Melpomene (PJO)

21. Pan's Labyrinth

Nobody spoke. Probably because none of them had the words. There were no words.

Mari wasn't sure how long they ran for. A long time. The only thought in her head as she followed the others had been that they all needed to put as much distance between themselves and Lu-Kronos as possible. It was Rachel who stopped them, unable to carry on. They halted in the middle of a corridor, and it was like some kind of horrible wave came crashing down, as the reality of what they'd all just seen truly began to sink in.

Annabeth was the first to react. She collapsed to the ground, head in her hands, and wept. Mari knelt next to her, putting a hand on her shoulder but Annabeth shrugged it away with a sob.

Mari sat back. She thought back on what she'd said to Luke when Daedalintus brought her to him, about him giving up everything because he was too scared to admit he'd made a horrible mistake. She hadn't expected him to take it so literally. She wanted to be angry. She wanted to hate Luke for what he'd done, but she just felt empty. Like she'd been cheated. Because Luke was gone. Mari had all this rage, at what Luke had done to her, to Mason, to Annabeth, to everyone at camp, to the entire world if Kronos won, but she didn't have anywhere to put it anymore. She couldn't be angry at an empty husk.

Then she felt scared. Because Luke had been bad enough on his own, but at least there was hope that he could be defeated. How were they meant to stand a chance against Kronos?!

Annabeth looked up. Her eyes were glassy. "What... what was wrong with Luke? What did they do to him?"

Annabeth knew. Annabeth had been there, she'd seen it. She was smarter than all of them, she'd have put together the dots. But maybe she just needed to hear someone else say it. Mari opened her mouth. Then she closed it again. She couldn't get the words out.

"He's gone. He gave himself over to Kronos," Percy said, voice soft. "I'm sorry, Annabeth, but Luke is..."

"No!" Annabeth said. "You saw when Rachel hit him. He was - just for a second -"

"Yeah," Percy agreed, turning to Rachel. "You hit the Lord of the Titans in the eye with a blue plastic hairbrush."

"It was the only thing I had." Rachel's face went as red as her hair.

"But you saw!" Annabeth's voice broke. "When it hit him, just for a second, he was dazed. He came back to his senses."

Mari wanted to say that Luke had never had any senses to come back to, but it didn't seem like the time. Percy spoke instead. "So maybe Kronos wasn't completely settled in the body, or whatever. It doesn't mean that Luke was in control."

"You want him to be evil, is that it?" Annabeth asked. "You didn't know him before, Percy. I did!"

So did I, Mari thought. I wasn't a fan. But the Luke who had kidnapped her and the Luke who looked after Annabeth with Thalia when she was little... Mari couldn't mash the two together in her head. It was like play dough. The Luke Annabeth and Thalia knew was a pot of fresh play dough, without any other colours mixed in. The Luke that existed now was evil play dough, full of dried up bits, and someone had put a worm inside it as a stupid joke. If she tried to mix the two, the dried up parts wouldn't fuse with the fresh stuff and the worm would probably eat through half. Huh, maybe that was a useful way to think of Kronos. Right now, he was like a really bad tapeworm.

"Maybe you didn't know him as well as you thought," Mari suggested.

"What, and you did?" Annabeth cried. "You were at camp for two weeks before he- when you first met him!"