Who We Used to Be

Chapter 3

She hardly even registered what she was doing as she sprinted across the newly cleared land.

"PERCY!!!".

Everybody must have recognised the disbelieving grief in her voice, and soon everybody else was following her. Though three in that crowd already knew what everybody else was refusing to believe.

Hazel, Nico, and their shared father, Hades wore matching expressions of sadness. Even the god himself. He had grown to like the impertinent nephew of his. He would never admit this, but he owed a lot to the demigod. He would ensure that both he and his love reached Elysium. That he swore on the Styx.

Nico ran forward and all but tackled his immortal cousin to stop her.

"Let me go! Let me go!", she yelled, struggling against his surprisingly strong grip.

He held on tight, though. "Thalia...—".

"NO! I won't lose him! I can't lose him and Annie! He's my family let me go!", she yelled, finally escaping with a well-placed electrically charged elbow. She sprinted the rest of the way, finally arriving to Percy's crater just as everybody else did.

She pushed through, not caring if she hurt anybody in her way.

And there he was. Percy. Kelp Head. Her big brother.

He laid in a pool of his own blood. His torso and abdomen were entirely torn up, pieces of rock and other shrapnel from the explosion sticking out of the wounds in a bloody mess. Another smaller pool of blood rested under his head from where it had slammed into the ground, and his right arm was barely even recognisable as a limb.

Thalia skid down the crater, ignoring the protests of those in the crowd, and came to rest on her knees on the dusty stained ground beside his head.

This couldn't be Percy could it? Their resident son of Poseidon, bane of monsters, Titans, Giants, and now, Gaea herself- because it had become abundantly clear that she was, in fact, really gone.

She lifted up his head from the ground and put it in her lap, not caring about the sticky, crimson red blood that was soaking into her clothes, turning them all the color that she loathes so much.

She didn't even both wiping away the slow trail of tears that made their way down her cheeks.

His skin was pale, way too pale, and cold too. Cold in death despite the fact that he had died not even five minutes ago. The thing that attracted her attention the most, however, was the expression on his face.

It wasn't twisted with agony as she expected it to be considering what had happened in his final moments. Nor was it covered in the forcefully blank face, expressionless with determination as it had been since he had been rescued from Tartarus without his love.

His eyes were closed, his face relaxed and peaceful, and the mangled meat of his chest no longer rose and fell with steady breath.

Despite everything that she had observed in those short two minutes of shocked silence, it seemed that that small detail was the thing that really stuck in her heart.

He wasn't breathing.

Just like that, the world came back into focus.

Thalia looked around her, and her senses came back online.

Poseidon was at the front of the crowd, staring on with his mouth slightly opened in shock. His sea green eyes, so painfully like Percy's, were glistening with unshed tears while a single one tracked its way down his cheek.

Surprisingly, or unsurprisingly depending on who you ask, Hades was next to his brother with a comforting hand on his shoulder. He too was staring down at the mangled and limp body of his nephew with regret, but not surprise. No, the Lord of the Underworld was not at all surprised at the boy's suicidal plan. Even he would be the first to tell you how much he and the daughter of Athena loved each other. It was stronger than anything he had ever witnessed before, and upon her death, he had witnessed the darkness that had been steadily growing in his heart. What had happened was just a large elaborate way for him to get back to his lost love and take down her killer with him.