Archive of Our Own ^beta

Percy stepped off the road.  “Come on.”

The ground was squishy, but he didn’t think much about it until Hazel shouted, “Percy, no!”

His next step went straight through the ground.  He sank like a stone until the earth closed over his head – and the earth swallowed him.

Percy knew, somehow, that he had been underground before plenty of times.  He could distantly, as if it were a dream, remember snippets of a dark labyrinth.  And though he couldn’t remember the circumstances, he knew he’d been to the literal Underworld on multiple occasions.  Instinctively, he knew that each time he found himself beneath the crust of the earth, he’d felt confined, trapped, claustrophobic.  

Maybe it was because he was the son of the sea god.  Much like his father, exactly like the sea, Percy couldn’t stand to be restrained.  He hated conformity, hated following rules, hated feeling trapped.  The sensation that the walls were closing in on him was one of the worst in the world, and he felt that to some degree every time he was in a cave, underground, or confined in some way.  He always fought through the panic, of course, because there were always lives on the line, people who were counting on him.  

Being sucked under the muskeg was a million times worse than he could have imagined.

He hadn’t had time to take a deep breath – or a breath at all – before the earth had consumed him.  In one horrifying instant, the world went from light to dark, and all around him was pressure and blackness.  Immediately, mud filled his mouth and nose and clogged his ears.  He’d managed to slam his eyes shut right before his head went under, but he could still feel the earth pressing hard against his eyelids, probing for a way past his defenses.

He choked on mud, unable to draw in even the tiniest breath.  Already, his lungs burned and raw terror carved a hollow in his chest.  In his entire sixteen years, Percy Jackson had been afraid of a lot of things.  He’d never been afraid of drowning.  Even when Ella had recited that line of prophecy – the son of the sea god will drown – he had a hard time believing that water would ever betray him.  It had always been his friend, something safe and comforting and never an enemy.  It hadn’t even crossed his mind that he could drown in something other than water.

Self preservation kicked in, swatting aside the panic after a few petrifying seconds, and Percy floundered, trying to push himself up and out, but it was a struggle to even move his limbs.  He felt like he was pushing against solid stone.  He wondered vaguely if this was Gaea’s doing or if all muskeg was so impossible to move in.

Finally, he managed to get his right arm up and he would have sobbed if breathing were an option – his fingertips had brushed against something solid.  A shoe.  Summoning every bit of stubborn resilience that had gotten him through some of the most impossible, deadly situations in his life, he reached further, and finally, his fingers curled around a slender ankle.  Hazel.

Guilt warred with relief at this revelation.  He knew he shouldn’t be so happy that Hazel was in here with him – what if instead of him dying alone, she died with him, after just regaining her life? – but there was a part of him that pulsed with newfound hope that he wasn’t alone in this, that Hazel was here to rescue him.  And if Hazel were in trouble, there was nothing Frank wouldn’t do to rescue her.  

By this point, though, Percy’s mind had fogged so much that he could barely remember what had gotten him into this awful place.  All he knew was that he couldn’t breathe and everything tasted like dirt and his chest screamed at him for air, his head spinning, stomach roiling, pins and needles arcing across his skin and he was dying.  He was drowning in earth, and he would never see Annabeth again, never remember his old life.  

Part of him was tempted to embrace his coming death; maybe as he died, his life would flash before his eyes.  But he was too stubborn to let go completely.  As much as his hand wanted to go limp and slack on his lifeline, as he wanted unconsciousness to release him from the agony of suffocation, he tightened his grip on Hazel’s foot and forced himself to recall every single tiny detail of Annabeth’s face.

His chest flailed uselessly against the dirt packing his airway, and for the first time since he’d slipped under, the intense, eerie quiet of the earth engulfed him.  Despite the feel of Hazel’s ankle under his hand, he felt more alone than ever before.  No memory.  Buried alive.  Dying alone.  Whatever his story before his memory loss, this was not how he wanted it to end.

A tinny ringing disrupted the quiet then, and he felt his hand loosen slightly on Hazel’s leg despite his efforts to hang on just a little longer.  He could feel himself fading and knew that it was over.  He’d fought so hard, but it hurt so much and he was drowning and he was scared but it was over.

The next thing he knew, he was being heaved onto solid ground.

Percy flailed weakly on the ground, mouth and nose still clogged with muck, still unable to breathe around it.  He heard Frank as if through a long tunnel, a panicked mantra of, “Oh, gods!  Oh, gods!  Oh, gods!” The sound of shuffling, someone coughing, and Percy struggled to do the same, but he still couldn’t breathe .

He felt someone grasp him by his armpits and drag him a few feet, and then there were large, gentle hands on his face and neck, and he was being turned on his side and someone was banging on his back, and clearing the muck away, and he could breathe again.  And then, as Frank gently wiped the bulk of the dirt from Percy’s eyelids, “You were down there for so long!  I didn’t think – oh, gods, don’t ever do something like that again!”  Tentatively, Percy cracked his eyes open and peered into the blinding light of day.  Thankfully, Frank blocked the worst of the sun.  Percy had never been so happy to see a child of the war god in his life.  “Hazel?” Percy rasped anxiously.

“I’m here,” came a weak voice to his right, and Percy flopped his head over to see Hazel lying on her back, looking back at him with exhausted but relieved golden eyes.  “Frank saved me, too.”

Frank blushed, then patted Percy on the shoulder and moved back to Hazel, helping her sit up.  “I couldn’t have pulled you out at all if it weren’t for Hazel.  Thankfully she had time for a deep breath before jumping in after you.”  Frank shook his head as if both impressed and bewildered by Hazel’s reckless bravery.

“Gaea had me in some sort of trance the whole time,” Hazel added, eyes deeply troubled.  She flashed Percy a tiny, scared smile.  “So I didn’t realize at first that I was suffocating until I felt you grab my foot.  In a way, you saved me too.”  She studied Percy carefully.  “Are you okay?” she asked.

Percy wished that he could tell her that he, too, had been in a trance, that he’d not even realized he was dying, but he couldn’t bring himself to lie to her.  “All I could think about was Ella’s prophecy, and I was so sure…”  He trailed off, rubbing his chest.  He felt like Hannibal the elephant had been sitting on it.

Frank winced sympathetically.  “Yeah, your lips were really blue when I pulled you up.  I didn’t realize how bad off you were until I’d finished cleaning Hazel up enough so that she could breathe.  I’m sorry, Percy.”

Percy understood that his friend was feeling guilty for seeing to Hazel before he’d helped Percy, but as far as he was concerned, Frank had nothing to feel bad about.  He’d known Hazel much longer, and there was obviously a spark between them, and Frank didn’t really have a reason to think that Percy would have been much worse off than she’d been.  It was only natural that he’d thought of her first.

“Don’t worry about it, dude,” Percy said, struggling to sit up.  

Frank nearly wilted in relief.  “Hazel, what was that vision you mentioned?”

Hazel’s face was grim as she recounted everything that Gaea had shown and offered her, and Percy suppressed a shudder when she revealed that Gaea had been planning on saving him for her sacrifice, keeping him “safe underground,” whatever that meant.  He certainly hadn’t felt safe as he’d choked on the bog.

Percy reached over and patted Hazel’s filthy, mud-coated arm.  The feeling had started returning to his extremities, and though his chest still ached from lack of oxygen for so long, he felt a bit more like himself.  “You – you saved me, Hazel.”  He grinned weakly at Frank.  “You, too, Frank.  We’ll figure out what happened to Nico, I promise.”

Frank squeezed his shoulder and Hazel nodded, determination coating her just as thickly as the mud.  “And then we’ll get your memory back, Percy.”

Percy took a deep breath – it had never felt so good to be able to do that before – and staggered drunkenly to his feet, feeling like his legs and arms had been turned into noodles by the pasta god.  Was there a pasta god?  Then he shook his head.  Who cared?  He probably sucked as much as the rest of them.

“C’mon, guys.  Any hotels or something where we could clean off?  I mean… hotels that accept mud people?”

Hazel cracked a smile at that, and took a few moments to think.  “I’m not sure…”  But then she brightened.  “Actually,” she amended, “I might know a place we can freshen up.”