"Send me! Send an army! Send a thousand ships! I don't care, just bring her home. I hate being without her."
[ PERCY JACKSON x FEMALE OC ]
[ PERCY JACKSON SERIES ]
cover by @humaneity !
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0005. | BOLSTERING IS TRIED BUT RULES ARE BROKEN
Exhaustion stuck with Octavia now harder than before Mount Othrys and her poisoning. Like honey on her hands, she could clean it away and push past it but a certain residue and stickiness remained as a reminder. Be that as light shadowing under her eyes that hadn't been there before or a slowness in her mind which most definitely had been there before. Maybe it was the poison she could still feel coursing inside her like a phantom, or maybe it was the ghost of tiredness still haunting her still after how close to Charon's ferry she had come.
Logically, she knew the poison was gone. A poison that strong had to be felt. She had nearly died from it, according to James and Will's trusted judgements. She remembered how it hurt, how it fogged her mind. She was fine now. No pain, no fog, just a different taste to her favourite foods and a rasp in her throat that tickled when she sang or when the wind was cold. The poison was gone. Logically, she knew that. But she had never been very logical. There was a scar on her mind and she could not cut it out no matter how deeply she dug her claws.
Some days it was easy enough to ignore.
Other days she would catch a waft of cinnamon on the air or someone tall would pass by with blond hair and she would flinch like it could have been a Hydra. A monster she could handle, one that exploded into golden dust and roared its croaks. When she had began learning to be a hero, she didn't realise how many different types of monsters there were.
Family being cruel was not a new idea to her, it was not a shocking one either. Her mother had taught her that. Her father had taught her that. It was one of the few things that they had ever taught her.
But still, being taught from a young age by everyone but her own parents that family was supposed to mean something completely unconditional didn't fly entirely past her ears. She knew what a proper family was supposed to be, just like she knew what a healthy body and a healthy mind was supposed to be. No matter how ruined she and her life was, she still held an expectation that it would all be all right. That was her fatal flaw. Ambition for perfection. If she could be perfect, then everything would be okay. To be perfect was to be absolved of any criticism or wrongness. She wanted the perfect life, the perfect family, the perfect skills, the perfect face, the perfect body, the perfect friends, the perfect actions, the perfect everything. She never wanted to be near criticism and yet, it found her anyway. Her ambition was necessary because it was good for her in small doses. Ambition to be better was always good, but it could be worse when taken to the extremes of divinity. Unfortunately, Octavia was half divine. She always took everything too far.
Sometimes, that worked in her favour. Other times, it did not.
She was yet to learn the favours of being parasitic to a corpse of a woman who lived thousands of years ago, but she would learn. One day, she would not dream of Helen. One day, she would just be her.
