The landing had felt like they had jumped off Olympus and landed on the concrete in front of the Empire State Building. When he was younger, he referred to it as cement, but who didn't? Annabeth had corrected him from calling the sidewalk's material cement early in their friendship. She would get mad and call him Seaweed Brain whenever he argued that it was the same thing.
"No it's not! Cement is and ingredient. Calling concrete cement is like calling cake flour."
She was always telling him things like that- little facts about her favorite places and their architecture. How things were built. What materials were used. Stuff like that. He was always eagerly attentive. Not because he was particularly interested in the places. He could honestly care less about how many square feet the Parthenon had (23,028 at its base), but the way Annabeth's eyes lit up when talking about it made every boring statistic less painfully boring.
Her eyes weren't lit up now. When she had fell face-first after Arachne had got a hold on her ankle, the impact had busted her head. While the injury normally wouldn't have been fatal, it, along with the broken ankle, the drag down the side of the cliff, (which had caused a lot of cuts, the most concerning being the one on her stomach that had managed to soak the small bit of ground they had found at a safe distance from the rivers of lava that seemed to be in abundance) and the impact of the fall, had caused Annabeth to lose her strength. And blood. A lot of blood. He was definitely not squeamish; no half-blood could make it long outside of camp if they were. He had nothing to stop the bleeding except the bottom of his dirty, bloody shirt. He pressed it to her head anyways. It was better than nothing. The shirt touched her open wound and she shuddered.
"Percy…..Arcachne will find us soon." She said quietly from her position of Percy holding her upper body close to him while her legs were carelessly sprawled on the ground.
She didn't have to explain herself further. Neither of them was in current condition to fight her. It was luck that the thread on Annabeth's ankle had been so long and had given them enough time to move out of sight from where the end of it had been laying on the ground after Percy had cut it from her ankle. They didn't go far, however. Annabeth could barely walk, and Percy was too beaten up from the fall into Tartarus to support most of her weight for too long.
"I know."
What he didn't say was that he was more concerned with stopping the bleeding enough to keep her from passing out than a threat that wasn't staring him in the face like her blood loss.
Annabeth looked like she was already about to pass out.
"This place is awful. And I thought that the Underworld was bad."
She made a sound of agreement.
"You know, if Nico hadn't looked half-dead, I would have hit him. I understand that he needed to keep the camps secret from each other, but-" He stopped as Annabeth's breathing became more labored. Her eyelids had begun to droop.
"I wonder what Mom told the school had happened to me. I was actually doing okay there to! I didn't even get a detention all last semester. And I was passing all my classes." With Cs, but they were a huge improvement from his normal low Ds and Fs. It wasn't that he was suddenly interested in his education. Every time Annabeth saw him on a school day she would go through his folder and make him do his homework. He didn't ask her, but he figured that it was some weird way to try to get her mom to hate him a little less. But when he had got back his first progress report boasting passing grades in all his classes-with a B- in Ancient History, he had felt a twinge of pride as he had showed his mom and Paul, and later Annabeth.
Her breathing shook her entire body.
He remembered when he had first told his mom about his now openly romantic relationship with Annabeth. She had merely smiled at the time and gave Paul a meaningful look before continuing to make the blue celebratory "Percy didn't die" cake. As he walked out the door, though, he heard his mother's voice say "It's about time!"
Her eyes were barely open now.
He remembered when Annabeth had been kidnapped and he had forced himself into the quest with Thalia, Grover, Zoe, and Bianca. The quest that only two of his companions had survived. A little good had happened, though. The Hoover Dam had been where he had met Rachel. Rachel, who he had also liked, before she became the Oracle. He also had met Aphrodite, who had told him she was going to make his love life difficult because she liked him. That wasn't too good. They had also saved Annabeth, and Artemis. He had to literally hold up the sky to do it. It had made him and Annabeth closer. They both had the matching streaks of gray in their hair after that.
Her breathing was more strained than ever.
He remembered their kiss in the canoe lake. He had trouble breathing after that.
Her eyes had closed.
He was used to seeing her with closed eyes. If they ever watched a particularly uninteresting movie, she would fall asleep before the end of it.
Her breathing slowed.
He thought of when he had seen New Rome, and imagined living out his life with her there. Even before they arrived in Tartarus, it seemed like an impossible dream. The Romans wouldn't let them within a hundred miles of their camp. He didn't want to be within a hundred miles of Octavian.
Her blood had pooled around them. It didn't soak his clothes. It did contain water after all.
He thought about the first time he had met Annabeth when he had first came to Camp Half Blood. So much had changed since then.
Her breathing had stopped.
His mom had always said not to let anything anyone else did make him cry. He didn't think she would mind this one time.
He wiped his eyes. Just because he was resistant to water didn't mean his tears wouldn't stain Annabeth's already ruined clothes. The clothes that had become her final ones.
He wondered if any of her siblings would live to burn the shroud. Their chances looked better than his.
Sorry for that. It was a prompt I wrote a few weeks ago. It's my first PJ fanfiction, so please tell me how I did.
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