"The moment I met you,
I held my breath.
And you've been taking
it away ever since,
Nico di Angelo."
[ NICO DI ANGELO x MALE OC ]
[ PERCY JACKSON SERIES ]
[ HEROES OF OLYMPUS SERIES ]
cover by @humaneity !
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0027. |THE COMPLICATIONS OF TIME MANAGEMENT
Vela didn't understand time. His version of eternity was two thousand years trapped in the sky as an object of comedy for Zeus. His life felt completely distorted. Sometimes days would pass in minutes, other times, like when he kissed Nico, a moment could stretch to a millennia.
He couldn't understand it, but there was one thing about time that he was certain of, and that was that Silena hadn't had enough of it. Vela had lived for two thousand years and he had wasted it. She deserved some of his wasted years. How he wished he could give her a lifetime's worth. Life wasn't supposed to be short, but just as then, he was struck by the fragility of mortal life. Death happened in a second, lives ended in the blink of an eye and he just couldn't process it.
It didn't feel right, it didn't feel sad, he didn't feel anything really. Normally after he threw a temper tantrum, he'd cry, but he hadn't. Instead he felt empty, completely hollow like his chest had been shattered, concave with nothing in it. That was it; he felt hollow.
Vela felt like a shell of what he was only a few hours earlier. He didn't feel like a god or a hero, he felt like a complete and utter failure. But he also felt guilty. More guilty than he had ever felt in his entire life.
His sister was dead.
His sister was dead and he did nothing to save her. He couldn't save her.
He was useless, pathetic. A good for nothing moron! He was a pathetic excuse for a god, he was a pathetic excuse for someone allowed to breathe. He should've been dead, not her. Her blood was on his hands.
He had been staring at the blood for an awfully long time, watching it dry and crust over the creases in his hands, the bends of his knuckles a little darker with the burgundy of her blood. Her blood that now stained his hands because of what he didn't do. His stupid—fucking—hands!
His breaths started to shudder and his throat felt tight. He just knew he needed to get rid of the blood, he had to get rid of his hands. In that moment he'd rather chop them off than have the reminder of Silena on him, right in his palms.
His hands flipped like a seizure, clenching and unclenching into fists, rubbing his knuckles, scraping his nails, anything he could think of to get his hands as far away from his as possible. He couldn't bare to look at them.
"Vela." Annabeth's hand held onto his shoulder. The street was empty, all the other campers were inside the Empire State Building and the Titan army had either been disintegrated or ran off. They were alone in the middle of the asphalt with Vela's stupid, disgusting hands.
"My—," his voice cracked. "My hands, they're—," he couldn't finish.
Annabeth gave him a soft smile, one he might've seen on his mother's face. That sympathetic look of a child about to break down. "Okay, that's okay." She told him. "Come on, come with me. We can wash it off, how does that sound?" She offered him her hand to hold.
