Prompt #022 - Enemies

Prompt # 022 - Enemies

My Own Worst Enemy

Time Frame: Post-Battle of the Labyrinth

Pairing: None

POV: Luke

**

“The face of the enemy frightens me only when I see how much it resembles me.”

-Anonymous

**

Luke is drifting now—no longer here, nor there. Drifting, he is, in the shadowed world between living and dead, sane and crazy, waking and sleep.

Since the moment it happened, he realized it was a mistake. He had been wrong about everything. Wrong about the gods, wrong about the Titans, wrong about his father and his mother and Percy and Annabeth and Thalia and Grover and the camp and his old life.

Was it so bad, Luke wonders, to be in a place where everyone had something to fight for? Was it really that awful he never knew his father? Was it so bad to have brothers and cousins and a place to stay and train? Was it so bad to have a teacher and friends and a place to call home?

No.

And now because he so focused on what was missing instead of what was there, everything has been taken from him. And now Luke is merely a memory.

Still, for brief moments he can surface, pushing for his new-found allegiance to the first and only family that ever really took care of Luke.

His enemy used to be his past—his father and his family that rule distantly from the clouds. Fueled by hate and spite and vengeance and a broken heart, Luke joined the Titan army and fought for Kronos.

But now his enemy is within him—the ancient evil his father fought against to free the human race. Now he is fueled by love for those he left behind and heroism that would rival heroes of ages past.

Is Luke scared? Yes. Terrified? Certainly. Somewhere in the back of his mind he knows he won’t make it out of this alive. But he knew from the get-go his life would be short and messy and miserable. That’s not the part that bothers Luke now. It is the fact that the enemy he is fighting now is inside him—and Luke was the one who let him in.

And now it’s Luke’s job to take him out once and for all.

He is essentially now fighting himself. Ever pushing back the darkness in his mind, ever climbing upwards towards the light and all those he abandoned and betrayed.

Struggling to regain all that he took for granted so readily growing up.

Fighting to simply be Luke Castellan once more.

~fin~