νεκρός || Annabeth Chase x Fem!OC

Vol. 3-16: I try to clear my head then try to clear Nico

TEMPEST

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I made Anne narrate that last part. I can't ever talk about it.

After she passed out, I laid her down on the bed and covered her up. The exhaustion from traveling through the Labyrinth had caught up, which I knew since she was softly snoring. She's usually silent when she sleeps unless she's extremely tired. Then she snores a little. It's kind of cute, but she doesn't like it when people tell her she does it.

I left the room, though. It makes me feel bad being in there with her when she's asleep, like I'm somewhere I shouldn't be.

I didn't care if it meant I was crazy, but I had a horrible suspicion that Annabeth liked me the way I liked her. Well, maybe not as strong, but she didn't touch me or hold me in a platonic way. Yeah yeah, I don't have many friends and I've never dated anyone, but I know certain things. I just do. I'm not as dumb as people might think.

I was horrified at the idea, I'll admit it. Yeah, I wanted Anne to like me- but I wanted her to like a living version of me. I wanted her to like me when I had a beating heart and aged accordingly. She doesn't even know that I'm still fifteen, and that I always will be fifteen. She thinks I'll be seventeen in November. She thinks I'm the only survivor of my family's murder, and that's not true. There weren't any survivors that day.

That's why it kills me so much. I feel like she likes a version of me that's not even real. She likes a complete and total lie. And I hate myself for it, because Anne doesn't deserve those things. She deserves to fall in love with someone that can age with her, grow up, and carry on with her life. And those are things I can't give her, because she will one day turn twenty, thirty, forty years old.

And I will always be fifteen.

I tromped downstairs to find Grover and Percy passed out on the couches, the nature channel still playing in the background. I figured Grover was watching it to get back in touch with home or something. I knew it had been his doing, since he was holding a half-eaten TV remote.

I rolled my eyes and just left the house entirely, deciding a walk might make me feel better. I knew it wouldn't, but one can hope.

It wasn't very cold outside, which is customary for Texas in the middle of June. It was still pretty warm and a horrible humidity permeated the air. I decided to walk around the edge of the ranch, since I had no interest in the animals or whatever work Percy did on the Poo Poo Parlor. I wanted to get my mind off things, or something of that sort, but that didn't really work.

Melinoe had preserved me. She did that over eighty years ago. Every day, I would wonder why. Why did she do it? She simply said she knew I'd be important some day.

For some reason, I thought about the Great Prophecy that Anne had shown me. Unfortunately, I knew I was part of it. Fortunately, she didn't. The hero's soul, cursed wraith shall reap.

I was a wraith, a ghost. I had been killed.

But who was the hero? The idea of that absolutely horrified me. The only thing I knew- Percy's sixteenth birthday meant bad things would happen. And he's a hero. My entire head rattled it back and forth. One thing comes to another; I am not killing him. I don't care if the Fates come up to me and damn me to the deepest confines of Tartarus. I can't kill my friends.