AFTERMATH
"How do you pick up the threads of an old life?
How do you go on...when in your heart you begin to understand...there is no going back?
There are some things time cannot mend.
Some hurts that go too deep...that have taken hold."
-Frodo Baggins, Return of the King
PROLOGUE
They had done it. They had managed to defeat Cronus; actually defeat him this last time. He was back in Tartarus, where he would hopefully stay; for the remainder of their lifetime at least.
But the visions hadn't stopped. Nor had the desire for both power and normalcy. And when you were a teenaged psychic who had visions and could see the future, normal was very far away indeed.
Theresa couldn't remember anymore how many days she had spent staring at the same wall. She did know, however, that there were forty-three cracks in it, three different layers of paint, and that the whole room stank overwhelmingly of fear and a sort of desperate resignation.
She sat with her back to the wall, facing the door, but not because of any dormant instincts towards self-preservation. No, that was simply how They had positioned her on the bed when They dumped her here. Solitary confinement. Her arms and legs were bound and she couldn't move.
Too dangerous, They said. She might injure more of the staff.
They were right. She had tried to escape her prison three days before. She would have made it too, if it weren't for the damnable drugs that They forced into her. They slowed her down too much; skewed her perceptions. They also made the visions stop, so she could no longer rely on instinct to guide her out of traps.
Clearly, a change in tactics was in order here. If she could stay lucid enough. If she could stay sane enough.
Theresa would be twenty-one in a few days. And she had spent the last two years as a patient in the New Olympia Mental Health Institute, courtesy of her father. She wasn't sure what exactly her official diagnosis was, but was fairly sure that her father had paid enough money for Them to either overlook it, or make something up. At first she had pleaded and tried to reason with Them, trying to convince Them that nothing was wrong, she was perfectly fine.
Apparently They found her quite fascinating, if Their experiments were any indication. She did not agree. It had so far earned her the label of "dangerous and unpredictable", as she resorted to more and more violent tendencies in a bid to secure her freedom or die trying. She had thus far obtained neither.
More often than not her attempts were hampered by the sedatives They pumped into her, as well as some of the "therapies" They attempted on her. She couldn't quite recall anymore exactly what They had done to her. She knew it wasn't good, wasn't right. They weren't helping her, They were seeing how far They could push until she broke.
Her father barely visited anymore, too pained by how she had declined, despite his best intentions for her to "get help".
Two years.
Two years and nobody had come for her.
All those years she had fought for the Olympians. All that she had sacrificed for them. And now they left her to rot in this damnable place. And her friends? Where were they? What had become of them all, that she could disappear from their lives so completely and they turned a blind eye? What had her father told them?
Theresa tried to push back the wave of misery and despair that threatened to overwhelm her. She was a fighter; was The Fighter. But she was close to breaking, ready to give up. It was getting harder to find a reason to continue resisting. It would be so much easier to just give in; become the docile, pliable shell They wanted of her.
She closed her eyes, exhausted. She hadn't slept since they put her in this room, though her reasoning for that was getting fuzzy. Just like everything else. She kept struggling past the sedative's lethargy, though she couldn't pinpoint why anymore. Her breath hitched, eyes stinging, and she started rhythmically swaying back and forth.
Why hadn't they come?