Disclaimer: I promise, I don't own Percy Jackson, and I never will.

Rating: T

Prompt: Me (surprisingly enough)

Prompt synopsis: a funeral hits the Jackson family hard...

Gravestones

I stared at the slab of rock in front of me.

It had been hours and hours since the funeral had ended. The people dressed in black satin and white button-up blouses had long since left, leaving only me to sit by the gravestone. The tears had long run out, much as I wanted them back. Somehow, crying made things feel better. It made you feel like you were contrite. It distracted you from the feeling of seeing a gravestone. It was a heavy feeling, like you were drained and unable to take another breath. The only feeling I had ever felt like it was when I held up the world with my wife.

"Percy." I turned around, seeing the only person who had bothered to stay for as long as I had. My wife stood behind me, her high black heels digging into the dirt. Her blonde hair whipped around her face, and black mascara streaked down her cheeks in stained rivulets. Annabeth. All at once, I caved in, and started to literally collapse. It was a good thing that I was already on the ground, though. The grass stains on my suit were never going to come out.

It seemed that Annabeth, like me, didn't have any scruples with her black satin pencil skirt and blouse. She knelt by me gingerly, putting her arms around me. Previously, I had thought that I was all done crying, but as she hugged me tightly, I figured that I was never really going to be quite done crying. Sobs emanated out of me, spurred by the lasting image of the coffin being lowered into the earth.

I looked at the gravestone, though the image was blurred with tears. The marble slab read SALLY M. JACKSON, 1975-2020. My mom. It was funny, really. I had always kind of taken her for granted- I mean, she was my mom. She was my blue chocolate-chip cookie baking mother. She wasn't going to leave me. My mom couldn't do that; it was impossible. There was no way on earth that she was ever going to leave, at least not until I did. With all of my quests, it seemed far more likely that I would die first. Of course, I had learned a long time ago that things didn't always turn out the way that you wanted them to.

"Oh, Percy," Annabeth said, her voice breaking. This was almost as hard on her as it was for me. I knew that she and my mom had been close. When I had gone missing, my mom had been the only person Annabeth knew who to turn to for help dealing with my disappearance. A sob hitched in my throat.

The weather even seemed to agree with us. Rain poured down around the grave in heavy, sleety bursts, pattering softly on the mushy ground. Water slipped off of the trees above the graveyard, splashing into puddles below. We both cried. We cried and cried and cried, because, really, though you might stop crying, it would never really be a true stop. The tears would never really run out.

My mother had only been forty-five when she died. It had been a car accident, and it had all happened so fast that it had been a blur. Hell, I hadn't even seen my little girl in what seemed like weeks, but was probably only about five days. The whole time, I had been passing through the world in a dull blur.

I thought back to a conversation that I had with Poseidon. The god had the gall to turn up at the funeral, looking contrite. He hadn't really been there for the service; I had spotted him at the edge of the graveyard, his hands tucked into a black suit, looking over the coffin being lowered in the ground. Quietly, I had murmured to Annabeth to stay there. At first, she had a quizzical expression on her face, until she spotted Poseidon watching us. Then she nodded, hugging me briefly. I figured that hug was the only thing that got me through the conversation that followed.

"Why did you do it?" Those were the first words that came out of my mouth. 'Why did you do it?' I was a distraught, confused, twenty-seven year old demigod, and I wanted to know why my father let my mother die.

Poseidon looked at me sadly. "Who lives and who dies are not up to me, Perseus. You, of all people, should know that." Somewhere, in my heart, I did know that. I knew that Poseidon couldn't tell the future, he wasn't the Fates, and he wasn't my uncle, Hades. There was nothing that he could have done.

Yet, I, as my distraught self, didn't want to hear that. "You're a god!" Tears burned in my eyes. "You should have done something. You shouldn't have just stood there in your little underwater palace and watch her die!" My teeth gritted together.

Poseidon glared at me, and thunder rumbled on the cloudy sky, though there wasn't any signs of rain at the time. It seemed that even my father had his limits. "Do not speak of what you do not know, Perseus." Those were his final words, for with that, he turned around and walked back towards the ocean, his figure fast receding. He didn't even use his godly powers to teleport to the ocean, much as I figured that he could. It wasn't his fault, and I regretted everything that I had ever said to him.

It seemed like I had acted like more of a dick than I really knew. My mother's death had impacted more onto the lives of those around me than I thought. My daughter was probably confused beyond all knowledge. And here was my wife, broken-down and sobbing as we held each other tightly. She had orchestrated the whole funeral. She had taken care of everything. And yet, here I was, crying when I should be thanking.

The thing about death was that you never really knew when it was going to happen. My mother was the first person in fifty years to be a lover of Poseidon, and she died as young as forty-five. I was a demigod, immensely powerful, and my death date could have been right there, right then. My wife was the smartest person that I knew, and even her wit and intelligence wasn't going to get her out of a crux one day.

These were the facts of life. One day, we were going to die, regardless of who we knew in the immortal world. We didn't really have any control over that. We just had control over what we did when the situations were upon us, and how we dealt with it. There was really no coping; it was just controlling it until you let it go.

Annabeth had done all the right things. She had held it together for me. She had found a babysitter for my daughter, bought the flight tickets up from Virginia to Montauk, where my mother was buried. She bought my suit, got a pencil skirt, orchestrated the funeral, and never shed a tear through the whole thing.

Nobody was invincible. We all had our breaking points. The trick is to hold it together for as long as you could, and then break apart into little pieces into the arms of somebody who understood and cared. That was the only way to get through something like this. It was a pure show of willpower.

I could summon hurricanes. I could control 70% of the earth's surface. I could slay a dozen different types of monsters in about twelve seconds. In fact, I was probably one of the most powerful demigods to ever walk the earth. It wasn't bragging; it was pure truth. What I was learning, though, was that the words 'strong' and 'powerful' weren't necessarily the same thing.

My wife didn't have any godly powers. Sure, her super-intelligence sometimes seemed like a holy power, but it wasn't, really. Yet, as we sat there, crying into each other, I was learning something fast. Despite my powers, my wife was thirty times as strong as I would ever be. Her breaking point had been a week after mine.

I figured that I owed her this one favor. I took a deep breath that seemed to rattle my chest, stilling my shaking hands and legs. Standing up slowly, I lifted my wife up. She looked thin as a toothpick, I reflected, having not eaten in a long, long while. Reflecting on my own appearance, I figured that I didn't look much better.

"Come on," I said quietly. Annabeth blinked up at me, her lashes fringed with tears. In that moment, she didn't need to say thank you. It was already said with her expression. Leaning on me, we both walked through the graveyard, away from my mother, away to my daughter. The world was for the living, not for the dead, though I figured that my mother would always be with me, in some way or another.

It wasn't, however, before I spoke the last words that I would ever say to my mother. They weren't anything special, they were just the honest trueness that I wished I could have said to my mother's face before she died.

"Goodbye, Mom. I-" My voice choked. "I love you."

I loved my mother. And I knew, with her heart, that she loved me back. My mother would reach Elysium- and one day, I would join her there. There would be no telling how soon or how long it would be, if my daughter or wife reached Elysium before me, or if I would go tomorrow, or a week from now, or a month from now. The world was for the living, not the dead.

I would see my mother again. She was just on the other side of the river now. For right now, I needed to be strong.

Annabeth's hand entwined in mine, we walked back to the car, our strength not in our willpower, but in each other.

A/N: So this is it. I'm in a rental home in a vacation destination right now, so updates might be a bit iffy. It all depends on where my family drags me XP. Unpacking right now... which I really, really don't want to do. Have a headache. Nauseous. Basically, I just want to complain after being seasick on a ferry, etc, etc. Probably shouldn't complain, but I am, because I feel sick on vacation.

Anyway... thanks for the reviews! I will do your review tomorrow, Athenachild101! Please review again!