SAVE THE EARTH SIBS AU

[wises]

[ this world is earth as we know it in modern days, but some people here were once upon a time elsewhere. in different worlds, as different people, with different lives. they were all reborn here for vague reasons as of yet unknown, souls tied to new lives and new bodies, but the core of them all remains. and sometimes there are echoes. the first memory always comes with the numbers. a string of random code that, when written on any surface, opens a network of people like you. people who are remembering lives that once were. people who are getting echoes of that past.

echoes come in many flavors. the color your hair used to be. what your name was. how to speak a language you forgot. a skill you never had in this life, but had in the other. a memory. there's no telling what it will be, although they tend to be tied to what you experience, what triggers them. seeing a face from a past life might bring a memory of that person. someone saying something they once said might bring that memory. doing something you once did might bring back a skill in full force. after the first echo, they all come. sometimes more of them come when Weird Shit happens, when they have to fight against the mysterious forces gathering.

before anything occurs, annabeth clarke lives a perfectly average life by anyone's standards. she has a mother and a father. she has an older brother. they have a dog. at school she gets straight a's and she's on the track team. she has friends, although she'd call her brother luke her best friend, older or no. her childhood was an ordinary if happy affair, and she wants nothing more than to graduate high school and attend a college near enough to visit her family when she pleases.

it changes when she gets her first echo. the first thing that doesn't quite fit, overlaid with the rest of it. there's a boy named percy who's on the swim team for another school and she's there for a friend and she meets his eyes and it clicks. she's seen those eyes before.

he drools in his sleep.

it's not a guess but a memory, a memory of something she doesn't and couldn't know, and it's baffling as anything, as are the numbers. she ditches the meet as quickly as she can and tries not to think about them. but other things keep coming back, in different ways and at different times. a spider crawls up her leg and she remembers them covering her entirely in webs, crawling over her skin, and spiders hate annabeth from that moment on. her brother's girlfriend tosses her a college pamphlet and she remembers different pamphlets that were meant for thalia that made no sense. luke ruffles her hair and she finds an orange shirt in the back of her closet that she never bought. they have a fencing day in gym and annabeth suddenly knows how to use a sword.

she goes to another swim meet in another town and sees that boy again. this time he has a shock of gray in his hair and she remembers her brother - different, but it's luke - being crushed beneath the weight of something, remembers taking it willingly and then there was nothing but pain and a weight she couldn't bear, but had to.

annabeth ditches the meet again, sending an apology text to her friend. by the time she's home it's dark and she goes up to luke's room. she hasn't said a word about the echoes, has only watched the network of people with disjointed memories and skills off and on, but this time she goes straight to her brother's room. opens the door, drops onto his bed and punches him in the shoulder. ]

Luke? [ a memory where luke walked away makes her think she's going crazy. she's been thinking that forever, though. so annabeth, now with a streak of gray in her hair, just wants the comfort of her dumb older brother being his usual self. at...late at night. but he can put up with it because he loves her, right? ]

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[chiseler]

[Life was weird. Life was always a little weird for Luke but it he always assumed that was just how life was. It wasn't that his life was bad by any means. He has a loving family including a little sister who's brighter than he is most days and one of his most trusted confidants, a decent future ahead with the idle idea of maybe becoming a teacher, a girlfriend he'd been with for several years, friends as far as the eye could see and a part-time job teaching kids how to fence. The world's in the palm of his hand and there's nothing more he could ask for.

But, life has a weird way of working out. Even if there's nothing more he could ask for, he finds himself receiving more in ways he doesn't understand. The first echo happens years ago when he's fourteen and he and Thalia are goofing off at a petting zoo at a local fair, a date they'd settled on for no reason at all. At first it seems as though it's a normal goat, but Luke looks again and suddenly he realizes he and Thalia have chased a goat before. It makes no sense to him because it's not possible for a goat to really exist with its curlicue horns and glowing wispy fur. He says nothing but tightens his grip on Thalia's hand, a sense of dread settling into his stomach as he pulls her away.

The echoes continue to occasionally plague him as he gets older, haunting him in various places. A clear picture of the Panama Canal in his head that he accurately describes in class one day despite never seeing it or being near it. For that matter, knowing how to steer a boat at all which surprises him because he isn't really a fan of water. One day he looks at himself in the mirror and jumps in shock as his eyes seem to glint gold at him, but by the time he blinks they're back to their normal blue again. He's in the hallway at school and a blue plastic hairbrush soars through the air as one girl tosses it to another, and despite being on the far end of the hall he flinches and covers an eye. It's little things like that that almost seem normal but he knows are out of place and rooted in irrational knowledge.

That's not counting the fact that on his sixteenth birthday he was able to steal a car off of the lot without notice and no one ever caught him for that. He came up with a quick lie about where it came from but even that was something he knows was unusual enough.

The worst part, Luke thinks, is the dreams. He hears a voice in his nightmares that he doesn't recognize but he does know it's familiar, knows not to listen to it this time because the last time he had it lead to something bad. He doesn't quite know what, but the visions in his nightmares are familiar. He's learned to stop screaming in terror as to not worry people.

Maybe that isn't the worst part. There's something else, something from a different dream tonight but he's afraid to look if it's really true. It's late, maybe in the morning it'll go away. It's a little dark in his room and even if it's late he's awake because of said-dreams keeping him up. He's laying on his side in bed and when he feels Annabeth punch his shoulder he reaches up to wrap a hand around her wrist to stop her.]

You couldn't say my name before punching me? I'm already up. [He's not lifting his head from his pillow but he raises an eyebrow.] Did you just get home? [That's how the Clarke siblings handle things. They don't ask "what's wrong" but they talk around the subject.]