You know, I told myself I'd have a strict schedule when writing this but um... yeah that plan fell through the cracks. Why does time both feel like it's moving so slowly and yet I blink my eyes and a week is gone? This chapter was hard to write for multiple reasons. While previous chapters were divided into a flowing narrative time-wise between Annabeth and Luke's parts, this one is separated with each of them experiencing the same moments in time in separate narrations. Hope that's not confusing. I also didn't have as much time to edit as I would like so I apologize on that front as well.

The epigraph for this chapter, I would say, summarizes the entire plot of this story. All the epigraphs for Part One are taken from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Anyway, please read, review, and favorite/follow (well only if you like it). I hope everyone is well and safe.

Trigger Warnings: There is a description of self-harm in this chapter of perhaps the "uncommon type." It is nonsuicidal self-harm and involves a character inflicting self-battery upon herself during a panic attack. I will star next to the start and double star at the end so that you are aware of when it starts and ends. Fanfic is stupidly not letting me do line breaks to clearly indicate where it starts and stops. If anyone knows how to fix this, let me know. I will let you know right now that the character who suffers from nonsuicidal self-harm will receive professional help in this story. It will be addressed. I am not romanticizing self-harm or depression or mental illness nor will a romantic relationship be the solution to mental illness here. I plan on hopefully making this one of only two chapters with explicit self-harm descriptions and I will always include a trigger warning

Chapter Five

He who was living is now dead

We who were living are now dying

With a little patience

The following early afternoon, Luke wondered if there was a rat in the apartment next door. Or some disgusting vermin which crawled out of the cracks and decided to be roommates with Annabeth. It very well could be the unkillable beast which was the cockroach. He had seen a few during his undead adventures in the apartment and even in his desperation he was not willing to befriend them.

He wondered if there was a rat in the apartment next door because he couldn't figure out what the other reason would cause such loud repeated thudding to come from Annabeth's apartment. He would have to ask her when she visited later in the day.

She had, after all, promised to come back that evening with more pictures and stories about New York to hopefully trigger some semblance of a memory from when he was alive.

Last night had been the most fun he had had since, well since forever because he couldn't exactly remember what it was like to be alive. In fact, it had been so much fun that Annabeth had stayed far longer than she had originally intended to and flew out the door with a hasty goodbye.

He had spent the rest of the day experimenting with the notebook and pens she had left him. He had written a couple poems, a few observations about his existence, a charming character sketch of the landlord who liked to poke his head in every now and then to inspect the place.

Perhaps he could write the first book from the afterlife. Forget any "I Spent 10 Seconds in Heaven" books. He would give a hot spill sesh on Purgatory. Or hell. Whichever this apartment was. He'd have to figure that out before he published of course.

Could a camera capture his image for his author's picture?

The notebook from Annabeth had developed a whole series of questions about the state of ghosts and the ghostly and careers for the dead which had kept him well occupied for the day.

But as the hours ticked on and the day turned into evening and then the evening turned into night he grew worried. Annabeth had promised him that she would come back and yet here he was, sitting on the floor awkwardly waiting for the door to open.

He must look pathetic.

Something must have happened. Perhaps there had not been just one rat but a whole family? Or even worse, a whole army of rats had invaded and Annabeth had gone off to find a nutcracker to destroy them all.

Surely destroying an army of rats would take priority over the ghost in the next-door apartment. It was plausible, Luke mused to himself because there was no one else to muse to, that rat armies could exist if ghosts could exist.

The traffic outside of the window had died down and the bus was coming less frequently which meant it had reached hours in which most normal individuals were going to sleep—or at least were going to lie down in bed and suffer from existential dread and thinking about things they should have said during the day—which meant Annabeth was most likely not coming. She had told Luke about her strict schedule and while it involved a rather unhealthy bout of insomnia, she always aimed to be in bed before midnight.

"I'm an absolute nightmare in the morning without sleep," she laughed when explaining to him her sleeping habits. "It's so bad. Piper can tell within seconds how much sleep I got and knows to avoid me."

Well Luke hoped she had slain the rat army and gotten a good night's sleep. He assumed she had because the thudding had died out almost as quickly as it started.

But even though he knew that Annabeth would have a perfectly reasonable explanation for standing up, he still felt a twinge of something in his chest at the fact that he had once again been abandoned. He took a few deep breaths. It was pointless to think about being abandoned when he didn't know if he had actually be abandoned at this point.

Nevertheless, Luke settled down for the night with the uneasy, slightly queasy fear that if Annabeth were to never come back to the small apartment, he might officially lose all semblance of sanity. He had tasted human interaction and conversation and he wasn't sure he could be starved of it again.

She was late to catch her normal train that morning which meant Annabeth spent the twenty-minute community packed into a train car like an overstuffed crayon box. Her head was dizzy and her eyes were so dry it hurt to blink.

The last night with Luke had gone on later than she previously made schedule had allotted for. Her scheduling system was threefold. She had a rather large planner with everything scheduled to the day and color-coordinated with a system tried and tested in high school AP classes. That planner was too large to tote around the city in her backpack without giving her ibuprofen worthy backaches so she carried a smaller, less detailed weekly planner to keep track of homework and TA assignments. But her most important planner was her daily one which ordered her days in neat, pristine lines by the hour. Over organization might seem unnecessary to most but Annabeth loved the sight of neat, orderly days lined up like good little soldiers marching toward victory and graduate school.

But the ghost in the apartment next door had fired a cannonball at those nice and neat little soldiers, scattering them to the wind like chaff. She had penciled an hour for the ghost next door but found you can't pin a spirit between penciled in lines.

Luke had pushed her entire night routine back by far too many hours than she would have liked. Her homework had been rushed and hardly up to her normal standard of perfection.

And as she braced herself amongst the sea of working-class professionals—there was barely enough room on the handrail for a few fingers and her backpack was clenched between her feet to avoid being yelled at by a man in a too expensive business suit—Annabeth felt her stomach flip over and over as she mentally checked through her schedule for the day. She had barely managed to make it out the door in one put together piece and hadn't had the time to check her planner.

She flew the turnstile and up the escalator, out of the foul-smelling subterranean station (1). She entered the college a minute before one hour before her classes began.

She sighed and headed to the elevator bank. "Good morning Coach Hedge," she greeted the small but burly security guard at the front desk as she swiped her ID (2).

"Morning Chase. You're cutting it close."
"I know. I overslept."

"I was getting ready to send out a search party."

"It would have been an uneventful search party, I'm sure."

"You have a good day now, you hear?"

"I'll try my best Coach." She waved goodbye to him and ducked by a group of sophomores huddled together with hushed whispers over local coffeeshop cups. It was standard for students to latch onto a local coffeehouse by their second year in New York and to forever scorn chain shops.

(She wondered if people in Seattle considered Starbucks to count as local.)

She found herself a seat in the library which took up an entire floor of the building. While it certainly wasn't as impressive as libraries at the larger schools in the city, Annabeth always enjoyed the feeling of being surrounded by books even if most the books weren't helpful to her research (the funding for the library had suffered greatly and instead gone to the sports teams). There had been a push a few years ago to digitalize the library but after many heated Op-Eds written to the school's newspaper and a mini protest in which Rachel Elizabeth Dare chained herself to the library doors and refused to move, the school administration decided a digitalized library wasn't the right hill to die on (3).

Annabeth found a quiet seat in the corner section and pulled out her laptop to continue working on her graduate school applications. She closed out of all the tabs she had forgotten to exit out of last night when talking with Luke.

"Grad school apps again? Weren't you working on those last week?" Annabeth looked up to see Percy setting his bag down in the space next to hers at the table.

"I feel like I should officially dub you with the title of 'stalker' after the past few days. And keep your voice down."

"Please, Leo's working the desk today and you know that he could care less about the volume in here."

"Just because the school makes a habit of hiring people who don't particularly care about doing their jobs correctly doesn't make it an excuse to ignore the time-honored rules of sacred spaces."

"Okay first of all," Percy began holding up a finger, "the library hired Octavian and I think he makes up for all the slackers on the staff when it comes to taking one's job seriously. Second of all, I don't think many people would agree with your statement of the school library being a sacred place. And if the majority doesn't agree the rule doesn't come into play."

"I feel as if I should be worried about your logic in that argument."

Percy shrugged and sat down. "You know I tried to be a philosophy major for like a week but that failed."

"Yes, I know. We were in Ancient Philosophy together."

"That was probably the worst class I have ever taken but at least the company wasn't that bad."
"Thanks, I guess." She turned back to the meticulously planned spreadsheet, trying to ignore Percy's eyes reading over her shoulder. "You know that it's rude to read over someone's shoulder."

"Yeah I know, I know. I was just curious as to where you're thinking about applying. Any local schools?"

"Columbia and Fordham I think. I don't know if I stand a shot at getting in because the programs are so competitive though."

"Come on, you're Annabeth Chase. If they won't accept you then they're crazy."

"Graduate school isn't like undergrad Percy. It's a lot harder to get accepted. Most people only get one offer or they only get one offer with a good funding package. You don't exactly get to choose where you go to grad school."

"So you're applying outside of New York?"

"Of course. Cast your net wide to hopefully get more fish."

"But not too wide, right?" He then added, "I'm sure Piper would be devastated if you go back to California or Wyoming or something like that."

"Like I'd ever go back to that shithole," she muttered. "I plan to stay on the East Coast."

"Oh well that's good. You can usually catch a bus to anywhere on the East Coast from New York. And there are plenty of trains."

"Yes there are. I hope to stay within a day's travel to the city if I'm lucky. But I'll go wherever takes me. I don't have much choice otherwise."

"I mean you could always reapply another year if you don't get in? Get some work experience and add to your resume for grad schools?"

"Curriculum Vitae."

"Huh?"

"That's what it's called when you're writing an academic resume. It's a bit different than a job resume."

"Why do academics have to go and make us plebes feel so unimportant?"

"I mean, they do make their kingdoms in ivory towers."

"Fair." Percy looked at her spreadsheet again. "So what does it mean if it's highlighted?"

"Do you even have class this early?"

"No. But all of my roommates left early and I always feel lonely when the apartment's empty. Plus it's boring just sitting in there alone. Why do that when I could be here and pester you?" (4)

"Because sometimes I have important work to get done."

"Sometimes you're just boring."

"Then why are you still here?"

Percy studied her face and Annabeth felt her face grow warm under his stare. Then he just shrugged and turned to look at his phone. "I guess even when you're boring it's less lonely than being in my apartment by myself."

Annabeth bit her tongue and turned back to her spreadsheet.

"Hey Annabeth." She rolled her eyes and turned away from her laptop again. This time Hazel Levesque stood awkwardly next to the table, her hands holding a textbook from their research methods class. (4)

"Hey Hazel, what's up?"

"I was wondering if you wanted to review for our exam today?"

Annabeth blinked. Once, twice, a third time to make sure Hazel was still there. Did her heart always beat this fast? "What exam?"

It was Hazel's turn to blink. "You know the one in Research Methods?"

"Oh gods." She vaguely remembered studying her flashcards on the train a few days ago for this exam.

Stupid stupid stupid ghost.

"I um… I wouldn't worry about it Annabeth. It happens to the best of us," Hazel offered sympathetically. "The professor is an adjunct anyway. It's sure to be a breeze if you paid attention in class which knowing you, you surely did. But I can see that now would not be the best time for a buddy review session so I'll just… I'll see you in class." She hastily added, "But seriously I wouldn't worry about it Annabeth. It's only the first exam of the semester. There's three more and countless write-ups. You'll be fine."

Hazel quickly ducked away; some people don't need clamoring hands of kindness in times of stress. Someone had reached into Annabeth's lungs, grabbed them with two hands, and yanked them, stealing her breath. Her head was so light it might fall off her shoulders.

A hand was on her shoulder. "Hey, it's going to be okay. Everyone forgets about an exam at least once. Gods know I've forgotten about more than I can remember."

"I'm not everyone," she bit out. "And I don't need distractions right now." She quickly sorted through her backpack for the flashcards which had been abandoned at the bottom of the bag. Stupid stupid stupid ghost. Stupid Percy.

Stupid Annabeth. How on earth could she forget about an exam? Her spreadsheet sat mocking her.

"Look Annabeth, it's going to be fine. I promise you that you'll recover from this grade. Your GPA will barely even feel it."

She might yank her hair out. "Just shut up. You don't exactly know what you're talking about." Her caustic voice caused someone further down the table to take his headphones out and look questioningly at the duo.

Goddamn it everyone always wanted a show. Well Annabeth didn't have time to please everyone. She lowered her voice, "Please, please just go Percy. I need to think. I need to study."

Percy stood up and grabbed his bag. She wondered if the table had always been this dark. Perhaps it had been stained over the weekend. "If you need to talk after the exam, I'll be around all day. Just shoot me a text or something." He turned and then paused, looking back. "You're going to do fine Annabeth. You're the smartest person in this school."

Then he headed out of the library.

The flashcards were a mess in Annabeth's brain. While she could normally cram with ease in a pinch—like when she had three finals on the same day—her typical study schedule revolved around building up to the exam day over the course of a few days. But cramming thirty minutes before an exam was unheard of.

Especially one so heavily based on theory. The words blurred together in her neatly ordered compartments in her brain. Something was on the edge of her eye and she swiped it away quickly before anyone could notice.

If the flashcards a mess, then the exam itself was like Hannibal destroying the Roman legions in the Second Punic War. Normally she was Scipio Africanus destroying the Carthaginians in the Battle of Zama during an exam. She'd never felt what is was like to be destroyed by the dude who brought elephants over the Swiss Alps.

It was devastating.

She knew half the exam, took her best guess on the other half, and left one question blank. Annabeth wished she had the courage to write some outlandish answer that might at least make the professor laugh. Instead, she turned the offending stapled together stack of papers into the professor and fled the classroom.

She wanted to tell the professor that she was so terribly sorry that she hadn't studied and that she meant no dispersant to her class but there was a ghost in the apartment next to hers and she had stayed up far too late showing him pictures of New York and it would never happen again and she was so terribly sorry once again.

She said nothing instead.

She forgot to grab her pencil from off her desk.

Failure is an uncomfortable word. It's a strange word with strange sounds strung together to automatically make one's heart raise. The heights of the "ai" were only smashed by the slurring of the "ur" at the end. It's an uncomfortable world because we are made to believe it is uncomfortable.

She could hardly remember stumbling home, swiping her unlimited card, gripping the railing down the stairs to keep her feet from falling out from under her. She thought she might throw up when the train started to move.

She tried to recite the alphabet backward. She gripped the underneath of her seat, taking in the feeling of the hard plastic shell. She focused on her feet touching the floor, grounded.

* There was something growing in the right side of her chest, a dull pain that settled there as if it was building a house and the smoke from its chimney was going up to her throat, rising upward in a dry sob.

Annabeth hurried down the street. People on the street must have thought she was drunk in the middle of the day.

Up the stairs, two at a time.

Fumbling with the keys. Trying to force the wrong one into the keyhole.

Her heart felt a little funny. That dull pain in the right side of her chest was crawling across. Her lungs were a little tight. She rubbed her chest with the heel of her hand. Was the room spinning? No. No. It was still straight.

Okay maybe it was tilting slightly now.

It started so quietly she hardly noticed the rapid intakes of breath until it was all she noticed and she couldn't stop. It was a runaway freight train crashing through her senses and tearing through her body. The floor seemed like a nice place to lay down on, curl up into a ball until she was small enough to disappear.

She neeed to grab something. She needed to hold something and squeeze it tight and just, just be in control. She knew that theory class was the hardest one of the semester. She didn't have room to make a mistake like this. There was no room in the twelve-step for the future for a mistake. For anything lower than her high standard.

One bad exam grade led to a bad grade in the class as a whole which led to a flub on her transcript which led to graduate schools scoffing at her application and tossing it aside without a second thought which led to an endless nightmare that kept her awake most nights.

When had she fallen down onto the floor?

Annabeth clenched her hands together, balling them into fists so that her nails dug into the flesh of her hands so that she could grip something, so that she could just, just be in control.

There it was. The sob that came at full force, rising from a place deep down, a small box which she had carefully constructed during high school and locked tight so that no one—not even herself—might see it. Might find it.

She didn't find it. The box she had constructed in high school and locked away so tight that no one could see it found her first.

"It's fine. It's fine. It's fine," she muttered to herself. "This is so dumb. You're being dumb. It's just a stupid exam," she said in between sobs. "You're dumb. It's dumb. You're fine. Gods it's fine."

Her chest was on fire at this point. It was not a house with a chimney but instead, a dragon had now taken up residence, burned the house down, and the smoke was rising up through her throat.

It hurt at first.

Her head.

It always hurt at first. But she hadn't done it in so long that she forgot just how much it hurt the first time.

They were lucky this wall was on the outside of the building, she thought absentmindedly.

They said girls were less likely to do this than boys.

Ha.

Luke had done this once, the ghost next door, but that was just to prove that he was dead. She liked to do it to prove that she was still alive. Like pinching yourself to make sure you weren't dreaming. Because when you're dreaming you're not in control so you better pinch yourself awake.

It always hurt at first but after a while it just became numb. And the numbest felt like control.

The control was nice.

She'd have to tell Piper that someone knocked her down on the subway and that she hit her head so badly it bruised. She could wear a hat tomorrow. She touched her forehead and winced but then smiled, the dragon in her chest had curled up and gone to sleep. **

Annabeth closed the box inside of her that she had built in high school after the incident. She headed to her bedroom and stripped down to her underwear and pulled the covers up. It was easier to fall asleep now even though the fall sunlight was streaming through her window. She vaguely remembered glancing at the old woman still sitting at the bus stop across the street.

"Stupid ghost," she thought to herself as she drifted off into blissful darkness, "I'll be the one to find out who is was when he was alive."

She didn't lock the box that she had built in high school though.

End Part One: Hamartia

(1) A Brief Side Exploration of the NYC Subway: The NYC subway system is integral to the function of the city though it has a reputation—probably rightfully so—for being notoriously difficult to navigate and notoriously dirty (especially when compared to the Tube in London). It is expected that you will get dreadfully lost at least once—probably in a borough you've never been to—when you first move to the city. Go out of a scoop of edible cookie dough your first week in Manhattan and you'll end up on a train to Far Rockaway in Queens. The subway—a singular "subway" train is simply referred to as "the train" by New Yorkers, for example, "The train was late today"—is comprised of multiple lines named with letters and numbers (the most unfortunate line is the BDFM line). Swiping a metro card is an art that must be perfected and it is highly advised that you avoid hopping the turnstiles in an effort to not pay. The fine that you can get slapped with is hardly enjoyable. Further interest in the NYC Subway—the MTA will be explored in a later chapter, of course—can be directed to the New York Transit Museum. But for as much grief as New Yorkers will give the subway, it is always a better alternative to a taxi. If you are a tourist, take the subway and save some money and potentially get a free concert from excellent street musicians who set up shop in the stations.

(2) Gleeson Hedge, Coach, a Character Sketch: A retired baseball coach with a predisposition toward self-importance. Beloved security guard even if he is the butt of more than a few jokes made by the students, what most students don't know is that Coach Hedge has played on multiple seasons of Survivor where he has come close to winning once and went home pre-merge the other time. On Survivor, he is known for his charisma and loud personality. But as Survivor is not popular with the youths of this particular generation, Coach Hedge managed to keep his celebrity status under the radar. Spends most his time telling confused tourists that the bathroom is not available to the public and letting in students who forget their ID cards and making sure his baseball bat is at the ready just in case. However, one can occasionally find his gameplay to be the center of many conversations on the Survivor reddit page.

(3) Rachel Elizabeth Dare, a Character Sketch: Haling from New York and being the daughter of a prominent land developer created a drive within Rachel Elizabeth Dare at a young age to fight against exactly what her father praised, primarily the development (and often stealing) of land. In high school, she formed many protests and created a twitter account to keep people up to date with unethical business practices involved in land development and the government. (She had something to tweet about almost every day.) The twitter account took off her junior year of high school and her father was not pleased (and was even less pleased when she said she liked girls as much as guys). An environmental science major with an art minor, Red (affectionately called by her friends such as Percy Jackson and Grover Underwood), chose a small college over Columbia or NYU because those schools wanted her for her last name more than her activism. Charming, funny, smart, and made famous school-wide after her library stunt, Rachel went on to be voted Student Body President her senior year.

(4) Hazel Levesque, a Character Sketch: The sort of girl who believes she was born in the wrong time with a love/hate relationship for the 1920s which she studies (and no, she does not like The Great Gatsby so don't ask her about it). From the south and a fellow history major to Annabeth Chase, when she first arrived in the city she was rather terrified and hardly left her apartment until a fellow student, Frank Zhang, asked her awkwardly to go with him to a jazz club in Harlem. This started a bi-weekly tradition of the two of them going to listen to jazz music and becoming best friends and Hazel came out of her shell more due to having a friend. Two years later, the two began dating. Though she is still quiet in class, she is the president of the Black Student Union at the college and outspoken in matters of racial justice and equality on campus. A junior, she is well-spoken, well written, and well loved by her fellow classmates. She is always on the hunt for good beignets and depictions of fellow demisexuals in history.