when the new sites grow old and i start to feel cold i'll sail home again: Really busy. Sorry for not writing. Thanks for all of the support, anyway. Something that I've wanted to write for a while, started out as a drabble, and didn't end up as one. It happened at 2 a.m., the best hour for inspiration after a dry spell. Written in one sitting, so it might be riddled with mistakes. It's Poseidon, love him, love him, love him. Thanks for reading, as always.

song choice: Brielle by Sky Sailing

Leaving is so easy it's a sin.

Halfway out to sea, he recalls her scent that morning. She smelled like smoke, heady and dark, from the bonfire the night before. He told her he loved her that night, told her he'd build her a palace beneath the waves, pluck the very stars from the sky and make them into a necklace. He said this, even as he looked within her where her red blood whooshed through her veins in heavy pulses – where underneath her porcelain skin and hidden secret beneath the layers of sinew, muscle and bone, cells were splitting in two again and again into infinity. Inside her, there was new life. Bloated with this knowledge that he could not reverse, he smiled and pressed her into the sand, made love to her, and promised her the world.

The next morning, he kissed the nape of her neck, inhaling the mixture of bitter and sweet. Her dark eyelashes rested on her cheeks, beautiful like little brushes.

Then, he was gone, only the imprint of his body pressed into the sheets as a parting memory.

In the centuries, he had learned to say goodbye many, many times; he was disgustingly good at it, he knew. What he thought in those last moments – when he was far away enough that he could no longer hear her cry of surprise ringing in his ears like the worst of condemnations – he wished he could say that it pained him, that he regretted it, that he felt the crushing weight of his guilt. After all of those years, all of those women, he lingered in the smoothness of her arms, lived in her laughter for two perfect months. Even then, leaving was easy.

The difference was, this time, the easiness of it was what hurt.

oOo

He loved how full she became in the following months. He wished he could cup her roundness, touch his lips to the belly button that now protruded like a hard little knob. She looked tired. Her ankles were swollen. She stopped crying around the third month, but her lips had grown tight around the corners, as if she was always trying to hold back something she wanted to say. There were probably a lot of things she wanted to say to him, he reasoned, and a lot of them no doubt involved four letters.

So he watched. Not too much. But when the day was lazy and the sea was an even grayish blue, choppy waves moving across the surface, he would turn his gaze in her direction and admire her. In the full throes of pregnancy, she appeared to him a goddess of fertility, growing every day in infinitesimal increments. He knew it was a boy and even in the womb, he knew this small creature who he could crush in the palm of his hand had tufts of black hair and green eyes, just like his.

When she gave birth, the first thing she did was smile, and he felt her explosion of love when they laid the baby in her arms, so powerful, it was like the shockwave of an earthquake. What surprised him, was how this being with its tiny rattling plum-sized heart could move him too. He liked babies; sometimes, he even liked his own.

oOo

Trembling and pale, this skinny boy with a mop of black hair atop his head was bowing before him. It was him, and he forgot how easy it was as a god to forget the timeline of mortals. Was it yesterday when he looked into the Jackson household and saw a two-year-old Percy eating a ladybug with great contentment? Not that the kid in front of him is that much bigger; really, for a son of the Sea God, he is positively scrawny. Doesn't look like someone who could lop off the head of Medusa or escape from the depths of the Underworld.

Percy lifts his head, gazes into his mirror-image green eyes, and even though there's a hint of apprehension, there's a lot more defiance and even resentment. All right, he thinks. His son has reason to be angry. And he's not going to sit here and pretend like he's sorry for what he did. Well, he is sorry, but if he were going to go back and do things all over again, the end result would be the same. He is the Sea God, and he wanders. Every affair he begins is inevitable to end. Except his marriage to Amphitrite, because as the gods surely know that's something he'll never escape.

But there, his thoughts are wandering again. He regards the boy. Even though Percy is practically a carbon copy of him, there are undeniable signs of his mother – in the set of his jaw, the softened brow, the long, dark eyelashes. When he finds himself telling his son that his mother is a queen among women, he's telling the absolute truth. When his son bites his lip, not saying the words he so desperately means to say, come home with me, Father. He almost acquiesces. But that would be dangerously foolish.

He watches his son walk out of the pavilion, amused, worried, and feeling something like, something like what?

It's a little something like pride.

oOo

It takes a whole different kind of courage to show up at the Jacksons' front door for Percy's fifteenth birthday. He is almost ashamed to say it, anxious about seeing his, er, family, again. Seeing mortals. What a joke. He frowns, materializes, and knocks.

She opens the door, blanches, almost shuts it in his face, and then composes herself. "Oh," she says faintly. "It's you."

He blinks. She's older. Oh, he knew she would be older, his son is already a teenager, but she has wrinkles where he definitely didn't remember them, and her brown hair is threaded with hints of gray. When he last saw her in person, she practically glowed with youth. He's not exactly sad; mortals age, it's what they do, and gods just kind of shrug it off. Zeus has been known to go back for sloppy seconds, only to realize his lover died twenty years ago. The years slip by easily. Even so, the visible signs of time catch him off guard.

"Er, hello," he says, smiling awkwardly. "May I come in?"

Wordlessly, she steps aside.

What really catches him off guard is the presence of what has to be her new boyfriend. He has shaggy, graying hair, is average-looking, as far as human males go, and slouches ever so slightly. Whatever he expected Sally choosing for a partner, this man is not it. But there; he's only making minor observations about a situation is completely detached from.

The momentary distraction of Tyson crying out at the sight of him breaks the tension.

As he situates himself in this mortal household, the changes become clearer to him. The apartment is messier. Percy is older than the last time; he's reached that age where he's all elbows and knees, and he really needs a haircut. They need a new carpet too. It's covered in unidentifiable stains, probably remnants from Sally's first husband, that detestable creature. There are no longer child's toys strewn across the floor. There's a laptop sitting on the coffee table instead of bottles of beer. The curtains are flowery blue instead of beige. The kitchen walls are halfway painted; it seems as if they are in the process of taking down the wallpaper on one side.

Sally is happier. Even though she is older, she is young, her cheeks pink with warmth and joy.

Because he is a god, because he loved her at one point – yes, loved her – he knows he half-hopes she could be frozen in time forever, waiting on the shores of Montauk with her face turned in the direction of the sea and the salt-spray of the water, her hair whipping behind her like a portrait of Annabel Lee from Poe's poem. He can't love anything forever, but of course, in all his vainness, he wishes she could do that for him.

But this is Sally Jackson he's talking about. This is the woman who raised a demigod all on her own in Manhattan, survived an abusive relationship, paid the bills with a minimum wage job, and never let go of her dreams, going back to college to become a writer, what she told him originally she was going to be in whispered talks late into the night. And she was right. She stands tall before him, staring him straight in the eye, and he knows now that Sally Jackson would never put her life on hold to mourn for a love that was never meant to be. She stopped waiting for him before she started.

So even though he could never love anyone forever, at this moment, he is glad to have loved her.