A/N

My second Percy Jackson-fanfic. Written for NaNoWriMo -09 - OC-story, 10 years after TLO.

"dead people live in a dead world, see dead things, feel dead things. But the thing I remembered feeling was something in between."

BARELY CONSCIOUS

Five tips that will most probably make you consider are you a half-blood:

1. Demigod dreams suck.

PART 1: DREAM

1 THE DAY MY NIGHTMARE BEGINS

I am serious about this one. I actually thought them of as regular dreams – just until this autumn. My birthday was September 2nd: and that was the day, when my world started to collapse. It all started from the stick.

I had a really freaky dream that night.

In the dream I stood in some sort of corridor, all empty and windy, so that I could hear the breeze thru the closed windows and understand how lucky I was to be where I was. I couldn't say was it day or night, but one thing really bugged me out then. I guess I was going to school or something, because when I thought about it, suddenly the floor turned turquoise and the walls filled with doors of dark wood – this was our staircase. The door to our crappy apartment stood right beside me and I walked, then rushed down the stairs. The echo of my footsteps rang in my ears in a stable tune and so normal it felt, until I saw something very unnatural in the first floor. Our house had three storeys and we of course had to live in the third – and by the door with the family name PADDINGTON there stood a stick. I could already hear the voices from outside, the yells of some children and cars flowing by, but I just stood there. Stood and stared at the thick stick leaning on the door of pinewood and could not say why. It was an ordinary stick all right, the kind you see kids playing with when they want to look tough, that kind of you could light up to make a torch. I saw those sticks all the time. It was Canada, the hill our house was on was full of those. But I could tell there was something wrong about that stick – maybe it could symbolise something about to happen.

And I could never realise, that I actually guessed it right.

At daybreak, the time I woke up, I noticed this horrible pain in my head. It was like I had a hangover or something. Okay, I couldn't tell what a hangover was like since I had never had one, but I guessed it was mainly like the headache you get of drinking coke. I always woke up seeing my purple-painted closet, an electric clock with 6:06 on the screen and cans of coca cola. I had never counted how many cans I actually owned, but there was fairly over 100. My dad worked in a coke factory. He always brought coke home – but never told me what the secret recipe was. I guessed there was actually no secret recipe at all, but people just thought there was one and the coke-factory guys just played them fool. I always thought about things like that. My thoughts wondered easily – if I had to study for a chemistry test with all the elements in it et cetera, I'd start to think about some jewellery shop or something, I dunno why, maybe because when I start thinking about the periodic table of elements, I always think of gold. And when I think of gold, I think of a jewellery shop. With guys dressed up in freaky suits with zebra stripes on them and a smile worth of million dollars on their face. I hate zebra stripes. I couldn't say why, but every time I saw zebra stripes somewhere, I had a feeling I should punch the guy wearing them in the face and tear his zebra-mania apart. Usually the guys wearing zebra stripes look just like my dad, the coke-factory guy. He is a pretty cool guy actually, we get on well, but he looks odd. My dad looks kinda Asian, and people always ask me am I adopted or something. My mum then… she's got this very light look. Like she would come from Norway or somewhere there, that place where each woman looks like she works in a toothpaste commercial.

My mother. I couldn't understand her very well. If I had to describe her shortly, I'd say that she sleeps all the time. She has to always take her beauty-sleep and she wakes up every morning at twelve. Because my dad is in work already and my mum wants to take care that I actually eat something in the mornings, she always does me some coffee and maybe a banana and tapes a note with huge letters on the coffee machine, so that I would notice it. I of course always do, but it's just because my mum always writes my full name and can't understand, that I hate coffee. My mum was probably the only person in the world who called me with my whole name. Eleanor. It's a pretty stupid name in my opinion, if I think about it. That's why everyone always calls me Elea, or then The Collins girl. I was one of the few people whose names were always remembered. I guess its maybe because they are so dorky. I never asked who made up my first name and who the second, but the thing is, I hate them both. Especially the second one – Cicada. Who in the world names their kid Cicada? I always asked my mum that wasn't a cicada some sort of locust. I never got the answer, but I'm pretty sure that it anyway is some damn bug.

And you know what really bugs me? (Speaking of bugs.) The whole thing with me. My life has always been crazy, it was never easy for me. And for the least in this world I could hope that someone would actually start messing it up. I did wait for answers, someone to show me those words I couldn't hear, but the way that happened wasn't the way I wanted it to. Sometimes I actually hope I had stayed home that day. Sit on that damn chair covered with brown leather and drink that damn brown coffee. I'm sure that drinking that would have made me sick. Sometimes I still imagine my life is just a dream. I wake up in the morning, survive, then lay down again, but what if it all is just a life-long dream, and when I wake up, I would be a child again, innocent, and the whole fifteen of my years on this planet would have been just a dream. Would it then be easier for me to make those decisions right?

But that day I felt like that even more than I had ever felt. Right after the ring of the morning bell I could tell I was awake, and as the rays of sunshine hit my face I knew I could sleep no more, but the dawn felt unnaturally quiet. I pulled on a purple sweater, my favourite colour, black leggings and a pair of black ballerinas, brushed my teeth probably with the expression of a zombie on my face, dragged myself into the kitchen with mum's coffee and the note with ELEANOR on it, but there was something wrong about that morning. I should have never stood up from that table. Never stridden out of the door or biked to the school. But still I did it, the way as I always did and learned to survive. Before leaving the apartment I applied a layer of lipbalm on my de-hydrated lips and tied my orange hair up and closed the radio. I'm sure there was something wrong about the radio too. Maybe I had really then turned into a zombie.

After getting to school I finally understood why I felt so odd. It must have been one of those days when everything just goes wrong, and the first time I noticed it was when I started checking my pockets for my lipbalm. I always had to have it with me, because my lips had a problem and they never hydrated – it was like torture to me not having one with me. It should have been there, but the thing was, that leggings didn't have pockets, not my sweater either. This was going great.

The second thing driving me crazy was our gym class. Usually I loved gym, it was like my favourite school subject, but this time nothing was just going well. I wished we would have played ice hockey, but they never played it that time of the year. This time we played basketball. I got to be in the front, maybe because of my height. I was actually pretty tall, but the problem was that my hair was sorta wavy, and it always kept on coming on my face, so even though I tried to pull it aside it just kept bouncing wherever it liked to, and made me look like a 12-year old with strawberry blonde pigtails. I could almost always do something to keep my hair out of the way, but this time it seemed impossible. It was like my hair had suddenly its own will or something. And the long, long nightmare was only in its beginning – since about ten crows attacked me on the long break. Birds always seemed to have something against me, maybe it was the way I always smelled like coca cola and they couldn't stand it. That crow attack made me actually think about it, all the birds and stuff. Sometimes when I had been little they had stared me in a strange way, very strange way. I also saw a lot of dead birds. Or then they were just asleep, but it was bright day, and only one person in the world slept in that time – my mother.

Maybe it was just the attack of the crows which gave me another dream. But this dream didn't have a stick in it, no, but actually something as freaky. Ten crows by a little pond on the edge of the road, staring at their own reflections like they were concerned on the cleanness of their feathers. It would have been pretty normal, yes, but as I said, my dreams were never up to no good, and the next day when they started to turn into reality, I knew, that playing with my dreams was no fun at all.