Hey there I'm excited for this new story. Big ups to my friend and beta Zaria (her fiction press account-icebubble). Without her this wouldn't have been possible.

DISCLAIMER: I don't own Percy Jackson, Nike and New York.

Hope you enjoy

The worst thing about being a demigod isn't' the fact that one of your parents doesn't like you at all, or the fact that in the end most of your loved ones are dead, or the fact that you'll never live a normal life. It's the fact that sometimes you end up losing your life for the silliest reasons like you fall asleep and then some monster stabs you with its claws or some sort of crap like that. Or it could be that people who you once thought5 were close to you and would trust you, thought you were crazy after telling them the truth. The point I'm getting to is that the life of a demigod really sucks. *

I sit down on the front steps of my house, chucking loose stones into the muddy pothole in the middle of the road, ignoring the powerwalking citizens of New York on the other side and the random cars zooming past. This is what I get for trying to skip school again. I sigh as my pebble misses the intended spot by about a foot. I'd left school as soon as History started, not wanting to listen to Mrs Adams' drone on Russian architecture, with the full intention of lounging in front of the television with a nice selection of greasy junk food. I chuck a stray rock at another bustling passer-by. Instead, my father was home. Honestly, I should have known. The man's been moping around the house for weeks now, doing absolutely nothing constructive – the hypocrite. The moment I stepped into the living room and spotted him on his favourite red reclining chair, he pushed me out of the house with nothing but a grunt of disapproval.

Interrupting my silent musings, a boy sits down beside me, all brown hair and brown eyes. Ethan is his name; my childhood best friend. We met young and just stuck together.

"Why are you sitting here? You look like you're having a serious staring contest with the ground."

I look at him, staring at the flip of his curly hair around his shoulders, something he'd spent hours last weekend trying to perfect. He keeps stealing my hair gel, not that I have any use for the gooey stuff anyway.

"Dad kicked me out for skipping again." I stare down at his once white sneakers. They're tired and worn out. Dirty and wrinkled, like my father. I can no longer remember my father's smile. I've seen it in pictures before, but it always seems so foreign, like a stranger in his body. Sometimes there's a ghost of a smile on his face when he's alone, and I know he's thinking of my mother. But I don't know her, never did. According to my father, she 'supposedly' ran away when I was two and Alex was three. I confess to the lack of memories I have of her, the woman who gave birth to me. When I ask Dad about her, he just says she's beautiful, and that smile appears again, that sad one that on anyone else wouldn't have any relation to a smile.

Ethan nods and pats my head, then gets up and, stuffing his hand in his pockets, walks away. Sometime later, a pair of familiar dark blue Nike sneakers pops up. Alex. He walks past me and opens the doors with his keys. I make to follow him but we stop short at the doorway. The television's off, so are the lights, and the smell. Usually the smell isn't even anything to be proud of, rotten food and garbage, beer. But now, it smells of something rancid and impure.

Alex stiffens. "You smell that?"

"Smell what?"

He bites his lip. "I'll check here, you go upstairs," and he begins to scope out the area, creeping cautiously into the kitchen. In the dark, I make my way up the stairs with shaking limbs. Once in the hallway I turn on the light. A hiss escapes my lips, a verbal representation of the damage done. Slashes and blood along the walls, rips through the curtains by the window, and shattered glass where our pictures have fallen from the walls. The trail of mayhem stops at the entrance to the bathroom. Slowly, I push open the door, strangely loose on its hinges. Inside is every teenager's nightmare.

Sometimes, I imagine my father dyeing. Morbid yes, but you can't deny you haven't done it before. Or maybe you're just an exception. Sometimes it's in a car crash, or a shoot-out. Never, I've never once imagined him dead… not like this.

At funerals, if they even let you see the body, it's whole and well preserved in its open coffin. As a gurgle of mucus and spit jams my windpipe, I realize I'll never want to attend another funeral in my life; much less one for my father, knowing his 'body' is no longer even recognisable.

A body part I don't recognize. His leg has been ripped open, revealing a gaping hole where his kneecap juts out. His left arm is all the way on the other side of the room, leaving his 'body' hanging limply on the edge of the tub. The thing I've been ignoring, the thing that would leave no error in the recognition of exactly whose body is now splattered all around my bathroom. His head – gaping holes where his eyes once were and three slashes drawn diagonally through his puffy lips and his nose, that crooked thing that just made it his - completely dislocated from his neck, just there at my feet, staring up with empty eye sockets. And I feel like maybe that one time I had chicken pox a few years back, hadn't been the worst day of my life.

I must have screamed, because there's Alex beside me, staring at the fragments of our father flung and splattered like the mud off a shoe. Somehow, in the deafening, screeching silence that descends upon the world, Alex is hugging me in the threshold of my father's murder. But there are no heart wrecking sobs shaking my body, not even a single tear falls, but I can tell, in some dark epitome of my soul that those are being saved for later, after the shock dies, and all that's left is the truth.

Then there are footsteps, but we do not separate. Our eyes are closed, hugging each other, and holding each other, a comfort found by no other than siblings.

"Well, I'm truly sorry to disturb this whole heart crushing, tragic event, but we really got to get going if you don't want to end up looking like him," A boy with brown hair and brown eyes stood behind us.

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