《The Half-Blood Games | Percabeth》Chapter 23: Sleep
Advertisement
Eventually, Percy gets to his feet, brushing himself off before extending his hand towards me. Fatigue still runs through my body, but I take his offer, and he pulls me to my feet. I have to use him as a support for a few seconds to stop myself from falling over, my legs feeling like wet noodles.
"What are we going to do now?" he asks as I finally manage to stand on my own.
I take a look at the orange sky. "We should probably find shelter before nightfall."
He shoves his hands in his pockets. "Can't argue with that."
It takes us a little while to find another cave. I was sure that there must be another one near us; the gamemakers always put an abundance of caves in mountains. Watching tributes freeze to death wasn't exactly exciting, so they wanted to make sure that we had some form of shelter.
Percy finds one eventually, just as the sun dips below the horizon. This cave is smaller than our last one, but I couldn't care less. I was happy to have found one at all.
My companion dropped his backpack on the floor and stretched before sitting down. I join him on the ground. He pulls some food out of his bag; roast beef. There's only enough left for one meal, and he doesn't have anything else. This is it.
"The gamemakers won't let two out of the remaining five tributes starve to death," I say in reassurance. Neither of us pointed out the problem, but I could see the question on his face.
"We'll see about that," Percy grins joylessly, but he gives me my half of the beef anyway. We both know that we have to eat tonight if we have any chance of warding off any threats tomorrow. And seeing as we'd just spent the entire day climbing down a mountain, and no cannons were fired, the viewers must be bored. There was no way that tomorrow would be uneventful.
Advertisement
The two of us eat in silence. As the sun sets, a chill kicks in. Despite being at the base of a mountain, it's somehow colder than it was at the top. We have to wrap ourselves in our sleeping bags as we eat, and even then, I can feel the chill in my bones.
A fire is out of the question. Not only would it be a signal flare to the Careers, but the smoke would get trapped in the cave and suffocate us.
By the time we're done, both of us are shivering. There's no way this is natural. The gamemakers must be making it colder. But why?
Realization hits me quickly as I remember one of Blitzen and I's conversations. Your ship name is percabeth.
"Percy?" I ask.
He looks at me. "Yeah?"
"Want to share a sleeping bag tonight?" I suggest. "I'm freezing."
"Seriously?" he tilts his head, a slight smile on his lips. "Didn't notice."
"Shut up," I replied with a huff. This must be what the gamemakers want us to do. It would certainly be entertaining. Besides, the idea of sharing a sleeping bag with Percy wasn't unappealing to me, though I tried not to think about the reason that might be.
Only one of us was going to make it out of her alive. I like Percy, more than I cared to admit, but I couldn't grow too attached. If I was ever going to survive this, he was a sacrifice I'd have to make.
"Well, if that's what you want," he pulled down the zipper and flung his sleeping bag open. "Get in."
I did. There was just enough room for both of us inside, though it was a bit tight. His entire body emitted heat, and I suddenly felt very warm.
Advertisement
He grabbed my sleeping bag and formed a makeshift pillow out of it, placing it under our heads. We both leaned back and stared up at the cave ceiling. It was too dark to make anything out any details, but I could see the blurry forms of stagnates hanging from the rocky surface of the ceiling.
"Annabeth?" Percy says.
"Yeah?" I respond.
"If anything happens to me tomorrow," he breathes quietly. "I just want you to know that I've enjoyed this. Spending time together, I mean. You've made this Hell a little more livable, and I thank you for that."
"What's with the sudden sappiness?" I ask jokingly.
I can almost hear the smile on his lips. "Seriously, though, Annabeth."
"You weren't too bad to hang out with either, Percy," I respond, resting my head in the nook between his neck and shoulder. He wraps an arm around my waist.
There's a certain danger to this, but at that moment, I don't care. His arms are far too comforting for me to be thinking about anything else but him.
"Don't think like that, Percy," I say. "We'll both make it through tomorrow, and however more days are needed after that."
"Yeah," he sighs, but I can tell that he doesn't believe me. Heck, I don't even believe me. Something tells me that this will be the last night I'll spend in this arena.
"Goodnight, Percy," I yawn as I nuzzle my face into the soft skin of his neck, half to please the people in the Capitol, half for myself.
"'Night, Annabeth," his voice is distant, like his mind is elsewhere. I feel the urge to ask him what he's thinking about, but I'm not too sure if I want to know. Knowing him, he's probably thinking about what would happen if it was just the two of us at the end, and that's a thought I don't want to even begin to entertain. I don't know if I'd be strong enough to.
With those words, I close my eyes, trying to use his breathing as a lullaby to rock me to sleep, seeing as there's too much on my mind to ever quiet it by myself.
It doesn't work.
Advertisement
- In Serial40 Chapters
Game Starts With The Scarecrow
“Is there something wrong with the scarecrow? Damn, it killed me within a second…” Player 2: “Is there anything wrong, why is the name of this wild monster more than 40 meters long? Player 3: “F*ck, that guy brought a group of bosses to siege the city again, can’t they give us a chance to live?!” Mo Fan: “Kid, do you have a lot of questions?” …………………… After Mo Fan entered the game, he found that he had become a scarecrow next to the Beginner Village, a wild monster for players to kill and level up. Mo Fan, who had become a wild monster, began to continuously upgrade and level up; he underwent Star Ascension, fused with new bloodlines, and watched as his attributes soared!
8 584 - In Serial10 Chapters
Honey Bun: Awakening
By what right do we exist? Is it something innate – a soul, a birthright, some natural law? Or is existence earned, by deed and attitude? Perhaps neither is the case, and life is merely a cosmic accident. This is a story about a magic bun.
8 205 - In Serial82 Chapters
Kaiba's Prostitute
When CEO Seto Kaiba propositions Joan, she expects a one-night stand, but he and his brother keep coming back for more. Now the Kaiba brothers want an heir from her and will pay any price to get it. How do Joan’s husband and boyfriend feel about her new profession? More importantly, how do they handle public scrutiny? Alternate Summary: CEO Seto Kaiba visits his brother Mokuba's side venture in California and goes on a power trip, threatening to fire Mokuba's best employees and calling the art director's girlfriend a whore. Who will win the ultimate battle for control? Join the Kaiba brothers at the Silicon Valley Game Developers Summit to find out! Cover art by skyward-shoujo on DeviantArt "Men see beauty wherever they can get it. But that's the allure of the Red Light Princess. Like any good whore, she's whoever you want her to be."-- James W. Bodden "The more you love, the more you can love--and the more intensely you love. Nor is there any limit on how many you can love. If a person had time enough, he could love all of that majority who are decent and just."-- Robert A. Heinlein Seto Kaiba is 27, Mokuba Kaiba is 22, and Joan Saunders is 25. Disclaimer: This is a work of fan fiction from the Yu-Gi-Oh! world, which is trademarked by the venerable Kazuki Takahashi. I do not claim any ownership over them. This story is for entertainment and is not part of the official story line. I am not making any money from the creation of this story. However, this work of fiction is blended with many of my original ideas. Names, characters, apps, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of my imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Written to to present both polyamory and sex work in a positive light and to tickle the fantasies of Seto Kaiba fans, mine included.
8 202 - In Serial9 Chapters
The Bronze Players of Recreation
The world of Creation has seen a recent explosion of what can only be called an adventurer’s culture over the past few decades. People who were once looked at as nothing more than lower class mercenaries rose to the ranks of heroes and legends as adventuring became recognized as an idealized lifestyle of overcoming hardship and finding triumph. With the establishment of a guild-based government system on the continent of Terramania, adventurers were soon legitimized and adventuring became a phenomenon universally accepted around the world. Redlette had retreated from this world to live on Earth for the remainder of her years, having been born and outcast by the gods of Creation. However, upon meeting a friend that she treasured dearly, she found herself longing for a return to her world—she wanted to experience it properly and go on adventures with someone whom she holds dear. Putting a plan into action, she meets with her friend, an awkward, nerdy boy by the username of Herring who she’d only known through years of playing online games with him, and invites him to go on this fantastic adventure with her. An adventure in another world had always been an impossible dream for Herring, but when he suddenly found himself with the opportunity to embark on one, he knew it wouldn’t be as simple as books and shows made it out to be. Redlette was notorious for rushing into things without thinking them through, and he was flighty and weak. In the games they played together, they rarely grasped victory. They were losers through and through, both in hobby and life. Despite this, though, he takes the leap and sets off with Redlette into the world of Creation. Together they only had one goal: to have fun and go on the adventure of their lives. This time, they’d establish a guild of their own and be free to take on whatever exploits their hearts desired. This is the story of the founding of their guild. Author’s Notes: -My writing style is largely based off of the absurd amount of light novels I’ve read and anime I’ve watched, so it may come off as cartoonish or exaggerative at times. If that isn’t your thing, I’d steer clear of this story.-Not an MMO story.-No numerical stats.-Relatively slow pacing.-Posts are between 2000-5000 words weekly after Chapter 1. Art Credits: Cover Art, Inserted Art, and Character Designs by @TransFlames on Twitter. World Map and Cover Logo by @figburn on Twitter.
8 140 - In Serial82 Chapters
ငါ့ယောက်ျားက မြွေဖြူရှင်!! (Myanmar Translation)
အောက်တိုဘာလအတွက် ပြင်းထန်တဲ့ဖျားနာမှုက ငါ့ကို ကိုယ်ဝန်ရသွားစေတယ်။ အဲဒါကို အိပ်မက်ဆိုးတစ်ခုလို့ပဲထင်ခဲ့တာ။ငါလုံးဝမထင်ထားခဲ့ဘူး။ ကလေးရဲ့အဖေက မြွေတစ်ကောင်ဖြစ်နေတယ်တဲ့လား?!Myanmar name - ငါ့ေယာက်္ားကေႁမြျဖဴ႐ွင္!!ေအာက္တိုဘာလအတြက္ ျပင္းထန္တဲ့ဖ်ားနာမႈက ငါ့ကို ကိုယ္ဝန္ရသြားေစတယ္။ အဲဒါကို အိပ္မက္ဆိုးတစ္ခုလို႔ပဲထင္ခဲ့တာ။ငါလုံးဝမထင္ထားခဲ့ဘူး။ ကေလးရဲ႕အေဖက ေႁမြတစ္ေကာင္ျဖစ္ေနတယ္တဲ့လား?!Authors - 禾旁×妄北Alternative name- 十月蛇胎, Shi Yue She Tai , October Snake FetusMyanmar name - ငါ့ယောက်ျားကမြွေဖြူရှင်!!- All credit to original Author, Artists and English translators.
8 307 - In Serial12 Chapters
Pixie Dust Away
The crew is excited that they can use Pixie Dust all day but Izzy falls over and she loses all of her pixie dust. Will she be okay? (This is my own version)
8 165

