A boy.
A woman.
Two siblings.
Two spouses.
Three siblings.
Three policemen.
Four members of a family, hugging and crying.
These are the figures that haunt Percy Jackson's dreams.
He has never told anyone this, but he was there.
When the mushroom cloud rose into the sky, he was there.
When the earth shook and the building burst, he was there.
When the people screamed and ran for cover, he was there.
When the drone of the second plane grew louder, he was there.
When time stood still as everyone watched the final tower implode, he was there.
He is the happy-go-lucky demigod, the powerful savior of Olympus, the handsome leader of Camp Half-Blood.
But every night, he is also a four-year-old boy, full of street-smarts and sass and bravery.
And every night, when he hears the first person scream, he races toward the building.
And he never makes a different choice.
When Leo announces to the table where the Seven sit together (Percy and Jason have petitioned Chiron to have the dining pavilion set like Camp Jupiter) that he has created a 9/11 slideshow, and could they watch it, please, Percy is all set to decline. But when Leo goes on about how he spent the past four months on it, and he wants to know if he's any good at "making people cry", Percy finds it hard to say no.
He'll be able to tell him if it's realistic, anyway.
Leo brings his friends into the deserted Hephaestus cabin during free time, when his bunk mates are at the forges, and sets up a projector. Music begins playing, Lee Greenwood's God Bless the USA.
A picture of the Twin Towers appear, bustling with people, the center of trade and business. And without warning, it turns to a muted video clip. The first building comes down hard.
Percy closes his eyes briefly, but reopens them, watching with a kind of sick fascination.
Pictures of the casualties begin to appear, one by one, a dead woman fading into a smashed man fading into a person lying in an impossible angle.
At the sight of a small child, not dead but clearly fading fast, Percy's shoulders stiffen. Annabeth looks at him.
"Are you okay?" she mouths.
Percy nods in a way that he hopes comes of as casual, even though he knows it looks only stiff and false.
A drone interrupts Lee's country drawl and the second plane hits the building. A crash makes the entire cabin shake.
A woman is standing at the edge of the curb, bleeding from all over her head so that she looks like she is standing under a bloody waterfall.
A man is screaming soundlessly, captured in black and white so that the red is imagined in an even more shocking and grotesque manner.
Three dots appear near the windows of the tower. People, obviously.
A man and a woman fall from the tower hand in hand, the woman half on fire, falling forever.
A little boy, maybe four years old, cradles a dead woman's head in his lap as he stares at the camera with unblinking green eyes.
Percy yells in shock and alarm. He whips away from the picture and Leo freezes Lee's voice mid-stanza and the boy's face immobilizes.
"What happened?"
"Oh my gods," Annabeth breathes, looking from the young boy to the back of her boyfriend's head to the boy's eyes again. "It's you."
"Percy was there?"
"They took a picture?" Percy finds himself mumbling. "Why did they have to take the picture? It would be so much easier to deny if-"
"You're not denying anything," Hazel orders. "How come this didn't come up in conversation?"
He flushes, and Annabeth draws a comforting arm around his shoulders. And when he speaks, the room is silent.
"From the time I was three, I was out on the streets of the city on my own. My mother worried, but she couldn't do a thing. She worked longer than full-time, at a candy store and then a Starbucks shift. And I couldn't be home alone with Gabe. That was worse, in her opinion.
"So I stayed out on the streets, sticking to the ones where there were just so many people, not too crowded, but not too secluded. I stuck to the fronts of Duane Reades, or Starbucks', or this café on Eighth Avenue, which was right near Central Park, so I could go and sit to the side of the security booth, so they wouldn't see me and send me to an orphanage or something but if someone tried to hurt me I could scream and –"
Annabeth touches his arm softly to stop his rambling. "Sorry." He flushes again. "I-" He lifts up his right hand. It is shaking badly. He examines the left one. It, too, is trembling. "I'm sorry," he repeats. "It's just that I never told anyone about it and I don't think anyone knows I was there except for my mother of course because a four-year-old can't help but tell when he's scared of something and-"
Annabeth touches his arm again.
"It's okay," Leo says. "You don't have to tell us." He moves to shut off the projector, but Piper stops him.
"Percy," she says, motioning to the woman in the frozen boy's lap, "Who is that?"
Percy looks almost surprised. "I don't know."
Jason looks confused. "What do you mean, you don't know?"
Percy shrugs. "They died too fast. But I can close my eyes and see every one – I can draw their faces, every crinkle, every spot of ash, every burn, every bloodstain – and I can't draw a straight line with a ruler. I was the one who had a million names. I was a son, and a brother, a grandchild, a mother to one particularly delirious man… I was Bernie to two old people who I later realized were husband and wife. They weren't next to each other. Only the husband made it to the ambulance. I don't know how much longer he lived after that."
He takes a deep breath. Now that the flow has started, there is no stopping them. He would explode, otherwise.
"When the first building was hit, everyone froze. I remember people getting out of their cars to see, confused; they just simply could not comprehend what was going on. They said things like, 'The pilot must have been drunk, or high-' No one thought it was a terrorist attack. It was an accident. And then the people came running away from the building, and there were three or four or five people running towards the building, and one of them was a stupid four-year-old little boy who wanted to go save lives.
"Those people falling from the tower, holding hands? One of them was on fire? I didn't see them, in particular, but I saw people jumping together. At the same time. And all those people that say it's fake, they're wrong."
His voice finally breaks. The tears fall.
"So what if one of those pictures was Photoshopped? So what? It still happened. If you make one picture, it sends the exact same message as a real one. I've seen articles disproving that very picture-" he points a shaking hand at the screen "-but who cares?"
His voice rises.
"Who cares? NO ONE! If that one was made up there are still millions of eyewitnesses. People did jump. I can vouch for that. And only an eyewitness could have made that picture, because it's as realistic as hell. I've seen like that! And when they hit the ground-" His body shakes. Tears continue to fall, thick and fast, spilling from the vast green sea churning behind his eyes. "It's demeaning, that's what it is! To all of those people that died, it's an insult!"
He drops his head. Silence fills the room.
Frank speaks first. "Why didn't you tell anyone?"
Percy raises his head. Scoffs. "Pity. You already have it in your eyes. 'Oh, look at Percy, he's had such a hard childhood, growing up in poverty, witnessing terrorist attacks, having nightmares-' I didn't want that. That's why I never should have watched this video. Because I sleep alone, and my dreams look like this-" He motions himself, frozen on the screen. "I recover alone. But here, now…"
He laughs bitterly.
Hazel, looking insulted, says, "You seriously think that we'd think less of you for witnessing this? That because you went through trauma you're a lesser human being? That's the kind of people you think we are?"
"No," Percy says. "But you won't understand. You can't."
"Try us," Hazel dares.
Percy looks her straight in the eye. "Do you remember when Octavian stabbed Gwen in the gut?"
Hazel nods.
"You remember what the inside of her looked like? You remember the blood that collected under her body? You remember the smell of death that hung around her, even after she came back to life?"
Frank winces. "Percy-" he begins, but Percy isn't listening.
"Imagine you were half Julia's age and you saw that. Now imagine that Gwen was not one person, but hundreds of people. Imagine that not all of them were dead – yet. Imagine they were lying there, screaming.
"Imagine the river of blood where four people tripped and landed on the remains of a window. Imagine the mother who is shaking her dead son in her hands, screaming at him that this isn't funny, that he had better wake up now or else-
"Imagine figures stumbling over corpses, dressed in ash and dust and broken bits of the wall and the window and holding on to anything they can find. Imagine the smell of death that lingered over Lower Manhattan for months – months!
"Imagine the firefighters that pull up outside the heap of cadavers. Imagine the wall of smoke that blocked out the sun. Imagine the EMTs, the First Aid People, the NYPD, the regular people, who all ran towards the building instead of away, like I did. There was this one woman, I remember, she ran around sans left arm handing out water bottles and rubbing alcohol and whatever else they could give her. When the three nearest makeshift stations ran out of supplies she stuck the bleeding stump inside her shirtsleeve and ran in and out of the burning building leading kids out. She took me to the little area where the kids were three times, but with all the chaos it was easy to slip away."
"You were, like, four, though," Piper says reasonably. "What could you possibly have done?"
"Comforted people," Percy says simply. "I would go to the hysterical people and hug them, I went to the hurt and tugged them to the nearest ambulance, the nearest volunteer, I went to the delirious and, quite by accident, stood in as their son, their brother. When they asked me for forgiveness, what the hell was I supposed to say? I told them I forgave them. The most depressing part was how many people left arguments unsettled, old feuds not resolved, grudges seized and never let go…"
His voice trails off and he looks directly at Annabeth.
"You were lucky you got to apologize to Luke," he says bitterly. "There are so many things I want to say to Beckendorf, to Silena, and Lee, and Michael, and I never said anything to Castor, and for that he deserves an apology… It's funny, because for eleven years I never understood how those people could have had so many things to say. And then Castor died, and Beckendorf…"
"You can't beat yourself up over that," Annabeth starts fiercely, but Percy cuts her off.
"Yeah?" he asks. "Zoë knows? Bianca knows? Bob? You're telling me Bob doesn't deserve an apology?"
He breathes heavily. "It doesn't matter. My point is that you had better tie up all loose ends, because the life of a demigod is not the safest. Or any life. You know, a group of terrorists could fly into your school building. You think I never fly because of Zeus, that my mother never flew because of her parents? No. Grover sat next to me on the plane, that one time we had to fly, with the master bolt, he kept poking me… I kept looking up and around to see if there were any terrorists. I had my right hand on the barrel of Riptide and my left on the cap the entire ride. The ride was six hours long and I did not move my hands off Riptide for one second."
He stops, having run out of both breath and things to say. Leo breaks the silence tentatively.
"Who did she think you were?" he asks, tapping the dead woman.
"Kyle. He married a girl she didn't like. Saphira, but that was a fake name. She rambled a bit."
They sit in silence until Percy gets up and rewinds to the picture of the smashed humanoid on the pavement.
"I tried to catch one," he says conversationally. "I watched her jump and I figured it'd really, really hurt when she hit the ground so I went to where I thought she would land and held out my hands. It's a good thing my four-year-old long-distance eye sucked, because if she would have landed on me she would have killed me. I missed by a foot. I still got splattered, though."
Jason makes a sound of revulsion. He leans over and switches the picture back to the snapshot of Percy. The latter looks at his younger self.
"But life goes on," he says. "The Freedom Tower is being built on Ground Zero and whenever I'm in the city I make sure I see it in the skyline. Airline security has increased massively. There's no such thing as a hijacked plane anymore. We're fine. And what are a few nightmares in the grand scheme of things? The unity that America had – there was a flag in every doorway, everyone was doing 'random acts of kindness' – it's okay."
Seeing their relieved expressions, Percy adds, "I'm going for a swim."
He doesn't mention the families ripped apart as a result of 9/11. Nor does he mention the racism that gripped America, the distrust of Muslims from those who did not realize that it was a radical sect of suicide bombers and not all Muslims were quote-unquote "evil". He doesn't mention all of the horrible things said to them, blaming them for the attacks, blaming them for the radicals when, in fact, they never wanted any of it.
He doesn't mention any of that.
And long after Leo shuts off the computer, the ghost of the lost innocence in the boy's green eyes haunt the darkened room.
IN MEMORY OF THOSE WHO DIED THIRTEEN YEARS AGO TODAY.
IN DEDICATION TO THOSE WHO SHOWED THEIR COURAGE.
NEVER FORGET.