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Officially this was his first time in Sally and Percy’s apartment, when he showed up during his son’s fifteenth birthday celebration.
Unofficially, it was somewhere around his hundredth. Five hundredth? Thousandth? Somewhere in that ballpark at least. He liked to… keep his eye on things. Check that Sally was alright, her new boyfriend was a decent man, his son was alright and thriving. Interference in his son’s life was forbidden but at least he could watch for him even if he wasn’t capable of watching out for him.
It was a nice place though, and if he occasionally warded up areas, like bedrooms and the kitchen and the doorways and the entire whole apartment until it was the godly equivalent of Fort Knox, well it was none of his brother’s business.
Perseus Jackson must survive until his sixteenth birthday. No one could allow otherwise. And perhaps it was because of the due date, the general consensus around the end of his son’s life, that the other gods turned a blind eye to what he did.
They kept their eyes closed while he kept his on Percy.
He was taller now, and still growing, his hands and feet mismatched to the rest of his body in that way that suggested a growth spurt sooner than later.
His demigod children got taller these days than they had back in the day. Or maybe Percy was an outlier. His last children had been born in… the late thirties? Early forties? Even between now and then so much had changed. And they were all gone now. Percy was his only demigod son now.
But he stood maybe around the same height now as some of his Lacedaemonian children had. He even looked the same as more than a few of them. There was a certain uniformity to his children, he had found. Not always, depending if he had been taking an alternate form, but they tended towards similar noses and jaw, hair colour and even eye colour. It made Poseidon proud to see how close Percy looked in comparison to his favoured mortal form.
Sometimes he found himself, at least one iteration of himself among the however many others, practising wry smiles or eye rolls before he realised what he was doing.
It was strange how much he had hoped that Percy might remain on Ogygia, safe and free from the prophecy, but there was no such luck in that since as much as he looked like Poseidon’s mortal form, he was really Sally Jackson’s son.
But he had hoped, hoped that he would remain there until the di Angelo boy fulfilled the prophecy or some other child of either of his brothers whenever they were born, and then he could return. Calypso had kept Odysseus on the island, and away from his wrath but that wasn’t the point, for seven years.
She had kept Percy for a mere two weeks.
It had been a last chance, a desperate bid, maybe blessed upon him by the Fates, maybe a test of courage or loyalty.
And Perseus Jackson was the most loyal demigod he had encountered for centuries at least. Maybe millennia. Maybe ever. He wouldn’t abandon his questmates nor his quest, especially for something so selfish. Poseidon wished that his son would be selfish for once, but he’d rejected it with both hands outstretched and there was naught he could do now between now and his son’s next birthday except try to prevent any untimely death before then.
And there was the daughter of Athena too.
He could push any nymph, naiad, minor godling in his son’s direction. Persuade him to take immortality in some way through them. Keep him safe through some kind of relationship or marriage but even if his son refused to acknowledge or do something about whatever was going on with the Chase girl, there was something, and he wouldn’t betray her even if it would please his father.
Back in the day, at least in Sparta, this would have been a bigger party. His son was an adult now and he would have survived all the usual horrors of childhood death. Like tripping on a rock or… getting too cold. He had a vague impression of something like a knee infection taking out one of his children at the age of five, but he had no idea or desire to learn why that had happened.
He had had plenty of children at that point. At least a hundred. A couple not making it to Camp Half Blood or the usual age to go there hadn’t been much to cry about then. He had been too busy drowning sailors and fathering new children.
This new age had softened him. He cared about his children now. He’d made sure Tyson was safe at camp, and claimed him so that they wouldn’t destroy him. He’d paid for Percy’s schools and sent his other children to guard him and keep other monsters away.
Of course, he’d visited his wrath on Odysseus when he’d blinded Polyphemus but his son had had to call out to him to have that happen. And it hadn’t hurt that Odysseus had been Athena’s favourite hero at the time, so he was fine making the little human’s journey home unnecessarily long and arduous at every point possible. It had been more out of annoying Athena than protecting the cyclops though. That part had been… incidental. An excuse, perhaps.
This was rare, these days, getting to talk to one of his demigod children without disguise and without breaking any of Zeus’ precious rules.
He listened to his son’s concerns, and comforted him, and reassured him about Antaeus. Truth be told, Perseus Jackson was probably his favourite child now but even if that hadn’t been true… now wasn’t the time to turn the child of the prophecy against Olympus.
In America, the age of majority was eighteen. By their standards, Percy would die a child, as some kind of tragic loss, a light blown out too soon, a thread cut too early.
And it was true that he was too young. For gods, any age really was too young, but not even two decades cut at him more than he would admit to.
But sending off a child to die, fully knowingly, made him ill at some level. His first in seventy years, cut down at sixteen was sickening.
But in Sparta, he would be a man today, and if Poseidon clung to that fact more than anyone would consider justifiable, then it was no one else’s business.
His son would die a man grown, whatever that meant, whatever caveat he had to add to man, adulthood, or maturity to make it work.
He had to die as a man grown because if he died as a boy, still years away from his age of majority, Poseidon was unsure how he could ever justify it to himself or assuage his own guilt in the matter.