So I have some writer's block for this AN. Hey! This is my first fan fiction that I'm publishing somewhere. I really hope you'll enjoy reading my story. It will be multiple chapter, hopefully somewhere around twenty or so chapters, so stick with me. This story is rated M for violence. I will write in the beginning of each chapter if there will be something to trigger on. This story isn't historically profound and some of the details are not based on history facts so if you see something out of place just go with it. English is not my mother tongue, so if there are spelling mistakes it will all go to my best friend/editore.
Hope you will have fun reading my story, good luck!
All rights belong to Rick Riordan.
CHAPTER 1
I walked through my street I was born in, where I lived, experienced happiness, sorrow and grief in my short fourteen years.
It was cold, the winter has just begun and the wind had just enough strength to bite my cheeks, making them catch a shade of faint pink and my breath to apire like a ghost on the night street.
I made my way to the small apartment that Biance and I lived in. Well, apartment was exaggerating. It was a small place that we found after mama hadn't woken up again. It was inside a sideway alley near where our old place was. It was bigger, brighter and happier than everything we've ever known. The entrance door was at a clear street, no garbage cans thrown everywhere, no rats or scary man, no stinking smells of things I wished I didn't know what they were.
People knew us back then: our neighbours, friends, salesman in nearby shops which we've been to our whole life with mama. Now, the place we had was an abandoned basement or something alike. It took a while, but it slowly became home: cleaning up the place, puting some of the old sheets we could take from the apartment on the perforated mattress to hide the dark stain in the middle of it, lighting an oil lamp only when we really needed to. It was small, crappy and it smells no matter what we did, but it was the closest thing to confurting at the end of the day. People didn't recognize me anymore: my skin now was pale as snow, my hair was longer, I was thin, only a little bit taller than before and my eyes had never looked more dead.
I walked in the street, looking as casual as I could look so people won't know who I was, won't pay me attention and question me who was in charge of me, and almost reached the turn to the ally when I heard a scream from behind me.
I turned around, almost expecting to find soldiers behind me, grabbing at my coat and dragging me to the place that people didn't came back from.
It was dark and the street light wasn't the brightest light ther is, so as my eyes fixed on the direction where the scream came from it took my eyes a second to adapt and focus properly.
And I couldn't look away. I saw a man, trying to fight two soldiers who grabbed his arms, each arm for each was screaming, fighting to break free, slaying swears at the soldiers, everyone who watched and didn't help, god. I was pretty close, so I could hear him make a small prayer while he fought. My eyes went wide open when I understood that the prayer was in Hebrew. He was Jewish. I was surprised because in this days no one heard this language anymore. It was something that has been banished from all over Europe a year ago. And if you did hear it, the person who spoke it will soon be in a whole new different land.
I may have gone to help him, but I had two reasons to suspend that thought: One, it was already too late, not me, nor somebody else for that matter, could have help him. If they knew his identity he had nothing to do to hide it anymore, and two, I had my own secrets. I couldn't just stand in front of the authorities whenever I wanted to. I had absolutely nothing, and everything to lose.
Eventually the soldiers stuck something to his mouth that made him look like he went to sleep. His limbs went numb and his head fell to the left. One soldier took his arms, the other his legs, and soon enough they were gone, quiet as thieves in the night, and the street turned back to the way it was, as if nothing has ever happened.
We knew things like that will soon start to happen here as well as the rest of Europe. Usually things like that didn't happened too often in this area of town. That's why when everyone was gone I found myself stuck to the ground, staring at the spot the man was just a minute ago. Most of the people were apathetice to soldiers in the streets by now, but as I sew them walking throw the streets I could practeclly smell the wriking, sweet oder of death in the air.
As I caught myself staring, I quickly shook my head to clear it and made my final step into the ally.
Because the winter had just showed it's first signs, the puddles of filthy water were everywhere, causing me to jump over and around them like it was a children's game. In times like these I almost felt like something resembling a smile wanted to reach my dry lips, but it was so hard forgeting everything and be a kid for once in my life when the world around me was crumbling and adding handreds of souls to the underworld each day that has past.
I missed one puddle and my shoe got wet.
"Merda," I cursed quietly under my breath.
I reached to the door of the basement while shaking my foot at the desperet attempt of drying my shoe. Lifting my head, I sew the fading numbers that I guessed used to have three numbers on it, but now there were only two numbers left on it:
a fading 13, the leg of the 1 almost gone completely. Christians tended to avoid this number for some reason that had something to do with religion, but in our family we didn't paid it that much of attention. We were Christians, yes, but we don't define ourselves by it. My mama always said to Bianca and me that we needed to define ourselves as who we were, what kind of people we were and by what we did with our lives. And we liked that version better.
I opened the door with a crackling sound that I associated as home and entered. It didn't make a lot of a difference with the cold: it was still cold inside, but at list it blocked the wind.
I looked around, expecting to see my sister, standing beside a pot of something you couldn't call soup, but it was all we had for years, and it sure was good enough for us, mixing it so it would appear warm, smiling at me when I got inside. But of course... That will never happen again.
She's long gone.
With a sigh and a stinging ache in my chest, I closed the door to keep the "warmth" inside. I tryed blowing some hot breath on me frizing hands, since I couldn't affored gloves that didn't have hols in it.
I was exhausted after a day of work at the forest. It was overwhelmingly exhausting to chop wood all day every day. I had my ax in hand, cutting the stacks in front of me. I hated that thing. If I had to chose my own instrument I would have chosen a swored like the ones the soldiers of ancient times used during wars, only mine would have been black, reflecting the cold depressing days I've sinked slowly into. It would help me kombat all my enemies. Except for those in my mind and heart.
Since all the man were at war, everyone who were under seventeen had to take over everything they left behind. Because I didn't have education for the better half of my life, I could only work somewhere that didn't required it. So for over a year now I've been at the woods, working with the rest of the teenagers who were like me: kids with no family, no education, all alone with no future ahead.
I've been alone for four years and a month, never stop counting, never forgetting. It's been hard, especially at the first month. I was ten years old, with no job to support myself, no knowledge about the world to help me cooperate, no one by my side to help me with my grife. I could still remember the pain and agony trying to suffocate me with every breath I took.
But that's in the past. I lived it every day, and if I had a minute to forget, I took it.
I took out of the small cabinet the leftovers from yesterday that mostly incloded some potato skin that swam in canned soup that I think said on the front "tommatos". I put it in the small pot we had for years, turned on the fire in the gas burner and waited. As I took off one layer of clothing at a time, I made a self note to buy some new food. Some Potatoes, canned beans, and if I had enough money left, a small piece of bread. My stomach whined at the thought of bread.
The only sound I could hear was the old woman who owned the tailor shop from above the basement, screaming at her husband to stop bring mud in the shop in a very nice words combination. It was unpleasant, but I could't help but to think that at list they had each other. All I had was a small pot with a meal for one for years and years. I lifted my gaze to.
I ate quietly like always, and when I finished I got to the bucket I kept with some dirt water that I took from the river at the edge of town, not warm, the winter has just began and it would only be a waste of gas, and cleaned my face as best as I could so I wouldn't go to sleep dirty with dry sweat.
I changed to a more comfortable clothes and went to sleep, my stomach just a little bit fuller than before, my mind too tired to think about everything in particular, and my heart aching with something that went missing years ago.
