Chapter Text
Percy ducked under the water and kicked off the wall, flying through the pool with ease. Nobody else was around, the swim team had already packed up even if the school pool didn’t close for another 20 minutes, so he felt no need to surface, reaching the end of the pool and kicking back off again after a sleek turn. He didn’t resurface until he reached the other end, enjoying the feeling of the water breaking over his head and taking a deep breath of air.
It was as peaceful a feeling as he could achieve outside of the ocean itself.
“Holy sh*t!”
The peace shattered.
The whole swim team were staring at him from the side of the pool.
They were supposed to have left already. Both teams trained together, the girls' and boys' competitions were often held together (if not members of the other team would come as moral support), and they did co-ed comps together too.
All 15 school swimmers were watching him with awe and shock.
“Dude, you were under for ages, how did you do that?”
“Oh spill, where’d you learn how to hold your breath like that?”
“And why haven’t you taught us jackass?”
Percy could only justify his next words as being of pure panic.
“It’s cos my dad’s the sea god, actually.”
The team burst out laughing.
Everyone knew he lived with his mom and Paul, and that he only saw his dad on holidays and some weekends. He didn’t really talk about his dad, because how does one explain to mortals being the son of Poseidon, having a royal family as his family, visits to Atlantis. Poseidon was a mystery to his school friends, and they’d jokingly tried to learn more, more than once.
Now it seemed he was giving real information, and it was too absurd to be believed.
“No, Perce, for real, spill.”
“I told you,” he replied, finding himself laughing in spite of the situation, “I can actually breathe underwater. I'm built different. Part fish, clearly.”
The team were wheezing.
His own laughs were somewhere between amused and utterly horrified.
“Alright, keep your secrets. Merboy.”
“Wow, Kels,” he shot back, “not even Merman.”
“Get out of the pool, fish boy, we’re going for ice-cream.”
“I was going to...”
“Stay and do some extra laps, we know, but we you don’t need to.”
“Especially not if your part seagod or whatever. Come get ice-cream.”
Damnit, the whole team was ganging up on him now. He wasn’t opposed to ice-cream, or spending time with the swim team. They were all nice people, some of his best friends in the school, but he’d wanted a little bit of time alone in the water, just to think.
Oh well, he also liked ice-cream.
The team cheered as he pulled himself out of the pool and past them into the changing room, laughing as he splashed them with pool water as he passed.
If he used his powers to make sure the water didn't miss them, that was nobody's business.
Kelsy, the purple-haired captain of the girls' swim team and overall group captain, got a few droplets of pool water in the eye.
Success.
He rushed through drying off and getting dressed so the team wouldn’t have to wait too long and jogged over to see the coach had joined them at the door.
Huh.
“You’re gonna win the championships this year, I can feel it. So that means I'm buying you ice cream.”
Hell yeah.
Despite knowing none of the team actually believed him when he told them who his dad was, that he had said it at all was terrifying. He couldn’t believe he’d been so stupid.
The team had already found other things to joke about as they walked the two blocks to the ice cream parlour, and he tried very hard to join in on those jokes. It didn’t last.
Percy ordered the blue ice cream, which surprised nobody, but Mark was smiling like the secrets of the universe had been revealed to him.
“Wait... Percy, is the blue for the ocean.”
Tell them about Gabe or keep revealing actual truths about himself and the world behind the mist.
“Of course it is.”
“I would have thought you’d have picked the sea salted caramel.”
“Funny.”
He had to put up with about 7 more ocean puns before coach interrupted.
“I’m lost.”
“Didn’t you know coach, Percy’s dad is actually the god of the sea, Neptune or whoever.”
“Poseidon dipsh*t.”
“I don’t know myths do I.”
Percy rolled his eyes at Mark and Lili’s back and forth and prayed his father either wasn’t watching or was finding it too funny to be insulted.
After that, it became a running joke.
Once he got past the terror of the situation, once he realised they didn’t think he was insane and monsters weren’t going to launch themselves out the rafters the second someone mentioned it, it was actually pretty amazing.
He could tell the truth about his scars, he got to tell Ryan Spearman to his face that the tattoo was a brand from ‘that time I lost all my memories and was pressganged into the roman legions’ and won first place at the next three swim meets.
It was weirdly nice.
The Stoll brothers would be so proud.
