Mind over matter/Percy Jackson x oc

I become a know fugitive

POV Percy

I'd like to tell you that I had a deep revelation on my way down, that I came to terms with my own mortality, my own death, and laughed in the face of death.
The truth , I had only two thoughts in my head: Aaaaggghhhhh! I was also thinking of the girl next to me, who was closing her eyes, probably waiting for me to find a solution.

The river raced towards me at the speed of a truck. The wind whipped the breath from my lungs. Steeples, skyscrapers and bridges followed one another in my vision.

And then... Flaaa-boooom!

A whiteout of bubbles.
I sank through the murk, sure that I was about to end up embedded in a hundred feet of mud and lost forever.

But the impact with the water hadn't hurt. I was falling slowly now, bubbles trickling through my fingers. I settled on the river bottom soundlessly. A catfish the size of my stepfather lurched away into the gloom.
Clouds of silt and disgusting garbage - beer bottles, old shoes, plastic bags - swirled up around me.

At that point, I realized a few things: first, I had not been flattened into a pancake. I had not been barbecued. I couldn't even feel Chimera's poison boiling in my veins anymore. I was alive, which was good.

Second realization: I wasn't wet. I mean, I could feel the coolness of the water. I could see where the fire on my clothes had been quenched. But when I touched my shirt, it was perfectly dry.
I looked at the garbage floating in front of me and grabbed an old cigarette lighter.
No way, I thought.
I flicked the lighter. It sparked. A small flame appeared, right there at the bottom of the Mississippi.

I grabbed a soggy hamburger wrapper out of the current and immediately the paper turned dry. I lit it with no problem. As soon as I let it go, the flames sputtered out. The wrapper turned back into a slimy rag. Weird.

But the strangest thought occurred to me only last: I was breathing. I was underwater and breathing normally.

I stood up, my thighs in the mud. My legs felt shaky. My hands trembled. I should have been dead. The fact that I wasn't seemed like.... a miracle. I imagined a woman's voice, a voice that sounded a little like my mother's: Percy, what do you say?
" Um... thanks." Underwater, I sounded like I did recordings, like a much older kid. "Thanks you... Father."

No response. Just the dark drift of garbage downriver, the enormous catfish gliding by, the flash of sunset on the water's surface far above, turning everything the color of butterscotch.
Why had Poseidon saved me? The more I thought about it, the more ashamed I felt. So I'd gotten lucky a few times before. Against a thing like the Chimera, I had never stood a chance. Those poor people in the Arch were probably toast. I couldn't protect them. I was no hero. Maybe I should just stay down here with the catfish, join the bottom-feeders.

No, I had to find Kassi, I'd taken her down with me and she couldn't breathe underwater if I didn't bring her to the surface right now she'd drown.

Fump-fump-fump. A riverboat's churned above me, swirling the silt around.
There, not five feet in front of me, was my sword, its gleaming bronze hilt sticking up in the mud.

I heard that woman's voice again: Percy, take the sword. Your father believes in you. This time, I knew the voice wasn't in my head. I wasn't imagining it. Her words seemed to come from everywhere, rippling through the water like a dolphin's sonar.

"Where are you? I called aloud.

Then, through the gloom, I saw her - a woman the color of water, a ghost in the current, floating just above the sword. She had long, billowing hair and her eyes, barely visible, were green like mine.