In the aftermath of monsters – in losing her home, her eye, her mother – the name finally fades. She loses herself in a whirlwind that is equal parts understanding and misery. Bianca is told who she is and why she is and that there are many people like her. On the surface she accepts it, but some place in the back of her soul knows they aren’t going deep enough.
It is because of Percy Jackson that she almost changes for good. He is her Savior, Mentor, and above all – her brother. Her godly brother who teaches her to fight and shoot and bend the tides –he teaches her to be powerful and human.
It is when he teaches her that dreams have meaning that Bianca learned it was Percy, not the imaginary Nico, she had always dreamt of.
There couldn’t possibly be two people on earth so powerful, broken, and lonely.
…
On nights at the beach, when the stars align just right, Percy would talk about heroes. He would talk about the dead sons and daughters of gods and their too-young also-dead sons and daughters and the three wars he managed to live through even though his hair wasn’t yet gray. To each hero, he dedicates a books-worth of stories all told in reverse: from their last quest to the moment he met them.
Because of this, Bianca couldn’t blame him for taking so long to get to Nico. His is a long story that takes the whole night, and Bianca is half asleep by the time the hero who was lost to Tartarus becomes a boy with a card came and a dead sister. At this, Bianca wakes up.
And then Bianca wakes up.
…
She is too young to go on her own, she didn’t need to be told. Bianca knows entire stories about demigods who had died going on her own. However, Bianca was just old enough to not care about permission.
The night before she leaves, she dreams of the story Percy would tell much later – somehow making the foolish girl who left for Tartarus sound heroic down to the moment he pulled her from the rubble of her home. She dreamt of oblivion and straws, and of becoming a regret among thousands of regrets that Percy would reach for on his way to the next life.
But that regret would have a name and a soul that weren’t hers. Percy had never known her as Bianca, but as a daughter of Posiedon by a different name and mother. As she walked through the early morning shadows she felt the Bianca history had known –
and that Nico now depended on.
…