Hi there! I bring you a new chapter...about Thalia and Percy. Duh. In Demigod Files, the sorta left us hanging after the Sword of Hades...so this chappie explains what Thalia and Percy did after they crushed the roses. ENJOY!
Disclaimer: Wow, I still don't own Percy Jackson and the Olympians, billowing, poisonous green fire, or anything else from the series. What a surprise.
Percy's Point of View
Thalia nodded. "In that case, still up for dinner?"
I couldn't help but smile. "After all that, you're hungry?"
"Hey," she said, "even immortals have to eat. I'm thinking cheeseburgers at McHale's"
And together we crushed the roses that would return us to the world.
McHale's was crowded and raucous, with boisterous people that shouted over the loud din. It was steamy inside from all of the body heat, but I didn't mind, not one bit, because it was still freezing cold outside.
I imagined what we must look like to everyone. A girl in a silver hunting jacket with camouflage cargo pants, a silver tiara placed lopsidedly on her unruly, spiky black hair, twirling a heavy silver bracelet around her extremely thin wrist. A boy, his school uniform almost ripped to shreds, a long red mark on one of his shoulders, a ballpoint pen clutched in his hand.
I'm sure we made quite an impression.
I spent the last hour or so catching up with Thalia. I mean, I haven't seen her in a year. She's changed a lot. And not just physically, although her hair is much longer now, just brushing her collarbone. Her cheekbones are slightly more prominent, and her body is thinner than I remember, but there are hints of muscle all over her limbs. One of the perks of being a Hunter, I guess. But Thalia seems more subdued, less reckless than I remember, almost contented with whatever is going on. I guess time has slowed down for her, making her less on edge. I still remember Bianca Di Angelo telling me the same thing when she became a Hunter.
I told her about everything that had happened: how Nico Di Angelo had run away and conferred with Minos, Daedalus, the Battle of the Labyrinth. But I talked about personal things, too. Rachel, my mom, Paul Blofis. She was really interested in what I had to say, even the most boring things, like how I did on a quiz. I realized that she was drinking in my whole, normal, (well, about as normal as you could get for a demigod and a son of one of the Big Three) life, as though it was refreshing her, listening closely to every little detail. A pang went through my chest as I thought about how she would never take another quiz. Never go to school. Never be around boys, never marry, never have kids. She would stay a maiden forever. In fifty years she would still look sixteen. I realized with a start that I was almost as old as her.
"Why did you become a Hunter?" I blurted out, without thinking. Curse my ADHD.
Thalia stared at me for a moment, her eyes narrowed in a combination of bewilderment and sadness. She kept twirling Aegis around her wrist, picking listlessly at her half-eaten cheeseburger for such a long time I thought she wasn't going to answer. But then she murmured quietly, "Percy, I needed a home."
"But, Thalia," I hear myself whine, like a little child. "Camp Half-Blood could have been your home. You could have stayed with Annabeth, Grover, and...me."
"Percy, most people think I accepted Artemis' request of becoming her Lieutenant because I didn't want to be a child of the Prophecy. I guess that that was part of it. But really, the Prophecy...my sixteenth birthday came much too quickly. Too quickly for me to have time to think about it. I mean, the first few months I had to get back in sync with the rest of the world and pretend like the Prophecy didn't exist. Then, right before my birthday, I realized I was still out of sync with the world. I was in a different time. My body and my mind hadn't adapted yet. I needed to be...out of a commission, at least for a while. So I could think about everything: Bianca, The hunters, you...Luke." She swallowed hard and blinked her eyes when she said his name. "If I became a Hunter, I could sort out all of my problems. Think about things. Catch up with the rest of the world. And I also needed a home."
"But Camp Half-Blood-" I started to say, but Thalia cut me off.
"Camp Half-Blood was a temporary resting place. I could never stay there permanently, and you know it, Percy. I don't fit in there. I've always been an outsider. And I've never really had a home before. I know I lived with my mom in our house, but that place was a miserable hellhole. In fact, being on the run with Annabeth and Luke was the only time I ever had the sense of being at home. I thought about this for a long time. Then I thought, well, maybe I'm a traveler. Maybe wherever I go is my home. But I needed more than just a home."
"Oh?" I asked, my curiosity piqued.
"Yeah. I needed a place to belong."
REVIEW! PLEASE! Today is my birthday (no joke) and the best birthday present would be REVIEWS! Thanks so much!
~lilmissf
