BROKEN PIECES & GOLDEN SEAMS

XXIV

46. it matters
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Percy sighs and the world exhales with her. Fingers of chill that have taken hold of Hogwarts were yet to show up at New York and she intends to enjoy it thoroughly.

It was the usual scene. The glaring sun that was a dot in the vast sky shining down upon the insouciant waves. Rustling leaves and faraway laughter. An unchanged day at camp for her changed self. It didn't quite sit right with her.

All that she has cherished for so long had taken a permanent place in her heart that wasn't the same anymore. A poorly mended heart that was being gouged out to make space for more. More people to care. More people to lose.

"You spend only an hour or two here," the sudden raspy voice makes her smile, "are you gonna spend the little time feeling sorry for yourself?"

Percy's grinning despite the less than friendly tone. "Hey Neeks, yeah I've been great! What about you?"

"Don't call me that," he mutters as he joins her beneath the pine tree that used to be their other cousin. "You don't look great,"

"Yeah thanks,"

"You look like shit,"

She snorts.

"Not like how you did before though," he abandons the pretense of admiring the sky and peers at her. "This is a different shitty look,"

She gives a dry look, letting him that she didn't appreciate the staring but aware that she can't do much about it. "Is that bad? Good?"

Nico continues to gaze with his bottomless eyes. He picks at her soul and she fiddles with the new pins on the jacket she had gotten him. He makes observations of how she's changed and so does she.

Percy's gained some colour, an impossible feat with the weather in her school but she's known for those after all. Impossible things like surviving Hell and almost death four times a week because she might have left the place but that place never left her.

It hasn't left him as well. Memories of the wretched place set in bruises beneath their eyes and tremors in their limbs.

Nico takes her hand and doesn't let go. She squeezes back and recalls the time she's been the one to hold on to him.

There wasn't much worth living after the war. Or at least that's what she thought. Surviving, being alive? That she could do. For the sake of her family, friends, camp depending upon her but the actual part of living was something that she shut away. She barricaded it with never ending work and she didn't have to bother with it when the aftermath of Hell imprisoned her.

She couldn't think about living when she couldn't even remember it.

They say she went completely still. After a war to be told for ages for its glory and gore, she receded into herself. The long, deathlike nap was an indication to her absolute collapse but no one could do anything about it. A twenty or so hour nap is to be expected from someone that forcibly tucks Mother Earth to sleep. Leo Valdez vanished in flames for instance.

She was cradled by the arms of her campers, her odd family that took her to her cabin and tucked her into the sheets that have been waiting for her. She wasn't given much thought later save for occasional cries of 'Percy!' when their friends were found, struggling or unmoving.