NEVER BE THE SAME . . . percy jackson

one hundred and six: the breakfast.

FOUR DAYS AFTER leaving the House of Hades, Brooklyn was pouting during breakfast.

Percy was eating a huge stack of blue pancakes while Annabeth chided him for pouring on too much syrup.

"You're drowning them!" she complained.

"Hey, I'm a Poseidon kid," he said. "I can't drown. And neither can my pancakes.:

"Just let him drown his fucking pancakes," Brooklyn muttered, fidgeting with her ring. "They taste better that way."

After Tartarus, her appetite's been fucked up. Most of the time, she's not hungry at all, able to eat the tiniest portions of food before being too full to eat anymore. Then for one meal a day, she's ravenous and devours everything in sight, including half of Percy's food. Half of those four days she ended up throwing up after her giant meals. So, life was great. This was a not hungry at all meal.

"Glad you agree," said Percy, though he was looking at her, concerned. She waved him off, drinking a protein shake that she'd drawn up. She could stomach those, so for right now they were her life.

To her left, Frank and Hazel used their cereal bowls to flatten out a map of Greece. They looked over it, their heads close together. Every once in a while Frank's hand would cover Hazel's, just sweet and natural like they were an old married couple, and Hazel didn't even look flustered, which was real progress for a girl from the 1940s. Until recently, if somebody said gosh darn ( minus Brooklyn, who swore so often she was used to it ), she would nearly faint.

At the head of the table, J Money sat uncomfortably with his T-shirt rolled up to his ribcage as Nurse Piper changed his bandages.

"Hold still," she said. "I know it hurts."

"It's just cold," he said.

Brooklyn could hear the pain in his voice. That stupid gladius blade had pierced him all the way through. The entrance wound on his back was an ugly shade of purple and it steamed. Probably not a good sign.

She and Jason had talked a lot, because she had watch over him last night while Piper slept. He'd been awake, so they talked as long as he was awake, which was a few hours. She talked to him about Tartarus because he'd asked her to and she's barely talked about it with anyone else, even Percy and Annabeth.

"It's just . . . weird," Brooklyn scrunched up her nose, curled into a ball on her chair.

"What?" Jason asked. The word looked hard for him to say, which was why she was talking and not him.

"Being here," she told him. "And not in Wonderland. Stop talking, it hurts."

"Me or you?" he countered.

"Ha ha," Brooklyn rolled her eyes. "Seriously, though. That looked like it hurt. You're my brother, Jason. I kinda need you to be okay."

"Then talk." Jason told her. "Tell me about Wonderland."

She'd hesitated. "Were you ordered up to this by someone?"

"I don't know what you mean."

She could tell that he'd meant it, so she told him everything — every feeling, every event. Everything. She put her trust in his hands, yet it wasn't broken. Yet.

"What's up, guys?" Leo strolled into the mess hall, dragging Brooklyn out of her memories. "Aw, yes to brownies!"

He grabbed the last one — because Brooklyn had eaten most of them during a hungered craze — from a special sea-salt recipe they'd picked up from Aphros the fish centaur at the bottom of the Atlantic.