Percy felt odd.

It was as if he was moving through very humid air, not as direly unforgiving as to feel like he was slogging through pudding, but still loaded with the choking thickness of a sauna, minus the heat.

In short, it was very difficult to breathe or move, and everything was very confusing.

He opened his eyes. That in itself was way too hard, like going against a determined crowd on a busy day at Coney Island. He blinked, filled with an uncertain feeling as he breathed in the too-heavy air.

He blinked again.

"Percy?"

He turned (another action that was far more difficult than normal). It took a moment of focus to remember what he was turning around for.

"Percy."

Ah, that was right. Someone had called his name: someone in the form of…

"I'm right here. Stay with me, Water Boy. Let's not let Zeus beat you with just one parlor trick."

He blinked again, eyes slowly focusing on the guy in front of him. His figure wavered slightly in the haze, and he appeared to glow slightly. The guy rolled his eyes, clearly unimpressed with Percy's efforts to lock his eyes on him. "Atta boy," he remarked, his tone dripping with condescension that flew far over Percy's befuddled head.

Percy struggled for a moment, trying to remember how to move his tongue. It shifted slightly in his mouth, and he fought to move his lips apart to allow sound out of his mouth. "You're…"

The guy waited for about four seconds before losing his patience. "Eros," he supplied when it became clear that Percy had gotten distracted by the sound of a word escaping his mouth. "Me Eros. You idiot demigod who pissed off Zeus."

Percy processed this for a moment, moving past the mock-caveman speak with very little reaction, much to the god's minor dismay. "Eros," he repeated. "Right. Corinthos. The monsters. The pineapple pizza."

"Right!" Eros agreed, seeming a little relieved. "At least you're somewhat coherent. Full sentences seem a bit beyond you, but I feel like that's not too unusual from your usual command of the English language anyway."

Percy just blinked again.

"Right, that's what I thought…" Eros sighed, running a hand through his perfectly tousled hair. It shone a glowing gold in the odd lighting. Percy glanced around, dimly aware of the fact that everything around them was pale blue, and that nothing seemed to have an ending or a beginning. There were no walls, no ceilings, no floors. The concept of distance seemed to be on vacation, and everything besides Percy and Eros was just... unobtrusively nonexistent. It wasn't there, but it didn't draw attention to not being there. Everything simply just wasn't.

It was kind of soothing, in a way. Just endless blue, a warm haze on everything that wasn't anything at all...

"Let's not get distracted there, Water Boy," Eros cut in, drawing Percy's waning attention away from the glowing blue nothing and back to the one something in the area. "You need to wake up fairly soon."

"Wake… up?" Percy asked, his brow furrowing.

"Yes," the god confirmed, trying his best not to throttle the demigod. Maybe if he successfully got Percy back on the road to success for his quest, he'd regain the permission for use of his arrows sooner. Those two damn kids in New Jersey just weren't going anywhere without a little nudge, and the mortals were simply not going to be able to wait a whole century for Aphrodite to grant his arrows back to him. "You're asleep, ol' champ," Eros informed Percy, trying very hard to be patient and speak slowly. "You passed out after your last fight, and Zeus decided that a very easy way to make you fail your quest would be simply to keep you asleep until after the deadline had passed."

"I'm… asleep," Percy mumbled, as if trying to confirm Eros' explanation. With great effort, he lifted one hand and pinched his left arm as hard as he could manage in his current state. His brow furrowed again. "Why couldn't I… feel that?" he asked slowly.

Eros didn't even try not to roll his eyes that time. "Because that's the oldest trick in the book, dumbass," he explained sweetly. "Pinch yourself to wake up, oh man... It's all too simple to just disable physical sensation when you're controlling a mortal's dream."

Percy frowned. "Well, how… how do I wake.. up?" he asked. Normally, he would've been angry about the way Eros was talking to him, but he didn't really have the mental faculties to get into a battle of wits at the moment. He didn't really have the mental faculties to summon any sort of emotion either, really. Getting angry wasn't an option.

Eros shrugged. "Honestly, I'm not really sure," he answered. "My mom made me come check on you, shake you out of the stupor she was sure you'd be in. But it's already hard enough to sneak into your dream without Zeus noticing I'm here, I have no idea how I'm supposed to wake you up without him realizing a god intervened."

"Perfect," Percy mumbled, letting his eyes close again as he felt a brief pang of frustration cut through the dreamy contentment filling his system. "So how long do we have… to figure out how to…"

"Water Boy?" Eros prompted, stepping closer as Percy seemed to stagger sideways. "For the love of- don't close your eyes, you idiot!" The god resisted the urge to simply slap the mortal, knowing full well that it wouldn't help in waking him up: physical sensations disabled and all. Oh, but how satisfying it would be…

Percy, however, was long gone. The stagger sideways turned into a simple collapse into a heap, where the powerful demigod started snoring in a haphazard pile. Eros pinched the bridge of his nose, inhaling and exhaling deeply. He never should have gone near this annoying kid in the first place, and now here he was, on naptime duty.

Well, there really was only one thing left to do.

"Technically you have three days, but counting that one is for fighting and you'll need at least one more to somehow find a way back to Camp Halfblood, you basically only have one day to wake up," Eros informed the unconscious hero. "So that… sucks…"

Percy snored gently. Eros cursed under his breath.

"I guess I better start figuring out how to wake you up… or maybe how to make you learn how to sleep-fight…" he muttered. "I swear, I am not getting mixed up with demigods for at least a couple hundred more years… so much drama…"

Still muttering to himself, the god disappeared from Percy's dream, taking care not to alert Zeus to his exit. The last thing he needed was His Royal Moodiness getting on his case too, and all because his mother was forcing him to act as Percy's guardian in her place…

Eros suddenly felt overwhelmed with irritation at his current predicament. Really, the last week had been a horrible use of his time. Annabeth wasn't even properly mooning over Travis anymore, apparently too stuck in the agony of the Tratie scene she had personally witnessed. And now Percy was just passed out, his physical form slumped on a mat with several pizza-eating monsters peering at him in admittedly rather endearing concern, considering he had already killed all but one of them in the past week. There was no fun to be had anywhere here, and nowhere else to go until he had cleaned up the whole mess.

But he wasn't about to not get any enjoyment out of this. He already knew that it would be really difficult to get Percy to wake up, so there was no way he would waste energy trying to make it a gentle experience. But he definitely wouldn't mind putting in the extra effort to garner some personal entertainment...

Now, what was the most awful way for someone to be woken up…?

I'm afraid if I talk, then people are gonna be like "OMG YOU SCUM OF THE EARTH, YOU DARE TO SHOW YOUR FACE HERE AGAIN AFTER THIS LONG?!"

So I'm just going to throw this out there and retreat: I really want to get some closure on some of my old fics, such as this one, which has been in progress since before I was even on fanfiction… I did a lot of editing on the previous chapters as well as uploading this short new part, in case anyone was interested ehe.

and yes, that does mean I intend to do some work on School Days, if anyone here cares. If you don't, that's probably better for you =P

I just feel somewhat in the writing mood again after surviving my junior year of high school, so I wanted to take advantage of that after months of writer's block for fiction (:

review please? (:

~TMI~