I do not own PJO!

Just Too Much That Time Cannot Erase

She hates him on sight. The impertinence, the way he carries himself, the way he dares to insult Lady Artemis. He reminds her of someone, someone long ago lost. His long sweeping black bangs remind her of another's, the green eyes made dark with pain remind her of another who left, left her a cast away. She hates him, but oh, she sympathizes, so, so deeply with his sorrow.

So when he insists to go on the quest, she says, "He cannot. He is a boy. I won't have my Hunters traveling with a boy," while she's crying on the inside.

She will not return, boy. Do not go after her. Do not have thy heart broken to bits like mine was. Do not let thy heart bleed like mine did. Do you not see it's for the best, staying here?

She puts on a mask of indifference to his pain. She does everything she can to prove that she doesn't care, because maybe she'll convince herself. She shouldn't care. He's a boy. But she does, and that's what hurts.

When he shows up at the museum, her heart almost breaks. Almost.

Why? Why do you condemn yourself to this? Why? Don't you know it's hopeless?

He kills the Nemian Lion with the packet of space food, and she tells him to take the skin. He doesn't think he should, and she tells him, "It is a spoil of war. It is rightly thine."

He offers it to her, saying that she should take it, because she killed it. She eyes the thing with revulsion. It was Heracles'. She can't take it.

So she smiles thinly and answers, "I think thy ice cream sandwich did that. Fair is fair, Percy Jackson. Take the skin."

Only then does he fit the skin, now a full length coat, around his shoulders. But to her, the coat still looks like a skin, wrapped securely around the shoulders of a hero that she's still reserving judgment on.

She only makes up her mind about him when he sacrifices the skin to protect the satyr. That is when she realizes that this hero is not Heracles. He's a remarkable man.

You aren't who I thought you were, hero. But you still won't find her.

She forces herself into the Garden that she once called home. Her sisters, her dragon. Her life that she abandoned for him. He gave her a rose for her efforts, then flitted away when she needed him. She can still remember the red rose, plucked from her garden, in his hands as he presents it to her. She should scream at him, tell him that no one but the Hesperides are allowed to tend the flowers, but she can't, because she loves him.

The scent of the garden sickens her.

The dragon bites her, her father tries to break Artemis, betrays her yet again.

Percy finds Annabeth and her heart splits, because why couldn't she have the ending he did?

And one shall perish by a parent's hand.

As she dies, her eyes catch the stars, because she wants to be as far away as she can be from the Earth and it's sorrows.

And what is this? I have no idea. Just a pointless little oneshot that was supposed to be for a challenge, but took on a mind of it's own. Title based on My Immortal by Evanscence.

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