Chapter Text
"I can't go another day choking back
I love you.
I feel it in my shoulders when I breathe."
To love someone is firstly to confess: I'm prepared to be devastated by you.
—
But the ache for him is stronger than my anger. I want to speak of something not dead or divine. I want him to live.
—
"Please, I beg you—
he is all that I have,
and you have so many hereos
and the world has so many more.
Let him be soft,
and let him be mine."
—
he wears the smell of blood and death like perfume
there is fire in his eyes
and ice in his veins
but you love him anyway
for he is a star
burning with the light of a thousand suns
(and your world is dark without him)
Chapter One:
As far as he was concerned, the world ended the day it was saved. Under the same sun, Percy watched the survival of an era and the fall of an eon.
The hearth crackled noisily, some distance behind him where the hushed voices of campers rang. It was a melody he'd usually relish in, over smores and the curve of Annabeth's lips, the snort of Grover's laughter harmonizing with the soft glow of the moonlight. It'd always been peace, always his sanity.
None of them knew he was there that night.
He'd like to keep it that way. They didn't deserve the devastating gravity of his presence now. The weight of breathing the same air as something that could decimate the planet they'd worked so hard to save.
He couldn't bear the weight of their eyes.
His back was to the warm light emanating from the heart of camp, the thin fabric of his camp shirt still wearing the golden ash of monsters like glitter, like an accessory. Like a badge of honor. A reminder of their victory, of the graves that would be added to Camp Half-Blood's cemetery.
It'd only been three days since Gaea's demise. Three days since the sky split in colors of ichor and flame. Three days since the air calmed, and the spot beside him grew colder in her absence.
The water's skin rippled the visage of the moon, a sliver of a smile taunting him with its haunting reflection and untouchable countenance. The only time you saw the celestial body tremble was in the shivering waves.
The thought feels heavy. Like the pondering of the moon's fragility was a challenge to gravity, to celestial law, daring Percy to question the formidable being and punish his ignorance with the weight of the sky.
Percy's held it before. He's sustained bloodier burdens, allowed his lungs to be carved open, burnt to ash and reborn to accommodate the gruesome breath of Tartarus itself.
Even now, in the crisp evening air carrying clouds of sea salt and blood across his tongue and teeth, his lungs struggled to swallow it down. Like a puzzle piece that wasn't his, the air wouldn't fit in his chest. Every breath jagged, rough. Scraping the tender flesh with every inhale.
He felt like a fish out of water.
Something quiet trembled in his chest, a hollow little creak of amusement at his own joke, rattling through the cavern of his ribcage like a haunted thing.
Annabeth would've laughed.
The waves crashed on the shore, swallowing up a canoe whose rope had been burnt during the siege. The scars of Long Island were still fresh, raw, and ripped open without the tender care of sutures.
He was supposed to be that thread. That's how everyone saw him. The stitching that wove everyone's tapestry, a silver thread carving into every pattern and texture the Fates could weave. Defiance. Reliable.
A hero. Prophecy born.
A martyr.
The waves crashed harder, dislodging and upturning another canoe from the docks.
Percy closed his eyes. The image of the moon's smirk burned delicately into his retinas. He could see the shifting light behind his lids, pale moonlight warping across his features like the flash of napalm skies.
What was he to do with all of this weight?
The ocean crept further. Kissing the ground at his feet and lapping comfortingly at his ankles, asking to come closer, offering comfort and kindness, and answers lost to time.
Percy pulled his knees up to his chest, dragging sand and shells with him away from the gentleness he didn't deserve, pulling them away from the only home they'd ever known.
Pull yields pain. Push yields patience.
The ocean persisted. Percy gave.
The sand glistened, swirled up in creeping currents that offered presence and sanctuary from the ache in his marrow.
His scars stretched across his knuckles, slim silver worms snaking over joints bleeding pale with tension as his nails dug crescents into his palms. The tide drew in, splashing across his lap and spraying up to caress his cheek like a caring hand.
The touch was corpse cold, as if atrophied fingers were playing across his cheekbones and stiffly carrying the weight of his chin like a burden he couldn't lift.
Her dark eyes were pale, pupils milky with premature elderly blindness. Awash with the telltale sign of laceration and decay. Holes and lesions littered her cheeks and painted her features in harrowing shades of mortuary walls. Her fingers were cold and limp, unresponsive to his desperate hold. He'd only survived this long as a result of her. All of her hope. All of her knowledge. All of that ambition to climb out of this pit and change everything. To mold and reshape it all into her image so that the world would have no choice but to remember her.
Percy's nails bit into his skin so hard he drew gold. The waves churned, coming in just high enough to swallow the ichor down. He paid it no mind, not as the water rose to his shoulders, delicately dislodging him from the sand. It carried him from the shore as if he were a beached creature, slowly escorted back home.
The color of precious metal swirling in the delicate current, luminous and vibrant and so terribly inhuman, made him sick to his stomach.
His ears were still clogged with the wet breath she'd released as her chest stopped moving. His fingers were permanently etched with the memory of her cold skin.
No part of himself longed to remain here on the shore, surrounded by a wall of proximity that he wasn't allowed to cross into. The warmth of voices, quiet laughter, and the drifting scent of toasted marshmallows mingling with the ashen air drove him further and further into the ocean's depths.
Percy let the water take him until the laughter was drowned out. Allowed it to consume and swallow him down far enough that he couldn't see the calcified image of the moon shattering across the ripples of his taking.
Percy gave himself over to the ruthless pull of the current, tinged with something silent and ancient enough that he felt so small mixed into it. Like he was an unnecessary grain of salt dropped into the primordial soup of the universe.
He gave the ocean his newly earned ichor, the glow of his divinity eclipsed by the darkest depths of his father's domain.
Thoroughly stripped, bones settling into something closer to human, closer to intact, Percy retained only one thing.
He wouldn't dare part with it. Wasn't sure if he could detangle himself from it and survive, like an infant out of the womb, like a life on aid.
Like letting go meant rewarding himself for the burden of carrying.
Percy knew he didn't deserve that salvation.
The weight of the ocean crushed him, pressed him down down into the promised embrace of the ocean floor. It felt like hours, it felt like seconds. It felt so much easier than the devastating descent into that harrowing hell.
The impact of sand and ocean sediment never came. And as the journey progressed, the weight in his chest let up just enough to allow rest.
Slumber caught him before the ground did.
He was spared the painful warp of matter and space elongating into one taut thread, pulling and tugging with him in the center; the knot that united both ends. He was the epicenter of past and future, the place where origin is reborn. Had he been mortal, his atoms would’ve likely been scattered across time, like hour glass sand carried in the wind.