I found inspiration for this while I was reading a fanfic featuring this AU. Sorry if it's bad, depressing, or something like that. OOC alert.
DISCLAIMER: I own nothing. Like always.
/Percy sits in front of the window, trying to understand what everyone said that happened./
A coma. He fell into a goddamn coma.
His demigod adventures…? He dared to ask.
The doctors and nurses just looked at him uneasily, like he just went insane.
(Maybe he was.)
Gone. That's what happened to his demigod adventures. They were a lie, a dream, a picture of smoke that faded into the wind.
They weren't real.
When his parents (yes, both of his parents) took him to their house —because, let's be honest, his house was Camp Half-Blood—, they received him warmly and affectionately and Percy felt out of place, because he barely knew these people.
His mother is still Sally Jackson, but she is a lawyer and a quite famous one. She isn't as caring as his mom was, and she loves her cases and clients more than she loves her own family.
His father's name is Arthur Jackson, and he is a surgeon. He's rich, he is important, and he tries to give Percy the best (and most expensive) things so he can live up to his father's name.
But, in general, they are great, because there are two of them and they love him and his father isn't an immortal force of nature who fell in love (oh, the perks of the forbidden passions) with so many mortals that it's actually disgusting and his mother isn't a woman who had to raise her kid on her own and put up with a sickening old pig.
He tries to tell himself he doesn't care, but he does, that it's okay, but it isn't, that he can live like this, but he can't.
And, if this isn't enough, his name isn't even Percy.
"Dylan," his father greeted him when the nurses took him to the waiting room. Of course, Percy didn't recognise the man who had spoken nor the name he had said. So he obviously turned around, looking for another kid who looked like he could be named Dylan, and the nurse chuckled.
"He is still a bit in shock, I'm afraid," she said to the man while pushing the wheelchair Percy was on towards him. "Okay, Dylan, here you go. Be careful with the bumps in the road, sir, his condition is still delicate."
And Percy almost wanted to cry, because his name was Dylan —and Annabeth once explained to him that, in Welsh mythology, he was a god associated with the sea— and he didn't know why everything had just disappeared and everything felt like a horrible joke.
And when he met his mother, it wasn't much better. She wore so much make up and she was so buried in shiny jewels and expensive clothes that Percy almost didn't recognise her.
"Dylan!" And she hugged him, but something was not right, because her hugs usually smelt like cookies and love, not like Channel No. 5.
/Percy —he will never call himself Dylan— just buries his head in his hands and cries a little bit, but no one will ever know because the window he's sitting in front of has now its curtains closed./
When he realised he was still twelve, he almost passed out. He stood up, leaving the wheelchair behind and everything felt so much higher, like he was an infinity shorter, and when he asked her mother she just shook her head.
"I think you have actually grown a couple of inches this last year, Dylan." One month in coma and even your own mother is different. "It's not bad for someone your age."
"For a sixteen year old?" He asked, surprised. Annabeth had once told him that he would grow up at an incredible speed.
Sally looked at him puzzled. "What are you talking about, honey? You're not sixteen."
Well, he was actually seventeen, but was it really necessary to be so picky?
"Dylan, you turned twelve two months ago. We threw a great party just for you," His father said. "Don't you remember?"
(No!) He wanted to scream. (No, I don't because my life is a lie and I don't even know who I am anymore!)
He just shook his head.
"Maybe it's part of the coma."
/And all he does is sit in front of his window, watching the hours (and the clouds) fly by, hoping that all of this is a nightmare./
In this world, Percy likes reading —he almost laughed at this one— and it's a prodigy with his guitar. He has two of his walls covered with bookshelves and the guitar (it's old, undoubtedly, but also beautiful, he guesses) has a special place near his bed.
He hates Dylan Jackson.
/He caresses the books and the guitar, in hopes that they will bring some of his friends— at least the Athena and Apollo cabin back. No such luck./
Sometimes, he actually freaked out when he unconsciously put his hand in his pocket and he didn't find Riptide, only to remember it never existed.
He never played any sports. His mother said it was too dangerous and his father, too inelegant. The only sport the 'plays' is running up and down the stairs of their huge house.
That means he is still scrawny, and that his hero appearance is now completely gone.
He is forgettable again.
/He lies on his bed and the ceiling is so white that it actually hurts his eyes. His ceilings —whether in his little apartment or at Camp— have always been blue, just like the rest of everything./
"Dad, do you know the Dare family?"
His parents were important and rich, weren't they? Rachel's parents were important and rich too. Maybe they knew each other.
"Of course, son. You've been playing with their daughter since you wore diapers."
Percy let himself have a ray of hope.
"Really? Is Rachel okay?"
Oh, how wrong he was.
Arthur frowned. "Son, you have been acting weird lately. You don't remember Brittany?"
Brittany? Of course he didn't remember her. He couldn't remember someone he never met.
But instead, he put on a plastic smile on his face.
"Of course I remember her. What was I thinking, calling her Rachel?"
It's painfully obvious that his smile is forced and that his words are too sugary and fake, but his father doesn't seem to notice.
He pats his son's shoulder.
"Very well, Dylan. We can arrange a meeting with them tomorrow, if you want."
Another unreal smile. More words that he doesn't mean. A father that doesn't understand.
Why is the world such a horrible place?, Percy thinks.
(He still agrees to the meeting with them.)
/And the walls of his bedroom are painted grey and every time he looks at them all he thinks it's Annabeth, Annabeth, Annabeth and he repeats that name in his head and with his lips like it's the prayer of a man who has lost all hope and it hurts to look at the walls./
Brittany Catherine Dare is a fifteen year old brat who only cares about herself and is practically Rachel's complete opposite.
She has soft and boring brown hair (Rachel's was always frizzy and so full of life that you could think it actually danced, he thinks) and dull hazel eyes —but he looks away quickly, because just finding out what color her eyes are brings back more pain than he is able to put up with.
The only thing she has in common with Rachel is their last name.
Just like him.
"Look, I drew a picture of you," she announces, and although he looks much scrawnier than he actually is in the picture (he's sure she did that on purpose), it looks so real that Percy thinks it might be alive.
Turns out they also share their artistic talent.
"Could you come to my house more often? It gets lonely here."
He felt a smile creeping up his face.
"Sure."
He thinks they might share their friendship with him, as well.
But, in the end, all Brittany does is apply make up and ignore him when she doesn't need him, but Percy doesn't say anything and stands by her side because he doesn't care, not really, not when she is all he has left.
(They only resemble each other in the last name and the talent, after all.)
/The light flickers and he's momentarily in the dark, and then he's blind. He thinks of all the ways that can apply to his lives— both of them./
But maybe it's for the best, he tells himself, so his mother wouldn't have to put up with a disgusting mortal and Charles and Silena and Luke and Zoë and Bianca and oh so many more innocent souls didn't have to die and Nico didn't have to lose both her mother and her sister and Jason didn't have a childhood away from his family and Piper didn't have to grow up being ignored by her father and Leo didn't have to lose his mother and Hazel wasn't considered a cursed child and all that keeps Frank from reuniting with his mother and grandma wasn't a miserably stick and Thalia didn't have such a sad life and Clarisse didn't have to fear her father and Annabeth didn't have to lose her family and her boyfriend twice.
/He visits all those places, you know. From the Empire State to San Francisco and LA, with the occasional visit to the Hoover Dam —and now every time he has that inside joke with himself an unbearably painful sadness drowns him, because no one is there to share his joke anymore— and St. Louis Arch hoping to find something, anything, that will tell him the gods are real, that it wasn't just a dream./
But it's also for the worst, because his favorite place in the world doesn't exist and neither do his friends and he will never see the bravery and loyalty he had seen through those years, and now he has to live with people he doesn't know in a live that isn't his and all he has left of his former life are the memories and a spoiled brat that only resembles his friend Rachel in the last name and the artistic talent.
/He has decided not to come near the water again, because he fears he might drown —and, oh, the irony of it all just kills him a little bit more inside— for he is no son of Poseidon. So he just watches the stars, looking for Zoë's silhouette, only to never find it. In the end, Brittany gets tired of everything and just goes home./
But he resigns —that's what heroes do— because if this is his real life it means that there weren't sacrifices, wars or deaths. It means everyone he knows —knew— is safe so he just answers when his parents call him Dylan and tries to be a good friend to Brittany Catherine Dare because Rachel Elizabeth Dare was his friend, because that means lives were saved, and a hero's task is to save lives.
And he guesses that, demigod or not, he can't stop trying to be a hero.
/And no many how many places he has visited or how many years have passed, he will always touch his neck in hopes to find his necklace. And with it, the rest of his old life./