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#But Percy always struck me as a person who would hate being stuck swimming laps for no reason
shorlinesorrows · 5 months
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Give me a Percy Jackson who hates swim team. Who went to a public pool for swim lessons once when he was five and started to sob the second his skin hit the water
give me a Percy Jackson who is always just the slightest bit unsettled at pools because water is never meant to have the life sucked out of it and be divided into lanes or put in boxes in the ground
Water isn’t meant to be contained.
a percy jackson whose skin feels like it’s slowly beginning to burn when he tries to swim in chlorinated water, who hates any set swim stroke with a passion and can’t stick to one for the life of him
who doesn’t understand why you’d want to keep only to the surface of the water, when being cradled under the surface is everything
because swimming is supposed to be like the tides, maybe patterned, but never identical, it’s supposed to be flowing with the world around you as you please
Give me a Percy Jackson who loves the sheer nature of water so much that he can’t help but quietly despise our “pools” and their dead water with their constricted sides and restrictions on what it means to change with the world around you
A Percy Jackson who is the child of water in its most natural state, and who can hardly bear to see the way society has attempted to contain it and sterilize it and strip away its power
He hates swim team, but that’s only the half of it
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