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Percy hasn’t been able to get out of bed this week.
The soft, wavy ripples of light marking up the walls of his cabin keep the surface of his brain occupied, enough that he’s frozen in place. He stares at the reflections of water shift and dance and it keeps his brain from going to worse and worse places--it’s the only coping mechanism he’s been able to internalize and do on his own. Everything else requires someone else to be here with him, and…everyone’s busy. Percy can occupy himself.
It’s been three days since he got up. He’s only subsisting off of the water bottle he keeps on his bedside table. Even if he had food nearby, his stomach would be too queasy for him to have an appetite. Percy slips in and out of uneasy sleep, dozing in and out of nightmares that are worsened by the sounds of shouting and clanging of swords wafting over from the arena.
Percy doesn’t know what his endgame is here. He’s hoping that eventually his brain will click back into something that lets him shove everything down and stand back up again. He’s hoping someone needs his help so he can get out of bed for someone else. He’s hoping he falls asleep and never wakes up again.
Last time he was this bad, Annabeth was there to open the blinds in his cabin and coax him out of bed with gentle bullying--but right now, she’s in California for a month. The time before that, it was Charlie, showing up and asking Percy to provide hydraulic power for some insane new generator he was prototyping--but he’s...
Percy sinks back, letting Jason’s hoodie swallow him further. Every time he thinks about his friends, or someone he could reach out to, he’s reminded of people that aren’t around anymore. And he thinks about how it’s his fault that things turned out this way, and how he has no one to blame but himself for the fact that he’s here, alone, unable to breathe.
As his despair starts to drag him down again, into a haze that will probably swallow up another few hours of his life, he feels Grover reaching out. It’s a gentle, cautious sort of poke at their link, like Grover’s patting his shoulder.
Their empathy link has become such a routine thing that Percy rarely notices it. Now that things have calmed down ( for the time being, a paranoid part of his brain whispers), Grover’s emotions are back to being mostly serene. He’s getting pretty good at calming down his spikes of panic--Percy thinks that the group he travels with lately has some kind of meditation ritual-slash-weed habit that helps Grover from being so high-strung. Most of what Percy feels from him are brief thrills of anxiety that Grover calms himself down from.
Guilt rises like nausea up Percy’s throat. He’s felt a secondhand panic attack from Grover before, and it wasn’t pretty. Now Percy’s latched his claws into Grover and forced him to feel the full extent of his mood all week, when Grover has things that he’s doing.
Grover nudges him again, more sternly this time. Percy feels like if he wasn’t teetering on dehydration, he would start crying.
He doesn’t know what Grover wants. All of the churning, muted feelings in Percy’s head are exhausting him. He just wants to go to sleep and never wake up again so Grover doesn’t have to deal with his bullshit anymore.
Between one shaky breath and the next, Percy’s view of the wavy lights on his walls is interrupted by the shimmering of an incoming IM. Even before the image stabilizes, Percy knows that it’s going to be Grover, alarmed by how bad Percy’s gotten.
He’s unable to summon the strength to flip over and pretend to be asleep. Percy just watches, lying limp, as the face of his best friend comes into focus.
“--it going? It’s been a while,” Grover’s saying. He squints, maybe trying to make out Percy’s form where it’s all swaddled up in the big blanket. “I meant to call last week, I’m sorry.”
Percy feels too hollow to say anything back. He knows his emotions are speaking for themselves. He doesn’t blame Grover for not calling--the issue isn’t that he doesn’t know that there are people out there who care about him. The issue is that he’s so fucking tired of being in his own head and he doesn’t know how to find his way back out again.
“Have you eaten?” Grover asks, voice softening. He’s not alone; Percy sees movement behind him, a beautiful glade clearing being crisscrossed by the group of satyrs that Grover’s been traveling with for a couple weeks. None of them are stopping to stare, but Percy’s sure that most of them are listening in.
Percy can’t even open his mouth. He makes himself even smaller, seeking the clammy warmth of the unwashed sweatshirt, like that’ll keep any of Grover’s friends from recognizing him.
“Hey, Percy,” Grover says, a knowing and sad tilt to his mouth as he tries and fails to get Percy to react to him. “If I ask someone at the kitchen to send you some snacks, would that be overstepping?”
A burn at the back of Percy’s eyes confirms that he wants to cry, he just can’t manage it. The link he has with Grover has started to get warmer, a surge of love and concern that hurts his tired and foggy head.
He can’t manage anything but a blink and a pathetic twitch, but inwardly, he curls himself around the warmth of Grover’s affection like a dragon around a pile of gold.
“I’m kinda worried about you, man.”
Percy closes his eyes and thinks, radiating it back through their link, please don’t be.
“No, actually, I’m gonna be worried and you can’t stop me.” Grover isn’t impatient with him. Percy wishes he would be--but that thought is caught up, too, because Grover’s voice gets even more concerned as he says, “ No, I’m not gonna be mean to you. You hate yourself enough for the both of us.”
That makes Percy open his eyes again as a startled laugh leaves him. It’s just a short huff of air through his nose, but it feels as rejuvenating as a spat of rain. The feeling immediately fades, but it reminds Percy that he’s alive.
Grover is relieved. His smile becomes more certain, and the love that Percy’s clinging onto gets louder. “There you are.” The image starts to ripple, threatening the end of the call, and Grover’s face falls. “Shoot. I’m gonna tell someone to bring you food, okay? There’s gotta be someone at camp you’re okay with me asking.”
The only people Percy thinks of instinctively are people who can’t be here. He thinks of Annabeth, of Jason, of his mom.
“I know,” Grover says, feeling the instinctive, plaintive thoughts in Percy’s head. He’s fading fast. “I know. Who else?”
Percy’s head is too heavy. He doesn’t want to think about how lonely he is. In the midst of being all wrapped up in this feeling, he ends up just staring as his best friend’s face wobbles and disappears in a sheen of rainbowy mist.
Sorry, Percy thinks, though the surge of guilt leaving him is probably already telling Grover that.
He gets a soft, dark blue pulse of reassurance in return, a promise that Grover isn’t mad.
The IM conversation exhausts the limited energy that Percy had. He falls asleep again--or at least, there’s a span of time during which his thoughts turn into swirling, nonsensical, terrifying things that are probably dreams and not reality, and so he figures he fell asleep.
When he wakes up, it’s because he hears his cabin door opening. His instincts are just as sharp as they always are, but the difference this time is that Percy is all wrapped up in apathy and so he doesn’t even twitch towards a weapon to draw on the intruder.
Something smacks the wall behind Percy’s head. He flinches, but no further projectile threatens him. His eyes feel all puffy and they’re hard to open. He manages anyway, prying open his eyelids to see what the hell has been thrown at him.
There’s a ziplock bag full of squares of ambrosia lying on his bed. Percy traces the path of the bag back to his assailant, and finds that it’s Clarisse.
“What the fuck?” Percy mumbles.
“Don’t give me that.” Clarisse’s scowl holds no more malice than she usually has. And contrary to the fact that she’s just attacked Percy out of nowhere, her approach to Percy’s bed is only a purposeful stride that doesn’t necessarily threaten violence.
He doesn’t have it in him to sit up to greet her. Clarisse doesn’t stop until she’s near enough to plop down on the edge of his bed, where she picks up the plastic baggie and, all businesslike, rips out a square of ambrosia and shoves it in Percy’s face.
Percy recoils, looking at it suspiciously. He has no idea what’s going on.
Clarisse waves the ambrosia in front of his nose. “Eat up.”
Percy isn’t hungry. He gives her a blank, exhausted look and turns his head away from the food.
“Alright, that’s not an option. You want me to split it in half?”
A part of Percy suddenly longs for the days when Clarisse would have just ripped him out of bed and tried to give him a swirly in the nearest toilet. That would at least make more sense than whatever’s going on right now.
“Okay, this isn't cute anymore. Three-two-one,” Clarisse says, and shoves half of the square of ambrosia into Percy’s mouth. She catches him by surprise and by the time it’s in his mouth, it’s too much work to spit it back in her face.
The taste of chocolate chip cookies takes him all the way back to his first days at camp, when he missed his mom so much he could barely move. The ambrosia spreads comfort through his body, fixing the hollow feeling in his stomach and letting his arms regain some strength, but the new wave of loneliness hits hard. Hard enough that Percy’s face must make some kind of horrifying expression because Clarisse says, a bit alarmed, “Shit.”
Percy’s eyes are brimming, too much for him to try and blink back. Drops spill down his face, warping his vision as he watches Clarisse’s overwhelmed look tell him that she didn’t sign up for this.
She steels herself, though, and new determination lights up her eyes. She’s not as confident as she was when she charged in, but she’s sizing up the situation and adapting, visibly planning what to do like this situation necessitates a battle strategy. “How long have you been in here, dude?”
He gives a useless little shrug.
“You should sit up. Get moving.”
Percy doesn’t want to.
“Laying around isn’t gonna work forever. You already slept today. Up.”
He feels like she should understand better than anyone that he hates being bossed around. He ignores her, irritated thoughts mixing with his sad ones.
Clarisse sighs. “I know we aren’t usually…the person to do this sort of thing for each other. Okay? But you’ve already tried lying around feeling sorry for yourself so it’s time to try my idea instead.”
Percy scowls.
“Yeah, I know you can hear me.” Clarisse peels the blanket down from his shoulders. Percy shivers. “C’mon.”
Clarisse slides a hand under the small of his back to drag him upright. The cool air of the cabin immediately makes Percy annoyed to have been disturbed, but Clarisse doesn’t stop until he’s sitting up. She pulls his comforter up around his shoulders and he leans back against the wall, exhausted by this small movement.
She fills up his water bottle and makes him drink half. Percy takes tiny dejected sips from his water in the silence that swallows both of them. The water restores more of his strength, until all that’s left is the mental fog that won’t go away with magic.
Clarisse stays perched on his bed, like a very uncomfortable stone gargoyle. After she gets a little too antsy not saying anything, she asks, “You know how to make friendship bracelets?”
Percy twitches in surprise, and then shakes his head.
“Silena showed me,” Clarisse says, now pointedly not looking at Percy. “For when my head got all messed up.” Like yours, goes unsaid. “I could show you.”
Already, she’s seen him in a very low place, and she’s scraped the remains of his body back together, and now she’s telling him a very intimate-feeling secret, one that Percy doesn’t think he has the right to know. He looks over at her, a bit jarred by how open she’s being.
“What?” she asks, hackles raising as if specifically to prove him wrong. “Don’t look at me like that.”
Percy politely averts his eyes, if only to avoid getting cuffed upside the head. “That sounds cool,” he finally croaks.
“The bracelet thing?” Clarisse eases up, no longer sounding so intense. “Okay. Uh, I’ll get some thread then. And some real food. Don’t go anywhere.”
A snort leaves him before he can think about it.
“Yeah, I figured you weren’t gonna move but you never know. Whatever.” Clarisse pushes herself up off the bed and starts to leave, then doubles back and picks up the rest of the ambrosia and takes it with her. She gives him a weird look as she pockets it, and then leaves without another word.
It should be humiliating to have Clarisse think about Percy willingly eating way too much of the godly food just because he’s left alone. Percy’s just relieved that she took it with her so he doesn’t have to wrestle down that urge.
When she comes back, she has contraband potato chips from somewhere as well as Coke in a real can. She has a Jeep that she drives off-camp fairly frequently, raking in dough from campers who want stuff from the mortal world, and Percy’s glad she’s not charging him for these snacks. She also has two clipboards with thread clipped to them, hanging off in long strands, one of the bunches of threads all greens and blues and the other one red and metallic gold.
Unexpectedly, she hands him the clipboard with red and gold thread. At his weird look, she glares and says, “What? You don’t make your own bracelet.”
If Percy wasn’t back to feeling so hollow and blank, he thinks he might’ve started crying again. Instead, he takes the clipboard and sits criss-cross applesauce and Clarisse slowly, painstakingly teaches him how to weave.
At her instruction, he gets a bracelet going with a simple candy-stripe pattern. He has a lot of mistake spots, the red and gold getting mixed up in spots like glitches in a pixelated image, but Clarisse doesn’t really know how to fix that either. Her stripes look better, though that might just be practice.
She isn’t a chatty person. Percy isn’t feeling capable of talking either. Besides random reminders to pull the thread a certain way, they’re silent as their fingers fumble around the tiny knots. Clarisse’s fingers have been broken many, many times and it’s hard for her to pull off these intricate knots, but she manages if she takes it slowly. Percy’s brain tries to spiral and take him into flashbacks, but the repetitive motions and the presence of someone next to him keeps him present.
If anyone had told twelve-year-old Percy that he’d be getting lifesaving quality time with Clarisse La Rue, he’d have laughed so hard he threw up. But. She understands his brain now. And both of them have grown up enough that when they try to kill each other, it’s out of respect.
It’s getting dark outside as Percy finishes a pretty wobbly-looking bracelet. Whenever he lets go of it, it curls around itself in a tight spiral, but when stretched taut it should be long enough to wrap around Clarisse’s sturdy wrist. Either way, he’s out of thread.
She’s finished hers and has been crunching potato chips contemplatively for a while, waiting for Percy to finish. Seeing him tying off his bracelet, she unclips her completed bracelet and gestures for him to hold his arm out.
He extends his wrist, clumsily pulling up the large sleeve of Jason’s sweatshirt to bare his skin. Clarisse carefully wraps the bracelet around his arm, and says, “Make a wish while I tie it.”
“What?”
“Shut up and do it. It’s bad luck not to.” Clarisse gives him a brief glare before refocusing on the knot she’s tying. “And you really don’t need any more bad luck.”
“Mean.” Percy breathes in, and on the exhale wishes for a restful night’s sleep and a clear head tomorrow. As he breathes out, Clarisse fastens the knot and leaves the bracelet there, striped with sea green and dark blue and teal.
She brandishes her own wrist. “My turn.”
Percy unclips the thread from the clipboard and repeats the same process. The bracelet fits. He hesitates before fastening the knot, giving her a look.
“What?” she demands, meeting his eye.
“Are you making a wish?” Percy asks.
“Oh. Yeah, sure,” Clarisse says. As Percy tightens the knot, she says, in that same casual voice, “I wish you were less of a little bitch.”
Letting go of the ends of the bracelet, Percy swings a fist forward, knocking her in the sternum. Clarisse grabs his fist and twists it. Two concerning popping noises emanate from his elbow and wrist before he grits his teeth and taps at her arm twice, saying “Uncle.”
“That’s what I thought,” Clarisse says with a self-satisfied sneer. She releases him and drops her clipboard on top of his. “You can take those back to Crafts tomorrow.”
Percy pushes the two clipboards onto the floor of his cabin, where they make a loud clattering sound.
Clarisse snorts. She scoots off of his bed and stands, grunting when her back makes a weird cracking sound. “My cabin needs me at campfire.”
“Oh, right.” He’s a little sad to see her go. It’s been hours and he doubts her patience will hold out forever, but his brain is much quieter than it was.
“If you, uh, you know.” Clarisse waves her hand, avoiding his eye. “If it gets that bad again, I’m…”
“Thanks,” Percy says. “I get it. And, um, you too.”
Clarisse nods. She takes a couple steps towards the door, and then stops. “Also, you kind of stink. You’d think the son of the water god would know how to shower.”
Percy rolls his eyes and slumps back down into bed, pulling the blanket around his shoulders and returning to his spot on the pillow. “Thanks, Clarisse.”
“I’d better see you at breakfast,” she threatens. “Signups for Capture the Flag are then.”
“Sure,” Percy says, amusement softening his face. “Whatever.”
She leaves, slamming the door behind her. Her jogging footsteps recede, joining the rest of the camp at the firepit. It’ll probably spark a bunch of questions, seeing Clarisse leaving Percy’s cabin after Percy’s been a reclusive ghost for several days now, but Percy can deal with that tomorrow. The friendship bracelet magic will probably get him feeling better, if Clarisse’s claims hold any weight, because he’ll get some sleep and he’ll be less of a little bitch in the morning.
He hears a round of camp songs starting up in the distance, and the rattling of someone smashing their spear on a shield for dramatic effect. Percy runs his fingers over the bracelet on his wrist, finding comfort there, and lets the off-key singing from the campfire lullaby him into slumber.