I got bored in DT and started writing this, because Thalia Grace is way more interesting than vacuum forming. -Izzie
TRIGGER WARNING: Ending mentions suicide
DISCLAIMER: Ich nicht bin Rick Riordan (I am not Rick Riordan).
Sometimes, Thalia would take out the photographs.
She had four of them in her wallet, their names scrawled on the back in long-faded blue ink. Every night, she would repeat their names like a mantra, until she was sure she wasn't going to forget.
The first picture was of a long-dead girl, with grey eyes like stone and blonde curls tumbling over her shoulders. Thalia had cried when she'd died, and for years after her death she couldn't face to look at this picture. But it wasn't like she was going to throw it away.
Her name was Annabeth Chase, and she had died a hundred years ago.
The second photo was of two boys, one pale and dark and the other blonde and tanned. The dark boy was still alive, Thalia knew that at least, but she hadn't seen him for at least ten years. That was fine. He had changed, and she wanted to keep the memory of him smiling forever.
Their names were Nico di Angelo and Will Solace.
The third image was of three people this time; a grinning Hispanic boy, a thoughtful-looking Cherokee girl and a boy with blue eyes just like Thalia's and a half-smile. It hurt; it physically hurt for her to look at the third boy, and she only looked at this photograph when she forgot whether a tiny scar was on the top left or right of his lip, or when she closed her eyes and couldn't hear his voice in her mind anymore.
They were called Leo Valdez, Piper McLean and Jason Grace.
The fourth image was the worst. She hadn't looked at it in years. And why would she? The green-eyed boy laughing back at her was alive, very much alive, and he was happy. Maybe it was because she didn't want to believe that he had moved on; she was as stuck in the past as Nico di Angelo.
She had forgotten the rest. Slowly but surely, names had stopped matching up with faces. Then the faces disappeared entirely. Just snatches of a memory; a girl who had worn the same headdress as she did now, the scowl of a girl who had grown up too fast.
She hated it, this half-life, how the original trio of cousins were the only three left. How her pop-culture references were one hundred and fifty years out of date, how she didn't understand the slang of the newbies anymore.
And so she signed her suicide note with the same words she had first said to a boy with green, green eyes.
I am Thalia, daughter of Zeus.