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Jake stares at the kid and the kid stares right back, not even having the good grace to look sheepish. He is drumming his long fingers against his knees, exposed by ragged rips in his jeans that Jake would sooner believe were signs of wear than a fashion choice. The kid looks like a skater so that wouldn’t be the most surprising thing. The fidgeting looks impatient rather than nervous and Jake almost can’t believe he’s sitting with a teenager in the precinct.
Usually when they bring teenagers in they’re these frightened little things who have been caught doing the worst thing they’ve ever done (which is usually not even all that bad, worth a warning and very little else), or they’re angry, hardened, yelling at how they’ve done nothing wrong or the NYPD will be better off if they believe that. But the kid just looks impassive and like he wants to leave.
Jake sighs as the kid stares back with these luminous, piercing sea green eyes that look about a thousand years old. He works as a cop in New York so he has seen his fair share of terrifying teenagers, most of them with gang affiliations or working illegal trades with sketchy people to make it through the winter. The kid has scars on pretty much all of the visible skin that Jake can see, including his face, and there is something about his gait that suggests he is in pain but his face is stony, fierce with denial. There are, luckily, no signs of gang affiliation or drug use but Jake knows it’s too soon to rule either one out.
“What’s your name, kid? I’m officer Peralta,”” he asks and the kid scowls at the form of address just how Jake expected him to, but there’s some amused undercurrent to the expression that Jake can’t figure out. He’s certain that the kid is no older than fifteen, probably even younger, so ‘kid’ is definitely accurate.
“Percy Jackson,” he says and the name rings a bell even if Jake can’t place it. He hears so many names every day so he can only assume the kid has made an appearance in the nine nine before.
“That short for anything?” Jake double checks before he logs it in the system and the kid looks vaguely displeased with the question, as though it’s an imposition or just something he’d prefer not to answer.
“Perseus,” he begrudgingly admits and Jake tries to bite back a laugh. There’s a moment where he thinks that it must be a fake name before there’s another one where he thinks to himself well why the Hell would that be the fake name he picked?
Instead he coughs into his hand, evidently doing a bad job at hiding the laugh he is trying to stifle if the look on the kid’s face is anything to go by. “That, uh, that sounds familiar?”
The kid looks vaguely amused. “The son of Zeus,” he says with a grin that suggests there is a joke somewhere in it that’s just for him. Outside it begins to rain. “The guy that killed Medusa,” then he mumbles something that Jake can’t really hear but sounds sort of like “the first time,”
“Right,” Jake nods. “You’re not about to tell me your dad is actually Zeus, right?”
“Nah,” Percy shakes his head and readjusts himself in the cold metal seat, wincing slightly as he moves, “But his name is Poseidon,”
“You’re shitting me, kid,” Jake says as he turns to type the kid’s name into the database. He is looking forward to, if nothing else, finding out the kid’s dad’s name is Paul or something equally mundane. But when he pulls up a scanned copy of the kid’s birth certificate there is no father listed. It’s not really the most surprised he’s ever been but it is vaguely annoying and he tries to ignore the anger and the resentment he feels whenever he hears about absentee fathers. Against his will, his gaze softens as he looks back at the kid, really registering for the first time that he really is just fourteen, average height, with inky black hair and a grey streak, and baby fat that looks like it’s dropping off by the day. He’s in that stage of adolescence where he has those puppy-like proportions, feet and hands slightly awkwardly large and limbs gangly, even if there’s lithe muscle evidenced beneath the tan skin. The kid is frightfully young and covered in scars and not nearly as uncomfortable as he should be about sitting in the nine nine.
“Okay so I can’t prove that,” he says, and at last the boy grins. “This says you're from Manhattan,” the kid nods, “so what brings you to Brooklyn?” It’s 4:30 on a Wednesday afternoon so it seems unlikely the kid would be on a day trip.
“I took a wrong turn on my way home from school,” Jake gets the impression that Percy has told many worse lies but this one is by no means good. He raises an eyebrow.
“You took a wrong turn all the way to Brooklyn?”
“Sure did!”
Jake sighs and decides he’s not getting a good answer out of him. “Listen kid-”
“Percy,”
“Right. Listen Percy, I need to log this incident and talk to you a bit about it. Do you have any prior criminal convictions?”
There’s hesitation in the way the kid shakes his head. “That’s a different thing from arrests, right?”
Jake laughs humourlessly into the palm of his hand. “Yeah,” he says, “Those are different things,”
“Then no. There was a manhunt for me when I was twelve but they cleared me of all charges,”
And suddenly Jake knows why the name was ringing bells. “You’re the kid that blew up the St. Louis arch!”
Percy frowns and shifts in his seat, looking beyond Jake rather than at him. “I didn’t blow it up. I told you, they cleared me of that. I was just there, I just survived the experience,” In spite of his insistence that it wasn’t his fault, he looks guilty. It doesn’t really make Jake suspicious of him.
“Right,” he says, remembering the video that had been all over the news and the internet a couple of years ago, of the monument being blown to bits (the people unlucky enough to be at the top faring no better than the building itself), the small shape of a child--bright orange and jet black--flying through the air in what was probably a record-breaking jump, the kind that could only come from desperation and adrenaline. He remembers the way the internet had swarmed with conspiracies and theories about the missing preteen who was suspected of killing his mother, who seemed to be constantly blowing things up, a few crazies even going so far as to suggests that the murky, slate grey water the boy had landed in had reached up to grab him, bring him into its warm embrace. Jake still struggles to believe he survived that fall. “You’re the kid that jumped off the St. Louis Arch and survived the fall,” Jake, of course, remembers the whole kidnapping aspect of it, the stepfather that had jumped on accusing Percy as soon as the press gave him the time of day and tried to claim his mother’s life insurance policy as soon as he was able, he remembers the gun fight that the twelve-year-old had won as well as the companions he had travelled with, one of whom who still hadn’t been identified.
Percy nods and twists his fingers into a knot in his lap and Jake’s curiosity wins. “Are you still in touch with those other kids?”
There's a small smile on Percy’s face when he nods. “Yeah, of course, they’re like my best friends,” Jake can’t recall the girl’s name but he remembers that a missing person’s case several years old was solved when she appeared, relatively unharmed.
“Who was the boy you were travelling with?” he asks, just because he wants to know.
Percy doesn’t seem to mind when he shrugs and answers without protest or hesitation. “His name’s Grover,”
And because Jake is nosey and aware that he might get the glory of solving that mystery two years after it had first appeared, he asks, “Last name,”
“Underwood,” Jake commits it to memory and decides to look into him later. Then he realises he got side tracked and there’s still a lot to do.
“Okay, Percy,” he says, “I got side-tracked but I do actually need to fill out this incident report. You have quite the juvenile record here,” It’s true. The kid has a list of offences and expulsions but nothing has ever come of a single one of them, most of them, if not all, seem like they were wrapped up rather hastily and without proper procedure. “You're lucky it’s all going to be expunged but you need to get your act together or you’re going to be an adult and it will all be there to stay."
Percy smiles at him bittersweetly, “Nah,” he says with so much conviction that Jake doesn’t think he has room to argue, even if he can’t hope to know what the kid means.
“Right,” Jake shakes his head. It’s starting to ache. “What really matters right now is why you were reported to be attacking an old woman in an alley with a baseball bat,” When Jake had arrived the woman was nowhere to be seen so she wasn’t exactly there to press charges but they still needed the incident report before Jackson would be free to go.
Percy looks at him, unimpressed. “Do you see a baseball bat anywhere on me?” he asks and Jake has to admit he doesn’t. The kid is wearing a hoodie without a jacket and there is no sign that there’s anything in the front pocket.
Jake shakes his head. “Empty your pockets and show me your bag,” So the kid does, pulling out two ziplock bags from his jean pockets, one full of lemon squares and the other with jingling gold coins that are definitely intriguing but also definitely not a baseball bat, as well as a pen. Jake nods as he picks up the blue backpack and pulls out its contents even though he is sure it’s too small for the baseball bat the kid was supposedly holding. There is a school folder and a couple of notebooks in it. Jake pulls them out and sees doodles of sea creatures that are amusingly accurate even though they have almost human facial expressions, with speech bubbles written in a language Jake doesn’t recognise. The kid’s handwriting is particularly bad in English but it looks neat enough in what Jake thinks might be Greek. There’s a photo of the girl from all those years ago tucked into the folder, seemingly proof that they’re still friends because she looks a couple of years older. There is an empty lunch box and a little bag of candy, all of it bright blue.
“Okay,” he agrees, “No baseball bat,” He returns the kid’s things to his bag but not before he reaches out and grabs the candy, offering it to Jake who takes a piece and waits for the kid to chew on it contently before he does too. “But why were you attacking an old woman in an alley?” They have enough witness reports to know that something strange had definitely happened.
Percy shrugs. “It was hardly unprovoked,” His teeth are tinged blue.
“Witnesses all said that’s exactly what it was,” Jake reasons and Percy leans back in his chair, absentmindedly brushing a bit of glitter from his shoulder.
“This might suggest otherwise,” he says calmly and pulls up the bottom of his hoodie. Above his right hip is a nasty looking wound that has blood blooming across the t-shirt he’s wearing under the sweater, the hoodie’s dark colour doing wonders to keep any staining that might be leaching through the fabric well-hidden. There is a worryingly greenish tint to the edges of it that suggests there’s a growing infection that needs emergency medical attention. When Jake makes his concerns known Percy shakes his head. “I’ve had worse,” he says cryptically and he leaves soon after, popping one of his lemon squares into his mouth and chewing thoughtfully, posture immediately straightening a little.
Later Jake will look into everything strange about the encounter in his own time. He will find out the kid goes to a boarding school so clearly his excuse was bullshit, if that wasn’t clear from the word go. He will learn the girl's name is Annabeth Chase and that the only Grover Underwood who matches the physical description is about thirty and he has next to no paperwork in the database. Then he will get curious and seek out the videos again, of the arch and the firefight, and of the statement Percy made afterwards and his stepfather made during. Curiosity will get the better of him and he will look into Percy’s stepfather and find him missing, presumed dead and he won’t feel suspicion, not really, and a strange sense of relief will hit him like a truck.
Jake thinks about the kid for a month straight before he really stops and let’s the teenage boy with the strange scars and the strange eyes and the manner of speaking that makes Jake feel like he’s been left out of the loop fall into the background of mysterious characters. He’s met his fair share of them.
It’s a couple of years later when all of Manhattan falls asleep and nobody can enter the area to find out what is actually going on. He hears about all the destruction and how the Empire State Building had glowed oddly blue as Manhattan woke up to find their home in ruin and disarray. As confounding as it all is, the destruction is at least explainable, whereas the way a number of statues have moved across the city is not.
Nobody really knows what happened but Jake knows there are a few people on the internet insisting on message boards and forums and in shaky, phone camera videos, that they saw monsters and teenagers in armour with old timey weapons and strange powers. He wants to think they’re all delusional or hallucinating, clearly mentally ill but seemingly harmless but he can’t ignore the logic-defying way their stories all seem to line up. And all of them talk about, leading the charge from one side, a young man, early twenties, with blond hair and golden eyes and a scar from his jaw to just beneath his eye. And they all say he was met by his opposition, headed by three teenagers who all sound a tad too familiar. The boy with the strange, struggling gait with the wispy facial hair and the ginger curls tucked beneath his hat, the girl with the tall, strong frame honey blonde hair and intelligent grey eyes who took a weapon in the fight then eventually re-emerged, seeming like she had recovered far too quickly. And of course the boy with the black hair and the sea green eyes who rode a hurricane into the fight.
It’s all nonsense, it has to be, but Jake can’t help but think of the strange fourteen-year-old that had definitely not attacked an old woman with a baseball bat but might have attacked her with something else, but certainly hadn’t done any of it unprovoked. It makes Jake’s head hurt but instead of laying it to rest he prints out a picture of Perseus Jackson and pins it to a corkboard on his apartment’s wall, as though he’s some kind of conspiracy theorist.
He rewatches the video from the arch and thinks, just maybe, he is actually losing his mind because there is certainly something unnatural about the way that filthy water moves.
When Percy Jackson goes missing a few months later the report crosses Jake’s desk. He’s told to keep an eye out. A teenager, especially a renowned troubled kid, isn’t usually high priority, assumed to be a runaway instead of something more pressing. But his mother waited a couple of weeks to report him missing, like she was used to him disappearing and showing up. Only this time he hasn’t shown up. So he’s been missing for weeks and he has a history with a kidnapper who was never actually caught. He becomes a priority.
Until his mother recants the missing persons report a few weeks later. There’s still no sign of him.
Jake looks at the corkboard on his wall where the web of string and names and grainy photographs is going. He stares at Percy Jackson’s face until he is impossibly familiar with the straight, strong shape of the bridge of his nose, the point of his upper lip, the square of his jaw, and the bags beneath his eyes. His colouring has been engraved in Jake’s head for a few years already. You don’t forget eyes that green and fathomless.
Over the next few months Jake hears all sorts of odd chatter about the boy. There are sightings of him with two other teenagers--and African-American girl who is five two at most that nobody has been able to identify, and a Chinese boy who is impossibly tall and broad even though his face is soft and youthful and seemingly harmless. His name is Frank Zhang, he is Canadian, everybody assumes he crossed into the US illegally but nobody does anything. The Zhang family home in Canada burns down and there are no bodies found but Frank’s grandmother is missing, presumed dead.
Then there are sightings of him with a boy that the media muses is the long-missing son of Beryl Grace, some washed up actress that Jake Googles when he hears the name. She’s long dead. Jason Grace is also presumed dead, unless, of course, the blond boy with the scar on his lip who keeps appearing in all sorts of places alongside someone who is assumed to be Perseus Jackson is actually him. Missing people, all presumed dead, seem to be a recurring theme and Jake isn’t sure how to feel about it. It is Amy that points out, with a semi-amused smile that could just as quickly turn to frustration, as the theory circulates on the news, that Jason and Perseus are both named after Greek heroes. Jake thinks Percy drew the short straw there.
Percy Jackson, or somebody that looks like him, is seen with an exceptionally pretty native American girl. Jake actually recognises, without having to look her up, that she is Tristan McLean’s missing daughter. Much like Percy, she was reported missing, as was her father. Then her father showed up a while later and withdrew Piper’s missing person report. There were still no confirmed sightings of her.
The blonde girl is there like she always is.
There’s a Latino boy who is also missing, presumed dead. Having run away from foster home after foster home and disciplinary school after disciplinary school, his record is long enough to rival Percy’s.
They are seen all over the US and briefly in Canada, then in Europe, in Italy and Greece, even though Jake is pretty sure most of them don’t actually have passports. Destruction follows them and Jake, thinking about the talk he once had with a young Percy Jackson, can’t help but wonder whether or not it’s really their fault.
There is evidence of three train tickets to Alaska. Nobody claims to know how they managed the rest of the journey.
Jake's mess of string is growing and he feels a little like he’s lost it as he follows the story obsessively. Amy catches him one day and puts a hand on his shoulder, gently tells him he needs to stop because this isn't good for him. He nods and doesn’t even slow down.
It’s a genuine coincidence that, as Jake is collecting evidence for a murder in an apartment building he is 80% sure was committed by the husband, he bumps into Sally Jackson-Blofis. He pretends he doesn’t recognise her face from his conspiracy board but Amy looks at him strangely so he’s not sure how well he’s managed it. She says she hasn’t heard anything as she sits down in her living room, cradling her swollen belly and offering Jake a cookie. He doesn’t ask why they’re blue, it’s hardly the strangest thing about the Jackson family. He really hopes she isn’t trying to replace her missing son with a new baby, and thankfully all the photos of him and the strangest group of teenagers Jake has ever seen seem to suggest she hasn’t even come close to forgetting him. They’re all wearing orange shirts, like the flash of neon colour Jake sees every time he rewatches the video of the preteen springing from the St. Louis Arch and surviving the fall.
Boyle is in the study talking to her husband and Amy, seeing Jake has the situation under control, joins him. Left alone with Sally Jackson, Jake contemplates just how little her son looks like her.
“Percy must look an awful lot like Poseidon,” he muses and Sally shoots to her feet, blue eyes blown wide and staring at him like he’s just grown a second head (maybe even a few more, just for good measure).
“I’m sorry?” She says, voice shaking. She’s wearing a pair of slippers and a loose dress and she looks ready to fight even though Jake doesn’t think it would go all that well if she did.
“Oh,” he says, “I had your son at the precinct a while ago. He told me his father’s name was Poseidon after I heard about his name…”
Sally deflates, a look of amusement mingling with a renewed sense of grief on her gentle features. “That sounds like him,” Her smile is sad. “How long ago?”
Jake knows what she’s asking so he shakes his head immediately, not wanting to give the grieving mother false hope. “About three years,” he says with an apologetic smile. “I’m guessing there’s still no sign of him?” Jake knows there isn’t. He’s been paying far too much attention for that.
When Sally sees him out she doesn’t ask how he knew who she was. He notices it and marks it on the ever more dizzying corkboard.
Jake hasn’t stopped thinking about Percy Jackson, even after he has returned home safe, and strange sightings of him still continue to happen. They are usually in Manhattan or Long Island, outside of Jake’s jurisdiction. Until one day something happens in Brooklyn.
It’s winter and there is rain looming in the dark, heavy shapes of the clouds. It's the afternoon and the sky is already beginning to look like night, the thin shape of the moon against the deep blue sky growing more and more visible. There are reports of four teenagers fighting three other teenagers in an alleyway with baseball bats, all three of them dressed as cheerleaders even though schools have definitely all broken up for the holidays.
The cheerleaders have disappeared by the time he gets there, as have the baseball bats. It seems a little too familiar, especially as Jake turns into the alley to apprehend the four teenagers, Boyle by his side, and he is met again with the bottomless pit of vibrant sea green eyes.
Percy Jackson looks so much worse for wear. As ever, his clothes are full of bloodstained holes and Jake is almost convinced it’s some skater-y fashion choice but something about that brand new hallowed look and everything he has ever learned about the boy stops him from even considering it. His clothes look a bit too big for him, like there are lingering hunger pangs in his frame, probably a remnant of his time on the run, and what little Jake can see of him seems vaguely ropey, muscle under skin as though, even in his months of malnourishment, he hadn’t been allowed any rest. There are more scars than Jake remembers, the grey streak which had been fading in the years preceding his disappearance back in full force, now almost pure white. He’s outgrown the baby fat and he’s sort of devastatingly handsome in spite of looking like he has been through a wood chipper. His cheekbones are high and prominent enough for Jake to consider calling them gaunt, a long, pink scar cutting from his jaw up, crossing one. Some part of Jake’s brain goes back to the reports from the year before, about the blond boy with the scar and the eyes like a precious metal.
He’s seen the girl before, too, though never in person. He’s sure this is Annabeth Chase, with her long, curly blonde hair that is sort of jagged at the edges, as though it had been hacked at and burned away, pulled back away from her face into a ponytail. She has a matching grey streak. Her eyes are a fierce grey and Jake can’t describe if he’d sooner consider them haunting or haunted. She looks about as starved as Percy, who is definitely her boyfriend judging from the way their scarred hands are linked, and her skin looks washed out, like she’s struggling to regain a tan and is also in New York in the winter.
The other boys are less familiar and maybe a year younger than Percy and Annabeth. Jake thinks he’s heard descriptions that match theirs in the time he has spent trying to figure out the enigma that is Percy Jackson, but he doesn’t have any photos. They’re holding hands too, and Jake thinks it looks a bit like the world’s worst double date.
The shorter of the boy looks like he might be dying. His undertones suggest he’s of Mediterranean descent, which they all appear to be, but he looks like he hasn’t seen the sun in years, a walking vitamin D deficiency. There are serious bags under his eyes, which are as shockingly dark as his hair, and he, too, looks starved, nearing emaciation. Jake suppresses the urge to let them all go and take them to go get burgers or something. They look like they could do with it.
The last of the teenagers is the only one that looks healthy. He hasn’t got the dark circles or the signs of starvation, not even the chapped lips that look like they’ve been fighting a winter wind all day. He looks bright and sunny, with sun-bleached blond hair, bright blue eyes, and tanned, freckled skin. He has too many scars for a kid his age but it’s really nothing compared to his companions. He is also dressed for warmer weather than what they’re currently standing in and he doesn’t look the least bit cold.
They’re all wearing matching necklaces, with leather straps and clay beads. It’s a detail Jake has noticed in a lot of the photos of Percy Jackson and his associates he has examined far too closely, looking for answers. He is a detective for a reason, after all.
“Peralta!” Jackson calls and he doesn’t look the least bit concerned about the fact that Jake and Boyle have shown up to bring them to the precinct. The cheerleaders and the weapons are gone along with any evidence of them so there’s not much else to do besides log the incident and wonder what the hell the gold glitter that they’re all covered with is about.
“You remember me Jackson?”
He shrugs. “You’re the only cop that’s actually been nice to me,” Jake didn’t really struggle to believe that.
“What are you doing in Brooklyn again?” Really Jake probably shouldn’t be trying to catch up with Percy, but the group of teenagers is being cooperative enough, aside from the venomous scowl on the shortest one’s lips that refuses to move away. “Not gotten lost on your way home from boarding school in the middle of the week?”
Annabeth sends him a level look. “Really, Seaweed Brain?” She looks vaguely amused as Percy shrugs sheepishly.
“At least it wasn’t a bathtub,” he smiles awkwardly, and Jake could swear his teeth are somehow sharper, more predatory.
The short one stops scowling for a moment to mutter “I can’t believe he fell for that.” and the blond boy positively beams at him.
“Who are these kids?” Boyle asks.
“Ask them,” Jake tells them, “They’re cooperative enough,”
So they introduce themselves, the two unknowns giving the names Nico di Angelo and Will Solace. “Nico’s my cousin,” Percy says when Boyle asks how they all know each other. “Annabeth and I were kidnapped together a millennium ago,” he says, sharing a grin with Annabeth who shakes her head, amused. It’s infuriating. “And we met Will at summer camp,” Jake can believe all of that, seeing some sort of resemblance between Percy and Nico.
“Let me guess,” Jake says, looking at Nico over his shoulder, “ Your father is Zeus!”
Nico sends a look Jake can’t decipher to Percy who returns it intently, and Nico’s face changes entirely. He grins at Jake and the expression looks foreign on his delicate features. “Hades, actually,”
Jake shakes his head and looks at Annabeth and Will probingly. Annabeth holds up her hands and grins like she’s up to something. “My dad’s Frederick Chase,” she says, “But my mum is called Athena,”
Jake holds back the urge to yell just long enough for Will to say “Naomi Solace and Lester Papadopoulos,” and Boyle, in spite of his own name, has the grace to wince at that one.
Once they’re at the precinct Jake asks again about why they’re in Brooklyn and, this time around, Jackson actually has a decent answer. “We met some friends for lunch then figured we’d hang around a bit until it was time to get dinner,”
“What are your friend’s names?”
“Carter and Sadie Kane,” and, with a quick search in the database, Jake is able to confirm they are actually Brooklyn residents who are relatively close in age to the teenagers sitting in front of him. They have a missing father, presumed dead. Jake kind of wants to ask outright what the hell is going on but he knows he won’t get a good answer.
He looks up the kids too, and Nico apparently doesn’t exist, because the only Nico di Angelo he can find in the US is missing, assumed dead, and, on the off chance he is still alive, would be in his nineties. Jake can hear his accent and wonder if he might have immigrated illegally, but Italy also doesn’t have anyone with both the same name and the same description either. So either the kid doesn’t exist or the name’s a fake one. But Nico pulls out an ID and it looks real enough, even though Jake knows there are people in the city that can make some pretty convincing fakes. Not to mention that the age on the card is sixteen and Jake doesn’t really see why the kid would have a fake ID that wouldn’t let him buy alcohol.
Will was evidently not lying about his mother being Naomi Solace, though he does briefly wonder what it is about Percy Jackson and being friends with the children of celebrities. He looks at Will after googling his mother. “What is alternative country music?” Will shrugs. There is no father on his birth certificate.
Annabeth was also, evidently, being honest about her father’s name and her mother is, of course, registered on her birth certificate but her name looks to be pretty illegible. Jake supposes that if he squints at it, it might say Athena.
He eventually lets them leave and decides, one again, to look further into the goings on around Percy Jackson.
He starts with Annabeth. He can’t find anything else about her mother or that side of her family but he does see a whole family on her dad’s side. She has an uncle named Randolph (unfortunate) and a dead aunt (unfortunate) as well as a dead cousin named magnus (doubly unfortunate) who was homeless for a while before his rather public, dramatic, befuddling death (and that just feels cruel, really). In spite of Magnus being very, very, dead--his body had even been found and autopsied--there were still semi-frequent reports of a kid matching his appearance doing strange suspicious things, often with a hijabi girl or a kid his age with bright green hair and a garish taste in clothes. The kids were never there when the police responded to the reports of them and the one with green hair matched another homeless child who had died in strange circumstances named Alex Fierro. She was only sixteen, just like Magnus, and in spite of what Jake does for a job, he can’t help but feel a little ill.
Then he looks into Will, finds next to nothing beyond a mother in Texas who seems to know that her teenage son is living on the other side of the country without her, and decides instead to look into this supposed father. There are a couple of Lester Papadopouloses in the country but one is in his eighties and the other is barely older than Will. It’s a truly confounding lie.
He shakes his head and gets up from his desk, realising that the more he looks into Percy Jackson the less he is sure of. He sighs and shakes his head in the middle of the precinct which is almost empty. He doubts he’ll get paid for the overtime which is fair enough seeing as he was using the time to research for the sake of personal curiosity. He looks across at his desk and sees a folded receipt there. He picks it up. It looks like it’s for gauze, antiseptic, wound dressings, and a large, reusable water bottle. There’s a pufferfish drawn on it in pen, another oddly accurate drawing of a sea creature with a speech bubble written in what Jake could, once again, only guess was Greek. He took to the internet to translate it and was a bit taken back to see that it wasn’t modern Greek, but Ancient Greek. The internet told him all it said was “
sorry”
and he didn’t know whether or not to laugh or cry.