Disclaimer: Not mine. I wish it was, but it isn't.

Chapter Eight Little Words

They say that dreams tell you about your fears. If you have nightmares about losing one of your permanent teeth it usually means that you have a fear of being wrong or of things not being perfect. If you have a dream about drowning in an ocean it means you fear being small and insignificant. But doctors can never fully know the workings of the mind, they can never fully determine a dream and its meaning.

But they do know one thing:

Dreams have power.

When the body goes to sleep, the mind is still at work and you're transported to another world. A world of dreams. But not all dreams are good. Some dreams can hinder more than help. Some dreams make you relive a past you just want to forget about.

And some dreams make you wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night.

Just as Percy Jackson was experiencing right now.

"Tyson!"A fifteen year old Percy yelled as he watched his thirteen year old brother run into the road after a ball after Percy had dared him to go and get it. He had called Tyson and chicken and a coward and taunted him until he said he'd go and get the football that he had overthrown in their game of catch.

"Watch out!" Percy screamed, he heard his voice crack as time seemed to slow just as they say it does when something awful is about to happen. He could feel it in his stomach, his heart began to pound faster and faster as he watched the car coming out of nowhere, swerving left and right as if the driver couldn't control themselves. As if the driver was drunk.

Straight at his half-brother.

Tyson didn't stand a chance.

He had always been slower than Percy, bigger and seemed to lumber around whereas Percy was agile and quick. The car struck the thirteen year old boy down.

In all happened in a blur. The car. The scream. The boy crumpling to the ground. Percy couldn't remember any feeling more terrible, any feeling more thick with emotion as he watched in horror as his little brother didn't move. As the car didn't stop. As the car sped on by.

Percy was praying. He was praying it was all a dream and that Tyson would get back up and laugh. That he would be fine. But it wasn't a dream. He knew it wasn't it. It couldn't be after all. Things don't happen like this in a dream.

Only in nightmares.

"Tyson, Tyson!" He yelled as he rushed to his brother's side, shaking the limp form of the boy who he had been mad at for so long.

Yes Percy Jackson, the kid who everyone thought was easy going and who liked everyone and everyone liked, had hated his only brother. Well half-brother. He hated how his dad, his dad who he had only met once when he was eleven had sent Tyson to live with him and his mom even though he must have known it would strain his mother and make her work harder. He hated Tyson and his innocent ways of thinking and how he thought everything was right in the world.

Everything wasn't right in the world.

He shouldn't be so damn happy while Percy wasn't. How could he smile when all Percy wanted to do was throw something at someone? Sometimes he wanted to strangle the kid.

But not now.

No. Looking at Tyson as he lay in the middle of the road in lower New York with blood pooling out of his head from an unknown source and his face turning a sickly white, Percy wanted nothing more than to take back every single terrible thought, every single time he wanted Tyson to disappear.

But he couldn't.

And here he was, facing the hard, cold truth right in the eye.

Tyson was dying. And quickly.

An ambulance appeared and suddenly there were people all around him, pulling him back and taking Tyson away from him. "Tyson!" Percy yelled. "No!" He fought against the hands that seemed to be grabbing at him. He couldn't let his brother be taken, it was all his fault.

All his fault.

"It's okay son, your brother will be alright," a man said as he patted Percy's back. "There's just a lot of blood, it looks bad but we'll fix him."

Percy jerked away from the man and stared at the ambulance, someone must have called for it. He should have done that right when he saw Tyson fall. But no, once again he was too stupid to care about his brother. "It's all my fault," he whispered.

But this was where the dream turned even worse. "Of course it's your fault. It's all your fault, everything is your fault," the man sneered at him and then his face turned to that of his mother.

"Every time I look at you I'm ashamed, ashamed to call you my son, ashamed to have given birth to you," Sally Jackson said shaking her head in disgust at her son. And it kept going and going.

Different people telling him he was worthless, that he had failed miserably. That it was all his fault.

Everything was his fault.

Everything.

Percy jerked up in bed, his breathing heavy as he clutched at the silk sheets that pooled around his body. His forehead was covered in sweat as the same nightmare which had plagued him every since that day when Tyson was hit by the car, haunted him.

It never seemed to let him go. It clutched at his soul. It was his fault.

He felt tears growing in his eyes. Percy hated crying. He felt weak, he felt useless. But he couldn't help it. The feeling was suffocating him, it was dragging him down. Pulling him deeper and deeper into the murk of the dream.

Percy swung his feet out of his bed and just sat there, staring out into the twinkling skies at the New York sky line from the large windows in his room. There were so many people out there that were all living their own lives, not even knowing what was going on in his. Many of them probably listened to his music, a few probably had posters of him on their wall. But they didn't know.

After all, how could they?

There were so many people in the world, how could they know about anything. They would pass a person on the street and not realize that that person was dying inside. They would laugh at a fat person and not know that they were suffering from an eating disorder that could kill them and no matter how hard they tried they couldn't get thinner.

They just didn't know.

That day, the day Tyson was hit, Percy learned that the world was cruel. That fate was cruel.

When his father had heard about Tyson being in the hospital, he had made sure to send one of the best doctors he knew, Dr. James Hermes to tend to Tyson. Percy had been mad, finally his dad showed some sort of inkling of caring. But only when his son was injured.

His dad after all was Marius Poseidon, though everyone knew him as Poseidon. He was a legend. He dabbled with everything dealing with the water, from swimming pools to cruise ships to submarines, everyone knew about Poseidon Industries, just as everyone knew about his brother Zeus. His father had millions upon millions of dollars yet he never gave any to Percy or his mother. In fact he made it harder on them by sending them Tyson, a son he had out of an affair with a super-model.

And of course Sally couldn't turn Tyson away.

That night, while Percy and Sally sat in the waiting room of the hospital (Gabe had been having a poker party and didn't see the point in going to the hospital, so Sally left him with a seven layer bean dip and called it good), Percy couldn't help but be angry.

Angry at everyone.

Why the hell couldn't life be fair? Wasn't he a good person? Why did he have to suffer?

Tyson lost an eye.

He was blinded in one eye and it had swollen shut so tightly that Hermes said it would never open again. And if it did, it would be a milky white color, the color which meant he would never see out of that eye again.

And he had become dumb. Not dumb in the sense where he was stupid, he was still smart. But he had a hard time forming complex words, preferring to stick to shorter, easier to pronounce words, his favorite word to say being "peanut-butter." His brain wasn't working as fast as it should have been. A blow to the head could do that to you. He would be in the hospital for a while.

While Percy thanked whatever immortal being had saved Tyson's life, he began to grow mad again.

That night when he got home he began the cutting.

The cutting seemed to relieve the tension and the pain.

It made him focus on a different pain. This pain was more physical, not emotional like he'd been feeling. He could handle this pain.

That was when he met Nico.

Nico was there for him, Nico understood him. Nico had been the boy that everyone thought was weird, with his leather jackets and his skull rings, pasty white skin and dark black hair that fell over his eyes. But Percy didn't find Nico weird.

Nico was going through the same thing.

His sister Bianca had died in a car crash recently.

No one had known. She was in college, she didn't attend their high school.

It was another example of how the world really didn't care about what was happening around them. They lived in their small houses, doing the same routine, caring only about what they went through, not what someone else went through. Why waste your time?

But Percy and Nico bonded over both accidents.

If you could call bonding participating in drugs together. Drugs were what Nico did to rid himself of the pain, just like Percy cut himself. But Nico had standards. Nico didn't get caught up in gangs like Percy did. Nico didn't get into fights like Percy did.

Nico held Percy back at times. Something Percy now realized was a blessing in disguise.

Nico was a blessing in disguise.

So when Percy started finding the letters three years later, the letters that let him know that he wasn't the only one that was fed up with this crazy world, that he wasn't the only one who was tired. When he found the letters and made the promise that he wouldn't let up, he proposed the back-packing trip through Europe to Nico.

He wanted to live.

And so did Nico.

Both were tired with living in the dark. But the dark seemed to have become their friend. This was a way out, a new experience, a new life.

So they left. They left New York City, they left the drugs and the cutting and the gangs. It was hard, there were nights when Percy woke up to find himself clutching a knife. It scared him to think that he had that little control over himself. But Nico stopped him, just as Percy stopped Nico when he was wanting to take drugs, when he was losing his fight.

They held each other up. They were there for each other.

And she was there for Percy as well.

Sometimes Percy wondered what would happen if he had never read those letters all those years ago, sometimes he wondered if he'd still be stuck on cutting… or worse, if he wouldn't even be alive anymore. Those letters forced him to cling onto hope, to not stop praying and wishing that he could actually live.

She had a way of making him smile.

W4W: Sometimes I just can't help myself. Sometimes I just want to live. I just want to dance. I want to sing at the top of my lungs. So do it. Don't hold back, don't hold it in. Let go and live! Dance in the rain, sing in the shower, play as if you're the best person at the sport. Smile often, laugh much. Those are what makes a life a happy one. Laughter and smiling. Love and Hope.

She had a way of connecting with him even though he had never met her before in his life. She had a way of lifting him up.

And he never knew her.

Now he wished that he did. He wished that he had the courage she did to leave a letter. He wish he could have left a letter for her. But he had told himself it was a dumb idea, that she would probably laugh at him. He might be able to write song lyrics, but he couldn't write a letter to save his life.

He had tried, oh he had tried to. But every time the letter wounded up crumpled in a ball and in his waste basket.

Percy buried his head in his hands. What was she doing right now? Where was she? Did she get her dream of backpacking across Europe? Did she find it just as amazing as he did when he went? Or was she still not living like she wanted to?

Percy sat there, his head buried in his hands. He thought about just how much he was getting tired of it all. Was it all worth it?

Sometimes he didn't think so.

Sighing, Percy pulled himself off his bed and wandered out of his bedroom towards the kitchen. As he walked he looked around at his apartment, his penthouse that he shared with Nico. It was definitely expensive but it wasn't like it cost anything to him, he could afford a dozen of these houses. Percy snorted, who'd have thought that he would be able to say that about himself.

He bet that the kids whom he had gone to highschool with were kicking themselves for making fun of him. They were probably thinking that if they had been nicer to him they would be getting the "special" treatment from him, which included VIP tickets to his concerts.

Percy snorted, thinking about the variety of emails and texts and even hand written notes, telling him how much Ray Smith from his ninth grade Biology class missed him and how they needed to "catch" up, or from Sue Holland saying that they were "tight" in eleventh grade. His favorite had been from Nancy Bobofit, a kleptomaniac red head with a face that looked like liquid cheetohs had been sprayed onto, had told him that she had a big crush on him back in tenth grade and that was why she always harassed him.

Nice try.

Percy wandered into the kitchen, almost in a daze as he looked at the expensive furnishings. He was living the dream and yet at times it felt like a nightmare.

His guitar laid on the table from where he had left it last night, trying to pick out a new rift for the chorus of one of the songs he was working on entitled: Little Words.

W4W: I feel like we don't understand the importance of the little words in life, I mean, "have a good day" is just as important as "you got the promotion" or you look like a model. If I could hear the phrase "have a good day" at least once a day, I think I'd smile a bit more. Maybe I'd be happier. Just simple words, once a day, can have more of a meaning than quote unquote "big" words do every once and a while. Why can't we use words how they're meant to be used? Like the words "I love you". I want the man I marry to say those words to me and mean it, not to have said that to another dozen girls. Remember the little words, cherish them. Speak them.

It was little words like saying he was sorry to Tyson. Like saying that he never wanted Tyson to be hurt. Like saying he loved Tyson.

Percy hummed along with the lyrics he had written, a smile playing on his lips. The one thing he could never forget that the mysterious letter writer had given him was his music. Without her he may never have found the beauty of the lyrics, the beauty of the haunting melody that played over and over in his head. Found the way that music speaks to you when words can't. Music overcame anything.

Music was soul.

"Percy?" Percy's eyes shot open to see Nico leaning against the fridge, his black hair tussled from sleep and his eyes tired. "What are you doing up? It's 2 in the morning." He let out a yawn and then rubbed his temples.

"I couldn't sleep," Percy said.

Nico gave Percy a sympathetic look, "Was it the nightmare again?" He asked. Percy looked away.

"It keeps coming, I thought it'd go away, why doesn't it go away?" Percy whispered harshly. "Why won't it leave me alone?"

Nico came over and sat down next to Percy. "Perce, I don't know why. You know that I don't have the answers to why bad things happen, and I'm not going to pretend to. I'll just tell you this. It's the past, look forward Percy, don't look back."

Percy cracked a grin, "Have you been reading over my back?" He asked. Nico's pale face turned slightly pink.

"I have no idea what you're talking about," Nico muttered.

"You've been reading The Letter Writer too! (AN: For those of you who need to a clarification, the Letter Writer is the story Annabeth is writing)" Percy said.

"I might be…" Nico admitted. "It's not like I had anything better to do," he grumbled.

"You like it though, you have to admit it, there's nothing else like it out there," Percy said, poking Nico in the side.

"Yeah, whatever," Nico said. That was going to be the closest thing to a confession that Percy would get. He grinned again. "You know what else it good? Sleep," Nico said, standing up. "Get some sleep Percy." He turned around and headed out of the kitchen.

"Hey Nico?" Percy called. Nico paused and turned around to look at Percy.

"Yeah?"

"Can we go and see Tyson on Saturday?" Percy asked.

"Yeah Percy, I don't think we have anything that day," Nico said, trying to stifle a yawn.

"Great. And Nico. Thanks for being here for me," Percy said.

Nico gave a ghost of a smile. "What are best friends for?"