
He said the wrong thing. He knew it immediately. Shaak Ti's face fell to a neutral one right as he finished speaking.
"And that is where the bad news comes into play."
Great.
"What?" He asked, his gaze hardening as he gripped the table, "What do you mean?"
She motioned with her hands, interacting with the green spheres. The map began to zoom out and expand. Further and further. The ten spheres he knew became small dots and then pixels. The cluster of pixels they belonged to, the Milky Way Galaxy, became a pixel of itself. It just kept going. The map kept distancing itself further and further from Earth.
"You are a very long way from home, Percy. A journey one cannot travel in a lifetime or even two. Even if you did get there in, it would be centuries past when you left. Your time you came from would be a memory lost in itself."
:P Line Break d:
The storm was at the apex of its fury, and frankly, Percy didn't care. It was more comforting than being inside. Lighting and thundered flashed and crashed seemingly at the beat of his heart. The very rain was coming sideways, trying to raise the sea level by several meters.
Yet, that didn't matter to Percy.
He was squatted on the edge of a landing pad, with his elbows on his knees as he gripped his hair. He refused to cry, no matter how easily his tears of magma would be lost in the onslaught of rain. He wouldn't let himself.
"Fuck!" He screamed into the storm, standing at his full height. His shout echoed into the heavens as lightning turned the world white momentarily. The following thunder shook the building he stood on and rattled his ears. "Why? What did I do to deserve this?"
He dropped to the ground. Legs before him as his elbows rested on bent knees. His black hair stuck to his forehead as a stream of water raced down his hair and to the ground before his eyes.
"Why me?" He croaked to himself. He didn't expect to hear an answer.
"Close your heart."
She was back. The whispers of a woman that guided his waking hours had returned after leaving him for a week.
"You are needed here. Then I will take you home myself."
"How?" He growled, fighting to feel something besides pain, but he wouldn't settle for hope yet. The thunder began to rumble, a continuous roll. "How ever could a voice in my head get me across the universe and home? Huh? Explain it to me. How?" He screamed at her, at everything.
"I am a goddess of these worlds," she answered calmly. "A goddess of the very Force that imbues these people. When I saw you arrive in these very waters below you, I knew, in my heart and all that is, that you were the key to saving this galaxy…. You would end this plague. This war. This taint of darkness. You would purge it from the very pool it festers. You do this for me, and I will see you back in your old life exactly where you left it. Memories returned and in Annabeth's arms once more."
She knew too much of what he wanted… Or was that because she was in his head?
"You did this to me?" He snapped, standing as he heaved heavy breaths. "Didn't you? You took my memories. Bait to lure me through your plans."
"NO! I did no such thing!" She hissed. "I found you! A dying soul, doomed for damnation. Not even an afterlife. I flooded your being with the Force, with life. I am the reason you breathe this very air now. I am not a fool. I know what you are. I occupied your very body. You may seem human, but you are not. You are more. You can do more. I would not strip away such status to hold over you if I knew you could use it to expedite this whole affair. Your missing memories are not my fault."
"Then why me?" He screamed aloud with the lighting crashing around him. His throat burned. His hands were balled at his waist as waves threatened to reach for him. "Why is it up to me to do this?" He hiccupped. "Why save me to do this? Why?"
"Because you are untainted by the view of these planets and their citizens."
Untainted?
"The galaxy is plagued by civil war. The Separatists and the Republic. The Jedi align with the Republic, and the dark side controls the Separatists."
"And you want me to win the war for the Republic?"
"The Republic does not need to win to see the dark side fall. Yet, as I said, they ally themselves with the light, so it would be easier to serve the Republic for your needs. You would have more resources. But none of this ends as long as the darkness taints the Force. I can not get you home till the light prevails. Do you understand?"
He understood, and he knew what he would have to do if she could hold her side. He would do it.
"What if I refuse? What if I just let it all happen on its own?"
"You won't. You are a man of action. You will act."
How would she know when he doesn't even know either?
"But, what if I didn't? Then what?"
"A fate worse than death. The darkness would grow unmatched, and the universe would feel the effects. Even your home planet on the other side of the universe would suffer. So, let me remind you. This is your new purpose: Purge the darkness. Save the universe, and I will take you home."
He would go home…
"And what will you be doing? While I act? You are some powerful deity, I presume. What will you be doing to help me?"
"I will break these bonds they have chained me with. The bonds that have allowed things to become unbalanced. Then, I will call for you. At that point, together, we will reunite families and rid the worlds of evil."
He needed her to commit to this. To commit to him going home.
"So this is forward? This is how I get home? Through spilled blood?"
"Yes. This is forward."
"Swear it," He growled at her.
"On what?" He hated how he could hear her grin.
"Swear it on Creation. Swear it on your soul that if you have lied, you will be damned. Because if I found out you lied. I will pull your voice from my head, and then I will parade your bloodied head down every street I see until I find my own way home. I will use that spilled blood to paint murals of those foolish enough to deny me."
What he said must have made an impact, as she was quiet for a moment. That grin didn't last long, did it? Good. She understands how serious I am.
"Very well, Perseus Jackson. I swear it upon my soul lest it is damned. I swear upon Creation that I will assist you in your journey for as long as you aid me in kind and purge the taint of the dark side of the Force. I will see you returned to your planet."
"Then we have a deal."
"We do indeed," she purred. "We have a deal."
He exhaled a long breath. His heart was beating fast. He needed to calm down. He breathed in a deep breath again before slowly exhaling.
He was going to be able to go home. To Annabeth. To whatever life he left behind.
The storm around him had calmed and mostly lessened. The winds and rain, while still strong, were noticeably less severe than before. The flashing and crashing of the heavens were sedated. The very waves below did not reach as high to try and topple the city.
"So, what do I call you, Voice?" He asked, feeling the comforting rain caress him once more.
"I have not used my name in many sun cycles." How long was a sun cycle? "It would feel wrong to stake its claim when it is no longer who I wish to be. You can call me Mother."
"Alright, oh Mother, that is not mine. What do I do first?"
"You go back inside. Remember, the Master Jedi is forward, just as I first told you. She will guide you. She will arm you. She will send you to win her war. Through her war, you will find your way home."
"So, I am to surrender my will to her? Kill whoever for her?"
"She will never be able to control all of you. Only direct you at times, you will be on your own, far from her, and you will act."
"I'm in over my head, aren't I?"
"Of course, little padawan. This war is not a single mission to be done overnight. We will have years to experience together.
"Years for you to be able to purge the pool."
AN: Wow! Thanks for the HUGE amount of support from the first chapter alone. I can honestly say I never expected to see such a response. Seriously, THANK YOU! There are only 11 fics on this site of this exact crossover (PJOx SW: CW), and I am glad that so many of you are behind and supporting this fic. I will try not to disappoint, but not everyone will like everything.
To those who commented that they were still hesitant and or such but will see it through for a few chapters, I appreciate your open-mindedness. I hope to sway your opinion for the better, but at the end of the day, I am glad you are just giving me the time to read this work. For the inevitable hate that pops up, can you at least give constructive criticism? You are already typing the hate, so go the extra step and help me learn to be better.
As always, if you enjoy, please leave a review, follow, and favorite. Makes me happy, and I like to be happy. Feel free to drop some names for random clones that might be involved as background characters for small cameos. Who knows, might even develop one or two beyond a mention.
I hope you stick around and see where I take this story.
As always, if you want to contact me, PM me or reach out to me on Discord. I'm accessible on the Emerald Library discord server. (Search it in the discord server browser) I go by Manke on that site. I love talking about my work. I also am in the market for someone who is interested in committing to working with me and my lengthy ideas and messy notes. If that interests you, please reach out to me on Discord. Special thanks to Orion for giving this chapter a precursory read.
That's about it.
-Manke