Guilty.

Leo Valdez's hands are shaking while he tries to grab that tiny little piece of the metal in the ground. He has been locked in his room for the past hours, saying to himself that he won't get out of there until he builds something.

But his fingers refuse to create anything.

His jaw tightens and he drops the screwdriver along with all his other tools, papers and the lamp of his desk, to the floor. Everything to the floor. Everything fell.

Leo hides his face in his dirty and aching hands, closing his eyes. He's in pain and it feels better not to pretend anything there, with nobody else to see. In that moment, he isn't a demigod. He isn't the fireproof son of Hephaustus.

In that moment he is just a boy. He is a really lost boy, blaming himself of somebody else's fate. I screwed up everything. I did it. It was all my fault…Why did they have to pay the price of my mistakes?

And a pencil rolls in the ground, at the top of one paper, with the drawing of a rope in it.

And the ghosts get showed up. They come from the walls, from the papers, they come from everyplace, and they come from nowhere.

They speak and they pull him from his clothes. They repeated together, like a perfect, twisted chore a single word:

Guilty.

He covers his ears with his hands, trying to shut them up. But they won't. They will never do it. They will keep chasing him, shattering him a little bit more with every whisper.

I'm Guilty.