The Fallen Hero (Percy Jackson x Avengers Crossover)

23: The Super-Sized McSchizzle, Bad Boy Supreme!

Percy took his time drifting back to consciousness. He didn't want to wake up, but he thought he could hear someone calling his name, and it sounded like Annabeth. He knew that if she couldn't sleep she'd just go to work on some project, not bother waking him up, so he must have forgotten something.

His mind-self giggled sleepily as he floated around his consciousness. He had definitely forgotten something, and as far as he could tell it was important, stressful, and depressing. And the more to tried to push the desire to know what he had forgotten out of his mind, the closer he came to remembering it.

Why would I want to remember something that makes me feel so crappy anyway?

His eyelids twitched, letting a brief flare of white light through, slamming painfully into his skull.

Nope.

Percy rolled onto his side and stuffed his head under his pillow, unwilling to deal with the world right then.

He was almost gone into dreamland again when something tiny dropped onto his stomach and then ran down his leg and hopped off him. 

Wait.

Percy heard the thing land on the floor with a tiny ping! and then something that sounded suspiciously like a vacuum cleaner, followed by a whoosh! and a grunt. Reluctantly Percy moved to see who this intruder was--and what kind of spider had just crawled down his leg--when it hit him.

"Shist!" he yelped, shooting upward in a panic. "I forgot the whole citations page! Wait a sec..." he dropped his spinning head into his hands, then lifted it miserably, meeting the confused brown eyes of a man in a strange-looking red motorcycle suit. "Dude," he groaned, "I forgot to submit the dam thing! Whelp, there goes my English grade."

The man in the funny-looking suit blinked, his mouth opening and closing a couple of times before he said, "Hi, I'm Scott Lang. Ant-Man...kind of a new guy. But I'm sure you've heard of me?"

He sounded ridiculously optimistic. 

"Ah...no." 

The guy cocked his head to one side as if Percy might be lying.

"You sure? 'Cause, like, you know, I'm kind of a big deal...or a small deal...and occasionally a regular-sized deal..."

Percy shook his head, and the weird guy--Scott--looked so crestfallen that he felt the need to add, "Sorry man. I live under a rock."

Sebastian the Hermit Crab started wailing bits and pieces of Under the Sea in the back of his mind.

"S'okay, I communicate with ants."

There was something inherently wrong with that sentence, but for some reason Percy couldn't figure out what exactly it was.

For the first time Percy noticed the little tubes sticking out of his arms. 

O-o-o-h...

Gradually the events of the past months came back to him, but in a half-baked swirled up, confused sort of way. He was lying in a hospital bed in a small lab-like room. 

O-o-o-h! 

"Hey, man, could'ja please check out this..." Percy's words slurred and he licked his lips, frowned, and tried to concentrate. "What's this thingy..?" he managed before he was forced to lean back on his pillows as a bout of lightheadedness hit him.

Scott took a step over to Percy's side and read the labels of the bags. The words got muddled on their way to Percy's brain, and his confusion must have been evident, because the man translated for him. "Serious painkillers."