𝒞𝒶𝓉𝒽𝒶𝓇𝓉𝒾𝒸 | ᴘᴇʀᴄʏ ᴊᴀᴄᴋꜱᴏɴ¹

2. He saw her everywhere

༺ - indicate flashback scenes and/or dialogue

｡ ₊°༺❤︎༻°₊ ｡

I wish I had a river so long

I would teach my feet to fly

Oh, I wish I had a river

I could skate away on

I made my baby say goodbye

｡ ₊°༺❤︎༻°₊ ｡

❤︎ It's like everywhere he turned, he saw her.

He saw her getting groceries with Ethan or walking down the street on a random Tuesday.

It was like he had become her shadow. The irony wasn't lost on him.

Being someone's shadow meant you had to be near them, attached to them, yet Percy Jackson couldn't have been further away from Helena Colette.

No matter where he went or what he did, he saw her. Sometimes, it wasn't even her. It was things that reminded him of her.

Those red shoes that are buy one, get one-half price? She would have gotten them and three more pairs in seconds.

That strawberry cheesecake sitting on display in the bakery down the road? She would have bought and eaten the whole thing in-store and then bought another one to eat at home.

The sun, the weather, the show playing on TV, the posters he saw stuck to street lights, that song, that smell.

Everything led back to her.

It was like a piece of him was missing.

Even before they got together, the two had been good friends. They saw each other every day; they lived in the same building, on the same floor, two doors away from each other; their friendship was pretty much inevitable.

Percy had (briefly) gone to the same school as Helena when he was in the sixth grade, and it was the best seven months of his life until he was expelled for some reason he couldn't for the life of him remember.

Helena always made everything better.

His homework wasn't as hard, the letters wouldn't float off the page as much, the content in school wasn't rocket science anymore, people weren't as mean to him, and the teachers didn't hate him immediately.

When he had returned from camp half blood, he had been ready to get on his knees and beg forgiveness every day, even at school, but Helena hadn't turned up once.

Which was odd because if there was one thing Helena would never avoid, it was her education.

So, it led him to wonder if she had transferred schools. Ethan was old enough to attend one, right? He was around the same age as them. Maybe she had transferred to be closer to him rather than drop out. That sounded more like something she would do.

She had so many hopes and dreams. He could literally stay up all day and recount each of them by heart.

Her dream job was being a forensic anthropologist. She wanted to work at the Smithsonian in the forensic or human origin program; he had no idea what that even meant.

Percy had asked her once what she would do if she somehow couldn't make it into the Smithsonian, and all she had replied with was Plan B.

༺"Plan B?" Percy said. "If you were so confident about Plan A, why would you even need a backup?"