in which...
DAWN QIU WOULD RATHER ERASE THE PAST
than live with the pain that comes with it.
BUT PERCY JACKSON WOULD RATHER DIE
than forget how painfully he loved Dawn.
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"I hope you find it again."
"Find what?"
"Your eternal sunshine."
ོ༘ ₊ ⁺ ☀︎ ₊⁺⋆.˚
In the end, Dawn couldn't change a thing.
The Fates had sewn together the course of her life in its entirety, stitching every rise and fall with impenetrable precision. Despite trying everything she could to be a different story, the outcome stayed the same. Dawn had destroyed herself and everyone who loved her for nothing.
For someone who had spent their entire life fighting against the grain, ending up just like everyone else was unacceptable. Annabeth from Cabin 6 had often told Dawn that obsessing over control wasn't the same as fighting for survival. It was all the same to Dawn. To be stuck in the same hopeless situation with no way out was a fate worse than death. To survive was to be in control of your own destiny.
Powerlessness wasn't something Dawn ever grew accustomed to in her 18 years of life. She wasn't meant to struggle and suffer the way everyone else was. She was the exception. Dawn was the blessed daughter of Tyche; she was the youngest billionaire in the world, nicknamed the "lucky charm of the gods". Life always went the way Dawn wanted it to because she was the maker of her own fate, not some god.
Dawn couldn't accept the fact that she had lost to ill-fated tapestry of The Fates—no, she refused to believe it. Sheer willpower could only take a human being so far. Sometimes, a stroke of luck was all that was needed to see something through the end, a fortuitous intervention that came in to save the day when hope seemed lost.
Dawn was that intervention. She could turn the tides of war. She was incomparable. She was invaluable. So it was only natural that she would seek solace from facing failure by finding fault in anyone but herself.
Given the many backstabbing and conniving choices she'd made throughout the years, there was an almost endless embroidery of adversaries Dawn could blame for her misfortunes: her spineless father, her ambivalent mother, her glass castle of a family, The Fates themselves...
Yet by some twist of events, the only person Dawn loathed as she gazed into the hypnotizing depths of the River Lethe was Percy Jackson.
Percy was the most foolish of them all. He was clumsy, irrational, and on several occasions, an outright bonehead. His impulsivity had no bounds, neither did his rage nor his aptitude in bulldozing the world down. No one could talk any reason into him, and he never listened, even to someone as sensible as Dawn. She had never met anyone as emotionally unhinged and prone to life-threatening idiocy as that green-eyed son of Poseidon.
Percy was a forbidden child, an Olympian-level threat—and most treacherous of all, he was the love of Dawn's life.
But not anymore, Dawn had to remind herself as she watched the gentle white waves lap up the sand of the riverbank. And especially not after what I'm about to do.
