"Percy! Time for school!" Steve called from where he was flipping pancakes in the kitchen. "Percy?!"

"He's not here, Cap." Tony walked in, a cup of cold coffee in his hand. Steve turned to him, confused, his brow furrowed in annoyance.

"Why not? He's got school in 20 minutes." Tony sighed.

"He's not going to school today, Cap, and probably not the next few days either."

"Why not?" The super soldier repeated, plating the pancakes. Tony took a long sip of his coffee.

"We had a talk last night. He's not been dealing with the recent clusterfuck well, or at all, and he needs some time." He held up a hand when Steve opened his mouth to argue. "You can watch the recording if you want, but he needs some time to himself." The captain must have heard something in the engineer's voice, because he stopped working and gave Tony his full attention.

"What's wrong?" His voice was heavy with concern. Tony sighed again.

"He can barely handle everything that's happened recently with the mission, the media and his PTSD. He needs a few days off school, not having to worry about the public and acting normal."

"That's not everything is it?" Steve met Tony's eyes and the genius' face was grim.

"He was considering suicide, Steve."The soldier inhaled sharply. "He wasn't going to do it because he promised Annabeth," every Avenger said her name with reverence now, "but I could tell he wanted to. He wanted to end it, Steve. If it wasn't for her, I think he would've." Steve's expression was  strained as he regulated his breathing.

"Do you know where he is?"
"No, but I can track the watch we gave him if I have to - don't worry, he knows. I don't think we need to though, he wont do anything."
"You're sure?"
"Yeah I'm sure, Steve. We'll have to show the others the video or something later, but the point is that he's going to take a couple of days off school and were going to let him."

"All right." The  soldier gestured to the pancakes. "We'll call the school later, for now, let's eat." He smirked sadly."I'll bet you haven't eaten since lunch yesterday."

 Tony smiled.

"Thanks, Cap." 

XXXXXXXXXXXXXX

The God wandered along the stone path slowly, watching his feet as he did so.

Percy had been living with the grief for a while now. He'd come to realise that, with people who didn't live with grief and trauma as aspects of their everyday lives, after a couple of days - maybe a week at most - people expected you to get over a tragedy.

No. That wasn't quite right: they didn't expect you to be over it (they'd be appalled if you even suggested that), rather they expected you to get on with your life. For your first couple of days you'd be given allowances; allowed moments of peace and respite or forgiven for slip-ups or forgotten details, but then it was forgotten; swept away under the rug of polite society.

At first, for Percy, his grief had been debilitating. A raging fire fit for Hephaestus' forges, then it had become a black hole, absorbing and destroying every aspect of his life. Next it was a raw wound, which sent spikes of crippling pain through him at the slightest touch. Now, it was a dull ache, as though there was a tight band tying his lungs to the back of his spine, which, every once in a while, would pull tight and make it hard to breath.

Of course, there were still moments. Moments when the pain punched him in the gut and he was forced to curl into himself and sob, unable to stop himself for anything from thirty seconds to half an hour to two hours or more as it all became too much all over again.

But he was functioning. He had friends to support him and having a routine - even one as insane as his - helped. He had distractions and duties and causes to fight for again. It wasn't ideal, but it was so much better than it had been that sometimes he simply sat and laughed, unable to believe how much had changed in a few short months.

He sighed as he unlatched and opened the iron gate of the graveyard, past the WW2 memorial and walked to the gravestones. Reading his family's names as he passed, before finally kneeling in front of the last one. He gently laid down simple grey flowers on her grave.

"Hey, Annabeth." He smiled,"It's been a while. I've missed you." He let his tears fall, not even lifting a hand to wipe them away. "I hope Elysium is treating you well. Are you and the others doing OK? I've been doing well with the Avengers and, even though it was kinda hard to trust them at first, I've  made some friends at school." he grinned and laughed, "Yeah, I know. I'm back at school. Piper would love Ella, Thalia probably would too. Frank and Jason would like Matt and I'm pretty sure Hazel, Katie and Juniper would be friends with K/C straight away." He chuckled again, even as the tears got worse. "They're great people, I've been friends with them for a while now and K/C had a hard time with her birth parents so she'd fit right in. Oh, and Rachel would love Ella too, both of them make," he choked, "-made- it their life's mission to do the opposite of their parents."

His composure cracked completely."I really miss you guys. I wish you were here so badly so you could meet my new friends and just to see you again. I-" he sobbed, "I wish you were alive, Wisegirl, I wish you were all still alive." And then he broke down, unable to chain his grief a moment longer.

XXXXXXXXXXXX

Ella crossed her arms tight against her chest and stamped her feet.
"I'm cold." She complained to Chris through her scarf.
"So is everyone else." The other teen replied while he adjusted his brown woollen hat.
"Come on, guys." Matt encouraged his friends. "It'll be fun once you're moving around a bit." Ella glared at him.
"I am not moving."
"Me neither." Chris added and Matt rolled his eyes at them both.

The three teens were standing on the side of a road, surrounded by their peers and a handful of either unlucky or over enthusiastic teachers, where they'd all just climbed out of their coach.
"OK, class, gather around. It's time for the register." Called a teacher who undoubtedly fell into the latter category.

Shuffling forward, the reluctant students made their way to the teacher.
"Olivia?" He started is role call.
"Here."
"Michael?"
"Here."
"Patrick?"
"Yes, Sir."
"Jack?"
"Here."
"Matt?" The names eventually got to the trio of friends.
"Here, Sir."

It continued on like that until the teacher arrived at Percy's name.
"Perseus?"
"He's not here, Sir." Ella answered for the missing teen. The teacher glanced up then nodded as if remembering something.
"Yes, of course. Thank you, Gabriella." The girl ground her teeth at the name. Matt elbowed her playfully.
"Hey, if Percy has to put up with 'Perseus', you can deal with -" She span to face him, pointing a finger at his chest.
"Don't say it." She ordered, but her warning was only met with a snicker.
"Do either of you actually know where he is?" Chris asked in the silence that followed. Ella chewed her bottom lip.

"No. I haven't even been able to text him."
"Well, we know he's rubbish with his phone anyway. He's probably just sick." Matt suggested and the trio was quiet for a moment.
"Yeah, that's probably it." Chris said, but any further conversation was prevented by their chaperones.

"Come on, class! Just through here. Don't forget your cameras and notebooks!" The teenagers groaned, but followed the teacher nonetheless.
"Why do we have to visit a war memorial anyway?" Billy from the other homeroom group muttered mutinously as they trudged along the stone path.

The school group gathered around the memorial, listening to one of their teachers drone about symbolism and figures. It was a fairly a average trip until Billy spoke up again. He tugged out his headphones and stared at something behind the teachers.
"Hey," he pointed, "is that Percy?"

Every student turned in the direction he was pointing, ignoring their teachers until they too turned. There, kneeling by a grave in nothing but a t-shirt and jeans, was a lone figure with inky black hair.

He'd obviously been there for a while, but he didn't look affected by the cold.
"Percy?!" The startled question escaped Ella before she could stop it. The figure's head snapped around and it was him. He froze in shock when he saw his class and they had a clear view of the teen's tear streaked face and exhausted eyes.

"What are you doing here?" Matt called, confused, but the question seemed to snap the kneeling teen out of his shock. Seemingly without thinking about it, he jumped up and ran. He stumbled slightly in the mud as he did so and his desperation to escape was clear. Running from the graveyard, all the grieving teen left behind was a patch of flattened grass and pale grey flowers in front of a carefully cleaned gravestone.

The class; students and teachers alike; stared at one another.
"What just happened?" Matthew asked no one in particular.
"I have no idea." Ella stated, "Let's find out." She started striding towards the grave her friend had been kneeling in front of. Chris grabbed her arm.

"El! We can't just go up and stare at a grave. It's none if our business if he doesn't want to tell us and we're not going to learn anything from one name." He tried to be gentle as he reasoned with her: Ella had always struggled with having a filter and thinking through the consequences of her actions before doing them. She preferred to throw herself into situations head first.

The mixed race teen chewed on her lip.
"But we could research it and we could help him better and I just... I want to know what's hurting our friend, Chris." She implored the student opposite her.

Chris sighed in resignation and let go of her arm.
"Fine, we'll all go when Sir's finished talking, OK? But we don't bring it up unless Percy does. Deal?" His friends nodded and the three of them turned back to the teacher who'd managed to reclaim the class' attention only seconds before.

Later, after Mr Partridge had exhausted every possible topic connected to the memorial and the day had gotten that bit colder, the students were allowed to wander the graveyard and talk amongst themselves.

"For the record, I still think this is a bad idea." Chris reminded his friends even as he followed them. The other students, after watching the scene earlier, had remained curious despite the teachers' attempts to dissuade then and visited the grave themselves. So the trio of friends was forced to wait to see it for themselves.

"Annabeth Chase." Matt read; he spoke carefully, as if sensing the significance. The friends lapsed into a respectful silence foe a while, not knowing quite how to respond now that they were there.
"She was only seventeen." Ella noticed, "Damn..."
"Yeah." Chris breathed.
"That's our age." Matt added, feeling as though it had to be said even though they all knew it.

It was then that the teenager were struck by how young that really is. They would live for another sixty or seventy years, possibly more, but this girl, who was everything to someone, family to someone, would stay dead, would never get past her teens. They'd go on living their lives while she only lived for a fraction of what hers should have been. They couldn't imagine how much worse it must've felt for her loved ones. They didn't want to.

"Do you think she died in that tragedy he told us about?" Ella whispered to Matt. Their words were hushed out of an unspoken respect for the girl they'd never met, but who meant so much much to their friend.
"I don't know, but I think so." Chris suddenly inhaled sharply., causing the others to turn to face him. "What's wrong?" Matt asked him.

Chris, uncomfortable about the entire business, had been looking around at the rest of the graveyard and hasn't made a sound until then.

"The other graves," he said shakily, "they all from the same time, they're all cleaned in the same way and they all have a flower in front of them." The tired teen's friends' gazes moved to the graves and they saw that he was right: every grave was carefully maintained and had a flower in front of them (they didn't know it at the time, but that was Tony's doing, along with the well cut grass, new security cameras at the gates and mysterious donations) and every one had the same year neatly engraved into them.

Ella looked unsure.
"That doesn't necessarily mean..." Chris shook himself. "Come on," he said, "it's really none of our business." Then he pulled them away and they rejoined their class.

The incomplete group didn't talk about what had happened for the rest of the day, but none of them thought about anything else.

A/n:

Hey guys, it's been a while (this is a copy of one of my replies to a comment by the way).

The deal with this story (and most of my stories on Wattpad) is that I've improved my writing astronomically in the last year and a half or so and honestly reading my old work makes me cringe so badly its unreal. To the extent that on other accounts I've simply saved my work to personal file and deleted it from public view. Additionally, any work I do now is normally original work that I want to try to get published one day and consequently can't post.However, despite all that, I do still love all the fandoms (of course) and have a lot of old plans for this so I'm definitely not abandoning any of my stories, at least I don't plan to. So, although it will be excruciatingly slow, I will edit, improve, rewrite and continue most of my work on this account. But it really will be slow because I have studying and exams and other projects which take priority.Thank you all for all your support. I really do appreciate all of it and value all of you.-Sam