"No monsters."

He mouths the words at first, staring, wide-eyed at the empty space before him. He shouts it then, his hands aching to hold Hazel in his arms and kiss her, to pat everyone on the back, to hug them, even. He does not think anyone could love another group of people more than he loves the rest of the Seven right then.

But his joy is short lived, evaporating the moment Hazel's scream lifts in the air. It's to the brim with pain, and he can't think of anything more terrifying then losing her.

Swerving around as quickly as his body would allow, he sees her back shake with sobs as her shoulders curl forwards in dejection. She's dying. He thinks, looking at the blood pooled around her.

Frank does not panic as he sprints, even though the cold air feels like an icy stab every time it enters his lungs and his mind runs wild with thoughts of how he could possibly move on without her.

But as he comes closer, he sees that she's not the one bleeding. Relief does not come, it never does. She holds Percy in her lap as he chokes on his own blood, coughing it out on his face and neck so that his collar and Hazel's shirt are dotted with crimson.

There's a serious wound on his side, bleeding although Hazel makes valiant effort to put pressure on the broken skin, and the many layers under it, to stop the bleeding. But the scarlet still pours out despite her basic medical knowledge and desperate pleas.

"Percy, stay with me, Percy." She manages, though it sounds like someone has wrapped cold hands around her throat, altering her smooth voice. She sobs uncontrollably. "Say something. Damn you, Percy, say something!"

Frank falls to his knees beside her, unbelieving. It couldn't be true, this wasn't right. Percy couldn't die. No one in the Seven could. They were family.

They had come into this battle fully prepared to die. Certain death was expected but watching his friends die was not. In a last hope, a desperate attempt, he closes his eyes and clenches his fists, imagining what Percy's life would be if he could only get up and fight. He tries to show the gods what could be, to beg them not to take him from them.

He sees Percy coming home and his camp cheering wildly, tearful demigods left and right running to embrace him tightly in their arms and Percy grinning fondly at them. He sees he and Annabeth married under a blue sky. He watches as they expand their family, little kids running around their ankles. They would talk constantly, the Seven. They would never lose contact with each other, chatting idly just to hear their friends' voice and laugh.

Somehow, he doesn't think that will happen now. It's like trying to grasp a fading dream, only to have it slip through your fingers.

He opens his eyes to reality and hates it. Blood stains his shirt and jeans, clinging to his skin. Tears trace down his face as he holds Percy's hand. He can't believe that this is happening, that he is leaving them.

In his desolation, he didn't hear Hazel shouting. But he listens now, never taking his eyes off the red-covered demigod in front of him.

"Do something!" She cries. It's useless. She knows as well as him that there's nothing he can do. That anyone here could do.

He turns his eyes to her, however reluctant to take them off his friend, and finds her hand with his free one. She shakes with an extra sob. Together, they return to the tragedy at hand, though they would never forget the unspoken moment of understanding they shared.

It's the most impossible thing in the word, he thinks, over the sound of people approaching and his own sobs, Percy Jackson is dying.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Jason has crossed paths with many things before.

He has battled against titans and giants, against storm spirits and sea monsters. He has, not once, fought blood.

But here he finds himself, kneeling with a frozen Frank and a screeching Hazel clutching a bleeding Percy. A dying Percy.

"Percy?" He breathes out, his voice almost shaking as much as his hands

The problem at hand manages a smirk that's nothing like him and speaks like he isn't spitting blood as he does so. "Do you know any other handsome heroes that just saved your sorry ass?" His voice is scratchy, and his breaths are shaky. He has no idea how he could speak, sharp mind quickly diagnosing a punctured lung.

Jason doesn't want to look.

Instead, he weakly smiles in return as though he isn't worried that those may be his friend's last words.

"Well, I don't know about handsome." He says after a moment of silence because it's what Percy would want. It's almost as difficult to create an air of humor in a time when Thantos breathes down their necks as it is to keep his eyes dry.

He wonders how Percy did it all those years, joking though chances were not in his favor, never in his favor, and realizes that he will miss that about him. Who will bring the Seven together now? How could they possibly go on without Percy?

They couldn't, he realizes suddenly. Simultaneously, he hears a gurgle of laughter in response, followed by a fit of uncontrollable red-speckled coughing. He doesn't know it yet, but many nights later he will lie awake in his warm, comfortable bed and stare at the ceiling, listening to the terrible, terrible sound bounce in his head over and over.

But right now, the noise wakes him from his daze and field training kicks in. His hands no longer tremble, so he gently removes Hazel's quivering fingers from the flowing wound on Percy's side and places his own to keep pressure on it.

"Stay with me, Percy. Okay? We can't—"he closes his eyes, resigning himself to the words, knowing that if he dies that they will follow him after, long after. "We can't lose you."

They can't, they can't, they can't. He can't.

His hands are already stained crimson. And so the battle against blood begins.

He will lose terribly.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Piper's knees are jelly.

She watches from at least a hundred yards away, and even from the football-field-distance, she can see Jason's blue eyes blazing and the tears rolling down Hazel's rosy cheeks. She can see Annabeth sprint with inhuman speed, her stone mask shattering and she sees Frank's fingers tremble as he holds both Hazel's and Percy's hands, and Percy, oh, Percy. If she didn't know it was bad already, she can see the red that first came in specks but now leaves his mouth with a vengeance, pouring out furiously and drooping down his chin and onto his already soaked shirt.

Annabeth starts sobbing, falling to her knees beside her wan boyfriend. Jason won't quit trying to save him, even when Percy arches his back off the ground and breathes a final, rattling breath.

She can hear it from here.

With stunning certainty, she knows that her friend is dead.

Hazel screams sharply, shards of the broken sound piercing her like the knife stuck in her heart. The blade twists as Hazel, now sobbing, holds her hands to her ears and rocks back and froth, Percy's head lifelessly lolling about on her lap as she does so.

"He's dead!" She rasps. "He's dead, he's dead, he's dead."

The blood won't stop streaming from his mouth. It tortures her, the blood. Why won't it stop, she asks. Why won't it stop?

She watches as Jason falls back, stunned, and scrambles back up to his feet, staring at Percy. At a corpse.

She watches as Nico appears from nowhere, face impossibly becoming paler, and kneels along with the others. He puts his forehead to Percy's and rolls from his toes to his heals repeatedly.

She watches as Annabeth shakily reaches for his hand and hold it there, uncomprehensively gazing at his dead palm.

Piper will not remember a lot of that day, of how she ran to them, of how she wept without restraint. But she will remember what she could not see from the hundred yard distance.

How he smiled, teeth tainted scarlet, finally at peace.

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Annabeth's heart leaps into her throat at the first sight of the gathered party.

Somehow, in the deepest part of her, despite her every fiber rejecting the thought so strongly, she knows who they're crowding around on the grass. Who they cry for and who she runs to.

Her future.

He lies there, red, red blood pouring from the lips she has kissed a thousand times but never will again, from the critical stab wound on his side that has sustained sword cuts and survived explosions, but in the end will be sacrificed for the rest of the Seven, for the camps.

For her, she realizes, later that night in bed, reaching for any comfort.

She remembers everything they had done together. Of how they saved friends and helped gods. Of how she loved him so strongly it sometimes hurt, of how they rescued each other countless times, but the moment she really needed to watch his back, she failed.

Distantly, Annabeth grasps his limp hand with hers, tracing the lines on his palm absently and willing herself to remember every aspect of him, from the way his smirk tilted just ever so slightly to the right, to the hard-earned callouses on his fingers.

She knows that soon it will hit her. That tomorrow she will wake up and she will not be able to meet him at his cabin, that there will be no arm casually slung around her shoulder in a silent comfort that only they could manage.

The day her world collapsed, the sky was gray, hopeful streaks of sunshine peeking through the clouds. (They had won, Frank said later that day. Nobody mentioned how much was lost.)

But for her it was red of his blood and the glare of the sun reflecting upon it.