#while percy is like 'hey GORGONS you're WIMPS and you smell like DEEP FRIED CHICKEN oh cool apparently i'm a smartass'

[words-writ-in-starlight]

pjo for any mix of 2, 5, 8, 14, 19, 20, and/or 21?

I have a bunch of asks for this meme but I have finally seen MY BOY again in Son of Neptune and I missed him desperately, so.

2) Emotional/moral weak spots

Percy “let the world burn to save a friend” Jackson’s emotional weak spot--his Achilles heel, if you will--is always the people around him.  Not always just friends, either.  Anyone he thinks of as his responsibility will qualify, from his civilian parents to his camp rivals to outright enemies (Ethan Nakamura, anyone?).  He’s good at muscling through it, at bearing up and fighting on, but deep down he’s still a twelve-year-old kid who’s risking his life for someone who lied to him and watching his mother turn to dust.  Deep down, Percy never really left that hill, and you can tell.

This is also the single most powerful trap that Percy’s good heart can fall into, the biggest moral blindspot he has.  Once someone crosses that line, hurts someone Percy considers his to protect, they’d better hope the judges of Hades have mercy on them, because Percy sure won’t.

5) Guilty pleasures

Percy mostly embraces the attitude that if anyone has earned some junk food and trash TV, it’s him.  He and Annabeth watch cooking shows when they’re too tired or insomniac to function--stuff like Cutthroat Kitchen, where they can watch people get really intense and high-adrenaline about relatively low-stakes issues.  They find it calming.  The closest Percy really comes to a guilty pleasure--in the sense of never ever admitting to anyone how much he genuinely enjoys it--is watching Annabeth’s architectural shows.  You know those shows on Netflix and YouTube that are just a couple of people gushing over weird buildings?  Annabeth loves those.  Percy has never retained a single piece of information from the shows themselves, but he likes to sit with Annabeth’s back against his chest and his chin on her shoulder and his arms around her waist, so that she can pause it every five minutes to provide color commentary without asking him to move.  Annabeth has Some Thoughts about the pseudo-brutalist concrete-facing-and-bulky-squares aesthetic and Percy can repeat that rant word for word.  He has no idea what half the words mean but he sure does know every single one of them.  He puts up a good front of being dragged into watching her nerd shit, but Annabeth Knows The Truth.

Also, related, but Percy finds it very soothing to have Annabeth on his lap or asleep on his chest and something like a firm couch or a wall at his back.  He thinks it’s something about the pressure--it’s a little like being underwater.

8) Bad memories/experiences

What isn’t, to be honest.  But I think for a while there after Mount Saint Helens, Percy was really, truly, deeply afraid of fire.  Hard to hold onto a phobia when you’ve got a world to save, but sometimes when he’s standing too near to a fire, he still feels the heat seize up in his chest and the instinctive craving for water.

14) Ingrained habits/forces of habit

Percy’s number one top habits are clearly being enthralled with Annabeth, taking over armies, and terrifying acts of demigod, based on the 20% of Son of Neptune I’ve gotten through.  In that order.

As far as headcanons go, I’m firmly convinced that Percy is the worst fidgeter in two camps full of fidgeters.  He plays with his necklace and drums Riptide on tables and knocks his knuckles into his ribs or knees or temple and clicks his tongue and paces and plays with Annabeth’s hair and and and--  Annabeth, whose ADHD is much more inattentive type than Percy’s raging combined type, finds it charming, her personal perpetual motion machine.  She jokes that if she hooked him up to a generator, she could power all of New York.  Really, some kind of pressure stim, putting him under five blankets or putting someone on his lap or something, is the only way to get him to hold still.

19) People they’ve hurt or indirectly killed, and how it affected them

I already mentioned Michael Yew, but honestly I think Percy is...pretty haunted by the Battle of Manhattan.  He’s a leader by nature and a soldier by training and a hero by blood and none of those things make him okay with knowing how many people died on his orders.

On a slightly less morbid and more ADHD note, Percy has a mental list in excruciating detail of every single time he’s made Annabeth cry and sometimes when he’s already in a bad headspace he finds himself kind of obsessing over it.  He thinks a lot about her face while she burned his shroud.

20) What Ifs/Alternate Timelines

I described this to my girlfriend as “Big Three kids but one to the left,” soooo.

When Annabeth is twelve, she tries to go home, because her father just moved to California and all but begged her to come.  It lasts like three weeks and then she’s got her bag and her knife and a sour expression and she’s...figuring out transportation back to Long Island.  “Hitchhiking” makes it sound so dangerous.  Technically the driver of this truck doesn’t even know she’s here.  She just waits for him to stop and bails out and counts her forty-nine dollars and tries to decide what she’s going to do.  She’s already used one of her three drachma to tell Chiron she’s on her way, and really she shouldn’t use any more until she hears that they’ve sent someone to meet her, and--

And gods she’s tired.  She thinks she’s maybe in Vegas?  It’s only October, so it’s not real cold, but she’s angry with herself, for thinking it would be different with her dad, and angry with the truck driver, for stopping somewhere so glittery and confusing, and angry with the whole damn world for being like this.  She’s so angry that she doesn’t realize she’s gotten off the Strip until she practically slams into a wide gilt-glass door, which a doorman opens for her with a huge beaming smile.

“Welcome,” the doorman says warmly as Annabeth eyes him.  “We’ve been expecting you.”

Annabeth spends a few hours in the hotel’s game room, before she finds a strange boy about her own age who mentions offhand that he’s expecting his mother to come get him, after the war has settled down a bit.  They talk a little, and then the boy blinks at her, narrows his eyes, and says, “Something’s--not right here.”

Perseus--Percy, he tells her after giving her his full name, with a rueful smirk like it’s an old argument with someone else--hauls her out of the Lotus Hotel and Casino just after the winter solstice, and he has a few hours to gape around at Las Vegas before every monster in a forty mile radius descends on them.  Percy, in something of a panic, yells, and an entire graveyard bursts out of the ground.

Oh boy howdy is Olympus not amused at the sudden appearance of a son of Hades, two days after Zeus’ master bolt goes missing.

Also ft Bianca as a pine tree forming the gate to Camp Halfblood, and Thalia and her baby brother Jason, children of Poseidon, running scared from a manticore.  Thalia martyrs herself saving the quest to recover Annabeth, Bianca becomes lieutenant of the Hunters, and eventually, a kid who calls himself Nico shows up not long after Percy disappears.