I don't own Percy Jackson.
Without You By My Side
In fifth grade there was a knock on the door. His father was at work, so he interrupted his Mythomagic game to answer it. It was a woman in uniform.
"I'm sorry," the woman said, but he slammed the door in her face and ran to his room. He stared in the mirror and wondered why he wasn't crying. When his father came looking for him he locked the door.
He was only ten but he knew that a plane crash meant his sister wasn't coming home.
He didn't go to school for a week and didn't talk for three, just wandered around listlessly. Even when he did start talking he didn't say anything to the counselor his father made him go see. He would curl up in the corner and stare at the floor or the ceiling or the furniture but never the counselor, and wonder what he'd done to deserve this.
In sixth grade his father got remarried. Her name was Persephone and she was very nice, but he couldn't bring himself to smile for her. Then again, he didn't smile for anyone anymore.
He dragged himself through the wedding and after the ceremony he went to the docks. There was no moon to reflect on the water and he sat with his feet dangling over the water lighting matches and throwing them into the dark abyss. His father never came looking for him and he might never have gone home if a group of teenagers hadn't come along.
He ran home and spent the next three days locked in his room.
In December of seventh grade he stopped eating, it wasn't that he wasn't hungry, just that everything tasted like cardboard. He made it through winter break without eating anything except a muffin on Christmas morning to please Persephone, although he ended up hiding half of it in his pocket. Halfway through January he collapsed in the school cafeteria. He could hear people calling to him, feel how heavy his head was, see the darkness around his vision, and before it covered his eyes he wondered briefly if he was dying, and it wasn't the thought of death that frightened him but the realization that he wasn't afraid to die.
But he didn't die and he woke up in the hospital with Persephone crying next to him and he wanted to ask her why she was crying, she wasn't the one in a hospital bed, but his tongue was too heavy.
His father took him out of school and he finished seventh grade online.
In eighth grade he went back to public school and everyone stared at him like he was a freak, and sometimes he wondered if he was. He had no friends but he spent afternoons away from home to convince his father and stepmother that he did.
He started digging his nails into his palms and eventually he began to draw blood, but he didn't start doing anything else until he had a fight with his father and ran upstairs and locked himself in the bathroom. He gripped the sink and stared at himself in the mirror until he couldn't stand it anymore and smashed the mirror into shards. One of the shards sliced the side of his hand open and he gasped, but as the blood ran down his hand and into the sink he began to laugh.
He carved the words that he heard people call him at school into his arms and sometimes into his stomach. Words like freak, creep, and idiot became his battle scars.
In ninth grade he went to a party and someone gave him something to drink. He wasn't sure what it was but he knew that it drowned out the world. He began drinking more, taking bottles from his father's liquor cabinet. When that wasn't enough he went to the drug store and bought cough syrup, and sometimes he took the prescription drugs from the medicine cabinet. He would go to the docks and lie there and drink alcohol and cough syrup and pop pills until he couldn't feel anything. Then he would slide his pocket knife across his arm and laugh at how he could feel the pressure and see the blood but that was all.
He barely went home on weekends anymore.
In tenth grade he walked into school on the first day and saw the most beautiful girl he'd ever seen. She had spiky black hair, black skinny jeans and a black shirt that said "Death to Barbie". She was leaning against a locker laughing and even from down the hall he could hear it, and he never wanted it to stop.
He knew she heard what they said about him but she never said anything herself, and maybe that was why he liked her so much. Her name was Thalia Grace, she was a transfer student from Florida. She was okay at school (which was better than he would ever be) but it wasn't the most important thing in the world to her, and she was part of the popular crowd but she didn't spend every waking moment worrying about her makeup. He had a few classes with her and he watched her from his desk. By the end of first quarter she had a boyfriend.
Of course he knew she would never want someone like him, he was a wreck. Half the time he skipped school and the other half was spent slouching in the back of the classroom hoping no one called on him. His weekends consisted of drinking and cutting and lighting matches on the docks, which he now considered his special place. But he still watched her and wondered if she was really as perfect as she seemed.
In eleventh grade he went to the docks one night and found her sitting there, staring at the water. He didn't say anything, just stared for a while, until she got up and left.
The next week she was there again and he stood there staring, wondering if he should do something, but before he decided she turned around, smiled at him, and gestured for him to come sit. He didn't, and she didn't press.
The third week he found her there he sat down next to her and wordlessly handed her the flask he'd hidden in his jacket.
The fourth week she brought her own flask.
He still cut and he still drank and he still did drugs but sometimes he felt like maybe he didn't need to as much anymore. They never spoke at school and they told each other about their lives, but sometimes they talked about their teachers or told jokes, and he loved to see the sparkle in her eye when she laughed.
In march he had a fight with his father and he ran out of the house and down to the docks. The moon was full and he briefly considered jumping in and chasing the reflection to the bottom of the ocean and never coming back up, but instead he took out one of the bottles of vodka he'd hidden (he'd grown fond of vodka, no matter how awful) and stared up at the moon and drank and swallowed some pills.
When he'd drank a quarter of the bottle and taken more pills than he cared to count he pulled out his pocket knife and began to cut his pale skin open.
When he'd drank half the bottle he was trembling and his hand slipped. The blood poured onto the docks and he vaguely realized that if he didn't get help he wasn't going to make it through the night. He thought maybe he didn't care.
He heard someone calling his name and as he lay down on the dock and watched the stars spin he saw a head of black hair pop up in front of him. He tried to push the person away, they were blocking his stars, but he didn't quite reach them. He felt them shake him and say his name again, then pull something out of their pocket that he realized was a cell phone and call 911.
"Nico," the person said, and he knew it was Thalia.
He tried to tell her to leave him alone but he couldn't manage it.
"You're going to be okay," she said to him, and he thought he heard tears in her voice.
He finally managed "No," and he hoped she understood.
Before everything went black he thought he felt something warm against his lips.
He was taken to what they called a care center for trouble teens and what he called a loony bin for the rest of eleventh grade and most of the summer. For a few weeks he didn't talk but when his father visited him without Persephone for the first time he broke down and cried in his father's arms like he was three and his father comforted him, patting his head and whispering meaningless things into his ear, and he felt a great weight lifted off his chest that he hadn't even known was there.
In twelfth grade he walked in the first day and heard the whispers that he'd gotten used to in the past four or five years but that now cut like a hot dagger. As he walked to his locker, pulling down his sleeves to hide the scars, he looked down the hallway to where Thalia stood every morning. She had never looked at him before, but this time their eyes met and she smiled, and for the first time Nico thought he might have a chance.
I thought of this at work during a very slow time, and by the time I had paper to write down the outline there was a rush. Of course I had to be at Dippin' Dots on a hot day.
But on the bright side, I quit my job (thank God) and now I get to go to my summer home for a month!
I really liked the second to last paragraph when Nico talks to his father without Persephone there. I feel like I might write a different one-shot based on that same idea.
You guys should all review because reviewers are nice people and we need to trick the world, don't we?