Three days later, I stepped off the plane in Yokohama, Japan. Zeus had, surprisingly, kept his word and let me fly freely to the country of my choice. There wasn't even any turbulence. Luggage check-in was a waste of time, since everything I own fits in a carry-on sized backpack. But, there was one place I needed to stop by before leaving the airport.
The ATM transaction was simple enough that even someone with my seaweed brain could comprehend it. The only problem was how time consuming it was. Each machine could only give you so much Yen in exchange for American Dollars, so I had to go to several in the airport, my ADHD making it harder and harder to keep focused on such a repetitive task.
I left the airport and just started walking. I had no plans and no idea where I was or where I was going. I didn't mind that though, this was the first taste of true freedom that I've ever gotten in the fourteen years I've been alive. The rest of my life has been filled with Smelly Gabe, gods, and monsters dictating how my life would be run. Taking away my choices. All I needed right now was a library or a bookshop. I've gotten okay at reading and writing Japanese, but learning it from a book is different from truly speaking it or reading it.
I managed to stumble across a small bookshop, tucked neatly between a shoe and a clothing store. When I walked in, the woman at the front desk, most likely the owner, looked at me with tourist eyes. It was a look that those of us who live in New York and other often visited tourist destinations shared, no matter the city or country. I looked down at my shirt, feeling slightly ashamed for receiving such a look. I was wearing my camp shirt: Camp Half-Blood * Long Island Sound. She wasn't wrong to assume, most people wearing English shirts are tourists. But I didn't really qualify for that position anymore. Tourist are temporary visitors, I was a runaway teen wanted for murder back home and here to stay
Ignoring the woman and her piercing gaze, I walked over to the novel section of the store. Most of the books were simple paperbacks with familiar covers or overdone tropes, but one strangely caught my eye. I remember a song that the Stoll brothers used to sing until Chiron banned it from camp, something about all the dumb ways to die. Though the brothers must have modified it to fit demigods since whichever mortal that wrote it wouldn't have thought to add mintators or "challenge an Olympian god" to their list.
The book was titled The Complete Guide to Suicide. A crude title to put simply but who was I to judge. Without thinking too much on it, I picked up the book and leafed through it, surprised to find just how many things I have done in my life that have made it into this book. Demigod life is weird. I bought the book, receiving a worried look from the store owner. But her pity was useless, I wasn't planning on killing myself, not really, I just wanted to get a good laugh out of the strange book. It's not like I would ever use it seriously.
—
I'd been in Japan for a few months now, long enough that I didn't think of camp all that much anymore. After sleeping on the streets for a few days, I moved to Yokohama's slums, Suribachi City. It was a strange city built into a crater left behind by an explosion seven years ago. The city was deep enough that depending on where you were, the sunlight might never reach you. The sea, which could be seen from almost everywhere in this part of japan, could never be gazed upon from within Suribachi City. it was its own little world. The slums were not the cleanest of places, but they were warm. Nights were getting colder as winter drew closer, fall already almost done with. At least in the slums, there were always fires burning.
Food was scarce in the slums, but that wasn't anything new to me. Any fat or muscle I'd managed to put on since Smelly Gabe's death was gone in no time. I felt weak in a way that I hadn't since I was in elementary school. Even so, being here was better than any jail cell that the police would have thrown me in back in New York. The people here were more aware of everything, always watching their step to avoid crossing any of the organized crime syndicates that roamed the area. Pickpocketing here wouldn't work, at least not the way that I did it back in the city.
News of a new illness spread through the slums in the middle of winter. No one knew just how bad it was, but soon it had spread through almost all of the tightly packed city. Everyone in the city either had it or knew somebody that did. At the peak of its spread that winter, one of the people living next to where I'd set up camp, cme down with the unnamed plague. The man and most of his family died within the next few days, but just living this close to them allowed for the highly contagious disease to spread to me.
The first sign was a fever, blinding and violent. My skin felt like flames were constantly licking at it, the flames dancing horrifically on my skin. It felt like someone had thrown me into a vat of lava, just cool enough I wouldn't die right away. I tried walking, tried moving away so that the people near me wouldn't have to die with me, but just ended up crumbling to the ground as my head spun and delirium set in. Not long after, my eyes began to swell shut, my throat closing up. Most people that died from the illness didn't really die from the plague itself, but from coughing and choking on their blood in their sleep. The aches that took over the body made it too hard to move even if they had been awake.
When the aches set in, I accepted my fate. No one really survived this, not from what I'd seen anyways, I wasn't going to be an outlier. I don't know if it was day or night, my eyes to swollen to see, but I told myself it was night. Dying at night, under the stars in a foreign city seemed like a beautiful concept to me. It was something much more peaceful than I could have hoped for back at camp where even trees weren't safe from the claws of war. When my breathing slowed and my head dropped to the side, my struggle to keep it up gone, a smile curled on my lips, death would finally come for me. No more losing anything that I've worked to obtain, no more fighting to survive, starving at home or on the streets, no more killing.
Just peace.
Everything became still as dreams danced across my vision for the first time in months. This feeling... nothing in life could really compare. Not anymore
—-
Sometime later, I felt my body shift. I tried to open my eyes, surprised to find that the left one actually would. There was an old man in a hazard suit pulling on my leg. Behind him was a pile of bodies. The government had sent someone to care for the dead before the disease could spread past Yokohama. My leg was still stiff with aches, but the pain had lessened enough to allow me to kick the man's hand away with my other foot. He stumbled away, a brief scream escaping his throat as the man clutched his chest. I held up my hands, using my little energy to shoot the man the bird. He ran off, taking the dead bodies with him.
A sense of grief gripped my heart when I realized what this meant: I hadn't died. I remembered the way I'd felt when I thought I was going to, the way all my problems seemed to finally slip away. There were no worries or struggles in those moments. I missed the feeling. Living a life where everyone you allow yourself to love would just leave you or be taken from you, where everything you want is lost the moment you finally have it. Living a life with no real reason to continue it just didn't seem worth the pain, the agony, anymore.
Maybe it never did.
I've always been frustratingly careless with my life, finding no worth in it, maybe I'd just been living to realize that I wanted the peace of dying. Maybe I've just been living to die.
My book bag had fallen to the side, I went to grab it but something felt off. The picture was distorted and blurrier than it should be. It was like I was taking a vision test. I lifted my hand to my eyes, the left one was still swollen and irritable, but it was open. The right one was still swollen shut. I brushed the problem to the side, it would heal eventually.
Weeks later, my left eye was back to normal, but my right eye was still all but blind even when open.
—
Mine has been a life of much shame. Of much suffering.
When you spent your entire life fighting just to survive in a world that seemed bent on killing. It made you wonder what you were even fighting for to begin with. In my life, I've never gotten the chance to be a kid, not really. I don't even know what it feels like to truly be one. Are you even human if you were never a kid? Can you even be called that? When you were born into the life of a demigod, you're born into a life of pointless fighting. Of killing monsters and obeying the gods' whims just for the monsters to regenerate some time later and the gods to live forever and use someone else.
Tiredness had sunken deep into my bones. Exhaustion, yes, but also just general tiredness. Tired of fighting, killing, stealing, and being hunted. Tired of being accused of crimes I haven't even committed just because something was trying to kill me. I was tired of life. Tired of this thing that someone has deemed to call living.
Everyone out there was running around with some deep sense of purpose. Maybe it was just to live to the next day, or something greater like becoming a doctor. But I had nothing like that, not anymore. If my mother was still alive, I would've lived for her. But she's gone. Thalia should have already gone through with the prophecy at this point. New York and the rest of the western world wasn't in flames yet, so I can only assume she led the gods to victory. The gods who haven't tried to kill her for just existing yet like they have me. Maybe it doesn't even matter if she failed. I don't think I can bring myself to care either way. All I know is that completing that prophecy has been my purpose, but now it's lost to the flow of time.
When your life has been debated by a group of deities right in front of your eyes, is it even your's to live, or are you just passing time until someone finally says that you can rest now? That your fight is over?
When the scars on your body grow, when you add to them with your own hands, is it even worth living to just destroy yourself more? My arms were a torn story that everyone could see. Filled with deep cuts from swords, claws, spears, arrows. From me.
When you're not even mortal, do you have the right to call yourself human?
All these thoughts swirled in my head, they danced there singing a deadly duet. They led me to a bridge in the middle of the night. At least I'm smart enough to do this when anyone that would have tried to save me is long asleep. The only people up at this hour were the ones belonging to the criminal underworld of this city. None of them would save a child from doing something like this. From killing themselves.
The bridge was tall enough to kill any mortal the moment that they hit the water down below. This spot felt like coming full circle in a way, I was born from mortals and the sea and to the sea I would return. No one should've let something with the heart of the ocean, restless and forever changing, live on the earth. Not when life on earth felt like a prison. My bag was safely on the ground behind me, on the safe side of the railing. Someone else could have the things in there, I wouldn't be needing them. My demigod powers that would have let me survive this fall were gone. Being here, in Japan, was too far outside the realm of the gods' influence. This fall would surely kill a mortal, and now I was just as weak as one.
The wind blew strongly, encouragingly almost, as I stood there on the dangerous side of the railing. Maybe I was waiting to realize some reason, something to keep me alive, but there was nothing to find. My hair had gotten longer since I ran away. It fell in front of my eyes, nearly obscuring all my vision between it and my blind right eye. Maybe that's why I didn't notice the girl making her way to my side, staying on the safe side of the railing. Maybe I just didn't care enough to be aware of my surroundings anymore.
The girl was blonde, with long flowing hair and a colorful red dress that screamed money in many ways. Something about her was unsettling as she made herself known, clearing her child-like throat. I startled slightly at the noise, my hand instinctively reaching into my pocket, to Riptide. I turned to look at the girl, spinning my body so my back was to the water down below. Something about the girl was off, alien almost, but I couldn't quite place it. Something about gave off the impression that she wasn't quite human.
Was this how people felt when they looked at me?
"If you're going to jump," the girl started, leaning forward on the rail dangerously, "you might consider doing my friend a favor first." the girl was eerily calm as she stared at me waiting for an answer. Something told me this was not how she usually acted, she seemed like the brattish type. But this situation was delicate, so she was too. Though why a girl that looked three years younger than me knew to be calm in a situation like this, I didn't know.
I smiled at the girl, a fake well practiced smile that had fooled my teachers into believing that everything was okay back home. "Tell you what," I took one of my hands off the railing, "I'll make you a deal, if I survive the fall, I'll help that friend of yours."
A strange look filtered across the girl's face. I didn't waste the time to try and place it. My other hand had already let go of the railing as I was talking to her. I leaned back, letting gravity take me. Maybe it was cruel to make a young girl watch this, but her trauma wasn't my problem. The wind flowed around my body the way that water used to, chilling me as I fell. I watched for a moment as the railing became smaller, but as I was about to close my eye, the sight of a figure kept it open.
The girl had jumped after me.
She was glowing slightly, a pinkish hue encasing her. She fell faster than I did, like some force was pushing her down. Her hand was outstretched, latching onto my bare wrist. I'd thought her touch would feel warm, like another person's, instead it felt like nothing. The girl pulled at me, slowing both our momentums down forcefully. But just as quickly as she had done that, as the trumpet smile had morphed the girl's face, a blind blue light exploded between us.
The girl disappeared with the light as I hit the water.