Warning for both canonical character death (with a lowercase D) and Death (with a capital D). Compliant with everything through The Last Olympian.

This is cross-posted to AO3, so if it looks familiar, that might be why!

i. thalia

You wish Zeus had given you a heads-up. You might have saved some time not making the trip out to the strawberry fields in the rural part of New York—the unglamorous not-city parts. Water pours from the sky, dumped from the clouds. It spares no soul in the area: the monsters are soaked along with the children running from them. It doesn't affect you, but you knew you didn't have one, anyway.

The dark-haired girl had fought viciously, as if her father's lightning thrummed under her skin, itching to burst out—like she'd been waiting for it for lifetimes. She's gone now; Zeus must have thought he was being generous, turning her into that pine tree. He must have assumed she would appreciate the effort. How kind of him, the king of the sky. How merciful.

Clearly he wasn't thinking of the friends she left behind, the ragtag, makeshift family of three you're watching now. (You might as well stay a moment and take a breath of rain. You've got time between now and your next pickup, one town over in Addison). The blond boy leans heavily on the satyr, one ankle twisted, and clings to the little girl left behind. Her blond curls are matted in the rain, falling in her eyes. She's screaming a name, the same one over and over, and the boys only attempt to drag her farther down the hill.

"It's over, Annabeth," the blond boy says, reaching over to grasp her shoulder with a bloodied hand. He sounds world-tired. They are all so young. "She's gone. Thalia's gone."

The girl wails, high and wordless. It slices into your core, where your heart would beat, if you had a chest to lodge it in. You turn away to drink in the sky, a murky, muddy brownish-gray, and behind you the children limp lopsidedly away.

ii. zoe nightshade

You climb the hill slowly, savoring the drip-drag of every silver star in the sky. There are millions out tonight, here in San Francisco above the clouds of smog. This girl deserves it, you think as you approach the group huddled around her body, limp on the hard-packed dirt. Not the dying part; everyone gets you, whether they want to or not. But Zoe Nightshade deserves the glow of a million tiny lights blazing a million miles away.

(Artemis appears as young as always, but in moments like this her eyes betray the thousand thousand times your two paths have crossed.) As you lean down to loosen Zoe's soul from her body, Artemis reaches out and plucks the essence from where Zoe's heart used to beat, releasing it to the sky. That is when you make your next mistake: you stay to watch it rise, to watch the huntress join the ranks of heroes picked out in pinpricks in the sky. That is when you see the girl with the blond hair, crouching in the dirt next to Zoe's body, her knuckles white around the hilt of a dagger.

You nearly don't recognize her, but on second glance it's clear. This is the little girl from the hill, Thalia's hill, but now she is nearly grown. She's as affected by Zoe's passing as any of the others, but she's not one to waste tears. That's good, you think. She'll need them later. Her whole life is ahead.

The thing you notice first and last, though, is that she's not looking at the girl dying on the ground. Her eyes drag again and again to the boy with dark hair, the one on the opposite side of the circle, like she's magnetized to him, like she'll never look away. They have matching streaks of grey in their hair, and the same shadows under their eyes. Perhaps if you had more time you would make a note of that. Now, though, a car is rushing toward a little boy on a bicycle two hills over, and your work calls you away once more.

iii. marcus, and penelope, and cassidy, and—

There's a war raging through Manhattan, crashing through the air, blowing out skyscraper windows onto the pavement below. All the humans are sleeping, blissfully unaware. You carry the souls of children, blood-streaked and exhausted, in your arms.

You're just passing through, really, going back downstairs from the top floor of the Plaza hotel, where you picked up a boy no more than twelve. (The gods send children to fight their wars now.) Through an open doorway you see her—laying on some kind of elaborately ugly sofa, smudged with dirt from her shoes and blood from her arm. When you pause in the doorway, she looks up, and for a moment she seems to look straight at you. That's odd: you're not here for her. You nearly thought it was her time; she came quite close, with her heroics with the poison dagger and the dark-haired boy whose soul glows gold like ichor. (Yes, you saw that too; there was a child dying at the edges of the fray.)

The even odder thing: she looks hopeful.

But then a boy charges past you, the dark-haired one from earlier, and her eyes track him even when she's too exhausted to move her lips to speak. He kneels next to her, and there's a hole in his ichor-colored soul pulsing softly, a place for another soul to settle in to stay.

You have a pretty good guess as to whose soul it fits.

Anyway, you should have known better. People rarely look at you like that, and Annabeth Chase almost certainly would not be one of them. She clings to life by her fingernails. She would fight you away with her fists.

It is not her time yet—but when it is, you'll have plenty of questions to ask.

iv. luke

Luke is not a man, you think as you watch him trembling and pale. He is only a boy. He is barely twenty years old; twenty years is a whisper, a flash, a sigh. It's a damn shame, what happened to him—no, really. He has a good heart. He does not break a promise. (Well, mostly.)

The dark-haired boy—Percy Jackson, the gods' newest hero, poor child—clasps Luke's hand as he draws his last breaths. It's funny how those things work out.

"Promise me," Luke gasps, and looks at Annabeth.

"I will," says Percy, but you wait for Annabeth's small nod before you step in and take Luke gently away. His body slumps on Olympus' marble floor. His soul sighs as it settles into your arms. Finally, it seems to say.

Annabeth watches Luke silently, her breath ragged as you straighten up and move away. There are tears carving tracks in her skin. You want to say, "I'm sorry, child." You want to tell her that she will never go through this again. But it does not behoove you to make promises you cannot keep, and besides, Luke is already asleep.

The gods come thundering through the door, prepared for another battle, and find their children instead, cracked open and hurting. You stand out of the way and slip quietly outside, the one small soul in your arms, and carry him away.

v. her own

There's a house on Long Island Sound—white with blue shutters, apple tree in the front yard—with a gate that squeaks when you open it. It's two stories, even though both occupants are getting on in years. (Annabeth tells you later that it's because Percy wanted somewhere to escape in the case of a zombie apocalypse. "We could stand at the top of the stairs and cut their heads off as they tried to come up," she explains.) Their bedroom is on the first floor, though; the second-floor bedrooms are for the demigods who come and go every day.

When you push their door open, they're sleeping turned toward each other, like closed parentheses. Their souls shine gold and silver, mingling in one soft, brilliant glow. Once you wondered how many times Annabeth Chase would have to mourn Percy Jackson—enough for multiple lifetimes, at least; there aren't many humans who have a soul-shaped hole in their chests like either of theirs—but finally the Fates have shown a sliver of mercy. You're not due to collect him for another year or so.

"I knew it would be you," her soul says when she sees you. "Really, I'm surprised you didn't come earlier."

It's an odd feeling, to feel as if a single human is older than you when you're literally immortal. Somehow Annabeth manages it anyway, speaking as you walk hand in hand. She's been through the wars, this one—but it has only made her kinder, and wiser. Her mother would be proud. You tell her so, and she smiles.

The lines on her face disappear one by one as you draw closer to your destination. By the time you reach Los Angeles, she's as young as she was at the Battle of Olympus, nearly a child. She looks at you with wide, silvery eyes and says, "You'll see Percy get here safely, won't you? Make sure he doesn't wander off in the middle. He's easily distracted."

You wouldn't dare cross her: not the little girl with a dagger, the architect for the gods. You owe each other nothing, but she is remarkable, even as heroes go. She is extraordinary.

Of course not, you tell her.

Charon looks at you oddly as you wait for the group of souls to shuffle into the elevator. Annabeth is the last one in. She turns back and grants you a cheeky wave, twelve years old, as the silver doors slide shut.

You never see her again.