Chapter Text
Percy was stuck in his dreams. Again. Of course, they had to be nightmares. The life of a demigod is never easy. Most, as far as he could see, never lived past age twelve. Those that found safety with their kind at Camp Half-Blood lived into their teens. He’d never met an adult demigod. His book-smart and battle-ready friend from his first summer, knowing of the danger and battling out of it, Annabeth Chase, daughter of Athena, mentioned famous people that were supposedly demigods, like Amelia Airheart, daughter of Zeus, or Elvis Presley, son of Apollo. He guessed that being a child of the Big Three Gods didn’t use to be so dangerous. They still wouldn’t tell him what had changed.
Percy Jackson was not so lucky. He was the son of Poseidon, and hunted by monsters and hated by gods alike. He supposed he’d partially earned the favor of the Olympians, aside from Ares, who was still sore that Percy beat him in a swordfight in the surf of the ocean and retrieved the Helm of Darkness for Hades and the Lightning Bolt for Zeus. That’s what pulled him into this chaos. Last summer, a demigod had stolen the weapon of the King of the gods. Naturally, a twelve-year-old kid with no clue that the myths may even have a semblance of truth to them was a sleeper agent and a supertheif that deserved to die or to retrieve the weapon for peace while the brothers tried to kill him for his efforts.
Where was he? Oh, right.
So Percy was a demigod in the midst of a terrifying nightmare. Demigod dreams, unfortunately, were often prophetic or symbolic of some real-life problem. Lovely.
Percy was on a beach. It was no ordinary beach. The grains of sand were tiny shards of glass. The sky was blood red and dark, as if in the belly of a beast bigger than Manhattan. The very air was toxic, and Percy could feel his lungs struggling to draw breath even as each breath carved its way through his chest. There was a river nearby. Within the water, tortured screams of despair wailed constantly, a never-ending ebb and flow of countless voices united in hopelessness.
His attention was caught by a scream of immense pain and fear. His body, bigger and stronger than what it should be at his age, sprinted towards the noise, fear gripping his heart. There was a girl pinned beneath a spider the size of a car. The girl had blond hair caked with dirt, her right ankle wrapped in a rudimentary splint, and startling gray eyes. Percy realized with a start that the girl was Annabeth. But not quite her. This girl was older, with more grief and pain in her face. She had a gray streak through her hair that his Annabeth did not have. The spider lunged downward, biting into her stomach just as Percy reached her, an inarticulate scream of grief and rage tearing from his throat. Percy quickly dispatched the spider woman, who was too distracted with her triumph. He crouched down, barely avoiding falling to his knees in the sharp grains of glass. He frantically tried to stem the bleeding, but the wound was rapidly turning brown, as if the very air was infecting the wound as he watched.
“The fire water,” the girl croaked.
“What?” he asked helplessly, knowing with horrifying certainty that he could not save her. Her wound continued to darken, the blood flow growing sluggish as it thickened, but not stopping. He had already stuffed as much ambrosia, the healing food of the gods, into her mouth as he dared. Any more of it could burn through her body in seconds.
“Drinking it will keep you alive down here. Find the doors. Leave me.”
“I won’t leave you.”
“Always loyal. I’m lucky to have loved you.”
Then her eyes closed, and the thick blood stopped flowing.
He screamed, the sound echoing in the cavern and shaking the ground around him.
He collapsed onto the sand, not caring that the glass cut everywhere it touched.
Hearing the sounds of approaching monsters, Percy found himself outside of the boy’s body. With terror in his heart, he looked into a pair of very familiar, determined sea green eyes. Red light from a crevice illuminated his older self’s face and anger crept into the corners of those determined eyes.
Percy was jerked from his dream and into the waking world. He sat bolt upright, looking around him in a desperate attempt to ground himself. He started hyperventilating.
“Percy?! Percy honey, what’s going on?” He vaguely noticed his mother, the amazing woman that she was, knelt by his side. He was focused on not suffocating. The world shrank to his laboured breath, and then a hand touched his shoulder.
“Percy, slow breaths. What are three things you can feel?”
“Your hand, the bedsheets, and the cool air.”
“Three things you can hear?”
“Your voice, the radiator, and car horns.”
“Three things you can smell?”
“Your shampoo, my sweat, and…cookies?”
His breath had slowed and his vision cleared. He gazed into the worried shifting shades of blue that were his mother’s eyes.
“I’m okay,” he murmured, halfway to believing it.
“What did you see?”
That was one of many amazing things about his mom. She knew about his world, and knew exactly how to get to the heart of a problem. “I was older, and stuck in some hellish place where the very air was poisonous. Annabeth died. At least, an older, more scarred version of her did. She said something that confused me and scared me before she went.”
“Which was?” his mom asked softly.
“‘I’m lucky to have loved you.’”