Son Of Sally Jackson

by SonOfHades2009

"Percy Jackson will grow to be many things. A warrior, a soldier, a friend, and maybe even a lover. But ichor will never flow through his veins as it does yours, daughter of Athena. He might just be the saviour of Olympus, but he won't be a half-blood." What if Percy was just a normal guy who could see through the mist? This is the story of a mortal who conquered the land of gods.

Just wanna get this out the way. I DON'T OWN PJO OR HoO OR ANY OF RICK RIORDAN'S WORKS. (As much as I'd love to.)

Few things: Percy is going to be a mortal in this AU. Gods exist, and he is going to fight in the Titan War, but as a mortal. Also, this is kind of just a fun project for me. If need be, it will be put on the back burner for The Son Of Ceres. Lastly, I'M FINALLY WRITING A PERCABETH FIC MY OTP IS GETTING THE LOVE IT DESERVES!

If you want to give CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM, go for it, but I really don't wanna get flamed in the reviews.

Please review, give criticism, give feedback, and if you want, give pairing or plot ideas.

SON OF SALLY JACKSON - THE LIGHTNING THIEF

I wish I was a half-blood. Of course the actual half-bloods would moan about how hard it is being chased by monsters and blah blah blah. Trust me, it's even worse when monsters target you and you're not the child of a god.

If you're reading this because you think monsters are real, my advice is: close this book right now. Believe whatever you want. Maybe it's a hallucination, or a dream, or a figment of your imagination. Being able to see through the mist is dangerous. It's scary. Most of the time, it gets you hunted in painful, nasty ways, and you have no way to stop them.

If you're a normal kid, reading this because you think it's fiction, great. Read on. I envy you for being able to believe that none of this ever happened. But if you recognise yourself in these pages – if you feel something stirring inside – stop reading immediately. You might be one of us. And once you know that, it's only a matter of time before they sense it too, and they'll come for you.

Don't say I didn't warn you.

My name is Percy Jackson. I'm twelve years old. Until a few months ago, I was a boarding student at Yancy Academy, a private school for troubled kids in upstate New York. Am I a troubled kid?

Yeah. You could say that.

I could start at any point in my short miserable life to prove it, but things really started going bad last May, when our sixth-grade class took a field trip to Manhattan – twenty-seven rich kids, two teachers, and me on a yellow school bus, heading to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to look at ancient Greek and Roman stuff.

I know – it sounds like torture. Most Yancy field trips were. But Mr Brunner, our Latin teacher, was leading this trip, so I had hopes. Mr Brunner was this middle-aged guy in a motorised wheelchair. He had thinning hair and a scruffy beard and a frayed tweed jacket, which always smelled like coffee. You wouldn't think he'd be cool, but he told stories and jokes and let us play games in class. He also had this awesome collection of Roman armour and weapons, so he was the only teacher whose class didn't put me to sleep.

But once, I could've sworn that I saw Mr Brunner with the body of a horse. Grover told me I was just tired.

I don't know if I believe him.

I hoped the trip would be okay. At least, I hoped that for once I wouldn't get in trouble. Boy, was I wrong.

See, bad things happen to me on field trips. Last time, I saw what I think was a lady with snake hair. The time before that, there was a dog the size of a freaking car with red fur. It was like Clifford the big red dog! And the time before that… Well, you get the idea.

This trip, I was determined to not have any encounters with… whatever the things that I saw were.

All the way into the city, I put up with Nancy Bobofit, the freckly red-headed kleptomaniac girl, hitting my best friend, Grover, in the back of the head with chunks of peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich.

Grover was an easy target. He was scrawny. He cried when he got frustrated. He must've been held back several grades, because he was the only sixth grader with acne and the start of a wispy beard on his chin. On top of all that, he was crippled. He had a note excusing him from PE for the rest of his life because he had some kind of muscular disease in his legs. He walked funny, like every step hurt him, but don't let that fool you.

You should've seen him run when it was enchilada day in the cafeteria.

Anyway, Nancy Bobofit was throwing wads of sandwich that stuck in his curly brown hair, and she knew I couldn't do anything back to her because I was already on probation. The headmaster had threatened me with death-by-in-school-suspension if anything bad, embarrassing, or even mildly entertaining happened on this trip.

"I'm going to kill her," I mumbled. Grover tried to calm me down. "It's okay. I like peanut butter." He dodged another piece of Nancy's lunch.

"That's it.'"I started to get up, but Grover pulled me back to my seat. "You're already on probation," he reminded me. "You know who'll get blamed if anything happens."

Looking back on it, I wish I'd decked Nancy Bobofit right then and there.

In-school suspension would've been nothing compared to the mess I was about to get myself into.

Mr Brunner led the museum tour. He rode up front in his wheelchair, guiding us through the big echoey galleries, past marble statues and glass cases full of really old black-and-orange pottery. It blew my mind that this stuff had survived for two thousand, three thousand years. He gathered us around a four-metre-tall stone column with a big sphinx on the top, and started telling us how it was a grave marker, a stele, for a girl about our age. He told us about the carvings on the sides.

I was trying to listen to what he had to say, because it was actually kind of interesting, but everybody around me was talking, and every time I told them to shut up, the other teacher chaperone, Mrs Dodds, would give me the stink eye. Mrs Dodds was this little maths teacher from Georgia who always wore a black leather jacket, even though she was fifty years old. She looked mean enough to ride a Harley right into your locker.

She had come to Yancy halfway through the year, when our last maths teacher had a nervous breakdown. From her first day, Mrs Dodds loved Nancy Bobofit and figured I was devil spawn. She would point her crooked finger at me and say, "Now, honey…" real sweet, and I knew I was going to get after-school detention for a month.

One time, after she'd made me erase answers out of old maths workbooks until midnight, I told Grover I didn't think Mrs Dodds was human. He looked at me real serious and said, "You're absolutely right."

Mr Brunner kept talking about Greek funeral art. Finally, Nancy Bobofit snickered something about the naked guy on the stele, and I turned around and said, "Will you shut up?" It came out louder than I meant it to. The whole group laughed.

Mr Brunner stopped his story. "Mr Jackson,' he said, 'did you have a comment?" My face was probably red. I said, "No, sir." Mr Brunner pointed to one of the pictures on the stele. "Perhaps you'll tell us what this picture represents?" I looked at the carving, and felt a flush of relief, because I actually recognised it.

"That's Kronos eating his kids, right?"

"Yes," Mr Brunner said, obviously not satisfied. "And he did this because…"

"Well…" I racked my brain to remember. "Kronos was the king god, and because-"

"God?" Mr Brunner asked.

"Titan," I corrected myself. "And… he didn't trust his kids, who were the gods. So, um, Kronos ate them, right? But his wife hid baby Zeus, and gave Kronos a rock to eat instead. And later, when Zeus grew up, he tricked his dad, Kronos, into barfing up his brothers and sisters-"

"Eeew!" said one of the girls behind me. "-and so there was this big fight between the gods and the Titans," I continued, "And the gods won."

Some snickers from the group.

Behind me, Nancy Bobofit mumbled to a friend, "Like we're going to use this in real life. Imagine: it's going to say on our job applications, Please explain why Kronos ate his kids."

"And why, Mr Jackson,' Brunner said, "to paraphrase Miss Bobofit's excellent question, does this matter in real life?"

"Busted," Grover muttered.

"Shut up," Nancy hissed, her face almost brighter red than her hair. At least Nancy got in trouble, too. Mr Brunner was the only one who ever caught her saying anything wrong. He had radar ears.

I thought about his question, and shrugged. "I don't know, sir.'"

"I see." Mr Brunner looked disappointed. "Well, half credit, Mr Jackson. Zeus did indeed feed Kronos a mixture of mustard and wine, which made him disgorge his other five children, who, of course, being immortal gods, had been living and growing up completely undigested in the Titan's stomach. The gods defeated their father, sliced him to pieces with his own scythe, and scattered his remains in Tartarus, the darkest part of the Underworld. On that happy note, it's time for lunch. Mrs Dodds, would you lead us back outside?"

The class drifted off, the girls holding their stomachs, the guys pushing each other around and acting like doofuses.

"Grover," I whispered to him. "What does disgorge mean?"

"Like, to vomit."

"Gotcha."

Grover and I were about to follow when Mr Brunner said, "Mr Jackson." I knew that was coming. I told Grover to keep going. Then I turned towards Mr Brunner.

"Sir?" Mr Brunner had this look that wouldn't let you go – intense brown eyes that could've been a thousand years old and had seen everything. "You must learn the answer to my question," Mr Brunner told me. "About real life. And how your studies apply to it."

I said something really intelligent, along the lines of: "Oh."

"What you learn from me," he said, "Is vitally important. I expect you to treat it as such. I will accept only the best from you, Percy Jackson."

I wanted to get angry, this guy pushed me so hard. I mean, sure, it was kind of cool on tournament days, when he dressed up in a suit of Roman armour and shouted: 'What ho!' and challenged us, sword-point against chalk, to run to the board and name every Greek and Roman person who had ever lived, and their mother, and what god they worshipped, and their kids.

But Mr Brunner expected me to be as good as everybody else, despite the fact I have dyslexia and attention deficit disorder and I had never made above a C- in my life. No - he didn't expect me to be as good; he expected me to be better. And I just couldn't learn all those names and facts, much less spell them correctly.

I mumbled something about trying harder, while Mr Brunner took one long sad look at me, as if I was about to die and he was wondering what to say at my funeral.

I know, that sounds morbid, but that look was morbid-er. If that's a word.

He told me to go outside and eat my lunch. The class gathered on the front steps of the museum, where we could watch the foot traffic along Fifth Avenue. Overhead, a huge storm was brewing, with clouds blacker than I'd ever seen over the city. I figured maybe it was global warming or something, because the weather all across New York state had been weird since Christmas. We'd had massive snow storms, flooding, wildfires from lightning strikes. I wouldn't have been surprised if this was a hurricane blowing in.

Nobody else seemed to notice. Some of the guys were pelting pigeons with cheese and crackers. Nancy Bobofit was trying to pickpocket something from a lady's bag, and, of course, Mrs Dodds wasn't seeing a thing.

Grover and I sat on the edge of the fountain, away from the others. We thought that maybe if we did that, everybody wouldn't know we were from that school – the school for loser freaks who couldn't make it elsewhere.

"Detention?" Grover asked. 'Nah,' I said. "Not from Brunner. I just wish he'd lay off me sometimes. I mean – I'm not a genius." Grover didn't say anything for a while.

Then, when I thought he was going to give me some deep philosophical comment to make me feel better, he said, "Can I have your can?"

Grover collected cans. I didn't know why, and I honestly didn't want to.

I let him take it. I watched the stream of cabs going down Fifth Avenue, and thought about my mom's apartment, only a little ways uptown from where we sat. I hadn't seen her since Christmas.

I wanted so bad to jump in a taxi and head home. She'd hug me and be glad to see me, but she'd be disappointed, too. She'd send me right back to Yancy, remind me that I had to try harder, even if this was my sixth school in six years and I was probably going to be kicked out again.

I just wouldn't be able to stand that sad look she'd give me.

Mr Brunner parked his wheelchair at the base of the handicapped ramp. He ate celery while he read a paperback novel. A red umbrella stuck up from the back of his chair, making it look like a café table with wheels.

I was about to unwrap my sandwich when Nancy Bobofit appeared in front of me with her ugly friends – I guess she'd gotten tired of stealing from the tourists – and dumped her half-eaten lunch in Grover's lap.

"Oops." She grinned at me with her crooked teeth. Her freckles were orange, as if somebody had spray-painted her face with liquid Cheetos. I tried to stay cool. The school counsellor had told me a million times,

"Count to ten, get control of your temper." But I was so mad my mind went blank. A wave roared in my ears. I don't remember touching her, but the next thing I knew, I had Nancy Bobofit by the scruff of her neck, and I was pulling her away from Grover.

"Let her go, Jackson!" someone yelled.

It was Mrs. Dodds. Her beady eyes were fixed on me like she was trying to see into my soul. I let go of Nancy. She stumbled backward, glaring at me with a mix of fear and hatred.

"You're in trouble now," Nancy said in her sing-song voice. I wanted to strangle her.

As soon as Mrs Dodds was sure poor little Nancy was okay, promising to get her a new shirt at the museum gift shop, etc., etc., Mrs Dodds turned on me. There was a triumphant fire in her eyes, as if I'd done something she'd been waiting for all semester. "Now, honey-"

I felt a surge of panic. I'd already been warned about getting into trouble on this trip.

"I didn't do anything!" I blurted out. "She's the one who-"

"Enough!" Mrs. Dodds cut me off, her voice like a whip crack. "You're coming with me, Jackson. Now."

She grabbed my arm with a grip that felt like iron. I glanced at Grover, who looked as shocked as I felt. Then I followed Mrs. Dodds, feeling a sinking sensation in the pit of my stomach.

As we walked away from the group, I could hear Nancy Bobofit whispering to her friends, her voice filled with satisfaction. I gritted my teeth, trying to block out the sound.

Mrs. Dodds led me to a secluded corner of the museum, away from prying eyes. She stopped and turned to face me, her expression unreadable.

"You know, Percy Jackson," she said in a low voice, "I've had my eye on you for a while now. You're trouble, through and through."

I swallowed hard, feeling a cold shiver run down my spine. Mrs. Dodds wasn't like any teacher I'd ever known. There was just something off about her, something… inhuman.

"You've been giving us problems, honey," she said.

I did the safe thing. I said, "Yes, ma'am."

"Return it."

Now this was getting confusing. I thought I was in trouble for attacking Nancy, not stealing something.

"I don't know what you're talking about," I said, trying to sound defiant despite the fear gnawing at my insides.

Mrs. Dodds's lips curled into a cruel smile. "Oh, I think you do," she said. "But don't worry, Percy Jackson. I'm going to make sure you never cause trouble again."

"What are you-"

"Did you really think you would get away with it?" The look in her eyes was beyond mad. It was evil. She's a teacher, I thought nervously. It's not like she's going to hurt me.

"I'll– I'll try harder, ma'am." Thunder shook the building.

"We are not fools, Percy Jackson," Mrs Dodds said. 'It was only a matter of time before we found you out. I don't know how you did it without a god, but that does not matter. Confess, and you will suffer less pain."

I didn't know what she was talking about. All I could think of was that the teachers must've found the illegal stash of lollies I'd been selling out of my dorm room. The candy cartel, I called it. Or maybe they'd realised I got my essay on To Kill A Mockingbird from Google without ever reading the book and now they were going to take away my grade. Or worse, they were going to make me read the book.

Then I realised what you said. "What do you mean, without a god? Are- are you going senile, Mrs?"

She ignored the question, which in my opinion, was a perfectly reasonable question to ask. "Well?" she demanded.

"Ma'am, I don't…"

"Your time is up," she hissed.

Then the weirdest thing happened. Her eyes began to glow like barbecue coals. Her fingers stretched, turning into talons. Her jacket melted into large, leathery wings. She wasn't human. She was a shrivelled hag with bat wings and claws and a mouth full of yellow fangs, and she was about to slice me to ribbons.

Whatever happened to no weird creatures on this trip?

Then things got even stranger. Mr Brunner, who'd been out in front of the museum a minute before, wheeled his chair into the doorway of the gallery, holding a pen in his hand. "What ho, Percy!" he shouted, and tossed the pen through the air.

Mrs Dodds lunged at me. With a yelp, I dodged and felt talons slash the air next to my ear. I snatched the ballpoint pen out of the air, but when it hit my hand, it wasn't a pen any more. It was a sword – Mr Brunner's bronze sword, which he always used on tournament day.

Mrs Dodds spun towards me with a murderous look in her eyes. My knees were jelly. My hands were shaking so bad I almost dropped the sword. She snarled, 'Die, honey!' And she flew straight at me. Absolute terror ran through my body. I did the only thing that came naturally: I swung the sword. The metal blade hit her shoulder and passed clean through her body as if she were made of water. Hiss! Mrs Dodds was a sand castle in a power fan. She exploded into yellow powder, vaporised on the spot, leaving nothing but the smell of sulphur and a dying screech and a chill of evil in the air, as if those two glowing red eyes were still watching me.

I was alone. There was a sword in my hand. Mr Brunner wasn't there. Nobody was there but me. My hands were still trembling. My lunch must've been contaminated with magic mushrooms or something. Had I imagined the whole thing?

I couldn't have, I decided. I literally have a bronze sword in my hand.

The weirdest thing was, the blade seemed to go through my hand. Was I going crazy? The hilt seemed solid enough, but the bronze just went through me, as if it wasn't real.

Ok, I thought. I might be going crazy.

LINE BREAK

I was used to the occasional weird experience, but usually they were over quickly. This twenty-four seven hallucination was more than I could handle.

The entire campus seemed to be playing some kind of trick on me. The students acted as if they were completely and totally convinced that Mrs Kerr – a perky blonde woman whom I'd never seen in my life until she got on our bus at the end of the field trip – had been our maths teacher since Christmas.

Every so often I would spring a Mrs Dodds reference on somebody, just to see if I could trip them up, but they would stare at me like I was psycho. It got so I almost believed them – Mrs Dodds had never existed. Almost.

But Grover couldn't fool me. When I mentioned the name Dodds to him, he would hesitate, then claim she didn't exist. But I knew he was lying. Something was going on.

Something had happened at the museum. I didn't have much time to think about it during the days, but at night, visions of Mrs Dodds with talons and leathery wings would wake me up in a cold sweat. The freak weather continued, which didn't help my mood.

I honestly thought that I was going crazy. The only thing that was convincing me that I wasn't was the bronze sword. And even then, the blade literally couldn't even touch me.

One night, a thunderstorm blew out the windows in my dorm room. A few days later, the biggest tornado ever spotted in the Hudson Valley touched down only fifty miles from Yancy Academy. One of the current events we studied in social studies class was the unusual number of small planes that had gone down in sudden squalls in the Atlantic that year.

I started feeling cranky and irritable most of the time.

My grades slipped from Ds to Fs. I got into more fights with Nancy Bobofit and her friends. I was sent out into the hallway in almost every class. Finally, when our English teacher, Mr Paterson, asked me for the millionth time why I was too lazy to study for spelling tests, I snapped. I called him an old sot.

I wasn't even sure what it meant, but it sounded good. It was satisfying, in my

The headmaster sent my mom a letter the following week, making it official: I would not be invited back next year to Yancy Academy.

Great, I thought to myself. Just great. My math teacher is literally a demon, if she's even real, and my only evidence that she was real was a sword that I couldn't even touch properly, and to top it all off, I was expelled.

I was homesick. I wanted to be with my mom in our little apartment on the Upper East Side, even if I had to go to public school and put up with my obnoxious stepfather and his stupid poker parties. And yet… there were things I'd miss at Yancy. The view of the woods out my dorm window, the Hudson River in the distance, the smell of pine trees.

I'd miss Grover, who'd been a good friend, even if he was a little strange. I worried how he'd survive next year without me. I'd miss Latin class, too – Mr Brunner's crazy tournament days and his faith that I could do well.

As exam week got closer, Latin was the only test I studied for. I hadn't forgotten what Mr Brunner had told me about this subject being life-and-death for me. I wasn't sure why, but I'd started to believe him.

The evening before my final, I got so frustrated I threw the Cambridge Guide to Greek Mythology across my dorm room. Words had started swimming off the page, circling my head, the letters doing one-eighties as if they were riding skateboards. There was no way I was going to remember the difference between Chiron and Charon, or Polydictes and Polydeuces.

And conjugating those Latin verbs? Forget it.

I paced the room, feeling like ants were crawling around inside my shirt. I remembered Mr Brunner's serious expression, his thousand-year-old eyes. I will accept only the best from you, Percy Jackson. I took a deep breath. I picked up the mythology book.

I'd never asked a teacher for help before. Maybe if I talked to Mr Brunner, he could give me some pointers. At least I could apologise for the big fat F I was about to score on his exam. I didn't want to leave Yancy Academy with him thinking I hadn't tried.

I walked downstairs to the faculty offices. Most of them were dark and empty, but Mr Brunner's door was ajar, light from his window stretching across the hallway floor.

I was three steps from the door handle when I heard voices inside the office. Mr Brunner asked a question. A voice that was definitely Grover's said, "I'm worried about Percy, sir." I froze. I'm not usually an eavesdropper, but I dare you to try not listening if you hear your best friend talking about you to an adult. I inched closer.

"He knows… he can't be alone this summer," Grover was saying. "I mean, a Kindly One in the school! Now that we know for sure, and they know too-"

"We would only make matters worse by rushing him," Mr Brunner said. "We need the boy to mature more."

"But he may not have time. The summer solstice deadline-"

"Will have to be resolved without him, Grover. Let him enjoy his ignorance while he still can."

"Sir, he saw her…"

"His imagination," Mr Brunner insisted. "The Mist over the students and staff will be enough to convince him of that."

"Sir, I… I can't fail in my duties again." Grover's voice was choked with emotion. "You know what that would mean."

"You haven't failed, Grover," Mr Brunner said kindly. "I should have seen her for what she was. Now let's just worry about keeping Percy alive until next autumn-"

The mythology book dropped out of my hand and hit the floor with a thud. Mr Brunner went silent. My heart hammering, I picked up the book and backed down the hall. A shadow slid across the lighted glass of Brunner's office door, the shadow of something much taller than my wheelchair-bound teacher, holding something that looked suspiciously like a bow.

I opened the nearest door and slipped inside. A few seconds later I heard a slow clop-clop-clop, like a horse, then a sound like an animal snuffling right outside my door. A large dark shape paused in front of the glass, then moved on. A bead of sweat trickled down my neck.

Somewhere in the hallway, Mr Brunner spoke. "Nothing," he murmured. "My nerves haven't been right since the winter solstice."

"Mine neither,' Grover said. "But I could have sworn…"

"Go back to the dorm," Mr Brunner told him. "You've got a long day of exams tomorrow."

"Don't remind me."

The lights went out in Mr Brunner's office. I waited in the dark for what seemed like forever. Finally, I slipped out into the hallway and made my way back up to the dorm. Grover was lying on his bed, studying his Latin exam notes like he'd been there all night.

"Hey," he said, bleary-eyed. "You going to be ready for this test?"

I didn't answer. "You look awful." He frowned. "Is everything okay?"

"Just… tired." I turned so he couldn't read my expression, and started getting ready for bed. I didn't understand what I'd heard downstairs. I wanted to believe I'd imagined the whole thing. But one thing was clear: Grover and Mr Brunner were talking about me behind my back. They thought I was in some kind of danger.

"Grover?"

"Hm?"

"What's a Kindly One?"

Grover shot out of bed. "What did you say?"

I repeated the question. "What's a Kindly One?"

A nervous laugh from Grover. "Umm… someone who's kind?"

"I heard you and Mr Brunner, Grover."

He paled, looking like a deer in the headlights. "Um… I can explain?"

I uncapped the pen. "Explain this."

Now Grover looked downright terrified. "How did you get that?"

"That's not important. What is important, is the fact that this bronze can't touch me!" I stabbed myself with the blade just for good measure.

"But… I thought you were…"

"Thought I was what?"

"Let me explain. I'm… I'm a satyr."

And that's how I ended up vaporising my math teacher, getting a cool sword (or was it a pen?) that I couldn't touch, and found out that my best friend was a goat.

S0... how was it? I tried to mirror Rick Riordan's writing style. This will get probably weekly updates. Anyway, any reviews are welcome! Over and out!