Three ♰ Till Forever Falls Apart
PERCY RUNS AWAY the second they get to the bus terminal.
Aileth doesn't appreciate it— though she supposes it is justified, considering how Grover keeps looking at her like she's dead already, and muttering to himself: "Why does this always happen?" & "Why is it always sixth grade?"
When they get off the bus, Grover runs to use the restroom, and Percy grabs his luggage in one hand and Aileth's wrist in the other, preparing to slip away.
"I'm leaving first," he tells her. "Are you coming with me?"
"No," Aileth answers. "I'll try to talk to Grover about. . . whatever that was. I'll see you during the break?"
He doesn't seem to want to leave her behind, but Percy nods, understanding. "Right. I'll stop by at your place later, then."
He pulls her in for a hug at the same time he flags down a taxi, pressing his face into her shoulder.
"Get home safe, okay?"
"Of course."
When they break away from the hug he grabs her shoulders, and he looks like there's something he wants to say.
The cab screeches to a stop in front of them. Aileth watches the words form on Percy's tongue, watches him try to get himself to say it, watches him tell himself it's not important, not right now, and discard the sentences.
"See you later," he tells her instead, and hops into the passenger's seat.
She watches him leave, the tide drawing away from its shore.
Grover comes up to her just as Percy's cab disappears down the corner. "Don't tell me that's—"
"You just missed him," Aileth says, shouldering her bags. "He left."
Grover swears, and then blanches when she raises an eyebrow at him. "I can tell. Why didn't you try and stop him?"
"Why would I?" Aileth retorts. "What's happening, Grover? Why are you acting like this?"
"I— I can't tell you." His voice is ragged, and he seems to have forgotten how to breathe. "Prophecies— saying them out loud is like surrendering to their existence."
It dawns on her, a fatal sun. "I'm the one who's going to die, aren't I? Is that what it means?"
His skin drains of color, now a sickly shade of pale brown.
"Don't. Fucking. Say. It."
"What? That I'm going to die?" She presses on, essentially cornering Grover. "Why can't I say it? Why do you think I'm going to die?"
She thinks of the broken yarn, hanging limply like a severed lifeline. "I heard you and Mr. Brunner. You know something happened to Mrs. Dodds. He said something about me— said I wasn't one of you. I don't know what that means, but you do, don't you?"
Grover turns, as if to run away. Aileth grabs him by the wrist.
"You know something's wrong with me." It hurts that he's not telling her, it hurts that they've been friends for over a year and that he's keeping something like this from her. "My parents— they haven't been telling me everything, either. But you know. You know what I am, and I don't."
"You have to tell me," Aileth pleads, holding on to him. "I know no one else will."
"Aileth, I—"
"You don't want me to die, do you? Tell me."
For a moment Grover sways on his feet, eyes losing focus. His jaw unhinges, mouth moving to shape words as if compelled to do so— and then he stops.
"I can't," he tells her, ripping his wrist out of her grasp. He almost looks afraid— for or of her, she can't be sure. "I won't."
"Grover—"
He runs away.
Aileth flags down a cab and spends the ride home seething in silence.
❦
There are two kinds of monsters that Aileth knows of.
The first kind are the ones that claw their way out from the ground— all dislocated joints and bared teeth, broken ribs protruding from flesh. The ones that are obviously monsters, the ones you know to run from the moment you lay eyes on them.
The second kind are the ones shaped like a person, like a knife ready to stab you in the back at any given moment. A monster wearing the skin of a human, sickly sweet like peach around cyanide— impossible to see, and thus impossible to run from and to avoid.
She has met enough of both in her lifetime to lose count.
Dread sits on Aileth's shoulder on her way back home, sinking its claws into her thoughts like poison.
Every step she takes seems to ring indefinitely in the lobby as she enters the apartment building, loud and jarring as if to say I'm here, come and get me! Even breathing seems too excessive, as though simply inhaling is to draw some kind of monster to her position immediately.
The elevator doors open. The bell rings. The sound is quiet but Aileth swears she can feel it in her bones. It is empty when she enters. Her skin crawls.
"It's all in your head," she reminds herself, pressing the DOORS SHUT button upon entry. No one else comes in. Aileth looks at the empty elevator over and over again to etch the image in her mind. You are alone. No one can hurt you here.
(Is it just the air conditioning or does someone laugh?)
Aileth doesn't understand why she's so scared all of a sudden. Her heart thrashes at her ribs like a prisoner in its cell, tearing at the bones and screaming for her, at her.
Is it because of Grover's implication that she's going to die? The thought of checking on Percy crosses Aileth's mind briefly, but as she steps out of the elevator it feels like there's someone mirroring her movements, and Percy's apartment feels too far away.
Hers is closer. Hers is safer.
Aileth recalls a conversation with her father from when she was younger. Whatever you do, do not alert the monster to the fact that you know they're there, her father says. They'll try to get you the second you start running. You need to buy yourself time.
The hallway suddenly seems endless, and she can't quite remember which apartment is hers. The peepholes from the doors feel occupied, as if someone/everyone is watching her, leering.
Whatever you do, do not run. Walk as if nothing is happening.
Flat 2309, Aileth reminds herself. 2306, 2307, 2308—
The scent of hyacinths and cold December air floods her senses just as she nears the apartment. Someone is right next to her. She pretends to have not smelled it— them— and hurriedly enters the apartment, closing the door right behind her.
Dread, still seated on her shoulder, chatters its rotten teeth.
(Did it get in? Did they get in?)
She cannot see anyone in the apartment, and the scent has disappeared. The feeling, however, remains— crawling under her skin, talons sinking into her bloodstream.
Today, Aileth observes to herself in an attempt to calm down, is a terribly strange day. First there had been the incident with the ladies and the yarn, and there had been the strange flashes of moments she doesn't remember living out.
Perhaps, she rationalizes, the feeling of a second presence is simply the leftover anxiety from today's events.
"Aileth?" Her mother makes her way out of her room, a stack of books in hand. "You're back. How was school?"
There is something strange about Veronica Morgenstern.
She resembles Aileth, though only to some extent— they share the same pale blonde hair and ivory skin, but Veronica's is dry and thin and has stayed the same length for as long as Aileth can remember, and the pallor of her skin is sick, deathly even. Her cheeks are sunken and sometimes when Aileth looks at her, her eyes are yawning chasms— the black of her irises having bled into the sclera, twin voids staring back at her daughter.
(But then every time Aileth blinks and strange parts of her mother are gone, as if someone had gone over and fixed the mistakes in her appearance, colored the sclera back to white. Every time Aileth blinks and her mother looks just like everyone else, and then every time Aileth forgets that there is something inherently wrong about the woman sitting across from her father at the dinner table.)
"It was fine," Aileth answers, placing her luggage down by the front door. "And maybe a little weird. Mom— can I tell you something?"
Veronica's mouth stretches across her face in a smile. It splits her face in half, like clay. "Of course."
"My math teacher tried to kill me and Percy."
"Oh." Veronica blinks. She is still smiling. Something is wrong, Aileth thinks. Her mother has always been strange in both manner and appearance, but never like this. (It occurs to her that this is the first time in a while that she's been left alone with her mother. Usually her father is always in the room with them.)
"You don't believe me, do you?"
"It's not like that, Aileth." The smile retracts itself from Veronica's face slowly, like a reversed stop-motion animation. Her face remolds itself to form an expression of concern slowly— first her eyebrows sink, creasing together at her temple. Her eyes widen, and Aileth watches as her jaw unclenches just enough for her mouth to fall slightly open as it forms her words. "I... It's just— how did that happen?"
"I don't know," Aileth answers. "Mrs. Dodds... she said we were giving her problems. Whatever that means."
Her mother tilts her head, her joints— no, bones— snapping, reshaping, to follow the curve of her neck.
"I don't think I know, either."
There is something strange about Veronica Morgenstern.
"Mom..." Aileth starts.
"Perhaps we should wait until your father returns," her mother says, and then adds as an afterthought— "There is nothing to worry about."
(She's really fucking worried, thank you very much.)
"Right. Of course. Everything is fine," Aileth says, sitting down at the island. She force feeds herself the words as she waits for her father to arrive, until they mean nothing any more and the dread sits, silent.
When she looks up again, the black of her mother's eyes have yawned into twin voids.
There is something strange about Veronica Morgenstern. They sit at the kitchen island. Her mother has placed a stack of books in front of her but she makes no move to read any of them. Aileth doesn't notice that her chest does not rise or fall, or that it never has. (It is second nature for her to gloss over anomalies that have existed for as long as she can remember.)
Thirty minutes later her father returns home, body strung taut like a live wire. He is staring at something Aileth hadn't noticed before— cracks in the floorboards, jarring black and singed, as if fire had erupted from beneath and split the ground open with its wrath.
"Aileth?" he calls.
(Besides her, her mother stirs slowly to life, flips one of the books open like an actor resuming her role. She almost looks human again.)
"Here," she answers from her spot at the island, legs swinging.
"Oh, good, you're still here." William seems to relax at the sound of her voice. He rushes over, grabs her hands as if to make sure she's real.
"Why wouldn't I be?"
He blanches at that. "It doesn't matter. Listen, Aileth—" her father hunches over so he is at eye level with her— "we're going to go on a little adventure, okay?"
"What adventure?"
"It's a surprise," he tells her, though the urgency with which he pulls her from the island with indicates that this surprise is probably unplanned. "Come on with me, alright? I have your bags packed and ready in the car—"
"Since when did we own a car?"
He turns to her, his expression a mixture between fond amusement and frustration bordering on anger. "Since always."
It seems to make sense, then, and Aileth vaguely thinks of a car— maroon and with five seats on the inside, just enough for her and Percy's family (sans Gabe, because he doesn't count) to go on road trips together. She's thinking— oh, of course we have a car, how could I forget?— when it occurs to her that the apartment building they're in does not have a carpark, and that her father always, always takes the subway to his job.
Aileth thinks of Grover, of the unfocused look in his eyes.
Tell me. She'd stressed the words out, just as her father is doing now.
"Come on, Aileth," he says, again. "Let's go. Before it's too late—"
"Too late for what?" Distantly she registers the feeling of her father pressing two thin bands of silver into her hand. Rings. What for?
The apartment door swings open, hinges creaking eerily. It opens out into an empty hallway, there is no one behind the door. Aileth thinks it's a ghost until the air starts smelling of hyacinths.
"Dad—"
She's clinging onto his arm, now, but he rips it out of her grasp with a surprising kind of viciousness she hadn't known he possessed.
"I told you to go." Something cruel crawls into his voice, a punishment of sorts.
"I—I'm sorry." His face is like wrath personified, it hurts to look at him. Aileth doesn't recognize him anymore.
"William Morgenstern." The voice is smooth. Like a river, like a knife. Somehow Aileth knows that it's the second presence from earlier speaking. "How many lives have you lived before this one?"
Forget her mother. There is something strange about William Morgenstern, too, and Aileth watches as it presents himself in front of her.
The illusion has been stretched across his face for all of Aileth's life, thin and tight like a mask. It peels off his face like a second skin, and in a matter of moments it is like her father has gone back in time, for the lines of his face have melted away, smoothing over like glass.
He smiles at the figure standing by the door, the man cloaked in black, and Aileth realizes that he seems to have aged backwards, looking not a day over twenty-five.
"James," he acknowledges.
The man, James, is inhumanly gorgeous in a way that inspires more terror than awe. The features of his face are sharp and soft in all the right places, the dark brown of his skin bordering on black. His ears, Aileth observes, are pointed— just like hers. James' eyes are gold— she realizes in horror that it's the same color as the blood running down the side of his face from an open cut. No, not blood. Ichor.
He smiles at her, as though he could hear her thoughts, and then the first knife flies through the air. Her father dodges— the blade buries itself in the wall, a torn piece of her father's coat pinned to it.
"You've lost your precision."
James' lips move to speak, his voice a melody of ire. "You have lost your agility."
William's mouth presses into a thin line, tight with fury. "Aileth. Get out of here."
"Halt." James turns to her as she scrambles for the door. The gold of his eyes resembles fire, but his gaze is cold and deathly so, twin flames of cruelty.
Her body turns to stone. Aileth freezes, arrested in motion. What is happening. Why is this happening. Why is this happening to me—
"Leth-fhuil," he spits out, teeth bared and sharp like bone. There it is again— Half-blood. Godling. "There is no running away from this."
Whatever witty remark Aileth might have thought of makes its own grave somewhere in between her ribs, right next to her heart. When she swallows, her fear tastes of blood and cyanide.
The rest of the scene plays out like it would in a movie— James lunges forward for William, and they're fighting, knives and all, across the very apartment Aileth grew up in. There is a certain kind of intimacy in the way they move, as if it is a dance they've practiced before, as if they each knew the other's steps before they were taken. As if they have lived this moment out a million times already.
James has a lilted kind of grace with the way he spins across the room, a dance of blood and blades and brutality. There is a poise to his movements, always aiming for either the heart or the jugular. He is not wrong— her father has indeed lost his agility, and is struggling to keep up with the young man's swift attacks.
Aileth thinks that she could have found beauty in it if it weren't for the fact that there's ichor all over the floorboards and her father is nearing death.
He looks at her, as if having heard her thoughts, and that's when everything falls apart.
In his moment of distraction, James strikes, ripping the blade out from the wall and driving it right towards her father. This time, his aim is precise. He only misses when William utters a word in a language she doesn't understand, and the blade catches fire in his hands, flames crawling up to consume the rest of James' arm like a starved animal.
He cries out— the bonds around Aileth unravel, pooling at her feet, and she drops to the ground just as the knife does. Smoke rises as the fire bleeds into the cracks of the floorboards and up the sides of the wall, desperate to make up every part of the apartment.
Heart in throat, Aileth stumbles through the black haze of smoke towards the door. It's beginning to become suffocating— her head spins and she doesn't notice when another knife leaps from James' hand, soaring through the air and right for the jugular.
At least not until her mother steps in to intercept it.
There is something strange about Veronica Morgenstern. Aileth's scream dies somewhere in her lungs, lodged against the horror of what stands before her— her mother, unyielding, gestures for her to go despite the large knife protruding from her chest.
This is the part that deviates from the movies. Veronica Morgenstern stands there, knife in her heart, and she does not bleed. Nor is there any rise and fall of her chest, and she continues ushering Aileth out the door as if nothing had happened at all.
"Go," she says. Her voice is disembodied, played from a puppet's broken sound box. It almost sounds more like her father's than her mother's. When Aileth holds her hands, they are cold. Have they always been like this? "Find Camp Half-Blood. They will keep you safe there. I will find you again."
Behind her, the apartment is burning. Aileth is on the other side of the door as her mother catches fire. Veronica's smile is both terrible and punishing at the same time, and when she pulls the knife out of her chest and sets it on the ground Aileth sees it— a gaping wound, bloodless, as if her heart had stopped long before this moment.
"How—"
Veronica's face twists as her smile grows. Her lip is split.
"I have been dead since the beginning."
Something in Aileth seems to die with her in that very moment. So this is what is strange about Veronica Morgenstern.
The apartment goes up in flames, fire licking at the door. Aileth runs.
You cannot kill someone that has already died.
Author's Note ♰ happy holidays! consider this update a (late) christmas gift to you all. so we got to meet aileth's parents !! there is obviously something going on w her mother being a literal puppeted(?) corpse, some random guy called james sent to kill her father AND the fact that they know each other... i have so much planned for this fic & i'm super excited to show you all !!
i was motivated to update this chapter because i recently decided to add more original characters to the plot, one of which will be showing up in the next chapter! hopefully y'all will still be around when i introduce her, see you then! ily guys for reading & please lmk what you thought !!