and that boy, with his angry blue eyes and teddy-bear smirk, is going to be the death of her. she meets his eyes across the room and feels strange, suddenly - as if she can see more, but know less, like the future is fluctuating through their contact -
focus, rachel! she thinks, so she looks away and remembers percy and annabeth and the real problem and goes through the rest of the meeting with a mild headache as she glares at him.
.
his name is octavian, she learns, and she wants to laugh so loudly when she hears it - if only he was as brave as his namesake, if he had the same power. that scrawny boy who is horribly taller than her will never hold that much power over anybody.
that is what she thinks. that is what, she learns, is not the truth. because the boy who looks like he cannot hold a fortune-teller is holding up an army with his lies.
she can see him in her mind, feel him under her skin . . . like he is her counterpart, the past to her future, the wrong to her right, the lies to her truth.
somehow they blend consciousnesses until they are an infinity of what-could-have-beens and things-that-are - like stars across the night, falling but being lifted up, the beautiful in-between that is everywhere in the cosmos but is centered in their minds, stuck in time.
he does not know what is right and wrong and she does not blame him because the future, how you interpret the future, it isn't a right or wrong, that she knows - it is a perspective on time. sometimes she sees actions. sometimes she sees outcomes. what leads up to them, what changes them, what changes time, she has no idea - she tells the future, she does not decide it. he sees it and he tries to change it.
in her mind she wonders what do you see and he replies a universe and it's like their minds are going to the future and back again.
"i can't change fate," she whispers to herself when she's alone, and she knows that somewhere on the other side of the battlefield he is thinking to himself that he cannot -
but maybe they, both of them, together - maybe they can.
.
in the dead of night, they don't meet intentionally - they just drift together, like worlds over time, different but edging together just because they need to move.
"stars, you're beautiful," he says, like he can trace every freckle on her skin and make constellations out of her flesh. she say nothing, just trace his limbs with her starry fingers, making them both mortals and gods and oracles and augurs and everything.
"and you - you're an eternity," she breathes unto him, and he falls apart, like her supernovas are collapsing into themselves and blinding him.
like there is a certain fragile shard of hope that comes from knowing the future - like they both can watch every other particle in the world do its work while they stand, single, immaculate, all knowing, forever.
.
octavian can hold up an army, but his army cannot hold him up - and rachel, rachel can break in her own mind, trapped in the future, her own thoughts destroying her.
and they both end up collapsing; but not on each other, not where they should be. somewhere else, another place, another timeline, another destiny.