things we lost in the fire
Annabeth lost her mother when she was seven. Not that she allows it to define her. If she's honest she hardly remembers her mother, just one mental image of her remains. Blonde hair, grey eyes and a face obscured by the sunlight. Her father didn't handle her death well. There are no pictures of her, or anything really to prove that she existed. Again, not the she allows it to define her. Her fingers click-clack during the dead of night and she loves it. To have knowledge, is to have the world at your fingertips. It's something she just knows, though she doesn't remember how.
Click clack, click clack, she pushes the hair out of her face with a defiant blow to it. She is focused and poised, even here in the safe darkness of her bedroom.
Annabeth has no mirrors in her room. "You look too much like your mother" her father would say. And so her own reflection would haunt her like her mother's ghost. She wonders though if she does. She doesn't know what her mother looked like, and as much as she'd like to, how could she?
Besides, her father remarried, to an Asian woman named Susan. The opposite of her blonde all American mother. She likes to think he did that on purpose, seeing as no other blonde has ever stepped foot into her mother's domain.
Click clack, click clack. The Red Queen's theory is the topic at hand. Which Annabeth finds incredibly interesting. As she writes about the rabbit running for his life, and the fox running for his dinner, she thinks of herself when she was younger, helpless, and torn. She ran. She ran from the sadness, from the reality of who she was coming home to, or rather who she wasn't, she ran for her life from the fox who wished to take her innocence before she was ready to give it away.
Annabeth lost her mother when she seven, not that she allows it to define her.
Percy, on the other hand, his father chose to leave. His mother, quite possibly the best person he's ever met, didn't deserve that. His mother was kind, smart, funny, and she had a smile that you made you stop what you are doing, and appreciate her. His father didn't deserve her. Not that it really affects his life.
Percy's mother has always been there for him. For every dance, for every life lesson, for every turn of the road where his father's advice may have been imperative to his learning experience. But it's not like he'll ever know. Percy looks at himself in the mirror a lot. His sea green eyes and raven locks were far in contrast from his mother's warm brown hair and eyes. And he may not have paid attention in his biology class but he knows enough to know that if he didn't get them from his mother her got them from him. And that's okay, if you enjoy being the living breathing reminder of the one thing that your mother actually hates.
She says though that she doesn't. He asked her once when he was young, if it hurt her to have Percy around. She was flabbergasted by the question, and immediately tried to set the record straight. And as much as he wishes that it did, it didn't make him feel better. And so Percy worked extra hard to make his mother proud. His grades were subpar but he tried. He never acted out, or made his mother worry. He respected his curfew, if she asked him to be home by eight for any reason, he was there quarter to.
And Percy thinks highly of this. He's well aware that maybe if his father were around he'd be a trouble maker. Because he is always tempted. The allure of drugs and alcohol are ever present. He wants to know what it's like to be walking home at three A.M, drunk past the point of walking straight, after a night under the stars with his friends. But he won't. He spends his Saturday nights with his mother, and her keyboard. He tells her his hopes and dreams for his future and she tells him stories from her past.
He wonders, ever so often, if one day his life will be more eventful. If there would ever be a girl who take a place in his heart. Or if he would ever have the love that his mother felt that for his father. He dreams of a blond girl, she's smart and feisty and he loves her even though she isn't real. He knows that his time is yet to come, but he's okay with that.
Percy's father walked out on him, but he doesn't allow it to affect his life. And so when it's 1:23 in the morning, and he's stumbling home slightly buzzed, he runs home to his mother.
Piper never really knew her mother. Or her father for that matter. She grew up in the limelight. Cameras and flashing lights and body guards and worst of all, nannies. Her mother was, is gorgeous. Her father is a phenomenal actor and well sought after. Her mother and father have been around the world and back. They've seen it all and lived for it all. But not with their little girl.
Piper has been left behind and set aside so aside so many times that her mother's brief kiss on her forehead and airy ta-ta doesn't even faze her anymore. She used to cry when her mother said goodbye. She didn't want her mother's rose like smell to ever go away. Her manicured fingers would run through Pipers long hair, and for a few blissful moments she would feel complete.
Lately she pretends to be okay. She doesn't know that she is pretending, but the small intake of breaths to reset and start over, and practicing how to laugh and smile say differently. She doesn't know that she's just a little bit broken, because she's always been this way.
Piper stands on a cliff. She dares to stand at the very precipice. She looks down at the scene below and how sudden and quickly she could fall. It seems to Piper that the only way she can feel alive is if she's close to dying. The wind whips through her mother's hair and she breathes in through her father's nose, puckering a mixture between both of their lips and she decides. She wants to feel alive.
She turns around and spread her arms like a bird.
It doesn't take any effort for her to fall.
She doesn't regret falling, she feels so alive in those last moments that it makes up for a lifetime before it's over.
It's a boy named Jason who finds her. He's got blond super hero hair, and large framed glasses. Jason lives alone he tells her when she wakes, and that's she's safe and she can leave whenever she sees fit. She's groggy and disheveled and good gods she feels as if she's broken every single bone in her body. To be fair, she might have. But her broken bones are nothing compared to spirit she sees in front of her.
Jason doesn't talk much for the first few days that she is with him, and neither does she. He mostly just brings her soup, and she doesn't have the heart to tell him how bad it tastes. She doesn't have the heart to tell him anything really, so they mostly communicate with glances, and shrugs, and one word sentences. He sits with her and read a book. He almost never glances up from it.
On the fifth day he asks if her if she wants to go back to her family. He tells her that her wounds should be healed enough to go back into the public and get help from an actual doctor. In that moment she doesn't care whether or not she's a bother to him or if he's running low on supplies. For now Piper wants to believe that she died, and this geeky blonde boy and his little cabin is her afterlife. She scowls at him at and turns her head.
Jason wishes that he could blame her. He knew why she didn't want to leave. He had seen what the fame could do to a person. His mother fell victim to it, and turned into a druggie for the scene. He was taken away from her too young to know who she was outside the vigourous google searches that he's done.
She looks back curiously at him to gage his reaction. He just nods at her and leaves the room.
In his bedroom Jason only has a number of books, his small bed and a chester drawer to hold his clothes. He's had too many homes to try and acquire a lot of personal knick-knacks. He finds them time consuming to pack and unpack only to pack again. So his little home is simple. So far the most interesting thing there is Piper, and she hardly ever says anything.
He does have one treasured item though; a picture of his mother and his sister cradling him as baby. For the past seventeen years that's all he's had to remind him of his family. Thalia, his sister has been one blank slate to him for all of his life. Every dark haired girl he's ever come across to him strikes an uncanny resemblance.
From foster home to foster home or couch to couch, Jason adopts a new persona to fit those around him. He doesn't really know who he is, and that's why he's in this cabin. He figured that maybe solitude would answer all of questions if he gave it time. But he's still as lost as he started. He reads his books, and picks and documents wild flowers. He brews his soups and occasionally goes into town to get a burger when his cravings take over.
Other than that he likes his simple life. He has always been skeptical of other people and this way his contact with them is limited.
Occasionally a friend will visit. More often than not, it's a buddy from one of his foster homes, Leo. Leo had seen his fair share of the darker side of the world. On the eighth day that Piper is in his home, Leo walks right in, exclaiming that he is home.
And then he sees a strange girl in bandages asleep on Jason's couch. A very beautiful girl, but sadly unapproachable-ly so. Leo was never a handsome guy. He was skinny and elfish, and his luck with the ladies was, less than subpar to say the least. He sat in front of the girl, and examined her carefully. There was something oddly familiar about her.
"Stop staring at me Jason. It's weird." Leo scratched the back of his head sheepishly and without correcting her left to find who he came for.
Leo couldn't live the life that Jason did; here in solitude and quietness. He enjoys the city life and bustling movement of a city that never sleeps. He parties and creates. He likes to think of himself as an alternative artist. Even more so when he's stoned. He believes that the weed- if that's his drug of the day- brings out a certain creativity in him. His hands work themselves when his mind is elevated.
He has to create. He doesn't paint though, he builds. Something he took from his mother and father. When he builds, or feels the satisfaction of finishing one of his projects, he feels a tug, a moment of closeness to his parents that he cherishes. So yeah, Leo gets high off of his ass. He parties all night, and has a different scene every night. Change is good, change is a blessing. Change keeps life from catching up with him. Jason was one of the few things that were constant, and Leo liked it that way.
Jason walks in a half hour later, groceries in hand and his face lights up when he sees him. They catch up and Leo clues him in in the last few months while Jason tells of his uneventful life in his cabin. He explains why Piper is there and she waves at him non committedly. After Leo hears that she's been in bed for a week he nearly drags her out and makes her see the outside world.
She wasn't nearly as hurt as she was letting herself believe she was and if she had known that there was this beauty outside of the cabin she would have explored much sooner. She and Leo talk about everything from spaghetti to Paris and all the way in back around to lasagna. Her legs have ached for this, even though she never knew it. Having been surrounded by tech city lights and penthouse apartments Piper doesn't think that she ever really took a walk in a meadow.
The sun goes down and they return to the cabin, which smells strangely like.. hamburgers? Leo pumps his fists as if this is the god given gift he'd been waiting for. Jason is inside with a kiss the cook apron, whistling a familiar tune. Piper makes a joke about how she thought he only ate soup. He laughs sheepishly but doesn't say much else.
Later that night Leo announces that he has a surprise for Jason, and a few minutes later in wants a small bronze girl with hair to rival a lion's mane. She's young and pretty and seems to get flustered whenever Leo looks her way.
That night they all eat outside. Jason finds out that Piper was a vegetarian only a week before, but she didn't want to turn down his kind offerings. Leo sees a budding romance as they speak in hushed tones around a fire. Leo and Hazel have been friends for the longest, like Jason she was one of the few constant things in her life.
Leo liked Hazel because she was interesting. She had the backstory to end all backstories in Leo's opinion. Hazel enjoyed everything in life. Every butterfly that came her way, and the way that air smelled mid-morning after it rains. Food tastes just a little bit better for Hazel, and the sun shines slightly brighter.
She may be a little stuck in the past, and music nowadays confuses her but she's grateful to be alive. Spending nearly half of your life in a coma will do that to you. Hazel knows that not only is she grateful to be alive but she's lucky.
Hazel hardly had a chance of survival. From her thirteenth birthday to well into her twenty-fourth year she was only living off an IV. Her father only had three children, one who had already passed away and he wasn't ready to let go of another of his daughters. So being the the wealthy business man that he is, he allowed his daughter to live, nay, survive, for eleven years in a hospital bed. In that time Hazel had lost her childhood, her young girlish body, her friends had moved on, and her mother passed away.
Hazel awoke with no knowledge that eleven years of her life had been stolen away from her. She still felt like a thirteen year old girl, who was worried because she had school tomorrow. Strangely enough she did have school still.
Hazel's few friends laugh at her innocence, and how she gets flustered when things like sex are mentioned at twenty four. They giggle at how she refuses to listen to contemporary music and god forbid that she actually wear a bikini with the.. she can't even say the word.. on her chest.
It's not like she wants to be this way. She feels almost entirely cut off from the things that she knows and understands. Everyone around her tips toes with her as if she's on the brink of explosion. She hates it.
In the end, Hazel was glad to meet Piper that night, and Leo still makes crude jokes at her expense and she laughs because she has someone she can feel normal around. She also looks up to Jason. Leo may have spilled a few secrets that Jason doesn't know that she knows, but when she sees him she thinks that to have been alive, and gone through everything he did, and to still come out and live his life the way he wants to, is very admirable. If she wasn't slightly crushing on Leo already she may have had a thing for him.
So, around a bonfire, Piper sings them all a song she picked up from her alisi. She picks at her hamburger, not totally okay with eating an innocent. Leo makes corny jokes, doing his fair share of keeping the party alive.
After that night Piper and Jason become more acquainted. Jason learns to make a vegetable based soup, and Piper says an ample amount of words to him. It never dawned on Piper how handsome Jason was until she saw him in the sunlight. Stolen glances and accidental glimpses of skin play their fair share in Piper's growing attraction. Jason on the other hand has known all along, but he prefers to be a gentleman.
Except he's not obtuse, and he sees Piper's eyes when they linger. Passion and vigor ensue when they first kiss, when he kisses her soul, and in the soul-binding movements that Jason learns Piper likes.
She spends four months in Jason's cabin. When she returns to the land of the living she finds out that she had been proclaimed dead and there was an active search for her body. She wasn't expecting that much, considering her mother and father never worried about her, especially since her eighteenth birthday. Maybe four months of radio silence was too much? In her defense Jason didn't have cell reception, or like a calendar. She would joke with him that this was a the perfect place to hold a hostage and he would joke that he already is. Every now and again he would bring in a paper and tell her she was on the front cover but she was content being just Piper, rather than the Piper McLean.
Either way minutes after she stepped into the busy streets of Santa Monica she had cell phone cameras on her and flabbergasted stares. Eventually a little girl came up to her and yelled out "Piper McLean! You're alive! Everybody, she's alive!" And just like that peace and serenity be gone. Police officers and paparazzi and questions.. oh so many questions.
A few weeks passed before it become calm again. Her parents, who had in several interviews cried her poor pretty heart out, didn't bat an eye when Piper told her that she was going to school in New York. Piper could pay for it herself but she didn't mind the fact her sorry father was more than willing to take credit for being the one to put her through college.
There, she meets a very serious, workaholic, perhaps a bit overachieving blonde with whom she has nothing in common with except for her dorm. When Piper arrived the girl hardly blinked at her, handed her a list of nonnegotiable rules, told her to make her own if she really wanted to, and kept her distance.
Beth she calls herself. Her grey eyes are hard and calculating. She says all but three words to Piper a day. Piper makes fast friends on the boy Beth is mentoring, Frank. They share jokes about how intimidating she is.
Frank is lovely and sweet, no more threatening than about baby panda. He hardly drinks but the first time he does he opens up about being an orphan and the last of his line. His heartbreak is fresh, Piper tears up when he sighs and says that pain fades but scars last forever. He shakily smiles and raises his glass. She never sees him cry again, but she remembers that night clearly, it tugs at her when she sees sadness flash in eyes.
The first time she sees Beth smile is when a floppy headed green eyed boy cracks a stupid joke about a porpoise and what he's doing with his life. He smells like sea breeze and his smile never falters. Piper thinks that Percy is perfect for Beth, the yin to her yang, so to speak. It makes Piper happy to see that she isn't as stoic and cold as she was when the first met. Beth even joked with her once. Granted it was about the pythagorean theorem and Piper had no what she was talking about, Beth lit up like a light.
When Percy sees Annabeth laugh; only he can call her that; it's like something is igniting within him. He swears it's like listening to fairies twinkle. She might not know it yet, but one day Percy will call her his wife. He knows this like he knows that her nose crinkles when she laughs. This is the girl he used to dream of. This is the girl he has waited for. He sees her for more than her tense shoulders and death glare. Other people think he must be out of his mind. Such an easy going fun guy, falling in love with the most driven and stoic girl on campus.
It's only because they don't know her like he does. They don't understand why she ticks and why she is so closed up. And that's more than okay. What nobody sees is that he never broke her wall down, he asked her permission before he built a door. He thinks that's all she ever wanted; for someone to want to understand her without prying her bare. To Annabeth, Percy is unique that way. He doesn't want what's best for him, and he doesn't look for the easy way out. He takes his time, yet he's hardly deliberate. He allowed Annabeth to fall for him by her own accord.
Annabeth sees in him the one thing she never thought she would find: solace. She click clacks in dead of night, she is relaxed, Percy's heavy breathing fills her room. A small mirror hangs in the far corner. She is no longer haunted by her mother, instead she feels peace.
flames burn bright in the hearts of many
ashes lie dormant in her chest cavity
burned rose petals are no longer crimson red
the reddest flower of all is now fed
loss is great, loss is dire
yet we need not mourn things we lost in the fire