Chapter Text
The taxi to Percy’s house is attacked by an empousa.
She’s got a flaming mop of hair, so bright it’s hard to look at, and under her waist, her legs are deformed— odd, even for him. One is furry and brown like a satyr’s and the other is a glinting bronze like the kunai in his pouch.
Peculiarly, her eyes don't burn with hunger, but with purpose.
Naruto looks around. He’s not with a demigod. He’s alone.
“I thought you guys were supposed to be discreet.”
She hisses with a snake tongue. “Foolish child, mortals having an inkling of knowledge is far less important than this.”
“Aren’t you a servant of Hecate? The mist should be your top priority, right?” She glares, and he assumes he actually did get that right. “Unless you’re a rebel of sorts.”
“Enough!” She waves her hand, and the air in front of her shimmers. He sees wisps of green smoke trail around before the environment changes.
To the drop from the top of the Empire States building.
He has the briefest of seconds to react, till the world cracks and the illusion breaks.
“What in Hades?” She curses. “What did you do?”
“Nothing,” he says and he leans into a stance. “Seems you just suck.”
Her hand goes alight with fire. He’s almost impressed, but he remembers that no one needs rudimentary hand seals here.
She throws it at him. He twists under it. The empousa waves her hand and vines rise out of the earth. He jumps over her.
He grabs a discarded taxi window, twists, then blocks a burst of fire. The heat licks his skin.
Once she’s stopped, he flips it around. And knocks her over the head with it.
He hits her again with it, between the ribs. She, through a wheeze, strikes with her claws. It passes through the shield and grazes his forehead.
She opens her mouth over his neck. He kicks up at her jaw.
She takes a step back. Her mouth is bleeding like a faucet. “Sorry, honey. Did you bite your tongue?” he says.
She growls and starts charging for him again. He picks a kunai, grabbing the only side of it he can touch, the handle made of steel, and flicks it.
The celestial bronze tip pierces straight through her shoulder and she collapses like a sack of potatoes in front of him with an ear-piercing scream.
He squats to her level.
He pulls out another kunai. She hisses at him.
“You may succeed at killing me, Uzumaki, but my master has a lot planned for you. I’m just the beginning.”
“Master, eh? Kronos seems to have a very weird attachment to me. Tell him he downgraded once you get out of Tartarus.”
“The crooked one?” She scrunches her face. “That pathetic fool isn’t my master!”
Naruto stops just seconds before he stabs her face. It takes him a second to compute
Likely– possibly— it’s his mystery primordial.
He swallows. “Pray tell, who is?”
The empousa isn’t very smart, or isn’t very tight-lipped— or both. Both is good— for she runs her mouth. “You have lost. Even before you’ve started, you’ve lost.” She gets really close, close enough to bite his nose off.
“She controls the ground you stand on, the air you breathe, and if she wanted to, she could collapse every building on the planet in seconds. Uzumaki, she controls everything.”
Everything?
He laughs in her face. “You don’t expect me to believe that Chaos is your master.”
Her face goes stunned. Naruto’s goes slack.
No, he goes. No.
It’s because of the absurdity, he thinks, she’s shocked by–
Before the thought can finish, she moves and tries to bite at his face. He dodges by the skin on his nose, and brings his kunai out by the side, through her head.
She bursts into golden showers.
Naruto gets up, pats the regular dust off his pants, then shakes the monster dust off his shoes.
Everything. He almost laughs again.
Chaos, he thinks. Right.
Naruto gets to the Jackson home without another interruption. Thankfully
Ms. Jackson opens the door for him. He’s taken kind of aback. She’s usually at work at this time of the day.
“What happened to you?” She asks. At that question, Percy looks over the couch.
He hisses sympathetically.
Naruto looks down. His shirt is slightly facing the wrong way, and he probably has the faint smell of sweat, but he doesn’t look far off from just fatigue.
Then Ms. Jackson moves over to her purse on the dining room table and brings out a wet wipe. She cleans his forehead and he stands still as she does so, utterly confused.
She pulls it back and it’s got crimson, thick splotches of— ah, blood. The empousa had cut him.
Ms. Jackson then looks the wound over. She hums a satisfied song. She disposes of the bloody wipes with not even a grimace, then returns back to him.
“Stitches?” She asks.
He doesn't really mean to squeeze his face up as much as he does.“It’s not very deep,” he says.
She purses her lips but relents. “What happened?” she asks again.
He walks into the house.
The place changes every time he comes, as Percy and Ms. Jackson get used to… choice. They’ve got a new house plant by the door now, and he can see the ongoing process of the wooden cabinets in the kitchen being redone and the bathroom being painted sky blue.
“Empousa. Got me in a taxi.”
“Why did it come after you?” Percy asks.
“Hell if I know. But apparently she worked for a master.”
He tells them about what she told him. A tight grip envelops his neck over the conversation, and he entertains the thought that it just might be the effect of saying their, well her now isn’t it, name.
“I’ll talk to Chiron later,” Ms. Jackson promises. “You just rest.”
The sun’s rays are still cold, and the birds around have started chirping and tweeting outside his window, when his eyelids open and stubbornly refuse to stay closed.
He was supposed to be gone by night but Sally had insisted, said she would call Chiron– she’s drachma rich apparently, and she would drive him to camp so he could save up the money they gave him for transport.
Yeah, right. Three seconds in camp, and it’ll be stolen by a Hermes kid.
Naruto has a weak will next to Sally Jackson, and eventually he’d bowed down on it, and accepted the guest bed, propped up in Percy’s room, just for him when he visits.
He slides his legs into a pair of fancy bathroom slippers, and rubs night cricks off his shoulders. He gets up on his feet. His throat is dry, itchy, scratchy.
Percy, the lucky bastard, is drooling on his pillow, completely asleep.
Naruto pats at his hair till it looks fine, then splashes a handful of water in his eyes. The world gains color.
Sally is in the kitchen, pulling the blender from its cabinet. She sees him. “Morning!”
Chipper? At this time in the morning? Criminal.
He grumbles something, and grabs a glass of water. He hungrily slurps down till the last drop. His voice gets a bit less croaky, and the scratching stops.
This is usually where the conversation dies off so his mind is blanking on casual things to say, they haven’t really talked much past this.
“What are you making?”
“A smoothie.”
“Nice.” Then he sees her grab a handful of kale.
Not nice.
He helps her chop the vegetables, then peel the fruits. “So, Mrs– no, Ms. Jackson–”
“Sally.”
“Um, Sally—” he looks to Percy’s bedroom, and somewhere distant in his mind he thinks he’s going to come and eat Naruto alive.
Nothing. “Do you have a sharingan as well?”
Sally blinks. “What?”
“I mean you don’t seem the type. Oh— that’s probably offensive if you have it.” Naruto has never stumbled over his words so much in his life.
“What’s a sharingan?”
“Oh,” Naruto frowns, “Percy didn’t tell you?”
“... No.”
sh*t. He’s messing something up. “Well, they’re the eyes from my time—
“Your time?”
Naruto sucks in a breath. “I’m from, like, five hundred-” Sally widens her eyes, “-thousand years ago. I was sent forward in time, by Kronos and, um, Chaos or whoever this master is.”
“Oh,” Sally says. She steadies herself on the counter. “That’w why you— okay, that makes sense.” She’s long forgotten about the smoothie.
“And he has eyes from then?”
“Yeah. You don’t?”
“No. That’s important?”
“Yeah. They’re hereditary.”
Over the silence he can hear her brain spinning. Finally, after a good minute; “I can ask Poseidon,” she suggests.
Naruto stops his movement of putting the glass in his hand into the sink. He turns back to her. “Percy told me that the gods had ancient laws, no mortal contact or something– but you’ve contacted him… twice? For this, and my forged papers… Sorry if I’m overstepping but– are you and Poseidon still close?”
Sally sighs and the world is in her breath. “I’m not frolicking with him, but we—”
He hears footsteps, gentle and soft, walk out of Percy's room. He hears the swish of a cloak and then the slight clink of armor. Sally is looking straight, above his head—
Stilled.
Naruto frowns at her. “Sally?”
He turns and there is nothing there. Then he hears the creak of the bathroom door, and then the same whine as the person walks out.
Before the person enters the room they suddenly stop, and turn. He sees a peek of purple, then he sees a golden, sharp spear poking out of the hall.
Golden. Not bronze.
Naruto tries to grab at a shinobi pouch that isn’t there. Sally grabs a pan, and shakily hands it to him. No words are wasted.
Naruto creeps along, on the tips of his toes. His breaths are choppy—a bit too loud and his fingers won’t stop twitching.
That was Percy's bedroom the figure walked out of. His mind won’t stop racing with uncomfortable, nauseating thoughts.
Naruto starts turning the corner, then his head meets another
He staggers. His vision swims. Both he and the intruder blink.
He’s got lightning for eyes.
A swipe of the spear. It hums. Naruto dodges, then swings with his pan.
Wham!!
It hits the guy in the joint of his elbow. Something cracks harshly, like a whip.
He smiles, then he smells ozone in the air. The intruder floods his body with lightning, and every cell of Naruto’s being pours into pain. His nerves go alight, and shivering shocks race up his body.
He takes a step back. The intruder glares up at him, nursing his arm, his bent and red arm.
He’s got fashioned blonde hair on a picture perfect face, the type that shows up on magazine covers with fake, dazzling smiles— except where the perfect face fails; at the bottom of his chin, dotted like ink, he’s got a scar, tiny, barely there, but there.
“Wait!” The guy says, panicked and just a little confused.
“I wait? Hell, no!”
He swings and the guy jumps back. The pan hits the walls and there is another deafening crack.
The guy stabs, and Naruto twists around it. He goes to grab it but his hand slips right through it, like the spear is not there.
Oh.
It's like Celestial Bronze.
And he’s mortal.
It can’t hurt him.
Naruto, however, has a neutral frying pan.
“Wait!” Sally says before they can start grappling for the pan. She walks up to them from behind them, from Percy’s bedroom.
He doesn’t know how she got there.
She stands by his side, and glares. He shifts a bit so she’s protected by his arm. “Do you know where my son is?”
“I- what?”
“Naruto?” He brandishes the pan.
The assailant goes pale in the face. “I’m sorry, Ms. I- I don’t know.” He frowns to the floor. “I don’t know a lot of things.
Sally and he share a look.
“Where did you come from?”
“I don’t know.” Naruto takes a step forward. “Honestly, I don’t. I swear on the Styx.”
Thunder booms.
Sally’s eyes widen. “You’re not a monster?”
“What?”
“You’re a demigod.”
Naruto frowns. He’d kinda figured that out already. “Of Zeus, apparently.” He shakes off the remaining shocks, and tries to get his numb face to move the way he wants it to.
“Jupiter,” the guy corrects instantly then he blinks. They all blink at him.
Sally runs a hand through her hair. Wrinkles he’s sure weren’t there before take over her brow, and her shoulders get heavier as he watches. She looks older than her age, and that’s an odd sight.
Naruto rubs at his sinuses. This guy can’t stick to a story, and it’s pissing him off. “Do you know anything or not?”
“I can tell you my name. I’m pretty sure I know it.”.
Naruto leans on the wall he’d cracked open. “Go on,” he says, despondently.
“It’s Jason,” he says, bringing his arm to his chest. “Jason Grace.”
