Percy Jackson Series. Annabeth Chase X Male Reader Story

I Am Offered Condolences

(Y/N)'s POV

My dream was hellish, a twisting and turning mass of faces and names on people's lips, it was nauseating, and then when it settled, it was even more so. I couldn't hear the words being spoken, but I understood them.

They were calling me out, telling me what a curse I was, how dangerous I had become and how my very existence was a threat to them. Once I understood their message, their faces came into focus. Campers.

Maybe I had never met them all personally, or interacted with them, but I knew them. Faces I had seen in passing, hateful looks at the dining pavilion or disgust at me arriving at camp activities. All of them I ignored while I was waking, but they had still found me in my dreams.

I clasped my hands over my head as if they would protect me as I remembered the haunting image of a dead soldier, a dead camper, glaring at me, hating me for killing him, for sentencing him to death just by being near him.

My stomach turned as Bianca was now added to the list of people I had failed, the Ares Camper, my mother, Annabeth, and now her. That was when I suddenly found hands placing headphones around my head.

But for once, this didn't stop the nightmares, they weren't images conjured by Tartarus to taunt me, or a biproduct of the underworld, they were the truth, the thing that I had been avoiding all my life was finally coming to haunt me, I was a curse.

I tried to tune them out, but it was impossible, I tried to avert my eyes, but they never moved, there was only one inconsistency in the dream, one I'm not sure I was meant to see. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a blurred figure.

From what I could make out, it was a tall man in a long black coat. Most concerning was that his face never sat still, it was constantly changing, to faces I remembered, or to a mashup of strangely disjointed features, if I tried to focus on the figure it disappeared, like an illusion.

I couldn't see his face properly, like it was both there and not, like a mirage, for a second, I wondered if I was still in the desert. Once this connection was made in my subconscious, I remembered that my body was in danger, and worse, so was one of my friends.

I woke up in absolute darkness, the last strange image I remembered from the dream was perhaps the clearest, not that it meant anything meaningful, it was the same figure, it's face frozen to show a man with gray hair and blue eyes.

He was looking at me almost joyfully, his finger over his lips in a 'shhh' motion, smirking behind it like he knew something I didn't. Before I could contemplate who it was, I realised that I didn't feel the sand under my body.

After a second of my eyes taking in my surroundings, I saw golden eyes looking down at me, without really thinking about it, I swung my fist towards them, only stopping short when I saw the light in them.

"Sorry." I apologised, and with my first waking word, my dream was a hazy forgotten mess, that face not even worth remembering, he shrugged, "Happens all the...time..." He magically pulled the covers from me. I shook myself awake, before catching my breath as I remembered my fight.

"Bianca!" I said, trying to rise from a sitting position, I now realised I was in Hypnos's cave. My outburst woke him up. I stumbled to my feet but couldn't support myself, falling in less than ten seconds. Only to land in another mattress.

"Calm down...be careful...you need to...recover..." But I didn't care about that. Maybe there was a small chance I could still save her. I rolled from the mattress, landing on my hands and knees, unable to support my own weight, but I pushed up on my knuckles and struggled to my feet, pain washed over me, but I ignored it.