Bandages and Salt (PJO x BSD)

The first thing I noticed when I woke up was that I was not dead. I'd been to the Underworld before, and while some people might consider this place hell, it was not the real thing. I was strapped down on a medical bed, my hands pinned to my sides, unable to move. Suicide watch, smart. Not that I would if I wasn't, my entire body roared in pain just at the thought of moving. This pain too told me that I was alive. Chemical smells wafted through the air, revealing that I was in some type of medical facility.

My skin felt strange against the bed. Where sheets should've been soft and cool, they felt slightly rough, containing almost. There was a bandage covering my right eye, shielding it from the harsh lighting. From what I could tell, there were bandages covering my arms and torso too. I suspected that if I were to remove them, I would find bruises lining my skin. Whichever doctor I have probably put them there because some older wounds reopened when I hit the water.

There were clothes on me, fancy clothes almost. A nice dress shirt and dress pants. These were the nicest clothes that I'd ever worn. Someone must have changed me into them when I was brought here. This just added to my assumption that I was not in a real hospital, but some type of facility instead.

There was a man, a doctor judging by his long white coat, standing in the shadows observing me as I took everything in.

"I survived then," it wasn't a question, so the doctor didn't treat it as such. Maybe in this moment, I should have been feeling grateful to be alive. Instead I was just wondering how long it would be before I could leave here and try again, this time without pesky interference

The doctor stepped closer, bringing himself into the light where he could be better seen. His coat swayed slightly with him. The man wore a formal shirt and pants instead of scrubs like doctors back home. He had shoulder length black hair commonly found throughout Japan. Everything about the man was average, boring even, except for his eyes. The man possessed a pair of purple eyes, a color no human should have. More interesting though, was the intelligence those eyes held. The startling intelligence in those eyes was comparable to that of Athena. He looked like he was already screaming three steps ahead. This man is dangerous.

Maybe he will be the one to kill me.

"You were brought here after a suicide attempt," the doctor stated simply. "Before that, you made a deal with my Elise. Do you remember it?" he questioned.

I thought for a moment, remember the blonde girl on the bridge, she must be Elise. "I said I would help her friend if I survived," I stopped and looked at the man fully, "I'm guessing that's you." the doctor just nodded, pleased. "So what do you need me to act as a witness to?" I asked the man as if I was asking for the day of the week.

The man's eyes widened in surprise, but he quickly schooled his features back into a neutral expression. But his gaze on me felt different, almost like he was impressed with me. "How do you figure?"

I resisted the urge to roll my eyes at the man, he was tiring. Instead of just confirming my suspicions or calling me a fool like everyone else, he wanted me to explain my thought process. "A suicidal teenager who no one will miss and just kill himself after completing whatever recording of the events it is that you need me to do has fallen into your lap. What else would you need me for?" I didn't bother looking at the doctor anymore, the ceiling was much more interesting than him at this moment. "Besides, if you wanted me to commit a c rime that you couldn't, which I wouldn't say is many, then you would have found a common criminal, not a suicidal child."

I looked back at the man, my expression dead. The doctor smiled in a way that could have almost been described as warm if it weren't for the glint in his eyes. He found me interesting, it seemed. I'm not sure how I feel about that. "You're correct," the doctor said. "How strange," the last part was said in little more than a whisper.

"My turn," I interjected. If the doctor got to ask questions, then so did I. "The girl, Elise was it, what is she? Why did she disappear when I touched her?"

The man had a look on his face akin to that of a raccoon that had found something shiny and latched onto it. He knew something that I didn't, something important. "Do you know what ability users are?" the doctor asked.

I thought for a moment, the topic had always irked me since I came here. Ability users were gifted, they all possessed some type of supernatural ability. Most people didn't even think they really existed. And yet the one thing that everyone seemed to agree upon when it came to them was that almost no ability user had the exact same ability. Ability users and demigods were something different from each other because of that small fact. Demigods have common powers that come from their godly parents. The fact that abilities almost never repeat means that gifted were something else entirely.

"I've heard about them in the slums some, but no one has given me a straight answer as to what they really are," I explained. "Whenever I would ask, they always just brushed me off. The people there always just said they were rumors, myths made up and not worth spending time wondering about."

"Ability users are those born with an extraordinarily powerful gift," the doctor explained, "some gifted can manipulate time, some can heal people from the absolute brink of death, some can even see into the future."

A thought came to me, as swift and sure as a lightning strike, "Elise is an ability, isn't she? Was the blue light calling her back?" It was a wild guess,but judging by the doctor's approving gaze, it was at least half right. "What did I get wrong?" I asked him, genuinely curious to know. I felt like I was back in Chiron's class, trying to prove that his interest in me wasn't as much of a waste as I thought it was. That I wasn't a waste.

The doctor pulled up a stool, taking a seat next to my bedside. "Elise is an ability," he started, "but I wasn't the one to call her back. When she's in that form, I can't force her to do anything." The doctor sounded tired, like a man who's been run ragged fighting for control for years, he probably has.

"Elise is sitentent, or at least something close to it, isn't she. That's what you mean by you can't call her back in that form. You can only ask her to do things, but can't force her to actually do any of them when she's in something akin to a human form with human emotions," I analyzed. The doctor smiled at me approvingly. That look was enough to tell me that I was right about my assumptions. I felt my brows furrow slightly, not that it'd be easy to tell given the bandages on my face. I had a theory, a few actually, but I thought it best to wait it out.

"Correct, good job." a small flood of warmth rushed through at those words. I've been praised for my intelligence before, only combat abilities and success in battle. In school, everything was hard, I was always six steps behind, not being able to easily read what was right in front of me. At camp, I was still behind, not knowing enough of the Greek myths to even keep myself alive on my own. But this, this was all me. "Any other observations?"

I thought back to the fall. "Elise had a pinkish glow to her when she was actually acting as an ability. Since you say that you didn't call her back, then the blue glow was most likely the work of another ability user," I stated, summarizing my thoughts while still dancing around the theory in my head.

The doctor seemed to have noticed what I was doing. "You can say it," he encouraged, "I know that you've been thinking about it since your fall." I would have to learn to hide my thoughts and intentions around the doctor better.

I gathered up my courage, adults being anything other than displeased with my intelligence is a completely new concept to me. Something that I Know the doctor can easily see and is playing into. But this has never happened before. This, this moment here, was a fragile thing. Even though I know that once I act as a witness to whatever crime it is that he wishes to commit and lie for him it will be over. Even though I know that his whole scheme is built around me being disposable. This isn't something that I want to break just yet. But the doctor was encouraging me, telling me that this, me thinking freely, was okay.

"The other ability user," I started, my voice sure, "was me, right? My touch nullified your ability."

The doctor nods and I know I'm right.

"The way your ability is," the doctor explained, "you wouldn't have known that you had it until you ran into another ability user."

A part of me was curious if any of the other demigods at camp were ability users as well, but that theory didn't make much sense. My ability would have activated, canceling out theirs. But the demigod aspect did encourage some of the other theories that had been floating around in my head.

"Hmm," I responded non committedly. "How do abilities occur? I can guess that it's some kind of mutation, but can it be predicted? Are there common genes that all ability users share?" I spit the questions out faster than the man could answer them, but I knew the doctor understood my spiral. From the looks of it, he'd been here before himself.

The doctor held up a hand, signaling for me to stop. The gesture reminded me so much of something that Chiron would do that I did immediately. When I was finally silent the man answered my questions. "As best as I can tell from my experiments, every ability user shares some type of distant mutation that was weakened through the generations. The mutation comes from ancient times, and after lying dormant for some time, it tends to mutate once more. This second mutation results in abilities."

I nodded at him, accepting the information without complaint. My best guess was that the mutation comes from having a demigod as an ancestor. Mom was a mortal born with the ability to see through the mist and view the mythological world as if she belonged to it. While this may not be an ability in the sense that we are discussing, it does most likely come from some distant relation to the Greek gods. If she had been the descendant of a demigod, then that would be the residual power showing itself. It would also explain why I have this gift. The ability to nullify other abilities.

"Now," the doctor started, standing up from his seat, "before we go back to discussing our deal, I believe it's only fair that we introduce ourselves." The doctor looked at me expectedly. Personally, I could have gone on referring to the man as 'the doctor' for the rest of my short life, but I was in too much pain from the fall to argue.

My brain spun quickly. My birth name was out of the question and my fake name on my passport wouldn't be all that good either. "Dazai," I decided, "Osamu Dazai."

The doctor looked at me in a way that told me he knew that I was lying, but didn't feel the need to pry. To this man, whoever I was before falling into his hands didn't matter, not really.

"Ougi Mori," the doctor said.

Percy Jackson had died long ago, he had been destroyed by the flames that had killed his mother, his ashes swept away over a bridge. Today, Osamu Dazai was born from the fall.

—

Mori introduced me as his medical apprentice when he took me to where the Port Mafia boss was staying. The guards gave us weird looks every time we visited. They thought that my being there was some type of joke, that I was too young to be of any use to anyone.

They just didn't know the rules of the game that we're playing.

We would go do the Boss's check ups after Mori was done for the day acting as the general mafia's underground doctor. Surprisingly, there weren't many injured mafiosos during the week that I was with Mori leading up to the climax of the man's scheme. Most of the time, Mori just did paperwork or experimented with blood samples.

On the second day I was with him, Mori asked a strange question. "Dazai-kun," Mori said suddenly, bringing my attention away form the suicide book that I'd been reading to the underground doctor before me, "do you think I could have a sample of your blood?"

To be completely candid, I'd been expecting this to come, just not quite so soon. But, blood doesn't really matter to a dead man. "Sure Mori-san."

My arms were still securely bandaged, something that I've made no move to undo. If anything good were to come out of this it would be the relief that I get from having these bandages in place. Mori knew better than to remove them as well, so he took the blood from my neck. This happened multiple times during the week that I posed as Mori's assistant. At the end of the week, my neck was left bruised from the constant abuse to it. I wrapped some new bandages around it, stopping the extra stares that I received every time I left Mori's office to go to the room that he'd procured for me in the mafia building.

At the end of the week, before our last visit to the boss, Mori stopped me before I left his office.

"I'd like to give you something," he said, the man's hands were hidden behind his back in a secretive manner. I waited for him to continue, "a thank you of sorts for the help that you've been since you were brought here."

Mori held out a large black overcoat, big enough to fit the man himself. I took the piece of clothing, draping it over my shoulders. It was worn from use, but well kept. It was the first gift I'd been given since Chiron gave me Riptide when I was twelve. I nodded at the doctor in lieu of a thank you, not that he'd really been expecting one. I wouldn't waste either of our time on fake signs of emotions like smiles, something that Mori seemed to appreciate.

Like every other time we visited the boss, he was raving, spouting one crazed idea after another. This time he was giving the order to take out all other enemy organizations. A stupid order to give given the current state of the Port Mafia, but who was I to argue with the ravings of a senile man? I just turned the lunatic out and stood by the window, waiting.

Mori didn't make me wait long.

The scalpel had slipped into Mori's hand before the boss could even finish the brunt of his rant. In one elegant move, blood splattered the walls, running down. Blood gushed from the boss's throat, drenching the white sheets, dying them a deep red.

And there I was, watching the scene unfold. I should have been horrified, but there was only a dull sense of surprise. I'd seen countless beings die in my short life time, this death was by far the most tame of any of them.

When did I become so passive to the world around me?

"The boss has succumbed to illness. Before his passing he named me his successor. You are the witness to this fact," Mori turned around, facing me. There was blood splattering the man's face, making it look like an abstract painting created by some deranged fool. "Understood?"

I stared at him, my eye cold and lifeless, and nodded.