Chapter Text
They say eyes are windows to the soul.
They wouldn’t be wrong—at least, not exactly.
Eyes are so much more than just—
Empty lives, empty deaths—such a bore,
These meaningless existences are.
Violence trapped in violets ripple languid and fading but still so mad.
Percy looks at the withered vines trying and failing to creep over should-be slender legs bloated to calves of a common drunk; at skin that could-be smooth and marbled rather than the rough and mottled mortal shade it has become; at fattened fingers that should be dripping wine and blood but instead fails to bleed ichor only because there is barely any to bleed.
He looks, and burns to see dried-up vines curling around fraying strings, dead flowers bearing rotten fruits; it stretches and spreads a rotten blight across the land.
Laughter is fading but not-quite dead. Whispers decay that it soon will be.
He wants to laugh but the sound burns in his throat.
Half-empty cups turn in his direction.
“We have four,” echoes a withered husk of a god, “for pinochle.”
Boredom drips from a voice languishing decadent, and Percy burns.
He does not meet the gaze that bubbles up half-full and still too empty.
“Forever I will love you,[0]
Forever I will hate you.”
“Your eyes are so cool,” Nico di Angelo, son of Hades, tells him when they meet the first time.
His older sister, Bianca, dead huntress-to-be, hushes him. “Nico! That’s– That’s not—! Oh, I’m so sorry about him! He’s– My brother– Nico can be very blunt about what he thinks.”
Percy blinks slowly, pale white and blood-red flickering in and out of view. He shakes his head, closed eyes and awkward smile as he replies.
“That’s alright,” Percy assures her. “And thanks, Nico. Most people think my eyes are scary, you know.”
“No! Your eyes are very pretty,” Nico insists, and Percy can’t help but laugh at his reminiscent enthusiasm. Bianca just drops her face into her palms, groaning.
His eyes are black with hate. I’m sorry I couldn’t protect her.
Percy lets his lips widen to a cheeky smile. His eyes burn the longer he keeps his eyes on them.
“But say, what’s so pretty about my eyes?”
“Uh,” Nico flounders, as Bianca sighs, long-suffering. He licks his lips, blinking furiously, “They’re, um, very deep...?”
Staring into Percy’s eyes, Nico trails off, as a blush works its way from his ears to his neck to his cheeks. It’s adorable, the ways his breath hitches.
Love is worn on an angel’s final breath,[1] dark eyes blown wide and hearts stained deeper black as lightning comes crashing down, failing still to chase the shadows away.
“You’re cute when you blush,” Percy says off-handedly, smile growing as he sees Nico’s blush deepen. It’s a shame he won’t stay innocent for very long.
Bianca scowls. “You– Quit flirting with my brother! You—”
Her words die on her lips as she meets his gaze, and she pales.
Lost in the land without rain,[2] figurine held in bloodstained hands, a metal giant creaks to life.
And he smiles, wondering what exactly his cousin doomed to die had seen reflected in his eyes.
.lOok AT Me
Ǝɯ ꓕɐꓘ oo⅂.
He is eleven yet to turn twelve when he first meets Grover.
A nervous little thing, but steady in all the ways that matter. He says he’s twelve, then. One year older than Percy. He is twice that and then some.
He meets Percy’s eyes once and tries many times again but fails just so. His eyes stay trained on his lips and ears and nose instead.
It’s almost too easy, falling into the dynamic of “friends” with him. Perhaps it’s because he knows who Grover is—who he will be—better than anything. At least that’s what Percy tells himself.
It’s easier still to pretend and lie and act, when Grover refuses to meet his eyes. And as much as it hurts, it is fine. Grover doesn’t need to see him hurting over someone who isn’t there.
He is seven and eleven and sixteen turning seventeen when he first meets Grover Underwood.
His friend the satyr does not recognize him yet.
He meets Percy’s eyes exactly once and then never again.
Hail,
The Lord of the Wild—
The eyes of the Wild find the eyes of the dead and alive and find peace and a glimpse.
Rubble of cities in ruin, abandoned and left to the whims of Time. Grass sprouting like weeds, tall as small trees. A song drifting through the winds, blown through pipes by growing horns.
The fraying strings begin to snap one by one.
“Grover, my brave, brave boy,” Pan whispers, soft and fading fast. “I leave the Wild to you now. I trust you.”
Nature croons a mournful tune, a farewell long overdue. A promise withheld though long since forsworn. Pain long carried but never despised.
Desperate Grover wails. “But I only just found you! Everyone has been waiting, no, searching for you! We need you, Pan!”
(This is a seed for hate, for despair, for resentment to bloom. How long can peace be held at bay before longsuffering breaks?)
Percy knows Pan can never hold it against him, never against him and them. Pan is a sad remnant of the Wild-Father, love and pity and wishful thinking staying desperately and unwillingly abreast of oblivion.
“You’ve managed just fine without me,” he says, and his eyes do not lie. “You must move on. To a new age of the Wild.”
Pan wheezes, as his form flickers. Percy closes his eyes in mourning. Grover whimpers, like a child, a child he hasn’t been for years now.
A shudder threads its way through Percy’s spine, his fingers, his eye-sockets, his veins. Hate rumbles in hungry expectation. He bites his tongue and tastes cold, burning ash.
“You are young, yes. But you will grow, as all things Wild must.”
(It is a promise and a prophecy, an inevitability woven to fruition at long last. He has no say here, only the duty to watch and hold the wishes of a fading god.)
Percy opens his eyes to a smiling Pan, eyes hazy and—their eyes meet, and something flashes in the fading god’s eyes.
(Recognition, realization, restitution. Long owed, finally released.)
“I trust you,” Pan repeats, his eyes reflecting Grover, old and grown and Wild as ever.
It’s a promise of the ages and one that is millennia in the making.
The eyes of the Wild find a glimpse and a piece.
Once, there was a boy
In darkness all alone...
His eyes are wild and empty and—
A boy reeking of salt and sand raises a sword against him. Please don’t hurt me—
—HOW DARE HE?!
Percy flinches and rolls to the side just as the Bull of Minos charges. His horns graze his ankle, but it’s a slight one. It heals quickly under the rain.
“Percy, run!”
His mother’s eyes are as wild as his. The only thing he finds looking there is his own reflection.
“I can’t leave you. And he only wants me.”
Percy is right, and his mother knows that. And yet, her eyes flicker black, same as his—
“You know I have to go, sweetheart,” she says bitterly, face crumpling as she turns from him and towards Pasiphäe’s son.
It is roaring in his ears and he cannot tell if it is his blood rushing or the rain falling or the storm crashing down on them.
What is certain is that Sally will not make it past the border, and only one outcome will leave her alive.
It has to be this way, they both know, and they hate that it has to be this way and no other.
He hates it. Even knowing that she has long made her peace with it. He still hates it.
They make eye contact with the Bull of Minos.
Sally laughs breathlessly.
“I’ll see you soon, I’m sure. So…stay safe, honey. Now go.”
And then Asterion[3] crushes her into golden sand.
Percy doesn’t cry.
“—Don’t wait long for me, mom.”
It’s all he can do not to scream.
There is no use for dreams nor hopes
Down in the Underworld, and beyond.
Mist is might woven into mayhem[4] that sinks deep into Psyche and still it sinks and sinks and sinks deep into his without any end—the pit has no end.
Instead of delusions rising and illusions blinding it is memories that well up and an abandoned dream and a hope thrown to the bottomless that awakens and forms into words that slip from his lips.
“Lady of the Palace—”
It sounds like sunbeams falling and ocean waves frothing, lapping at foam-formed land.
“—sorry that I ask this, but—”
Pits of black make way for hazy green as words are strung to a melody familiar, loosening the threads that try and fail to strangle him, and for his men, he must raise up arms to fight—
“—I hope that I’ve been—”
“What did you just call me?”[5]
Ah, he thinks, the haze clearing. A laugh bubbles up his throat, but all that spills from his lips are black and liquid hate, dripping corrosive and eating away at everything that dares to wrap its claws around Its own.
She is staring at him with wide green eyes and he can taste (disgusting) fear and hope (traitorous) and want (lust, acts of—) and it is so very old, moldy and not his, so it must be hers—
Percy doesn’t flinch even as all of CC’s attention goes to him. It’s heavy, and threatens to crush him from the sheer weight, but her will is weak, her hate faltering and pitifully wavering.
It is not his imagination. It is a memory he cannot forget.
She knows him. And yet, he does not know her.
Odysseus laughs, with eyes of red and a monster in his chest. “When the witch turns men—is she goin’ insane?”
She gazes deep into his eyes and her eyes turn ever greener, and as Percy matches it he grins at the cold caress of phantom winds on his cheeks and skin, the echoes of rain ringing in his ears.
If he closes his eyes he’ll probably see a memory of pain and rage and sheer and utter loathing.
“Lady of the Palace,” Percy rolls the words on his tongue, “is that not you, my lady?”
He fights the urge to bare his teeth in challenge, for that is not him, that is someone else’s hate and he cannot, must not drown in—
Circe looks at him, really looks at him, and then with a strange mix of indecision and certainty says, slowly, “Who, me?”
It comes off echoing, drifting like mist, like Mist, and hearing it is like falling through sands of Time.
Falling, falling, he is falling. —Down in the Underworld—!
(Annabeth goes ignored, but she knows better than to intrude now. She knows she is an outsider, here.)
Percy meets her gaze, indifferent shades of green, and stares into her misty, unseeing eyes, searching.
“There are other ways—” she sings, enchantments of love woven into her voice. But they only bring grief and misery in to end.
The man in her bed weeps. “I’m just a man.”
“It’s your one final hope,” is not the last she says on the matter.
Circe tears her gaze away, first.
As she opens her mouth, Percy strings the words to the familiar tune, chorusing with her.
“You’ve given me one reason to bestow you with my trust...”
Numb to the white-hot fires,
Cold to the permafrost burn.
Blood-red eyes suit Ares as well as the burning orange of desolation’s fires.
It brings out his savagery, among other things. Fitting for a god of war. Puts emphasis on his bloody nature, as the heated, passionate face of war—something he shares with his lover, Aphrodite Areia—as opposed to Athena’s cold, logical strategems.
He says as much to the god playing guard dog, ignoring—pointedly—the daggers his questmates train on his back.
It does not, surprisingly enough, make the god decide that flaring his aura is anything remotely close to a good idea. Small mercies, Percy would suppose, were the memory of their last confrontation still not fresh as ever in his mind.
Ares somehow still ends up getting it into his brain meeting eyes would be a good idea.
Rivers rush and roar, flowing fast and free. Red trickles in waterfalls, black wells up and rises to swallow oaths made in rage and hate and vengeance. Sins unforgiven and wishes unfulfilled last generations, curses on her, from her, to dwell in blood and never end, not even in death.
Percy grits his teeth as cold blood starts to boil, hate burning higher than ever before. Betrayal tastes numb on his tongue, it burns and carves its way past thin scalp and hollow sockets and he bites his tongue to stifle his screams.
“Huh,” the god figures, grinning widely and wildly, teeth bared as he peers at Percy over his sunglasses. “Like what you see, nutcase?”
“Well, it’s better than gold,” is all Percy rudely murmurs, to his companions’ chagrin.
Ares just grins, wild and feral. Bloodthirsty, even. And he laughs crazed and craving.
He wonders if the god can still wear that bravado when he lays eyes on his daughter’s desecrated remains.
Percy forces a smile through the god’s heavy-handed patting of his back.
This version of the god, all rage but no hate nor malice, simply the feral bloodlust of war, is a familiar stranger. He hates him all the same.
“Well, well! I’d say you got balls, but you’re crazier than that, aren’tcha?” Ares almost looks proud. “Shame you got all that from ol’ Uncle P.”
Percy’s smile is wan. “Dreaming too much can drive anyone crazy. You’d know, if you bothered to ask any of us demigods.”
Behind him, someone chokes. Sadly, it isn’t Zoe.
“You should really learn to watch that tongue, demigod. Could earn you points from the, ah, other gods.”
“The day you remember to watch you temper is the day I’ll think of watching my tongue,” he says, returning the god’s ugly grin, staring straight into blazing honor and savagery running wild.
Ares’s eyes burn, but his blood runs cold.
Pearl of the sea,
Foam in the wind.
When he blinks awake, it’s to hues of coral blue and a soft green tint in his vision.
The Sea once held Prophecy, he faintly recalls, as bells ring and the water froths beside him.
Black billows and fades, burning and weaving and freezing cold. The Son of Neptune shall drown, so whisper the waves in his ears. He remembers falling, last.
Percy watches the tides dance around him, always coming close but never once touching. The edges of him fade and foam, they turn transparent, pitch black blurring the line between him and the Sea.
A two-tailed merman—his half-brother Triton—swims up to his side. A bitter smile forms on Percy’s lips as he tastes the same impersonal hate from him that Hera also had.
Still, whatever words he has to say to Percy dies on his lips as they lock eyes, for Percy has the most distinct feeling that—
—his eyes are no longer her black nor his own green, but rather—
“Η κόρη μου,” her πατέρας[6] whispers brokenly.
—He hasn’t the heart to correct him.
Time runs out, and the edges of them bubble to foam, sinking down, down, down to—
Triton inhales sharply, voice lost to the waves.
Percy breathes, and chokes on the foam filling his lungs.
See how much misery
Misery can take.
“Please,” Annabeth pleads, “let us through.”
The stench of sincerity wafts off her in waves, threading through a miserable blanket of fatigue and despair, all of it burying a delicious hatred for her own self.
It is her fault they fell, after all. Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before the fall.
Percy spares her no sympathy, and neither does the goddess before them.
Akhlys smiles, dreaded thing that it is. “No,” she whispers sweetly, sunken eyes hazy and unseeing, blood on her lips and poison in her breath. “No, I don’t think so. Your misery is sweet, demigods, and it. Is. Mine.”
Percy sees her lunge before he feels her nails digging at the flesh of his cheeks, he sees her bloodshot orbs spin in their sockets before he pushes Annabeth away from the claws that would have plucked her heart out.
Annabeth screams.
There is a stump in place of the leg that kicked her away. It is the fall and the silver dagger entrenched in the goddess’s neck that saves his head from being torn clean off.
Black bile threatens to rise in his throat as he chokes. Black tears fall, and he pulls on the iridescent chains wrapping around Akhlys's neck.
Annabeth pounces on her, half-melted gloves stuffing whatever plants are in reach down the goddess’s windpipe.
“You promised!” she screams, retching, sobbing ugly tears that fail to wash the poison seeping under her skin.
Akhlys cackles—or at least she tries, and fails for trying.
Percy drags himself over to where Annabeth is shrieking still as she beats the goddess to inches of ill-fated immortality.
The disgusting hue of pitch swelling in the Death Mist finally overtakes the sickly grayish green of Misery, and Percy pulls on the fragile frame of it, he pulls and pulls and pulls until it gives and it shatters.
Percy is there to catch Annabeth as she is thrown back, as Akhlys gasps sharply, sunken eyes opened wide. She tries to speak but finds nothing; her voice has failed her.
The jagged edges of Misery’s shroud abandon their old mistress, bound to the chains of a wraith child of broken oath.
Percy’s smile is sharp as he giggles, “You promised!”
Akhlys reaches pitifully, reaches for something, for nothing.
As the sickly Mists that once was hers rise, she pales. It is no longer the familiar gray-green of hers, but a hateful black that reflects nothing but a promise of retribution.
She makes to beg for mercy, the pitiful thing, but Percy has none for her.
Annabeth’s limp frame he cradles close, as he wills her misery loose from where it had burrowed beneath her skin.
Sunken eyes shed tears of red-streaked gold as they plead.
Percy’s answering smile is sweet, his eyes a sightless black as he croons, “Oathbreaker.”
The fog of black sweeps forth, and Akhlys shrieks.
Fury, Kindly,
Fly, the Sisters Three.
“Mrs. Dodds” is the first in a long while to meet his eyes and she is wanting.
Red becomes her, those fiery pits of rage and Kindly Fury, and there is nothing quite like it, he thinks.
He does not meet her gaze until the day she first chooses to call his name. And oh, is it glorious.
Poor Grover, to be assaulted by such a heavy stench of death—one beside, one before. For even the seas can drown—drown in absolute hatred, borne of the ocean’s eldest daughter.
A bottomless pit, unforgiving loathing, for existence and all the more.
Ah, but things like her are not kept below for nothing; Mrs. Dodds had recovered quickly, and even had enough guts left to give him detention, after!
She is Fury when she asks—no, demands of him, “What are you?” like he is not even owed the right to ask her the same.
“Perséus,” he answers her, first—because that is what he must be. And then, he is what he is, what he will always be, “Katára.”
Olympus to preserve or raze, the yet-to-be undead had murmured, closing her eyes as she thinks of ink under the hands of red, painting a river drowning hopes long accursed.
Mrs. Dodds had taken a step back. Percy stays where he is.
And then Alecto turns and never looks back, not even as pits of black burn holes in her back.
“You’re as old as he was
When I broke his heart...”
There is a rush of wind, and then.
Hermes is there, sitting beside him.
Percy does not need to turn to see sky-blue eyes glancing at him, the very image of the ones that so swiftly turned gold from kindness to cold.
“You cannot save him,” Percy says before anything else. No noose wraps tight around his neck, this time, for this is no secret to the thief sitting beside him.
“But I can certainly try,” the pitiful god murmurs, hopelessly hoping, “can’t I?”
Percy cannot help the hate that bursts forth and dyes the water lapping at his feet an inky black, that turns the warm sand beneath his feet to solid, cold obsidian.
It is better than anger, better than any other emotion he cannot control.
This is a god, Percy reminds himself. One grieving for the living, but still.
“Choose, then.” He does not say it lightly. Choices are not his to command, but he is still bound to provide. “You can’t have it all. Either save one, or save the rest.”
Hermes’s stricken face reminds him of his mother’s, once upon a time. Blue is not brown, and yet, there is no difference. He is still a father forced to doom his child.
He feels like a god, for voicing fate, and yet, he is mortal all the same. It is a terrible feeling, a terrible thing, to be a god.
“Is there no other way?” Hermes begs, and Percy thinks of grey eyes clouded by poisonous green.
Percy has never hated the gods more, has never hated his mother more, for this burdensome fate.
He wonders if he should lie, wonders if Hermes will take the sweet lies better than the bitter truth. He is the god of lies, after all, it would be impossible for him not to know.
And then he thinks of his mother, and he thinks of the curse that binds him by the neck and is strangling him at this same moment still.
And he closes his eyes, and bids the words to come.
“There is no other way.”
Luke really is his father’s son, Percy thinks, gazing into blue eyes so deep, deeper than the sky, and shallower all the more for it.
I hate you, he curses them in his mind, and hopes Hermes feels every bit of the weight of his hate and more.
But then Hermes flees, he flees as if that is the only thing he knows to do, and Percy is left without an answer, not even from the whispers in his head.
Though these actions haunt your days,
Every child you slay is the price—!
Luke gives him the gift his own father had given him once upon a time, cursed to hell and back again.
“You know I can’t fly,” Percy tells him flatly, unimpressed.
He reconsiders for a moment his judgement when Annabeth opens her mouth to protest, only for the logic to parse through a second later.
Before either Luke or Annabeth can say anything, though, Percy says unceremoniously, “One of them can have it.”
Percy does not believe the audacity Luke has, though, to give him a cursed gift and not hold a shred of hate for Percy, or even his own self.
“Ah,” he murmurs, wincing, “it was a thoughtless gift, wasn’t it?”
At that, Annabeth sputters, while Grover wrings his hands, looking awkwardly between the three of them.
Percy does not lose his frown, either way.
“Not really. All that matters is that you meant well.” Percy looks straight into Luke’s eyes, and wonders. “You did mean well, right?”
There is not a hint of gold in those sky-blue eyes, not even a hint of hate. Only earnest, hopeful blues.
Luke’s smile is kind, his eyes crinkle just like his mother’s used to. “Yeah,” he says, and there is not a shred of insincerity there.
Perhaps that is what makes it all so much worse.
How can you live with yourself, Percy wonders, knowing everything you’ve done, and still plan to do?
A blessing for the son of May,
A shroud for the son of Hermes.
Cloudy gray, unseeing, peer at him, looking, looking, looking.
A smile splits through wrinkled skin. “You brought a friend!”
Hazy green stares back, empty, aloof, searching and finding—nothing. There is only broken clockwork, repeating, endlessly. There is something there, but it’s more hollow than a shell.
Words come to mind, unbidden, but there. “One who calls you friend,” he murmurs, watching as layers peel back and reveal a glimmer of intelligent silver, “shall betray you in the end.”
The crone shudders, and when she opens her eyes again, it is the same hazy green he sees in the mirror that stares back.
“Westwards shall ye go,” escapes a raspy whimper, stifled and strangled, but escaping all the same, it goes, “to meet a friend turned to foe.”[7]
Percy’s smile is brittle and thin, Nico’s fear is a palpable thing.
The haze of green recedes to reveal shattered, distant pale white, the hue too pale for gray and still not enough to be.
It is milky enough for him to see his reflection, to see that his eyes have lost their green as well, replaced with pitch from the depths.
“Hello, May Castellan.”
She looks and sees.
And it is terrified and haunting and deliciously hateful.
Blood of the covenant runs
Thicker than water of the womb.[8]
Once, there was a girl who saw the world as it was.
“This world is amazing...”
That girl has grown and become a woman, now, but her view has not narrowed, but only grown in scope.
“No matter the place...”
Chocolate brown eyes once were so warm like nothing else.
“Greet the world with open...”
Now there is nothing more than wells of pitch that only empty in sleep and under the shroud of Night.
“Is this how weʼre supposed to live?”
She is mother now, maiden no more, crone yet to be.
“This way... You know what your place is...”
She is his mother, vessel once, and shell forevermore.
“You might live forever... You can make it be...”
Brown bleeds black and reflects green deeper than the seas and lighter than what any will ever see.
“...mercy upon ourselves...
Blood of my blood,
Forever mine.
The first time he lays eyes on her, he swears an oath that binds him to something longer than forever.
She is flesh and weakness and still a source of strength like no other.
The brightest green eyes stare back, impetuous and so full of will, defiant as ever, and it is more than memory. Black is a ring around it, and black is the well at the very center.
“What’s her name?” he asks, wondering.
His heart stirs with something that is not anything he knows, something no weaker than hate but still just as overpowering.
His mother glances up at him, something tender in her unseeing gaze, and perhaps she is seeing something out of time.
“Estelle,” she says in that tone he has only ever heard in his dreams. “Her name is Estelle.”
Pitch black eyes devoid of any hate peer at twin greens like only one other, and murmur words that no one but three others with eyes just as black hear.
“...Estelle,” he concludes quietly, as liquid chains snap in place around his heart, the reins of them held in hands too small, too precious for a cruel world.
The final verse,[9]
Prelude to the next hearse.
The empty vessel is fragile but not brittle, mane of red and fingers stained with ink and paint, eyes too clear but still that cursed shade of green.
Rachel Elizabeth Dare is fiery as her initials and fresh as her familiar unfamiliar eyes.
Blinding gold, something blue flies by, and the flood stutters. Cries of rage drown out an oath sworn, life then forsworn, whilst laughter at expense bubbles up dark and stark.
And he must hold his tongue, if only to stay the course because there is no other way this can end well.
RED has no such restraint, however, and slaps away the next sharp object that tries to poke her. Or she tries, but both hand and blade slip through the other like neither exists.
It comes as a shock to the rest, but not to the two of them.
“Please,” RED still groans, “don’t try sticking your swords in me. It was terrible the first time, I don’t need a second.”
Someone chokes at the innuendo, but it escapes RED entirely. She steamrolls on, undeterred.
“It’s uncomfortable and unnecessary.” She huffs, and they share a glance over to where things of dreadful white approach. “Besides, there are perfectly hostile skeletons right over there who deserve to be on the receiving ends of those things.”
It is unflattering, and sounds perfectly terrible out of context.
Percy is under no illusion that she does not know it. The glint in her eye tells him everything.
Green eyes, gazing upon the world in cold indifference, seeing all and yet seeing none. The whispers that once thundered in tumults have gone silent, but the silence is no better than the noise.
Percy simply smirks, though, and throws her a sword prepared just for her.
“How about you try doing the sticking, then?”
RED looks at the sword, at him, and then back at the sword. “This was not what I meant, and you know that.”
“Are you doing it, or not? We’re not exactly good on time, you know.”
Clear green meets a kaleidoscope of the hue, vast and blinding and mind-numbingly loud and silent all around, and RED grimaces.
She sighs, and slashes blindly at the first thing that jumps her.
It cuts a skeleton clean, and she glares at the girls who gape at her in a mix of shock, apprehension, and appreciation.
“What?” she snaps waspishly, taking a jab at the next pair of dead soldiers that try to take her down. “My favorite spa is out, I just got referred to an asylum, and no one is answering my calls! No one! And now I’m getting jumped by some escaped exhibits—I think I’m allowed to take it out on these numbskulls. Argh!”
Her indignant scream of rage spurs the rest of them to action.
Percy laughs as he takes a swing at three all at once, and oh, is it exhilarating, the sheer hate that pours from them.
And yet, none of it compares to the barely restrained resentment emanating from RED. It’s a drug more addicting than the miserable fate that hangs over her eyes.
Green, green, such a lovely shade of green.
Maddening, and ever so green.
An eye for an eye,
Life for a life.
The boy is young, hardly older than him. And yet his eyes reflect resolve and rage unexpected of his age.
He fights for something he believes in, and for the first time, Percy envies.
It is not an unfamiliar feeling. And yet, it is an unfamiliar look on him—neither black nor green, but brown as his mortal mother’s own eyes.
He has something to live for, something to die for.
And yet, the boy tries and almost does throw his life away.
And so for the first time in a long time, Percy truly hates.
He hasn’t felt hate this strong in a while. Not since the solstice.
“Why?” Percy demands furiously. “Why would you throw your life away so easily?”
Ethan Nakamura is set to die, Percy knows that. And yet, for the first time in a while, there is a fate he refuses to accept so easily.
Nakamura gazes at him with an eye single to a will he cannot understand. “I owe you my life,” he says plainly, “it is only fair that I repay it in kind.”
And that, that Percy cannot accept.
His lone brown eye is full of everything Percy knows so intimately and yet can never understand fully.
And Percy hates him for that.
“A life for a life, is that it?” Nakamura bristles at his disbelief, but Percy and his spite cannot be stoppered. “You think too lightly of your life. The measure isn’t that simple, Son of Nemesis.”
Percy feels the hate burn in his veins, and he knows his eyes are bleeding black now, knows that his heart is steady as it is shaking.
“If you want to repay me with your life, then don’t you dare throw it away.” Nakamura stares at him, lone eye blown wide. “If you want to pay your dues, then live, you idiot. Live, and show me I didn’t save trash so easily thrown away.”
Percy lets out a shaky breath, and the earthquake he’d stirred up without knowing settles down. The Labyrinth still trembles, but there is quiet at last.
Nakamura opens his mouth, but nothing comes out.
Percy stares at him balefully. “Whether you live or die, the gods will fall, one way or another. But whether the children live, whether the lesser gods get their honor or whatever, that is only if someone who cares lives to make it so.” His lips turn a bitter smile as someone’s hate reaches him from so far away. “I don’t care for any of that. I can’t. But...you thought Luke could, but you and I both know he won’t.”
Percy does not take his eyes off the boy meant to die for the sake of scales already far too uneven.
He does not look away from the tapestry of consequences of blackened Fate that he is only just one thread of.
“I don’t need any more dead souls, Nakamura,” he swallows tightly. “You say you owe me your life—if that’s the case, then you don’t get to die that easily.”
So easy to let go, and yet, so hard to hold on.
Percy tears his eyes from the brown of mortal injustice and refuses to look back.
One-eyed, you are
The biggest heart.
It runs both ways.
Monsters are hateful things, though it is no fault of the little ones’ own. Taught to hate, it is the first thing they know, the one thing that never dies.
Half-bloods learn to hate after the first loss, and hate is hard to kill.
Percy would know.
But—this brother of his is a different one.
There is in him none of the hate that taints the hearts of most monsters. There is only curiosity and innocence, and the yearning that he almost always finds in half-bloods.
He is his father’s son, and yet his smile reminds Percy of his mother instead.
Percy does not love his brother, he cannot ever, not as a spawn of hate, but when he looks in Tyson’s brown eye, he finds he can’t hate him anyhow.
Tyson is no different from his mother, from Sally in that frame.
The first time Tyson calls him “Brother” is the time when he tells Percy that he loves him.
And Tyson means it with his everything—Percy does not need to look into his eye to know that, because Percy is the first to give him something that isn’t apathy or fear.
It is twisted, that hate is the one thing that means Percy cares.
And Percy…
Percy can’t help but hate himself for not being to say the same to his brother.
He can’t help but hate himself for always, always hating.
Riches from beneath,
Curses for her wreath.
“Cursed, huh?” Katára murmurs, deep black eyes gazing deep into burnished gold.
Hazel looks away first. Katára does not hold it against her.
She closes her eyes, and lets her palms press flat against the ground. It trembles, lightly, and Katára thinks it is to her what the curdling sludge under his skin chest is to him.
A single grain of glimmering gold peeks out from a crack in the ground.
Plucking it delicately, Hazel sighs, conflicted. “It’s pretty, but…that’s all it is.” Her eyes flick towards him. “I’m guessing you are too? Aside from thr amnesia, of course.”
They do not quite look at each other, but their gazes meet anyway.
Asphodels, in an endless field of gray. A pit in the ground, breaking, and then. The rushing winds, upwards falling, and then.
“Your curse shall last all your days,” Perséus whispers softly, “‘til Neptune’s blood wills it washed away.”[10]
There is nothing in the end.
Katára hums, closing his eyes.
“You should go rest.”
Hazel’s eyes do not burn against his back.
“...Wake Frank in an hour.”
He nods quietly, turning the grain between his fingers, thinking.
To see is to know,
The truth the ravens crow.
He does not quite flinch in the face of cold blue eyes, burning with the need to know.
Octavian is a distasteful mix of hope and desire and curiosity and lust. He does not quite hate—at least, not yet, anyways.
Katára hates looking into his eyes, anyway.
Madness approaches, writhing in his blood, the fate of those who keep on looking.
“Come,” Octavian beckons him, pupils wide with want and teeth bared to bite. His dagger held tightly, he whispers impatiently, “An augury awaits!”
Entrails and stuffing, spilling out. Red is streaked with gold and flecks of black stain cotton white until it spreads and taints everything.
Katára bites his tongue. A familiar act. “I...think I’ll be fine,” he says, and it is not a lie, “but thanks for offering.”
The sun shines, burning, merciless and willful.
“Oh, I don’t think so.” Octavian grips his hand tightly, pulling him close. His hand caresses Katára’s cheek, but there is nothing gentle about it. “You—will come with me.”
Rage, welling up. The river cold and black swallows the sky.
Protest dies on his lips.
Heat burns in the shape of a hand on his back, and his heart freezes cold.
He looks into blue eyes so deranged, and murmurs.
“...Alright.”
All will fall,
All in due time.
The Underworld Lord stares at him impassively.
“So, you are my brother’s newest spawn.”
His eyes are black as the depths, his shadow a living, writhing thing.
“The nerve of you to enter my territory, and so brazenly at that.”
His heart is just as black. Vengeance, grudges, debts owed to him. They dye it all so black.
“Tell me,” Hades narrows his eyes, “why? Why should I not smite you here and now, boy?”
Percy stares at his uncle, stares at the deep black wells threatening to drown him in their depths.
His smile is sharp, but there is no goodwill there. “Your kingdom is already full, Lord Uncle. Kill me, and there will be a war. And then there will be more dead. Are you sure you want that, uncle?”
It is only for a moment, but the shadows freeze. But that is enough of an opening for Percy to dig his claws in.
“I don’t mean to threaten you, uncle. I don’t need to, when my father is who he is.”
It only makes Hades glare at him. It would be frightening, if not for the fact that Percy has endured worse—even if only in dreams and nightmares. And Hades isn’t even trying.
There is hate, there, but it is not so deep as everything else. Hate has been slipping, slipping, in favor of dread.
And then realization and confusion sink in.
“You...” Hades murmurs, brows furrowing. “I know my brother’s eyes. Whose eyes do you wear, boy?”
Percy cannot help the grin full of teeth that slips on his face. “You always were the sharpest one, Uncle.” He lets the locks in his chest fall, lets the hatred flood his veins. And he grins.
“I only have the one quarrel with you, Uncle. You did take my mother, after all.”
Shadows writhing in pale sockets stare at wells of pitch and polluted sludge. Dead on one side and the rushing boundary in the middle.
“My patron,[11] on the other hand,” Percy murmurs, “shares that one quarrel, for reasons of her own.”
Hades’s eyes blacken entirely, in rage, in dread, in shock.
Percy grins.
“Will you grant us this one favor, Lord Uncle?”
The Underworld trembles.
Garden of lovers,
Graveyard of flowers.
Tragedy is a creeping beast, a dreadful thing that goes hand in hand with comedy.
He is all the world to shadow and bone—for only all of one moment, before Sun and Song and Prophecy descends in all its terrific golden glory.
Pitch black swirls in the presence of purest gold, sinking in favor of misty green.
The scent of flowers burn his lungs—laurels sit like a thorny crown upon his head, hyacinths take root and sap his breath, drawing on his blood.
Moonlit silver digs into his heart, whilst burning hands carve his belly open. Leaden fear encases his heart, bidding his tired feet to run, run, run for his life.
Mist settles behind his eyes, resting in his sockets like coiled snakes, ready to pounce. A curse sits and binds his tongue, and everything he says grace deaf ears, everything he sees—they make him want to retch.
Bright blue is burned away by molten gold, lost in the vision of a dream and a wish long gone.
It falls on its knees, the wretched thing, the wretched thing—and it calls him Love.
And it fills his heart with Hate,
Wraps it in Lead, a wreath of blossoms Dead,
Makes the Wind choke on Flowers stained Red,
Fills their ears with Screams of Truths unheard,
Snapping Silver strung to fly without a word,
Such is the vengeful Oath of the tragedies of Fate.
Father of Monsters,
Such is my curse.
He is only a child when he is told that he is a mistake. By his own father, no less.
He means well, Percy knows.
It does not change the fact that he uses words like an ill-practiced man wields a sharpened knife.
At least his father is mature enough to admit his faults.
It does not change the fact that Percy hates him anyways.
If he were a kinder father, he would have stayed, no matter the cost.
If he were a wiser ruler, he would have known not to place himself in temptation’s path.
If he were a stronger god, he would have already overthrown his brother a long time ago, and finished the job instead of leaving it hanging like Zeus left Hera hanging over Chaos.
But Poseidon is not; Poseidon is true to who he is, in the end.
Like a child, he has his favorites. Like the sea he rules, he is subject to his whims. Like the lesser mortals they lord over, he clings to sentimentality instead of power as their mad father did.
More than anything, though, he hates that his father is not quite wrong to call him a mistake.
He does not need to look in his Father’s eyes to know that.
Even without seeing his reflection in those sea-green eyes, he knows his are but a pale imitation of the truth. An illusion of the Mist to conceal the ugly truth.
He does not have his father’s eyes, but he does have his father’s face—
The face that belongs to the Father of Monsters.
There are memories, bound to blood and oath, buried in unseeing eyes.
There are fates, spun and spinning and still in the making, mirrored in the eyes.
There are truths, that have yet to be known, that may never be told.
Everything returns to the sea, in the end.
It settles deep in the below where no living may venture.
And now in a vessel it dwells, to a spirit it is bound.
All that come must one day go.
They say eyes are windows, mirrors.
His eyes are—
They hold glimpses and reflections—
Swear on me,
Swear by me.