Mama's Boy

I Fall From The Arch

[Percy's POV]

I'd love to tell you that my last thoughts were about my friends. My mom. Camp. Maybe some deep revelation about my own mortality, laughing in the face of death and all that on my way down from the Arch.

Unfortunately, none of that was true. It was more like:

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

The river raced towards me at the speed of a car, the wind ripping the breath from my lungs as I plummeted. Steeples and skyscrapers exited and entered my vision.

And then a whiteout of bubbles. I slowly sunk through the murky water, convinced that I was about to end up embedded in a few hundred feet of mud, never to be found again. But to my surprise, my impact with the water hadn't hurt. Falling slowly through the water, bubbles trickling through my fingers, I softly landed on the riverbed.

At this point, I realized a few things. One, I wasn't flattened like a pancake, and whatever poison had been courting through my veins was now absent. I was alive!

Second, I wasn't wet. I could feel the coolness of the water around me, but when I touched my shirt, it felt completely dry. Looking around, I grabbed an old cigarette lighter from the floating trash.

Certainly not, right?

I flicked the lighter on, and to my surprise, a tiny flame appeared right there at the bottom of the Mississippi River. I grabbed a nearby soggy hamburger wrapper, and it immediately turned dry. Holding the lighter to it, the wrapper caught fire, but when I let go, the flame was extinguished, and the wrapper shriveled up with moisture.

Finally, I was breathing underwater!

I stood up, thigh-deep in mud. My legs felt shaky. My hands were trembling. By all accounts, I should be dead. The fact I wasn't seemed like a miracle. A voice in the back of my head that sounded like my mother was saying, 'Percy what do you say?'

"Um... Thanks, Dad." My voice sounded much deeper underwater as if I were a few years older.

Another much more startling thought hit me.

What was I gonna tell Annabeth?

Y/N had grabbed me and told me to "Make it count," all but verifying that he believed he was gonna die up there. Should I lie? Should I say he made it down some other way and was gonna meet us back at the train? I didn't know. If I did lie, she was gonna find out eventually, then what do I say? 'Oh, he must've gotten lost. He'll meet us in Los Angeles!'

Why had Poseidon saved me? The more I thought about it, the more ashamed I felt. I'd gotten lucky against Medusa, against the Minotaur. The only reason I made it out of those two situations was because of Annabeth and Y/N stepping in. Those poor people and Y/N were stuck up there with a very angry Chimera.

I wasn't a hero. Y/N threw me to safety and stayed behind to defend those people. He was a hero. Staring at the surface of the water, a very morbid thought entered my head. He'll never grow older, yet here I am, still living and breathing. Who decides these things? His mom would never get to see her baby again. He'd never get to take Annabeth to that baseball game. That dryad at camp would never get her bow back. Lou would lose her best friend.

A riverboat paddlewheel broke my train of thought. Looking around, I spotted something. My sword! It was a mere five feet in front of me. Its bronze hilt sticking up in the mud. I heard that woman's voice again.