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Imagine this:
You’re pulling the car over. Someone’s waiting.
You’re going to die
in your best friend’s arms.
— "Planet of Love", Richard Siken
++
All right, so Percy isn’t very good at planning most of the time. He can pull a coup de grâce out of thin air every so often - he thinks of it as one of the perks of being a hero, along with the high probability of dying young and living forever in legend, which is particularly cold comfort. Occasional divine inspiration is pretty cool but it would be better if it came along with some sort of health coverage.
Of course, there’s the Styx, but that messes with the metaphor.
What Percy does do is make friends. Percy is good at that; Percy is good at accidentally slipping into the sort of intimacy that usually only arises from years of friendship and/or sexual relations. He knows half the campers’ coffee orders, and the other half don’t drink coffee. He knows whose younger sister is playing Rachmaninoff in a recital next week, and he remembers enough from his music requirements to make jokes about just bashing the keys harder. He knows whose father has a renewed interest in science fiction and fishtanks. It’s what he does, and he wouldn’t trade it for anything. Being around his friends makes Percy happy and it seems to make them happy, and sometimes they pull his ass out of the fire, which makes everyone happy besides the fire. It also means that when he’s off on a patrol just beyond the borders of camp with Nico, he’s a little less likely to cause an actual interdivinity incident between two of the Big Three. It’s the little things.
Sometimes, though, it would really be nice to be able to plan like Annabeth, or get angry like Clarisse, or even play the pipes. Actually, strike that, being able to play pipes and summon Nature with a capital N would be pretty awesome. Percy can fight as well as any camper who’s survived their first year of the climbing walls of doom, as well as drill overseen by the Ares cabin, but when he’s well and truly away from water he has no ace up his sleeve, no crossed fingers behind his back, no bolt from the blue.
Actually, what he has behind his back is a splinter - half an arrow, fired by one of the skeleton archers hard enough to glance across the edge of his vulnerable spot and splinter on the edge of soft skin. He hadn’t been wearing armor, of course, because that’s how ambushes generally work. They don’t give you time to pack up camp and buckle on your sword before they happen. The archers had unfolded from the earth like nightmare marionettes, and promptly done their best to skewer Percy and Nico. “I have them under control!” Nico had shouted, peeking out from behind a tree that looked like a glorified pincushion, and Percy hadn’t had time to come up with a witty rejoinder before Nico had slipped into the sliver of shadow behind the trunk and vanished to parts unknown but hopefully not too far.
Now, though, Percy is bleeding too much for witty rejoinders. The arrow doesn’t feel fatal - he doesn’t get the sense that it’s severed his spinal column, say, or hit a kidney or anything of vast importance. And he’s breathing fine. It’s just the way his back is wet and he can’t get a grip on the splintered wood because his fingers keep slipping, and he can maybe feel his pulse, like a microscopic tide, push-pull, except there’s no pull, because the push gets blood all over his fingers, and the pull hurts more and more. Every part of his body hurts, under the skin, aching and burning. Percy thinks muzzily I thought bleeding to death would be nicer than this, and then wonders exactly when he thought that, and then his hand falls away from his back because it’s just too much effort to twist it up like that. Standing is pretty tiring, too, he thinks, I should sit down. Conserve energy.
Percy goes to sit down and instead falls to his knees, throwing an arm out to keep himself from going face-first into the dirt. It’s not hard-packed dirt anymore, though, but blood-slick mud, and his hand slips, and by the time he catches himself he’s inches away from the red-brown mess of it. He may as well lie down. He may as well just curl up and wait and see -
“- Jackson,” Nico says, “don’t you dare die on me.”
Most of the archers are still around. The one that shot Percy fell out of a tree and shattered shortly afterwards, and didn’t seem too inclined to reform from bone dust, but his sword had gone through the others with the sound of a xylophone made of bamboo, and they’d shaken the blows off and kept coming.
“I’m not dying on you,” Percy says cattily, “I’m dying in the mud. Big difference. If you get shot, though, you will be dying on me. Give a man a little dignity, would you?”
“You have the dignity of a piece of wet bread,” Nico says, and then there’s this horrible yawning feeling. Percy feels it click through his bones, like a landslide, and then it passes, like the flash between lightning and thunder, like a trough between waves, but alien and leviathan and dispassionate.
There’s the incongruous sound of someone dropping a hundred bags of chopsticks.
“You couldn’t have done that earlier,” Percy says, forehead now resting on his arm. “Save us all a lot of trouble. Save me a camp shirt.”
When Nico doesn’t reply, Percy rolls a little - the world lurches and his stomach twists, but - and looks up, and Nico looks terrible. Percy is currently lying on the ground in a puddle of his own blood, so this is saying something, but Nico looks like he’s been up for a week straight on sheer force of will and very strong espresso. The dark circles under his eyes are worrying and he looks slightly feverish in the way that generally means he’d be able to punch a bear out right around now with sheer nervous energy but would then pass out and sleep for a month.
“Nico?” Percy says, gently.
Nico looks down at him, and that’s even more terrifying, that is. He doesn’t look desperate, and he doesn’t look wired to punch a bear or kick down a tree - what he looks is bone-deep tired. “Don’t you dare," he repeats, a little quieter, and kneels down to loop one of Percy’s arms over his neck. “Call yourself a hero?”
“Never,” Percy argues, trying to get his legs underneath him and help Nico out a little, but he feels lightheaded. There’s no way he has legs. There’s no way he has a body. He props his chin up on Nico’s bony, uncomfortable shoulder and stares at the hinge of his jaw and the way his hair curls along his throat and feels as though he can see every detail, every cell, every molecule of power.
“Power doesn’t come in molecules,” Nico grunts, and Percy realizes that they’re moving. Nico’s moving, anyway. Percy is stumbling along, a bit. Everything is very blurry except those few square inches of Nico. “Did you know you were talking out loud?”
“Did you know you were talking out loud?” Percy retorts. Nico’s ear is blurry. Nico’s jaw is blurry. He doesn’t hurt all over any more, which should probably be more worrying than it is.
“I always know when I’m talking out loud,” Nico snaps, and takes a worried (blurry) look at Percy. Whatever he sees makes him drag Percy along faster, Percy’s dangling feet leaving tracks in the dirt. They’re coming up the hill now to camp, and someone’s seen them; there’s either a segment of turf that’s gotten up and is rushing headlong at them, or about half the camp is sufficiently worried to try and find out what’s going on.
“So don’t you dare die on me,” Percy says, because no way is he dying without being a final pain in the ass to Nico di Angelo. It’s practically in his statement of purpose. “Sounded awfully personal.”
“I’d hate to explain to Annabeth,” Nico says, “I mean, she’d probably kill me, but if she didn’t it would probably be even worse -“ and then Nico just shuts down, snaps his mouth shut and drags Percy further. “Nothing personal there.” His face is just a pale blur now, dark circles under his eyes like empty eye sockets, but even so he looks like someone has seized him by the waist and twisted. He looks tired and young and overwhelmed, and Percy doesn’t want to ask, but who would he be if he didn’t?
“Is that so,” he begins, and passes out, which is probably for the best all around.