Percy Jackson had never exactly been an expert on how to stay alive, but he was pretty sure they were doing it wrong.

Not that he had much say in the matter because he was reason number one that they were all in this mess in the first place. Or maybe it was his Father, the actor Posideon. Thousands of dollars worth of reasources going to track down the Monsters. It might have just been easier to parade Percy down the street with a red target on his back and hand out guns to every person on the street.

Once upon a time he had been Percy Olympia. But when he moved, they changed his last name, his personality, his eating habits. They couldn't change anything more than that: Percy wouldn't let them. He didn't want to wake up and have to struggle to remember what his father looked like. He was after all, a spitting image of the man. Grover had looked at him and nodded.

"Okay," He had said, nonchalant, "We'll keep the look."

That was the first time he remembered seeing the guy, even though he knew his dad had introduced them a few times before. Grover worked for him and had charmed Percy's mother enough that she had invited him over for dinner once or twice.

Percy didn't recall liking the guy before that moment. The moment when Grover Underwood sat down next to him so he was lower than the hospital bed Percy was on, told him what had happened softly, and asked Percy to trust him.

"I'm trying." Percy had said. Always trying.

Juniper had ruffled his hair and told him he needed a cut, when Grover first introduced her. Percy had liked her, but maybe it was because she smiled the same way his mother did, with her eyes shining and her dimples obvious.

He wondered if they were standing at that Police line right now, hand in hand, with stress stealing the years of their lives away. He wondered if he survived, if they made it out, if he got to see tomorrow's brilliant sunrise, if Grover and Juniper would be anything more than bone dry skeletons.

Percy did a head count. Annabeth, with her blonde hair and stressed mind; Piper with her bullet wound and door opening skills; Hazel with her secret passages; Thalia with her growning need of revenge on the Monsters. Jason seemed like he had gone into a mental numbness, as if he couldn't take the trauma anymore. Frank rubbed his temples.

They were down to seven.

They had half a plan,

They stared at each other, barely daring to breathe. Piper stared at her hands. They were shaking, Percy noticed.

"Do you think we can make it?" Annabeth whispered finally breaking the silence. Her voice was barely more than a whimper. Percy remembered how he had accidentally insulted her when they first met, back when she was pushing into a backstory he had been trying to keep quiet.

Always trying.

He remembered how the halls had been full and she had come charging after him with a determinded look in her eyes and a confident smile when she shoved a microphone in his face and asked all the questions a good reporter would ask. And he had blurted the first thing that had come to his mind.

"What are you trying to do? Stalk me?"

He was trying to be funny. To get her to back off.

She didn't look anything like that Annabeth anymore. She looked like her mind was running thier chances of survival and it was getting smaller with every second. She looked like she had read a dozen articles on school shootings and come to the conclusion that they weren't going to make it and she wanted it just to be over.

Thalia pulled her hair behind her head in a tight squeeze before letting it fall again, "No." She answered, "I think our luck has run out."

Percy snorted, "We had luck to begin with?"

Hazel leaned into Frank. "I'm tired." She said.

Piper nodded in agreement. "I feel like we've been doing this for years." She swallowed hard, "It's been eight hours." She glanced up at the ceiling, inhaling sharply. Percy thought she was jsut trying to hold back tears, "Reyna, Nico, Coach....This is what we agreed, isn't it? None of us mattered if we could just get Princess Reyna out of this Hell?"

"Why do you think they are doing this?" Frank asked. "What do the Monsters have to gain? What is so important that someone would agree to take a life for it?" He stared out the window at the police line.

"Money?" Thalia offered, "People would kill for money. And Power."

He shook his head, "But where does that get you? You can have all the money in the world, all the power in the world and you still only need six feet to lay your corpse in.   Why do we fight wars? Why do people fight at all?"

Percy sighed softly. He scanned Frank's face for a moment trying to come up with an answer to the question he was sure Frank didn't want an answer to at all. Percy had been dealing with the Monsters for a good long time now. But he had thought after the arrest of Kronos and Krios, the threat would have died. It seemed that it had only ever grown.

So why had it grown? Why had they become so bold to take on a high school and kill kids?

"It makes sense now." Thalia said suddenly, "Why Luke chose Zoe over me. They're both crazy."

Annabeth sat back on a desk causing it to creak, "Hey Thals?" a whisper of a smile ghosted her face, "I think you dodged a bullet there."

Thalia let out a breathy exhale that mimicked a laugh. "Something's bothering me, though."

"What?"

"Remember how I punched Zoe this morning?"

Percy thought for a moment, "Right, and Zoe came in to get the trainers keys for ice." He nodded at the desks, "I was sitting right over there. And Jason was there. Ethan was behind us. Zoe said it was a "misunderstanding"."

Thalia twitched her lips downwards, "Sure. She came up to me at my locker, and told me I needed to leave. Like leave the school. Like we were friends. I punched her. But why would she warn me to leave? She's nearly killed us a million times by now."

"Nearly." Annabeth repeated, tasting the word on her tongue. "What if she wasn't trying to?"

"Are you suggesting that Zoe is....pretending to try and kill us?" Percy said. It sounded ridiculous. Stupidly ridiculous. That was the type of desperate thinking that people got to when they had no other options.

They had options, right? They had things they could do. Percy wasn't ready to admit that they were out of ideas: they had half of a plan already! They were going to find Hazel's bomb shelter and they were going to bunker down  and they would find a way to let the police know they were alright and they could storm the building and and and....

Percy wondered if that plan was any more serious than the idea that Zoe was on their side. Zoe had, after all, killed a boy sitting in the first row of this room for no reason other than he looked at her.

He glanced out the window at the tiny figures in the distance. He couldn't help but think that the monsters had cornered themselves into a box here. That all it would take was a single bomb dropped on them and it would be over. They would be dead but so would the monster's most powerful members. If an act like that didn't outright destroy the gang, it would as least rally the world against them. Everyone loved to avenge dead kids.

It was that moment that Thalia chose to start laughing, her voice shaking  and wobbling with heavy hit misery. Her fingers carted through her short black locks gripping at the ends and tugging loosely.

"I was supposed to graduate." She said suddenly, "I blew off two parties to stay home and study so that I would past those motherfucking midterms so I could graduate this year. I--I was looking at this nice all girls school across state. Damnit!" She muffled another laugh with her hand, until she was biting down on her fist.

Annabeth sighed at the ceiling, "Do you think they give back my money on that architecture camp I signed up for over the summer?"

"Architecture?" Frank repeated, "You're into architecture?"

She smiled wryly. "Yeah. This school doesn't have an architecture club so I threw myself into journalism. I was going to design my own home one day. A mall complex? A hotel? I was going to be famous."

"Being famous sucks," Piper huffed a bit, but it was more resigned than prudence. "People are so nosy, so annoying. I couldn't even help out at the food bank without the sharks pressing me to find out what I got out of it. I only ever wanted my dad to pay attention and notice me for me."

The room was silent for a moment. Percy couldn't find the will to break it, but Frank seemed blurt out words before even thinking about it.

"I didn't have any plans," He admitted sheepishly. "It's just with my mom, and Mrs. Iris, and my grandmother... I always thought there would be..." He gave a half shrug. 

"We should go."

Percy was surprised by his own voice. A few pairs of eyes turned to him but he kept his gaze on the floor. There were scratch marks where the desk had been moved over the years, visible dirt from so many student shoes in the room. It was silly and dumb but the very idea of other people, of someone not trying to kill them or having secrets, made his throat start to swell and his eyes blur with tears.

Part of him wanted to hate humanity. Part of him wanted to die and be done with it. Part of him was done grasping for straws and pretending to be strong only to come up short when it mattered.

Percy acknowledged it, understanding it on a level that was deeper than ever before, but then he let it go. In the room full of strangers he couldn't hate other human beings. He had seen Annabeth stressed and angry and despondent. He'd seen Thalia at wits end, Frank toughen himself up to take a blow not meant for him. Percy had seen Leo Valdez take a knife for another kid, seen an adult attempt to keep a promise none of them had expected him to keep.

"Are we going to go?" He asked them, "Is it worth it?"

"Worth it?" Hazel spoke up, confused. "isn't any chance better than no chance? What do we have to gain from hiding in here?"

Thalia and Percy shared a look, but neither of them said what they were thinking because it didn't matter. It got them minutes more, an hour, two, or it got them dead very fast. It was a guessing game, a gambit with their lives that they had been playing for so long today they had realized the cost in the long run: summer camps, futures, dreams.

It was dumb and stupid and and and--

"Jason," Piper said, then softer, "Jason?"

At some point he ended up staring silently, accusatory at his palm. They were dried with a dark brown, blood that he hadn't been able to wipe off on his pants. He didn't offer any signal that he heard her, that he was even in the room at all.

"Jase," Thalia snapped in her short, direct tone. She kicked her foot at him bumping his hands and jarring his entire body. It was only then that he finally moved, just a twitch, a blink, and his irises set back on her. 

Percy expected her to say something comforting, something a sister would say. An "are you okay?" or "hang in there."  Instead she tilted her head to the side and grabbed him by his wrists. Her fingers pressed to his inside wrists were his pulse would be. He followed her movement wordlessly with his eyes.

"Wipe that stupid look off your face," She commanded.

"It's my fault," He croaked.

"It's nobody's goddamn fault." Her words were a breeze, effortless. "We're done with the blame game. We're done with games in general. Do you hear me?"

Percy thought he saw a flash of the same Jason in his eyes, a flash of the boy who had stood between him and Zoe at the beginning on this and only moved when Percy told him to. Of the boy who had been trying to navigate his sister's broken heart and the drama of school and trying to be perfect at everything. They were two sides to the same coin and if Jason had become this, then Percy didn't want to know what he was becoming. 

"I said, do you hear me Jason Grace?"

Jason nodded, slowly, and let out a shuddering breath. "I don't want to die."

"No shit, Sherlock." Thalia's crooked grin reached the rest of them. The room lightened a tad, but Percy wasn't sure if it was because of her renouncing his stating of the obvious or because her obsolete slang.

"Fuck off, Watson." Jason's lips twitched and he looked down again. 

Percy didn't think they were alright, or even going to be alright. But at least they could hold on to each other. 

"Let's go," Thalia said, with a tone stronger than before, "Let's go and find this hideaway of Hazel's. Let's go talk about what we are going to do over the summer. Lets go make an effort to live."

"Why?" Jason asked, but he was already letting Thalia pull him up.

"We've spent all this time playing everyone else's games." Piper was the one that spoke up next, placing a hand on Jason's shoulder for support. "We were together because everyone around us thought it was what we should do. You got me flowers I don't like, chocolate I don't eat, and you spent all day practicing sports you don't have a passion for. Aren't you tired of it? Of doing what others want?"

He didn't nod, but the look on his face was clear. 

"It's Hell out there," he said.

It drew a laugh from Percy as he stood up with Annabeth by his side. The Seven of them were all face to face now, stupid, dumb, and far too young to die. Percy didn't think he even had a good picture to go in the obituaries when it happened.

Piper was the first one through the door, cautious and nervous, like a stray cat. Frank and Hazel were next just because they were closer and they didn't seem to leave each other's sides. Annabeth was after them, her fists calm but her gaze stormy. Thalia gathered Jason after her, and Percy followed last wondering vainly if they'd ever see another classroom interior again.

Nonetheless, he placed a first on Jason's shoulder, mustering a smile that was probably more of a grimace. "Look at it this way," He told them, in a hushed voice that did not carry in the hallway, "This means that actual Hell can't be any worse, right?"

He sent a silent pray out to Grover and Juniper, as if they had a mental communications link. Wherever they were, what ever they were doing, he hoped that when it was over they'd understand at least that he'd kept his promise; He was going to keep trying. To live, to trust them, to be himself.

And if he died, at least he was surrounded by friends.