Percy Jackson was seven the first time he met a teacher who didn't look at him like a problem to be solved. It was at a small, struggling private school in Queens, a place that took students other institutions had gently suggested might be better served elsewhere. The new history teacher was Mr. Aldridge. He was young, with quiet grey eyes that seemed to notice everything without ever narrowing in disapproval.
He taught history as a series of causes and consequences, of people trapped between greater powers. When they covered ancient Greece, he didn't glorify the heroes. He dissected their dilemmas.
"Theseus," Mr. Aldridge said, pointing to a drawing of a youth with a sword, "entered the labyrinth to kill the Minotaur. A brave act. But why was the Minotaur there? Because a king broke an oath to a god. The king's sin created a monster, and a hero was sent to clean up the mess. Was Theseus brave? Yes. But was he free? Or was he just a smarter weapon sent into a maze built by someone else's mistake?"
Percy, who usually spent history class tracing the cracks in the plaster, found his eyes fixed on the drawing of the maze. It looked like a trap. He felt a strange, cold kinship with the bull-headed thing inside it—a creature born from someone else's fault.
Mr. Aldridge was there the day Percy accidentally caused the classroom's old pipes to shudder and spray rusty water during a tense spelling test. While the other kids shrieked, the teacher simply walked to the valve in the corner and gave it a firm, knowing turn. The geyser died to a drip.
"Volcanic activity," Mr. Aldridge said mildly to the class, wiping his hands on a handkerchief. "The underground world making itself known." He caught Percy's panicked eye and gave a slight, almost imperceptible shake of his head. Not your fault. The fault of old, fragile systems.
The school closed at the end of the year. Percy never saw Mr. Aldridge again. But the questions stuck.
The next few years were a blur of different schools, different apartments, same suffocating feeling of being a square peg. Gabe's presence was a constant, low-grade toxin. Sally did her best, but the light in her was dimming.
The summer Percy turned nine, a change came. A new boy moved into the building. His name was Nick. He was staying with his aunt down the hall, he said. He was Percy's age, but where Percy was all nervous energy and sudden anger, Nick was preternaturally still. He had grey eyes that were too calm, too knowing for a kid's face.
They met in the laundry room. Percy was struggling to get a quarter into a stubborn machine. Nick watched for a second, then reached over, gave the machine a specific tap just below the coin slot, and the quarter slid in with a smooth clink.
"You have to find the pressure point," Nick said. "Every system has one."
Nick became a quiet revolution in Percy's life. He was a friend, but more than that—he was a competent ally in a world designed for Percy to fail. He could fix Percy's broken backpack zipper with a twist of a paperclip. He knew how to pick the lock to the building's roof, giving them an escape from the smell of Gabe's cigars and cheap beer. He always seemed to have an extra sandwich when Percy forgot lunch.
But it was with Sally that Nick performed his quietest, most vital miracles. He'd show up at their door with a container of soup his "aunt made too much of." He'd notice the kitchen light flickering and, with Sally's permission, would stand on a chair, fiddle with the fixture for a moment, and the flickering would stop. He'd sit at the table and listen to her talk about the novel she was writing, asking questions that were oddly insightful, that made her eyes light up with forgotten passion.
He was a buffer. On days when Gabe's mood was a thundercloud about to break, Nick would suggest he and Percy go to the library or the park with an urgency that felt like a rescue mission. Sally began to look less like a ghost. She'd smile at Nick, her hand resting briefly on his shoulder. "You're a good boy," she'd say, and the gratitude in her voice was a living thing.
Percy, drowning in the confusion of his own life, accepted Nick's presence like a sunbeam in a dark room. He didn't question why a nine-year-old was so handy, so wise, so available. He was just grateful.
Their conversations as friends were where the real work was done.
One afternoon, hiding on the roof from Gabe's rant about a lost lottery ticket, Nick said, "You ever think about why some people have all the power and just make everything worse for everyone else?"
"All the time," Percy grumbled.
"The Greeks had a word for it," Nick said, staring at the water tower. "Hubris. It's not just pride. It's the pride that makes you think the rules are for other people. That you can take whatever you want, and the consequences are someone else's problem to clean up." He glanced at Percy. "People like that… they build mazes to hide their messes. And they call the people stuck inside monsters."
Another time, after a particularly bad day at school where a teacher had blamed Percy for a locker room flood, Nick listened to his furious rant, then said quietly, "Anger's a compass, Percy. It points at what's wrong. The trick is not to just follow the needle blindly, but to read the map. To understand who drew the map wrong in the first place."
The lessons were seamless, woven into the fabric of friendship and survival. Percy's worldview was being crafted not through lectures, but through shared frustration and quiet commentary on a world that felt fundamentally unfair.
As the years progressed, the time finally came for the moment that signified the start of the book canon to occur.
For a being at the level of Nicholas, it was quite easy to sense the moment it happened; quite frankly, half the gods on earth could have sensed the cataclysmic eruption of rage that happened once Zeus realized almost half of his power had been stolen. It shook the earth and caused the air to feel thick and heavy; the thunder all around the western world ceased, as if a light switch had been turned off. The controller of the phenomenon had been disarmed of its authority.
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