Chapter Text
When Sally Jackson died, she had almost expected to remain in the fire that had killed her, smoke forever in her lungs. She had killed someone after all, a selfish bastard that had the gall to hurt her and her son, but a human no less. Worse, she had even dragged her son into it - back then she didn’t know of what her son would become - a twelve year old who only had the glittering dust of monsters on his hands till then.
So yes, Sally Jackson had been expecting to remain in that fire from the moment that she had realized that she wouldn’t make it out of it alive, that the doors had been magically spelled shut. It was a punishment for the weight that she held on her shoulders and had partially placed on another’s.
She hadn’t been expecting for the world to go dark as her spirit finally left her body and to wake up in a small room with a couch and a bed and a wall of hazy mist where a tv would be. She hadn’t expected to see the mist come to life with the image of her son splayed on it like an Iris Message that he had told her about. She hadn’t expected to see the boy, her boy, watching as the building burned to ash with a look on his face that could almost be described as cold, but Sally knew to be shock. She watched later as Percy dragged himself to a library and slept there on its roof and wondered why he wasn’t at camp.
She watched him pickpocket, steal, learn languages as easy as breathing, and make a deal with a god and realized that it didn’t matter.
Sally watched as Percy traveled to Japan, his appearance nothing like the boy that she had raised and yet something that he fit seamlessly into. She watched as he found his way to the slums and grew ill and wondered if this truly was a punishment, one where she had to watch her son suffer and die alone.
She watched as Percy became Dazai and knew that it must be.
She knew that if this was a punishment for her crimes that it was a piss poor one because she would do it again in a heartbeat, dragging the doctor - the monster - that found her son that day along with Gabe the moment that the first needle grazed his scarred skin.
Her anger only rose in the first year that her boy spent with the doctor, where he was broken and shaped into someone that she almost could no longer recognize - she could though, at the end of the day, because the gods weren’t the only ones that are ruthless and Sally knew that she was partly to blame. She couldn’t find it in herself to care so long as he lived.
She didn’t want to be joined by her son for a long time.
But then another boy came along, one with eyes like the bluest of seas and hair the color of flames and Sally knew that her son was falling long before he did in those first days. Falling like Icarus as he soared to freedom.
For the first time in more than a year Sally watched as her son acted like a child as he bickered with the other on the way to the sub - executive’s home, even if he was still defensive and somewhat withdrawn. She thought that it would be strange if he wasn’t. The world had never been a kind place and she knew that Percy wouldn’t be letting his guard down now with a stranger, even if he was already looking at the other as if Chuuya was someone that he would never want to lose.
The look doesn't change when he kills that man that had held a gun to the older boy’s head, and would have seen the red head dead if it wasn’t for his ability. She didn’t know if her son had realized this fact, but she knew that even if it wasn’t the complete reason that he had killed the man, that protecting Chuuya had at least been a factor.
(She thought that it wouldn’t be long before her son would let the world burn if it meant that the other boy was safe)
Her son had blood on his hands, mortal blood, at the age of fifteen. Sally knew that this death wouldn’t be the last.
She didn’t want to say that she was fine with it, but at least Percy was alive. Besides, it wasn’t like he was the only one with blood soaked hands, the gods were not innocent and Chuuya was no different.
She hated seeing the betrayal in her son’s gaze once he had been told what the other truly was. Hated seeing the way that he hated himself for being attracted to the very world that he had run from, yet there was nothing that she could do as he felt just that.
There was almost too much relief in Percy’s eyes when the other boy said that he wasn’t a god, but Sally couldn’t deny that she felt it too.
The pair fought together to take down the ability user that had tricked them until he couldn’t anymore. Sally knew that she was seeing the birth of something new even as the pair parted on the street going their separate ways, Chuuya to the slums that Percy had hidden in for months, so close to the other and yet far enough away that their paths never crossed, and Percy himself went back to a hell of his own choosing.
Sally wished that he hadn’t, especially with what had come next.
—-
Everyone perceives the afterlife differently. It’s colored by their choices and toned by their beliefs in life. Hades had known this from the start, long before he had become the god of the dead and presided over his realm. The power had come so naturally to him that it had taken him time to feel cheated and alone.
He hadn’t been alone for too long though as the rest of the Underworld gods had joined his side, and soon there had been ones from other Parthenons as well, their realms existing just outside of one another’s, close enough for them to speak.
He’d seen many curious souls in his long life, but so few were like Sally Jackson.
When the mortal had died, the seas had raged as rivers even within the Underworld had turned.
(Hades knew that this wasn’t the work of his brother alone, even if the sea god’s spawn did not. His brother had never been able to manipulate the rivers within his domain even in the worst of his fits. This was one of them)
Hades had seen to the mortal’s soul himself, allowing her to cross the Styx without even so much as remembering it, his brother had loved her and there had been a time when Hades and Poseidon had been close after their birth that he would have done anything for the other. Now he was doing so for the sake of a love that was once there.
The woman’s soul has been one of the most balanced that he had ever seen, his counterpart’s daughter aside. She had led an almost unremarkable life before meeting the sea god, but since then her life had been a constant give and take. She married someone that could hardly be called a man to keep her son safe, and yet he had been hurt by that very same man all the same. She had sought to protect her boy and yet had been selfish and kept him close, only to send him away to boarding schools and then to Camp all the same. She had killed a man to save them both from the life that she had condemned them to, scarring them both.
Give and take. Balance. Hades knew that if that was how she had lived, then that was how she would in the after life as well.
He hadn’t expected for her version of heaven and hell to be the same thing.
She would watch her son grow, even though she wouldn't be able to speak with him again.
She would watch her son suffer without ever being able to help him.
Heaven and Hell, one in the same.
It only seemed right.
Death was something that reached farther than any of the other gods, it was something that all souls ran from and yet were destined for sooner or later. A man may never step into the sea or fall in love, but from their first breath they are destined to die (even if some took much longer than they should to do so). This was why with the cooperation of some of the other gods of the dead Hades was able to create the room that he had given the mortal for her eternity, why with their influence as well he was able to just barely display a view of the boy.
With such a balance Hades had never expected the day to come when Sally Jackson would try and escape her small room, but over a year after the mortal had died that was just what she had done.
Hades had been in gardens when he had sensed the mortal banging on the wall of her cell, clawing at with the feralness that only a mother could posses. The god of the dead had never rushed before, not when everything and everyone would come to him with time, but he did then because he felt that something was very wrong.
He was right.
He hadn’t wanted to be.
The man on the screen didn’t fall within his jurisdiction as a Greek god, but the boy did. His nephew did.
Demigods live sad, horrid lives and then they die, that was how it had always been and Hades knew that it would be the same for the boy on the screen, especially if one of his children were to become the child of the prophecy. But when heroes died or faced a hardship or death then it was usually at the hands of a monster; Hades supposed that it still was.
It was a monster that would one day step into the domain of one of the other Parthenons’ rulers of the dead.
As Hades held the raging, crying mother, he wondered what favor it would take for the monster’s soul to go to him upon death.
He didn’t think that it would be much.
—-
Sally didn’t look at the screen for a long time, long enough that a few days had passed. Percy was in a tea shop with a woman that she had only seen a few times before, an executive.
She had known almost instantly what the Port Mafia boss had done after hearing the request that her son had made and seeing the way that the boy had acted. Sally didn’t know whether or not to hate the woman for not trying and getting her boy out, or to thank her for what she had agreed to do to help him, and to teach him.
It didn’t matter because at the end of the day, all those within the Port Mafia building were demons, her son was no exception as he carved his moniker into a man.
When Chuuya retired to Percy’s side, her son was a hollow of who he had once been and Sally knew that the other could see it even if he didn’t have all of the pieces or yet knew how to connect them.
It didn’t matter as the days slowly faded into months and each boy grew older. Chuuya was sixteen and so was ‘Dazai’ even though Percy was still fifteen. Such a small discrepancy wouldn’t matter if it hadn’t been for the prophecy that hung over the boy’s head, the one that the pair set off to America to fulfill.
Honesty always seemed to come when one was close to death, and Percy was no exception to this rule even as he was to so many others. In a hotel bathroom the older ability user was met with the appearance of a boy that Sally had thought long dead, so much so that she cried once she saw her son again looking as she had once known him to, looking so young and yet burdened by more than he should have been.
She knows that it would have been the same if he had stayed as well.
On Half - Blood Percy speaks of most of the truths of his past that he had sought to hide, leaving out a few of the finer details that he hadn’t wanted the other boy to know.
Sally feels pride for her son, something that she hadn’t got to do much in life when it had seemed desperate to make everything go wrong for the boy. It still did, in a way.
She had never seen her son interact with the other demigods, but she knew that the coldness that he held with them now, the distance, was new. It was walls that he had built taller than Olympus himself so that no one else could hurt him (such walls would never keep out the boy that could simply walk over them, or the demigod son of Hades it seemed, as he could slip through the wall’s shadows). They’d been out there the night that he had chosen to leave camp, and had only grown since. Sally only hoped that it was a good thing, as Percy ventured out to sea with one of the other demigods, leaving his other half at camp.
Only one of the pair made it back.
Percy didn’t mourn, but the others did.
Sally wondered if in another life he would have. She thought maybe this was better. Her son had always been driven by emotion, even now, this coldness was saving him (from himself). She only hoped that it would be enough.
With New York and camp came the river. Sally didn’t have to guess much to figure what her boy had seen - she wasn’t given the privilege of seeing it for herself, but she had seen how Percy looked at the gravity manipulator, and how he let the other boy touch him and hold him with trust and want that he didn’t have for anyone else - but it had hurt all the same to watch his venture into and out of the Underworld. It had hurt to know that he was so close to her - a few cells over at one point - and yet still so far out of her reach.
Always out of reach.
She found herself wondering again if this was Hell.
She watched her son fight and dance with monsters, slaying them as if it was his birthright to do so with the other boy at his side, as the war ended in a bloodied throne room.
Percy turned down immortality and Sally hated herself for feeling relieved. She worried for a world that might have possessed this version of her son for eternity. She didn’t think that it would be long before the world burned, even as her boy’s powers were tied to the sea.
The boys grew distant after the night on the beach, and Sally knew why but at the same time she found herself cursing her son for not seeing the obvious signs before him. Not that Chuuya did either.
She watched as her son had been willing to let a city burn just for a chance at his partner regaining his memories and knew that she had been right to fear for what the world would have become had he been in it for eternity.
The city didn’t burn, though Sally was sure that Chuuya had thought that he hadn’t truly had a choice in the matter, Sally knew her son better.
Oda Sakunosuke.
Odasaku.
The man was dangerous in the same way that Percy was now that he was removed from the gods, though he didn’t act as if he was, not in the least. Sally knew that he was still and knew that Percy saw it too. He was cautious of the man that had saved him even as he sensed a likeness within the older man, maybe because he did so.
The caution partially gave way to confusion when the older man had been so intent on saving her boy, even from himself.
And then they had been taken.
Sally's hands had been clenched as she watched as her son and the man that had been tending to him were taken by ghosts of the older man’s past, her son unconscious and vulnerable enough that he could have been killed at any moment and there would have been nothing that anyone could have done as Sakunosuke was passed out right next to him.
The older man almost made up for it by getting the pair of them out of there alive after Percy had freed them both.
Almost.
The Lupin Bar was a small jazz bar and no place for a child, but neither was anywhere else that Percy had been these past four years since first being dragged into the world of gods by the three brothers fighting over something that he hadn’t even done. Still, it was safer than a lot of other places too.
It was there that Percy had convinced the older man to stay longer with him, something that Sally hadn’t doubted would happen. She’d only seen that look in his eyes once before and the subject of it had joined the mafia then too.
Then two became three.
Sally knew that Percy never truly trusted Ango, the man never got any sort of nickname from her son like Chuuya or Sakunosuke did. He’d looked at Ango as if he were some sort of test, but had treated him like a friend once he’d seen how fond Sakunosuke was of the other man, something that Sally almost thought that he was no longer capable of doing.
She wished that she had been right as she’d watched her son’s world end and he held his dying friend in his arms, the man that had cared for him as only she had before.
She wondered if the fates loved to laugh at them all.
—-
It was very rare that Hades claimed a soul outside of Greek influence, few mortals managed to wrong his demigod children enough that he would do such a thing, the doctor was the only soul that he had claimed due to a child that wasn’t his own. Never had he claimed a soul in such a way for anything other than punishment.
It was very rare for the Greek god of the dead to claim a soul that wasn’t his to do so, and yet as the assassin died Hades found himself doing just that.
Oda Sakunosuke had worshiped no good in life, a practice that was common among those unknowingly descended from old gods. It felt strange for ability users - or the gifted as they are sometimes called as well - to worship gods other than those that they are descended from, and yet they were often too far removed from such origins to worship their own anyways. Because of this the spirits often wandered through a place similar to that of the Fields of Asphodel, though it wasn’t fueled by any diety, but by the absence of them. Because the man hadn’t believed in any god, there was nothing to stop the Greek god of the dead from taking the soul for himself and bringing it into his realm.
He blamed Nico for him doing all of this, Olympus knows he wouldn’t feel so strongly for the Jackson boy if his own son didn’t love him like a brother.
(Not even Hades knew if that was a lie or not)
—-
Oda had never thought that he would open his eyes once more when he closed them in Dazai’s arms. Hen had hoped between his grief that his children would find peace in their deaths, but never thought - never had hoped - that he would find any of his own. His hands were as stained as Dazai’s own after all, if not more so than even the infamous Demon Prodigy.
He’d never expected a peaceful afterlife, and looking into the dark eyes of a woman who looked so much like the teen that he had just left behind and yet not like him at all, Oda almost wondered if this even was one.
“My name is Sally Jackson,” the woman, Sally, said kindly as she held out her hand for the former assassin to take, her eyes kind in a way that he hadn’t seen in a long time, if he ever had, “thank you for taking care of my son.”
—-
Sally and Oda watched together on the couch as their son - because he truly was a product of each of their influences, and each loved the boy, even if they hadn’t completely done right by him in life - abandoned the life that he had built for himself in Yokohama and took a plane to England.
Neither was surprised when the boy almost immediately got wrapped up in something dangerous, it truly was only a matter of time.
Drovostkey was familiar to each of the spirits from the moment that they had seen him, both because they had heard of the man through their boy - whether from reading the files as he did, or from hearing of him from the executive himself - and because the ability user and Percy were more similar than either of them liked to admit. Still, he was surprisingly good to the teen from the start, tolerating the grieving boy and understanding.
There had only been imbaressment when the pair’d had to find a way to turn off the Mist for a few hours as the ability users had quickly become lovers, not the rage that had consumed Sally last time another had touched her son in such a way, or the despair that Oda had felt when he had been told that someone had done so by Percy himself.
Their relief didn’t make them blind though.
They each could see the underline of toxicity that existed between the pair, the way that Percy was using the older man as another form of self harm because he couldn’t trust himself with a blade in that first month after Oda’s death (the spirit himself didn’t know whether to feet bad about such a thing or not). They could hear the promises of a violent future the next time that the pair met after this brief escape from their own lives, a rekindling that would end with one of them being burned.
They could see that Percy was content with Drovostkey. Not happy - not exactly, at least - but sated for the moment as his mind was challenged without the fear of a harsh punishment and he trusted the other man not to hurt him in the ways that he had been before.
His heart wasn’t in it though - it belonged to someone on the other side of the world, had from the start - but neither was Drovostkey’s so the pair supposed that it was fine.
—-
“He killed Medusa?” Oda asks as the tattoo artist inks in the design slowly onto the pale skin, the image of the gorgon coming to life once more.
“He did,” Sally comfrims, her hands twisting in her lap at the question.
The story of Medusa wasn’t one that she was particularly fond of, not when she had willingly taken the god from it as a lover. She didn’t know which version of it was true, but the mortal knew that it didn’t matter to the demigod, not anymore. Percy would never trust a man, least of all love one, that had thought to violate someone in the way that he had been. The rose tinted glasses had been taken from off of the boy’s eyes and shattered onto the ground of Olympus’s throne room.
“Her eyes still worked even after her head had been cut off,” Sally continued easily, noting the other mortal’s blank gaze, “I used it to kill my husband when Percy was twelve.”
Oda only hums, still not quite knowing what to think of the woman that he was sitting next to.
It was clear to him that Sally Jackson loved her son, even after seeing all of the things that he had done since she had died, that wasn’t something that he had questioned since coming here. Her choices, on the other hand, were.
She’d explained to him the world of demigods and how the monsters can smell demigods, he understood that much, and on a base level he understood her reasoning for marrying the man that she had. He didn’t understand why she stayed, why she had her child - his friend that had been broken long before coming to Yokohama, and probably even before knowing he was a demigod because how could a child not be when they were lied to and thought that they were going crazy when he could see things that others couldn’t, only to find out that those closest to him had known all along - stay, after that man had hit her for the first time. It didn’t take Dazai to know that if such a bastard was willing to hit a woman then a child wouldn’t be a problem.
A part of him wondered if she didn’t see it on purpose.
Not that any of it mattered now.
Not that he was any better.
In the world of abilities and the mafia, Oda knew there was nothing that he could have done to help the boy when the very person that he needed to be free of was the man that he was right hand of. Then Oda had gone and died, not by accident, but by choice because his children were dead and he wanted revenge.
He’d let himself die and left his eldest behind as the boy had all but begged for him to stay - to not go - because he’d seen the ending coming too.
No, Oda couldn’t be angry with the woman at his side when he’d done no better by their boy than she had,
At least he left, that was the only consolation that Oda could find, but even then the former assassin thought of what - of who - Dazai was leaving behind, and wondered if Dazai would ever forgive him for asking such a thing of him.
He almost didn’t want to know.
—-
Neither of the spirits were surprised when the only person that the demigod could remember was the gravity manipulator. Those two were two halves of the same soul, an abundance of power and the thief of it, kindness and coldness, someone that could never hope to hide his emotions and someone that hid and faked them all, natural disasters in human skin.
It was a surprise though to see the teen acting as Sally remembered him being from before.
He was quick to save a goddess that didn’t truly need it and to befriend the daughter of Pluto and the son of Mars, trusting them much quicker than he ever did anyone other than the mafia executive himself.
He still had problems with authority though and the attitude problem to match it, but while the boy that they had grown to know would be calculative in how he handled the war god, an amnesiac Percy was anything but, saving strategy for battle.
It was fine though the pair supposed because they realized something quickly:
He wanted to live.
With his memories gone and only his scars left to tell the stories of what happened to him over these past years, he couldn’t remember all the reasons that he no longer wanted to exist. That he no longer felt human.
He smiled genuinely and hardly flinched away when the other two demigods threw their arms around him. If it weren’t for the armor and battle strategies that even the Romans seemed to think were impressive, if a little too harsh, Oda and Sally almost thought that Percy looked like a normal teen.
It didn’t last long though, it couldn’t have when the magic was never designed to and the teen had another world to one day return to, but it was still nice to see light in his eyes once more.
—-
Sally gripped Oda’s hand until her knuckles turned white as her son fell, choosing to go through hell voluntarily for the sake of the injured girl that he had known for so long now. She gripped his hand because she was terrified for both demigods on the screen and because the mortal knew that Percy was only falling with Annabeth now because of the promise that he had made to the man beside her. She knew her son, and she knew that the man that he had been before Oda had sought to see him change - something that he had already started to do whether he recognized it or not just yet - would have let the daughter of Athena fall on her own.
Sally hates herself for almost wishing that he had as she watches the pair wade through a river of the underworld and drink flames from another. As she watched the pair hardly survive as even the air that they breathed sought to kill them. Percy slashed through curses, taking them on as those that he had killed sought retribution on the boy, and Annabeth wandered, unable to see because of a drunken curse that Chuuya had given when he found out that Dazai had left him alone.
They listened as the goddess of Misery spoke to the boy that was all but the embodiment of it, and neither was surprised when she began to choke on her own poison. Neither minded either, knowing that the goddess wouldn’t die - not from something like this - but thinking the action fitting nonetheless.
The daughter of Athena hadn’t agreed.
Percy hadn’t truly seemed to care.
Neither had the former assassin and the murder with the sight.
—-
The Armed Detective Agency was both good for Dazai and bad for him all the same.
This was something that Oda had known within the man’s first week of being amongst them.
(It was strange to know that it wouldn’t be long before Dazai was older than himself. That as of right now they had known each other as long as Dazai had mourned him)
They brought out a kinder side of the man that had been brutally locked away when the younger man had first come to the mafia at fourteen. And yet Oda knew that a lot of this emotion was faked all the same, even if some of it was true.
It felt a lot like he was going from one extreme to another; forcing one set of emotions and killing the others for years, only to switch which set got that particular treatment.
But this was the path that he’d set him on, so Oda didn’t say anything about, instead feeling a sense of pride when Dazai had taken in Atsushi - even if his tactics had still been a little underhanded in doing so.
He wouldn’t be Dazai if they werent.
—-
It had hurt to see Ango again after so long, to see the coldness that existed between the two former friends. The way that Dazai had intentionally hospitalized the other man during the Guild conflict.
It had hurt even more when they had fought not too long after that. He didn’t like to see the people that he loved fight, especially not for his sake when he wasn’t even alive to benefit from it.
It hurt too to know that Dazai had still wanted Ango at his side like before but the other hadn’t reached out until then.
It seemed as if the boy was destined to be failed by those that were meant to care for him.
—-
Everything had started to come tumbling down for the young man when the mafia and the Agency had first crossed paths, though it hadn’t seemed like it at the time to the pair as they watched the devastating duo find each other once more. The realization had come later when the Agency had been called to meet with the mafia boss and Percy’s past in Yokohama had been laid out bare for the others in the room, the easiest details there for everyone to see and the darker ones there for those willing to put in the work to do so.
Sally had frowned as Percy lost Kunikida, his current partner that reminded her a bit of the man sitting next to her, to the truth of his past actions. And had lost him completely when Drovostkey had appeared later that day, spilling secrets as if they were wine.
He lost his current partner that day and lost the Agency and the demigods of both camps not long after to the truth of who he was.
Oda wanted to be sad for him, being forced to go back to a place that had been hell for the young man as a teen after spending years trying to change so that the man that he pretended to be was the man that he truly was underneath the facade. He wanted to be sad, but something told him not to be.
He was right.
It had only taken seven years, but on the night that Dazai had rejoined the mafia he’d finally found himself in the gravity manipulator’s arms.
It only took eight for Dazai to finally kill the boss.
It was amusing to the former assassin as he watched his former employer slowly die, drowning in his own blood, Mori had said back then that he’d fully expected Dazai to kill him and become boss. Back then the ability nullifier’d had no intention of doing such a thing, not wanting the extra work, and the doctor had seen the former assassins dead - landing Oda here - and had dragged Dazai back from the exile that he’d forced on him only to die by Dazai’s own hand.
It was karmic, Oda was sure.
The pair hoped that Hades was feeling particularly creative at the moment, he had a new soul to tend to.
—-
Watching was much easier after that, if the pair ignored the crimes being shown to them and the cruelties being committed at their son’s orders or even by his own hand.
The Port Mafia flourished even more than it already had under the demigod’s careful hands as the city was kept safe, as well with relations between the mafia and the Agency becoming better as the years went on until one day the former detective partners were reunited once more in their separate organizations as Mori and Fukuzawa had been once.
Some of the structure within the mafia changed as well, as Kouyou’s girls were quickly removed from the brothels and trained to be assassins as Gin and Kyouka had been before being sent to infiltrate the brothels of the port city and kill those in charge of them and the ones bringing the girls - and sometimes boys too - their. Oda knew that Dazai would have rather been made a god than lead an organization that did such a thing, no matter the information that they got from it. The assassin had seen the other man’s interrogation skills and knew that they could afford to lose the source of information.
Oda had been proud when Akutagawa had been eventually given Dazai’s old spot as an executive, and Q had taken over the mafia’s hellhound previous job as the one commanding the Black Lizards. Their power was much like Chuuya’s in how it brought even the mafia to their knees.
The pair thought that he’d made the right choice.
—-
It took a long time for the demigod to join the pair in the afterlife, the man dying older than either of them had ever grown to be, as Chuuya followed closely behind. The pair hardly looked older than twenty in death though - twenty-two, the age that they had found each other again - as they joined Sally and Oda in the now expanded room. The welcome had been warm for all those involved, the demigod holding and being held by the two people that he’d thought that he’d see again.
It hadn’t taken long for mischief to fill the partners’ eyes though.
“Who wants to try and break out of here?” The young man asked as he laced his fingers through Chuuya’s, another person who wasn’t in the afterlife that they were destined to be, not that any of them minded.
Oda sighed, he almost felt sorry for the Greek god of the dead.