"caffeine and praise like wind in my sails
trying and failing to quit biting my nails
keep moving to silence the voices in my head"
or
florence jackson finds herself
helping her younger brother
percy save the world and possibly
their mother.
[ fem!o...
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THERE WAS something special about sitting in the back of a dimly lit truck with smelly animals that just resonated with Florence. She couldn't imagine herself anywhere else... and she wasn't lying... this time.
She honestly couldn't imagine being in her apartment, she definitely wasn't going to sit at her mother's with her horrible boyfriend, and she didn't want to be at Camp Half-blood even though she would have been welcomed then. She would rather struggle with Percy and his friends in plain sight than be alone with no one to console her. Yeah, neither was ideal. She was on the brink of graduating from college and took the week off because her mother was missing and the people at Berkeley understood that. But now? Florence was in some sort of mental fog.
Her boyfriend was suddenly not communicating with her as much as she hoped, her mother was still missing and in the Underworld, she was having dreams about Percy dying, and she just didn't know what to do with herself. Yes, she could fix the whole boyfriend thing by just talking to Matthew, but how could she when he was cutting their call as quickly as they started? She had no one to talk to about this and she just didn't know what to do about it.
Maybe she could just pretend it wasn't happening. She could close her eyes for just a moment and just pretend that everything was fine. Just close her eyes and pretend that the gods weren't out to kill her and her brother, that she was a kid again and at home. Just close her eyes and pretend that she, Percy, and her mother were sitting by the window and sipping hot chocolate. Just a moment to-
"Florence."
She couldn't tell you the last time slept. Maybe it was on the train where she and Percy were stabbed, but then again, she didn't know if she slept then either. She didn't even know if had been asleep when Percy called her name. All she knew was that she had been looking over at him when he called.
"Are you okay?" He asked.
Florence cleared her throat and nodded her head, shifting her weight so that she would properly be sitting upright. The longer she lied to him about how she had been, the less he would worry about her.
