At precisely 3:17 PM, a dark-haired teenager walks into the Beth Israel Medical Clinic in New York City and made his way to the nurses' station. He's dressed in all black—saggy black jeans, a black t shirt with a faded band logo, and a black leather jacket. He carries a dark gray backpack and has a silver skull ring on one finger.
The nurse at the station looks up at his approach and winces a little. "Back so soon?" she asks, falsely cheerful.
The boy shrugs. "Can I see him?" he asks. There's no emotion, no inflection. He sounds hollow.
The nurse sighs and nods. She slides a visitor's badge across the counter. "I printed one up for you ahead of time. Go on back."
The boy tries to smile, but grimaces instead. He grabs the badge, pins it to his shirt, and heads towards the elevator.
As he leaves, the nurse drops her fake smile and turns to the other nurse. "Poor kid," she says.
"What do you mean?" the other nurse asks. She's very new; it's only her second shift. The older nurse is supposed to train her today.
"He comes in every day to visit his boyfriend," the older nurse shared. "Boyfriend's been in a coma for almost a month, and the doctors say that he probably won't make it. They haven't told him yet because he's not family. They're really only authorized to say something once he's dead."
"Oh my god, that's terrible!" the new nurse says. "What happened?"
The older nurse takes a moment to glance around and make sure nobody is coming. "Car accident. Some big rig lost control merging onto the highway, ended up t-boning him at sixty miles an hour. The car flipped three times and crashed into the median."
The new nurse's eyes widen as she imagines what a person might look like after such a crash. What it must be like for family and friends. "Oh my god," she says again. "No wonder he looks so broken."
The boy in room 331, a doctor notes, is not improving. Looking through the window into the room, she wonders if there's any hope left.
From her window, she can see the multitude of tubes and wires coming out of him. His blond hair had been partially shaved to treat a nasty head laceration from the steering wheel, but it's now just long enough to flop over the stitches. He's hooked up to a ventilator and a heart monitor and an IV, so any number of wires and tubes are coming out of his fingers and his hands and his throat.
The dark-haired boy is sitting in there again. The doctor's never seen the patient's father, but the dark-haired boy shows up every day and stays for as long as he can. He isn't very talkative, he rarely says anything. He knows that they can't tell him what he needs to hear, so he doesn't bother asking.
Sometimes, when she's walking past and she glances into room 331, she can see the boy bent over clasped hands, praying that the comatose boy might show even the slightest improvements. She likes to imagine that he's offering some sort of trade—his life for his friend's or something similarly dramatic—but she really has no idea.
Poor boy, she thinks as she continues onto her other patients. He's only seventeen, and he'll never see eighteen.
"I always found it funny that your father was the god of the Underworld instead of mine."
Nico di Angelo looks up to see the god Apollo standing in the middle of the hospital room. "Why's that?" he asks dully.
"Your father's Fields of Punishment—nothing compared to what mine does." For the first time, Apollo doesn't look like a teenage surf boy. He's wearing a lab coat and scrubs, looking for all the world like a young doctor on his break. He sits heavily in the chair next to Nico and they both stare silently at the boy they love.
"Why don't you save him?" Nico asks. "He's your son, you have to do something!" He hasn't cried since he heard about the accident, when he first saw Will unmoving on the bed with those damned tubes everywhere, but his eyes are watering now.
Apollo doesn't acknowledge Nico's question. "After all, your father would never dream of punishing someone by forcing them to watch their son slowly die, would he?"
"What?" Will Solace is just one of many mortals caught between the gods. He's dying because of the sins of his father and the vengeance of his grandfather and his death will mean nothing. The greatest healer in a century, and he's dying because Zeus is unhappy.
Apollo nods. "For my prophecies. For my role in the war. I'm forbidden from interfering."
Nico makes a sound that resembles a sob. In that moment, Apollo sees Nico di Angelo not as the hero of Olympus, slayer of dozens of monsters and survivor of Tartarus, but as a seventeen-year-old nine and a half months away from voting. A seventeen-year-old boy worried about his first real boyfriend, terrified of facing his death, knowing that he can't do anything to save him.
"It isn't fair," Nico protests, as if his words might convince Zeus himself. "The war ended two years ago."
"It isn't fair," Apollo agrees. "It's Greek."
No hero in the world gets a happy ending, that's what they don't tell you. Phaethon and Asclepius were blasted to pieces. Orpheus was ripped apart. Troilius was stabbed. And Will Solace will die choking around his breathing tube as the sound of the ventilator drowns out the persistent beating of the heart monitor while his father looks on.
Will doesn't remember the accident. He remembers lots of things—he remembers his father is a god, though he isn't sure which; he remembers that his boyfriend bends shadows and his brothers bend light; and he remembers that he once upon a time was a doctor—but he can't remember the accident itself.
He knows that he was in a car crash because Morpheus tells him this every time he visits. Morpheus brings good dreams, happy dreams, dreams about beaches and sunshine and kissing his shadow-boyfriend. But Morpheus also brings sad truths: his name is Will Solace, he was in a car accident and now he's in a coma, and he'll die. Will knows Morpheus is telling the truth because once upon a time Will was a doctor and doctors have to know when dead is coming.
Dead isn't so bad, probably. Dead probably doesn't hurt the way this in-between stage hurts. His brothers are dead, and they've never complained about it.
Morpheus returns. He isn't gray so much as colorless, Will notices. His edges fade away into the background until the only features Will can make out are his deep black eyes filled with sadness.
Morpheus's heart breaks upon seeing the fading mind of this once-bright boy. Gods like Athena and Hermes and Apollo like to think they know mortals best, but the truth is Morpheus knows their dreams better than anyone. He is their dreams.
He never wanted respect or acknowledgment or sacrifices, that's not why he joined the Titans.
He joins the Titans because the gods are cruel and they break and torment those who love them best to serve their own jealous whims.
Sleep is safe. Dreams are safe. Nothing can hurt you in a dream. Nobody was safer in New York than those mortals asleep on the sidewalk, lost in dreams about loved ones and happy places.
If he had the gifts of his father, he would kill the boy right now, end his suffering and the suffering of those that love him. But Morpheus doesn't have those gifts, so instead he cocoons the dying boy in dreams and memories of light and laughter and love and he curses the gods for their cruelty.
Thanatos spends a lot of time in hospitals these days. It's so convenient that now mortals gather up all their sick and dying under one roof. It really lessens his commute.
There are a lot of people he needs to see right now—a ninety-seven year old woman with renal failure, the man in the operating room getting heart surgery, the drug addict in the parking lot who just injected himself with enough heroin to kill a medium-sized elephant—but he stops just outside of room 331 and looks in on the comatose patient in room 331.
He should have died. He should have died when his car hit the median, but at the moment he hovered between life and death, some power shoved him towards life, and he started to heal from the stomach lacerations. He should have died when he suffered cardiac arrest in the back of the ambulance, but Zeus ordered the god of Death to wait, to let them restart his heart.
"Sickening, isn't it?" Thanatos turns to see his nephew, Morpheus, standing next to him. "What they're doing to him."
Thanatos does not get involved in the affairs of mortals. He sees them only at the moment of their deaths, at the moment when they become truly mortal. He does not understand pain and loss. His world is black and white, life and death.
This boy should be dead, but many people cheat death. Thanatos is, above all things, pragmatic. But he nods once, to appease his nephew.
He will be back. His schedule tells him that in two weeks, the boy will suffer massive cardiac arrest. There will be a Do Not Resuscitate order on file, so instead his doctors will stand by and watch him die. Usually, it takes minutes for a patient to die this way, but this one is a friend of the boss's son, so it will be mercifully quick.
Small blessings, he thinks as he drifts away to collect the old woman on the fifth floor and the man in the operating room and the bum in the parking lot and any number of hundreds of thousands of people all dying at the moment. Sometimes, a fast death is all you can ask for.
A man in his thirties, who for all the world looks like a doctor on his day off, finds the doctor in charge of his son's case and asks about his son's options.
She hesitates. This is the first time she has met Paul Solace, and she doesn't want to be the one to tell him his son is dying. "Sir, maybe you should sit—"
"I'm sorry," the man says. "I know there's nothing more you can do. It would take a…it would take a miracle for him to wake up. I meant about after."
The doctor nods slowly, wondering if he himself is a doctor. He seems a lot better prepared, more willing to take the news than most of the other parents she meets. "Let's go back to my office," she suggests.
He follows wordlessly behind her until they reach her office. "I'm sorry I haven't met with you before today," he says. The doctor is very attractive with her black hair pinned back. Is it wrong, he wonders, to use the imminent death of his son to have sex? Probably. "I had Will when I was very young, and my family is very prominent. I've had to sneak around at odd hours to visit." She certainly looks sympathetic, but not quite at sympathy nookie.
"That's fine, Mr. Solace. Now, about your son?" She might be harder than expected, and he isn't sure he wants to put in the time. Oh, well. There will be others.
"Yes, of course," he says, instantly contrite. "I want to sign a DNR." She looks a little surprised, but she doesn't say anything. "It's killing me to watch him die like this, Doctor. At least if we do this, his organs can help someone else recover."
The doctor wants to ask about the dark-haired boy, if he gets a say about it. He's spent more time with your son than you, she wants to scream. What kind of father are you, she wants to ask. But she's a professional and so instead she asks if that's what he would have wanted.
For the first time, the father of her patient seems almost real. "Will wanted to be a doctor," he says with a sad smile. "He'd never have wanted this for himself."
The doctor slides over the DNR wordlessly.
The Iris-message shimmers in the air, showing the face of a concerned Hispanic girl with hair done back in an elaborate braid. "Is he okay?"
The blond boy shakes his head. "I don't think so," he says. "He won't talk to anyone about it. Disappears every day around three to go visit the hospital. I've tried to reach out, Piper has too, but—nothing. Hazel came out just after the accident, but he wouldn't even speak to her."
The girl sighs. "Isn't there anyone who could get him to open up?"
The boy nods. "Yeah, well, that guy's in a coma. That's the problem."
"Would it help if I came out, do you think?"
The boy runs a hand through his hair. "Honestly, Ray? I don't know. I doubt it. I don't know what you could say that we haven't tried."
The girl shakes her head. "I just hate being so far away, not being able to do anything to help," she says.
"Trust me," the boy says solemnly. "It's a lot worse on this end.
A sixteen year old girl sits inside the Apollo cabin. It's gotten a lot quieter since the accident; very few people feel the urge to try any one of the musical instruments sprinkled throughout. Most of her siblings are at the archery range, hoping that maybe the physical exertion will tire them out so they don't remember what's happening to their once-leader.
The girl in the Apollo cabin cannot shoot. She is a healer, a surprisingly good saxophonist, and a sometime receiver of prophetic dreams. Tonight, she is neither the saxophonist or the dreamer. She is not even a healer, though that might come into play.
Tonight, she is an angry and wronged sister of a boy who will die soon enough. And tonight, she will vent all of her rage on a dark-haired boy some might call innocent.
"How dare you," she practices in the silence of the Apollo cabin. "How dare you. How dare you. How dare you."
The dark-haired boy walks out of the hospital at eight, when visiting hours officially end. He sometimes thinks about sneaking back in, but Will is a little too visible and the lights don't dim enough for him to blend into the shadows.
As he steps into the shadows of the hospital, he concentrates and reappears inside the Hades cabin. He doesn't know why he stays at camp, why he doesn't move on, but he can't bring himself to leave the place he and Will spent so much time together.
To his surprise, there's a girl sitting on his bed. It's pretty obvious that she isn't a relative—her skin glows in a way that marks her as a child of Apollo. She looks angry, her fingers twisting around a purple hair tie.
"How dare you," she says in a quiet voice full of anger.
"What?" he asks. He's very confused. He always thought Will's numerous siblings liked him, all things considered. They never made fun of the relationship the way everyone else at camp did.
"Do you think you're the only one who's hurting?" she asks. "Do you honestly think you're the only person here who is upset about the accident?"
He doesn't understand what she's getting at. "What is this about, Kayla?"
"You know exactly what this is about," she says. "This is about why you keep visiting Will."
Now he's really confused. "I have no idea what you mean. Are you upset that I…visit my boyfriend in the hospital?"
"You say you love him, right?" she asks. "I remember Will literally jumping for joy when you said it back to him."
He almost smiles at the image. "Yes, I love him! What is this about?"
She stands up, slipping the hair tie back onto her wrist. "If you love my brother so much, why aren't you letting him die?"
The accusation rocks him back a step. "What? Do you think that I—that I could even do that?"
"You're the son of Hades. I think you could do a lot of things, including keeping a dead person alive. Don't you understand how important death is? You're just drawing this out, don't you get that? Let him die in peace!" She's crossed the line from angry to upset, and he can see a few tears threatening to spill out of her eyes.
He shakes his head vigorously. "It's not me, Kayla! I talked to Apollo today. He says it's your grandfather keeping him alive, as punishment for the war."
The girl closes her eyes and takes a deep long breath. "My father said that?" she asks.
The boy nods. He can't think of anything else to say, except—could he do that? Could he keep Thanatos away from someone, let whatever healing magic Will already has do its work? Would Zeus let something like that happen?
He is not the son of Death, he reminds himself. He is the son of the Dead. The difference is small but important. His father does not—indeed, cannot—go from one end of the world to another, reaping souls all the while. He cannot stay an execution simply because he is in love. Love has no place in Death.
"Then release his soul."
The boy is brought out of his musings rather abruptly by these words. "You—you want me to kill him?"
"Last night, I found myself in his dreams. He's hurting, Nico. He knows he's dying, he knows there's no hope. All he wants is for it to come. Release his soul. He wants to be, and he should be, dead."
When Nico falls asleep, he finds himself in room 331 of the Beth Israel Medical Center. Remembering what Kayla said, he places one hand on Will's chest, closes his eyes, and tries to see how long his boyfriend has to live.
The answer rocks him back on his heels. Kayla's right; someone has intervened. Will Solace should have died when his car crashed into the median, but someone—probably Zeus—bound his spirit to his failing body. His soul is trapped in this broken vessel until the gods decide Apollo has been punished enough. Maybe tomorrow, maybe three years from now. Maybe never.
At this moment, Nico fully understands what it means to be a piece in the gods' games. He might endure it for the sake of his friends, for Hazel, even for his father, but Will shouldn't be tormented so his father learns not to cross Zeus.
Again, Nico closes his eyes. He clenches the hand atop Will's chest into a fist, and he lets out a slow breath.
Nico opens his eyes to see Death. Thanatos stands opposite Nico, his hand resting lightly atop Nico's fist.
"He still has two weeks," Thanatos remarks mildly. No questions. No judgement. A fact.
Nico pauses. Two weeks. Two weeks to mourn, to say goodbye. It's tempting, but—"Is he hurting?"
Thanatos shrugs. "I do not know," he says. "You would have to ask Morpheus."
Dying always hurts.
Nico presses his lips together. He wants so badly to wait, to have more time. But it's Will who has to come first.
"Can you wake him up, let me say goodbye?" Nico asks plaintively.
Thanatos shakes his head.
With tears in his eyes, Nico presses his lips to Will's temple. "Bye, Will," he breathes. "I love you so much."
He straightens up. "Please," he begs Thanatos. "Make it quick."
He flattens his hand.
Immediately, the heart monitor begins the loud, persistent beep indicating Will's heart has stopped.
Nico wakes up in his own bed sobbing.
Will Solace lies in the hot sand. He's back home, he's pretty sure. It looks like LA or Long Island or wherever his home is. But either way it's warm and it's beautiful and his shadow-boyfriend is huddled in the pathetic shade of a giant umbrella looking miserable.
Will laughs at his boyfriend's attempts to stay cool. "Come on," he insists, grabbing his hands and trying to pull him into the sun. "It's so beautiful outside."
Suddenly, the dream changes. He is standing next to the colorless Morpheus in a darkened hospital hallway. Will waits, but Morpheus says nothing, just continues to stare into a room with big numbers on the door. Something-three-one.
"Why am I here?" Will asks, like a petulant child dragged away from his favorite television show.
Morpheus continues to say nothing.
Curiosity gets the better of him, and he looks inside the room. There's a patient in there, some teenager who, he guesses, took a turn too fast and wrecked. He's got tubes and wires and a thick bandage wrapped around his head and—
Oh. That person, that bed is his. Will turns to Morpheus and screams, "Take me back!" In a much softer voice, he says," Take me back, please. I don't—I don't want to see this."
Morpheus doesn't want to move. "Wait."
Will looks again, and this time his shadow-boyfriend is inside. He looks exactly the same and yet so different.
The dream god makes a gesture indicating Will should go inside. This is apparently what Morpheus wants him to see. "Can he hear me?" Will asks.
Morpheus shakes his head. "This is his dream. We are simply eavesdropping."
When Will enters his own hospital room, his shadow-boyfriend isn't alone. Standing across from him is Death, or the god of. They're talking about something—weeks or days or pain. They're talking about him.
"Why are you showing this to me?" Will asks, somehow knowing without looking that Morpheus is behind him.
"I believe everyone has a right to listen in on those that decide their fate."
Will wants to argue, to demand a real explanation, but just then his shadow-boyfriend says something. It's as if Will is hearing it in two separate ways, because the words reverberate in his ears and his skull and his heart. "Bye, Will," he says. "I love you so much."
Why would he say goodbye? Won't they still spend their dreams together, in the sunshine or the shade?
Will is still pondering the goodbye when Thanatos reaps his soul.
The doctor is exhausted. She's been working for nearly twelve hours without a break, but the sound of one of her patients entering cardiac arrest jerks her out of her fog. It's the boy in 331. She almost wants to drag the crash cart into his room, restart his heart, but her hands are tied. The father signed a DNR just this afternoon. Still, she wishes the dark-haired boy could have said goodbye.
Glancing into the room, she can almost see the dark-haired boy arguing with the Grim Reaper. She shakes her head and both apparitions disappear. She must be more tired than she thought.
She walks into the room, alone but for the dead boy on the bed. "Time of death," she announces to herself and to him, "two-thirteen AM."
Carefully, she removes the IV, the pulse detector on his finger. She drags out the ventilator tube bit by bit. Once every tube and wire is removed, she pages the surgeon on call to take him away. He's an organ donor, and his death means a chance for others to live.
If he really wanted to be a doctor, she catches herself thinking, he'd like that.
Morpheus smiles as the dreamworld collapses. Another soul removed from the machinations of the gods. Another soul free from the whims of all-powerful megalomaniacs.
He just wishes he could free the world from them.
Thanatos stares, curious, at the soul in his arms. He wonders about these sorts of souls sometimes, what makes them so special in comparison to everyone else.
Not the great men, like King or Gandhi. Not the ones who are famous or talented. Not even the terrible ones, the ones like Hitler or Vlad the Impaler. Those souls rarely, if ever, capture his interest.
It's the little babies dying of cancer who bring attention and publicity to rare diseases. It's the unarmed men whose deaths incite riots. Everyone who was particularly unremarkable until the moment of their demise.
This soul in his arms is wholly ordinary, except that his father is Apollo, and Apollo displeased his father, the soul's grandfather, and this boy happened to be near enough to use as a punishment. Completely unexceptional, except that he is the favorite of his father and the beloved of the Ghost King, though neither of those made any difference to the Gods.
Entirely unremarkable. But now he's dead and the world's changed because of it.
Thanatos wonders how something as simple as death has that sort of power.
Mnemosyne walks. Her soft steps make tiny ripples in the black pool—black, for remembrance—sending the water lapping against the sides. Now and then, souls approach, driven by equal parts fear and longing, to discover their previous lives.
Mnemosyne walks on. Her white dress—white, for mourning—skims the surface of the water, never quite touching it. Never getting wet.
A single soul catches her eye, and she pauses her pacing. Bending down, the memory goddess scoops up water and pours it onto his blond hair. He has a lot he should remember.
She stands. Her dress is soaked. Her daughters, muses and poets that they are, would see it as a metaphor, as a sign that this soul would live on in memory forever.
They are wrong. The water, black though it may be, is just water. The dress will dry. The boy will not be remembered any longer than any other dead boy.
Mnemosyne alone remembers.
Will Solace remembers the accident.
He remembers driving back to the city at night, humming along to the radio—Shut Up and Dance is playing on just about every station. He remembers the sudden bright lights of the truck shooting into the window. He remembers his own attempts at a wild swerve, but it was too late because then the truck smashed into his car.
He remembers the sheer pants-wetting terror of knowing he was about to die. He remembers lying there in a pool of his own blood, feeling himself slowly dying, and wondering what was taking so long.
He remembers other things too, an entire life before this one. The life of a mortal boy named David Green who leaned the wrong way and ate lead in the Vietnam jungles. He was nineteen. Will is just seventeen. He never seems to last up there.
But mostly he remembers a pale, dark-haired boy who can speak with the dead.
Protocol dictates that a soul must wait twenty-five years to be reborn, to allow the soul to become at peace with their previous life, with being dead, and with the idea of new life. Thirty, if the death was particularly traumatic or there was more than one lifetime of memories to sort through.
Will Solace dies early Wednesday morning. That night, he is judged. Within three hours of judgement, he has an appointment with Hades. And by Thursday at noon—right around the time of his funeral—he is reborn.
Nico Di Angelo tells himself he is saying goodbye. That he needs forgiveness from the boy he loved, the boy he ended up killing.
He is lying.
Nico Di Angelo misses his boyfriend, which is not a crime. Even speaking to the dead is not a crime. But then why does it take him the better part of a week to try and talk to him again?
The answer is simple: Nico Di Angelo is ashamed. Death is part of life. It is something that children of Hades are supposed to take in stride and move on. They mourn, but they do not try and stop the natural order.
Nico Di Angelo is a terrible son of Hades.
He digs a ditch in a stretch of woods that border the ocean, a spot where he can see the beach where Will used to drag him on sunny days. He pours into it Sunny D and three cartons of French fries. A sprinkling of chicken nuggets, and then the words that summon ghosts.
They crawl out of the ground, dragging themselves up towards moonlight and food and above all, companionship, and Nico almost forgets to draw his sword and keep back those who would drink. Those who are not who he tried to reach.
He is fast, but not fast enough to keep back a shade with floppy blond hair and the kind of tan mere mortals can only dream of. For a second, Nico prays that it is the boy he wants so desperately to contact.
"So you're the bastard who ruined my brother's death."
He thought it had already shattered but, somehow, his heart breaks a little bit more.
Lee Fletcher is angry. No, Lee Fletcher is furious.
Once upon a time, Lee Fletcher was a living boy born in South Dakota to a women who didn't particularly mind that the sperm donor was a god, because she and her girlfriend had wanted a baby for a long time. Once upon a time, Lee Fletcher was in charge of protecting his brothers from things like death and destruction and heartbreak.
Once upon a time, Lee Fletcher promised a little boy named Will that he would look after him.
Once upon a time, Lee Fletcher sat in Elysium and watched as a battered soul once belonging to his brother and a boy named David walked in and demanded a meeting with the Lord of the Dead. It doesn't escape his notice that his brother doesn't come back from the meeting.
"What happened? Where is Will?"
Perhaps, if Lee were alive, he would be touched by the agony he can see on the son of Hades's face. As it is, Lee Fletcher has been dead for four years, and he isn't. "I don't know," he says shortly, cruelly.
Nico lets out a noise that might have been a sob. "Please," he says. "I just—I wanted to say goodbye."
"He's gone," Lee says, throwing the words at Nico like knives. "Because of you."
"What do you mean?" Nico asks. When Lee's heart was still beating, maybe the tears on the other boy's face would have softened him. But it's a moot point.
"My brother has been reborn," Lee says. "Twenty-five years too soon. Because of you." He casts his arm around, emphasizing the pit full of Sunny D and McDonalds. "Because he knew you would do this."
Now Nico is angry. "I wanted to say goodbye—"
"It's too late for that," Lee says. "You had your chance. You said goodbye." He leans in close, so that there's no chance of misunderstanding. "He doesn't want you to chase after him any longer. He's gone."
"I banish you," Nico croaks. "I send you back to Hell. Leave, spirit, and darken these woods no longer."
As Lee Fletcher and all the other spirits fade away, Nico collapses against a boulder and weeps.
Eight years ago to the day, Will Solace died from injuries sustained in a broadside car accident.
Nico Di Angelo knows this. He's a successful Wall Street broker, twenty-five years old and setting the financial world on fire, cuts a fine figure in his suit—but today, he will hail a taxi made of smoke, take it out to Long Island, and sit out on the beach to mourn. His boyfriend, Tyler, jokes it's the one time he'll actually tolerate the sun.
Tyler Vaughn knows this. A son of Mercury, he's lost a lot of friends to war. Does he think it's weird that his boyfriend spends time each year mourning another boy's death? If he does, he doesn't say it. One day, he just hopes that Nico trusts him enough to let him tag along.
Jason Grace knows this. He and Reyna and now Tyler meet up sometimes to make sure that Nico is still eating and breathing and all that. He's got a little girl now, Becca, but he'll be sure to check in with Tyler before the day is over.
Morpheus knows this. The gods are cruel and callous, but at least they've found new playthings and moved on from a broken boy in a hospital bed.
Thanatos knows this. Nothing sticks more than those who die and change the world.
Does Apollo know this? Nobody is sure.
A little boy named Ben Jung, however, has no idea. All he knows is that tomorrow is his eighth birthday and Mama said that all of the boys and girls in his class are going to come and there would be cake and ice cream and balloons and he hasn't wet the bed in almost a week, so it's just like Paul said and once you turn eight you stop things like that because eight is an important year, everyone says.
Ben was born in San Diego, but they all moved to New York three years ago, and Ben remembers it no matter what Paul says about him being too little. Ben remembers the sun and the sky and the beach, but he likes New York, too.
His mom worries about him because sometimes he takes off running when they go to the store together, chasing young professionals in black suits, but maybe eight is a magic year and he's outgrown that, too.