A/N: Yo, what's up? I was high when I wrote this, so I apologize for what quite possibly could either be the most epic or most retarded fic of all time. I'm also new to this, so put away the e-claws please.
Prologue: We Found Him On the Beach
"We found him on the beach, trying to crawl to the water. He was delusional, muttering about how he missed it, how the gods were about to shatter eternity on his poor innocent half-soul, nonsense like that. I was scared that we wouldn't be able to get him into the car, he was so out of it," the father said rather shakily, his arm firmly wrapped around his almost comatose daughter's face.
An eyebrow rose at that. "He was trying to reach the water?" the nurse with the honey blonde hair and the storm gray eyes repeated, rather unbelieving.
"Yes." The man frowned. This girl looked too young to be a nurse. "He was going towards it the entire team we were running to him. He had gotten an arm in by the time we dragged him out. I actually think he was trying to drown himself, put him out of his misery."
The nurse's jaw just about hit the floor. The boy's injuries… it couldn't be a coincidence. Did she find him? "You said he had gotten an arm in the water. Which arm was it, if you remember?"
She knew the answer. It would be his left. The boy's injuries… he had arrived with four broken or cracked ribs, multiple second degree burns to his lower body, and two bullets lodged in his right shoulder. His right hand had what looked like a bite mark on it. Cuts and bruises almost everywhere. Massive internal trauma…
It was a wonder he was even alive at all. What the boy had gone through, she wouldn't have wished upon her worst enemy.
The only thing that had confused the doctors and investigators was the boy's left arm. Almost every single inch of his skin had been injured in some way. Except for the boy's left arm roughly up to the elbow. There was a long slash mark on his upper arm that at the elbow had turned from a bleeding wound into a thin fading scar. But other than the scar, his left arm was fine. No broken bones, no brutal burns, no botched bruises (heh). It had been left completely untouched by the inhumane atrocities committed on the rest of the boy's body.
The man frowned. "I'm not positive, but I'm pretty sure it was his left."
The nurse pursed her lips. "Thank you very much for this information," she said quietly. "I'm sure it will be put to good use. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to see a patient. A member of the police will be here to speak with you shortly about this incident."
She turned and exited the waiting room of the hospital quickly, not waiting to hear the indignant response from the man. She didn't dare to hope. Was it possible that it could be him…? She hadn't heard from him in weeks, ever since he took the chance to unmake the world and shatter eternity into splinters of glass. She remembered the last words he had said to her, his lips on hers, and then… nothing. He was gone.
And him being back could not be a good thing. She laughed bitterly to herself for being Captain Obvious. With those injuries… who did it? White hot anger welled up in her throat.
She briskly walked down the hall leading to the operating rooms, reaching into the front pocket of her nurse's jacket as she did so, fingering the handle of her bronze dagger that had saved the world. She remembered something Chiron had told him once, something about not fighting mortals unless it was absolutely necessary.
If all went well, she wouldn't need to.
Taking a sudden right, the gray eyed girl entered and surveyed one of the operating rooms. The doctors were frantically working on a patient, shouting to each other in the controlled chaos trying to save him. Utensils were exchanged, IVs were injected, anything to save the life of the boy who had saved the world too many times to count.
She didn't even need to look at the operating table—the aura he gave, even while in mortal peril—was enough to confirm who he was. But she did anyways. Jet black hair. A well-built and would have been well-tanned body almost six feet in height, if it hadn't been so badly burned.
Yup, definitely him. "Percy," the fake nurse whispered to herself.
One of the doctors not operating on the world's hero noticed her as she approached the operating table. "Hey, you can't be here!" he shouted.
She ignored him as she walked over to the operating table and reached of the steel trays that held the operating utensils. She calmly picked it up and turned the tray over, not flinching as the tools hit the cold hard floor with a high ear-shattering clang, and continued to the sink at the edge of the room.
Placing the tray in the sink and turning on the water to fill it, she turned around to the scene she had caused.
It would have been funny if he wasn't dying less than twenty feet away from her. Anybody else, maybe. Still, she almost laughed. Open mouths, varying degrees of shock and anger at her insolence.
She closed her eyes and concentrated. She reached inside herself, just like Chiron told her, and felt the entity of eternity stirring everywhere around her, reaching out to infect the entire room. She felt the power, she felt the struggle of eternity as it fought against her will.
The Mist does not like to be contained, after all.
But she crushed it. Crushed eternity's hopes and dreams to escape her control, complaining little bitch it was. She extended a hand and commanded it to do her bidding.
It fought back, and boy, did it fight back hard. Why wouldn't it? It was infinite. Tendrils of that said infinite, the oblivion, fought back against her as she struggled to overcome it. In the end, eternity couldn't beat the will of a seventeen year old girl.
Because nothing could be more desperate than the misplaced will of a teenager.
The fake nurse's eyes opened slowly and she let the most powerful force in the world go with a rather basic snap of her fingers. An insult, to be sure.
"Leave," she said to everybody in the room, whom were still watching her like she hadn't been meditating like a freak for two minutes. "The patient has fully healed."
Eternity assisting her in her not-so-subtle order, the mortals readily complied, moving as one towards the door leading back to the hall, shutting it behind them.
The girl sighed as the door shut, fatigue evident on her face. Slowly, almost robotically, she picked up the tray now filled with water and walked back to the operating table.
She almost vomited when she saw the sight of his badly burned and crippled body. She closed her eyes from the sight and set her jaw as she focused on her task at hand. Dumping the water from tray onto his body, she placed her fingers on where she knew his forehead was.
She cringed at the feel. It was drier than sandpaper and she could feel flakes of skin crumbling at her touch despite all the water she had just threw on his body.
She set to her work. This was the hardest part, because this is where she knew if there was ever a point at where she would back out, this would be it. She knew what he would say. He'd grin at her, and ask in that fucking annoying voice why any regrets or morals didn't come to her when she bent the minds of inferior, enslaved eternity, or sent souls to the Underworld. Gods, she hated that voice.
This was different though. Taking a single memory from somebody was hard enough. Taking away every thought of you, all the world-shattering experiences you'd been through together was impossible. Especially when the point of was to make sure they would never see each other again.
She couldn't do it fully. She knew she couldn't. She had to leave some clue, some possible idea to give her the lingering hope that he could make it back, that he could unmake the world and shatter eternity into splinters of glass, and free oblivion into infinite. And come back to her.
"When you love somebody, you let them go." Right? Wrong. You keep them, build them, forge the circumstances of forever together, and you never fall. Make the world, break the world.
But she had to. Had to let him go, had to remove his memories to the point where to him, she would be just as important as that cashier at the grocery store the other day. And she knew it. Not for the sake of the world again. Not for his sake, which was far more important.
She closed her eyes. She asked eternity for another favor. She begged, half of her wishing for eternity to overpower her will and fracture her mind beyond repair.
But it wouldn't happen. Because the will of a seventeen year old girl overpowers the will of eternity, of forever.
The Mist responded, swirling around the fingers touching the savior's forehead in a visible white stream of magic before vanishing.
It was done.
Fate was a bitch, he had once said. Putting the fate of the world on people whose greatest worry should have been what people thought of them. A rare moment of clarity for him. She laughed again. Wasn't he right.
Annabeth Chase took one last look at the newly healed Percy Jackson. The water had done its work, mending the broken bones, healing the burns, and doing Zeus knows what else. She touched his cheek, then turned around and left the operating room, shutting the door behind her with a resounding bang.
It felt right.
A/N: So some clarifications if I made it too confusing and weird- the quest to "unmake the world and shatter eternity" and stuff will be explained later. Her "overpowering eternity with her will" was my (rather cringe-worthy) interpretation of manipulating the mist. The "nurse" is Annabeth, the guy who got royally destroyed is Percy.