The Current State of Things
Here it is, the most unique story I've ever attempted, being that it's centered around Piper instead of a dark AU of Percy.
Piper will be starting off low here in the beginning, but it's an arc. We start from the bottom and work our way up.
Disclaimer: I don't own PJO
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No, Piper miserably thought to herself. Not this again. Please, not this again!
But whoever was listening cared not for Piper's plea as the scene she had become dreadfully familiar with played out once more.
Caligula's spear shot through the air and ripped right through Jason. The emperor trotted over, yanked out his spear, and drove it back into Jason's body. The splintering of bone, the tearing of skin and muscle, the squelching of his lungs, all rang like cannonfire in Piper's ethereal ears.
The wind swirled around Piper and she was whisked away to the beach. Once deposited on the sand, she shut her eyes tight as she could because she knew what was coming next. Sure enough, there was the dull thump of something hitting the sand.
"Look at me," a cold voice commanded.
Piper, placing her hands over her shut eyes, vigorously shook her head. "N-No."
"Look at me!"
"No!"
Frigid, bony hands grabbed Piper's wrists and completely overpowered her, tearing her hands from her face. She clenched her eyes shut even tighter. Stale, rotten breath washed over Piper's face.
"Look. At. Me."
Piper didn't know why she opened her eyes. Maybe because she held onto the vain hope that he'd look different this time, or maybe the whole scenario would turn out differently, or maybe because she'd given up all hope and thought it'd be over faster if she just opened her eyes and moved things along.
Nope. He looked just as grotesque as he ever had these past two weeks.
Piper beheld the visage of Jason's rotting, animated corpse and tried not to throw up in her nightmare.
Jason's left eye has been hollowed out, maggots crawling around inside. Decaying skin and muscle clung to his face and arms, with bits of his skull exposed. His clothes were in tattered, shredded, bloody ruins, which exposed even more rotten meat. And there in his chest where his heart should've been was a gaping, dripping hole.
"You did this to me!" Jason shrieked in Piper's face. "You murdered me! You betrayed me! All I did was love you with everything I had and then some and you threw me away! You never loved me! What I am now is all your fault! It's all your faul-ack! AGH! AUGH! AUGH!"
Jason started to cough and hack, choking on something. He let Piper go and she scrambled backwards, tripping over something in the sand. No, she hadn't tripped; someone's hand had grabbed her ankle, and was still grabbing her ankle. Piper screamed and kicked the hand until it let go and sank into the sand.
A disgusting retching sound came from Jason, and Piper looked to see him cough his heart out of his mouth and into his hands. What a putrid, black, slimy thing it was, beating restlessly. Jason slowly looked up at Piper with his electric blue eye, the skin around it healthy and lively, his blonde eyebrow perfectly cut. He held his heart out. "I gave this to you, and you threw it away. You killed me, Piper."
Piper shook her head. "No. No! It's not true! I love you, Jason!"
The decrepit thing howled and shook with rage. "Liar! Liar, liar, liar, liar! Every word from your mouth can't be trusted!"
Jason advanced on her, holding his heart out as he took stiff, rigid steps. Piper crawled backwards until she slammed into something. The driver door of a BMW.
The ocean rose behind Jason, a towering tidal wave speeding for the beach. Jason broke into a monstrous screech, his mouth elongating as his eye sunk into his head. His body shook so bad his clothes fell off, and his corpse swelled and grew, before finally exploding just as the tidal wave hit, engulfing Piper in a strange embrace of crushing force and, for some reason, warmth.
The tidal wave was certainly different from how all the previous times of this had played out.
As she tumbled through the warm water, Piper saw Jason's skeleton swimming for her, his heart still beating in his skeletal hand. Jason opened his mouth, screaming, crimson bubbles billowing around his head.
Piper screamed too.
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Piper shot upright in her bed, screaming at the top of her lungs in terror. When she saw she was in her room, the face of the digital clock on her nightstand providing faint illumination, she calmed back down.
Piper heaved and caught her breath as her heart thundered against her chest. She was soaked in sweat, her hair matted to her scalp, her nightshirt was glued to her torso, and her shorts and underwear felt especially drenched. With a jolt, Piper switched her lamp on and removed her covers, revealing the large wet spot that was centered around her butt.
With a loud, long groan, Piper palmed her face. "Oh, good gods. Good job, Pipes. You just ruined an eight-year streak of keeping your bed dry."
Piper had celebrated her eighth birthday by draining a two-liter of Dr. Pepper by herself, along with several cans of the soda. She woke up drenched, her little bladder unable to handle all that caffeine.
That certainly explained the warm, watery addition to her recurring nightmare.
Piper messaged her temples. "Note to self: four wine coolers plus Sprite plus nightmares equals pee."
Yes, four wine coolers. Piper had wanted to start trying alcohol, and Dad said that was okay. She was a young woman, and it was only natural she would want to start branching out and getting a literal taste of the more adult things in life, but on his terms. Dad would get her alcohol, but only the kind he felt she was ready to handle, that being simple wine coolers. He'd gotten her a six-pack of fruit flavors when he found the time, and Piper had mixed the strawberry, mango, peach, and pineapple ones in a huge cup and added a whole can of Sprite to the mix.
Piper's sole purpose in wanting to try alcohol was that so she could try drinking her nightmares away like a true alcoholic.
It had backfired (backwatered?) spectacularly.
Yeah, this was the lowest point she had ever been in her life, and there were so many factors that contributed to it all.
With a heavy sigh, Piper looked at her alarm clock. 6:42 AM, a full 30 minutes before it was set to go off for the morning.
You might be wondering why Tristan hadn't come kicking down Piper's door with a shotgun in hand after she woke up screaming bloody murder, and the answer to the question of where he was at was also the answer to question as to how Piper had gotten away with drinking four wine coolers mixed with soda before bed: his sorry ass was already at work.
You'll have to forgive Piper's sour opinion of her father. She was very angry at him, and angry at her current situation.
With another heavy sigh, Piper got to work on cleaning up her mess. Off came her pajamas, and then she stripped her bed. Using an ancient Cherokee recipe that she learned from Google about how to get urine out of a mattress, Piper went about cleaning her mattress, the process ending with applying a layer of baking soda and letting it sit for at least eight hours. More than enough time to get home from school and finish cleaning up before Dad would be home and be left wondering why Piper's bed was covered in baking soda.
With that taken care of, her laundry taken to the hamper, Piper got the shower going and stepped in when the water was hot enough.
Piper stood under the water for a time before she leaned against the wall and slid down to the bottom of the tub. Her mind drifted off, happily reminding her of why she was so absolutely miserable.
Jason died the night of March 31, leading into the worst April Fools day in the recorded history of mankind. Piper's world had been rocked. It had been rocked when she woke up that morning in early December after weeks of emotional turmoil and realized that what had been ailing her so strongly was the fact that her romantic feelings for Jason were gone. Weeks of steady decline, and then she finally understood why. It had been December, Christmas on the horizon, and in order to avoid the ungodly awkwardness of breaking up with your boyfriend after he bought your present, Piper went diving headfirst into ending their romantic relationship.
Tragically enough, Jason had already bought her present.
It was the hardest thing Piper had ever done in her life, dumping him. It tore her up, the cognitive dissonance that festered from the conflicting thoughts that she felt much better now that she'd gotten that out of the way but she had proven herself no better than the likes of Drew.
It did not escape Piper's notice how she'd unwittingly fulfilled the very rite of passage she had abolished. She had gotten Jason to fall in love with her, and then she'd dumped him. Classic, textbook, daughter of Aphrodite behavior, but Piper overcame that internal struggle by recognizing that her sisters fulfilled that rite because it pleased Mom, because they were manipulators who were leading a boy on just to break up with him. Piper had never done that with Jason, as that had never been her intention.
As such, she hadn't fulfilled the rite of passage, because her whole energy and reasoning was way off that mark.
However, while she came to grips that breaking up with Jason had been the right call for her as opposed to forcing herself to stay in a relationship with someone that she just didn't love like that anymore, Jason had not been the same. Those many weeks between December and his death, Jason had been unable to let go of Piper. He tore himself up as much as he tore her up. In the time they spent together looking for Leo, braving the Burning Maze, and doing little side quests, every time Jason tried to bring "it" up, try to talk about it, Piper had always shut him down.
She didn't want to talk about it. She wanted to move on, put their days of being boyfriend and girlfriend behind them, and start new days together as best friends. But she didn't know how to say any of that. She didn't know what to say to Jason to help him to realize that she still loved him dearly, loved him so much it hurt, just not that kind of love anymore.
Instead, Piper had let the overall situation get the better of her, and she let it control her actions. Caligula struck at her father, defaming him, ruining him, stripping him of all his accolades and accomplishments, and almost got him sent to federal prison. Piper had explored every avenue she could conceive: filing suit against Jane and all the others for defamation, going after them and using charmspeak on them to confess their crimes, just straight-up murdering them, getting hold of a magazine, starting a blog-hell, even pulling the race card and trying to paint Jane and her fellow gargoyles as a bunch of anti-Native American racists.
All of Piper's ideas crumbled in the face of either logic, lack of resources, or her ethics and morals.
Her abject failure in saving her dad's career and sanity, after everything he went through during the Giant War, left Piper embittered and angry, and desiring a place to vent it all. Because Jane was so far away, and because Piper didn't even know where Caligula was at, and because she couldn't be mad at her dad (at the time), that only left one viable source to vent her frustrations at, and it didn't help matters that he just couldn't let her go. Jason wound up as Piper's emotional punching bag, and it was her biggest regret.
Hammered all the way through her body because with how rude and mean she'd been to Jason, especially after he found the Oracle and refused to speak to her about it, sending Piper beyond her boiling point, he had still loved her to literal death.
Piper had drowned in regret and remorse. Never had she felt worse in her life (other than right now). So much she had wanted to say to Jason, so much she had still wanted to do with him, so much to talk about, so many apologies for her behavior, and she never got to say them. Jason had died with the last spoken words between them being "You two be careful."
Piper didn't count her indecipherable grunting noises when her mouth had been busted by Incitatus as words.
Piper had taken all of her sorrow and guilt and turned them into righteous fury. She donned her leather armor and resolved to storm the Burning Maze, just to kill Medea. She was lucky to have found the Meliai, the first dryads, and with their help, she made it out alive after scoring her kill. After that came the encompassing emotional void that followed getting what you wanted, and Piper had filled that void with hope.
Hope that going back to Tahlequah would be the beginning of better days, a quieter, simpler life, and she could still go to Camp Half-Blood in the summers. Piper had hope that she and Dad could really start to reconnect and build their relationship like Annabeth was doing with her dad. Piper hoped that Dad's mind had gotten stronger, and that he'd be able to handle the truth about Mom, that she wasn't dead nor had she just walked out on them, but that she was a Greek goddess, making Piper a demigod, and that Piper was a world-saving hero.
Yeah, that all fell through like a lead anvil through rotten wood.
Going off the 2022 calendar, March 31 was a Thursday, and April 1 was a Friday. Santa Monica to Tahlequah was about a 22-hour drive, so Piper's entourage spent the weekend driving to her new/old home. Leo and Piper shared their goodbye brother-sister kiss before he flew back to Indianapolis, and the Hedge family emigrated south to Norman, Oklahoma for Gleeson's new coaching job. As it happened, Tahlequah's athletic department had no openings, nor had any of the surrounding communities, except for one major one three hours away in Norman.
Ladies and gentlemen, Coach Gleeson Hedge, Defensive Coordinator for the Oklahoma Sooners!
On Piper's side of things, the most important thing for her, getting enrolled in her new school, had been taken care of prior to their departure. Weeks before, in fact. When it had been depressingly determined that they were going to have to move, Tristan had done all the necessary things involved in transferring his daughter to Tahlequah High. The only hiccup had been the fact that Piper's discipline record followed her, the record of all her thefts up to the infamous BMW incident, and the school had already laid down the law that they would tolerate any thievery, either on campus or off. If Piper stole anything, she'd be booted to Central Academy, the local alternative school for at-risk students.
Tristan had assured them that Piper had gotten over her kleptomania, and was a model student, which was reflected in her spotless discipline record from the Wilderness School, Delphi Private School, and the school Piper had been attending there in LA.
Piper's education as an every-day high school student had been secured.
Living arrangements had been...interesting.
Tristan had gotten his big break when Piper was six, and they'd moved to California as soon as the several-million signing bonus appeared in Tristan's bank account. They'd left practically everything behind for their new life, and so stepping back into their old home, Grandpa Tom's house, was like stepping back in time. Everything was exactly how it was. Piper's bedroom hadn't changed at all since she was six, meaning her bed was still sporting the Pocahontas spread and was too small for her sixteen-year-old frame. Her dresser still had all her old Disney princess pajamas and play clothes, along with all her little socks and Disney princess underwear. The closet still had the toys she hadn't initially brought with her, and her fancier outfits. Even the halfway empty package of Huggies Pull-Ups from when Piper's little self was still struggling to stay dry at night was still tucked away in the back corner from when she'd forgotten it after having become a dry sleeper.
Gods, wasn't that ironic given what had happened?
Tristan's room had been fine, still full of his old clothes, but Piper's had been in need of upgrading. She needed a whole new bed and some more clothes, because all the clothing she had had been packed in a single suitcase, and the problem with that lied in the fact that the McLeans had exactly zero dollars to their name. But they did have a tribe of Cherokee that mostly had their back.
Piper had been nervous about what the tribe would say about them. As far as the world was concerned, Tristan McLean had been caught red-handed committing tax fraud and tax evasion. He was a crook and criminal, and justice had been done when he was stripped of all his fame and fortune. Piper considered it a miracle that the tribe didn't view her and her dad as disgraces to the Cherokee name, but the alternative was...debatably better.
It was the general opinion of the Cherokee Nation that Tristan and Piper were more victims of the White Man.
Yes, that was an actual thing.
And ironic, since it was true. Caligula and Media had been white (enough), Jane had been white, and all the others involved in the tax scheme had also been white.
The Cherokee government offered (ironically enough) to file a defamation lawsuit on Tristan's behalf, but he had declined. He had accepted that part of his life was now over, and now was the time to move on and start a new life. The government accepted that, and when it came to Piper's situation, the tribe pitched in and upgraded her bedroom. New bedframe, mattress, sheets, comforter, pillows, blankets, dresses, more pajamas and day clothes, but Piper had put her foot down when it came to her underthings.
As well-meaning as they were, Piper would not be accepting any socks, bras, or panties that she had not personally seen to herself beforehand.
Thanks to the solidarity of most of the tribe, Piper got a new bed, a fully stocked wardrobe, and the McLean pantry and refrigerator was teeming with food. Piper had high school to look forward to, Coach Hedge was making big money with the Sooners, Apollo was (most likely) taking care of Jason's body, and everything seemed like it was going to be okay.
Then Dad fucked it all up.
The McLeans weren't about to live the rest of their life off the generosity of the tribe, and so Tristan had taken it upon himself to get a job like a responsible father and adult. Thanks to the tribe's help, Tristan landed a job as the mailman. He started at 7 AM and delivered the mail until he had no more mail to deliver. His route usually took four hours, so he was done by 11 AM. But just one job wasn't enough to pay bills, put food on the table, and provide his daughter's wants, and so Tristan got a second job with Walmart, as the cart wrangler. He spent his time there, 12 PM to 5 PM, bringing in all the grocery carts left in the parking lot, then cleaning them off for other customers. 7 AM to 5 PM wasn't too terrible, especially with the hour-ish break between delivering the mail and bringing in grocery carts, but two jobs still weren't enough for Tristan. He got a third job, this one as an evening guard working from 6 PM to 12 AM.
He was usually in bed by one in the morning, and then up at six to be out the door by six-thirty so he could be delivering the mail by seven.
Working from seven in the morning to midnight. A 17-hour workday with two hour-long breaks therein, so technically 15 hours.
He made some good money though. Between the three jobs, the pay, and the hours, he was bringing in about $1700 a week after taxes.
But Piper never saw him.
That was the lynchpin to everything.
The one good thing that Piper had seen in the California Fiasco, the one bright spot, the little light in the tunnel, was that she was going to have a lot more time with her dad. They were really going to be able to bond, having dinner together every evening, spending the weekends doing things, maybe even having breakfast together, but no. Nope, Tristan was gone for work in the morning before Piper got up, and then he wasn't home until long after Piper had gone to bed, because she was not the kind of girl to stay up till midnight just piddling around. When it came to the weekends, Dad slept the majority of Saturday, catching up on all the lost sleep he missed from his three jobs, and Sunday wasn't much better.
The one good thing in this whole mess had been taken away from Piper by Dad himself.
Piper tried not to be mad at her father, but she failed. Dad had thrown himself into work because he felt responsible and guilty for what happened in California. It was his fault for ever having hired on Jane, his fault for not paying attention to the finances, his fault for having lost absolutely everything, his fault that the comfortable life his daughter lived as the daughter of a multi-millionaire had been violently ripped away from her, his fault that his daughter now bore the shame of having such a disgrace of a father, and so he was owning up to it all. From Piper's point of view, her dad was completely misguided and delusional.
His heart was in the right place, and he was really working hard to bring in money, but he couldn't see that his daughter was falling apart because he wasn't ever around to see it.
Of course Piper had offered to find a job herself and bring in money, but Dad had put his foot down.
"No, baby. You just focus on school. Make some friends. Hang out. I'll worry about the working, okay? You just enjoy life."
Except that Piper couldn't focus on school, she couldn't make friends, and she couldn't enjoy life right now.
The school scene was almost nothing new to her. Jealous girls that couldn't stand how beautiful Piper was without an ounce of makeup, and how she never had acne, and ogling boys that loved staring at her butt. That's why Piper preferred skirts, because the loose, flowing garments were better at hiding the shape of her bottom. Despite that, Piper had already been informed that while she didn't have much in the chest department, she had the best ass of the sophomores, and the fifth best ass in the whole school.
Gods, why was that a thing? And why did girls find competition in who had the most muscle on her pelvis?
Piper would never understand her fellow females.
Beyond the perverted teenagers that looked at her body, the majority of students had not an ounce of sympathy for her financial plight, just like the sneering kids back in LA.
Oh, boo-hoo. You lost your mansions and supercars.
Piper hated social media. She had hoped that California wouldn't have followed her to Tahlequah, but it did. Not just her dad's fall, however, but her own checkered past. Thanks to Twitter and Instagram, Piper's old bullies from the Wilderness School saw their chance to get tons of likes and jumped on the bandwagon, sharing their stories of how Piper was kleptomaniac and that was how she got sent to the alternative school.
The current running joke in Tahlequah High was for kids to check their pockets and grab their things whenever Piper was near.
It was a strange duality that Piper faced in school: jealous girls, horny boys, and bullying.
Minor bullying…mostly…but she was still bullied.
Piper got no help from the other Cherokee kids in Tahlequah High, either because they didn't care for her one way or another, they were borderline extremists who didn't see her an actual Cherokee, or they didn't want to be associated with her. It was their parents and grandparents that had chipped in with helping the McLeans get settled, not them.
Because of her social status, she had no friends. Well, she had one friend, but only because they sat next to each other in two classes. After being at camp, after Leo at the Wilderness School, Piper's definition of a friend was someone you regularly interacted with outside of class, someone who's company you enjoyed, and you did things together with—PG things. The friend Piper had made satisfied only the middle criterium.
Communications were still being jammed by whatever thing the emperors were up to, but that didn't mean Piper couldn't hang out with anyone. Despite that, she had yet to make any such plans with anybody.
Therefore, Piper had no friends, just a single guy she considered to be a good acquaintance.
Then there were the nightmares, the final, horrible nails in Piper's life of misery.
The current morning was April 28, a Thursday. Piper had spent the first week of the month just getting settled in, familiarizing herself with the area. The second week, Monday the 11th, is when she started school. So, it had almost been three weeks since the new chapter of her life started, and it had been April 14, a full two weeks ago, that the nightmares started.
It was just the first night, then Piper slept easily the next two, and then Sunday came the nightmare again. Then Monday was a good night, but not Tuesday and not Wednesday. Thursday was good, but Friday, Saturday, and every night since came the horrible replay of Jason's death, followed by his decaying visage screaming at her that it was all her fault. What progress Piper had made since Jason's death had been undone. Where she had comforted herself with the thoughts that Jason was at peace in Elysium, where she had resolved to put away her remorse, regret, and guilt for the rest of her life until she finally saw him again, everything had been violently upended.
Piper didn't know what that was. She'd had plenty of nightmares before, and this felt monstrously different. Was it just her mind playing tricks on her? Was she being attacked by some god? Was she being plagued by some evil spirit? Or, and this is what Piper feared the most, had Jason become a mania, and was now haunting her?
Jason's mother had become a mania, driven mad by grief and perceived neglect. Had the same happened to Jason? Had his own roiling emotions twisted and warped his spirit to the point he was now an insane ghost that was directing all his hatred at her? It made sense, actually. When Piper was forced to helplessly watch her dad's life crumble, she had turned Jason into her outlet, the focal point of her own emotions.
The problem with this theory, however, was that mania were also physical beings. This wraith of Jason only appeared in her nightmares.
Piper really wished she could get a hold of Nico and ask him, but alas, no form of communication she had tried was working.
So, yeah. That was Piper's life right now.
She was back to square one with her dad, where he was a workaholic that neglected her out of a misguided sense of responsibility. She had no friends at school, still had to deal with her ADHD and dyslexia, was an object of desire and a source of jealousy, she was watched by the teachers to make sure she was keeping her hands to herself, and she faced minor bullying with only one person she could consider to be an acquaintance. Hedge and Mellie were three hours away in Norman. She was being emotionally, mentally, and psychologically tortured by nightmares of her dead ex-boyfriend.
And she'd just wet her bed after drinking too much alcohol because she decided that taking to the bottle was one way to tackle her problems in the face of not having any other solid sources of support.
Piper was crumbling.
It wasn't just the nightmares; it was the uncertainty of the nightmares, the unwelcoming environment of school, the discrimination she faced as a thief and as a former rich person, how she had no friends, the resurfaced guilt over how she treated Jason, and then all of that rolled up together, and enveloped by the biggest problem of all:
Dad wasn't around anymore, just like in LA.
If Piper just had her dad, if she just had the person she loved most and wanted to spend time with, then everything would be better. She needed his support right now, she needed to talk to him, to lean on him, but he wasn't here, and Piper was so embittered with everything going on that she wasn't sure she'd be able to talk to him come Saturday when they had their allotted few hours of the day after he slept to almost two in the afternoon and went back to bed at nine, and almost the same for Sunday.
Piper sighed to herself in the shower. Life sucked, but she still had to go to school. She debated just skipping the day, but figured that would just lead to even more problems. With that in mind, Piper got up and reached for the nob to turn the water off. She still had to eat breakfast, pack her lunch, brush her teeth, floss, poop, get dressed, and get to the bus stop.
Piper shut off the shower, and then groaned.
In all the time she'd been sitting under the water, not once had she actually washed herself. She turned the shower back on, grabbed the soap, and gave herself a proper cleaning.
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Tahlequah High had just the standard dress code for a public school. Skirts and shorts had to be a certain length, and bottoms in general couldn't have holes and rips in them. Shirts couldn't have offensive images or slogans, reveal too much of the midsection or the shoulders, or be too transparent to where bras and pectorals could be seen. No uniform with blazers and dresses, no collared shirts, or khaki/navy bottoms, etc.
Just dress modestly, really.
Piper's favorite way to dress.
Today's outfit consisted of a pink t-shirt, a loose denim skirt with a little pair of shorts underneath as part of the dress code stipulated that skirts and dresses had to have some kind of bottoms underneath so a girl's panties wouldn't be flashing, no-show socks, and sneakers.
Her short, choppy, Thalia Grace-ish punk hair didn't require much maintenance. However, Piper's harpy feathers, her spoils from the Giant War that she had worn in her hair for months on end? Those stayed in her dresser. Not because she feared something happening to them, or being called out for having feathers in her hair, but because…well…Piper just couldn't bring herself to put the feathers back in.
Not after everything that had happened.
Not after she was still navigating who she was.
Piper locked the door behind her and marched to the bus stop. The April morning was crisp, but it would be hot later in the day. A few clouds hung in the sky as the sun came up. Piper had to wonder again just how that worked. Apollo was mortal now, so who was conducting the sun? Other sun gods from other pantheons? Did they, like, take turns driving the sun? Took over the sun in "shifts"? Were there even other pantheons besides the Greeks/Romans?
Thinking about other pantheons got Piper thinking about her own personal pantheon.
Dad believed the legends were just good bedtime stories with some good messages behind them. Grandpa Tom had treated the legends as undeniable truth. Almost four weeks in Tahlequah, and Piper had yet to encounter anything that resembled anything from the Cherokee legends.
Naturally, that observation tempted the universe.
Piper was walking with her head down, looking at her shoes, when she heard it: Hoo…
She stopped in her tracks and looked around. She found the source of the quiet utterance, and she found her pulse quickening. It wasn't just the fact that sitting on the branch of a distant tree was an owl, an ill omen in Cherokee folklore that was usually an evil spirit or a spying medicine man, but the fact that this owl was solid black with glowing, scarlet eyes.
And it was looking at her.
Hoo
Piper ran.
Evil spirit or something else, she had no intention or desire to tangle with monsters this early in the morning, or ever. She might just let it eat her.
Piper made it to the bus stop to find the usual congregation, the unspoken rule between them all being to not talk to each other. The rule was maintained, even in the face of Piper running up to them. They probably just thought she thought she was running late. It didn't matter.
The bus pulled up and Piper took her seat, which happened to be the first one on the right side, just inside the door. No one sat next to Piper, so she was able to set her backpack next to her. The ride to school was silent, as the morning route always was. The afternoon journey, however, was much rowdier.
Piper's daze settled back over her as the drone of the bus's engine rang in her ears, and her thoughts drifted to darker places.
The bus pulled into the drop off area and the students filed out, Piper in the lead. Due to the design of the halls, they ended up in the cafeteria where the din of morning conversation created an indecipherable cacophony of noise. Piper stood by herself as she stared at them all.
This is what she saved? A veritable circus? And not just here, but the whole world? It had been Piper up there with Jason and Leo as they fought Gaea. It had been Piper who put everything she had and then some into putting the earth goddess to sleep just long enough for her to be blown to smithereens. It had been Piper who saved the lives of everyone in Tahlequah, and everyone on the planet.
And none of them would ever know it. They analyzed her body and put her at the top of a sexualized list, they made fun of her by grabbing their things with sinister grins when she got close, and they had not an ounce of sympathy for her and the hell she and her dad had been through.
More so her than her dad because she was the one who fought in the Giant War and got to watch her ex-boyfriend get murdered.
These pissants in here had no idea what real pain felt like. They had no idea what real struggle was, what real strife was. None of them went to sleep at night wondering if they were going to wake up. None of them went through the day wondering if they were living their final hours. None of them had to fight gods, or monsters, or evil, undead emperors. They all worried about homework and tests, not the eldritch forces of the universe.
What was Piper even doing here? Why was she in some stupid public high school? After all she'd done and suffered through, why wasn't she somewhere quiet and peaceful and comfortable, loaded with money, happy and healthy, with all her needs met and her wants provided? Why was she still suffering after having suffered so much?
Maybe we should've just let Gaea win, Piper thought with the utmost bitterness.
Piper shook her head. These weren't her thoughts. She was just angry, tired, and worn out.
The brief peace she'd made with Jason and his memory was ripped apart by her string of nightmares. She had zero social life to speak of. She still had to contend with her ADHD and dyslexia (though no monsters yet, thankfully). Her dad was gone all the time again, never there for her, and so she couldn't talk to him like she desperately wanted to. Her way to cope with all of this was to drink herself silly, only to end up wetting her bed…because of the nightmare.
It was an infinite loop of misery, and Piper saw no way out of it.
With a despondent sigh, Piper left the cafeteria, trying to leave her bad thoughts behind her, and headed to her first period class: geometry.
Oh, yeah, another thing to add to the list.
She had math first thing in the morning.
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And that's the first chapter.
I truthfully do not know how many there will be, but I do know I have the general outline of how this will all go.
The fun part is that there's very little to go off of in terms of what Piper is like at the end of Tower in her three-page epilogue, so that's lots of room for exploration.