Percy walked through Tartarus like he owned the bloody place. His rusty, bloodstained sneakers thudded heavily on the ground, echoes punctuating every sound all throughout hell. In an attempt to make as much noise as possible, he whistled, he sang, he yelled, he cried, he let out everything...to his heart's content. It was a kind of vocal therapy in a way, but more importantly, it showed he was no longer afraid of the monsters. His chest had been corked with the strongest metal in the world, and he felt the power of the River Phlegethon rustling close by. Renewed energy ran through his bones like slick blood. He didn't feel scared anymore...

Even if the monsters did come, if Percy were surrounded and outnumbered, he still had his little shoulder devil—Kronos—as a background plan.

So yes. Percy Jackson, for the first time in hell, was feeling good.

"That's right!" he yelled into Tartarus, into its grounds and skies, across its horizontal plains. Over its peaks and under its valleys, until his voice had traveled everywhere in a three-mile radius, his voice flooding and sloshing all over what Percy guessed was the armpit of Tartarus.

Percy sniffed armpit-Tartarus with a wrinkled nose. "You'd do well to get some deodorant," he muttered dejectedly, only a few moments later.

He walked...and walked...and walked. His footsteps molded into the red dirt of Tartarus, into physical impressions of his existence, marks that showed he'd been here. Survived here.

Gods, he thought to himself, retracting in thought. Percy was acting like he'd spent months in Tartarus...

Despite his last conversation with Kronos, Percy knew it'd only been a day or two—it had to have been. It had to. He didn't want to imagine Kronos ruling over a apocalyptic, dust-bitten world. A world where hope was a forgotten concept, humanity a forgotten civilization, Greek gods a forgotten pantheon. He saw Annabeth, bloody and unmoving, and his heart practically stopped in his chest. It made him shiver, but he pushed the thought away, biting his tongue and walking on.

He walked with confidence. Assurance. Smooth steps and everything.

Percy Jackson...was going to...walk through Tartarus...like he owned the bloody place...goddammit.

Yet, he was walking with no direction.

Percy's brows creased as he tried futilely to shove away his doubts.

Admittedly, killing Bob was a stupid move—the ex-Titan was now unable to guide Percy himself, and Percy was just wandering around Tartarus, a lost traveler in a sea of red rock—but he didn't regret killing him. Percy couldn't regret it.

If he did, then Percy had to admit he'd been wrong. He was right in this. Bob deserved to die, and Percy idly remembered the giddiness that flooded his chest at the thought of righteous justice. He could not forsake these morals.

Then again, according to Annabeth, he didn't have morals except "kill Titans" and "save the world"—but hell, Percy thought those were some pretty good morals to have. Athena despised him for his fatal flaw of "loyalty," but Percy didn't see any faults there either. Athena and Annabeth's minds worked the same, really, with the same cogs and wheels spinning in tandem. They saw mistakes and flaws where Percy saw strengths.

Percy couldn't read Annabeth, like she could him.

Parental rivalry or not, they would've never worked— he thought. Percy closed his eyes. He didn't know where that thought had come from.

He could not dwell on these things; that was what Kronos wanted him to think...to feel. Percy definitely wasn't the smartest guy on the block—just a look at his middle- and high-school report cards was enough to clarify that—but he certainly wasn't the dumbest. He could tell that Kronos was trying to recruit him with his pseudo-propaganda... And yet—

The gods felt so wrong. When Kronos talked about them, the mighty immortals just felt wrong.

And when Percy thought about them, they also became dirty and gross, too. Like...unwashed laundry.

Ever since Percy had been introduced to the Greek gods, he'd known the gods weren't perfect. The Greeks had never designed them to be perfect; they designed them to be human. And human they were—stuck-up, neglectful, cruel, angry, vicious, unfaithful, sadistic, sickening.

Percy just ignored all that because it'd been Kronos who killed his parents, because it was Kronos who wanted to kill everyone. Percy ignored the gods' dirty laundry because the gods, despite everything, were the better alternative.

Because Percy was their perfect hero, and perfect heroes didn't question their masters.

Now though, the comparisons were stark.

Dial back a decade, and Zeus wanted to kill Sally Jackson. Dial back a few millennia, and Zeus wanted to kill all humans.

Like father—

—like son.

Percy's brain hurt from thinking overtime.

Percy's steps faltered a bit, and he ended up standing there. He dropped the adamant on the floor, unsure where he should proceed.

So.

He was having a mid-war crisis about whether the gods were morally good. Sure, okay, fine. That still didn't mean he was on Kronos's side. It just meant he was developing some common sense, not that he was being brainwashed. It just meant he was getting smarter, not that he was rethinking all of his life choices... It just sucked that he was having these thoughts at this particular time; Percy should be out there swinging his sword, not battling philosophy with his inner self.

Percy stood at the armpit of Tartarus without moving for about two minutes. His ADHD was all up-and-kicking before he could so much as think, and Percy being Percy finally started flailing his arms out, yelling, "Hey, Kronos! Hey, hey, I need some help right about now!"

There was no reply. Kronos must've been doing evil Titan duties.

"Kronos!" he shouted into the red abyss.

Like burning down camps, Percy thought to himself fearfully. Like killing pesky demigods that get in his way.

God, sometimes Percy was sure Tartarus's landscape was slowly melting his brain. He felt significantly dumber than he'd been on earth, and the bar was already pretty fucking low. His memory must've also been suffering: he kept forgetting who Kronos was, what he'd done, what he was going to do. He kept being reminded of Luke, his old mentor figure. The guy who taught him how to wield a sword. The guy who made him feel like he actually belonged at Camp Half-Blood...

Stop thinking about it, his mind insisted.

Percy finally stopped, his thoughts faltering, and he yelled again: "KRONOS!" And again. "KRONOS!" And... "KRONOS, YOU GODDAMN COWARD!"

And he was ignored again. And again. And...again, just for good measure.

"KRONOS!" yelled Percy, determined. He waited for the sound of Luke's voice, but all he received was a kind of sizzling silence. Percy seethed. The anger was from nowhere and everywhere all at once; Percy was just so tired of Tartarus, so tired of not knowing the time, not knowing if Annabeth was okay, not knowing if Kronos was ruling the world, not knowing if he was doing the right thing—not knowing, not knowing, not knowing.

If ignorance was bliss, Percy was having the time of his fucking life.

Percy stood, ramrod-straight, and called Kronos's name once more. He recalled names having power, but Kronos's seemed to do nothing. Or maybe it did, and he was just being ignored. He imagined Luke smiling above, amused, and Percy's nose flared like a bull's. He would not be ignored.

"I need to get out of here," he said to the sky. He was tired of feeling and faking confidence, when he was really just desperate.

He sank to the floor, dejected and tired and angry—and weirdest of all, sleepy.

Artemis and Ares never told me how to get out, his mind supplied unhelpfully, and the thought hadn't seemed important until now. His mind suddenly felt very silent, thoughts barred from it, and darkness took over. A headache throbbed at the back of his head, and his skin burned.

The sky above was as red as wilting roses.

Annabeth sat near the lake, even as night began to fall, her blonde hair messy and rustling back and forth in the wind. Her entire lunch had been emptied, but she didn't feel hungry, just disjointed and tearful.

She was scared and alone—and nothing like the leader Chiron advertised her to be. She was nothing like what the little half-blood kids described her as—"a big, ultra-smart soldier with armor and wits of iron!"—and it scared her. With war all around her, she was nothing like a soldier; she was scared and grieving and furious.

Because everyone she loved was gone, one way or another.

And she was alone at camp. Camp, she thought and almost laughed at the name. It wasn't "camp." It was really just another house of cards, ready to be blown over.

She walked back to the Athena cabin, careful not to make any noise. She sat silently on the bed, her legs hanging off the frame, her eyes dead-looking and exhausted.

She remembered his voice then:

We need to take the fight to them, Percy had told her multiple times, sea-green eyes as dark as two black oceans. We can't be pushovers, Annabeth. We can't wait around. I can't let them take camp. Then he'd hugged her, so tight and for so long it felt like a sort of physical promise. She'd felt her cheeks wet over with tears, while Percy stood straight and unbothered, face buried into the nape of her neck.

They could've stayed there forever until Annabeth disagreed.

We need to fight.

We need to wait.

And now it didn't matter. He was dead.

What good waiting had done for the two of them. Tears trickled down again. Annabeth didn't think she'd cried this much in her life, not even on the day Luke had betrayed them. Those had been silent, pained tears; now, it was heavy, crushing guilt, rage, and regret. The tears of a tsunami, not the tears of a cloud.

We need to fight.

We need to wait.

Hell, at the end of the day, it didn't matter whether they fought or waited. At the end of the day, there would be a battle to decide all battles, and the gods would have to pick their weapons off the floors and fight.

There would be a fight, whether it be now or later.

The Fates deemed it essential.

She couldn't just keep waiting in this senseless impasse.

"I'm doing this for you, Percy," Annabeth whispered and swallowed. The window revealed a night as dark as coal. Stars flickered hesitantly when Annabeth slid off the bunkbed. She saw Malcolm's wide, grey eyes blinking at her in the night, curious and confused, but she pressed on.

Hestia's lanterns hung across Camp Half-Blood's grounds, and Annabeth scanned around, jogging back and forth to look for her mother. A few heartbeats later, Annabeth blinked and blearily made out her mother's figure and golden armor. Alert, silver eyes met equally alert, silver eyes, and Annabeth let out a breath of air.

"Mom," she said carefully, "we can't keep doing this."

When Percy fell asleep, he dreamed of hard, obsidian rock and echoing screams.

And a man with dark skin, onyx-black eyes, and a neutral expression.

"Hello, Percy," said the man, if he really was that. Percy blinked, hazes of darkness clearing out, screams becoming more pronounced and noticeable. "I've been waiting for you."

A/N: Life just gets in the way whenever I want to write, so that sucks, but I really wanted to get something out for this, even if it's short. It's been way too long, but I hope you still enjoyed the chapter. Updates will be scarce from now on.