"Are you okay?"
I'd heard those words so much in my life, they didn't sound real anymore. My reply came out before I'd processed them.
"I'm fine."
The look on his face never change, like it was supposed to do, the caution encrypted his body, encrypting his body language, it wasn't how he was supposed to react.
"I saw your mother." Perry said, speaking with caution as if I were some monster he was trying to calm down before I killed him, which in retrospect wasn't half wrong.
"My mother?" I frowned. I hadn't seen my mother in an innumerable amount of years, and the casual mention of the woman made my heart ache. She'd always been a scary woman, but I still longed to see her, to test if she was still the monster from my childhood. "Why?" I'd never talked about my mother, not to Chiron, not to Luke, not to anyone.
"Nico said it might help us understand Luke better." Perry answered, which was probably the most logical reason for him and Nico to dive into my secrets, the one I'd tried desperately to hide to appear normal.
"Why didn't you come to me? I knew him better than anyone..." I felt violated, even if I understood the reasons behind it. Perry had always hated me, since Luke had betrayed everyone, he always suspected I wouldn't be far behind to join him.
"I know you feel responsible for Luke, I didn't want to add to that." I was confused, I never felt responsible for Luke's actions, I just wanted to help. I needed to help, to redeem myself, to separate myself from my brother.
"I'm not responsible for Luke. I could've given you more information than that woman could." Percy was starting to piss me off, the way he always tried to be the hero to a doomed story. He was too self-assured and egotistic. I could never figure out why.
"We didn't get much from her anyway." He shrugged it off like it meant nothing, like talking to my cursed mother meant nothing to him. It felt invalidating. "I don't know what else to do." I knew I had information he needed, and I happily invited the feeling of importance that came with that knowledge.
"What did she tell you?" My mother knew very little of my brother, she had instead spent her days scaring him with the curse her own father inflicted upon her, the curse of the Oracle of Delphi.
"Not a lot, she thought Nico and I were him for most of the visit."
I tried to reject the burning question I had, but my mouth acted against me. "Did she... mention me?" I immediately regretted asking, knowing I wasn't important enough to my mother to be mentioned. Perry shook his head, confirming what I already knew.
I shouldn't have cared, I'd never cared before, but my chest seemed to weigh me down, feelings I'd spent years pushing away, hidden in the unexplored areas of myself, attracted to the fact. It was suffocating me. "Are you okay?" His voice was so distant I barely registered it as my chest tightening, my breathing grew shallow and tears blurred my vision. I distracted my mind from those feelings with even stronger ones, my hatred for Hermes, the guilt I felt, reminding me every day that I could've stopped all of it if I'd tried harder.
Those feelings weren't distinctively different to the facts that my mother never mentioned me, like my existence was no more than a single thought to her, but they let me push that fact to the back of my mind.
"Bea." I felt a hand on my shoulder, and let that replace my opinions on my mother. I watched Perry's face relax when I shoved his hand away. "I asked if you could tell me about Luke."
"What do you want to know about him?" I could tell him how Luke cried himself to sleep every night as a kid, or how he'd lashed out on me when he'd first ran away because I wouldn't go with him.
"Anything that might help." The annoyance I felt whenever I saw Perry only strengthened.
"Wow, that's so specific." I considered what to tell him, and just went with everything. "Well, you know about the curse of the Oracle of Delphi, she scared both of us -"
I cowered under my bed as I watched the familiar green glow around my mothers feet. I heard my brother pleading for her to stop. I winced when he tripped over my discarded pillow and fell back onto the carpeted floor. I stayed unmoving under the bed, my hands over my ears so I wouldn't have to hear about my brother's demise, wondering if every family was like this or if it was just mine. - Aged 4.
"Luke! You're hurting me!" Luke let go of my wrist, but he still expected me to follow. I heard my mother's sobbing behind me, begging my brother to stay, I couldn't leave her like that.
"Bea! Come on." Luke urged me to go with him, but my legs wouldn't move. "I can't..." I whispered, wiping my tears on my sleeve. "I wanna stay." Luke looked at me like I was crazy, but I was a smart kid. I knew as soon as we stepped out of the front garden the monsters would kill us. Luke seized my wrist and pulled me along, and I screamed and screamed until he gave up. He left me alone with my mother, who wouldn't look at me. - Aged 4
I heard yelling from inside, and my heart dropped in the realisation that Hermes knew I had sneaked out. I knew he'd kick me out onto the streets, and my mother would do nothing to stop him. I slowly opened the front door, my footsteps silent, as I drew closer to Hermes, preparing myself to be the target of his latest tantrum. "Luke?!" I froze when I saw my brother, who was berating my step-dad, with two girls sat at the kitchen table behind them.
"Bea, grab your shit, you're coming with me." I glanced to my mother, who was in tears, but she never stopped me when I left the room. Not even when I followed my brother out of the house, she only begged for Luke to stay, she didn't even glance at me. - Aged 9.
I was the first to cross the border to the camp, with Grover hot on my trail. I collapsed into the long grass, heaving as I wiped at my wet cheeks, trying to hold back sobs. Luke carried Annabeth over the border, but didn't say a word and just watched Thalia dying. I glanced up at Zeus kneeling above Thalia, specks of magic surrounding my dead friend, the ground morphing beneath her body.
Eventually, Luke broke the silence. "Grow up." The coldness in his voice reminded me of Hermes, and that sent a shiver down my spine. When neither me or Annabeth made a move to leave, he dragged us through the grass, ignoring us both as we begged him to stop, he never did. - Aged 9.
