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“Tell me how you survived it.”
Annabeth looked into her daughter’s intelligent grey eyes, filled with a yearning to understand her mother and the ending to a story she had heard so many times.
So many times, Annabeth had tried to understand it herself. The truth was, there was so many things she didn’t remember. Things so horrific she had pushed them out of her mind, and the little things that were not so insignificant on their own but in the grand scheme of things had been deemed unimportant enough to be shoved aside and forgotten about entirely. There was only so much her mind could hold. Every memory hurt, like a jagged piece of glass that held by careless hands would cut deeper than a poisoned knife.
Tell me how you survived it. I blocked it out of my mind.
Distractions had helped, of course. Percy had helped, and their friends. After the battle with Gaea, there was a bit of a lull when everything that had happened started coming back too quickly and all at once, and Annabeth had succumbed to busying herself in her work again, creating more designs for mount Olympus, studying architecture in her free time, telling Percy she wanted to get ahead for college. She knew he could tell she was lying, but he let her get away with it, because he knew that what she really needed more than anything was to get out of her head. He was finding his own ways to distract himself, teaching sword fighting classes to younger campers, and spending a lot of time talking with Chiron and Reyna about how to maintain relations between the camps. She was asked if she wanted to help out with that too, but she had politely declined. When reality was just one locked gaze away, it was much better for her and Percy to keep their distractions separate. It’s hard to deny the truth when the proof is breathing right next to you.
Then her father had told her about Magnus, and Annabeth had found herself with another distraction to fill her time. Another world was revealed, one with thousands of secrets and mysteries she hadn’t discovered yet. One after another, the distractions piled up, and underneath it all her pain was buried. If asked, she would have denied that she was ever not fine at all.
Tell me how you survived it. I pretended it never happened.
For a while, everything was okay. She moved to New Rome with Percy, started going to college. For once, she almost felt like she had a normal life. She drank coffee in the mornings, kissed Percy goodbye, went to class, came home, studied, worked on her blueprints, ate dinner, went to bed. Get up. Eat. Study. Sleep. Repeat. The routine comforted her like a warm bed she never wanted to get out of. If asked, she would have said she was happy.
But there was still something missing in every tentative touch she shared with Percy, still something not right every time she looked in the mirror. A feeling she couldn’t shake every time she closed her eyes.
Tell me how you survived it. I didn’t. I killed who I was and became someone else.
There was never a moment when everything changed. She didn’t have some big epiphany, or a deep shocking moment of realization that she was making things worse by not talking about it. She clung hard to her denial, but there were times when she would inevitably slip up. Someone would mention something and all of a sudden she would see the deformed body of Arachne again, or the face of Misery dying, or feel the blind terror of Calypso’s curse. Some nights she would wake up from a nightmare, drenched in a cold sweat, terrified that Percy would have disappeared, only to find him lying next to her, already awake, green eyes knowing her like no one else ever could. He’d wrap her in her arms, and it was times like these that she’d let herself cry, that she’d let herself feel for the part of her she had lost so long ago. She could cry a world full of tears for everything they’d been through. But even on the worst nights, the tears would run dry, and it would be morning again. And she would get on with her life, taking gratitude in those moments when she felt truly safe, and trying to make up for everything she was afraid of when she didn’t. Eventually, the nights got shorter, and the days got a little easier. It still hurt to remember, but it no longer stung as sharp.
It was hard to say if she would ever be alright. But she always knew, somewhere deep inside of her, that things would be okay.
Tell me how you survived it. “I just kept living.”