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Apollo felt the explosion still ringing in his ears.
Faintly, he felt the wound in his chest produce throbbing pain. A voice in the back of his mind, one all too familiar, said, “If you don’t fix that injury soon, you’re gonna bleed out, dumbass.”
He couldn’t bring himself to focus on his own wounds. Not when he could see the ones of the man he held in his arms. The spear hadn’t been pulled out, it couldn’t be with an injury as severe as this otherwise it would cause him to bleed out faster. Call Apollo selfish for wanting more time with him, but he didn’t care.
He felt as if his own heart stopped the second he watched Caligula drive his spear through Percy’s stomach. Apollo felt his throat tighten painfully, the way it would when you were on the edge of tears and unable to speak because the moment you did the tears would spill out.
“Hey..” Percy started. Apollo’s attention immediately snapped to him. Percy managed out a weak smile, dampened by the weight of the tears falling down his face. “It’s just a scratch, don’t worry.” He attempted a joking tone, but his voice cracking betrayed that.
Apollo shook his head, on the edge of sobbing. “You-” He choked up. “You know it isn’t just a scratch.” He brought his hands up from where they were fruitlessly trying to cover the edges of the wound, trying to prevent just anything, the blood flow or the pain or anything at all but he knew it wouldn’t help. Apollo tried not to spare a glance at the red that covered his hands, knowing it wasn’t his own. He cupped Percy’s face and attempted to not break down when he leaned into his touch.
“It’s gonna be okay. It’s all going to be okay. It has to. It’s all gonna work out, you’re gonna be okay-” Apollo cut himself off with a violent sob. No, no, it’s all gonna be okay, he thought. It has to be okay because the fates wouldn’t do this, not after Daphne, not after Hyacinthus. They wouldn’t do that to me. It’s my turn to be happy. It’s my turn for a happy ending.
Except, he looked into the way that tears were gathering in Percy’s ocean eyes, and he knew that it wasn’t going to be okay. He was a doctor, he knew that someone couldn’t bounce back from an injury like this. Apollo doesn’t get to have happy endings, because people loved a good greek tragedy. Would Aphrodite mark this down as another heartbreaking love story? Would there be a statue? A painting, maybe? Would Percy be depicted as Daphne was, or Hyacinthus?
Apollo brought one of his hands down to the pulse point on his neck. He closed his eyes as he felt it weaken.
“Apollo?”
“Yeah?”
“Promise me you’ll still be here when I wake up.”
A sob tore out of his mouth. Apollo opened his eyes as he nodded, almost frantically. “Of course. I’ll still be here, I promise.” His hand came down to grasp Percy’s. Seconds later, the feeling of Percy’s grip faltering hit him.
The smile on his face twisted into an ugly, pained frown. “It hurts… why does it hurt?” Percy said, struggling to get the words out.
Apollo didn’t know how to respond. Later on, he would tell people that Percy didn’t die in pain, he died as peacefully as possible and Will would look at him as if he were lying and he was because how could he tell people that their savior, the demigod everyone they looked up to, had died in horrible pain, right next to someone who couldn’t do anything.
“It’s okay.” He whispered. “You’re gonna be okay.” Even as he felt him go limp in his arms, Apollo still tried to convince him that it was going to be alright.