Percy
Percy thinks it's strange how something so little can undo so much.
How it's only when you're staring down the edge of a metal blade that's inches from your throat, you realise this is actually happening. That you were really beaten in battle, no matter if the odds were almost fifty to one.
No sound makes its way from his throat, no saviour appears to take him to safety, there's no epiphany and no sudden revelation.
Behind him, the new demigod stumbles past Thalia's pine tree, and Percy finds solace in knowing he will have died for something good.
But it's not as if that can forgive him all the wrong he has done to get here. All the lies he has told. All the friends he has callously killed. Beckendorf. Zoë. Bianca. Silena. Luke. All of the others.
There's a strange release, when the blade slides into his chest like it were butter, and he leaves the world thinking of Annabeth.
Annabeth
It was odd, Annabeth felt, that she only knew her life had ended over six hours after it actually had.
She was visiting the site of a temple ruined by Kronos – one of the last not yet rebuilt – and she was marvelling at how half the roof was still there, even though only one column remained. Whoever designed it knew what they were doing.
She turned to a satyr to ask him to write down some measurements, and then the Iris-message came that sent her world spinning and crashing to the ground.
And there is nothing she can do except stand there. Frozen. Still.
It had never occurred to Annabeth how painfully red blood really was before, although she'd seen plenty of it.
Or how exquisitely fragile a human life really was. One pull of a trigger. One movement of a knife.
That was all it had taken for her to lose herself.
A tall, willowy figure stood by the grave.
It had been there for thirteen years.
Thirteen long years of regret and guilt and pain for the people who had loved the occupant. For everyone else, life went on. Global warming got worse. People still kept burning energy up. A new president was elected. Nothing changed.
But, for the woman standing beside the grave, those years were centuries. Centuries for her poignant grief to never fade. Centuries for her fingers to learn and caress every small mark of the writing on the marble stone, cold and unfeeling.
Here lies Perseus Jackson.
Friend, son, great hero and a great man, taken by tragedy.
Rest In Peace.
The woman hates this grave. Hates it because it embodies all that was him, who, try as she might, she can't stop loving, even after he did the unthinkable to her.
Even though he broke his promise and left her behind.
But she finds bittersweet solace in knowing she'll see him again soon.
Her fingers trace the last word – 'peace'. The peace she has never known. Perhaps she will find it now.
Finally, she moves away, to the edge of the cliff, and sees the sea again for the first time in thirteen years. The churning, blue-green, infinite oceans.
But her one true ocean is dead.
She breathes in the stale, living air, breathes out. Gives an exhausted, fleeting smile.
Percy.
Annabeth Chase throws herself off the cliff, and she's falling, weightless, limitless as he once said they would be.
Sweet pain carries her into the arms of Hades.