Disclaimer: I don't own Percy Jackson or any of its characters or themes...
AN: A LukexPercy fic... kind of.
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How do you know when it's over?
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Someone once said: "How do you know it's over: when you're more in love with your memories than the person standing in front of you."
And knowing this... Percy had known these words for years, but never understood what those words meant.
How could you be more in love with memories? How could memories replace the person who was sitting next to you? How could memories replace the feeling of you holding their hand?
It was warm, it was tangible and it was real.
It was something real.
Something a certain Demi-god had never experienced before. And right now, he's doubting he'll ever experience it again.
It was the one thing he clung to at night, something real that he latched onto whenever the world around him was spinning too fast for him to keep up. It was the one thing that he kept reminding himself of whenever it felt like the world was crashing all around him.
It kept him from giving up.
The one thing that kept him from giving up was that very real memory of the boy in front of him… Holding him tightly and telling him that everything will be alright. The very real memory of the man in front of him, gently holding his shoulders as they kissed for the first and only time.
Even now, the very thought of it made his lips tingle.
"Percy... there's only one thing I'd sell my soul to Kronos for... it's..."
The young Poseidon son, completely in a haze, had completed that sentence in his mind... "I'd sell my soul to Kronos for... it's for you..."
But now? The truth behind the words had come to light.
The warmth was gone. The feeling of knowing that you were utterly and completely safe, was gone.
And he misses it. He misses the feeling of walking through camp doors and seeing him again for the first time in weeks. That unmistakeable feeling of relief… joy… the strange tug of something else.
No longer does sleep bring any kind of relief or rest. It only brings up memories of being led so far into a fantasy world that knowing what's real from what isn't wasn't possible anymore. It brings up memories of being so wrong about a person he thought he knew completely.
He reminded himself, just like everyone else did, that it couldn't have been predicted. No one had seen this coming. But, he did. There were small give-aways. Minute, small little incidents that marked out a path that was soon to be the only one that existed.
But those small little red flags… he completely forced himself to miss. He let mist cover his eyes and let himself be blind. He let himself be led around by the one person whom he wanted to be led by. Be loved by.
He wishes he could just erase those feelings completely.
Erase the memories of something that had been a lie all along.
Because, no matter how many times you're told that you are loved…. When the knife twists, you know the truth.
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Note: the only reason Percy never refers to him (Luke) by name, is that he's still grieving the loss of the relationship and still hasn't recovered.