Alternatively

Newton's 2nd Law

There was a pole through her chest.

And it really, really hurt.

She propped herself up against the bench, wincing as her muscles squished and her bones crunched. The bleeding had stopped, a good thing, but she could feel tissues and veins begin to wrap around the metal spike. Dried tears cracked at the corners of her eyes as she strained to look at the mess, chin practically tucked into her neck in a certainly unflattering way. If she hadn't been so wimpy, she might have pulled the thing out before she started healing, but no. Apparently blacking out for a minute or two was in the cards.

The sole street lamp flickered, glaringly white in the night. It bounced off the chrome of her bike wheels, no longer spinning those few feet away. The construction workers had gone home hours ago and no one would be out as late as she was.

Fuck.

Her insides pinched and mended, weaving around the fence post with eye watering threading. She wrapped her hand around the pole and tugged, frowning at how solidly it was stuck in there. She would need serious force to pull it out, force she didn't have from her position. The end scraped the sidewalk behind her and she wondered if she could dislodge it by falling backwards, shoving it back through her.

That, however, required getting up and she was winded trying to sit upright.

It would be one thing if this was some great event, something worth getting impaled for. Her accidents had always been minor until then, paper cuts and scraped knees. There was that time she got glass stuck in her neck trying to get a baseball from the abandoned house, but it was superficial. The artery had barely been nicked. Crashing into the only construction site on campus because she wasn't paying attention was hardly the debut into big league wounds she had expected.

She huffed, leaning her head back. There had to be a way of getting the damn pole out; she did not want to sit there all night.

The stars twinkled above and she realized it was a clear night. Something about the cloudless sky unnerved her, the moon a sliver and the constellations taunting her. There was irony in being forced to take in her surroundings after being stuck in her head the whole ride from the Engineering Building.

"Oof."

The pole scratched the concrete behind her as she turned, following the boy as he swerved around a trashcan. He shook out his hand, frowning at himself and walking on the other side of the street. Her heart stuttered and she ran over her short list of options.

1. Wait until someone else found her and cause a huge to do.

2. Figure out a way to ram the post out of her body on her own.

3. Wrangle a lone, unsuspecting kid into a task that he would probably chalk up to a dream come morning.

"Hey."

He kept walking, earbuds glinting as he passed under the streetlamp.

She swallowed and winced at the blood running down her throat. "Hey, you!"

The boy and his messy sex hair didn't so much as flinch.

Well, shit.

She looked around, quickly grabbing the pebble that had been stabbing her palm and chucking it his way. It sailed through the air and hit the fire hydrant behind him, but it did the trick; he glanced around. She couldn't be sure what he saw when his eyes landed on her, definitely not the truth, and he pulled an ear bud out with a raised eyebrow.

Jeeze. "Come here!"

He took a second to look around him, slowly walking over. "You okay?"

Annabeth would have said something, but her ribs snapped into place around the pole. It resounded through her body and she was left breathless, black splotches dancing in her eyes.