Find my Seaweed Brain...

Running

The moment I started running I didn't allow myself time to think of what would happen once I stopped. I was aware that my phone was ringing in my pocket. Over and over. Sally had probably pieced every single part of the puzzle together by then and was calling to beg me to come back. She probably didn't even know that every single message she sent was like a flare being set off for every Monster in Manhattan. She probably didn't know that with every message she sent, I lost even more breath to an overpowering sob. She probably didn't know that everything had just got a thousand times worse.

So I ran. Like someone was chasing me. Like if I got to the end of the race Percy would be waiting for me. Like I wasn't breathless before I even started to run. It's an addictive feeling. It feels like if I don't stop running, then nothing will ever catch up to me. And this... this... this cluster of fucking cells. It's gone for a moment. Until I'm grounded back into reality by reaching the crossroads. And everything catches up, the old problems and the new ones I've created by running.

Because suddenly I'm gasping for air, and I'm in so much pain everything feels like I'm being stabbed by that poisoned knife that hit me in the war. I couldn't even differentiate whether the consuming pain I felt was mental or physical. I almost blacked out at first, because giving in is even easier than running away. Instead a fell to my knees in the middle of a crowded New York street, unable to breathe.

Does it make me a bad person that I wasn't even remotely worried about the cluster of cells? Sometimes the guilt eats me alive, but mostly when I think of it, I'm overwhelmed by the anger that no one helped. No gods, no demigods, no family, not even a stranger. All anyone could see was some stupid, unstable, pregnant sixteen year old having a breakdown in the middle of the street and getting in their ways.

Then, of course, it got worse. The pain came in waves, crashing over me like an ocean, dragging me back down each time I reached the surface so that I could never fully catch my breath. And between the waves of unbearable pain, I could make out a serpentine figure moving slowly towards me from across the crossroads.

Before she reached me, I tried to scramble away and saw a bone sticking out of my ankle. I guess the pain was physical.

A wave of nausea, fear and agony hit simultaneously, and threw me to the bottom of my ocean of pain.

Everything went black.

What was the serpent like creature making its way towards an incapacitated Annabeth? You Greek Myth nerds got any ideas?