Chapter Text
The day they tell her the plan, Clarisse thinks it's a joke.
She actually barks out a laugh. But that was before. Before she notices how Chiron is shifting on his back hooves. That’s before she looks over at Annabeth and sees the way she’s staring pointedly at the opposite wall. That was before Athena and Hermes shimmer into the Big House.
She’s not laughing anymore.
Annabeth’s got this almost manic look in her eyes, and she’s gesticulating wildly about how ‘this is the only way’ and ‘it actually gives us a fighting chance.’ How ‘my mother is right,’ and ‘we’d be saving so many lives.’
But Clarisse knows all of that's bullshit.
Annabeth may believe every reason she’s spouting about saving campers and preventing an all out war, but that’s not why she’s agreed to do this. She’s agreed because on the off chance everything goes right, she can save them both.
The prophecy will come true in a different way, and no one has to actually die.
The part of Clarisse that doesn’t want to slap some sense into everyone in the room—gods included—understands. Her and Annabeth weren’t always the best of friends, but they’ve known each other since they were nine. Clarisse has grown up beside Annabeth for the past six years. She watched her moon over the idea of Luke, and watched her ignore all the signs that he wasn’t the same person who made her all those promises when they were on the run. She watched Annabeth take a scrawny city kid under her wing on the off chance that she’d get a quest, and then watched as her and Percy became inseparable.
And Clarisse isn’t blind or heartless. She feels for Annabeth; it's really shitty luck to have the two people you love most in this world be on opposite ends of a death prophecy.
The plan is actually genius, in a twisted way.
Apparently, Athena and Hermes had decided to finally get off their asses and attempt to stop this war before it began. They both have their reasons, Hermes wanting to save his ‘pride and joy who got taken advantage of’ (when he actually says that to them oh, Clarisse has never wanted to punch a god in the face more—which says a lot), and Athena doesn’t want to take the chances of leaving the fate of Olympus in the hands of ‘Poseidon’s unpredictable offspring’ (she watches as Annabeth's jaw tightens and her eyes darken when Athena refers to Percy as ‘offspring,’ and Clarisse thinks it's the first time she’s seen Annabeth be truly angry at her mother).
(And it's insane that that was what finally pissed her off, because Athena had just called Percy a name and minutes before she suggested Annabeth fake her own death .)
She listens incredulously as Annabeth tells them the story of Luke showing up to her house last year, asking her to run away with him (the cowardly pervert ). When she questioned why he even thought she would go with him after everything he’d done, Luke had spouted a lot of bullshit. But the bullshit that got Hermes’s attention was when Luke had said, ‘because you saved me in the river.’ Annabeth recounted that, at the time, she’d thought he was referring to when he had an accident involving a lake while they were on the run, but Hermes realized it was something different.
The gods knew Luke had bathed in the River Styx to prepare to merge with Kronos, the catch being that they couldn't know where his only weak spot was located on his body. But Luke had inadvertently given them the person connected to said spot. Annabeth. And just like his mortal point is the only way to get through his skin, Annabeth is the only way to get through to Luke.
(After Hermes told them that, there was no way Annabeth didn’t go through with it. Any voice in her head that Luke was a lost cause had been crushed. Clarisse hates it. She hates a lot of things right now. )
As soon as Hermes made the connection, he went to Athena and secretly came up with The Plan. It was simple: Annabeth will wake up the day Percy is supposed to get to camp and tell the council she had a dream about demigod kids stuck in a warehouse in New Jersey. They’ll fly the pegasus out and leave it on the roof of a nearby building. Then, Clarisse and Annabeth go in. Annabeth figures out it was a trap set up by some Hypnos kids in Luke's army and manages to push Clarisse out of harm’s way. There will be an explosion. And Clarisse will come back to camp alone. It’s a good plan. Simple. Not much room for error or confusion.
And when the time comes, they would use Annabeth’s (fake) death to shock Luke’s system, causing his body to reject Kronos’s consciousness fully. Without a willing body to inhabit, whatever's left of him will float down to Tarturus, leaving Luke and only Luke.
“What about Nico? If anyone asked him to conjure my ghost so they could talk to me, won’t he figure out that I’m not in the underworld? Plus, Nico seems to be able to sense that kind of stuff in general. What if he says something?”
Athena waves her hand and says, “Nico has been taken care of. Everything has been taken care of.”
Clarisse had been flat out ignoring the gods in the room, saying and doing nothing except staring at Annabeth with all her Ares-kid-strength. But then Annabeth is nodding like it’s settled, like they can actually do this—and her exterior cracks.
She can’t help it when she shouts, “You can’t be serious, Princess!”
Chirons eyes warn her to keep her voice down, but right now she can’t find it in herself to give a shit.
“Think about this for two seconds! Everyone will think you’re dead. He will think you’re dead.”
Clarisse doesn’t have to specify who—everyone in the room knows it. And that’s when it happens, just as Clarisse’s mask failed, Annabeth’s did too, and you can see how terrified she is. Annabeth's eyes wander over to a picture on the bulletin board. It’s faded but paints twelve-year-old Percy and Annabeth sitting on the Big House steps. Annabeth has one arm around Percy’s neck and her other hand on her hip, and she’s looking at something in the distance. In the photo you can tell she’s mid sentence, but she’s smiling. Percy’s got one eye closed because of how he’s pressed up to Annabeth’s cheek, though he’s looking up at her with awe and content. Clarisse hasn’t seen him like that in a while. When Annabeth finally tears her eyes from the photo, she gives Clarisse a look of determination that screams, I will not lose them both.
This year has been rough on her, and Clarisse doesn’t know what the Great Prophecy states, but if Annabeth's theory of what will go down without this plan is right, the war will end badly. And Percy will end with it.
Clarisse remembers Annabeth showing up at the beach halfway through her quest, in a borderline fugue state and with no Percy. She remembers how the girl barely slept or ate, and when she did sleep, her screams echoed through camp because of nightmares. If she ate, she’d see something that reminded her of Percy and vomit. Clarisse remembers how she begged Chiron to let her out of camp so she could go search for Percy, and when he refused, she yelled and cursed and hit him and cried until she had to be sedated. Clarisse remembers all of it, and from the look on Annabeth’s face, she remembers it, too. Her eyes are screaming, I can not lose him again .
There is no changing Annabeth’s mind.
“Fine.” Clarisse says.
And it’s done.
The next two days are a blur.
Chiron told them they were supposed to act normal, which is frankly insulting, considering what they’re supposed to do. Clarisse hates it, and she ends up telling Chris that she's on her period and needs some space. Annabeth is weirdly good at it, going on with business as usual—Clarisse’s theory is that Annabeth herself is pretending that everything’s fine, pretending that she’s not going to die in 48 hours.
Fake die. Whatever.
She wakes up on The Day hating the universe and everyone in it. Luckily, she looks like that all the time, so it doesn’t alarm her cabin mates. To her credit, Annabeth plays her part beautifully. Just the right amount of anxious energy leading up to the story of the dream she didn’t have so as not to draw any suspicion. They purposefully choose to leave in the morning because Percy is set to arrive in the evening. They have to go before he gets there so he can’t insist he go with them.
(“Honestly, I don’t think he’ll care about me leaving as much as you and Chiron think he will.” They’re speaking in hushed tones in the Big House Basement, the only place safe enough to talk about this. “It’s just a ‘routine mission’ right? We’ve been doing them all year and he hasn’t said anything.”
Clarisse rolls her eyes. “That’s because he’s not here, dumbass. If he knew all the unnecessary danger you put yourself in on a weekly basis, he’d riot. Gods, he’d probably find some way to never leave your side again.”
Annabeth scoffs and retorts, “It’s not unnecessary.” But she pointedly avoided the other 75 percent of Clarisse's statement.)
Clarisse doesn’t look anyone in the eye the whole morning. She feigns apathy for the entire meeting, only acknowledging she’s heard anything in the room when Chiron asks her to accompany Annabeth. She grunts in response. No one bats an eye.
Chiron also asks if anyone opposes their mission—and Clarisse wants to scream, punch someone, flip the table, do something . But she remains still and silent. Conner sneezes and Beckendorf fiddles with some sort of hand-sized invention.
“Then it’s settled. Annabeth, Clarisse, go ahead and get packed and leave as soon as you’re ready. Meeting adjourned.”
Before they leave, she kisses Chris goodbye, grabs her stuff, and meets Annabeth on the front steps. As they make their way over to the stables, Clarisse watches. Clarisse watches as Annabeth has to stop to explain to the Stolls for the third time this week how to load the dishwasher. She watches as Katie tells Annabeth that rearranging the fences in the garden was an ‘excellent idea, thank you so much for suggesting it,’ and she just had a few questions about plant spacing for when Annabeth and Clarisse got back. She watches as Silena makes them stop so Annabeth can braid her hair before she leaves, because, ‘you’re so weirdly good at it, ’Beth—c’mon please!’ She watches as Annabeth calms a frantic Beckendorf by solving a logistic problem with a quick glance at the design for some sort of special shield. She watches as she gives her Second-in-Command instructions on what she expects of him in her absence, telling him things he already knows, and she watches as Malcom rolls his eyes and asks ‘What are we gonna do without you, huh?’
Annabeth is so ingrained in this place. She is practically as much a part of camp as the dining pavilion, or the rock wall. Clarisse watches as Annabeth shows, in a million tiny little ways, how all these people need her.
‘What are we gonna do without you, huh?’
Clarisse doesn’t have a goddamn clue.
They don’t talk on the fly up. Annabeth had mentioned that they couldn’t say anything in front of the pegasi because Percy could talk to them. She doesn’t know whether to roll her eyes or spill her guts to the stupid horse so that Percy can be in on it and this whole nightmare can be over.
(She rolls her eyes.)
“Hunting lessons.”
Annabeth finally breaks the heavy silence that had settled in the warehouse. They had found Annabeth’s supplies for the next three months with more to be magically delivered.
“What?”
“Conner, I promised I’d give him and Travis hunting lessons,” Annabeth says. “Teach them how to be quieter. You know how they always sound like drunken Minotaurs whenever they’re in a forest? I need you to give them hunting lessons for me.”
“Okay.”
“And Beckendorf—we’re still working on that shield. You have to get one of my siblings to help him. Try Alex; she’s the best with mechanics. Malcom’s gonna be a great lead counselor, just remind him not to doubt himself. He gets in his own head.”
“Okay,” Clarisse promises, but she’s not sure it matters.
Annabeth’s got that manic look in her eye again, and she’s staring right through Clarisse, as if she’s not all there.
“And Katie’s spacing problem, tell her to ask Silena. She’s great at organization and I’m sure once Katie explains the parameters, she’ll be a big help. She’s not gonna take it well. Silena, I mean; Katie will be fine. Let her give you a makeover sometime, that should cheer her up. Silena. Not Katie. Silena won’t take it well. Grover won’t, either; make sure he doesn’t throw himself into searching too much. He always blames himself for stuff like this, and I don't want him to hurt himself, the poor goat. And tell Grover first. I think Thalia would take it better if it comes from him and not Chiron. Same with my stepmom. Tell her first, that way she can soften the blow for my dad. He’ll be fine, I think. They all will. It’ll be rough for a while, but they'll recalibrate. Re-adjust. They’ll be fine.”
“And Percy?”
She freezes. It’s the first time either of them have said his name out loud since that goddamn meeting. When Annabeth looks up at her, it’s like she’s actually seeing Clarisse for the first time in three days. She grips at Clarrisse’s forearms with so much force, she almost loses circulation. There are tears in her eyes, but that look of determination has only gotten more intense.
“Take care of him for me. Remember what we talked about that night after the first meeting. Do you remember?”
Clarisse nods.
“Good. Remember that, and promise me you’ll take care of him.”
“Jesus, Princess. I don’t even—”
“Promise me.”
Clarisse swallows and nods. “Yeah okay. Okay, I promise.”
She takes a deep breath, as if that’s some kind of big relief, and then gasps “Oh!”
She digs around in her supply bag and finds her Yankees Cap, which she then shoves into Clarisse’s bag. “Give this to him. Tell him I was holding it, and somehow it ended up in your arms when I pushed you out. I’d want him to have it if I was actually….y’know. And this.” She unclasped her camp necklace, and put that in the bag too. “Tell him I was afraid it would fall off on the ride up and I put it in your bag for safe keeping. That way he can choose which one he wants to remember me by. Plus, it's proof. Y’know, like a spoil of war.”
“This is so fucked up, Chase.”
“I know.”
“You don’t have to do this. Your mother said they wouldn’t force you. You chose to agree to this, You can choose to change your mind.”
Annabeth smiles sadly and tells her something they both already know.
“No, I can’t. There’s a chance I can save them both, Clarisse. It wasn’t ever really a choice.”
She should hug her. She should say something nice about how brave Annabeth is and how she’ll take care of Percy and how everything will be just fine.
Instead, she shoves Annabeth’s supply bag in her chest and says, “I’m starting the five minute timer for the bomb now. You should get out of here.”
Annabeth has the nerve to smile gratefully, like Clarisse is doing her a favor.
And then she is gone.
Clarisse blows the building up, making sure to stay ten feet away from the entrance, exactly as Athena instructed her to, so she could get soot on her face without injuring herself.
As she’s running away from the burning threshold, the past 72 hours catches up with her, and she’s pretty sure she’s having a panic attack. The only thought her brain can conjure up is that it’s excellent timing, because the stupid horse will tell Percy she cried.
Clarisse wishes what happens next was a blur.
She lands on the beach, and as she dismounts from the pegasus, it strikes her that she must look just like Annabeth did last year. It’s odd, thinking about how she must’ve felt that day, especially because they really thought Percy had died. Clarisse feels a rush of empathy for the girl she’s about to announce dead.
The empathy is crushed as soon as she remembers she has to announce Annabeth dead.
Conner Stoll, of all people, is the first to know.
He’s the one on watch when she arrives and is the first person to greet her at the camp border.
“Took you long enough, La Rue. The Apollo kids are bitching about spoils of war again and I don’t thi—you look like shit.”
“Thanks.”
“Where’s Annabeth?”
“Dead.”
“Ha-ha. Clarisse, you should probably stick to beating on the innocent and leave the practical jokes to me. Seriously, where's Annabeth? We need her to delegate.”
“Not joking.” Clarisse hopes that when Stoll finally catches on, he chalks it up to shock, because suddenly she can’t form a full sentence; she’s forgotten how to blink. “She’s dead.”
“What….I mean it was just…..she can’t actually be….” Conner blinks and then spins around as if his brain has to physically reboot. “What?”
She doesn’t answer. She watches slowly as a crowd of campers begins to run to go meet her, to hear about their adventure. And suddenly Clarisse is very tired. She sits down on the sand and stares, unblinking, at the pairs of shoes that stop to meet her.
She hears them asking her, ‘ where’s Annabeth?’ .
She cannot look them in the eye.
She hears when Katie figures it out, her, ‘oh no’ soft and heartbroken. She sees the gadget, that some part of her brain recognizes as the one Beckendorf was fidgeting with earlier, falls to the sand. She senses the weight of Malcolm collapsing to his knees next to her. And she feels Silena’s arms around her, feeling the tears soaking through her shirt.
Silena is whispering, ‘i’m so sorry,’ as if Clarisse is a victim and not an accomplice.
She’s not sure how but she ends up at the back at the ping pong table in the Big House. All the head counselors are sitting around the table, but none of them are speaking. They’re all either in shock or in one of the first two stages of grief.
Grief . Christ. She wants to throw up.
Chiron has the fucking audacity to hang his head. If Clarisse is an accomplice in this crime—and Hermes and Athena are the masterminds—Chiron is the spineless henchmen. Worse than spineless, because he actually has one. He has a spine, she knows, because she’s read about it and she’s seen him use it. He has chosen to go limp; he has welcomed them to break his back, and he has allowed them to kill Annabeth in the process.
She vaguely recalls spouting Annabeth's directions on who to tell what as if they were her own. She hears when Travis tells Juniper to Iris-Message Grover. After half an hour, Juniper tells them that Grover knows but is in shock. When he snaps out of it, he’ll tell Thalia. She also informs them that the news spread pretty quickly throughout camp. Then Chiron contacts Annabeth’s stepmother with the instruction to tell Frederick Chase about the tragedy.
Silena hasn’t stopped crying. At some point, Conner stands up from his chair, and without a word, punches a hole in the far left wall. No one says anything. They’re sitting around the table in this heavy almost-silence, filled with Silena’s sobs that are muffled only by Beckendorf’s t-shirt. Chris is rubbing circles that span her entire back. Normally it's a comfort. Right now she just hates that she’s being comforted for what she’s done. It’s Katie who breaks the silence.
“Oh gods. We have to tell Percy .”
The statement ripples through the group as they all attempt to swallow the thought they’ve been pretending wasn’t already there.
“He’s not here yet. We could call Sally, have her break the news,” Malcom attempts half-heartedly. His eyes are still red-rimmed and Clarisse hates herself a little. Beckendorf attempts a hollow laugh that comes out more like a rush of air.
“What's the point? You know the first thing he’s gonna do is come here and demand an explanation—”
“Leaving a path of destruction in his wake,” Micheal Yew interrupts. He doesn’t seem to care when he notices all the eyes redirected his way. “What? We’re all thinking about it. We saw what he did last summer on Mt. St. Helens. And that was after he knew Annabeth was safe. I haven’t been here as long as some of you, but even I know—”
“I’m telling him,” Clarisse says, because she doesn’t think she can handle what she’s pretty sure Micheal was planning on saying next. It’s also the first full sentence she’s spoken all day, and her voice is hoarse. She clears her throat and tries again. “I was there. It’s like Beck said: he’ll need an explanation. I was the last person to see her. I was the one that couldn’t—” She cuts herself off as before she can finish the sentence, ‘I was the one that couldn’t change her mind,’ so she doesn’t blow the whole operation the same day it started. “Doesn’t matter. I’m telling him.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Silena says, seemingly filling in the blank of her unfinished thought as, ‘ I was the one who couldn’t save her.’ She momentarily detaches herself from Beckendorf to squeeze her hand, and Clarisse hates her just a little bit. Which isn’t fair, because Silena doesn’t know and she’s just trying to help. But still, Clarisse has to fight the urge to wince at the affection.
She has done nothing to deserve comfort.
She’s the reason comfort is needed at all right now. She shares the weight of her blame with two gods, a centaur, and one of the strongest demigods she knows—but the part of the burden she’s bearing is still threatening to flatten her. The weight suddenly concentrates on her chest and it’s in her lungs and she can’t breathe and she has to go go go . So she stands abruptly from her chair, and some part of her mind registers Silena warning Chris not to run after her because, ‘she needs some space, she’s been through a lot,’ and suddenly it’s all too much, so she’s running. She’s running and she ends up in the arena. She wasn’t trying to come out here, but an empty arena is as good a place as any to have a meltdown.
So, she screams, and cries, and rips dummies apart for what could've been minutes or hours.
When she’s done and the episode has passed, her throat is raw and her knuckles are bleeding. She’s pretty sure she lost a fingernail, but strangely, the pain helps. She can focus on it. She can fix it. She’ll assess the damage, get some med supplies, and she can take care of it.
‘Take care of him for me.’
Her promise is remembered like a punch to the gut, and she suddenly feels very stupid. All those errands Annabeth gave her wasn’t just her being type A. It was a silent plea. ‘Take care of them, all of them. Look after them the way I have.’ She’d said it out loud when she mentioned Percy, because he’d need the most taking care of. But that’s what she was really asking. She was asking her to do what she’d been doing since she got to camp.
Her feeling of stupidity is quickly stamped out and replaced with shame. Here she is, losing her mind, because she knows Annabeth’s not actually dead. She was berating those well-meaning kids in her head for putting their actual grief aside to comfort her . She stands and walks over to a plain steel shield and wipes her tears. The girl she sees in the reflection is unrecognizable. She has red-rimmed eyes and soot on her face and she looks exhausted. Worst of all, she looks small and afraid.
‘It’s only gonna get harder from here,’ a voice in the back of her mind that sounds suspiciously like her father taunts.
‘Shut up,’ Clarisse thinks. She regards herself once more.
“Get your shit together,” she tells Mirror Clarisse, and marches out the door.
She goes back to her cabin to briefly instruct her siblings to go through dinner and their nightly routine without her. Then, she grabs the bag containing Annabeth’s hat and necklace and sits on the dock.
And she waits.
How does one break the news to the most powerful demigod alive that their best-friend-in-the-world-who-they’re-also-embarrassingly-in-love-with-but-refuse-to-admit-it is dead.
(Fake dead. She has got to stop doing that.)
After careful deliberation, she decides to be gentle. In fact, she decides to avoid saying the word “dead” altogether. She will be calm and gentle and comforting. She’ll channel her inner Silena and hopefully avoid a tsunami in the process. She can do this.
Clarisse repeats it like a mantra in her head with such focus that she doesn’t notice when he arrives. Percy lands clumsily next to her, seeming surprisingly happy to see her.
“Finally. I’ve been looking for you everywhere.”
Clarisse cannot hide the surprise in her voice, “You have?”
“Yeah, everybody’s been so weird since I got here. Like, no one’ll look me in the eye and everyone is steering clear of me, for some reason. I couldn’t find Annabeth anywhere, and I really need to ask her something. I know you guys have been working together, so I figured you’d know where to find her.”
Percy hasn’t stopped moving since he sat down, swinging his legs back and forth and tapping against the wood of the dock. He looks every bit the fifteen-year-old boy that he is, and Clarissse hates herself for what she’s about to do. She can feel the guilt closing up her throat and, no, she has to do this. She cannot choke; she has to tell him.
“Annabeth isn’t here.”
Percy gives her a confused grin.“Yeah, I know that—did she go on a mission? When will she be back?”
“Percy, she’s gone. She’s not here.”
“Oh, fuck off Clarisse. Just tell me where she is and I’ll leave you alone.”
“We were on a mission. Annabeth had a dream about some kids that were in trouble, but it was a trap. Some kind of Hypnos magic. There was an explosion.”
The second she says “trap,” Percy freezes. The beach seems to get infinitely quieter, and she realizes with a jolt that the tide had frozen with him. Mid-wave and stuck in the air. Just waiting to crash in the sand.
“But, you took her to a hospital?” Percy asks, scarily calm.
His eyes have darkened to an intensity she hadn’t seen before. It suddenly becomes impossible to look at them. His hands are clutching at the dock so fiercely, his knuckles turn white.
“Percy—”
“You took her to a mortal hospital. Because it would’ve taken too long to get back to camp. That’s why she’s not here. That’s where she is. In a hospital.”
Clarisse reaches into her bag and pulls out Annabeth’s camp necklace. Then, as slowly as possible, she unfurls his closest hand from the dock and presses the beads into his fingers.
“I’m so sorry,” Even though she’s apologizing for something he doesn’t know about, she doesn’t think the words have ever been more sincere. “Annabeth is...she’s go—”
“No, no she’s not. She can’t—It doesn’t make sense. She’s supposed to….” Percy’s eyes wander to the necklace he’s cradling in his hand and whispers, “She never takes it off.”
Clarisse is supposed to explain how Annabeth was afraid her necklace would fall off and so she placed it in their supply bag for safe keeping. She is supposed to explain how Annabeth died a hero, how Annabeth saved her and how she was sorry she couldn’t do the same. But she can’t speak. Percy’s eyes are similar to those of wild animals—dark, frantic, and warning her that if she makes one wrong move, he will pounce.
They sit like that in tense silence for hours. Clarisse isn’t sure how far the perimeter of Percy’s stop-the-tide stunt is, but you can’t hear a single wave. In the corner of her eye, she can see some river nymphs looking curiously over at them, and some part of her realizes that Percy’s freeze of the current has extended to the canoe lake.
The lights-out bell rings. He doesn’t move. She doesn’t either. The look on his face reminds her of how in a cartoon, someone would run off a cliff—but they wouldn't fall until they looked down and realized that they were midar. She had just yanked the earth right out from under him, and it’s as if he has frozen time as well as the tide, so he can continue running in midar, pretending like the ground is underneath him.
They stay like that, refusing to look down, all night.
She has never understood the phrase ‘calm before the storm’ so perfectly.
Clarisse about to be in the eye of a fucking hurricane.
At some point the next morning, Chris appears to take her away from the docks so she can get some sleep. His hands are gentle, and he whispers in her ear. He has the same tone he used when he first told her about Mary, the one he uses whenever he tells her he loves her.
‘Hey kid,’ and that's what he calls her when he’s worried about her—and gods, she wants to break down all over again. ‘You’ve gotta get up, get some sleep. I know you can’t rest, but you’ve gotta get some sleep, okay?’
But Clarisse can barely hear him. Her ears are still ringing. Yesterday she’d chalked it up to the explosion and then the shock. But, Clarisse has been through explosions before, and she knows her eardrums didn’t burst, so ringing should have worn out by now. Which means it's just her.
(And yes, she realizes at sixteen having extensive knowledge on the after effects of being close to bombs is fucked up. She simply doesn’t have the brain capacity to get into how fucked up it is.)
Percy didn’t even acknowledge Chris’s presence, just kept staring blankly out into the unmoving ocean. (She wonders how he’s doing that, how long he can continue doing it before he breaks a sweat. She wonders how much power he’s demonstrating without even knowing that he’s demonstrating it.) He’s barely even breathing.
But, as Clarisse is pulled to stand, Percy blindly reaches out and squeezes her fingers.
And then she is frozen to her spot, because she did this to him. She killed his best friend and he’s reaching out to her. It all suddenly becomes too much again, and she goes almost limp in Chris’s arms.
As she’s pulled away, she can no longer see Percy’s face, but his shoulders are still hunched and the water is still and he looks so fragile. ‘You did this,’ a cruel voice in her head snarls, and she buries her head in Chris’s chest, as if it can cancel out the alarm bells ringing in her head.
She ends up in her cabin, forehead warm from the kiss Chris had pressed to it after tucking her in. She’s staring at the ceiling, her eyes stinging. She doesn’t remember when she falls asleep, but she must’ve, because after what feels like a second, she’s being shaken awake by one of her siblings. They’re saying something about the dining pavilion, and before she can kick them off and shove her head back in her pillow, she hears it.
“WHERE THE HELL IS HE?” Percy’s voice is clear and furious. It washes over her like a bucket of ice that chills her down to her blood.
And then she’s running, running towards the origin of the sound like her life depends on it. A small crowd had already formed, and she shoves her way through. Thankfully, the onlookers had the wits to keep a wide berth around the scene unfolding.
Percy is standing in the middle of the dining pavilion. He clenches Riptide in his right fist, and Annabeth’s necklace in his left. The bench closest to the left was knocked over as if he’d kicked it. Chiron is a few feet in front of him, with his back (hooves?) to the camp borders, and you don’t have to be an Athena kid to piece together the basics. Chiron’s trying to stop him, but Percy wants out of camp now .
Chiron’s tail flicks like he’s nervous. “My boy—”
“Don’t.” Percy’s voice is all barely contained rage, and Clarisse is suddenly glad she can't see his face. “You don’t get to call me that anymore. Either tell me where he is, or get out of my way.”
“My—Percy, all the gods—including Dionysus, are unavailable right now.”
Percy lets out a hollow laugh. “Trust me, I’ll make them available.”
“Olympus is closed. Besides, I need your help here at camp.”
“Yeah, well, you killed my best friend, so I don’t really feel like helping you.” Chiron flinches as if the words were a physical blow. “And the assholes that are indirectly responsible are sitting pretty on their thrones. I want to….speak with them.”
Chiron puts his palms up, as if in surrender. “I understand—”
“You could never .”
“I know what you want to do. You want to demand they bring her back. But they can’t.”
“They can; they just refuse. I’m going to convince them otherwise.”
Chiron hangs his head in shame. She realizes that the horse is in genuine pain, and Clarisse’s first thought is ‘good.’
“I’m sorry Percy. You can’t. You can’t leave camp.”
“You can’t stop me. I’ve left without your permission before, and I can do it again.”
“Not this time. One of the powers granted to Dionysus when he became a director was to limit who can enter and exit camp. Before he left for Olympus, he barred you from exiting….indefinitely.”
It’s silent for a long time and Clarisse was wrong.
This is the quiet before the storm.
Percy’s voice is shaking with fury. “Let me get this straight—”
“Percy—”
“No, no, let me make sure I understand you. Annabeth is dead.” Percy’s voice breaks a little at her name, and at the same time a crack in the earth appears at his feet.
She is reminded of the day Percy was claimed. ‘Earthshaker’, Chiron had called him. Suddenly, Clarisse is very afraid.
“She was killed on a mission you sent her on.” A splint at Chiron's hooves.
“A mission that wouldn’t even be necessary, if the Gods were decent fucking parents!”
The earth begins to rumble. Clarisse isn’t even sure Percy knows what he’s doing, or if he made the ground tremble with the force of his grief alone.
“Annabeth is dead . And all you and the other COWARDS that killed her decided to do about it was LOCK ME IN THIS PLACE!”
The ground quakes beneath them, and out of the corner of her eye she can see the currents by the docks becoming hostile. Then Clarisse falls to the ground. At first she thinks it’s the earthquake. But when she looks up, she sees Will Solace, of all people, running directly towards Percy. He’s got what looks like a tiny knife in his hand, and as soon as he’s within reach, he stabs Percy in the back of his neck with it. It’s then Clarisse realizes it isn’t a knife, but a syringe.
Percy whirls around; his glare alone makes Will stumble back three paces. He rips out the syringe and stares at it. His face morphs from rage to confusion to alarm and then back to rage, but it’s too late. Will recovers from Percy’s stare, grabs him by shoulders and begins whispering something in Percy’s ear. Everything freezes. The 20 foot tall wave poised to flood camp stops in its menacing tracks. Clarisse doesn’t remember standing up, but she finds herself almost to Percy’s side. She gets there in time to see Will touch his forehead and to catch Percy when he collapses. She’s easing him to the ground when Will says:
“Horse tranquilizer.”
She blinks up at him and stares blankly.
“That’s what was in the syringe. The horse tranquiliser we use on new pegusi. When I heard what happened to Annabeth, I figured something like this would go down sooner rather than later. I didn’t think he’d... I didn’t know he could…” He gestures around them and for the first time Clarisse realizes the scale of Percy’s damage. The buffet table is overturned, equipment for all the activities scattered around, harpies are hiding under benches, and a few trees at the edge of the forest have fallen down. “Anyway, he needs to lie down. Help me get him to the infirmary.”
“What did you say to him?”
“Oh, I didn’t convince him to back down or anything—it's a greek incantation used to put trauma victims to sleep so you can operate. I wasn’t sure the tranq would work fast enough to stop him from... hurting himself.”
Clarisse can’t think about all the implications of the sentence right now, because if she does, she may just implode on the spot. So instead she lifts Percy's shoulders and gestures for Will to grab his legs.
Drip... Drip... Drip...
The sound of the I.V. is the only thing Clarisse can hear other than Percy’s soft breathing. No one else is in the infirmary, which is fine with her, because it means she doesn’t have to look anyone in the eye. She’s keeping herself sane by imagining stabbing Luke with maimer in a different place every time she hears the sound.
Clarisse is sitting next to where Percy is lying in the infirmary. As her and Will struggled Percy up the hill, she had ignored the whispers and wide eyes of other campers, only looking up to tell Katie to get some of her siblings and help the dryads with their fallen trees. They’d placed him as gently as possible in the far infirmary bed, and Will had hooked him up to a bunch of complicated medical devices.
She learns that Will talks a lot when he’s nervous, and as a result, she learns camp had acquired these medical devices by sending a charmspeaking Aphrodite kid and a medically inclined Apollo kid to a hospital on the outskirts of the city. He rambled on about how, ‘It’s not technically stealing, We gave the money for it, they just don’t know what happened after the fact.’ He keeps rambling like this for 20 straight minutes before he’s satisfied with Percy’s set up and excuses himself.
She doesn't know how long she sits watching him before her mind wanders from violence against Luke to Annabeth's instructions.
‘Take care of him for me.’
Clarisse isn’t off to a great start.
“Annabeth?” Speaking of both devils, Percy croaks from his bed. He’s struggling to sit up and looking around until his bleary eyes land on her. If he’s surprised to see her at his bedside, he’s too busy reconciling with the fact that Annabeth isn't here.
“Just me.” Clarisse should call Will, ask if Percy needs anything—do something—but she is frozen to her chair.
“Sorry, it’s just…whenever I wake up in the infirmary, she’s always here. I had the strangest dream…..” He trails off and sees the look on Clarisse’s face, and he must register the past 48 hours, because she can hear the breath knocked out of his lungs, see color drain from his face, and she can almost feel his heart break all over again. He falls unceremoniously back onto the bed, and she looks away, unable to stand how hopeless he looks. It's because she looks away, that she's surprised to hear his voice.
“Y’know the second time I saw her was in that bed right there. I remember thinking she was a princess or an angel or something because I’d never seen hair so blonde or eyes so….like that. They were so intense, and she was asking me all these questions I didn’t know the answers to. And after that, after that summer, I mean, whenever I got hurt, she’d be in here when I woke up. And everything would be okay. She made everything okay.”
Clarisse knows he’s only telling her this because he’s in a horse drug-induced haze, but it doesn’t make it any easier to hear.
When she finally looks up, Percy’s eyes are glazed with memories. It seems to comfort him in a way, remembering. Pretending he’s among the moments with Annabeth he’s recounting in his head instead of here with Clarisse. He takes a deep breath, and then he's looking at Clarisse like what he's about to say is a secret for her to keep.
“She was supposed to be a bridesmaid. That’s what I was going to ask her, when I came looking for you. My mom’s getting married and she wanted to make Annabeth a bridesmaid. Like a thank you for taking care of me, and looking after me, and well, for everything.” Percy trails off, and looks down at the necklace he has tangled in his fingers. The warmth in his eyes at the memories of Annabeth hardens into something dangerous.
“I’m going to kill him.” He looks down at her necklace, and his voice is steady and low when he speaks again. “I swear to all the gods—I’m going to tear him apart with my bare hands. Then, I’m going to bring his remains to Olympus and their precious throne room. And I’m going to tear that apart, too.”
Clarisse meets his eyes once more and says, “Good.”
It’s probably not healthy or what she’s supposed to say. If Annabeth were here, she would shake her head and scold Percy about how destruction and death wouldn’t fix anything, wouldn’t bring her back. She'd tell Clarisse that she’s being an enabler, and that that kind of thinking isn’t healthy.
But Annabeth isn't here.
And as they look at each other, a silent understanding passes between them. She isn’t entirely sure what that understanding is, but it’s real and heavy in her stomach.
Percy seems satisfied with this unspoken agreement and nods slightly as he leans back all the way in his bed. It occurs to her that he’s been fighting whatever liquid is currently supposed to be keeping him unconscious, and she wonders again just how powerful he really is.
He could tear it all down if he wanted to.
Good. Clarisse thinks as she settles in her chair next to him.
She doesn’t realize she was reaching for his hand until she feels the camp beads from Annabeth's necklace on the pads of her fingers. Clarisse’s fingers are tangled up in his; she realizes he’s dreaming when he squeezes her hand twice and mumbles Annabeth’s name and something about dancing at Westover Hall.