Something else went wrong.
The Acheron held the souls that weren't worth individual punishments, sure. They screamed and wailed just like the other prisoners here. It only got worse as we approached.
It was the rhythm of the waves that captivated me at first. The waves hit the barren land it passed through as if the two were at war; harsh, brutal and unforgiving. It was almost hypnotic to watch. In fact, it was. The current pulled souls back and forth, up stream, far away. They grabbed at the air for an escape they could never find. And they screamed.
At first it was just that - pure screaming. But thousands of voices began to isolate themselves into dozens, then several, until I could hear each individual voice crying out at me.
"It's not Simon's fault." Cried one. I furrowed my brows.
"You're mother died!" Laughed another.
Each comment sent a spear through my heart. They couldn't know anything about this. Not damned here for eternity. Yet, they continued with absolute certainty.
"It's you. You're the stronger half-blood. The more powerful scent. You led the monsters right to her!"
They couldn't know.
"Yes we can!" One cackled, bringing me from my disbelief.
"We know because she's drowning with us."
I felt the ground hit my knees, but nothing around me seemed real except the water. The fast, interchanging blue current. The world was a blur. I tried desperately to look at their faces. My mom - no. She wasn't a bad person. She was kind, and did everything out of love for me. She wouldn't end up here.
Before me, images of her flooded through, superimposed upon the waves. My first few sessions with Dr. Clinn. I was in the waiting room, but I remember sneaking past the secretary to the door, to see if they were talking about how insane I was. The sun was pushing through the window of the office, casting shadows under the door. I heard my mom's shaky breath.
"I can't afford this,"
"I know." Dr. Clinn said. "But your daughter needs regular visits. It's important for her mental health that she has a trained professional to talk to."
"I know." My mom paused. "I'll make some calls. Is it okay if the first payment comes a little late? I just...Need to get some jobs in order."
That was around the time my mom's social life disappeared. She made the calls to friends, seeing if they could get her a job at their work - part time if it didn't pay well enough. On Fridays when she'd usually be out with her friends for a 'girls night' at the bar, she spent behind the counter, pouring drinks for customers.
She worked so hard. She gave up so much. For me. And I'd doomed her.
"You let her die. You put her here." A voice called quietly.
"But you can fix it." Whispered another, almost sympathetically.
"Jump in."
"No rest for the wicked."
"Jump in."
"Do it for love."
"Jump in."
I'll admit, I had almost headed their requests. The only thing that shook me out of it was when the world around me shot into focus because I heard Matt yell to my left. It snapped me out of my trance almost immediately, I was suddenly ten feet away from the edge of the roaring river, and the voices of the souls cut away to the unified screaming.
It took me a second to realize that the souls weren't just whispering to me, but that Matt was caught in their trance now, too, still kneeling at the water's edge. All I wanted to do was get away, curl up in a ball. The Underworld was not somewhere I wanted to be, especially not now. But there was so much to lose - if I ran away, the souls would continue escaping onto the streets of New York in search of their loved ones. The mortals would see them, and who knows what would happen then? My dad wouldn't be happy. Chiron might lose his job because of me. Worst yet, Matt would jump into the Acheron.
I couldn't run now.
But I was frozen. If I got closer to the raging waves, the poisonous souls... I couldn't hear any of that again. I couldn't hear any of that again because a lot of it was true. Gods, don't let me lose my mind. I moved to Matt's side.
"Matt!" I called, hoping my voice would draw him from the trance as his had done for me. His eyes didn't waver away from the waves. At first it appeared that the souls weren't interested in me. Of course, that was quickly changed when they started calling for me again. I tried to ignore it, to focus on Matt's face. He was gripping his burnt skin as if it was new, his breathing was laboured, his eyes were welling up with tears.
"Matt, it's me." I tried.
"Jump in," the Acheron whispered. I made the mistake of glancing at the waves. My mom was there - memories of her, anyway. Smiling. Laughing. Crying. Begging me to join her. Matt stood, and drew my gaze away.
Looking back on it, maybe I should have body checked him. If I knocked him to the ground, maybe it'd pull him back to real life and we'd figure out how to get around the river without getting close to it. If I'd body checked him, maybe I'd save myself some sanity.
Obviously that's not what happened. I've been facing trouble almost all my life, why would it stop in a trouble powerhouse.
To my left, the spirits screamed about my mother. Matt was getting ready to take the worst bath of his life. I screamed, a prolonged, guttural cry I didn't know I was capable of making.
"STOP!"
And they did.
Everything did.
The souls stopped wailing, throughout all of the Fields of Punishment. The Acheron slowed to a halt until the water was almost completely calm. Matt, shaking, rubbed his eyes, and looked at me. I took a deep breath as I helped him away from the shore, waiting for something to happen. The Underworld, in it's vast entirety, was completely silent.
It didn't last long. As soon as Matt and I collapsed to the ground, sitting side by side and holding our backpacks like pillow pets, the Underworlds roared back to life. Screaming, wailing, and pleading for the child of Hades to help them, the souls continued their punishments, the Acheron kept flowing.
For a minute, we just sat there. I felt light headed. I couldn't tell if it was because of what just happened, or if it was because I couldn't stop thinking about my mom. I pushed past it.
"Matt, are you okay?"
He looked at me, and swallowed, like he wasn't seeing me, but instead a ghost. He looked away. "I'm okay. Let's... Let's go."
"Go where?" I asked miserably. "There's no bridge. The Acheron goes all the way through the Fields of Punishment and then disappears down a really big hole."
Matt locked his brown eyes on me once more. "I didn't want to bring this up." He really did look sorry about it, but he continued. "Demigods sometimes have powers, like I do. Sometimes children of Hades get certain powers, for example: Shadow travel. I've heard from Angeline - one of your half-sisters - that it's not pleasant. Moreover it takes a lot of energy to do. As a schizophrenic, I thought it probably wasn't a good idea for you to try. But Y/N, you halted the Underworld. I've never heard of that being done. And you did it with your voice. You're powerful. I think... I think it's our only way out of the Fields of Punishment."
~
Shadow travel. That sounded pleasant. Here's where the sanity disappeared, in case you were wondering. Matt didn't know how this worked, and of course neither did I. We started by finding shade in the tree of someone's punishment. I'd asked if he could hypnotize me to suddenly know how to do it. He said it didn't work that way, and besides he never used his hypnotics powers on friends; only enemies. Holding hands, I had my eyes closed.
"Maybe think about the other side of the Acheron. We don't need to clear the Field completely, but we need to get over that."
"Right." I replied, followed by, "It's not working."
Matt sighed. "Um... Hmm... How about..." I opened my eyes. Matt looked like he had an idea. "When I use my powers, it's like a feeling in the pit of my stomach. It makes me exhausted, sometimes dizzy, sometimes—"
"Lightheaded?" I asked. He nodded. "When I shouted, when I made everything stop, I think I felt that. But what do I do? Just focus on how it felt?"
"I don't know." Matt reminded me. "Try?"
I closed my eyes again, and tried to focus. I thought it would instantly teleport us wherever I willed to be taken. Instead, it was more like a tunnel of darkness, similar to the Door of Orpheus, except so much worse. It was like I was moving in hyper speed, like my face was being peeled off. I didn't know what Matt was experiencing; if it was the same for him or not. At times I felt like his hand was falling from mine, I gripped it tighter.
Suddenly I was running, kicking out of the darkness and onto the rock hard ground of the Underworld, dragging Matt behind me. It took me a minute to realize what had happened, and instead of stoping my run I very gracefully (read: awkwardly) tripped over my own feet and face planted into the hard ground. Matt, fortunately, had released my hand and spared himself the fall.
I realized rather quickly that Matt saying "It takes a lot of energy to do" was not an over exaggeration. Again I felt light-headed, and kind of nauseous. Matt helped me sit up.
"I'm surprised you didn't pass out," He told me.
I was incredibly wiped, the last thing I wanted to do was keep moving. The Acheron was to our right, about feet feet away and hidden by some land forms and catapults belonging to prisoners of the Fields of Punishment. We'd made it across, and we were more or less unscathed physically.
"Let's set up camp." I suggested. "We've both had another traumatic experience in our lives."
"You heard the voices too?" Matt asked. I realized we'd probably both gone into a trance around the same time, and when he came out of it it was because I was pulling the Underworld to a halt. We started pulling out our bed rolls.
I nodded. "They were talking about my mom. Saying she was in the Acheron. That it was my fault she was there." I swallowed, focusing my attention on setting up my sleeping bag (much to the dismay of the prisoner's section we were in - he was a forty-year old strapped to an ancient torture device that slapped him whenever he started to nod off). "Then they told me it wasn't Simon's fault; it was mine. I get that they were just saying that to get me to jump in, but... They aren't wrong. Being a child of Hades, I would have a stronger scent. And whether he told my mom or not, the monsters went to my house because of me."
"Hey," Matt said, setting his bed up next to mine. "It's really not your fault. Nobody could have known. Sometimes, these things just happen. We're demigods, we can't do much about it."
I thought about how he looked at me back on the bank of the Acheron - like he was looking at a ghost. I'd been holding back asking, but now seemed to be the best time to bring it up. "Matt, what did you see? I could tell it was something about me. And I think it had something to do with what happened to you. I don't want to force you into talking, but..."
He looked away, casting shadows over his freckles. "No, you're right. You deserve to know. I was born in Louisiana. My mom had been battling psychosis before Hypnos showed up, but after accidentally got pregnant with me and I was born... That's when things got a whole lot worse." I could tell this was difficult for him to talk about. The way he wouldn't meet my eyes, how he kept pausing as if making sure each word he was about to say wouldn't make him break into tears. I wanted to comfort him. I didn't know how.
"Hypnos stayed with us longer than gods are supposed to. Even so, he couldn't be there every day. I... I was six. Me and my mom were home alone. I was in the living room, playing and watching the TV. I heard her talking, louder than normal. I was scared that someone had broken into the kitchen, or something like that. I ran into the kitchen, but she was alone, talking to herself over the stove. I think she was trying to make pasta for lunch, a pot of boiling water was shaking over the burner." Matt hesitated. I was sure I saw his eyes swell with tears.
"I called to her. When she turned around, it was like she was looking right through me. She didn't know who I was. She..." He took a shaky breath, finally meeting my eyes.
"She threw the boiling water at you." I finished for him. He nodded. I watched him put a hand to the right side of his face, where the burn scars started and extended a little down his neck.
"Hypnos took her to a hospital. They diagnosed her with... Anyway, I was put into the custody of Hypnos. But because he's a god, he couldn't stay long. When I turned seven, I was put into the foster system. I didn't hate the system, but I sure as hell didn't like it. The kids called me ugly, and made fun of my burn scar. Sometimes, when it got really bad, I wore a paper bag on my head. Don't get me wrong. I don't hate my mother, but I felt sorry for her. It wasn't her fault, not really."
I put two and two together, and looked away. "That's why you look after me. Why you know when something's up. Why you help me sleep. She had schizophrenia, didn't she? And now you feel sorry for me."
Matt looked at me. "I don't feel sorry for you. I feel angry for you. No one deserves to have something so strenuous on their shoulders. Something so dangerous. But... Well, I guess you're right. I help you because I can, and I know how to. It's like I'm helping my mom. I know that's probably not what you want to hear."
I brushed it off with a shake of my hand. "I'm just glad I know now. Thank you for telling me. Did you ever get adopted?"
Matt's usual ever-present smile returned. "I was thirteen. Adopted my Maxwell and Fiona Turner after they fostered me for a year. They're amazing. They let me keep my birth surname, they took care of me, and they never looked at me like I was a freak. When I was fourteen I told them I was a demigod. Hypnos showed up and we explained how this world exists, they understood, and they supported my decision to stay at Camp Half-Blood year-round. By being at camp, I could be surrounded by other demigods, and I could finally find out more about myself."
"I guess I'll be stuck with you year-round now, too." I said, accidentally putting a damper on the conversation (that happened quite often).
"Hey, Y/N?" Matt said. "Do you still have your iPod?"
I pulled it out of my backpack.
"Good. Put your headphones in and press play. I'll wake you up when it's your shift to keep look out." I tried to fight him, even though I was tired. "Put them in. You don't have to indulge me anymore, I know you've been itching to put it at full blast since we got here. It's okay."
I complied, and very soon he'd helped me get to a dreamless, and much-needed sleep.