Shattered

Piper

The daughter of Aphrodite found herself in a rather strange situation when she came to her senses. She was back in her living room in LA, sitting on the old, beat up, brown couch that had belonged to her Grandpa Tom, with the large flatscreen playing Die Hard; one of her Grandpa's favorite movies. Everything about the room seemed perfectly normal. Her dad's framed posters decorated the walls, their DVD and Blu-ray collection was waiting to be organized, the coffee table's surface was scratched ever so slightly, the ceiling fan was spinning slowly, and off in the distance she could hear Mr. Nugent's lawn being mowed. It was all so mundane, so ordinary, that it seemed off considering the last thing she remembered was a skyscraper of a serpent crushing her boat.

Thankfully, there was something out of the ordinary sitting next to her, in the form of her Grandpa Tom. He looked pretty good for a dead guy, having seemingly regained the weight he lost before his untimely death; no longer the frail old man Piper remembered from the wake, but the hearty man from her childhood. He wasn't as tall as she remembered, as she used to be able to sit on his lap without her head reaching his chin; but maybe that was because she had grown several feet taller in the years without him. He wore his usual blues jeans, white button-up, and black vest, with a cheap tourist stand bolo hanging around his neck. His hair was long and black with a few streaks of silver, tied back in a neat braid that would make Reyna envious. His face was just as wrinkled with laugh lines as she remembered, with his lips curled up ever so slightly into his permanent smirk. And since he was on his favorite couch, watching his favorite movie, one hand clenched onto the remote while the other hand was slightly tucked in his waistband.

"Hello, Piper," the old man smiled. "It's been a long time."

"Yeah. Yeah, it has," Piper gulped. She pulled her feet up onto the couch and turned to look at the man, trying to absorb every detail that had faded from memory over the years. The subtle curve of his nose. The way his left pinky twitched whenever he moved his right thumb. The way he crossed his toes when he relaxed. All such important details that made Grandpa Tom, Grandpa Tom, that she had somehow forgotten. "Am I- Am I dead?"

"Only mostly." The former Gayegogi let out a deep, throaty chuckle and ruffled her hair, without dropping the remote. "And there's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead."

"The Princess Bride," Piper smiled, rubbing her now sore head. I guess I'm not dead if I can still feel pain. Strangely though, the thought of being dead didn't seem that bad. If she was dead she wouldn't have to worry about Avalon, being the Gayegogi, the Nation, Reyna, or Atlas and Veronica; she could chill with her long-missed grandfather in eternal peace.

"Don't think like that!" Grandpa Tom said, the familiar and painful look of disappointment in his piercing black eyes. "You'll be with me again for sooner than either of us would like." He flicked off the TV just as Hans Grubber was making his big monologue, and tossed the remote onto the coffee table. "Now, our time together is limited, so let's get down to business so we can enjoy our time together."

Piper nodded, unwilling to blink and miss a moment of the old man's company.

"First off, I owe you more apologies than there are winds. I'm sorry I wasn't around to properly introduce you to your heritage; I really should've cut back on the red meat and fried foods," he added with a chuckle. "I'm sorry that I forced you to take up my mantle, that was always the plan, but not like this. I'm sorry that Coyote is on your heels; he is a good dog though, just remember he's lost so many friends over the course of his life. And above all else, I'm sorry you were ever born."

"Wh-what?" At that moment, it felt like her entire world had just been upheaved. Even after learning that she as the daughter of Aphrodite, she had been sure of two things: her dad would always try his best, and Grandpa Tom loved her more than any other person. To hear him say that made her wish that she really was dead.