Chapter Text
The houses around me are filled with people who panic
They hear the noise and the static
And then we all become frantic
We hear the omens and legends (the myths of gods and heroes and stories of betrayal and murder)
We’re praising gold and our pleasures (our luck at being together)
We’re looking over our shoulders (always running)
Pretend we got it together (pretending we are still children)
Draw the blinds
Check under your bed
Hide your gold (grip your bronze blades steady)
And hold your breath (the tension is murderous)
Feel the ghost in your chest (is that supposed to be a heart?)
Check your pulse, you’re scared to death (of the betrayal soon to come)
Para-paranoia
You know it’s coming for ya
Venom in your blood (given by your sister as she tried to kill you)
And there’s no one here to warn ya (would you even trust them, after what Alcyone did)
Para-paranoia
You’ve been here before (in another time, with Luke and yourself)
You can lock up all your doors
But there’s a phantom in your foyer (a traitor in the family)
**
Mockingbirds bring violent storms,
Betrayal brings blistering burns.
Eclipses bring new dawns
As the dead call for just turns.
“The worst thing about betrayal? It never comes from anyone that you’re not attached to,” Mallory Keen said, sitting beside the dark-haired Silena. In the dying rays of the sky-born sun, her hair was like a solar flare, and Silena’s was like a black hole.
“It’s always the people you trust most. A sister, a lover…”
“...a friend.”
“Does it get any better?” Silena whispered.
Mallory glanced down at the younger girl, her green eyes unusually soft. “Love can be painful, like a stab wound. But like the wound, it heals. Scar tissue forms. And eventually, you recover. It takes time, but it does.”
**
Para-paranoia
Para-paranoia
Para-paranoia
Controlled by the tension
That’s taking all our attention
Too busy with expectations
We’re losing all our convictions
**
Luke collapsed when they were about ten minutes away from the ruins of the Williamsburg Bridge. (They were looking for Aenea, Vi, Lee, Clarisse, and Chris. He hoped they weren’t just bodies in the cold river.) His body finally succumbed to the blows Kronos had given him. His mind wandered like a restless ghost- which he sort of was, if you thought about it. But none of the dreams were pleasant.
“Draw the blinds,” His mother sang as she knelt in front of a gravestone, a wilted black rose and a purple hyacinth in her hands. Her sky-blue eyes sparkled with tears, as steady and clear as Luke had ever seen them.
“Check under your bed,” sang Percy, his golden eyes sparkling in the sunlight like champagne.
“Hide your gold and hold your breath,” said the burnt spirit of Charles, his dark eyes boring holes into Luke’s head.
“Feel the ghost in your chest,” Lee whispered, running a hand up Luke’s chest. “Can you even call that a heart, you sociopath?”
“Check your pulse, you’re scared to death,” Kronos leered. “You fear them finding out what you did in the other timeline. You are prepared to flee, like the coward you are.”
“Para-paranoia,” hummed Tragi, covered in blood that wasn’t hers. Her unusual eyes met Luke’s, and a maniacal smile spread across her face. “You know it’s coming for ya.”
“Like justice.”
“Venom in your blood, and there’s no one there to warn you,” Thalia- his Thalia, the one from his timeline, taller and older and a member of the Hunters. “Not that you deserve it. You don’t deserve mercy- you showed us none. So you get none.”
“Para-paranoia, you’ve been here before,” Tragi said with a sneer. “A traitor. A killer.”
They leaned closer. “A servant of Kronos.”
“You can lock up all your doors,” a much older Annabeth hummed, her eyes accusatory. “But there’s a phantom in your foyer.”
You can’t run from your crimes.
You deserve to burn.
You should be dead, like us.
You don’t deserve this second chance.
Luke felt like he was drowning. Voices swept over him, past and present and future all at the same time. It was an ocean of regrets and ghosts and betrayals, scorching fire coming to burn him to ash. All the voices started to bleed together, merging into a crowd of thousands yelling at once. Cold, bony hands wrapped around him and dragged him into the darkness, his heartbeat ringing in his ears.
No one heard him scream. No one heard his heartbeat grow as quiet as an owl in flight. No one noticed his breath turn into the rattle of a dying man. No one noticed all the blood.
No one saw the golden-eyed Perseus Jackson grinning down at him as the Inferi-like ghosts of his past pulled him under the surface. No one saw his body go limp, sinking into the darkness, lost to the depths.
**
“Clarisse!” Annabeth called. “Lee! Chris! Aenea!”
“Over here!” Percy heard the familiar voice of Connor Stoll.
Percy and his girlfriend exchanged a look, and set off towards the voice, Thalia carrying Luke’s limp body (which occasionally twitches. He supposed his dreams weren’t pleasant.). The quartet reappeared on another street and found three demigods.
Vi was propped up against a brick wall, her wet hair drying in the faint sunlight. Her shirt had bloodstains on it, and she seemed to be asleep. Beside her was Aenea, who was keeping a very close eye on her, and the Stolls, who seemed to be keeping guard over the other two.
Connor’s eyes lit up when he saw them. “PERCY!” he came running over and tackled Percy. “Oh, it’s good to see you. Thought you were a goner, mate.”
Percy hugged him back. “Thanks. What happened here?”
“We got blown up,” Aenea said casually, still watching Vi like a fox. “Vi got impaled and her lung collapsed. She seems to be stable right now, though.”
“What?”
“Oh, so you lot did have something to do with half of the Williamsburg bridge being blown up,” Thalia said. “You crazy motherf*ckers.”
“Not our fault Alcyone turned traitor,” Aenea retorted, vaer eyes blazing.
“Where’s everyone else?” Annabeth asked, stepping between the two.
“We got IrisMessaged,” Travis explained. “Michael and Di Angelo were having…monster issues, so everyone else- including your brother, Thalia- went to deal with that. The rest of us were assigned to keep an eye on Vi, since she’s…y’know.”
f*ck. They could all be dead right now and we wouldn’t know.
Percy had lost a lot of friends. Had seen a lot of people die too young. And he was not going to let the others down as he had with so many of his friends (Charles, Luke, Jason)
Thalia seemed to have similar thoughts. She gently propped Luke up by Vi. “Keep an eye on you, will ya? Kronos gave him a bit of a beating.”
Aenea nodded. “Of course.”
“Let’s go find those idiots,” Thalia said to Annabeth and Percy.
**
Mallory Keen had seen a lot of weird things during her existence. Both in life and in death. After all, she was both a demigod and one of the einherjar. Oddity was to be expected.
But Greek demigods were not on her Bingo Card of weird-things she figured were bound to happen. She knew of other pantheons, yes- she’d been raised with stories of the Celtic deities and heroes of the fae. She was aware of the Egyptians having had gods, the Hindus worshipping their own pantheon. And of course, who didn’t know of Greece and Rome, arguably the most famous polytheistic cultures in the world?
But she’d never expected that their gods were real as well. One pantheon is crazy enough, she’d thought. Halfborn had mentioned the Greeks briefly, once, during pottery to the death. Someone had been making a Greek kylix and had been painting scenes from some Greek epic on it. Mallory had asked if he knew what that was, and he’d replied that he knew it was Greek.
In all honesty, she’d probably should’ve seen this coming. If the Norse gods were real, why not the Greek? The Celtic? The Roman?
She was pretty sure she had been trying to keep sane. Valhalla was not for the faint of heart. If you didn’texpand your thinking, you faded. And even if you don’t, some don’t stay sane. At all. She remembered a Russian daughter of Freyja, Pamyat’, who’d died in the ninety-eighties when she was twenty-two before going to Hotel Valhalla and settling on Floor Nineteen.
Dark-haired, with hawk-like golden eyes, Pamyat’ wastall and lithe, and wielded blades. At some point, though, she’d gone a bit off the deep end. She became a bit crueller. Her blades became laced with boomslang venom. Mallory rarely saw her these days (Pamyat’ was in another corridor of Floor Nineteen, after all), but she’d heard that Pamyat’ was becoming increasingly paranoid and struggling with false memories. Supposedly, not even Odin himself could cure what she was struggling with, and that she was potentially going to be sent to Mimir to see if anything could be done.
Moral of the story was things could always get weirder. People can always get darker. And you can find friendship in the oddest places. Across the table, the daughter of Ares, Clarisse La Rue, winked at her. Somewhere in the background, Rodriguez and Halfborn were playing a round of Russian Roulette with knives (gods, her boyfriend was an idiot).
Mallory took Clarisse’s outstretched hand. “Show me what you’re made of, grá.”
La Rue’s responding smile was sharp as flint.
**
Luke slipped farther and farther into the ice-cold, pitch-black depths. His heartbeat hummed in his ears like the song of a hummingbird. He felt freezing cold, as if he was swimming in the Northern Atlantic. He saw nothing but darkness. His dreamscape-if that was what this was- was frigid, deep water the colour of squid ink at midnight.
But then he felt the slightest touch of warmth. It was brief, and felt distant. But even in the wilds of Antarctica, a single ember can cause a flame. The fleeting heat of sunlight melted the cold ice wrapping around Luke’s heart, and the blond snapped upwards, his head breaching the water-
-and he could breathe again. He found himself against a brick wall, Lee’s sister Vi next to him. Her shirt had bloodstains on it, and she looked tired. He noticed she had a Time-Turner from Harry Potter tattooed on her forearm,right above her elbow, above the word ‘Always’. The tattoo was surrounded by names.
His heart skipped a beat. He saw his name. He saw Charles’. He saw Silena’s. He saw Ethan’s; Lee’s. He saw the names of everyone who died in the Titan War…in the original timeline. She turned to face him, her eyes glowing in the light.
“You survived,” she noted. A faint smile graced her lips. “Good. You deserve it, even if you don’t think so.”
What in the world?
“Welcome to a new life,” she said, grinning. Her eyes sparkled, and Luke noted that she was very pretty, even if he was attracted to guys and guys alone. “What will you do?”
Luke thought of Lee; of Annabeth and Percy; of the original timeline. And all I loved. I loved alone.
He pictured this time’s Lee, and his passionate love; his gentle touch, his warm kisses.
“Tell me every terrible thing you ever did, and let me love you anyway,” his mind’s picture of Lee whispered.
Luke smiled.
“I'm going to love.”
