Unmaking Percy

Part III - V, continued (The Dizzy Tent)

"How can you admit that so... so readily?" he babbled, steadying a hand on the balcony's railing.

"Why should I not?"

Because it was your back I was leaning against last night, Percy thought.

"Because... you're the chosen one", he said instead. "You're... supposed to be chaste!"

Evans stared at him with a peculiar look that Percy was incapable of reading.

"Am I? That's not written anywhere" Evans had a muted smile.

"There are lots of things that people expect that aren't written anywhere" Percy countered.

"But I don't know that they expect that at all. Do you?"

Evans stood draped in the midday light, handsome, impossible, the reflections from the lake-water jewelling him in liquid gold. The sight of him nearly frightened Percy back into the tent. And the thought of him, wrapped in the fabric of that secret nook as Percy himself had been, his body vulnerable to another, his neck curved as his head weighed back – Percy dug his nails into the skin of his wrist to blood out the thought.

"That doesn't matter" he responded, not as quickly as he would have wished. "What matters is what they were saying about you. The chosen one can't be seen in that light. All that talk of – how easy you were, and..."

He knew he was achieving little more than hurtling against a rock wall, over and over, bruising himself bloody for the sake of leaving his opponent exactly as he found him. Evans stepped towards him. Though he had always been taller than Percy, it was the first time that Percy felt Evans looking down at him, his brown eyes steeped in the deep waters of the lake.

"I know they said I'm easy. And I know they meant it as an insult. But, Percy, I don't feel it as an insult at all. I like bringing ease to people. Why is that so bad? Yes, I know you don't agree. And I'm aware that you think that of me, too. I've heard it often before. They say I am easy. That I am easy to please, and too easy to people, and that I will let anyone near me, or into my bed, with a scrap of flattery and a scraping of respect. And when they say it, they do not mean it as a compliment. They cannot understand why I feel no shame for it. Why is it so shameful for me to want to bring ease to people? To feel proud of it?"

Evans could hardly have admitted to anything more criminal. Only fools weakened beyond all hope by lacking ambition would admit to being pleased with little, and being eager to please. Percy knew that it was dissatisfaction that drove the world forward. Whether it drove it forward in a good direction, he had never been taught to ask.

But it was worse still. Evans had consented to being insulted, dragged through the mud while leaving his accusers pristine, when it would have been so easy, so necessary, to muddy them too. It bordered on ridicule, if not profanity.

Anyone confronted with a senseless sight – a river tripping, a tree bowing, a cloud falling – would be forgiven for thinking: just a trick of the light. That answer came quickly to Percy.

"I know you don't mean any of that" he said.

He did not know how to react when he heard Evans gasp. It was a frightful sound, a voice skinned raw. Evans' hand tightened around the railing, the white of his bones rising to the surface of his skin. Percy hadn't yet noticed how closely Evans' body was mirroring his, as though both clung, drowning, to the last scrap of flotsam.

"Do not dare to presume that" came a sound from a cave, dark, hidden, lonely. Percy had heard it once before. "Why would I not mean it? Percy, speak your most painful truth – how weak do you believe me to be? It's plain that you think me weak, but do you really think me so feeble that I would not mean what I say? Make of it what you will, but I won't have you claim I don't know my own mind. I said I am easy; I did not say I am nothing."