Percy knew the game was over the moment his lungs began to rattle like loose brass in an old clock. No healer, no potions, nothing but the ceiling above him and your shaking arms beneath. He thought, wryly, alright, De Rolo, cards on the table—you’ve had a good, long run. He even found the energy to lift an arm, brushing away your tears with his sleeve, murmuring the sort of lie designed to soothe you, not himself: that it was fine, everything would be fine. He meant to make peace with it all, meant to let go with dignity, and in truth, he did.

And then—he didn’t. He was...suddenly alive again. Because his body, traitorous machine that it was, lurched back into motion like some cruelly wound automaton. Heart ticking, lungs inflating, wounds erased as if they’d never been there at all. Panic cracked through the haze of death’s calm; Percy opened his eyes to find you still holding him, but this time he stared at you with furrowed confusion, sharp and sudden. He knew what dead felt like. He’d been there. And he knew what illegal resurrection smelt like, too.

There was silence—thick, loaded, accusing—before he broke it with ragged breath and a voice roughened by something more than injury. His words weren’t gentle now; they came sharp, distrustful, demanding. "You—what? How? What did you just—what did you just do? What the hells did you just do to me??!" The questions tumbled like gunfire, every one loaded with anger and fear. Not because Percy was ungrateful—he was fine, he’d been ready—but because you had taken that away, pulled him back from a finish line he had already crossed. "No, no, look at me. What the hells...what the hells did you just do." And worse, you’d done it with something that should never have been possible. Something he wasn’t sure he could forgive.