#aoah

It’s been three weeks since they got back from the field trip from hell, and Camp Half-Blood stumbles around normalcy. They eat, they sleep, they grieve. And they wait for the end of the world.

Percy’s routine had gotten a lot less listless and a lot more hostile. Rather than pick at, he stabbed at the food he barely ate. At his daily perch on the boulder, his vacant stare out into the forest became a pointed glare at the sky. Everyday it got harder to ignore the whirlpools he created in the ocean, or the screams of the monsters he hunted.

But he started training with her again.

(Chiron tells her he thinks it's a good sign. Clarisse thinks he should shove it.)

Time passes achingly slow when your entire life is an interlude. Days crawls by in echoey stretches, with stale smiles and eyes far too tired for their age.

And then there are the Bad days. The days where Percy’s control slips. The days where the ocean rages and ground trembles. Afterwards, he’ll come to her, eyes wide with bags so heavy his pupils strain to hold them up, and shaggy hair falling past his ears. On those days, without saying anything, she’ll take him to the beach. Sometimes he cries, sometimes he holds her hand, and sometimes he does nothing but stare out into open water. He barely speaks to her though.

He barely spoke to anyone.

So, needless to say, it’s a surprise when Percy had shown up to the morning meeting right along with the other head counselors, sat down on his chair and stared pointedly at a plastic white ping-pong ball. His presence alone made every pause echo and every silence a scream. The heavy air made Katies gasp at the door all the more noticeable.

Shit.

(It’s about here when something in Clarisse snaps. It’s as if all this watching yet doing and saying nothing finally caught up to her, and she was no longer in control of her body. All she could do was observe.)

She saw Dionysus waltz into the room with no warning and a Diet Coke. She saw the way Percy’s hand immediately curled into a fist. The way the muscles in his arms rippled, like it took physical force to keep him from standing up. The way the veins in his neck popped out as they all listened to Dionysus ramble about how Percy’s being granted the ability to leave camp was practically charity, and how he should be ‘eternally grateful’.

She heard the squeak of Percy’s chair at the word ‘grateful’ and saw Beckendorf’s hand snatch his wrist. She saw how Percy clamped his mouth shut, said nothing, and nodded, like it was the hardest thing he ever had to do. She felt the collective sigh of relief of the others as Dionysus turned to leave, but realized it was a breath let out too soon, when the god stopped.

He turned to Malcolm and asked how the Athena cabin was managing under his leadership. Malcolm, stiff and paler than she’d ever seen him, stammered through something like ‘not to worry, they were doing fine’.

Looking back, it was probably deliberate.

Dionysus hasn’t been here these days. He doesn’t feel the ground tremble, he doesn’t see the tidal waves or the cracks in the earth.

He didn’t hear the way Percy screamed.

Intentional or not, at the time, it seemed out of pure ignorance when Dionysus—who was walking towards the exit—looked over his shoulder, and, as if it were the most casual thing in the world, called, “Just let me know if you need a replacement.”

Several things happened at once.

Chiron shoved Dionysus the rest of the way out the door, slammed it shut, and cried, “Percy, don’t!”, but the damage was done. Percy broke free from Beckendorf’s hold as the room began to shake, chest heaving and hands trembling. Conner and Micheal tripped over each other trying to back up, and Katie yanked Travis out of the way just before a shield hanging on the wall could fall on top of them. Will looked hopelessly around and Clarisse realized he didn’t have anything with him. She was seriously considering whacking Percy on the back of the head with Maimer, (which would do nothing considering the fact that he’s invincible) when Silena stands up.

“STOP!” Silena commands, and, miraculously, he does. Percy falls to his knees, and when the ground stops shaking, it’s the first time anyone in the room is still enough to notice how hard he’s crying. Crying doesn’t really cover it. It’s animalistic, his sobs, so violent he positively heaves. It is raw and ugly and painful to watch. Clarisse is still frozen stuck to the floor, but Silena is quick to lose the authority in her stance, kneeling down to wipe his tears and put her hands on his cheeks, lifting his face to meet her eyes, and begin to soothe. There is music in her comfort, rhythm in the way she alleviates.

“Oh sweetheart, it’s okay, it’s all okay—no, no, no, no one is replacing Annabeth, I promise, right Charlie?”

A quick look of understanding passes between her and Beckendorf before the latter slides in to take Silena’s position.

“That’s right, no one is, and no one could—I'm sorry Perce, I'm just so, so sorry.”

When it’s clear that the sobbing isn’t gonna stop anytime soon, Beckendorf heaves a heavy sigh and rests his forehead against Percy’s, whispering, “I know, I’m sorry.” Over and over and over again.

“I need some air,” Silena says, her normally olive skin white as a sheet, appearing next to Clarrise. “Go with me?”

“Yeah, sure.”

They end up sitting in silence on the giant porch swing around the front of the building. At some point Katie wandered over too and the three of them sat, staring straight ahead. Katie links her arm with Clarisse’s, and Silena rests her head on her other shoulder. It should be familiar, the three of them sitting together, but it’s foreign in the empty spaces Annabeth should be taking up, throwing her gangly legs across their laps. Silena should be attempting to mess with Annabeth's curls, Katie should be complaining about Annabeth's sneakers on her thighs, growing tiny vines from the dirt in the bottom of her shoes out of spite.

The ghost of her laugh is stuck in Clarisse’s head. She wishes she could give apparitions the finger.

“You did great back there.” Katie speaks hesitantly, afraid to broach the subject.

“Yeah.” Clarisse adds. “You did good. I know you hate using your charmspeak, but he needed it.”

“Yeah, I know. Like Chiron said, ‘we have to contain him’.” (That's what he talked about when she and Percy were gone? Gods, Clarisse fucking hates that horse.) “But, I still feel bad. Messing with someone's head like that. Manipulating them.” She shudders.

Clarisse tries to think of anything other than the fact that Annabeth ‘dying’ in the first place is one giant manipulation.

(She fails.)

“You know, it was Annabeth who helped me learn to use my powers in the first place. Did I ever tell you that? Annabeth was the one who did all the research and taught me how to use it for good. She told me there was nothing wrong with me. It feels wrong using it against someone she….using it against Percy.”

Clarisse is putting a lot of effort into not standing up and punching a hole into the Big House wall Connor-style, when she feels teardrops sliding down the side of her arm.

“Katie?”

Silena, who was lost in thought after her confession, sits up and her eyes widen with alarm. “Kates, why’re you crying?”

“Because, I can’t fix the sunflowers!” Katie exclaims, tears rolling down her face. “Annabeth's gone, and Percy’s a wreck, and Travis doesn’t joke anymore, and Connor doesn't laugh anymore, and Micheal hasn’t fixed his bow yet, and I haven’t seen Grover in weeks, and all Beck does is work, and all Will does is worry, and no one sleeps or talks or sings anymore and I can't fix it! Any of it! The sunflowers are dying and I can't fix them, I can’t go anywhere near them, because they were her favorite and I don't understand how she can be gone—she was right here! Right here, and she was so good, so good, to everyone, and I can’t—it’s just—sunflowers!”

Clarisse has never been good at feelings. Especially not big complex ones, like the kind that crop up when someone you grow up with decides to fake die and leave you to deal with the aftermath.

But she can’t run. She’s supposed to take care of them. She promised.

“No.”

“Clarisse—,”

“No!”

“Try to understand—,”

“Understand? Understand what? That you have fake suicidal tendancies?”

“Clarisse, I read the prophecy when I was 10. I met Percy two years later. Every minute of every hour of every day I spent with him. I’ve known….. It's been on borrowed time. We've been on borrowed time. I've known it since the beginning. It’s all I’ve known. But, with this plan—,”

“This insane plan that not even Connor—fucking Connor—would go through with!”

“It’s gonna be okay, You’re gonna be okay—,”

“It’s not just about me! What about them, huh? What about the Stolls? Connor adores you, Travis looks up to you. What about Micheal, and all his anger issues only you know how to deal with? What about Beck, and the machines? What about Silena and Katie—you told me once the four of us were sisters! What about Malcolm, the rest of Cabin 6? He’s your brother, they’re your siblings! What about Percy?”

“Clarisse.”

“He’s never gonna forgive you.”

Clarisse didn’t notice her ears were ringing, or how heavy she’s breathing until the silence that held as Annabeth dropped her eyes. When she finally lifts them, they're shining.

“Did I ever tell you what the last line of my prophecy was? To lose a love worse than death. Percy and I haven’t been the same since last summer. He’s my best friend in the world and he can’t get through a sentence. I hurt when I’m with him and I hurt when I’m without him. Whatever it is that we’re doing—it feels like losing …... Because it’s all right there, he’s right there, but he can’t look me in the eye. So, yeah, maybe I will lose him forever. Maybe I already have. But, I’d rather ask for forgiveness after he’s survived, than ask permission from a dead man walking.”

“Annabeth—,”

“It's for all of them to decide whether or not they forgive me. All I'm asking is that you take care of them for me in the meantime. Please.”

Take care of them. Annabeth’s ‘dying’ wish echoes in her head, taunting and begging her at the same time.

Take care of them.

Gods. It’s all so fucked, she wants to scream.

So, she grips Katie and Silena’s hands, and marches them to the spot in the woods where Annabeth and the three of them used to sneak out to after curfew in the winter months when they were the few kids left at camp.

And she does just that. She screams. She screamed like she’d been wanting to this entire month. She screams for Annabeth and for Percy and every kid at camp and she screams for herself. She screams bloody fucking murder. At some point Katie and Silena join in, and Katie’s still crying and Silena throws a rock and they end up hugging and shaking and deliriously laughing. And they all feel the missing piece, and they curse and cry and stomp and just mourn together. And despite what she knows, Clarisse mourns with them.

The fucked-upedness of the whole situation is still there, but Silena seems a little lighter, and Katie’s smiling soft beneath her tears, and Clarisse finally feels like she’s done something right.

She walks the girls back to their respective cabins, and heads to the Big House with the intention of checking to make sure Percy had been put to sleep. (Will had to switch to liquid valium and stir it into pudding now. Because again. Fucking invincible.) When she feels the earth rumble and vibrate as if building up towards something big—

And then silence.

Eerie calm.

The kind that’s followed by storms.

She runs.

When she bursts into the Big House, she expects to see Percy at the center of the room, with Chiron and Dionysus cowering in the corner, Beckendorf trying in vain to get Percy to breathe, knocked over chairs, and maybe even a broken ping-pong table.

Instead, she finds Chiron pacing on anxious hooves and Beckendorf sitting across from a straight faced Percy. His expression is unreadable and his fingers are interlaced above the table, squeezing tight enough to burn. Chiron is at the head of the table with a disgruntled god of wine at his side.

“What's going on?” Clarisse asks, already afraid of the answer.

Chiron speaks up, fast, as if the words had come out before he had time to stop them. “Dionysus has just received word that Lu–Kronos,” Chiron catches, too late to stop Percy’s eyes from flashing. “Has found some way to……incapacitate New York.”

“Incapacitate…..how?”

“They’ve put the entirety of New York to sleep,” Beckendorf interrupts, glancing over at Chiron. “There's no real way to sugar coat that, I feel like we shouldn’t even try.”

“I’m sorry, they did what?”

“Morpheus. He put every mortal on the island of Manhattan to sleep,” Percy speaks, slow, sure, and rageful. He has to pause after every word to take a breath. “He put my city to sleep. The invasion has started.”

“We don’t know that, right, Dionysus?” Chiron attempts to placate.

Beckendorf shifts in his chair, Dionysus clears his throat. “No, we don’t. Besides, the gods are preoccupied at the moment, so it’s probably best to keep this under wraps. No need to go barging into New York trying to be heroes just yet, when we don't know what our enemies have planned. Let them make the first move, and we can figure it out from there.”

“What?!?” Clarisse objects, sharing the same incredulous look as Beckendorf as he speaks up with her.

“You want us to do nothing? That's insane!”

“For all we know their first move is bombing a hospital. You wanna just let them bomb a hospital?”

“Insane! An entire island is asleep and you want us to do nothing? People could be hurt!”

“We can’t just—,”

“He’s right.” Percy cuts in.

“What?” “Excuse me?” Clarisse and Beckendorph’s surprise is simultaneous and visceral. Chiron’s eyes almost pop out of his head. Even Dionysus is too stunned to speak.

“He’s right. We can’t do anything right now. There’s no use barging out into the open where we’re more vulnerable. We watch what they do from where it’s safe. We can do that, right? With the shield?” Percy looks to Beckendorf, who is staring at Percy like he’s dropped from the sky.

“Uhh, yeah. In theory we should be able to, but it is a prototype and without Anna—my partner, there are some kinks.”

At the sound of what was almost Annabeth's name, Percy’s bicep ripples, as if he’s squeezing his own hand even tighter, which shouldn’t be possible considering how white his knuckles are. Yet, he simply nods and continues. There’s something in his eyes Clarisse doesn’t recognize. “It will work well enough that we’ll be able to monitor where they are and what they do. It’s a bad idea to rush in, and there's no reason to worry anyone if we aren’t doing anything. Causing a panic with no clear solution is stupid.”

“Exactly.” Dionysus agrees, “Who knew the boy had some sense.”

Percy’s jaw twitches. He meets her eyes. They’re red and puffy but there’s something in them she just can't quite place…

“Well, if that’s all, the three of you are dismissed.” Dionysua waves his hand. Percy stands and exits as Clarisse and Beckendorf follow dumbly.

Once they’re outside, they keep walking, looking straight ahead. She brushes Percy’s arm and says,

“Nice speech.”

“Thank you, I thought so.”

“But you don’t actually mean any of the shit that you said.”

“Not a word of it, I’m killing the bastard. We leave tonight.”

Clarisse thought about the end of the world fairly often.

She tried her best not to. But she was fairly certain it would. End, that is. In her defense, the prophecy basically says the fate of the world depended on a teenage boy making the right decision. Forgive Clarisse for not having too much faith.

Then she met him. And the prophecy kid was no longer some nameless figurehead, he was Percy, a scrawny kid with little to no impulse control and a heart too big for his chest. And when he let her take home the fleece on her own and take all the credit when they were thirteen, she was certain—they were all gonna die. Clarisse used to think despite having the power, Percy was too kind to make the be all, end all decision that would decide the fate of the world, too gentle to kill.

Then Mt. St. Helens happened. And suddenly Percy was the most powerful demigod of their generation. And for a second, Clarisse thought they had a shot.

Then Annabeth died.

(Sort-of)

And suddenly none of that mattered because Clarisse’s life was a whirlwind of nightmare situations and she didn't have time to think about the end of the world, all she could do was try and keep herself and the people she cared about upright and away from flying debris.

Percy and Clarisse snuck out that night on some pegasi, and Iris messaged Thalia and Grover who’d met them in central park. Thalia, ever the badass, hitched a ride on a giant timber wolf, and an apprehensive Grover did the same with Percy’s hellhound, Mrs. O’Leary.

(She did not know Percy had a hellhound, but she doesn’t think now is the best time to ask. All she knows is she likes him better for it.)

Beckendorph stayed back at camp covering for them, but gave them the shield which they used to locate Kronos. It took a couple tries, but eventually they found him heading for the Upper East Side, and decided to cut him off at the Williamsburg Bridge.

They’re standing on the empty bridge, after getting the few sleeping pedestrians there out of their cars and out of the way, when she checks one of the cars dashes, she sees it's 3 am on August 18th. The end is finally here. She should probably be feeling more. It’s a bit underwhelming, actually. She takes comfort in the knowledge that if the world ends today, Percy’s gonna take Olympus down with it.

“So, is there a plan?” Thalia calls from where she’s directing her wolf (whom, Clarisse was told by Thalia with a faraway look in her eye, is named Jason) to dispose of a potbellied business man. “Or, are we wingin’ it? I’m good with either, I just need to know.”

“I am not good with either.” Grover pipes up from her left. “Not that it’ll have any impact on what ends up happening, just letting you know.”

The waver in Grover's voice almost makes her laugh, but then she peers over at Percy. He is standing a few feet ahead of her, sword in one hand, photo of Annabeth in the other, and eyes straight ahead, looking like vengeance personified. Any laughter dies in her throat.

Clarisse coughs an ‘ahem’—as if that was gonna get rid of the ball of guilt that lives at the base of her neck—and says, “Sure there's a plan, Goat boy. Wait until the army gets here.”

“Then what?”

“Try not to die.”

Grover mutters something along the lines of ‘hate that plan’, when they feel the ground beneath them tremble. Thalia’s brow furrows and calls, “Uh, Percy?”

“Not me.” He points to the other end of the bridge.

Holy mother of shit.

Horde isn’t a big enough word to describe what's steadily marching toward them right now. There's so many, it’s as if the spirit of this army made from demigods nightmares is one giant, living, breathing, gnarly thing, rearing its head and craving blood. And the head of this horror show is none other than the Minotaur. When the bull headed creature roars, what truly scares her is the echo of the sleeping city in response. There is no backup.

“Didn’t you kill him already?” Thalia asks, fingers visibly tight on her bow.

“That brand of evil doesn’t stay dead long.” Grover answers, hooves positively quaking. “How are we gonna…..”

And the goat might’ve kept talking, but Clarisse doesn’t hear it, can't hear anything other than the ringing in her ear because Percy is slipping Annabeth's picture in his pocket and turning around and their eyes are locking and she realizes two things at once.

First, when Percy runs headfirst into the biggest army Clarisse has ever seen, and he’s prepared to do it alone.

Second, that everything that’s happened since she lied to him on the docks has been a prologue, a fucked-up overature leading this moment. Before she knows what she’s doing Clarisse cries out, “Wait!”

Percy turns back, brows questioning.

Clarisse pulls Annabeth's dagger out of her bag and hands it to him. And her throat is clogged up and she can’t speak, but she doesn’t have to. Something about the reverence he holds for the weapon, scares her more than his earthquakes ever did. He looks at the knife like it’s judgment day, and every single monster in the crowd will have a reckoning with it. With him.

He looks her heavy in the eye. Nods. Turns.

Then he charges.

If you ask Clarisse after, she’d have no way of explaining to you what Percy did next.

The destruction he caused, the havoc he reeked was indescribable. He relished in creative ways to kill. He called water from the Hudson and shaped it like tendrils, lifting three empousa and slamming them into the ground turning them to dust instantly. He shook chunks of gravel until sinkholes the size of cars were created, leaving monsters scrambling for ground that wasn’t there. He brought the river to them, submerging monsters' heads in floating pools of water, drowning them on land. He was toying with them, killing for sport. He slashed and stabbed and laughed—an inhumane, ugly thing. The kind of laugh that made Clarisse forget whose side he was on.

She never understood how merciful Percy was, until he wasn’t anymore.

“Should we….try to stop him?” Grover asks with uncertainty.

We couldn’t if we tried, Clarisse thinks.

Then, Clarisse thinks about that day on the dock, how bright Percy’s eyes had been at the prospect of seeing Annabeth. Thinks about the stillness of water all night long. Thinks about his nightmares and cracks in the earth. Thinks about his half-drunk confession of a sober promise.

She thinks about the time he found her sobbing on a ratty old couch in the basement Big House. Thinks about how he sat on the floor below her, and took her hand. She thinks about how he didn’t let go all night, not even when she fell asleep. How he was there for her, steady and gentle and kind when she couldn't bear the consequences of her own inaction.

She thinks about how much better he deserves.

About how much they’ve taken from him.

Percy stabs the Minotaur in the heart with the creature's own severed horn.

She waves Grover off.

Time passes and Clarisse witnesses a massacre. She squints at Percy and realizes he’s barely broken a sweat. He slits the throats of the last standing telkhines, and when he’s done he kicks at monster dust as if unsatisfied with how quickly they died. He’s still got that maniacal glint in his eye but his muscles are taunt, as if he’s holding back.

What is he still waiting for?

The answer to her unspoken question rides upon a skeletal horse in golden armor. The air fills with foreboding and Clarisse smells ozone. Nausea washes over her as Luke/Kronos approaches leisurely, like he has all the time in the world. She remembers what he patrons and supposes he does. His decaying horse wanders through the wreckage and piles of dust, stomping on the only evidence Percy left behind that anything had been there at all.

Thalia crackles with electricity.

Grover raises his reed pipes.

Clarisse pops her knuckles.

Percy’s stoneface cracks. And he grins.

Fucking. Grins.

It’s an nasty thing. Charged with danger. And Clarisse thinks Annabeth was wrong.

The only dead man walking is Luke.

“Perseus Jackson.” Kronos speaks with Lukes voice. She’s never seen a titans puppet before. It’s unsettling, the way Luke’s mouth curls around a syllable half a second too late, the body tripping to keep up with the mind's demands. That same mouth twists into a facetious sort of pout. “I take it you didn’t appreciate my welcome party.”

Percy snarls.

Not-Luke waves him off. “No matter. Monsters are a restorative resource. I cannot, however, say the same about demigods. And I see you’ve brought some along with you.” His eyes flick around the makeshift defensive formation they found themselves in behind Percy. “Thalia Grace. I must say how disappointed I was when you made your….choice. The boy was so convinced he could get you onside.”

“‘The boy’ was profoundly mistaken.” Thalia retorts with a seemingly unconscious clap of thunder. “About a lot of things.”

Kronos remains unphased. “You’ve brought your pet to battle?” It takes a minute to realize he’s talking about Grover, who seethes with shaky hands. Kronos’s eyes wander and land on Clarisse. “Daughter of Ares. I must say I’m surprised to see you. Thought you’d be busy tending to a broken thing. What was his name? Chris?” Clarisse blazes but before she can respond, Percy interrupts.

“Enough.” He raises Riptide in his right hand and tightens his left hand's grip on Annabeth's dagger. He stares at the thing Kronos rode in on and it occurs to Clarisse that Annabeth wasn’t messing around when she said Percy could talk to horses, because seemingly out of nowhere, the creature of bones bucks on its hind legs, throwing Kronos off it’s back, and gallops away at full speed.

Kronos scrambles to his feet, yellow eyes narrowing at Percy as he approaches. “Cheap trick, demigod. I must say I expected more from the savior of Olympus.”

Percy lets out a low primal sound, and Clarisse doesn’t think he looks like a savior. He looks like vengeance.

Percy raises Annabeth's dagger to strike. As Kronos’s scythe rises to meet it, it transforms into Backbiter—a weapon that's become infamous these past years. Their weapons cross and the impact creates a shock wave that shakes what's left of the bridge. Percy wastes no time, using Riptide to slash at Kronos’s middle while Backbiter is occupied with so much force, half his armor is cut clean off.

Kronos stumbles back, and for the first time Clarisse sees fear in those horrible golden eyes.

Just as he shakes it off Grover begins playing his reed pipes, and vines pop through concrete, tugging at the titans legs and tripping him. Before he can fall all the way, Thalia calls a lightning bolt to deflect off of Maimer and hit Kronos in the chest.

“Stop!” The titan commands, and suddenly Clarisse can’t move. A quick look around and it seems Thalia and Grover are in the same boat. “I'm tired of your tricks. I’ll kill you one at a time.” He points at Percy. “You first, Jackson.”

This time Kronos attacks first, but Percy is far from on the defensive. Kronos fights like a demon, all heavy strikes and sheer force. Pure strength and no fear—reckless the way you can afford to be when you’re immortal.

Percy is graceful, delivering crushing blows that are just as powerful as Kronos, but he's so light on his feet he’s almost dancing. He flips, and kicks and turns and slashes up a storm—literally. He stretches a hand out and the river rises and swirls around him, creating a living barrier made of water vapor that swirled around him, winds so powerful they buffeted all the titans' hits. Percy jumps, water pushing him up over the titan before slashing at his back mid-air and landing in a roll a few feet away. The storm follows his path—leaving Kronos soaking.

If Kronos fights like a demon, Percy raises hell itself.

He uses the hilt of Riptide to knock Kronos on the head, then spins and slashes in the same spot on his forehead. The titan snarls in frustration and raises his sword to strike—

Then he freezes in place.

Clarisse feels her own muscles loosening and she’s no longer stuck under the titans hold.

“Wh-what is this?” Kronos’s voice waivers.

Percy lifts an arm and points at Lukes face, which suddenly flushes an unnatural shade of red.

“Stop this at once!” Kronos demands. His answer comes in the form of a flick of Percy’s wrist which makes the titan double over.

“YOU CANNOT KILL ME BOY!” Kronos bellows. “I AM A TITAN!”

Percy's face twists up in a chilling sneer.

“Even titans bleed.”

Percy curls his hand into a fist, and Kronos screams in agony. Clarisse hears a sickening pop.

One of Luke's arms hangs out at an awkward angle.

Thalia gasps. Grover vomits.

Percy grins.

Clarisse watches with horror as pale skin is stretched by burst vessels, and veins crawl out of place. Clarisse can only imagine what’s going on inside Lukes body, but from the outside it looks like torture. She can hear the sloshing of all the liquid in Luke's body responding to Percy’s unforgiving hands. Kronos groans in pain and squirms as if trying to put himself back the way he was.

Then Percy opens his palm and Kronos begins to cough and sputter. He’s choking. Percy is choking him with his own blood.

Grover retches, and cries out, “Percy, that’s enough.”

Percy ignores him. There’s another pop. Luke’s left leg spasms and he collapses.

Thalia shudders, closing her eyes and yells, “Percy, stop!

Kronos coughs up more blood.

Clarisse shakes out of her stupor and inches forward, reaching out to touch Percy’s forearm. He grabs her wrist with unforgiving force, but Clarisse doesn’t flinch.

“Why?” Percy asks, his voice shaking with rage. “Why should I stop? Why should I show him any mercy? He is the reason Annabeth is dead!”

“Annabeth?” A broken voice croaks.

Faster than she can think, Percy drops her wrist and grabs the owner of the voice by the throat. “Don’t ever say her name.”

The broken body looks up with desperation in his wild blue eyes.

Blue eyes.

“Percy, his eyes!”

Percy gazes at Luke with more scrutiny and is so shocked by what he sees, he drops him like a ragdoll.

“Is this real?” Percy asks, suspicion coating his voice

“I can hold him back—but not for long.” Luke groans as he attempts to look up at Percy. “Is Anna—is she really…did I really…” He trails off. Percy nods tightly.

They look at each other for a long time.

Luke undoes a strap in his armour, points at the skin exposed, and closes his eyes. “Do it.”

Percy drops Riptide and lifts Annabeth's dagger above his head with both of his hands.

Clarisse doesn’t see exactly where the dagger lands, but based on the agonizing scream, it hits the mark. Luke begins to glow, so she makes sure to turn Percy’s eyes away at the last second. There’s a buzzing in her ear that gets louder as the light gets brighter.

And then silence.

Silence, a sunrise, and the broken body of Luke Castellan.

Grover and Thalia inch toward them, as Percy looks down at Luke with thinly veiled disgust and says something that gives Clarisse whiplash.

“I can fix you, if you want. Put everything back in place.”

Luke looks up at him, expression unreadable. “Why? Isn’t my death what you wanted?”

“Not necessarily. I wanted you to suffer.” Percy says matter of factly. “But she didn’t.”

Oh.

“I could fix you. For her.”

Thalia’s already shaking her head when Luke says, “No. Thank you, but I couldn’t live with it. Any of it.”

Percy nods, but doesn’t say anything.

Luke looks at Thalia and Grover. “I’m sorry.”

Thalia looks at him with a strange sort of pity. “Maybe one day, that will mean something to me.”

Luke smiles, resigned, and takes a deep breath. Then another.

Then his breathing gets shallow and high pitched.

And then he stops breathing at all.

And they stand there over his body for a long time, mourning a boy and resenting the monster he became.

Clarisse put a hesitant hand on Percy’s shoulder.

He rests his head on her hand and closes his eyes for a moment.

Or three moments.

“Let’s go home.”

They all start to leave when Clarisse hears a voice—so faint she thinks she’s hearing things until Percy freezes next to her.

“Annabeth?”

She thinks it’s another hallucination like the one in the Underworld, and she’s grabbing Percy's arm and trying to turn him around. “It’s not real, Percy, it’s not her.”

He shakes her off, “No, that’s her, I know her voice.”

He takes another stem and she’s about to get Thalia to grab his other arm, when she sees a figure in the distance.

Then she hears it.

“Percy!”

Annabeth’s voice is crying out. Annabeth is crying out.

Then she’s yelling with Percy and Grover and Thalia have joined them and they’re walking toward her in disbelief. They’re in so much disbelief in fact, they don’t realize she’s limping until it’s too late.

“Annabeth? Annabeth! Annabeth, it’s me, it’s us! Annabeth!”

They’re close enough to see her face and for the first time in weeks, she sees Percy smile. A real smile, not a sneer or something hollow, a perfect genuine smile.

Annabeth stops to smile back.

Despite living next to it, she doesn’t visit much. In fact, she’s pretty sure it’s the first time she’s actually been in the city since her mom dropped her off at camp nine years ago. Campers were magically transported to Olympus during each of their Solstice visits, and her two quests took her underground and across the sea.

She’d heard stories, a starry-eyed Annabeth rambling on about how revolutionary the skyscrapers were to modern architecture and how beautiful buildings withstood the test of time. Percy whooping ‘THAT’S HOW WE DO IT IN NEW YORK CITY, BABY!’ gleefully whenever he won a camp challenge. Beckendorf, practically itching to go to school there in the fall. The Stolls, reminiscing about how many clueless tourists they knocked over without trying. Silena gushing about the high-end shops. So, the part of her that wished she’d been along for those adventures—the tiny part of her that wasn’t drowning in guilt—was kind of excited to go.

That tiny part of her is crushed as soon as they step out of the van.

The first thing she registers is the noise; it’s deafening. Millions of people screaming over each other, all thinking they have the most important thing to do. Not to mention the hawking, and the car horns, and the incessant commercials playing on the sides of too-big buildings.

Then, there’s the colors. Maybe it’s because she’s used to the unofficial orange shirt and jean shorts uniform from camp, but this is insane. It’s like a giant puked up a rainbow over the city. It isn’t just people's clothes—huge billboards and giant flatscreens are everywhere, begging you to buy this useless thing, promising it’ll make your miserable lives better.

Then, she makes the worst mistake she made since walking into the Big House with Annabeth two weeks ago.

She takes a deep breath.

Immediately she doubles over. The odor is all-consuming, there’s smoke, and sweat, and what must be miles of trash, and shit. Like, actual shit. On the ground. Eight feet away from her. She can feel the stench in the back of her throat, crawling its way further until she gags. She coughs and sputters and watches as the van drives away, back to camp where oxygen isn’t poisoned. She feels a hand patting her shoulder and looks back at Percy. His hair is still slumping over his forehead, and the bags under his eyes are even darker than yesterday.

“You alright?” He asks, and she can tell he’s genuinely asking. Not making fun, or asking out of courtesy—because he actually wants to know and to help. Her eyes almost start watering for an entirely different reason.

Almost.

“Yeah. Fine.” She gently shoves him off and gestures to the insane crowd before them. “So. This is your hometown, huh?”

The corners of his mouth rise in a half smile, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. “Home, sweet home.”

“Home smells like shit.”

“Oh, don’t feel bad for needing time to adjust, everyone who doesn’t live here does. You should’ve seen the look on Anna—” The words die in his throat and the laughter leaves his lips. Clarisse is already trying to remember which pocket she put the tranq in, when Percy spits out, “Don’t.”

They lock eyes, and he must recognize her concern is for him and not her own safety, because the ice in his eyes melts a bit, and he says, “It won’t be….bad every time. I can control it.”

She thinks about disagreeing. Momentarily. For one fleeting second she thinks about raising an eyebrow, and challenging him.

But, she looks at his face, and it’s the portrait of grief. It’s a portrait she painted. She glossed grey over his normally bright irises, stained the purple bags under his lashes. She scribbled the worry lines in between his eyebrows, and erased the color from his cheeks. Clasrisse has ripped out Percy’s insides and painted over the shell that was left.

“Okay.” He nods at her tightly, and she can see the visible relief in his eyes that she didn’t fight him on it. “Can we go now? I think the smell is getting worse, and that shouldn’t be possible.”

He flashes her a hollow smile, “Yeah. C’mon.”

He turns around to walk up the five steps, stopping in front of a worn down speaker surrounded by buttons with little paper labels embedded into the brick wall. He reaches for a button with a blue label and hesitates,running a hand through his hair and glancing back at her. Clarisse gives him what she hopes is an encouraging smile, but probably looks more like a grimace. He shakes his head, lets out a puff of air, and jams his finger on the button. A few seconds pass before the speakers crackle to life.

“Jackson, soon to be Jackson-Blofis residence!” It’s a voice so warm that it seems to float through the air like a summer breeze, even through an old speaker. Percy collapses in on himself a little at the sound of it, and she squeezes her fists tight at the sight.

“Mama? It’s me,” he croaks, and Clarisse tries very hard not to notice how wet his voice sounds.

“Percy? Oh my goodness, what're you doing here? What’s wrong?”

Her heart clenches at the fact that Sally can tell something’s wrong, even through the sound system, as Percy responds, “It’s….it’s Annabeth.”

She buzzes them in.

Their ride up on the elevator is suffocating, taking what feels like forever and a day, but eventually they make it to the apartment. A door to the left of them is already open, and by the way Percy beelines into the woman standing in it, they’ve arrived at the soon-to-be Jackson-Blofis residence.

Clarisse hesitates a few paces back with her head down as Percy all but crashes into his mother's arms, and she doesn’t have to look up to know he’s crying again.

“Oh baby, I know. I know I'm so sorry, my love.” She strokes his hair and everything about her is soft. From the washed out apron over her white t-shirt and jeans, to her smooth chocolate skin and wild puff of curls tamed only by a blue head wrap, she looks like home. But, as Percy shakes in her arms, she glares up at the ceiling and the look in her eye goes from concern to venom, as if cursing Olympus from her spot. Clarisse always assumed Percy got his fire from his father, but she was wrong. He definitely got it from his mother.

Seeming to remember they’re in a hallway, Sally secures an arm around Percy’s shoulders and turns to usher him inside, when her eyes land on Clarisse for the first time. She must recognize the Camp Half-Blood t-shirt, because she doesn’t ask why she’s there, or even a name, she just tilts her head towards the door with warm eyes that say follow me.

Clarisse hesitates in Percy and Sally’s doorframe, and one peek inside she’s hit almost violently what a home looks like. There is flour floating in the air, an entirely too full backpack leaned against the kitchen counter tangled up in the legs of stools surrounding the island. And three distinct pairs of shoes all lined up right beside the door. She thinks that’s what pushes her over the edge. The way the shoes look like a family on their own, the seams stretched, but stubbornly intact, laces frayed but still reaching for each other. Or maybe it’s the way she can taste the care put into the brownies being baked, all based on smell alone. Or maybe it’s the lines drawn on the wall door frame signifying how Percy’s grown over the years. Or maybe it's all of it combined—the comfort surrounding her, making her feel suddenly claustrophobic. Whatever it is, it’s why, when Sally turns around to see why she’s so far behind, she coughs out a weak,“M’gonna—gotta take—I have to call….someone.”

Sally’s eyes soften, and the closest Clarisse has gotten to confessing everything was when Percy was sobbing in her arms at the beach, but it’s tempting now, as well. She lets go of Percy with one arm and reaches into a bag sat by the door, pulling out some kind of travel humidifier.

“Take your time.”

Clarisse pulls out a drachma as the door creaks to a close, and despite her loss for words earlier, she’s misting the air, flipping her coin and calling out Silena Beauregard with no thought required.

She’s braiding strings with such focus that Clarisse has to call her name three times before she looks up.

“Oh! Hey, babes, we didn't think we’d hear so soon!”

Clarisse clears her throat and tries to think how insane she’d sound if she gave her reasoning as, ‘Percy’s house is a home and I'm not built for it, and I think all of the love in that apartment would crush me slowly.’ And decides to just go with, “Yeah we just made it to Sally’s.”

Silena nods, an odd look on her face. “Did you—”

“Tell her? No. No I didn't—well, neither of us did. But it’s fine. Not the thing. That we didn't tell her. She knows.” Clarisse is aware she sounds like she’s being held at gunpoint, (Well. A regular person being held at gunpoint.) but she can’t do anything about it.

Silena’s got a concerned frown on her face, and she’d never say this out loud, but she’s kind of proud of the fact that Clarisse’s nervous breakdown is so powerful, that for the first time in weeks, Silena’s eyes are dry. She broaches her next question carefully. Delicately. “How does she—”

“Know? Percy said ‘it’s Annabeth’ and looks on the verge of total collapse, I mean like a strong wind could come in  and he’ll fucking crumble.  So. Y’know. Educated guess.”

Silena winces at her words and breathes deeply, as if steadying herself, and before she can say anything Clarisse lets out a frustrated groan, throws her hands in the air, and looks at Silena more helpless than she’s ever been and says. “It’s not good. He’s not good—worse than we expected, and you know what we expected. I’ve seen people die and I've seen people grieve. I’ve never seen this.”

Silena is silent for a long time before she levels Clarisse’s gaze with a quiet remembering beneath the haze of uncertainty.

“You know, I've only met my mother once in my entire life. I was 10 years old and it was my first night at camp. She came to me in a dream. I was sitting in her lap in a field and she was stroking my hair. She said, ‘My dear, a lot of things are about to happen, you’ve learned a lot today and you will continue to learn tomorrow. But tonight, I’m going to tell you a story. And I want you to remember this for the rest of your life’.”

“That's not ominous at all.”

Silena snorts and shakes her head, “It wasn’t like that, she really did tell me a story. Can I tell you?”

“Can I interrupt with cynicism every now and then? I started a conversation with you about feelings. On purpose. I need to maintain some semblance of myself.”

Silena huffs. “You get three.”

“I’ll take it. What’d your mom say?”

“Once, eons ago, Zeus—,”

“Couldn’t keep it in his pants?”

Silena deadpans.

“Sorry. Tell me, really.”

“After Zeus found out Prometheus had created human beings without permission, after he was sent away to be punished, Zeus decided that he couldn't stand the idea that one of his underlings created something he couldn't. So Zeus set out to create better ones. They had four arms, four legs, two chests, and two heads. But, they shared their mind, their heart, and their soul.  And they were beautiful. And powerful. They were smarter and stronger than the being on earth and Zeus was afraid that they would rise against him. So, he separated them. And he released them into the earth. As time went on and he monitored the pairs that he'd sent out, they all seemed to find each other, no matter how far apart in the earth he put them, no matter what adversaries or conflicts he orchestrated, they found each other and learned from each other, they loved each other. It wasn't always romantic love, but it was real and deep and infinite.

“People think it's soulmates that are the other half of a person, but they're not, not really. We're a whole person on our own. A soulmate is like an anchor. Without an anchor you still have a boat, but you’re untethered at sea. Even though you're complete on your own, you aren’t supposed to be without them. You’re built to be together, always. Your hearts click into place. And once they do, it is impossible to tear them apart again. And, Gods help you if you try to. That’s why these people  loved so endlessly it was dangerous. They started and finished wars for each other. Hunted and killed creatures thought to be immortal for each other. Burned cities to ashes for each other. The love of soulmates, if provoked, became weapons of mass destruction.

“I don’t pretend to know whether or not soulmates still exist. But if they do, I think Annabeth was his. And I think Percy was hers. And I think a part of them both knew it.

“You don't ever really recover from losing someone, do you? You don't ever really fill the hole they left. I think you just grow to live with it. Grow large enough around it, so that one day you don’t notice it as much. Growing big enough for Annabeth is gonna take a long time for all of us. But Percy….his anchor is gone and he’s lost in the dark. That’s what we do. We hold him up to the light, the way she did, for as long as we can.”

Things are a blur again after that, because suddenly she’s wandering inside, and Sally is taking one look at her and deciding she is exhausted, and though she can’t see Percy, she can smell salt in the sheets, and it’s almost worse than the garbage because she feels like an intruder, and the salt gets stronger as she cries harder, until there is nothing but the inky dark and one thought in her head.

How is she supposed to hold him up  when she’s one of the shadows pulling him down? Clarisse hasn’t had a demigod dream in 2 years.

It’s one of the perks of being an Ares kid. Their dreams are all courtesy of the big man himself. Typically, her dreams involve her father’s torment, his daily dose of punishment for not being the best in every possible way. But, she can’t complain too much. It’s the same bullshit about her being a disappointment. Her mother being ashamed, her father’s legacy being tarnished, etc., etc.

She knows her siblings get it worse, especially the ones who’re too young for missions; he’s laid off Clarisse considerably since she started going on quests and scouting missions. At least she gets them once a week, and he gives her breaks when she’s on missions. She hasn’t had a demigod sanctioned Dream since this whole mess started. She’d like to think her father wanted to give them peace while they grieve, but based on the way Sam was shaking in his bed two nights ago, it’s probably Hermes or Athena telling him to lay off Clarisse specifically.  

All this to say, it’s a surprise when she ends up in an unfamiliar temple when she drifts into unconsciousness. It’s less of a surprise when she sees the architect of this disaster herself, Her Ladyship, Athena. 

Clarisse should probably bow. Or at least nod her head. But suddenly her ears are filled with Conner sniffling, and Malcom’s voice giving out, and Will’s desperate foot tapping almost drowned out by the crinkle of page after page on how to ease nightmares. And all she can see is Silena’s perfect manicure, marred by her incessant nail biting, Katie’s dying sunflowers, and Beckendorf’s surgeon hands shaking and spasming like she's never seen. All she can feel is the earth trembling beneath her feet, fingers tangled with Annabeth's necklace, Percy sobbing in her arms, and she can't find it in herself to show an ounce of respect to the woman that made it all possible.

Athena stands before her in a simple chiton and a far-too-pleased-with-herself smirk, and it takes everything in Clarisse not to smack it off. “You’ve done well, my child.” Her voice is definitive and filled with a disgusting note of pride. “I knew I chose wisely.”

“Chose the best liar, you mean? The best at casual and constant cruelty? Sound familiar?”

Her nostrils flare, but that’s the only acknowledgement she’ll show of  Clarisse saying anything at all. “We have new information regarding the prophecy. There will be a package beside you when you wake, but I figured you’d like to get the reasoning  behind it from the source. You’re welcome.”

Athena snaps her fingers, and before she can blink, Clarisse is in a completely different place. 

She’s in a house. She’s by the door, as if she just walked inside. It’s only one story, with lilac walls, a crouching ceiling, and tiny windows. She does a double take when she looks outside and sees a barrier like the one at camp encasing the place, seemingly shrouding it amidst what has to be miles of foliage. Then, she hears papers rustle. 

She hears a voice. 

Holy shit.

“Annabeth?” She whispers incredulously as she whirls around to find blonde curls tumbling down a hunched back, with crossed legs, tense shoulders, and shaking fingers frantically sorting through piles of handwritten notes. “Annabeth!” 

Her shoulders slump lower now, and she turns around so hesitantly she seems almost resigned.

“Clarisse.”

“Oh my gods, Annabeth. What the fuck.”

She must recognize something in Clarisse’s voice, because she snaps her eyes up and they widen in disbelief, “Wait—you’re not….this isn’t—Clarisse? Can you he….” Her voice keeps fading in and out, and Clarisse might actually fall to her knees because holy fucking shit. “—are you really here? Is this really—,”

“You bitch.”

Annabeths eyes fill with tears and light up as she smiles—like a real genuine smile—and Clarisse wants to live here forever, wants to bottle her up, wants to show Percy–

Fuck.

Percy.

She shouldn’t be here. It should be him getting to take in her maga-watt smile, him getting to see her face not in a picture or in a glossed up memory, but in person in all her imperfect glory.

“Oh my gods you’re here, how are you—,” Annabeth starts, but Clarisse cuts her off.

“Your mother sent me, she said they ‘have new information regarding the prophecy’. We may not have much time.”

Annabeth nods, straightens, and ties her hair up—which in Annabeth means she’s figured out something big. She can almost see how fast her brain is working, putting the pieces together. Whatever this revelation is, it must still be fresh, because Annabeth seems scattered. The gears in her head turn faster than everyone else’s; she has to grind them to a halt in order to catch everyone else up. Clarisse doesn’t want to do too much damage to the already fragile machine, so she eases Annabeth off the gas,  slows her a bit until she can stop on her own.

“I just figured it out. I can’t believe it took me this long. It felt like an impossible question at the time but now I realize…..It’s strange—hard to explain.”

“I know. Just try.”

“Single choice ... end his days…..Cursed blade….It will always protect its owner.”

“What will?”

“It tried to warn me, actually. It got so hot whenever he….It burned every time.”

“What burned?”

“It’s like they said, I’m the thing that ties them to each other. It’s only fitting.”

“What is? Annabeth, why did your mother send me here? What do you know?”

Clouds form in her eyes, but they dissolve once she snaps to attention. “Hestia visited camp once. After I got kidnapped. Everyone was celebrating Luke's ‘death’. Except for Percy, but I could tell he wanted to. He just didn't want to hurt my feelings. When everyone else went to bed and I was left alone at the firepit, she appeared. I can’t remember how the conversation started, but I was crying, I think. I kept whispering ‘he promised’. She looked me in the eye and said, ‘A promise becomes a curse when it is broken.’ Then she disappeared.” 

“That doesn’t seem very helpful.”

“It wasn’t at the time. But I understand now. Luke gave me my dagger, and he swore on it that he’d never hurt me. That he’d protect me from danger, that he’d never leave, that he would be my family.”

“Annabeth…”

“No! Don’t you get it? He promised to do those things and he didn’t. He’s hurt me more than anyone, he’s actively put me in danger, he abandoned me. Luke promised me, on my dagger, that he'd protect me. He broke that promise.”

Oh. 

Oh.

“A promise…”

“Becomes a curse when it is broken.” Annabeth finishes. “So you think—”

“I know.”

“But the prophecy says it’s the hero's blade. No matter what you say, Luke is no hero.”

Annabeth shakes her head.“He was a hero, past tense. Just like this blade was his. It doesn’t belong to him anymore. It belongs to me. And if I gave it to someone else...”

“The curse would go with it.”

“Exactly.”

Clarisse is silent for a long time before she says, “Christ, Annabeth.”

“What?”

“You’re a fuckin’ genius.”

Her face splitting grin is back again, and she visibly untenses. “I know, right? I’ve been trying to get you to see that for six years now.”

“Nevermind. I take it back.”

“Nope! Too late! You said a nice thing about me to my face! You’re never living this down!”

“I hate you.”

“I missed you, too.” Her smile fades minutely, “One problem though, my dagger sort of disappeared when I figured it out.”

“Your mom told me I had a package coming. I’m guessing that’s it.”

Annabeth nods, mutters something under her breath like, ‘now she finally listens.’ But shakes her head before Clarisse can give it too much thought. When she looks up, gone is the mega–watt smile and instead is a forced curving of her lips, and her voice is tinny and strained when she asks, “So, how is everyone?”

She’s telling a million little lies at once, Clarisse can see. She’s lying with her manufactured light tone, how heavy the question is weighing on her. She’s lying with her words, poorly masking the person she’s really asking about in the entirety of camp. She’s lying to herself, for asking the question at all. She doesn’t want to know. She doesn't want to know about shaky hands, or broken fingernails, or wilted sunflowers, or weepy Stoll brothers. She especially doesn't want to know how her absence created a perfect storm that is slowly swallowing her best friend up. She is asking, begging, Clarisse to lie to her back. 

So she does. 

But she lets go of the most obvious of pretenses.

“Percy’s okay.” Her shoulders relax marginally. Clarisse wants to tell her that he’s very much not okay, and also ridiculously in love with her, but it’s not her secret to share, unkept as it may have been to everyone else. “He misses you.” 

She looks up—and it’s less the tears on her cheeks, or the croak in her voice, and more the earnest desperation, and the genuine curiosity, as if she doubted it—with which she answers, “Really?” that gets to Clarisse.

 “Yeah, Princess. I mean, we all do. But Percy—,” She’s not even sure how she was going to finish that sentence, but she’s saved from trying when an echoey voice calls ‘time’s up’. 

Annabeth looks up and frantically shouts, “I’m giving it to Percy! It belongs to him now! My dagger, you have to—” 

And then she is gone. 

Again.

Clarisse feels a strange sort of deja vu from the warehouse, as she lies in Percy’s bed, pillow damp with salty tears and cold sweat. As her eyes adjust to the brightness, and her hands graze cool bronze she knows to be a knife, she takes a deep breath. Because something inside her knows that she won’t be able to again for a long time. Her gut is telling her, one way or another: it’ll be over soon.

It’s not a comforting thought. Because she’s in the eye of this hurricane.

And the only way out is through.

Clarisse stumbles out of bed, muscle memory having her duck from a top bunk that doesn't exist. She grabs her bag—which someone must’ve picked up and  laid out for her after she fell asleep—and heads to the bathroom to wash up.

She doesn't look at herself in the mirror once.

She stumbles out back into the bedroom to change and grips her re-packed bag tightly as she steeles herself for what’s waiting for her downstairs.

“Good morning, sweetheart.” Sally calls from the kitchen, kind and seemingly unperturbed by the fact that a teenager she did not give birth to has just walked into her kitchen holding an electric spear. “Did you sleep well?”

“Uh, fine.”

“Real fine or demigod fine because—oh, sit down your plate will be ready in a few minutes—I know what demigod fine is and it’s not fine.”

Hermes and Athena owe her a golden-fucking-medal for not spilling everything right then and there. Sally’s voice is honey and full and trustworthy. She makes it seem like everything is gonna be okay before you even tell her the problem.

Fortunately or unfortunately, Percy crawls into the room before she can say anything.

“G’morning.” He looks about the same as yesterday—which is not a compliment. Suddenly, Clarisse realizes in the midst of her self pity, she forgot to earthquake proof New York yesterday. She wants to ask him about last night but since she felt no tremors she doesn’t want to push their luck.

“Hey,” She broaches. Casual. Easy. Not at all like she’s talking to a walking tornado warning. “I’d say I'm sorry for stealing your bed but, I’m not.”

“Ha-ha. It’s fine. Paul’s at a writing conference so I just crashed with my mom.” Clarisse nods and tries very hard to mask the pity in her eyes at this boy who’s lost his anchor, clinging to his mother like she’s the last dock on earth. She apparently doesn't do a good enough job because Percy lifts a brow with half hearted skepticism. “What? No jokes about me being a mama's boy?”

She really doesn’t want to. But she knows when you’re hurting like he is, the only thing worse than the wound itself, is people acting differently because of it. So she shrugs, feigning apathy.

“I just figured the sentence itself was pathetic enough. No joke required.” He smirks, but she knows he can feel her heart not in it.

“So!” Sally interrupts, sitting down across from Percy and next to Clarisse at the table, before she gets the chance to ask whether or not he used any of the tranquilizer last night. “As much as I love seeing my boy, and meeting his friends, Percy told me last night that you both had something to ask me.”

Percy looked at me for reassurance and she tried to comply but she probably looked more afraid than he did.

“Percy has this…..plan.” Both Percy and his mother flinch and Clarisse wonders if she’s said something wrong. But it passes before she can ask. “To stop Kronos.”

Percy explains Nico's visit, the plan and what they needed from Sally, who looks less and less convinced the more Percy explains. “I don’t like it. Percy, it's dangerous, even for you.”

“I know but mom—”

“You want me to bless this, I mean—”

"Mom, I know. I could die. But—"

“You could die! Percy—”

“It was supposed to be me!” Percy interrupts, hands slamming on the table, eyes suddenly swimming. He takes a quivering breath and shakes his head almost violently. “M’sorry Mama, I’m sorry for shouting, I just….Annabeth is dead. I’m the one in the prophecy, I had time to deal with it, she wasn’t supposed to…...I spent all this time knowing, I wouldn’t have to….losing her was never in the cards. I never thought I’d have to…….” He puffs out a long sigh and wipes his face.

“Annabeth was the one that was supposed to live, Mama. I have to do this. I have to do this for her. Please let me do this for her.”

Sally stares at the table. She looked like she was trying not to cry. She squares her shoulders in what Clarisse has come to recognize as mournful resolution. She feels as if she’s witnessing something epic, historical and she realizes it’s because she knows what Sally is about to say. And Clarisse doesn’t know whether to be relieved or terrified.

“Percy, I give you my blessing.”

There were a couple times where Clarisse lamented to Chris that the toilets at Camp Half-Blood smelled like death.

The second she enters the Underworld, she vows to never complain again.

Percy leads her through a cluster of boulders he refers to as ‘harp-dude’s rocks’ and down what seems like a never ending staircase. They end up at the base of a cliff, on a shore of black volcanic sand. To their right, the River Styx gushes from the rocks and roars off into the darkness. The current swirls with dashed hopes—broken toys, ripped-up college diplomas, wilted homecoming corsages—all the dreams people had thrown away as they'd passed from life into death.

“This is it, I guess.” Percy says, and Clarisse is about to ask if there's any possible way she can get him to take a deep breath and go back to camp, but she's interrupted by the shimmering of a ghost. It looks so much like her father, she almost calls him Dad, but then she looks into his eyes. She has a pretty good guess at who this is, and Percy beats her to confirm it.

“Achilles.”

"I warned the other one not to follow my path.” He speaks with a foreboding certainty that makes Clarisse’s skin crawl. “Now I will warn you."

"Luke? You spoke with Luke?"

"Do not do this," he said. "It will make you powerful. But it will also make you weak. Your prowess in combat will be beyond any mortal's, but your weaknesses, your failings, will increase as well."

This guy must be big fun at parties.

"You mean I'll have a bad heel?" Percy snorts. "Couldn't I just, like, wear something besides sandals? No offense."

He scoffs down at his bloody foot. "The heel is only my physical weakness, demigod. My mother, Thetis, held me there when she dipped me in the Styx. What really killed me was my own arrogance. Beware! Turn back!"

As quickly as he appeared, he was gone.

“Nice guy.” Percy mumbles, toeing off his shoes. “Percy, are you sure about this?” Clarisse asks. Suddenly, none of this feels right.

“Don't go soft on me now, LaRue.” Percy jokes. “Nico told me to imagine one spot of my body that will remain vulnerable. He said ‘If you lose sight of what keeps you mortal, the River Styx will burn you to ashes. You will cease to exist’. So I focus on one point, take a dip and we get the hell outta here.”

“Or you’ll burn alive and I’ll get a front row seat.”

“It’ll be fine. Probably hurt like hell, but I'll be fine. Trust me.” She nods and Percy is digging in his pocket to hand her Riptide and a photograph. The photograph. The one from the Big House that got them into this shitshow in the first place. Gods, he’s been carrying this around with him.

“Hold onto this for me, yeah?”

“Sure.”

“And, hey. Thanks.”

“It’s no big.”

“No. I mean, yeah, thanks for that but, I mean, everything. Thanks for looking out for me.”

“Oh. Yeah, well. You helped me once.” That was different and they both know it, but Percy doesn't call her out on it. Instead he stretches his arms. “Don't worry, your secret’s safe with me.”

“What secret?”

“That you're a good friend, Clarisse.”

She wants to scream. She wants to punch every god in the face several times. She wants this insane amount of guilt to stop messing with her head. She wants Annabeth to not be dead. She wants to confess. She wants to take Percy to the one person that can fix what she has broken in him. She wants to stop lying, to stop the guilt. She wants to go back in time. She wants to. Fucking. Scream.

Instead, she does what she’s been doing this entire time. She pretends.

She shrugs.

“Whatever. Go choke on liquid fire.”

He winks at her—the little shit—and steps into the river.

In seconds he’s completely submerged, and after a minute passes, she realizes he’s struggling under the current. She has never seen Percy struggle in water before. The more his arms flail the less she cares about the curse working. She wants to pull him out—save him from the unknown miseries—when suddenly, he stills.

He cocks his head as if listening for something.

Then, with complete ease, he turns toward shore, and swims right up to the edge. His eyes are open but unseeing; his expression is desperate. A beat passes, and in an instant he bursts out of the river.

He looks somehow anguished and hopeful, and his eyes search the banks with tenacity. He scrambles up, immediately tries to start walking, but he trips. Clarisse goes to help him steady himself; he grips her arms like a vice.

“Where is she?” His voice scares her almost as much as the look in his eyes.

“Woah, woah, woah, easy, easy—”

“She was right here, where'd she go? She couldn't've gone that far she was right—”

“Who? Percy, no one was here.”

“Annabeth.”

Fuck.

“She was here, she pulled me out. I was drowning in the river, and she held out her hand, she made me remember—don't look at me like she was here, I know it.” He’s got the same manic glint in his eye she saw two weeks ago, but for the first time since that day on the dock, he looks a little less broken.

Clarisse knows for a fact she wasn’t but she can’t explain why, for obvious reasons, so she just stands there. Listening to Percy ramble on with soul-crushing hope about him taking her hand, and remembering, and how she smiled, Clarisse, she smiled and she laughed, a real laugh, she was right here—

Then his gaze locks on something behind her. The light in his eyes is extinguished, and for the second time, Clarisse is afraid of him.

She turns and sees something almost as scary as him. An army of the dead marched toward us. A hundred skeletal Roman legionnaires led the way with shields and spears. Behind them came an equal number of British redcoats with bayonets fixed. In the middle of the host, Hades himself rode a black-and-gold chariot pulled by nightmare horses, their eyes and manes smoldering with fire.

She’s about to pull out her spear when Percy growls next to her and—

Oh.

The River Styx exploded. A black tidal wave smashed into the armies. Spears and shields flew everywhere. Clarisse crouched and watched in awe and horror as Roman zombies began to dissolve, smoke coming off their bronze helmets.

The redcoats lowered their bayonets, but Percy didn't wait for them. He charged. It was the most insane thing Clarisse has ever witnessed. A hundred muskets fire at Percy, point blank.

All of them missed.

By a lot.

He crashed into their line and started hacking with Riptide. Bayonets jabbed. Swords slashed. Guns reloaded and fired.

Nothing touched him.

He whirled through the ranks, slashing redcoats to dust, one after the other, like it was nothing. He laughed as he did it. It was like he was no longer Percy. He is a weapon of pure destruction.

He is a fucking hurricane.

He broke through the enemy line and leapt into the black chariot. Hades raised his staff. A bolt of dark energy shot toward him, but he deflected it off my blade easily and slammed into him. The god and Percy both tumbled out of the chariot. Percy’s knee ends up planted on Hades's chest. He’s holding the collar of Hades' royal robes in one fist, and the tip of his sword was poised right over the gods face.

And then.

Silence.

Hades swallowed. For the first time in Clarisse’s life, she saw a god fear.

“Now, Jackson, listen—”

Percy snarled, an ugly look face. “Cut the bullshit. Where is she?”

Hades melted into nothing, leaving Percy with empty black robes in his shaking hands.

He cursed, an odd look on his face, and rose to his feet, breathing heavily. His clothes were slashed to pieces and full of bullet holes, but he was fine. Not a mark on him.

Clarisse’s mouth hung open. She closed it, but it just fell back down again.

“I think the river thing worked,”  Percy says, distractedly.

“No shit, you think?” She laughs partly in shock, but Percy shakes his head. “I don't understand.”

“What? What is it?”

“He had me.”

“What do you mean?”

“He had me in the palm of his hand. And he did nothing.”

“I don't know what you think just happened but he most definitely did not ‘have you’. Trust me you beat him.”

“No, you don't understand. Three years ago, on the quest with Zeus’s bolt, my mother was dead. And the first thing Hades did when I got down here was try and get me to negotiate for her life. He's not on the Olympians side in this war. Everyone knows I would do anything to get her back. He knows that, and he has her. He has Annabeth, so he has me. And he did nothing. He let me go. It doesn't make sense.”

Shit. 

“Maybe he doesn't know yet,” Clarisse scrambles, “Or maybe he was afraid. He might not even know he has her, he must get thousands of souls a day, right?” When Clarisse ends up down here for real, she’s going to the lowest pits of Asphodel.

“Yeah. Yeah. You're right. I guess. It just feels off.”

“Hey, the river worked. Let's just focus on that. That was the goal? The river, not Annabeth, Right?”

“Yeah. Yeah. I guess you're right.”

Clarisse breathes a sigh of stale relief. “Let’s get the fuck outta here, yeah? Underworld smells like ass.”

He lets out a half hearted chuckle. “Yeah, yeah, okay LaRue. Let’s go.”

But, before she moves toward the steps, Clarisse reaches over and squeezes Percy’s hand. It says a million things at once.

I’m sorry. I’m here. It’ll be over soon.

She’s not sure why, but she knows that for certain.

One way or another: it’ll all be over soon.

It’s not a comforting thought. Because she’s in the eye of his hurricane.

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 bedside 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 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 perv). 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 speaks for her. 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 for the first time in three days. Annabeth grips at her forearms with so much force, Clarisse 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,’ and blows 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 fathers 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 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 of 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 do this.

“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, ok?’

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 was 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’sbarely 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, Clarrise 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.

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 Clarrisse. He speaks again, looking at Clarisse like it’s a secret she should 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.

...

The first time she learned about the concept of death was when she was six years old. Her aunt had passed away in a car crash. They weren’t close. In fact, she hadn’t even met her. Apparently, Clarisse was born two years into an eight-year-sisterly feud, and by that time, her mother wasn’t even sure what the argument was about—she just refused to back down. Clarisse remembers that day well, when her mother sat her down in the living room and told her to listen up.

“You know your Aunt Angela? The one Mama doesn’t speak to?”

She nodded.

“Well, she’s dead.”

She stared blankly.

“Do you know what ‘dead’ means?” Clarisse shook her head. “It means somethin’ happened, and it made them not alive any more. Their heart stopped beatin’, their brain stopped thinkin’, their chest stopped breathin’.”

“Where do they go?” Clarisse asked.

“Their bodies? You bury ‘em, in nice boxes so bugs can't eat ‘em. Or you burn ‘em to ashes and keep ‘em somewhere safe.”

This was good information, but not what Clarisse was asking. “Okay, but where do they go?”

“I just told you.”

“No Mama, where does it go? All of their them. It has to go somewhere, if they’re not here. Their stuff, all of their thing, where does it go?”

Her mother didn’t answer, just told her not to cry and to pick out something nice for the wake.

Clarisse wonders where Annabeth’s gone. She knows she’s not dead, but she's certainly not here, and she doesn’t understand where all of her could’ve went. It hasn't been a week, but Clarisse can already feel the spaces she used to fill with all of her. She’s not even dead, and Clarisse is haunted by her ghost. The ghost of her energy, and her pride, and her books, and her laughter, and her sketching, and her logic, and her smiles. She’s everywhere and Not Here all at the same time, and Clarisse can’t stand it.

And, she isn’t the only one.

After the incident, she stayed at Percy’s bedside until the medicine ran out and he woke up. He nodded at her but didn’t ask why she was there, or why she was holding his hand, which she appreciated. She called for Will to disconnect him from the I.V. and pretended not to notice the tremor in his hands when he approached Percy’s arm. Will tried to explain what he was doing as he was doing it, but Percy didn’t seem to hear him. He stared blankly at the opposite wall, unflinching when Will removed the needle in his arm. When he was done, he shuffled almost zombie-like through camp.

She doesn’t know where Annabeth went, but she’s certainly Not Here because if she was, Percy’s eyes would be bright rather than bloodshot. He would be smiling, not clenching his jaw. If he noticed the whispers or the staring he didn’t show it. He just kept walking until he got to the edge of the woods and climbed one of the rock clusters facing the trees. And he sat like that, staring at the forest with his back to everyone else, for the rest of the day.

It was too quiet.

The sun was shining, the birds were chirping, and the sky was clear. Normally, kids would be swimming in the canoe lake, playing volleyball, laughing and talking on the beach. But today, people were hesitant to cough. Those who cared for Annabeth—which was most people—were dealing with their own grief. The one or two who didn’t were too afraid of Percy to make much noise.

Dinnertime rolls around while Clarisse is sharpening Maimer. Chris comes to get her with a sad smile and open arms, and she hates him just a little bit. Hates him for being good to her when she’s the one who made everything quiet.

She sits at her cabin table but doesn’t eat anything. And when it's time for the campfire, she finds herself searching the faces for Percy, wondering if he decided to come when someone answers her unspoken question.

“He’s not here.” Grover Underwood’s hooves are currently attempting to sit in the space next to her. After he settles, he nods in greeting, “Clarisse.” “Goat.”

“He’s on that boulder; I passed him on the way in. Has he been there all day?”

She nods, and it doesn’t seem to surprise him.

“He eat anything?”

“Have you?” She deadpans.

Grover exhales. “Yeah, I didn’t think so.”

They don’t talk for a while, leaving only Austin’s half-hearted strumming to fill the silence.

“Thank you.” When Clarisse furrows her brow, he elaborates. “Juniper told me you’ve been looking out for Percy.”

“Oh. Yeah, well. Anna—”, She almost says ‘Annabeth made me promise,’ but then she remembers Annabeth wasn’t supposed to know she was going to die, so she cuts herself off. “...She saved me.”

Grover nods like that's all the explanation necessary.

Neither of them speak again for the rest of the campfire, and sitting next to Grover in heavy silence, she finds herself wondering about where people go again. She doesn’t know where Annabeth is, but Clarisse wishes she’d come back. Because it’s only been a day and she doesn’t think she can handle her being Not Here much longer.

And that was before the first nightmare.

It's not like he woke her up. Clarisse was staring at the ceiling, counting backwards from 100, waiting for sleep, when she noticed the lightbulb was shaking.

Then she hears the screaming.

“ANNABETH!!!” Percy’s cry is raw and guttural and heart broken.

Without thinking, she throws off her covers and, despite the ground quaking beneath her, she manages to stumble out the door, where she runs headfirst into a half dressed and panting Beckendorf.

“Percy. He’s having a nightmare.”

“Yeah no shit, Beck. What do we—”

“ANNABETH!!!”

Will is running towards them but he falls every time the earth beneath him quakes. Which is every other second. When he finally makes his way over to them, Beckendorf has to grab his shoulders to keep him upright.

“Do you have the—”

Percy screams again, and they all flinch.

“Yeah, hurry.”

The three of them are hauling ass to the Poseidon cabin when Beckendorf freezes.

“Mother of Zeus.” He’s staring slack-jawed at the ocean where what can only be described as monster waves are crashing at the shore, each one bigger than the last.

Clarisse has to tear her eyes away in order to shove them both in the direction of Percy's cabin.

“This better work, Solace.”

After what feels like forever, they finally get to him. Beckendorf kicks the door open and Clarisse practically throws Will at Percy’s bedside. Percy is thrashing violently around in his bed, tears streaming down his face, alternating between whimpering and crying out Annabeth's name.

Will is staring at him, frozen in his spot. Clarisse punches him. That seems to snap out of it and immediately looks to her and Beckendorf. 

“Hold him down.”

Clarisse grabs his arms and pins them down at his sides; Beckendorf goes for the legs. Unfortunately, that only seems to escalate his panic, and he bellows, “NOOO!”

“Will…” Clarisse urges.

“I’m sorry—the earthquake—”

Another scream.  

“Will!”

“I keep missing!”

Another tremor.

“Dammit, Will!”

As soon as Will punctures his skin, Percy’s eyes fly open.

“ANNABETH!”

Beckendorf pushes Clarisse out of the way and looks into Percy’s eyes with a cool she wishes she had right now. “Hey, hey, Percy. You’re alright. You're at camp, you’re safe, but you gotta breathe, okay? Can you do that, man? Can you breathe?”

Percy looks like a caged wild animal, and he’s hyperventilating. “Annabeth? Where’s Anna—?”

“She’s not here right now, okay? You’ve gotta focus on breathing right now. Just breathe, okay? In and out, real slow. Yeah, that’s it, you got it, man, just keep breathing.”

Percy keeps his gaze locked on Beckendorf and attempts to match his breathing—until the sedative hits and his eyes flutter closed. Not even a full minute goes by before he’s muttering Annabeth’s name again. She and Beckendorf look accusingly at Will, and he raises his palms.

“I can’t stop the dreams, I can only limit his response to them.”  

Beckendorf wipes the sweat off his brow and winces when Percy mutters something about genius and promises. “There’s nothing you can do?”

Will opens his mouth and closes it three times before he answers. “I can do some research in the morning, but for now he’s gonna have to tough it out.”

“His best friend is dead; I don’t think ‘toughing it out’ is an option.”

Will shrinks into himself a little, and Clarisse would feel bad for the guy if she had the emotional capacity to feel anything but guilt.

With his head still ducked, Will mutters something about sleep and tiptoes out of the cabin, leaving Clarisse and Beckendorf standing over Percy’s bed.

Percy is tossing and turning and crying in his sleep, and the masochist in Clarisse refuses to let her look away. This is her fault. Every writhe and sob and second that he’s dreaming is her fault. She’s so busy hating herself that she doesn’t notice when Beckendorf urges chairs behind them. She doesn’t have the energy to ask what he’s doing, so she just raises an eyebrow.

“What? It’s not like either of us were planning on going anywhere.”

He’s right, and it hits her that this is her life now. It was pretty weird before this, but at least she could just stab at whatever it was and it’d go away. Unfortunately, you can't stab feelings. So now, she’s taking up an all-night vigil, at the bed of someone who, until last year, she referred to as ‘Prissy Jackson’, with her Aphrodite girl best friend's boyfriend. That's weirder than any monster Tartarus could throw at her.

She and Beckendorph lull into watchful silence filled only with Percy’s muffled whimpers and Beckendorf’s occasional shifting.

“This is worse than I thought.” Beckendorf’s lips had pulled into a tight grimace and his eyes didn’t leave Percy’s form as he spoke. “I knew it’d be bad. I thought about what he’d do if anything happened to her, but this? It’s worse than I expected.”

He doesn’t have to specify who. Clarisse can’t really think about all the implications of that sentence, so she focuses on one. “You thought about it before? Jesus, Beck. Why?”

“Because depending on whose fault it was, like directly, Percy might join Kronos. And then we’d be fucked. Like, royally.”

“I wouldn’t blame him.”

“Me neither. But, this? This is worse than him only blaming the gods.”

“What’s worse than that?”

Beckendorf takes a deep breath and leans back in his chair. “Him blaming himself.”

And that’s it. That's why her remorse is making it hard to breathe. That’s the icing on the fucking cake. Because she did this. Every sob, every tremor, every second of this waking nightmare, is her fault. And he thinks it’s his own.

“He wasn’t even there. How could he blame himself?” Clarisse knows the answer, but she’s way past self-preservation at this point. Hearing what she knows to be true will be the twisting of the knife she deserves.

“Exactly. He wasn’t there. He told me last year that he survived lava being thrown at him—something about being harder to burn because he’s a son of Poseidon. He’ll think he could’ve protected her somehow if he was there. And, knowing Percy, there’s no way we can convince him otherwise.”

She could. She could wake him up, grab him by the shoulders right now, and tell him it’s not his fault. That he didn’t do anything wrong, that Annabeth is alive and well, bored in a safe house in New Jersey.

But she doesn’t. Instead she tells Beckendorf she can take the first shift watching him and that he should take one of the bunks.

“You're right.” He stretches as he stands up. “We’re gonna need some rest for tomorrow.”

She furrows her brow. “What's tomorrow?”

He collapses on a bed across the room and spits out the answer to a question she wishes she hadn’t asked.

“Annabeth’s funeral.”

Clarisse has been to three funerals in her life.

Annabeth’s is by far the worst.

Campers gather in the Big House led by the Athena cabin. Malcolm is carrying Annabeth’s shroud, and Clarisse almost does a double take. It’s beautiful, the grey shimmers, changing color with every shift of the fabric.

She can’t wait to watch it burn.

The sky is cloudy and dark, which she finds weird, considering how bright it was yesterday. Then she remembers who was scheduled to arrive early this morning.

“Hey.” Speaking of the devil, Thalia Grace appears next to her. Her hair is choppy as always, but she’s without her signature punk makeup and accessories. Her eyes are red and her hair is wild. Basically, she looks like hell, and Clarisse is hit with another soul-crushing wave of guilt.

The year Thalia got de-tree-ified, before she and Annabeth headed off to boarding school, Clarisse and Thalia sort of became friends. Thalia was a bit stand-offish to Percy in the beginning, so whenever he and Annabeth were together, Clarisse would spar with her.

(Needless to say, they ended up sparring a lot.)

“Hey.” Her throat is hoarse from disuse, so the word comes out as a mangled croak.

She doesn’t say anything else and neither does Clarisse. They’re standing at the back, watching campers settle in. Beckendorf had ushered a sniffling Silena in one of the back rows, with one arm on her lap and another around a seemingly inconsolable Tyson. Conner hasn’t stopped shifting in his chair since he sat down, and Katie is gripping Travis’s hand. Will is whispering to Michael in hushed tones, and Malcolm’s knuckles have turned white as he grips Annabeth's shroud. Grover and Juniper stand in the far left, both looking ragged. Even Drew Tanaka looks worse for wear in the third row, but Clarisse can barely acknowledge it. She’s too busy watching the front row. Percy had arrived at the Big House before everyone else, skipping breakfast in favor of staring at the picture of Annabeth that they put up, gripping his thighs like the image was causing him physical pain.

Chiron clops on stage with his head hung. It was as if every bit of shame was weighing him down, and when he clears his throat, he seems to regret what he’s about to say, before he says it.

“Campers. You are gathered here for a day that I’ve prayed many times I wouldn’t see so soon.” Thalia mutters something under her breath, but she can barely hear over the roaring in her ears. Chiron looks as if he wants to say something more, but glances at Percy in the first row and thinks better of it.

“Annabeth’s best friend, Percy, will now say a few words.”

Shoulders hunched and without a word, Percy shuffles up to Malcolm and gingerly relieves him of Annabeth’s shroud. Like a man possessed, without so much as a glance up, he makes his way to the hearth. Then hesitates. He turns to place her shroud in the fire, and as soon as the fabric slips from his fingers, his hands begin to shake. A few campers instinctively grab their chairs in preparation for another earthquake, but it doesn’t come. Instead, Percy looks away from the fire, staring straight ahead when he starts to speak.

“I’m supposed to talk about Annabeth. I’m supposed to tell you all about what kind of person she was, but you all knew her. Gods, she’d been here since she was seven, because her parents failed her.”

From the way he spits out the word ‘parents,’ she half expects Athena to shimmer down here to scold him in person.

“You all knew her, so really, I don’t have to tell you how smart she was, or how kind she was. I don’t have to tell you how brave, or good, or beautiful she was. She was all of those things and more; I don’t have to tell you. Instead, I’ll tell you some things you might not know. Some things I never got the chance to say to her.” He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath before he continues.

“When she was five, Annabeth decided that she wanted to be an architect so she could build something permanent. She never changed her mind. When she was seven, her first monster-killing weapon of choice was a hammer. She fought off a hellhound with it all by herself. When she was twelve, she visited the Underworld. She tamed and befriended Cerberus in under three minutes, and they both cried when she had to say goodbye. When she was thirteen years old, Annabeth held the sky for 36 hours. At fifteen, Annabeth looked a ten-foot-tall Sphinx in the eye, and told it that its questions were beneath her. She was right.”

He looks up at the sky, swallowing obvious tears for long enough for Clarisse to notice, process, and get angry about the fact that both her and Chiron are crying too. They aren’t allowed to cry. They don’t deserve to grieve. They’re the ones that killed her.

“Annabeth Chase was the best thing that ever happened to me. She was the daughter of my father’s rival, and she was stubborn, and prideful, and a complete know-it-all, and my favorite person in the world. She taught me the constellations, and she was the first real friend I ever made. She was the first girl I ever danced with, and my first kiss, and she was—is my best friend. She’ll always be my best friend.”

Unable to choke them back anymore, he lets his tears fall freely. He’s allowed. He thinks his best friend is dead. Clarisse knows she’s not, so why are her eyes burning?

“I love her. I loved her before I knew what the word meant. I loved her every day that I knew her, and I never told her.” He looks up at her picture, as if desperate for her to hear him. “I can't believe I never told you. I’m sorry, I never told you, and I didn’t save you, and I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry, Annabeth.”

He breaks then, tears morph into full-body sobs, hunched shoulders into full-on kneeling. Clarisse is paralyzed in her spot until she notices the bulletin board’s shaking and realizes what’s about to happen. She surges forward as fast as she can with the weight of her blame on her back and grabs his shoulders. She’s pulling him up, and squeezing his arms, whispering in his ear; she’s not entirely sure what she’s saying, but it seems to work, because the ground transfers its trembling back to Percy. He’s shaking in her arms, and she half carries him to the best place she can think of—the ocean. 

They collapse on the sand, Clarisse gripping his shoulders in a way she hopes is comforting. She can’t bring herself to speak, knowing the only words she can say to fix this are words she’s not allowed to say. 

She doesn’t try to look back at the Big House. In fact she doesn’t try to lift her head at all until she hears shuffling. Thalia’s combat boots are crunching as she attempts to shuffle through the sand and she plops down next to Percy, disregarding her all black get-up being marred by the dunes. She doesn’t meet either of their eyes, and it’s a long time before she speaks. When she finally does, it’s only two words. “She knew.” 

Percy, who hasn’t moved a muscle since they sat down, looked over at her, wiped his face, and asked, “What?”

“She knew you loved her.” 

Percy sniffs and keeps his eyes on the ocean. “How d’you know?”

“Annabeth's always been self-sufficient. I don’t blame her, after what happened with her dad, she kind of had to be. She didn't want anyone else to look after her. We did, obviously. She was a kid, we had to, but she didn't really see it that way, y’know? She’d beg us to let her take watches or go hunting alone." 

Percy lets out a watery, barely there chuckle. “Yeah, that sounds like her.”

“She always tried to do everything herself. She hated being helped. But, when she saw you on Mt. Tam, she just ran to you. And she hugged you—like really hugged you. I've never seen her do that before, not with me or Grover or....” She trails off and glances warily at the ocean. “Not with anyone else.”

She laughs something hollow as she says, “It’s kinda stupid when you think about it. Like, we were about to die, but she saw you, and she relaxed, and she ran to you, and she let you hold her. I mean, I knew her as a seven-year-old who was running from the stuff kids older than her have nightmares about, and she never hugged me like that. Like she wanted you to hold her. We all took care of her, but she let you. She never let us do that.”

Percy’s trembling again and if her self-hate wasn’t as all encompassing, she’d probably be worried about the fact that being right beside the shore means she’s directly in the kill zone.

“So, you're wrong. She knew. She knew, and she loved you too. She never would’ve let you in if she didn’t.”

“She took care of me too. She…” He swallows hard, like there’s glass in his throat. His face morphs to a quiet rage and the look in his eyes could break stone. “She deserved better.”

“Yeah. She deserved a lot better.”

If she doesn’t leave now, she’s going to start screaming incoherently and another emotional breakdown is kinda the last thing anyone needs right now. So, she looks over Percy’s ducked head and makes eye contact with Thalia, silently asking if she can handle this. Thalia nods, and as Clarisse rises, she registers Percy fingers squeezing her calf and another tiny little piece of her dies on the spot.

She walks for a long time, and she can’t hear anything but the roaring in her ears, so it’s a surprise when she ends up at Zeus’s fist. Well, what remains of Zeus’s fist. She kicks her way through the rubble until she finds herself collapsing on the closest weight bearing boulder she can find. She’s physically exhausted. Clarisse has never felt so much, so intensely, for so long, and her body has an emotional hangover. She’s literally too tired to feel anything else.

“Thought I’d find you here.” She doesn’t have to look up to know Chris’s voice. He sits down next to her on the too-small boulder, and she knows how uncomfortable he must be, and she knows how weird he is about posture so hunching over must be slowly killing him on the inside.

“I don’t wanna talk about it.”

“I know.” He doesn’t move.

“You don’t have to stay here with me.”

“I know I don’t have to stay here. But, I do know about death. I know exactly how much what you’re going through sucks, and I know there's nothing that I could say to make it better. I know how you feel and I won’t let you feel it alone. So, we’ll just sit here in silence, and feel shitty, and watch the grass grow.”

And they do just that.

Thalia had stayed the night, spending her time attempting to convince Percy to go to sleep.

“M’already dreaming.’  He kept repeating. ‘I’ve had this dream before, I’m gonna wake up an-and she’s gonna be here. She’ll be right here when I wake up.”

It was six hours before he gave in.

Her, Thalia, and Will were watching him twitch in the med bay. Will had upped the dosage this time, hoping to suppress the nightmares, but by the way he was shivering, it didn’t work. Will seemed too nervous to move, so it wasn’t surprising when he exhaled as if relieved to be called to tend to a young kid who got a splinter. Clarisse didn’t blame him. Her and Thalia were radiating anger. 

Violent, visceral anger.

“I’ll kill Luke for this. With my own fucking hands, that bastard.” Thalia said to no one in particular. Her hands were in fists, but they way they trembled gave her away.  

“You’ll have to get in line.”

She furrows her brow, glances back at Percy, and seems to understand. “Ah, did he say the same thing?”

Clarisse grimaces remembering the earthquake damage, and how she’d never heard anyone speak with so much conviction as Percy did on the same hospital bed three days ago.

“I’m going to kill him.”  He’d said, gravely serious, with stormy eyes, and a voice so low and steady, that the threat was even worse than if he had yelled. “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.”

“Yeah.” Clarisse answers, feigning indifference. “Yeah, something like that.”

“I should probably go. I need to hunt something and if I stay here any longer, that somethings gonna be the horse.” Clarisse snorts and moves Maimer out of the way so she doesn’t trip.

“Try to keep the earthquakes to a minimum, yeah? I’ve got some shit to do before we destroy Kronos.”

“I’ll do my best.” Thalia claps her on the shoulder, and as she leaves Clarisse wonders if she’s up to the task. And as she watches Percy shiver, she flashes back to four months ago.

(“Annabeth, Silena, and Clarisse had just gotten back from a scouting mission in the city that ended in Annabeth getting a minor slash in her thigh. She was fine, but was ordered to stay overnight in the infirmary. Naturally, Silena insisted on having a sleepover to keep her company. They were switching between teary eyed laughter, and teary eyed confessions, when Annabeth interrupted the deafening silence of 3:28 in the morning.

“I miss him.”

“Which one?” Silena asks, all wide eyes and open heart.

“Both…I guess, I—”, She takes a deep breath and shakes her head. “No. I didn’t know Luke. Everyday, it becomes more apparent that I didn’t know Luke. I don’t miss him, I miss how he made me feel. Like, everything would be okay, y’know? But, I never really knew him. I don’t know him. I know Percy. I miss Percy.” She shifts so Clarisse can see her eyes, all shiny and broken. “What if he never comes back?”

Silena reaches out and takes Annabeth’s hand in both of her own, “He’ll come back,‘Beth. I promise.”)

Clarisse didn’t understand what they meant at the time, because they knew where he was. He was at his apartment in the city, and he was obviously going to come back to camp.

 She understands now. And she hates herself for it.

The plants in the Big House are dying.

Over the past four days Clarisse has found that the only way to not totally snap is to focus on anything other than the people around her. Because the people around her are grieving, and it's palpable and suffocating and herfaultherfaultherfault—

Anyways. Plants.

They’re dying. She’d seen it early this morning, but didn’t think that much about it. She was just relieved to have something to occupy her brain until their head counselor meeting. Katie, of course, is the second one to notice. She’d stood in the middle of Michael Yew’s status report, startling Travis who’d been playing with the hem of her shirt, and immediately began fussing over the browning leaves, wondering aloud how this could’ve happened.

“Isn’t your cabin the one supposed to be keeping them alive?” Michael snapped.

“No, I have my hands full at the strawberry fields. I just figured Silena was watering them for me.”

The Aphrodite girl, whose eyes shone with fresh tears and said in a quiet voice, “That wasn’t me.”

They followed her gaze to the two empty chairs on the far end of the table. The chairs that were supposed to be filled by Percy and Annabeth.

This happened often, throughout the week following the funeral. As soon as any conversation or activity edged close enough to normalcy, the absence of Annabeth would rear its ugly head.

The strangest part about it is, Annabeth wasn’t at camp 24/7 like she used to be. When she was small, and camp was the only place she knew, her presence at camp was heavy and a deficiency of it would’ve been obvious.

But, the year Percy arrived was the year Annabeth ventured out into the real world. Gave her dad a second chance, went to boarding school in New York, and of course, questing anytime the opportunity arose. And, as the rules barring exit from camp faded, so did Annabeth’s steady residence. It’s as if the camp was a living breathing thing, and Annabeth didn’t have to physically be there to be there. The bones of this place were held upright with the knowledge that she’ll be home soon.

“I still think we should call Sally.” Malcolm says, navigating their eyes from empty chairs to himself. “Not just for Percy. Annabeth adored her, she used to iris message the apartment just to talk to her. Sally deserves to know, and maybe she can…”  He gestures back to the empty chairs. “Fix that.”

“The barrier won’t let her in camp. And, Chiron certainly won’t let Percy out if it.” Grover replies, hooves tapping the floor, almost shaking the table.

“Yes, he will.” Clarisse interrupts, with so much conviction in her voice she may as well be charmspeaking. “I’ll take Percy to go see her and bring him back a few days afterwards.”

The group is looking at her like she dropped from the ceiling, so she elaborates, “I’ve got shit to do in the city anyway. Will practically gave me a step-by-step tutorial on how to put Percy to sleep, all I’ve gotta do is show Sally. Then, I do some scouting for a couple days, and swing back around to grab Percy on the way back to camp.”

Connor is bobbing his head, but his eyes are wild and refuse to make direct contact. Silena attempts a smile but it looks more like a grimace because she’s still crying. Michael sneezes. She takes it as a general census in her favor.

They adjourned, and for a moment Clarisse steps outside. She surveys camp with her arms crossed and her eyes squinting almost painfully.

Then she sees him. Her stomach drops. And suddenly she’s done.

She marches around the porch violently, until she finds Chiron looking like the weak old man he is, sitting in his wheelchair looking utterly and completely useless. His mouth opens and closes like a fish when he sees the look in her eyes and reads exactly what kind of conversations they’re going to have. She’s not yet within four feet when he begins his attempts to placate her.

“Clarisse—”

“I can’t keep doing this. It’s not fair, not to me, not to them. We have to tell them.” She’s shaking her head as she grasps the handlebars of his wheelchair, pushing him as roughly as she can without him falling out.

“You know we—”,

“Yes, yes we can because they need to know. They deserve to know.” She begins with desperation in her voice that her father would disprove of.

“It’s not a matter of—”,

“Michael’s broken six bows this week. Katie’s stopped planting sunflowers. Travis hasn’t played a single prank.”  

“Clarisse—”, He tries to interrupt but now that she’s begun, she can’t stop.

“Grover’s eaten half the tin cans in New York. Malcolm doesn’t do his crossword puzzles anymore. Will barely leaves the infirmary, Beckendorf leaves the workshop even less, and that’s just to check up on Silena. Silena hasn’t stopped crying, and neither has Connor, have you ever seen Connor cry before? Ever? Because before this I’ve never seen him cry before—”,

“Clarisse!”

“Look at him!” She throws him around the final bend in the porch, angling him directly at the Poseidon table where Percy is eating lunch. Eating lunch is a stretch, really he’s sitting hunched over a plate of egg whites Grover no doubt forced him to put on his plate. You can see the bags under his eyes from a mile away, and even without them, there's an exhausted, almost empty quality to his normally bright eyes. Even his mess of hair is mopped down, shaggy, covering his forehead. As if he doesn’t have the will to push it off his face.

Chiron has the decency to look sufficiently crushed, and it’s the genuine hopelessness in his voice that listens when he says, “Please. Let’s discuss this inside.”

She pushes him through the doors and stands facing him, waiting for whatever excuse he has lying in wait on his tongue. He surprises her when he says, “I’ve tried.”

“Tried how?”

“I’ve messaged both Athena and Hermes everyday, but it’s as if they’re more convinced in the pan than they were before. I can’t disobey, or they could kill you or anyone who gets in the way.”

She slumps defeated in a chair next to him. The quiet is deafening. They've buried Annabeth alive and now she’s screaming in their heads. They listen to the silence for a long time before Chiron says, “Sunflowers were her favorite.”

“Oh.”

“I think,” He begins carefully, “That’s why Katie stopped growing them.”

He looks as if he’s expecting her to snap at him, so maybe it’s out of some sort of primal spite that she simply answers, “Yeah. Probably.”

“I miss the sunflowers as well. Very much.” He says, his voice quivering, and they both know he’s not talking about sunflowers, but she lets him get away with it. Just this once.

“I’m taking him to go see his mom.” She says, more of a statement than a question, because giving them permission to leave is the bare minimum he can do.

“I’ll make arrangements with Dionysious.” His eyes are contemplative and it’s a while before he says, “Percy’s not doing well.”

“No.” She exhales. “No, he’s not.”

“That was—” Beat. “Expected.”

She nods. And she’s still nodding her entire way back to her cabin, where she throws herself on her bunk, the portrait of epic defeat.

It’s hours before she can drag herself out of bed. She goes straight for the boulders Percy stations himself at every evening. That’s what he does, he wakes up at an ungodly hour of the morning and goes deep into the lake. He doesn’t come out until it's time for lunch where he picks at the food Grover makes for him. After a half-hour of pretending to eat, he goes deep into the woods, for hours hunting god-knows what. (Sometimes they hear faint screams of monsters. They all pretend they don’t.) Then, when it’s time for dinner, he sits on that same rock cluster with a bottle of water, until it’s time for lights out.

He grunts in greeting when she sits down next to him.

“Chirons talking to Dionysious. We’re going to go see your mom for a couple days.”

That gets his attention. His spine snaps straight up and he focuses his wild-animal eyes on her face. “Really?”

“Yeah. We've gotta bring your sleep kit and shit but—”,

“Yeah, yeah whatever, but you can definitely get me to my Mom’s place?” She nods, and then he’s nodding, head bopping worse than Connor’s did earlier and he’s muttering ‘good, good that could work.’, when she has to grab his arm to snap him out of it.

“What? What could work?”

“It’s a long story. Nico’s actually the one who came up with the plan, and he was all frantic in his last message, when he gave me the instructions—”,

“What instructions, Percy? What plan?”

He meets her eyes then. And, for a second, the cold in them thaws, and the emptiness fills, and there’s a promise in them, buried deep. She doesn’t know how, but suddenly she understands two things deep in her core: whatever it is he’s planning on doing, he’s doing it for Annabeth, and Clarisse is going to help him.

“I’m going to bathe in the River Styx.”