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Percy POV
As Percy and Annabeth were set down by dragon Frank, they looked around at the ocean of enemies, Percy turned towards Annabeth and smiled, asking, knowing the answer already: “Are you ready?”
“Always.” she replied, matching his twisted grin with one of her own.
Percy took her hand and together they leapt into battle, slowly cutting a path through the horde of enemies with the second, third, and fourth legions at their back. Percy could make out Hazel and Frank in his peripheral vision, Frank in the form of an elephant bashing away monsters, and Hazel dashing through the army on Arion. Although Percy had no idea when the horse had appeared, he was glad Arion was there.
Percy and Annabeth fought as one being, moving in perfect synchrony as they had done countless times before. They slashed their way through herds of wild centaurs, and turned two headed men into no headed men with deadly precision, whirling and ducking in tandem.
But whenever they disintegrated one, two more would just take their fallen comrades' place. Surprisingly, Percy didn’t seem to mind this apparent problem, the reason was standing with her back to him, currently slashing an ogre from hip to shoulder with one slice, which Percy found extremely attractive.
He realized he would always be happy, as long as he was with her. For fucks sake they had walked through Tartarus together and lived to laugh another day.
Despite their seemingly dire situation, Percy couldn’t keep himself from smiling ear to ear, which he was sure didn’t look unnerving in the slightest. He was doing what he knew best, with his girlfriend, no, girlfriend wasn’t quite right. She was so much more than that. She was his mortal anchor, the person who had saved his life more times than he could count, his soulmate, his other half. And he loved her with all his heart.
This continued for less than five minutes, Percy and Annabeth whirling in a deadly dance of Bronze and Bone. Percy grinning like a lunatic the whole time.
They managed to unite the two Roman forces, and saw Reyna and Frank Organize the forces into one mega killing machine.
Things were going fine, he and Annabeth were cutting down monster after monster, the combined forces of the Romans and the Greeks were pushing the enemy back with renewed vigor. But he should have known better than to expect the best.
That was until he heard it . A familiar sound which he had heard hundreds of times. This time was different. This time the oh so familiar sound sent ghostly chills down his spine. The dreadfully familiar sound of an arrow hitting its mark.
Percy turned to see Annabeth looking at him with a puzzled expression, then looked down at the arrow sticking out of her chest. Time seemed to slow. Annabeth fell backwards before he could catch her. He ran to her side panicking as he assessed the wound. It was deep, too deep, it had slid right in between her third and fourth ribs, and straight into her heart.
‘No’
‘No this can’t be happening’
‘This isn’t happening’
But it was. It wasn’t some nightmare that he could wake up from, no this was real. So devastatingly, definitely real.
“C’mon Annabeth, you have to hang in there,” Percy managed to say, almost crying as Annabeth's breathing turned laborious.
He prayed to every god he knew, to Zeus, to his father Poseidon, Athena, and to every other Olympian and minor god ‘please, let her be ok. After everything we have been through, please let her be ok.’
Nothing happened, Annabeth wasn’t whisked away by the winds, she didn’t dissolve into light and drift to Olympus. No, nothing happened. Which left Percy with Annabeth quickly dying in his arms.
He tried to call for help, for a medic, for someone, anyone but his voice came out as a ragged whisper, and help was too far away.
Percy looked down at his dying girlfriend. He tried to put on a brave face as he said, “It's going to be ok, we’ll find someone to help you.”
Annabeth just looked at him and smiled, not sadly, rather it was the smile of someone who was at peace, and in a soft voice she simply stated, “You’re a terrible liar.”
At this Percy let out a sob, “Please, please don’t die. You promised, together forever, no leaving each other behind.”
Annabeth gave another weak smile as she said, “I’m… sorry
and…
I love you…
Seaweed Brain.”
With that, she closed her eyes.
She had used up the final bits of her energy saying those gut wrenching last words and Percy could feel her slip away. In that moment Percy felt something inside him finally break, something that had kept him going at the worst of times, something that enabled him to survive countless battles, survive tartarus, something he could not bear to live without.
Percy gently kissed her on the forehead, and whispered “Annabeth Chase, I swear on the river Styx I will see you again.”
With that, he slowly stood up, but he didn’t cry, not yet anyways. First things first, he had an army to destroy.
As Percy looked up at the monstrous army, he might have felt hopeless. There were still so many, probably reaching into the hundreds of thousands. And the demigods were losing their spirit and started to be pushed back, and that was without Gaea as well.
But none of those thoughts came to him. The only thing that ran through his mind was ‘one of them killed Annabeth.’ At that moment nothing mattered to him, not the overwhelming numbers or the fact that the demigods were slowly being pushed back or the lack of their least favorite primordial goddess. The only thing that mattered to him was revenge.
Piper POV
Something was wrong. Piper could feel it, all the hairs on her arms stood up like she was outside in an electrical storm. She stabbed the earthborn she had been fighting and it melted into clay. She looked around to see what the source of this feeling was. Jason was currently fighting sword to club with a particularly masty looking ogre so it couldn't have been him summoning lightning.
She kept looking around until she saw what she knew must have been the source. Percy was standing over a sleeping Annabeth while the monsters warrily formed a ring around them. No, not sleeping, there was something wrong, something sticking out of Annabeth’s chest.
The cold realization dawned on her as she recognized the arrow protruding from her best friend's chest. ‘Annabeth was dead.’ No, that can’t be right. Annabeth had survived through so much, had been to Tartarus and back, there was no way she was dead. But the look on Percy’s face said all that needed to be said.
Piper had seen some pretty scary things, she had thought she had conquered her fear in the temple of her half brothers Phobos and Deimos, not half an hour ago, they fought the giants and she hadn't been scared. But at this moment, looking at Percy Jackson, Piper knew what it truly meant to be Terrified. Percy stood glaring at the monsters with a look that could turn Medusa to stone. Pure power rolled off of him in waves, keeping the monsters at a warry distance.
Piper was not the first to notice, as heads started to turn towards his Godlike presence. Because that was really the only way to describe what it felt like, like you were looking at a god in their true form.
The first unlucky monster to meet his wrath was a dog-headed man that leaped at him, spear raised. It was cut from the air in the blink of an eye, the only evidence of anything having happened at all was the dust that slowly drifted off in the wind. After that, all hell broke loose.
Percy moved like a raging river. With superhuman speed, he blurred through the monster's ranks, slicing and stabbing at any monster unlucky enough to be within range of his sword. When the monsters closest to him realized what was happening to their comrades, they started to run. But not even that stopped him.
In what felt like milliseconds, Piper's ears popped and the air suddenly turned dry, as all the moisture was sucked from it.
Percy was pulling the moisture from the air and adding it to the swirling vortex of monster dust that she hadn't previously noticed. With a start, Piper also realized that Percy was taking moisture from the monsters themselves, pulling it out and leaving only a dry husk to be trampled by it’s comrades.
Struck by a terrible thought, Piper looked over at Annabeth’s body , worried that the hurricane force winds would disturb her peaceful form. Much to her relief and awe, not a single hair was displaced; Percy was at least in enough control to do that much.
All around her, Demigods and monsters alike were fleeing. So it went almost unnoticed when Leo came flying over the hills on Festus, who had miraculously been turned back into his proper dragon form.
Leo POV
Leo flew over the hills on Festus who was finally a dragon again thanks to months of sleepless nights full of tinkering. Don't get him wrong, Leo loved having Festus as the figurehead for his kick ass ship. But there was something about his original form, in all its metallic dragony glory that took the cake in his mind.
As Leo flew over the hills, he thought he knew roughly what would be happening. Either the Greeks and Romans would be fighting each other, or the ocean of monsters he had seen as he was flying (or crashing, depending on how you want to phrase things) overhead would be attacking the demigods. But what he saw was neither of those things, Demigods and monsters alike were fleeing in terror as a hurricane flew through, decimating their ranks. No, only the monsters were being harmed, something the Demigods hadn’t seemed to realize yet as they were still running for their lives.
Confused by what he saw, Leo took a second to survey the battlefield. On the plus side, Queen Dirt Face had yet to appear, and Leo could make out some of his friends in the crowd of Greek/Roman Demigods. Frank was in the form of a rhino, or he assumed it was Frank because he didn’t think there would usually be a rhino on the battlefield, carving a path through the monsters for the Demigods to escape. Hazel was on Arion, helping to guide them along, and stabbing any monsters that were within reach of her spatha. Similarly, Jason was also trying to control the frantic soldiers and kill any monsters that got in their way. All that left was Piper, Annabeth, and Percy.
He spotted Piper first, standing on a small hill, staring, mouth slightly agape at the scene before her. Following her line of sight, Leo saw Annabeth lying in a pool of blood, and Percy hovering a few feet away, eyes glowing with power, at the center of the storm.
Putting two and two together was not a fun time, and the result made him want to throw up over the side. Leo pushed Festus into a dive towards Annabeth, rain pelting his face like knives, he figured the least he could do was to get her out of harm's way. As he got closer however, it became harder and harder to fly until he wasn’t even moving. Assuming that Annabeth was probably safer with Percy anyways, Leo turned around before Festus could be blown out of the sky by Percy’s hurricane.
Leo flew over to the Demigods who must have realized the storm wasn’t affecting them, because they had pushed through to the cabins and formed a defensive ring around them. Just in case any monsters were still set on Demigod tacos, although they seemed pretty preoccupied with the whole, running-from-the-hurricane-of-power-that-was-Percy-Jackson thing.
As Leo flew towards the defensive ring to check in with Chiron, he spotted a Demigod in a bright orange shirt laying on the ground unmoving, about to be trampled on by a fleeing ogre. Leo smoothly maneuvered Festus into a dive once more, scooping the (hopefully just) wounded camper up and flew towards the ring of Demigods. He gently set down the camper by the impromptu field hospital stationed out of the Apollo cabin. Leo landed Festus, and jumped off to talk to Chiron and see if the rest of his friends were alright.
As he ran over to Chiron, Leo looked over his shoulder only to find that Percy had almost completely wiped out the monstrous army with only around five hundred monsters left, in various levels of fleeing. So many monsters had been killed, that the hurricane was painted yellow, and the air reeked of sulfur. Leo stopped in his tracks, entranced by the power and beauty of it all.
It was at that time that Gaea chose to show herself in all her dirt-faced glory, and that sure as hell snapped Leo out of his trance real quick. Re-mounting Festus, Leo prepared to do what he had realized was necessary from all his talks in the stables with Nike, and then again at Delos with Apollo.
Just as he was about to lift off on Festus, Percy turned his glowing eyes towards Gaea. If Leo didn’t know she was about as evil as evil can get, he would almost feel sorry for the primordial goddess. With a flick of his wrist, Percy summoned a wave the height of the big house, and brought it crashing towards her, encompassing Gaea in a cocoon of raging water that tore her to shreds. Each time she tried to reform, the water prison would just tear her apart again and again.
Slowly but surely after each destruction, she started taking longer and longer to reform. Obviously seeing that this was going to take longer than he had, Percy used his hurricane to launch five of the Imperial Gold onager projectiles at Gaea’s watery coffin.
The resulting explosion was big enough to make any demolition expert proud, scorching the very air with enough explosive power to level a small town. The shockwave alone rattled Leo’s bones, as flecks of molten Imperial Gold and earth went flying in every direction, leaving a perfect circle around Annabeth’s body untouched.
At this, Percy went limp and fell to his knees just a few feet from Annabeth, much like an automaton that hadn't been charged. But this wasn't a case of plugging him in, no, from what Leo could tell, Percy had used up all of his energy for one last all out attack.
And as Percy fell face first into the ground unmoving, one hand stretched out to lock into Annabeth’s, Leo realized that attack really was his last.
Nico POV
Percy and Annabeth’s burial shrouds were just about the most beautiful things Nico had ever seen. Percy’s a brilliant shade of sea green that perfectly matched his eyes, with golden thread weaving intricate patterns of his previous quests and exploits along the edges. In the center was a trident so blue it was almost black, crossed with the familiar bronze form of Riptide .
Annabeths was just as stunning, the fabric a dark grey the color of storm clouds. Similarly to Percy’s, Annabeth’s shroud also depicted her triumphs, woven to show a different scene every time you looked at it. The glowing silver owl in the center stood out from the dark background, glowering darkly as if it knew just who was under the shroud.
There were a few things that Nico hated about being a child of Hades, but one of the things he despised most was being the shoo-in to do the funeral proceedings. It was even worse when the bodies burning were two of the first people he’d met, the people he had known the longest, who had introduced him to this twisted fucked up world, the people who were truly the heart and soul of the camp.
The funeral pyre burned a brilliant gold that night.
The campers sat in silence just staring at the golden flames, in various levels of disbelief, guilt, or sorrow until the moon was high in the sky, and tears stained almost everyone's faces. It was only then that people started to silently get up and walk to their cabins.
Nico followed suit but he had a different location in mind than cabin 13. Having recovered enough from his earlier shadow traveling, he slipped into the shadows behind the armory. The pain was immeasurable, the voices clawed at his mind more than ever, screaming at him to just slip away. But Nico paid none of it any attention, he was determined to see them, the people he failed, his friends he could not save when it mattered most.
Nico appeared in his fathers throne room, and the last thing he saw before collapsing was his father having a discussion with two people.
When he came to, a minute later he was greeted by his father, whose face was a mask of sympathy, an expression he never thought he would see on Hades. Nico looked over to the two forms he had seen earlier, curious as to who they were, and maybe, hoping, against his better judgement that it was them.
When he saw who they were, a wave of emotions overcame him. First came happiness, followed closely by guilt, and a jumble of other emotions coming soon after.
Percy and Annabeth smiled down at Nico, but their smiles were sad, it wasn’t sadness for themselves though. This thoroughly confused Nico. They were dead. What other reason did they have to be sad?
“Hey Nico…” Percy ventured hesitantly. He followed that soon with “I’m sorry, it was selfish to do what I did, please tell everyone else I’m sorry as well.”
Nico was dumbfounded by this. Percy was apologizing to him? It should have been the other way around, Nico had failed, they had died. When he tried to respond, he was stopped by a heavy hand on his shoulder. Nico looked up into his fathers black eyes, but Hades only shook his head gently.
Nico looked back at Percy and Annabeth, and couldn’t stop the tears that came, tears which had been threatening to fall since he first saw their bodies being carried into the amphitheater, still hand in hand.
Before he knew it, Nico had bridged the distance between them and was wrapping his arms around Percy and Annabeth, sobbing uncontrollably into their shoulders. Percy still smelled faintly of the sea, but it was overpowered by the smell of smoke and burning flesh. Annabeth for her part smelled like lemons, but lying underneath there was the sickly, unpleasant metallic smell of dried blood.
There was so much he needed to say to them, so much he needed to apologise for. But when he tried to speak, he found himself unable to form any real sentence, and all he could muster was a dry sob.
Nico was only brought back to his setting when his father cleared his throat.
“They really should be going now”
Percy and Annabeth just nodded sadly, as if they knew this had been coming.
“But they can’t! I have to bring them back!” Nico tried to argue, “I’ve done it before, why is it different now?!”
Hades took a moment to respond, as if he was thinking of the best way to phrase what he was about to say.
“Hazel's circumstances were different for a few reasons. First, she was my daughter, so I was inclined to let you take her. But she also died prematurely, The Fates hadn’t cut her string yet, and it was purely the manipulation of Gaea. It was Percy and Annabeth's time.”
Arguing against the death of someone was pointless, Nico knew that better than anybody. And yet he tried anyways.
“But it’s not fai-”
“It’s alright Nico.” Annabeth’s words were sincere and this didn’t make Nico feel any better.
‘It’s ok, they’ve come to terms with this’ a part of his brain told him.
‘But they shouldn’t have to come to terms with this, this isn’t fair!’ another part shot back.
“But…”
“Hey, don’t think of it like we're gone and done. Rather we get to spend eternity together.” Percy said, entwining his fingers through Annabeth’s. “Plus, you can come and visit us any time you’d like.”
Nico highly doubted that, but he wiped away his long dried tears and tried and failed to force a smile.
“You really should be going now” Hades statement was directed at Percy and Annabeth who nodded and with one last hug, they smiled down at him.
“Goodbye Nico. And say goodbye to everyone else for us.”
“We’ll see you again I’m sure of it, we have to!”
And with that they turned and left.
Minutes stretched on for eternity and when Nico felt he could finally trust his voice he asked his father, “where will they go?”
Hades smiled again, “they are off to the Isles of the Blessed.”
Confused, Nico looked at Hades and said; “so this is their third time making it to Elysium?”
“I may have forged some records, it’s the least I could do.” Hades said, a small smile playing at his lips.
Maybe it was what Percy had said, maybe it was the thought of his father doing something nice, maybe he was finally going insane. But despite himself, despite everything, Nico di Angelo smiled.