More Than Just A Birthday

Mistakes

So... it's August 18th again, it's Percy's birthday again, so I'm writing a birthday one shot again. This may become a tradition or something in the future... I dunno, so instead I'll give you a story and leave you to choose.

The streets of Manhattan were quiet, silence looming like an endless fog that was all too easy to get lost in. Their wasn't a single person to be seen on the tarmac pavements, nor a single light on in the buildings. The city was dead, and it seemed that not a thing could stir the city that never slept.

It was quiet, too quiet.

"Psst! Leo, come on!" a voice broke the spell, "We don't have any time to lose! Hurry!"

"Alright, I'm coming, Piper! Just hold on a sec!" the response came. The sound of metallic sheets moving rattled through the air, echoing boldly.

A third voice joined the conversation, "Can you guys keep your voices down? You're making too much noise."

"Sure. Whatever, Frank."

The sound of scuffling continued, accompanied only by the dim light emitted from a silver-coloured screen. Silhouettes mixed with shadows in an intangible idea of dark and light.

"I think I can hear him coming!" the first speaker, Piper, whispered, "Hide! Quick!"

Above them, a series of thudding sounds shook the ceiling above them, too many and too loud to be one person. A door creaked open and lighted flooded into the room from the corridor, followed by the click of a light switch to reveal the chaos inside of the cold basement.

"Oh my gods," a male voice said as he entered the room. "I'm fine with people using my house as a shelter from monsters, but leaving the electricity on is just not cool."

He walked into the light towards the television playing and froze mid stride, eyes glued on the screen. A scowl formed on his face as he hurried towards it, opening the DVD drive and pulling out the old CCTV disk of the Titan War. The man dug out a key from his pocket and unlocked a dark coloured chest, hastily shoving the disk into its case before shutting it inside the box.

"On the bright side," the man spoke sarcastically to himself, "At least I'm home now. I swear if one more person comes up to me and says have a happy godsdamned birthday, I will gut them."

He sighed, running his hands through his messy raven hair for a moment before walking across to the side of the room where an ominous high shelf sat out of reach. The man smirked before reaching for for it, not even requiring to stretch onto his toes to grab the thin yellow package from atop of it.

He moved back towards the television and slid out a plain DVD from the package, carefully placing it into the DVD drive before sitting on a lone chair. His shoulders slumped as the disk began to process, pixels forming pictures. Pictures forming a story.

On the screen, a younger version of the man sat facing a video camera in a blank room. The boy was about thirteen in age, a grim look on his face far different to the smile most around him at that time would have seen.

"Look," the boy said, staring at the screen, "I don't want to die."

He averted his eyes for a moment, taking a deep breath before continuing, "If you're watching this right now. One of three things have happened. One, I didn't hide this well enough and a random person is watching this... confession ... I guess you can call it. Two, I've died and my Mom looked through my stuff  and found this. Three, I'm alive and decided that I would waste a small portion of my life watching myself try to come to terms with my death.

"Personally, I'm banking on the last one."

The boy rubbed his neck, ashamed.

"My name's Percy Jackson. I'm fourteen as of next week and I'm being told that in two years, I will die. Why? Because some corpse-woman prophesied it. How? Trying to save the world from the Titan of Time, Kronos, who has an army, a dung-ton of monsters, and my best friend's crush on his side.