Lost & Found

Ch. 2

Ch. 2

Percy Jackson sat in the Humvee, the bumps in the road sending him up and down as they drove at an accelerated pace down the old cattle trail towards the city. His mind had been focused on the mission at hand when he was distracted by thoughts of the past and how much his life had and had not changed in the past two years.

Two years ago, he was standing side by side the love of his life, his best friend, his Wise Girl in a battle at the foothills of the original Mount Olympus. That was in his life as a demigod, a son of Poseidon who had led his fellow demigods in wars not just as the Earth Goddess Gaea but also against the Titan Lord a couple years earlier. A war that had begun the moment he learned he was a demigod and was forced on a quest to find Zeus' stolen master bolt and hadn't ended until he was nineteen. The day he watched Annabeth lying lifeless and bloody, an Empousa's spear impaled through her spine.

Other than the end though, it wasn't necessarily a bad life. His old life was just different. It was the kind of life that you read about in fictional books, the kind mortal children wish they had, not knowing what it really meant. They have no idea what it is like to watch your cousin sacrifice herself to save you against a giant metal automaton that should be on your side given the god who created it. Or to watch a girl who hated you with every fiber of her being at the onset of the journey grow to become a close friend only to die at the hands of her own immortal father in order to save a goddess who looked at you like an insect; one who barely recognized your existence because you were born with a dick instead of a vagina until you take the literal weight of the world for her.

The kind of life where you are thrown into an ancient maze, struggling against impossible odds to find an object that is sought after by powerful immortal beings born millennia before your mother was even a thought in your grandparents mind. Or where you were forced to throw yourself into a deadly river in hopes of giving yourself just a slightest of chances to survive a battle against a foe so powerful the gods dared not speak of his name until he was knocking at their doorstep with an army of thousands.

That was his old life though, a life he left behind before finding a new purpose.

The aftermath of the second Giant War had been far worse than the Titan one a couple years earlier. Many demigods had fallen in the final battles at the feet of the original Mount Olympus. Though Annabeth had been the most popular, she was only one of the many who lost their lives on those ancient grounds, the roots of the Olympians.

Returning to Camp Half-Blood, Percy had hoped to put her death behind him, to move to on, perhaps help train the next generation of heroes in hopes they could have had better lives than the ones he and his friends had.

But it seemed every part of his home held some memory, a painful reminder of a moment he and Annabeth shared together.

He wasn't the only one. Frank Zhang, the chubby cheeked and slightly awkward Asian Canadian who had been a part of the seven who sent the earth goddess into her millennia long slumber felt the same discomfort and pain when returning to Camp Jupiter. He was forced to relinquish him Praetor position, a job given to him when Jason decided his new place was with the Greeks and his girlfriend, now wife, Piper. Hoping for a fresh start, he traveled to Camp Half-Blood, the relations between Greeks and Romans significantly improve after the execution of Octavian who, as Athena had stated, "was a direct and significant contributor to Gaea's war effort, even if his motives were driven by only a greed and lust for power".

Needless to say, not many tears were shed for the auger who had few allies by the end of the war.

Unfortunately for Frank, he found little comfort in his new surroundings. Rather than places with memories of his time with his deceased love, Camp Half-Blood was full of people whom he and Hazel had spent a significant amount of their short time together with.