The final battle with Gaea
Nico is stabbed with a spear by his father's enemy. He has a pierced lung.
Hazel runs over to him and drops onto her knees at his side, already fumbling in her pockets for some ambrosia.
"No – no use," he wheezes, blood already starting to stain his mouth red. "Percy, I need Percy. Please, I have to tell him…"
Hazel stares, aghast, but Jason overhears, and hastily grabs Percy and hustles him over to Nico, mindlessly defending from enemies that begin to swarm them. "Go!" he yells over the din of the fighting. "It's important, Percy!"
Percy skids to his knees and cradles his arm around Nico's shoulders, forcing ambrosia between his lips despite Nico's protests, of "It's too late."
Percy has something in his eye. He swears, just a dust mote, or a… something that isn't a tear. "You can't die! You're the Ghost King. We need you here, your friends, we need you, come on buddy, stay with us. You have too many hit points to die now, Di Angelo."
"I have to tell you… have to (couch-blood splatter) I wish you had loved me the way I did you, but I don't hate Annabeth, just … I love you and I'm okay with that, now. Thought you should know, so I can die happy."
"Die-" Percy's voice cracked and those were definitely tears washing white tracks down his sweat and soot-stained face. "Please, no."
Nico smiled weakly and coughed again. "Mythomagic," he mutters, head lolling back. "Hit points, heh!" He coughs again, blood flowing darkly from his mouth.
Percy has never felt so… so. Nico is dear to him, and his life is seeping away, and he, Percy, was the most important person to this kid. And Percy can't do a damn thing to save him. But there is something.
"Yeah," he says softly, salty tears dripping from his chin. "Happy, right." And Percy screws up his nerve and closes his eyes and kisses Nico on the mouth.
- - Because that's how he would want to go, with the person he loved holding him and kissing him as his last thought before oblivion. –
Nico dies with an expression of such tender awe and radiant joy. Percy is shaking. The feeling, it's not going away, swelling up into anger and rage and such, such pain.
The half bloods had never seen anything as scary as Percy Jackson when he let go of Nico's body and stood up shaking, fists clenched. His blank eyes and mouth smeared with the lifeblood of the son of Hades were a gruesome vision that haunted many dreams afterward. Then they realized that Percy wasn't the one shaking. Or rather, he was.
The Son of the Earthshaker stood upon that battlefield, and Gaea was shaking. He pointed Riptide at her and cried a harsh cry full of pain and vengeance and devastation and fury.
There is nothing left. The battle is over. Percy's ears are ringing and he stumbles. There is so much blood all over him. Someone tries to help him sit, to lead him by the arms somewhere, he doesn't know. Someone blond.
"Wash," he croaks. He must have been yelling something fierce for the way his throat felt. He couldn't hear anything but the ringing. "Gotta wash, I'm gonna go wash, okay? Just wash up this this bl-" he chokes, stumbles again and sobs once, not able to think or say the word, because he saw it bubbling up from his lungs, and that couldn't be true, it wasn't fair – Someone's hands are on him again, but he shakes them off and lurches toward the comforting scent of salt.
He walks right into the water, despite the protests of that blond person, (was it Annabeth?) He didn't want to see her – anyone- he couldn't- just-
the blood swirls around his feet and ankles and his leather sandals are turning black and now his battle skirt and the red leaches out of his orange shirt and water dissolves the stiffness of the dried blood on his jaw and the ocean closes over his head like a father's comforting embrace.
Out of the corner of his eye he sees a shark interested in the scent of blood, but the great and terrible swell of emotion pulses and that shark can't swim away from Percy fast enough.
Down, down, down, to the black depths. Black as hair, black as blood, black as nothingness. It matches his emotion, this nameless painful thing he feels trying to burst from his chest. Background thoughts run through his mind about the battle, all his battles, history, Greeks, blond Annabeth, and blond Jason, and the first time he ever saw that kid with the Mythomagic cards, and the last time he saw that kid's sister, and wondering how deep the Marianas trench actually is, and how they had measured it. He touched the bottom, laid his head against the cold hard rock of the deepest part of the ocean. The closest part to Hades, he thought.
The emotion, that nameless and painful torrent, broke free. In the back of his mind, he wondered if tears were more or less salty than ocean water and if the concentration of salt was higher down here and if so, was he diluting the water? The thoughts scrambled around his head, trying and failing to distract him from the pain. Nico Di Angelo was no more. He had loved Percy and Percy had not known; had never been good enough to Nico, not the day he met him, or the day he promised to keep his sister safe, not the day he failed. And failed again. And failed again. And Nico had loved him? What kind of person was Percy, to never-
He bangs his head into the rocky bottom of the trench. Nothing moves. Nothing lives down there in the inky frozen vastness. Percy lets the black take him.