A Crown of Golden Leaves: A Percy Jackson Fanfiction

Caput LXI: Glimpsing Eternity

A Crown of Golden Leaves: Chapter 41
by Kitty 
November 6, 2016

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"There are dark shadows on earth, but its lights are strong in the contrast." – Charles Dickens

Caput XLI: Glimpsing Eternity

ANNABETH was a godsend. Percy wasn't entirely sure how she had gotten Medicus Gaius to move so quickly when he had so many patients that he needed to tend to, but whatever it was that she had done or said, it had worked. Some of the nurses crowded around Jason, their backs blocking him from his sight, and he did his best to stay out of their way.

He wasn't sure he wanted to know what was going on anyway.

Soon, a stretcher was being brought inside. He barely saw what was being done or said. It was all a blur of movement as he kept perfectly still. It had been just this morning that he had been trying to find what was the origins of this plague and how to cure it. Now...

First Rachel, and now Jason. They were all too young for this stuff to happen to them. He knew men and women died every day, but they were usually in their thirties or forties, or they were infants. But this... Jason was a year younger than he was. He'd only seen his twenty-second Spring. To think that he might not see his twenty-second Winter...

No, he couldn't think like that. If he did, then he would be giving up, and Jason would be as good as dead. And he wasn't about to give up on him like that. He'd spent too many years alternatively judging or pitying him to let him go without a fight. Gods, Rachel had spent too much time fighting with him and goading him into seeing the just, honorable man who had only needed someone to show him there had been a way out of that pit of Hell he had descended into.

There was no way Jason was going to die. He wouldn't allow it.

Except... he couldn't really order something that something that wouldn't listen. This world was a harsh, demanding reality that took and took all that was given and never gave back—

No, that was unfair. He had known Rachel, and if she hadn't died, then he wouldn't have known Annabeth. If he hadn't known Rachel, he wouldn't have found Jason. IF he hadn't known Jason, then he would still be that arrogant, naïve, selfish child who thought he had known everything about the world there was to know.

The world gave back. Or maybe it was the Fates, or the gods, or luck, or even just coincidence. There was something or someone else out there that he didn't know of or believed in that led him to the people he needed to know at the time he needed to know them.

It was just hard to find the beauty in all the ugly things if you didn't look for it.

Reyna was standing in front him quite suddenly. The bibliotheca completely silent in the wake of the aftermath of Jason's collapse. He hadn't even realized he was still sitting on the ground, or that everyone else had left him there. Either they had been so focused on Jason that they had forgotten he was there, or they had tried to rouse him into following them and, failing that, had decided to leave him alone to come back to earth on his own.

Her hands trembled when she reached up and roughly scrubbed at her cheeks, but tears kept slipping out of her eyes and dripped off her chin. It scared him. Reyna hadn't even wept at Rachel's funeral. He had been the one who had broken down and she had been the one to hold him. It had always been that way with her. Showing weakness to him was something she had refused to do. It wasn't even considered.