A/N: Ugh, Guys. I am definitely getting off track.
I dunno when the heck I'll be able to update Nicknames or Exiled, I binge-watched ST this weekend, and I'm working on a crossover for THAT. And then I randomly started thinking about the Seven's kids and my Headcannons for them.
This will be much more explained in a Oneshot I'm working on: Out Of The Woods.
But why not try this?
WARNING: Not a happy story. At all. Death, destruction, violence, child-murder, kidnapping, fugitives, going into shock, drinking, and much more.
Just nothing over the T Rating.
Also, I killed more people during and after the Giant War. So what? Most of 'em don't live past
twenty . . .
DISCLAIMER: Don't. Own. PJO.
Criticism appreciated!
She always saw her.
It never changed, no matter the amount of times that she'd scream or her eyes would widen or she'd run away.
She tried to convince herself otherwise. That, fuck, Zoe's still dead and Andrew's still as stuck up as usual.
The latter was false, but the former was true.
Nobody ever looked at her the same way anymore. She was just Priscilla Jackson, the girl with the dead sister, the dead father, a wreck of a mother, and a very, very broken younger brother.
And, in some ways, she wished that none of that, was ever true.
She lost her father in the middle of her freshman year.
She didn't expect such a thing, not at first. She didn't ask for her to be called to the office, for her to find out that her Dad was merely driving across the road, when BAM! He crashed into another car.
"Drunk driver," the police said. And Priscilla just wanted them to stop talking and kill the man who ended her father's life. To torture him.
To make him suffer.
She didn't know that that thought, would be the worst mistake of her life.
Her mother kept in contact with her family friend.
From what Priscilla knew, the friend's name was Piper. Piper McLean. Apparently the woman was classified as 'insane' after the death of her high-school boyfriend, and apparently Priscilla's mother just wanted to keep her together.
It wasn't that Priscilla minded, though.
Most of her Mom's friends died as teenagers or young-adults.
It's just that she wanted everything to go back to normal.
She wanted it to be okay.
And then three months later, Andrew didn't come home one night.
It sent the whole family into a panic. One moment, he was biking over to his friend's house. The next, he simply wasn't.
A kidnapping. An abduction.
Hell, Priscilla didn't care about what she was supposed to call it.
He was twelve.
When she was twelve, she had gone to sleepovers and visited aquariums with her father. When she was twelve, she dealt with hallway gossip and homework assignments. She dealt with Zoe's bickering nature and her mother's love of art museums.
She didn't get kidnapped.
But he did.
Dammit, why did the people who did nothing wrong were the people who had to die, the people to suffer the most?
She didn't know.
Neither did Mom. Neither did Zoe.
The first thing Andrew did when he got home after two months was lock himself in his room.
The Jacksons (including Priscilla) never found out what happened those nights. They never found out how to help Andrew, how to know exactly what he was dealing with.
And so he never spoke a single word again.
"It's not fair!" Zoe protested. "Why am I the one that has to listen to your lectures?"
"Because, Zoe," their mother attempted to remain under control. "You are twelve years old, and these are seventh grade lessons."
"Yeah, but why not make the other two do them?"
Priscilla wielded a skill that Zoe could never even fathom: the ability to notice when to stop talking or else you'll be dealing with a very angry mother.
Priscilla just . . . Kinda blocked out of the rest of the conversation.
Which was hard when your mother was screaming like a banshee.
It never should have happened.
It didn't have to happen.
And yet it did.
Priscilla often contemplated that day. The one where Andrew didn't come downstairs, the one where Zoe finally gave up and let Priscilla have the dibs on the cranberry juice. Priscilla supposed that that should have been the moment when she should have started to become suspicious.
Never, in her sixteen years of life, of her twelve years of being stuck with Zoe as her annoying little sister, had she ever gotten the juice first.
The next hour went by so slowly.
Priscilla swore she could have recalled every moment of that hour. Of those sixty minutes. Of those thirty-six hundred seconds. Of those . . .
Okay, you get the point.
She remembered when Zoe asked to go to the lake behind the house. It was spring break, so mother hadn't really minded. And neither did Priscilla or her brother. Zoe was, strangely to say, responsible around the lake.
She was always back when she said she would. She was a pretty good swimmer, so she always followed safety precautions.
But this time, something went wrong.
"Catch ya later, Cilla."
The very last words Zoe ever said to her.
Priscilla cherished them, yet she also wished that it could have been different. She wanted to scowl at the way that Zoe had used that nickname, the very one that she had protested against for all these years and thought she would keep protesting.
But then Priscilla just had to find her at the bottom of the lake.
Of course she wasn't breathing.
Of course CPR didn't work this time.
April 4th.
An ordinary day to most.
But, to Priscilla, she thought of it in the same way that Hazel Zhang (Or something, Priscilla couldn't recall) thought about October 18th.
What did these two days have in common to them?
It was the day they lost a sibling.
She wanted for the guilt to stop following her.
She wanted to make all of it go away.
She wanted to bring Dad back, as stupid as it sounded. She wanted to help Andrew. She wanted to be there for Mom, and maybe, just maybe, stopped Zoe from going to the lake that day.
She wanted for everything to be the same again.
But it wouldn't.
And it never would be.
Chapter 2: Broken.