Clandestine~ (A Percy Jackson and the Olympians fanfiction)

Chapter 2: 'He's the one'

(Is he? Is he really?).

~*~
Percy

I had weird dreams full of barnyard animals. Most of them wanted to kill me. The rest wanted food.

I must’ve woken up several times, but what I heard and saw made no sense, so I just passed out again. I remember lying in a soft bed, being spoon-fed something that tasted like buttered popcorn, only it was pudding. The girl with straight black hair hovered over me, face blank as she scraped drips off my chin with the spoon. When she saw my eyes open, she looked at me gently, face still blank.

"I'm sorry…."

I managed to croak, "What?"

She sighed, shaking her head, "Nevermind. Sleep."

Somebody knocked on the door, and the girl quickly filled my mouth with pudding.

The next time I woke up, the girl was gone. A blonde girl was there instead, asking me about something stolen. I had no idea what she was talking about.

The last time I woke up, both girls weren't there, instead a husky blond dude, like a surfer, stood in the corner of the bedroom keeping watch over me. He had blue eyes – at least a dozen of them – on his cheeks, his forehead, the backs of his hands.

Mary Mary, quite contrary,
— — — — —
Ophelia

Guilt gnawed at me, a discomfort I rarely allowed myself to feel. Perseus, the kid who had lost his mother, now lay unconscious, and I couldn't shake the feeling that I could have done something to prevent it.

Perhaps it was the slippery mud, or my own momentary lapse in focus that led to his unfortunate accident. The irony of my own clumsiness in a camp full of demigods wasn't lost on me.

I surprised myself by offering Perseus an apology, a gesture that felt foreign and out of character. Apologizing was not my usual way of dealing with things.

The absurdity of it all made me question whether I was devolving into madness, a notion that seemed almost fitting given my name—Ophelia, a nod to Shakespearean tragedy.

My mother, a child of Apollo, often spoke of life-changing moments and visions of the future. Being a legacy of Apollo, I too experienced small visions and dream-like glimpses of what might come to pass.

Recently, I had a dream that exposed my fears, hinting at the possibility of falling in love—a notion that I found unsettling and unwelcome.

Annabeth, a child of Athena, insisted that Perseus was somehow linked to the theft of Zeus's lost belonging or, more dramatically, that he was the child of the Great Prophecy.

The idea made me scoff. This dopey, drooling idiot couldn't be the one of the Prophecy. If anyone had a shot at fulfilling such a destiny, it was more likely to be me than Perseus.

Currently, I found myself on the porch of the Big House, engaged in a silent argument with Annabeth.

Our disagreement manifested in angry glances and huffs, a familiar routine between us. Perseus appeared around the bend, catching my attention briefly before I shifted my focus to the pinochle game between Chiron and Mr. D. Grover, always in the midst of things, muttering away, likely sharing his observations about Perseus.