𝐇𝐀𝐕𝐄𝐍° ! percy jackson

𝐢𝐢.𝐢 - 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐞𝐲𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐚 𝐡𝐮𝐫𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐧𝐞 (𝐩 + 𝐚)

Sloan handed the photo to his ugly buddies, who made comments that made Percy want to pulverize them, then proceeded to rip it up to make spit wads. "What I would do to her." Sloan snickered, and Percy had to try really, really hard not to punch him in the face. 

"Shut up." The son of Poseidon gritted out, his hand twitching as it curled into a fist. Sloan was disgusting, and Percy wouldn't even begin to fathom how someone could make such crude and vile comments about anyone, let alone a girl. He wanted to beat Sloan up, not just for crumpling the picture, but for what he was saying about Aurora. The disrespect. Percy was not going to tolerate that, not when someone talked about a female in that manner. His mother taught him better than that.

"Or what? You're going to hit me?" Sloan laughed, like it was a hysterical thing, staring at Percy's skinny frame in comparison to the muscular bully. Percy wanted to shout, yeah, dumbass. He was two seconds away from doing so before Sloan opened his fat mouth again.

"Did I insult your little girlfriend? She could do so much better than you. You're such a loser, Jackson, like your stupid friend. Good thing I'm gonna put you out of your misery next period." Sloan spat, his huge buddies chewing up Percy's photo.

It was one thing to insult Aurora. He knew she wouldn't give a fuck, but he would still defend her to his dying breath. But Sloan brought Percy's only friend at Meriwether College Prep into the argument, Tyson—whom the bully referred to as "stupid," which irked Percy even more because Sloan was genuinely a moron. Tyson deserved none of the shit Sloan threw his way. Percy was the one who alays got them into fights, his friend simply the innocent bystander, which only andded to Percy's fighter guilt.

Although Tyson was homeless—the only homeless student at the school—he had a heart of gold and kindness that rivaled only his mother. As near as Percy and Sally could figure, he'd been abandoned by his parents when he was very young, probably because he looked so... different. He was six-foot-three and built like the Abominable Snowman, but he cried a lot and was scared of just about everything, including his own reflection. His face was kind of misshapen and brutal-looking. Percy didn't judge him based on how he looked, though. (Percy didn't think of himself as the best looking anyway, so who was he to talk? And, also, he could never bring himself to look at Tyson fully, for whatever odd reason.)

Percy would have murdered them right then and there, but he was under strict orders from Chiron never to take his anger out on regular mortals, no matter how obnoxious they were. He had to save his fighting for monsters. But it wasn't like Aurora followed those rules.

(Percy ignored how Aurora being called his girlfriend sent a shock of lightning through his veins. Probably Zeus playing a prank on him. The god of the sky hated his guts, after all.)

And so it went, the next class was PE. For a demigod, Percy wasn't exactly athletic. Aurora would constantly make fun of him for his slow running ability and lack of stamina—gods, why couldn't he get her out of his head? It was getting annoying. He was just trying to think. Thinking by himself was hard enough, and now Aurora was in there too? Ugh.

In the midst of all his preoccupied thinking, Matt Sloan asked to be captain. No surprise there.

Sloan grinned and took charge of the picking. He made Percy the other team's captain, but it didn't matter who he picked, because all the jocks and the popular kids moved over to Sloan's side. So did the big group of visitors. On Percy's side, he had Tyson, Corey Bailer, Raj Mandali, and a half dozen other kids who always got harassed by Sloan and his gang. Normally Percy would've been okay with just Tyson—he was worth half a team all by himself—but the visitors on Sloan's team were almost as tall and strong-looking as Tyson, and there were six of them. Matt Sloan spilled a cage full of balls in the middle of the gym.