Chapter 1.7 - In which Percy has a tattoo

Percy

Month 9, Day 27, Monday 1:00 a.m.

The pain of a horrible headache dragged Percy to wakefulness. He blinked at the darkness, the a brick wall resolving into legibility as the blurriness receded from his eyes, visible only due to the dim yellow light coming from somewhere to his left.

Groaning, Percy rolled over onto his side, then took a break to manage the spike of pain that sent both his vision and his stomach spinning. He would have continued lying there longer, but he was in the middle of a puddle. A puddle of what, exactly, Percy couldn’t say.

The liquid stank of alcohol and something else, but was strangely slimy and sticky, like someone had mixed honey and an impossibly large amount of mucus. It wasn’t vomit. “Oh, sweet Myrddin. Is this…spittoon juice?” Percy muttered to himself, swallowing hard to keep the contents of his stomach firmly where they belonged.

He managed to stand, hunched and shivering. He tried to wipe the filth off of his hands, but his clothes had soaked it up, half-damp and slippery, crusted at the edges where the slime had begun to evaporate. If it had been any colder, Percy might have frozen to death while unconscious. “Did I slip in that and knock myself out?”

He stumbled toward the light, which apparently came from a street lamp, the light crystal within illuminating just how alone Percy was. But his backpack still hung from one arm, his shoes still graced his feet, and even his money pouch remained, though only weighed down by a few copper coins.

Who could have guessed that the damned hag had filled the inside of the satchel with living moths!? What kind of spell component was that!? “Why the frick did I actually buy that stupid thing?” Percy seethed. He lifted one foot to kick the nearby wall, but stopped before he could add to the misfortune of this day by breaking a toe or something.

When Percy had been young, he and some of the neighborhood kids had gone playing in the woods near their village and found a beehive, the bulbous grey material attached to the underside of a gnarled tree branch.

Some of the other children had decided it would be great fun to throw rocks at the thing, mocking Percy for his well-known cowardice when he tried to dissuade them.

And of course, as Percy had known would happen, the bees became angry and swarmed out of their hive, ready to go to war. All of the children had scattered and sprinted away, but somehow the bees were drawn to Percy. He received a few stings, but that was far from the worst of it.

One might guess that he was about to discover an allergy, but thank the stars above, he did not. Percy’s body had always been blessedly robust. A frail child with his luck would have died in toddlerhood, if not sooner.

No, what happened was, in Percy’s opinion, much more horrifying. The bees had flown into his kinky, curly hair, unable to get past its springy denseness to his scalp beneath, but also unable to get free.

The little hairs on their legs were trapped in his thick strands, their weak wings unable to rip themselves free no matter how they buzzed or wriggled or scratched. His mother had needed to pull them free individually—many of them trailing their guts and in the process of dying from attempts to sting him—then try to comb their broken limbs and barbed stingers out of his hair until his curls frizzed out in a fluff.

And thus had begun Percy’s phobia of erratically flying insects.

Percy checked over his belongings again, frowning, and then began the long trek home. He hadn’t been robbed, which edged upon miraculous. No one had tried to help him or taken him to a healer’s either, despite him lying there just off of a main road for what must have been many hours. But with his luck, Percy was glad just not to have been stripped down to his underclothes by some opportunist thief. He had heard plenty of stories about the high crime rate in big cities like Gilbratha.

In fact, if not for his cardio training, Percy strongly suspected he himself would have been mugged at least once already. But he had run at the first hint of such a thing, and though the man tried to chase after him, his stamina was no match for Percy’s preparation. “You can’t outrun your luck,” was a saying that Percy had proven false more than a few times.

Along with the wealth of experience that gave him a mental catalogue of the sort of things that were likely to go wrong, and his vigilance, Percy’s physical training routine was his greatest defense.

By the time he arrived at the little house with a dirt strip of a front yard and only a meter-wide space between the houses on either side Percy was reaching the end of his stamina. Despite his pain and disorientation, he had somehow managed not to step in anything unpleasant, bump into any late night ruffians, or have chamberpot fluids thrown down at him even once on the way home. However many hours he had been unconscious had failed to revitalize him, but at least he must have used up all his bad luck already that day. He hadn’t even gotten lost, despite the city looking somewhat different at night.

“Thank Myrddin for small mercies,” he muttered as he unlocked his front door and tiptoed into the darkness of the house within.

As Percy crept through the living room, shuffling his feet forward so that he wouldn’t lose balance or step on some toy hidden in the shadows, a light bloomed with the scratch of a self-lighting lantern being struck to life.

A face appeared floating in the darkness above the couch, but its features were all wrong, lit from underneath and shadowed from above, like some sort of wraith.

Percy shrieked, high-pitched and sonorous, until his voice cracked.

The flame quickly grew brighter, revealing his mother, who had been sitting on the stuffed leather couch in complete darkness.

“Stars above!” Percy breathed, holding one hand to his pounding chest and another to his head, which he only now realized sported a rather large, painful lump on one side of his forehead. “Why were you sitting there in the dark!?”

“I was waiting for you,” his mother said, her voice flat and ominous, completely unsympathetic to the fright she’d given him. “In fact, we have all been waiting for you. Except your father, who went out to search for you. He’s on a route to check your workplace, the local healers,’ and then all the nearby copper stations. We were quite worried, you see.” But her voice didn’t sound worried. It sounded angry. “I hope you have a good explanation for being, oh,” she checked the time on her pocket watch, “five hours late.”

Percy stammered, trying to figure out how to be truthful while still making his day sound less worrying. His mom fretted a lot more than she let on, and he didn’t want to make her feel even worse than she obviously already did. Not only would it possibly make her reaction even more fearsome, he really didn’t want to hear her secretly crying in her bedroom, not ever again. “Umm, I was out on a delivery, and ended up being a witness to an escaping criminal. The coppers called me in to give testimony, even though I only caught a few glimpses of her and didn’t have anything useful to tell them.”

His mom’s tone softened slightly, but only slightly. “How long did they keep you? Don’t they know you’re only fifteen? It’s past midnight! And they sent you back through the dark without even a carriage, or an escort!?”

His siblings must have been woken by Percy’s shriek, because Lysander walked into the kitchen with her arms crossed, a judgmental expression on her face that reminded Percy of no-one so much as their mother. Only a couple years younger than Percy, she fancied herself the most mature of all the siblings, and thus, the boss.

Rubbing her fists into her eyes, much cuter Aethelwulf peeked around the corner, then smiled at him and gave him a little wave. She must have been worried. Without Percy to tell her a bedtime story, his parents had probably had an awful time getting her to sleep.

At least Gideon hadn’t woken, but the little boy, youngest of Percy’s siblings, did tend to sleep like the absolute dead.

His mom’s voice softened further, though it gained a layer of weariness. “Did you get lost again on the way home? I suppose there wouldn’t have been anyone out this late to ask for directions from. And it’s best not to approach any suspicious strangers. Someone could snatch a cute little boy like you up off the streets, never to be seen again.”

Percy groaned. “Mom,” he protested.

She stood, moving over the side cabinet to switch on the main living room lamp and illuminate the room with magically captured sunlight. “You’re hurt!” she exclaimed, her eyes roving over his face, and then, widening, down across his bedraggled clothes.

If shewas surprised, he must have looked worse than he imagined.

“You didn’t mention anything about that. What happened?” His mom stepped closer, reaching out as if to pat him down. “And you stink.” Her eyes narrowed. “Why do you stink?”

He chuckled awkwardly, rubbing the back of his head. “I slipped and fell into a puddle, but it wasn’t a water puddle—”

His mother looked down and shrieked.

Percy jumped away from her like a startled frog, looking down to his feet for the danger.

She lunged forward, grabbed his forearm in a punishing, vice-like grip, and held up his hand while pushing down his sleeve. “What is this!?”

Percy blinked. With his free hand, he rubbed at the black, decorative lines adorning the skin of his left wrist in the shape of what seemed to be a butterfly.

“A tattoo!?” his mom screeched, loud enough to hurt his ears and probably wake the neighbors.

Percy opened his mouth to protest, but no sound came out. Because it was, indeed, a tattoo. One he had no memory of getting.

Author Note: I don't know if you can tell, but I have a lot of fun writing this story.

And that bees-in-the-hair thing actually happened to me, pretty much exactly like Percy describes it. I'm writing my own phobia into a character.