#heehoo.

Canon Balderdash, when first transported to Woodstock, has a great time because he’s generally interacting with nice people. These people are eclectic, rough-and-tumble, probably drug addicts, etc, but they find his weirdness funny and take him in after the festival’s over, and generally provide a cushion to help him transition to the insanity that is his new life. Thus, by the time Aleph whisks him off again, canon balderdash has been able to fortify his belief that this is all a grand adventure, it’s for the best, and he just needs to ride the wave and have a good time. 

In this world, Percival Balderas does not have so good a time. A spiked drink, a bad trip, people whose laughs are so unquestionably cruel that he can’t pretend it’s all a game. No one to pick him up and take him home after, so he’s left to try and survive alone. 

Thus, this man learns quite early on that the stories he told to his sister were wrong. Even hundreds of years in the future, in a world of technological marvels, he is not to be granted that beautiful adventure. There’s no salvation here, no heroes and quests. Just him in his devil’s bargain, running in a hamster wheel as Aleph has their fun. 

This man wants to go home. He doesn’t want to be a bard or a knight or anything anymore. But you don’t get out of deals with the devil that easily. He tries asking, of course, then begging. Aleph writes down some notes, laughs, then sends him off to the jungle. 

He survives. Not because he’s having a good time (or deluding himself into believing he’s having a good time). He’s going back to see his sister. He’ll survive until then. With blood on his teeth and clenched fists, he’ll keep surviving. 

Just like canon Balderdash, this man is good at adapting. He ends up taking on a similar role as in canon, that of the entertainer. He’s still good at music, still good at making people laugh, even if it doesn’t bring the same joy. The persona grates on him, but it’s useful. It makes people underestimate him.

He’ll take any other jobs too, though, picking up skills and pilfered bits of knowledge and notches on his bedpost and scars but no other mementos. Avoids piercings and tattoos and sentimental trinkets, reinvents himself every time he’s dropped through time, blends in perfectly because there’s nothing about himself that he can’t mold to fit his environment. 

He learns that Aleph wants to keep him alive, that they care for him in some way. It’s the way a child cares about a shiny new toy, and a scientist about a particularly successful lab rat. When he’s on the verge of death they’ll sometimes take him somewhere, patch him up. 

He thanks them, and he makes sure to continue being shiny and successful. He cries when he thinks they might be hoping for a breakdown, balances struggles and successes, and never lets his gaze linger too long on the things he’s committing to memory. 

About five years later, he pushes a confused lover out the door, stumbles back towards the bed, and collapses as his heart stops. He is, by all appearances, and for all intents and purposes, dead. 

A few minutes later he wakes up in Aleph’s lab, their back turned as they analyze a sample of his blood. It’ll show a combination of chemicals, incredibly potent (deadly for the average person, if they hadn’t spent two years slowly inoculating themself), assembled from mundane ingredients that no one would have blinked twice at. They won’t have time to finish analyzing, though, because a needle full of the same stuff has been pulled from a ring on his finger and stabbed into their neck. 

Aleph isn’t a regular person, of course, so the poison only slows them down. It’s more deadly to them that they’re off their guard. They still almost kill him— he’s only a man, unarmed but for that one vial of poison. But in the end, chemical burns covering his skin from an exploded pipe, a portion of that pipe held in his bloodied hands, he stands over their lifeless corpse. 

The people of the Centre outside Aleph’s lab haven’t heard, or they don’t care. He fixes his wounds enough to keep from dying, loots the lab for anything of value, and puts together Alephs notes and the scraps of information he’s casually wheedled from them over the years and the math he’s been learning from the professor he convinced he had a kink for infodumping. 

His math’s slightly off. He pops up a few miles away, and years from the moment he had first left. But he’s back. A day later, he rounds the bend and walks between the houses of his village. 

A family is standing nearby. A man and woman, hair just starting to streak with grey, a young child, and a girl who is really a young woman now. 

The young woman looks over at him, then averts her gaze nervously. They all laugh at something the child has said. 

Ah. 

He could go over, wipe away some of the soot and dirt that stain his face, put on a smile and share memories of his childhood, prove to them he’s the same boy they lost. 

But he isn’t. 

He turns and walks away. 

The village is small, and dirty, and ugly. A few people stare at him. He tilts his head at them, and gives them a brilliant bloodstained smile. 

He never comes back. 

He starts going by Perseus. It seems somewhat funny. The hero who got a happy ending. But they did both kill their monster. 

If anyone calls him Percy, they’ll end up dead sooner rather than later. 

Interestingly enough, all Aleph’s rules about not altering the timeline only matter if you want to get back to your original timeline instead of staying on the new one. Perseus doesn’t, so he’s free to do anything he feels like. If the world he creates doesn’t turn out the way he wants, he’ll just got further back and try changing things again. Or hop over to a different dimension entirely, and fuck that one up instead. There’s a possibility he’s destabilizing the universe or some shit, but it doesn’t seem to be causing him any problems so what does it matter? 

No one is watching him anymore, no one can control him. He gets plastic surgery to fix his scars, ditches obnoxiously bright colours for something more refined, and only smiles when he wants to. He’s got a stockpile of weapons and gold and drugs and knowledge that can get him anywhere he wants, even if you didn’t consider than he can just teleport to wherever he wants. He’ll relax on a private island in the modern day, then moonlight as a foreign prince in the 1200s, then sell genghis khan a nuke, then go back to kill the first fish to crawl onto land just to see what’ll happen. He can reinvent his personality and identity on a whim, he speaks so many languages that he can intuit the rules of new ones based on shared linguistic structures, he’s set himself up as a God in a few timelines before getting bored of it, he can do anything and everything. 

The only thing he doesn’t do is play music. There are other people for that. He finds himself humming one day, a tune that a young boy once learned from his mother in a town that doesn’t even exist in this timeline, and feels bile curl up his throat. 

The man called Perseus lives in a world that he controls, one that he is constantly breaking apart. There’s no point in holding onto anything when it’s so easily broken, is there?