Pretty Poison ━━ Percy Jackson

TO LOVE IS TO DIE.

          To love is to die.

Wash, rinse, repeat. The Aileth he remembers is nothing but the blood and tar hidden beneath the changeling's fingernails — and yet some part of his best friend still lingers: she still likes chocolate ice cream and insists caramel is a godsend, she still complains about his language even though she's the one that curses all the time.

Nothing has changed — he would still die for her. Right? Everything has changed — her name is still Aileth Morgenstern, but she's older and the dawning war echoes across the haunted look on her face and the shadows in her eyes.

          To love is to die. He's loved her, always. Time is nothing.

(Again, he doesn't tell her this, but she looks at him and it's like she can see the way his knees ache from standing, from the burden of carrying his entire frame of flesh and bone and secrets for so many hours, so many years.)

          To love is to die. Percy is sixteen and he still loves Aileth. Percy is sixteen and War steps forward from his doorstep into the threshold. Percy is sixteen and she sees the blade before he does, she takes it for him and crumples to the ground drowning in her own blood.

          Percy is sixteen and Styx made him a God. And yet he's never felt any more mortal than he does right now, as his bones turn to fire and the air chokes itself out of his lungs, combusting under the beautifully ruinous flames that threaten to swallow him whole.

Please don't leave me. He scrambles over to the shaking form of his best friend. Blood is pouring from the open wound that she pulls Ethan Nakamura's knife out of.

I love you — he's crying and his vision is blurring and distorting, everything is jagged and twisted and still true as ever — Aileth is dying and he's dying (he still loves her) and the skyline is crumbling under the heavy weight of his grief, the same grief that has made a home in him, following him everywhere like the dead grass beneath his feet and like ruins in a God's wake, ashes of the hearts it burns in the name of love trailing behind its fickle frame.

          To love is to die.

Love is many things — the most selfish of all passions. He holds the limp form of his best friend in his arms closer and thinks perhaps it would not be so much of a loss if he were to slaughter everyone else in the world to keep her alive.

Aileth raises her head to look at him. From a distance they look like statues, the dying girl hailing from a jagged mess of fallen divinity and the blurry residues of the ichor-born and the boy-god carved of marble amidst the relentless tides and the song of the sea.

Love is many things — he's suffocating inside the cage of his flesh and bone, choking on all the half-formed sentences and unsaid words that have wrapped around his neck in a sense akin to a noose. A heart's a heavy burden, he knows this. And he's tired and he doesn't know how to explain any of this to her; he doesn't remember a time where he didn't love her and it's impossible to put into words, the terrible aching hell in his heart . . . Percy's aware of the bloodshed raging around him, the way the sands of time are slipping away into the depths of the hourglass.

War does not wait for you to catch up with it. The world is spinning, the skyline is falling. Mercy is a child's dream and it will do you no good to stand and watch everything crumble around you.

          To love is to die.

Percy understands, now, that it's not about whether you'd die for the person you love. It's about the grief and rage and the silence making a home inside of you and then swallowing you whole: You're dying because you were quiet for too long and yet the harrowing nothingness is all you know — you have so much to say to them that you have no choice but to tell them nothing.