If you're anything like me, I'm sorry.

⧖ ⧗ ⧖

i. Russian Doll / 2019-???,  ii. ??? / UNKNOWN iii. Flatline / SOPHIA LORNIE, The Clock Mender / AVERY PALMER iv. Not Strong Enough / BOYGENIUS, v. Normal People / SALLY ROONEY, vi. Bones & All / 2022, vii. Ptolmaea / ETHEL CAIN

tw: mentions of child neglect & death

The Nine to Five

Every time a child of The Big Three is born, the Gods flip a drachma, and the world holds its breath to see how it will land. For Percy Jackson, it keeps flipping and flipping. And when he dies for the first time, precisely 2 minutes and 36 seconds after watching Elliot Rhodes fall in the Battle of Manhattan, he can't help but think it was always going to be this way.

It is only natural, after all, that the universe corrects its imbalances. And he could chalk it down to that day all those years ago, to the goosebumps on the bus and an image frozen of The Fates with their callous hands clipping blue yarn. When he was younger, he would sit crisscross at the bottom of chlorine pools, trying to see how long it would take before his breath snuffed out. He would break the surface with nothing detrimental to show for his time. No blood in his mouth and no stars in his eyes, it was...is hard for him to feel insignificant and inconsequential. He didn't understand that this was hereditary.

And now, at seventeen, he still doesn't fully understand it. The whole savior bullshit. It is strange how he is bound to pay for the sins of his father committed before his conception. Now, he has every scar embedded in his skin to prove that there is a thing called penance. The crux of the matter is, despite how everyone wants to see him, Percy Jackson is just as good as anybody and just as bad as anybody. But he keeps pushing the cycle, keeps running himself ragged with the only life he has ever known. Over and over and over again.

He saves who he can save...

⧖ ⧗ ⧖

Taking the Night Shift

10 PM - 12 AM

There are parts of girlhood that never really leave you when you grow up. Elliot Rhodes thinks that all girls grabbed onto one warm feeling with both hands when they were children and never let go, so now she has these. These things, mannerisms that never really left her or gave her room to act like she was full. They sit right next to her godhood.

Elliot doesn't know what to do with it, the rage, the pulsing for blood. It is exhausting being angry all the time, and these days, Elliot finds it hard to react with anything but her fists first or her cruel tongue. It's everything she learned, or rather inherited from Natasha, before alcohol and secrets dragged her into the ground and wrestled her into an early grave. Natasha Rhodes always used to tell her daughter that she was a hard girl to crack, and it would make Elliot train every bone in her body not to flinch when she touched her shoulders with her cold palms. Because this is is the gift in which Natasha has succeeded in giving her: an anger that never truly bleeds out.

1 AM - 3 AM

New York is something else entirely for them; her mother throws vases at old boyfriends that snort lines off their coffee table, and Elliot is left to sift through the fallout. She teaches herself how to tie her shoes and pockets twenties out of her mother's purse every ten days, but she can only ever count up to eighty, so she ends up having to stack piles of eighty dollar bills, hiding them in cereal boxes. Lucky Charms is her favorite, but the bodega down the block, the only thing they can afford, is guilty of price-gouging name brand. The kids at school go for the jugular; it's the easiest part of the body, after all; they roll her name out through the mid-fronts of their mouths.

Elliot is a strange name for a girl.

There are not many things you would need to know in particular about her mother other than she is a hoarder, a cruel drunk, and a self-proclaimed connoisseur of art. She is prone to bringing in eclectic furniture off the street regardless of whether there are bed bugs and other various junk that Elliot secretly pawns off or desperately tries handing away to those on the streets. They live in quicksand most of the time, and the rent is always late to their landlord's avail, but they always manage to carve out a way. On days they finish with just enough to inhabit their home for the next month, Natasha calls her Lottie and lets her lick the envelope. Then she'll hop the turnstile and walk straight into an NYU dining hall with all the confidence of a Russian graduate student from abroad (her favorite alter ego) and steal her Lucky Charms in stained snowflaked Tupperware that always seemed to be washed twice and never clean.

Elliot loathes to admit it, because it was a rarity to taste, but the brand name always goes down better. The rainbow marshmallows are less gritty, and it's nice to pretend she is a child who can afford to have privileges like watching Sunday cartoons and milk that doesn't sour.

It takes a final turn for the worse when she turns eight and watches Natasha strangle the tendrils growing from the plants they keep on the windowsill by the kitchen sink with the ferocity of a mother grieving her child. A relentless hacking with safety scissors meant for the family tree project strewn across the french oak table they picked up on the corner of East Street. Elliot will always have it burned into her mind whenever she guts a monster.

Nine is when Natasha goes and gets completely and utterly gone, muttering tik tock under her breath and breaking out the crosses, she would tell Elliot were useless because God (no s tacked onto the end) was a vagrant. The revolving door of men falls into a frenzy; they haphazardly leave the house, dropping bundles of loose bud off in her room for her trouble, never mind her age. She never touches it, of course. Just turns on the hair dryer and barricades herself in the bathroom herself in the bathroom to drown out the sound of skin clapping against each other.

Ten is where everything rots off the vine. Ten is when she is forced to go on the run with nothing but her stacks of eighty dollars and a dull knife nicked from the peeling kitchen drawer. But Natasha is always there, a ghost of righteousness forever hiding Elliot's filth, her future self, from her.

4 AM - 5 AM

If Elliot is every bit her mother's daughter, then she worries about what parts she got from her father, if any. They can't even look at each other these days. It could have something to do with claiming her ten minutes after her brother, Castor, dies. Before that, it was five years of sleeping on the floor of the Hermes cabin and every other week spent away from Camp Half-Blood, only to return, stinking of monster blood and clutching Ēlektra like a wounded animal with a spoil of battle. And yet, he can't stop telling her just how much of her is Natasha over weekly games of Pinochle. It makes her so sick she imagines slaying him in her sleep.

The other brother perched on the end of their fucked up family-the one very much breathing- can't seem to fathom Elliot as a person, much less his sibling. She wonders what he sees, but then that notion of slicing his brain apart dissolves as quickly as it comes when she watches him practically kill himself on every scouting mission to capture their father's attention. Elliot is grateful that she is cognizant enough of where she stands in her father's heart.

It's not that Camp is her only option; there are always Artemis's hunters, and then there are less savory options, like striking it out on her own or joining amongst Luke Castellan's revolution. The drachma's other side boasts the company of one of her father's many enemies, awaiting eagerly to get her hands on Dionysus's only daughter. Yet another woman he has wronged in his past and more sins Elliot must pay for somehow with the same gusto she would rustle up rent money for back when her age progressed in the single digits.

A woman dubbed "Mother" standing on the outskirts of the many niches of America with her own pack of woman demigods, girls that enact an ironic, godless sort of violence. There's a sisterhood there, but it's sinister and all-consuming, and Elliot would be lying to say she hadn't at least considered it, but it's always the thought of calling someone who isn't Natasha "Mother" that keeps her at bay. Regardless, there are always places for those hungry enough to tear their godhood into bits, if only to spit in the face of their blood. Elliot knows the stories now, but she has been a pawn since her birth, and she is tired of being used in attempts to kill an otherwise immortal man. Besides, she's never really gotten along with other girls. Her mother's fault, she's sure.

6 AM - 7 AM

It's the predisposition to madness that should scare her. How looking in the mirror, she can't see when Natasha ends and where Elliot begins. Her reflection had always been odd in that way; she could see the spark of purple behind her eyes, barely there but simmering along with her rage. So no, Elliot isn't surprised when she bleeds out, faced up and split open,  left to rot with all the others. Because Elliot was born broken. It's her birthright. Because people don't like Elliot, much less love her. Because she is every bit her mother's daughter. The latter has never really left her, quite a bit like girlhood and godhood and all the grisly things that make her dirty, and now she weighs what she knows from palm to palm.

8 AM

The first time Elliot Rhodes dies, there's no pyre, but she thinks there's no reason to have one. And then she keeps dying. Over and over and over again.

Nico Parker.                            ELLIOT RHODES
TIMEFIGHTER

PERCY JACKSON
SAVIOUR

Jeremy Strong.                        Dionysus

Carla Gugino.                    MOTHER

Maddie Phillips.                          Caitlin Mckinney

⧖ ⧗ ⧖

Natash Rhodes ✞.                Thandiwe Newton
Sawyer Huang ✞.               Havana Rose Liu
Pollux.                       As Described

/

Thalia Grace.        Sophie Thatcher
Luke Castellan.          Drew Starkey
Hera.               Olivia Cooke
Caerus.                Riz Ahmed
Poseidon.              Oscar Isaac

The Last Olympian / TIME LOOP AU/ 2023

If you're anything like me, I'm sorry.
(But Darling, it's going to be okay.)

⧖ elliot og daughter of cain. if you're anything like me, i'm sorry - from taylor swift's poem "if you're anything like me." i do NOT endorse that woman in any way but i'm feral over the poem so quick death of the author approach with her art right now. also synopsis long as hell but unfortunately i am rusty and this is my comeback so going big or going home. (none of this is edited too whoops)

⧖ this is very much PJO on steroids??? in a good way, promise. multiple hybridized creations i am very excited to show you such as...MOTHER (not her true identity)...and her little women hunting pretty culty little group. and a lot of elements of the apollonian and the dionysian bc nietzche might have made some points once upon a time and that's all the credit i'll probably ever give the man. i'm just so excited to write a dual pov and be able to actually dive into the horrors that these kids are faced with on the daily while also coming of age. THERAPY FOR EVERYONE.

⧖ prophecy takes place at seventeen here, mostly because i feel that seventeen is THE age when it comes to the teenage years. i don't have much else to say about that. the gods are also very much authentic to their portrayals in actual greek mythology so you know how that goes. that is not to say everything is purely black and white SO many shades of grey in this fic.

⧖ TIME LOOP!!!  generational trauma is when your godly father died and was resurrected as a child and so now you yourself are stuck in a time loop where you keep dying and being resurrected. this is partially inspired by jacob geller's time loop nihilism, russian doll, and palm springs. i do have to say, again, that it is pretty AU and thus a lot more mature than the kids based media it was pulled out of...i play around a lot with canon and keep a lot of the og plotlines so a lot of the chapters before we actually enter the time loop strays from the main tlo plot line. which basically means this book is very fucking long but that is how it has to be to insert elliot in here. don't careeee

⧖ percy and elliot are verryyyyy slowburn. mostly because i think any love doesn't have to be THE love, it's a past livesesque philosophy. there's just something beautiful abt finding a person you fall in love with then never quite fall out of love with but you know they had an impact on your personhood that morphs into something you will always carry with you...spanning infinite parts of time. TIME it is always all about time!!! but plz stick with me!!!! it is rewarding okay? it's my magnum opus of like three years that i keep revamping and never moving forward with and it has lived many lives but there is a plan.

⧖ character inspo for elliot (lottie to the very close and personal and near and dear) rhodes: natalie scatorccio from yellowjackets, leah rilke from the wilds, ellie williams from tlo, beth cassidy from dare me, and max mayfield from stranger things.

⧖ also olivia cooke as hera and jeremy strong as dionysus...i'm not sorry. i just think jeremy strong is a silly little guy who could pull it off, idk he has that sorta manicness and the deadbeat down. sticking with it.

⧖ Content Warning / violence, body horror, gore, death, depictions of homelessness, mentions of alcoholism, slight suicidal ideation, mental illness, severe language, depictions of grief, depictions of trauma, child neglect.

PTOLMAEA.       /      If you're anything like me, I'm sorry.

© 2023