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It is strange being fifteen and knowing you are going to die.
Not in the abstract “everything dies and I am part of everything so I am going to die too eventually” way that he should know it, but in the way that it has been foretold long before he was even a thought in his mother’s mind, long before his mother ever had a mind to think with, that he would live to sixteen and not a day older. August 18th. He has stopped wishing for blue cake and cookies and all of his mother’s attention, stopped looking forward to a low-key celebration of the fact that, against all odds, he made it yet another year. He kept on surviving because that was all he knew how to do. He has less than a year left. He knows it. He wonders if that is supposed to give him peace, he knows it doesn’t.
He can’t bring himself to tell the others. Some of them know something is up and he isn’t telling them the whole prophecy, that they know what they need to know and there is a conspicuous blank spot right in the middle where his death lies hidden in his own silence. There is a big difference between knowing something is wrong and knowing what is wrong though; a big difference between knowing why you are quiet at dinner or around the campfire and having everybody else know too. Every word already sounds like a goodbye these days, he doesn’t need everybody to intend for them too. They are for him, all his. They will be until the moment he stops pulling through.
The moment when he found out is all he can think of, when he is sitting in class and can’t think of a single reason why he should be listening because he won’t get to graduate no matter how well he does or does not do in this class. When he is fighting a monster and he knows whether or not this is the one that gores him that he won’t get to live a full life and the only thing that stops him from giving up is the knowledge that if the prophecy isn’t his then it is Nico’s and he won’t let that happen. When his mom is smiling and he is trying to reciprocate because he can’t find the words to tell the person that matters most that she is going to need to navigate the empty space he is going to leave, that she will be able to live a life that is normal in that he isn’t bringing the supernatural into the midst of it, but not normal in that she will have lost her only son and there will be nothing she can do to fix it. When Annabeth is there and he doesn’t think he’s looking at her right, doesn’t think that he’s looking at a single thing in the world right because it’s hard not to try to memorise every single detail because he has less than a year left and he never knows when he is seeing something for the last time ever.
He thinks they must know something is wrong. It’s easy to tell that the prophecy is the problem because it is Big , bold and capitalised and distinct from all things around it, big enough, in fact, that it is at least part of the reason why he isn’t strictly allowed to exist at all. Zeus won’t have to worry about him for too much longer. Nobody will let him wipe Percy out but that doesn’t stop Fate doing it for him. He can hear the snap of those shears every time he closes his eyes, see the thread falling and the way that Atropos’ eyes crinkled. It has been written for a long time. It will be done soon. It can be everybody else’s problem then, when it can no longer be his. He’ll save everybody the worry for as long as he can.
He thinks about Luke a lot. He’s sure he isn’t the only one but he thinks that every single person at camp is thinking about him in their own way that is just his. For the newer campers it won’t really be Luke but rather something shaped a little like him, pieced together from stories that aren’t always entirely true, the image of a monster who was a boy once, with a scar on his face and his father’s eyes. He thinks about the Luke behind Kronos, the Luke that taught him to use a sword and the Luke that is going to kill him with one. He thinks about Backbiter slicing through the air, a weapon designed to hurt everything and spare nothing, to strike him with both sides of its blades, each one slicing through each disparate part of him. He was never supposed to exist, as much as it was written that he must. It’s hard to reconcile, just like it is hard to reconcile being human with being godly and being alive with being dead. He hopes he’ll get Elysium at least, another shot. He isn’t really worried about it but sometimes it strikes him that there will always be one last thing the gods or Fate or whoever or whatever else could do to fuck him over.
He’s not really doing a very good job at living these days. He stays alive and he eats and he tries to make the most of the time when he isn’t caught up in loops considering how it might be his last time doing something, how he’ll never have another autumn, winter, spring and no other chance to actually enjoy the summer. He stays alive and he doesn’t know how to keep forcing himself to do the things he doesn’t want to do when the options are school and Montauk and he won’t graduate either way but the sea will always be there, another world where he belongs as much as he doesn’t, where he is safer than almost anyone else rather than teetering on a precipice all of his own.
Dying is lonely. Nobody tells you that. Or maybe they do. Maybe it’s just one of the many things he never listened to. There are too many lessons he’ll never learn, too many second chances he’ll never get, too many first chances nobody thought to offer him because there should always have been more time. He should have grown more, been more mature, been better, been whatever he needed to be. His life hadn’t felt wasted until he’d started to run out of it and now he finds himself grasping at any loose thread he can, doing reckless things because he needs to do all the good he can do. It isn’t that he hasn’t already done a lot, he knows that, but with every new day he gets closer to the end and it feels less and less like it is actually enough.
Montauk is cold this time of year. The breeze that blows in is salty and brisk and just loud enough in his ears that it sounds like a wail, like something suffering somewhere in the distance just outside of his reach. He doesn’t have anywhere to go right now or anything productive to do so he sits and waits to die, feeling like he is wasting all his time away and yet not being able to make himself use it. He could learn a new skill, use the time he has left for something good, but he keeps getting stuck on the thought that he’ll never get the chance to use it. He could practise with his powers or his sword but he is already good and there doesn’t seem to be much point in getting better when he is going to die anyway, no matter how good he is. The stronger he is the stronger Kronos has to be to kill him. It’s stupid but sometimes letting himself idle feels like it might be the only way he can protect his friends, just a little. Never enough.
His mom isn’t here. There is no cabin with spiders in every corner, no bed that is warm and comfortable even if errant grains of sand have made it scratchy, no home-cooked meal or warm hug he can turn into. There is just him and the night and the sea and the fleeting sense of belonging he feels when he sinks himself into it and keeps breathing despite it, keeps breathing because he has twice as many places where he could and should belong but does not. His mom will worry if he isn’t home by the time she wakes up but she is used to him disappearing, will have to accept any monster-and-war apology he gives her because she has to, because her son is saving the world.
The school doesn’t though. He makes himself go the next day, makes himself sit through a day of lessons feeling less than human rather than more than, tries to take notes and pay attention and doesn’t manage anything near worthwhile, ends up wondering if there is anything that is worth his while anymore at all. He gets pulled into the guidance counsellor’s office at lunch. He isn’t hungry but it irks him on principle.
They say they are worried about him. It feels fraudulent to tell them not to be. They tell him there are people he can talk to if he is struggling but he knows that they don’t have anybody equipped for this. They tell him they are listening and he doesn’t tell them that he has nothing to say because his silence does the job for him. They tell him to take a pamphlet on his way out if he needs to but he is sure they don’t have one that tells you how to prepare to be murdered by somebody you once considered a friend. He doesn’t need a pamphlet. He needs a new life. The kind with longevity, with an expiration date so distant he doesn’t even have to think about it. He thanks them anyway. It isn’t their fault that they are useless to him. It isn’t their fault that every single thing is.
He thinks a lot about questions he will never ask. Would his mom have ever had him had she known how this would end? Would his father? (Yes. He knew. He had to know and Percy is here anyway. Percy is dying anyway.) What would he have made of his life if he was given the chance? Is the only thing keeping him going even now the fact that it has to be someone? The fact that he couldn’t live with himself if he let it be anybody else? How will his mom cope without him? Who will fill the empty spaces he’ll leave at camp? How long will it take for his cabin to start gathering more dust than they can just blow away? When will he stop being Percy in memory and start being Perseus? How long will it be before the big three start to break their oath again? Before somebody takes his place? Will it stay doomed even without him in it?
He thinks a lot about a lot of things really. It’s a bit like the only thing he remembers how to do is think. And so he continues to do it entirely against his will. There are support groups for kids who are dying but none for people who are experiencing quite what he is. He is alone in this and he’ll end up just as dead anyway. It’s not something he can talk about because there isn’t a single person he wants to tell. Chiron probably knows but Percy isn’t going to be the one to bring it up, just in case. Maybe he’s waiting for Percy to bring it up, to cope with this how he thinks is best. He isn’t coping with it though, just living until he ends up dying and hoping he does a good enough job of it that the world keeps going without him in it. It feels narcissistic to think but his options are to die for everything or to die for nothing at all and he can’t do that. He doesn’t know how to do that. He doesn’t want to do that.
He had never wanted an epic, heroic death before but when the options in front of him are either that or failure it holds an odd sort of appeal. He’ll be remembered in death, for his death, martyred for a cause. It will matter until the next war, until the next death the gods and the moirai decide matters. Until somebody else is in his place and staring down the shears and then the sword and then the fast-track to the best mercy Hades has to offer. He hopes it will be a long time but the thing about knowing you are dying is that it feels like an awful waste to spend that time lying to yourself. He finds himself looking down at that asterisk-shaped scar on his hand a lot these days, where the pit scorpion’s stinger went in, thinking about how it will feel to cross that final line after all of his numerous close calls. How it will feel to stop lying because, even though he can’t manage to lie to himself anymore, he can’t quite make himself stop lying to everybody else but death speaks for itself. He’ll be gone in a few months. He might not find his voice in that time but he’s sure death will manage, when the time comes and the hope dies alongside him and his job is as done as the Fates will allow.
It’s bleak and it’s grim and he thinks that if he had to live with it any longer than he does now it might kill him all by itself.