─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆
❛ Here we are at the end of the world, waiting for the sky to break into flames─but we are together, as if the stars had aligned. ❜
Percy Jackson never thought he would fall in love with a traitor.
[completed - editing]
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✩━━━ chapter twenty, carving through the dark. ❝How can something be so much heavier but so much less than what it seems? Darling, we sacrificed. We gave our time to something undefined. This phantom life sharpens like an image, but it sharpens like a knife.❞
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ONCE, ON A DAY THAT HE COULD NO LONGER TRULY REMEMBER, HIROKI FELL. The world seemed to end when he scraped and bloodied his knee. A portion of his life seemed to ebb away with every drop of blood, leaving him frightened and lightheaded, an unbearable coldness settling into his body as he tried to stand but found himself unable to do so. Lying on the harsh New York pavement, his eyes had welled up with golden tears, and he began to feel uncertain if he would ever be able to walk again. His mother had looked over his injury—the very wound that would kill four-year-old Hiroki—and simply sighed, her pitch-dark eyes like cosmic voids, absorbing all light and revealing little of the constellations that lay within as she extended her hand and instructed her son, "Sit up now, Hiroki. It's nothing serious, just a small cut."
Upon hearing these words, Hiroki wept and sobbed for what felt like the last moment of his existence, utterly devastated as his knee bled and his hand trembled, beyond comfort or saving—because his mother did not understand him. She had not seen the manner in which the entire universe had crumbled alongside Hiroki, without his control, without a warning, without offering him a chance to prepare himself. She had not felt his fear as the ground beneath him gave way and his body crashed onto the hard pavement. She hadn't noticed how the clouds and the sun had snapped and collapsed from the sky alongside him. Hiroki's mother stood there, bewildered by his outburst and unable to discern the true cause of his fear.
His father had appeared then, lifting Hiroki up into his arms right from where the four-year-old had fallen. Hypnos had spoken a lot, soothing the child's trembling body, but it hadn't been those forgotten words of reassurance that had calmed him. It was the strength emanating from his father's embrace that centered him, holding Hiroki tightly enough to stop the whole universe from unraveling any further. In that moment, he found a safe haven in his father's grasp, engulfed in such a sense of security and protection that he could no longer cry. He did not have to look up from his father's chest to see that the sun continued to rise high in the sky, unchanging; that the clouds floated above, as they always had; and that the ground below remained solid and stable. Hiroki knew that the world would remain constant as long as he remained cradled in his father's arms.
