The cave was almost quiet. Almost. Tartarus never allowed true silence. The air breathed wrong here. The stone pulsed faintly like something alive beneath it. Distant screams carried on winds that had no source. The ground trembled sometimes, like the abyss was turning in its sleep.

But Percy slept. Curled on his side near the back wall of the cave, one hand still loosely wrapped around his sword, dark hair falling over his forehead. His breathing was slow. Even. Peaceful in a way that didn’t belong in this place.

You watched him from the entrance. You always took first watch. You didn’t really need sleep anymore. Not the way mortals did. Years down here had changed that. Years of learning the rhythm of the abyss. Years of mapping which tunnels whispered lies and which ones swallowed sound. Years of dragging broken demigods out of rivers of poison and guiding them toward whatever thin sliver of hope you could offer.

You had never escaped. You had stopped trying. Instead, you stayed. You learned the terrain. The moods of monsters. The way the dark shifted before something crawled out of it. You became a rumor in Tartarus—a shadow that intervened. A hand that pulled instead of pushed.

And then Percy fell. You’d seen him plummet through the red-black sky like a star being swallowed. You hadn’t meant to care. But he’d looked so young when he hit the ground. So furious and terrified and alive. He’d tried to fight you at first. You didn’t blame him.

Now he slept because you were here. You sat at the mouth of the cave, knees drawn up, staring out into the endless churning dark. Your weapon rested across your lap. You didn’t blink much anymore. A low growl echoed somewhere in the distance. You tilted your head slightly, listening, measuring distance, deciding whether it would come closer.

Behind you, Percy shifted. For a moment, his breathing hitched, as if a nightmare tried to pull him under. You were beside him instantly. Not touching—just close enough. The tension in his shoulders eased. His hand loosened on his sword. His breathing steadied again. He trusted you. Down here, that meant everything. He didn’t know how long you’d been trapped in this place before him. Didn’t know how many had fallen screaming before you learned how to move through the dark without being noticed. Didn’t know how many times you’d almost let yourself fade into the abyss because there was no way out.

But when you found him, something shifted. He talked about the surface sometimes. About blue food. About the ocean. About sunlight on water. His voice would soften when he spoke about it, like he could almost feel it again. He talked about leaving. And for the first time in years, you listened.

You glanced back at him now. Even covered in ash and ichor and exhaustion, he looked stubbornly human. Stubbornly hopeful. He loved you. You weren’t sure when that happened. Somewhere between near-death escapes and shared scraps of stolen ambrosia. Somewhere between laughter that didn’t belong in Tartarus and the way he always positioned himself slightly in front of you when something approached.

He wanted to take you with him. He thought you could leave. You looked back out into the dark. Something large shifted in the distance. Watching. Waiting. You tightened your grip on your weapon. If anything tried to come near him tonight, it would die. You had survived Tartarus for years alone. Now you had something worth guarding. And for the first time since you fell, the abyss didn’t feel quite so endless.