Work Text:
Jason Grace liked to think of himself as an oyster. Oysters were known for taking something ugly, a nucleus and turning it into something beautiful, a pearl.
But the ugly thing, the nucleus, wasn’t gone, and it certainly wasn’t erased either. It was still there, just hidden and masked by the glossy casing, the oysters way of protecting itself from the irritant.
And that’s exactly what he’d done. He had taken his broken and ugly self and covered it with this mask of the perfect Roman soldier. Of the perfect son of Jupiter, the king of all the gods.
But nothing could actually destroy or erase his nucleus. His irritant.
The worst betrayal that he had ever experienced, and it was through his very own mother.
The one person who was supposed to love you unconditionally, your entire life. From the day you were born to the day she died.
Her broken promise to him stood at the very core of who he was and what he had grown up to be.
Except…
What happened to a pearl when you removed its nucleus? When you removed the very foundation of everything it stood for and everything it was?
Jason believes he has the answer.
And it’s all really quite simple.
It collapses.
Because that’s what he had done.
His mother had come back.
Maybe not in the way that Jason had thought she would.
But she did and it felt like the entire structure of his very existence was being torn down around him.
And all he could do was watch with acceptance etched into the only stable part of his body left…
His bones.