𝐌𝐀𝐍𝐈𝐀, 𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐜𝐲 𝐣𝐚𝐜𝐤𝐬𝐨𝐧

16 - memories galore

˖*࿐ •*⁀➷

PERCY DREAMED IN MEMORIES.

The remembering was slow and senseless, all in flashes of things that had no real meaning, but after a while, his jumbled, confused subconscious settled on one scene.

He was standing on the bank of a river, and his stomach was hollow with dread. The sand was black and so was the water, the icy current carrying down old, miscellaneous objects- unfinished dreams, snatched away by death.

This was the River Styx. Percy didn't know how he knew that, but he knew.

Someone was standing beside him, but he couldn't make out their face. The memory seemed to be piecing itself back together right in front of his eyes, some parts still missing, lost away in the mess of his brain.

Before he could ponder that fact harder, a figure flickered into existence a few feet away, and everything else went quiet.

With golden hair and sharp, knowing eyes as green as spring leaves, the man in front of him held a kind of effortless beauty, timeless and inhuman in the best way. His skin was smooth, corded muscle beneath tanned skin, but there was a gaping hole in his chest, flesh and bone shattered and ripped away in the center of his sternum, covering his torso in dark crimson blood. There was more blood, also, coming from the back of his leg. An arrow was lodged there, right at the bottom of his calf where his ankle met his heel.

Percy felt like something was wrapping around his throat, cutting off all his ability to breathe, and he wanted to scream and smile and cry and throw up all at once. He knew who this was, even just from the tales, but this knowing felt even deeper. Familiar.

"Achilles," Percy-from-the-past had breathed, and something so devastatingly, suffocatingly wistful had curdled in his chest.

The hero had just looked at him with those shattered-glass green eyes, a sort of longing sadness in his gaze, like he had everything he'd wished for right in front of him, but he was a million miles away.

Then, his eyes had flashed with a sort of feral rage and his form flickered, someone else taking his place.

The girl standing there had to be the prettiest person Percy had ever seen in his life. He'd met Aphrodite back when he was thirteen, he remembered, and she hadn't looked like anyone he'd ever met. Her appearance had flickered once to someone bright as fire, flaming hair and sharp green eyes, but had stayed firmly on brown hair and hazel eyes like broken stars for most of the time. And now, he was seeing those features he'd glimpsed years ago, all meshed together on the face of a girl about his age.

Her hair was really long, falling in brown waves to her lower back, and her tanned skin was dappled with freckles, a dimple on the left side of her mouth. She had smiled at him, just faintly, a dry sort of thing like she found him amusing, and he felt like he couldn't move, couldn't breathe, for fear of her disappearing again.

Looking at that girl right there, Percy had felt like he'd found the one thing that could fill the gaping hole in his chest, a hole he didn't even know existed until that very second.

The hazel of her eyes glittered with something he'd never seen before, something he'd never forget. Maybe it was madness, maybe it was anger, maybe it was regret. Or maybe it was joy, maybe it was relief, maybe it was a fervent kind of adoring reverence that only Fate could bring. Whatever it was, he never wanted her to look away from him again.

He hadn't known who she was back then, standing beside that river, but now, watching this memory back, the name fell from Percy's lips in a desperate whisper. "Mabel."