Archive of Our Own

(02)

It’s shocking how quickly he changes. When Annabeth finds him in May, he’s leaner than she’s ever seen. Taller and more solemn in the eyes. His hands, the webbing between his fingers and the cut of his knuckles, everything broader and longer and dusted with summery golden fuzz. He grins when he sees her, with abandon. Fearless grin. She gestures backwards, the taxi waiting behind her.

He’d been her height when they met. She almost wishes it could've lasted.

That new height of his confuses and pisses Annabeth off in equal measure.

She’s talking to him, discussing their plan to face Scylla, and when she turns to meet his eyes she’s about a foot off. And then she has to physically correct where she’s searching for his face, and the annoyance shows on her face.

Percy, on the other hand, is just tilting one of his pleased smiles at her.

‘Why did you have to get so –’ she starts, then huffs. He’s smiling even wider. She looks away again, back to the map of the coast of Florida and the Atlantic ocean. She grumbles under her breath, ‘What has Sally been feeding you.’

‘Seven layer dip,’ he drawls, easily. ‘Blue pancakes. And we had a couple fancy dinners from the money she made selling her new sculpture.’

She misses when she could stand on her toes and look down on him now more than ever. Because he’s driving her crazy, and he needs to be put in his place.

He scares her. Terrifies her, more than the sea of monsters ever could.

Promising her he’d give up everything for her, like it’s thoughtless, like it’s not even a choice.

Annabeth boxes it away in her head, tapes it up and pushes it somewhere far at the back, but it seeps into her thoughts. Slow-spreading and meandering.

After everything’s done, and the Fleece restores camp’s borders, and they’ve won the chariot race, things lull back to their mundane ways. Chiron gets a restful sleep and it’s evidenced by the curlers in tails. The Stoll brothers start some sort of prank war with the Ares cabin to lift everyone’s spirits, except perhaps the Ares cabin. Dinner and song by the campfire warm Annabeth down to the bone, melt her insides into something sweet, saccharine.

And it’s almost idyllic, having Percy with her like this.

She shows him around like she’s wanted to, properly. Camp is her home. He ducks under branches and tosses stones at the pond and hollers witty responses at the Hermes kids throwing jibes from across the bonfire in the evening, marshmallows on sticks, chocolate dripping from his chin.

At the tail end of a grueling spar, Clarisse tells her something that sends chills down her spine. ‘We almost didn’t get it back because of you.’

‘Get what back?’ Annabeth says as she parries the deadly arc of Clarrise’s spear. ‘The Fleece?’

Clarisse steps back, and it’s uncharacteristic how she’s in no mood to fight. ‘You should see how he gets when you’re taken from him,’ she says, voice more parts disturbed than disdainful. ‘He looked like he was gonna fuckin’ pass out.’

Annabeth’s head spins. She stares as Clarisse ditches her spear, Lamer.

‘He almost killed us all for you.’

When Thalia wakes up at the end of that summer, Annabeth dedicates most of her time to her. It just sort of happens. The daughter of Zeus sleeps for the first week that she’s been brought back, and she’s so still, disoriented from all those years as a spirit pulsing her energy through a tree. Annabeth is sensitive about Thalia, like she’s sensitive about all of her past. She has to take care of her, like Thalia took care of her and saved her life over and over again when she was barely seven.

It’s like a second chance.

At first Thalia is taken to the Big House to discuss everything, but it soon becomes obvious she needs time to rest. She’s disoriented. She snaps every two seconds.

‘She can rest in the Zeus cabin,’ Chiron says, low-voiced. His tail flicks nervously behind him. ‘But it needs to be cleaned, first, and the doors are.. in bad shape. It has, of course, been some time –’

Percy is there, at the sidelines. His eyes are big, wide, eager to help. ‘Or she could rest in Poseidon, it’s no big deal.’

Annabeth frowns, and immediately says, ‘No.’

Percy glances at her, those stormy eyes dark with worry. Heart always on his sleeve.

No, Annabeth can’t have him there. She wants to break it down slowly to Thalia, that their closest friend has betrayed them, been filled with resentment, and manipulated by the whisperings of the eldest Titan. Percy might get that look on his face, that impatience that rises whenever she so much as thinks of Luke as someone worth saving. He might turn her against their oldest friend, poison Thalia a second time.

No. She can’t have him there.

Annabeth doesn’t say anything further, just looks at Percy. Her face must be guarded, closed off, she knows her eyes get hard sometimes. She doesn’t care.

‘There is an infirmary here, at the Big House,’ Chiron says. ‘I would like to monitor her condition, at least for a while.’

Annabeth refocuses on Thalia’s sleeping form. She feels Percy’s eyes on her, but she steels herself against it.

And that’s the end of that.

Annabeth resolves to go to boarding school with Thalia in Brooklyn soon as fall breaks.

In the slippery, fast-fading days at the end of summer, Annabeth can’t help but recall C.C.’s Island.

Percy had all but spelled it out to her. Those clear, unwavering, dedicated eyes. The shaking line of his jaw, the fluttering pulse at his neck, shoulders heaving with each deep breath he takes. Eyes. Fixed in on her.

She might be the reason he chooses to raze Olympus down.

It never left her, it had poisoned her every worried recollection of the prophecy, of what was to come.

That poison fills her veins, has her jittery in the middle of history class. Her pen shakes hard enough as she writes down a line of notes that it skews off into the line above it. Words floating off the page.

Percy is thoughtless in his vows, in the ruin it could leave. Guiltless in the ruin it has brought her. She can only think of him, his trembling, pleading form, those too-earnest eyes, and feel absolutely terrified.

And it could be Thalia, in the end, fearless and ferocious Thalia. She hates her dad so much, she always had. But it’s different now, life after the tree. She goes quiet, so still, and when Annabeth wakes, it’s to Thalia’s back turned and face to a window as she stares at the horizon in the morning. She won’t talk about Zeus so much anymore, even if she’s still strongwilled and irritable, emotions changing like the winds.

Percy is different. Percy’s ideals are his mother, Grover – Annabeth herself.

She stares up at the ceiling and thinks of his intense gaze.

When Thalia studies a few pamphlets of Artemis’ Hunt, Annabeth takes one copy for herself. Her fingers glide over the glossy, kaolin pages of its promises, and she weighs it against his.

The pamphlet slides to the bottom of her bag.

The next time she sees Percy is in the dead of winter, when she falls off a cliff on the back of a manticore.

(03)

By summer, under the hot-gold hush of the sun, their twin grey streaks of hair glow warm enough to be forgotten. The enduring impression the Titan’s curse has weighed on them lifts off when they’re together at camp. And this summer she can tell Percy is trying to lift her spirits, lift everybody’s.

It’s lucky he’s a Big Three kid, and luckier he got a quest, and luckiest is how he talks to people. These sarcastic quips roll off his tongue without missing a beat, and it’s always like he’s not even trying. He’s magnetic, even as they try to hate him.

Everyone loves Percy and he doesn’t even see it.

The first time he makes her laugh so hard she snorts is in the Big House, at breakfast with Malcolm across from her and Percy grinning, leant back in satisfaction.

Her cabin siblings stare, and Malcolm squints at her, and she slaps Percy’s arm, laughter still bubbling up her throat, but he’s unrepentant.

‘That’s genuinely what Ares sounds like,’ he assures Bea, who’s also staring at Annabeth in amusement and mild shock.

‘Shut up, Seaweed Brain,’ Annabeth groans.

‘It was a very serious impression.’

‘Save it for your captive audience.’

He squints over at the Stoll brothers and waves. Annabeth takes another piece of toast, willing herself to still her shaking shoulders, but it never works.

He’s not even that funny. She’s sure he isn’t. But he gives her that wry look afterwards, eyebrows raising like c’mon, let me hear it, like her approval means so much. And he pulls it out of her somehow.

He’s like a useless, uninformed puppy sometimes, though. At the next meeting of the cabin counsellors, he asks her what it means that Connor is doing the ‘minutes’ of the meeting.

‘Percy, it was your turn to do the minutes last week. And the week before that. Did you not –?’

‘Oh. The minutes. Yeah, I definitely did those.’

She narrows her eyes at him, and tilts her head at the same time.

He’s giving her an embarrassed smile, like he wants to change the subject knowing full well he probably can’t. ‘Anyone ever tell you that you look like an owl, Annabeth?’

She leans in real close to him, makes sure he’s squirming, eyes darting away from her. ‘Anyone ever tell you that you’re a bonehead.’

‘...Uhhh.’ He swallows, and his throat shifts with it, Adams’ apple bobbing like a buoy on a wave. Annabeth allows herself to delight in it. His cheeks are pink and he looks like he’s trying really hard to look anywhere but her. ‘Come to think of it –’

‘Don’t even. I have notes from every meeting, so you can make your minutes out of these.’

‘I’m still not, super, entirely clear, really,’ he explains, voice a bit hoarse. ‘On – are they like normal minutes? Like with sixty seconds and everything?’

She doesn’t want to laugh right there in his face, but he’s so loud. Clarisse is staring, shaking her head. Annabeth’s supposed to be the serious one. Her lip twitches.

He raises his eyebrows and ducks his head in close. ‘Don’t laugh,’ he murmurs, pleading. ‘But… I’m being serious.’

She pushes him in the chest, fights off the smile and says, ‘Bonehead. What would anyone be writing down during a meeting?’

‘Just, like, my opinions?’ he guesses, eyes darting around the room and focusing for a second on Beckendorf. ‘Like how Hephaestus cabin needs to stop exploding their hair off and saying it’s just a fresh cut?’

‘How’s that relevant.’

‘It’s dishonesty, Annabeth,’ he says, tapping her temple. ‘I can’t not note down their lies.’

‘You’re so annoying,’ she responds, face breaking, finally unable to hold it back. He’s just so Percy, his unbelievably cocky grin, the sarcastic tilt to his jaw. No matter what she promises herself, he makes her laugh in the next minute and then Clarisse is threatening to kick them both out of the meeting. Percy raises his palms up and apologizes, slides her a sideways, conspiratory smirk. She can only roll her eyes and swear to herself she’s not endeared.

The next night, it’s late enough that she can’t exit her room without some cleaning Harpies threatening to eat her. But she’s so restless, she’s seen a dream – something connected to what Percy had dreamt, something about Kronos, something stirring up on Princess Andromeda – and without much thinking, she tugs on her Yankees cap and slips out of her cabin. She has to tell him.

It’s only when she pushes that door open and it gives with a click, and she steps in, that she realises she should have thought to knock. She’s been too stuck in her head to even think about common courtesies like that, because when she straightens up –

It’s Percy, sitting on the edge of his bed, back towards her.

He’s shirtless.

In the blue-din of the night, she can see the glow of his skin. The curve of those broad shoulders, the ravine of his back, the sight of twin dimples at the base of his spine. The inward slide and shift of his shoulderblades.

He’s slumped a bit, his shoulders shifting with something. He’s doing something with his hands. She can’t see what he’s doing.

Annabeth can’t move.

Then it’s gone, he’s shrugging on something black and soft and a size too big. He must’ve been straightening it out. Percy is always leaving his shirts inside out and slung on the headboard of his bed.

He turns, and frowns. He looks soft, mussed, disoriented. His hair is wilder than usual, cowlicks awry. The pajama shirt hangs open, not a single button done up. He’s not wearing the matching pants. When he stands those muscled legs come into view.

Shorts. She thinks she might fall over. His eyes fixate behind her, on the ajar door. He mumbles something to himself, garbled, barely formed – something like did I leave that open? – and then he’s striding towards her, eyebrow still furrowed, eyes rheumy from how late it is.

He’s mid yawn, rubbing that broad palm over his face and then shaking his head gently, and his stretched fingers press right above her head to shut the door behind her.

She stares up at the beads hanging from his neck, resting right at the shadow of his collarbones. He smells like salt. Everything smells like salt. His head is ducked, beachy curls in his eyes, and she tilts her invisible head further back to gaze up, breathless. There’s a mole on his broad left shoulder.

She’s between him and the door, her face inches away from that neck, and every thought in her head is snuffed out.

He inhales, deep. Right above her head. His nose almost brushes her braids.

‘Lemons?’ he mumbles, those same half-formed syllables.

Intense blue eyes narrow, and he’s staring unseeing through her, but he whispers to himself, ‘Why… does it smell like you?’

Blood thunders in her ears. She can hear her own heartbeat. Annabeth recalls faintly that she’d applied her typical lemon-scented mixed oil to her roots, but she had no idea the scent carried. She covers her mouth with her fingers so he doesn’t feel her stuttering breath against his pale, bare and muscled chest.

Percy shakes his head abruptly, like a very energetic dog.

He runs a hand up his face and over his hair, forehead exposed for one moment before his curls fall again. ‘Sleep,’ he grumbles, and slaps at the side of his own pink mouth. ‘Sleep!’

She stares, dumbfounded, as he pushes off from the door and ambles back, walking like a drunk, meaningless words escaping under his breath before he tosses himself onto the bunk carelessly, and the mattress protests under him.

Annabeth doesn’t even know how she makes it back outside and into her own bed.

‘I dreamt about you last night.’

She stands warily at his door. It’s sunny. It’s eleven A.M. It’s time for swordfighting class. She thought he’d be awake and ready by now, but fortune was not in her favour.

He’d just rolled out of bed, evidently. Percy stares down at his unbuttoned shirt, as if baffled as to why it's open. Annabeth does too, except she remembers. Vividly.

Then she pointedly looks away and crosses her arms. ‘What.’

His head lifts up, face flushing. ‘What, no – like, not like. Uhhh. I dreamt we were making lemonade. And you were going on about how it’s, like, super sour.’

‘Super sour,’ she repeats. Her face might be a bit hot already, and might look like she’s chewing on something super sour too. She does not want to enter the cabin. Not after last night.

‘Why’re you just standing there, I didn’t mean it like that,’ he complains, rubbing the back of his neck. She can’t look at him. The hem of his pyjama shirt hitches up with the movement of his hand, and doesn’t quite straighten out as he lets it fall.

‘I’m sure you didn’t,’ she says firmly. ‘Do you need help finding your armor, Percy?’

‘You’re such a narc, Annabeth,’ he says. ‘Swordfighting always starts late. They do that long-winded briefing every time like we don’t already know, just ‘cause Clarisse isn’t a morning person. No purposefully maiming, and all that.’

She narrows her eyes. ‘Shut up. You’re – you’re a moron. And you’re supposed to do a demonstration, which you’d remember, if you weren’t up at one A.M. thinking about lemons.’

‘Lemonade,’ he corrects, and then zeroes his eyes in on her, head cocked. ‘How’d you know I was up at one?’

‘I don’t,’ she replies, steady, raising an eyebrow. Even in full battle gear she feels vulnerable. She slows her breath, deliberately, and continues, ‘You just told me.’

He clicks his tongue and shrugs his shirt off, still holding her gaze. ‘Fine. I did lose all my armor though.’

Annabeth is dizzy. And disgusted. ‘How do you lose all your armor.’

‘This is a big, empty cabin, Wise Girl,’ he says, tossing his shirt carelessly to the left, and rising to stretch languidly. Arms. Shoulders. Pectorals. His throat, the beads. ‘Everything goes missing. It should all just show up again like Riptide.’ Then he goes pink again, and scratches his chin. ‘I, uhh. Right, I’ll change now.’

His mouth stays open for a second, then closes awkwardly.

And then Annabeth realizes.

She turns around and slams the door shut, feeling like there’s steam coming out of her ears. She hates that guy so much.

It’s a balmy afternoon, and Annabeth is supposed to drag Percy off to their mythical history lecture with Chiron. But where she finds him in the arena, he’s slumped over a dummy, head buried into its rag-chest, riptide loosely clasped in his hand and dangerously close to giving himself a haircut.

He’s fast asleep.

He’d come out here to practice. The nape of his neck gleams with perspiration, shining under the sun thats beating down on them. He must have been here for hours, because swordfighting lessons got over early morning, the arena is abandoned. Percy must have stayed back, practicing over and over until he collapsed with exhaustion. The bonehead showed up to this lesson without armour, just in a faded, old camp tee shirt. Somehow, he’d still avoided any slashes or cuts. Annabeth can’t help but feel awed. It isn’t lost on Annabeth, how good he’s been getting with that sword, and how tremendous his control of water has become. Still, he should wear his armour! It’s a bad habit Annabeth is constantly chiding him for, but to no avail.

But that tee shirt sticks to him, hitched up at his stomach, the notches of his spine vare to the world. The small of his back peeks out at her, pale, faun-soft. It looks strangely vulnerable.

Annabeth stares at it, and resists the urge to touch it.

Under her gaze, Percy stirs, lifting his head ever so slightly. He hums, mumbles something, eyes fluttering. Riptide slips out of his hand, down the dummy and clatters into the soil. His palm splays out, as if to retrieve it, but then he just thinks better of it, those half-open eyes weigh down and dozes off again.

And this time his head is sideways, cheek squished up against the dummy, pudging out cutely. Those long lashes of his fan out across the shining cheekbones, a tiny droplet of sweat caught in them, a neon circle gleaming up at her.

His eyebrows are slack, lips relaxed, and it’s so at odds with how his face is when he’s awake – tense, on edge, cramped up in emotion. Asleep, Percy is all smooth lines and soft skin. Like this, Annabeth absently thinks he looks like a son of love.

She crouches down beside him and reaches out, not to the small of his back, but to his wrist, and closes two fingers around it.

She feels his pulse. It’s steady, tugging against her skin. Powerful.

For a moment, Annabeth stays with it, and her thoughts slow down, mind dulcifying. Percy always has this effect on her.

Then she yanks at him.

Percy yelps, and wildly reaches for Riptide. But she tightens her grip on his hand, pins him hard enough that he’s rendered immobile. Annabeth grins down at him. He looks shocked, distraught, disbelieving and it makes her chest swell with pride.

She’s unrelenting as she was all those years ago when she first met him and said, you drool in your sleep. This time it’s, ‘Get up, Seaweed Brain. We have our 2 P.M. lecture.’

‘You only got me ‘cause I’m wiped!’ he sputters warningly, standing and pointing a finger at her, eyes comically wide. ‘You cheated! Or I’d’ve had you, I swear –’

‘Yeah, yeah, move it.’

(04)

Luke is at the back of Annabeth’s mind next year around. His desperation claws at her like the spines of an arachnid. He pulls at her mind, splits it in two. She’s lost. The last time she had broken, trusted him, he had placed her under the sky then left her there to shudder, strain and rot. But it doesn’t make her choice any less horrible, doesn’t make her feel any less empty.

She’s moody. She wants to talk to Thalia. She wants to talk to nobody and fight a close quarters battle with an Ares kid on steroids. She wants to lay down and sleep.

But she’s stuck here in her cabin, head pounding as she studies maps that lead from nowhere to nowhere.

The maps distract her.

Swallow away her thoughts, her worries, the decisions she feels she’s failed at. From thinking the twin faces of Janus are taunting her. All those agonizing reminders of Luke, desperate and out of breath at her doorway fade away.

The scanned images of decades of attempts to catalogue the maze snuff and tamp her mind into a numb state of study. Sketches, redraws, diagramed with two-toned lines overlapping to portray modular structures of some room or corridor and its moving parts. Bewildering descriptions of the cross between magic and engineering.

Some of those drawings are breathtaking. The older parts of the Labyrinth have open spaces, guildhalls, windows and false open atriums, designed to reflect Olympus. The architecture within these halls is stunning. There’s other drawings of what seems to be a ranch or a farm, and some of these open spaces are reminiscent of a Frank Lloyd Wright. Annabeth gets lost in it all, appreciating the ingenuity of design, the way negatives are employed in spaces, the sophistication in some ancient Greek formations’ raking cornice allowing for false fronts to slide into place, those insane mechanisms which hide away and tuck into corridors.

When she’s so focused on the foundations of one of those immense rooms, she forgets she’s even looking at a maze in the first place.

Annabeth thought her day out with Percy at the movies would help bring her some much needed calm. She had debated not going in the first place. She was in no condition to have a good time.

The worry and pain was gripping her. Weighing her down like the vortex of a storm on Mount Tamalpais, the apex of the sky and the earth burdened upon her. But Annabeth realises that when she’s lost in her thoughts, or lost in those maps, the one thing which breaks through to her is Percy.

The thought of him calms her, just as much as he terrifies her. She yearns for presence. His overt reassurances, his overwhelming trust and loyalty.

It doesn’t matter, in the end.

When she runs into him, and things are good for all of two seconds.

They’re on East 81st street, across FDR drive. It’s a perfectly New York block, concrete streets, brick-and-glass buildings cutting against a vivid blue summer day.

Percy looks windswept, boyish. His hair is messy as ever, that tee-shirt of his askew, sticking to his heaving chest. His eyes are so easy to meet, so open.The sun’s glittering down on him, lighting him gold, buttering his cheekbones. She grabs his shoulders to keep him from tumbling over and barrelling into her, chastising him.

She forgets all that worry which had been cloying at her the past few weeks.

Then this girl covered in monster dust calls after Percy – whom he introduces to her as Rachel. She’s pretty. And she only has eyes for him.

Annabeth blinks between the two of them. A lump rises in her throat, and distantly Annabeth prays that she’s better than this – the world might end, there’s a deadly prophecy unfolding in her time, she is not about to let something as small as boy-trouble and petty jealousy cloud her mind – but she can’t help but grow silent, resentful, as she fights the tannin that rises in her throat.

There’s police sirens wailing in the distance.

All she had wanted was an evening away, to watch a movie, to forget the scary parts of being a half-blood like Percy has always begged her to. He’d even picked the movie. And now –

‘Percy,’ she says. Her voice comes out like steel. She knows she does this, knows her voice comes out too harsh sometimes, knows she should watch her tone. For some reason, she can’t really breathe. It’s so, so, stupid. Her pride is rising up within her, turning her even more resentful, because Annabeth really believes she’s above this. ‘We should go.’

She can’t even look at him. She doesn’t even know what she’s saying, not saying. She feels like a kid again. Like she’s twelve and she’s been betrayed by her only surviving friend. Like she’s seven and her family doesn’t believe her. She should be above this, she tells herself once more, but it’s no use. She’s just so full of fear, this crippling, paralysing, sickening fear that Percy’s slipping away from her. Her inward condescension, those disdainful parts of herself challenging her to rise above it – it only makes everything worse. Her thoughts are so loud she’s afraid she might be verbalising them.

I guess our afternoon is off.

It stings.

When Percy knocks on her door, she’s studying one of those endless maps. She had organised them into a looseleaf binder for her convenience, to move each architectural scan around when she could figure out if it was closer or farther away from Long Island. She’s been trying to arrange them in order of how recent the architecture seemed to be. The sheets are strewn across her desk, a reflection of her scattered, disbanded inward mind.

The words of the Oracle echo in her mind, spinning, spiraling, stitching and weaving her thousands of thoughts together. Lose a love to worse than death.

When she looks up and sees Percy watching her silently, leant against the wall, she suddenly feels like crying.

She puts her arms out. He steps into her embrace without question.

For a while, she forgets everything. She can just breathe him in, sea salt and chocolate chip cookies, and her worries mollify and slip away.

His palm strokes down her back.

That evening they find the crack deep in the woods, and tumble into it together. When they press the glowing mark of Daedalus, Annabeth knows that their time at camp is over this year.

Summer is snuffed out as they spend the rest of it underground, trapped in a live, twisting, turning maze. The Oracle’s whisperings of a terrible fate spirals through her mind, threatening to turn her mad before the Labyrinth ever does.

(05)
winter
–

They get competitive together. It makes them a brilliant team that always wins and always results in soft eyerolls from Malcolm and her other siblings, and groans of misery from everyone else. It’s the most fun she’s ever had.

But when they’re up against each other, it’s war.

She’s almost seventeen when she first actually gets to the point where she wants to slap him. He’s grinning at her and he’s just won another round of Ludo against her for the fifth night in a row. She hates this game, it's strategy-less, it's all luck, and Percy has all the luck in the world. She tosses the box full of dice and pieces at his head. One of them gets stuck in the curls of his hair, and he shakes it out, infuriatingly charming.

‘I’m done with you.’

‘You’re a sore loser, Wise Girl.’

‘You’re a lousy winner!’ she cries out. Annabeth sits back and crosses her arms. She’s shivering a bit, it’s chilly in the Poseidon cabin and it’s so late in the night. Grover is dozing off against Tyson’s bunk and Thalia called it quits and went back to the Artemis cabin hours ago. She’s here for the weekend, and all Annabeth had wanted to do was hang out with her sister, have fun with her friends, and win a few board games.

Percy’s leaning back on his palms and smirking. ‘You don’t like when I win?’

‘I hate when you win,’ Annabeth says, eyebrow arched. ‘’Cause then you get like this.’

His hands shift and he’s leaning forward now, across the board. ‘Really, Annabeth? You always hate it?’

His eyes flicker down her face.

They haven’t told anybody yet. Sure, everybody saw them kiss underwater in August, but they don’t know the extent of it. That she called him her boyfriend accidentally to her dad, which surprised Percy for some insane reason. That Sally had been so delighted she’d kissed both of Annabeth’s cheeks, then held her by the face and smiled. That a few mornings ago Percy had taken her out further into the lake and they’d walked on water, his hand in hers and laughing whenever she was afraid she’d fall.

They’ve kissed so many times now but each time is like summer’s starting anew.

He starts crawling across the board and she laughs, covering her mouth with her knuckles and glancing at Grover’s still sleeping form. ‘Come on, Percy.’

‘You c’mon,’ he teases, and he’s grinning like a kid.

Annabeth obliges, smiling against his lips. He makes a little grunt at the back of his throat, a protest, and tips her chin upwards so he can kiss her properly. She can feel his heartbeat against her face, in her throat, fluttering across the backs of her lids, the tips of her ears. She warms under him, even as outside his cabin, fall is breaking.

That winter, Annabeth is redesigning Olympus.

It’s become Percy’s personal mission to crash her workplace.

Her makeshift office for now is among the mortal floors, this shiny classic Art Deco number. The view she has from up there may not be as dazzling as the one from Olympus, but it’s one to behold. A New York winter thrums beneath her, a city in glittering motion. There’s the Chrysler, Rockefeller centre, the Flatiron, Central Park. Percy calls it a shame, a waste of a view – because Annabeth’s too busy to notice.

She’ll be engrossed in Daedalus’ laptop, or in the midst of drawing on drafting paper, eyes zeroed in on the most intricate details in a columned entrance, the frieze, the architrave, the capital. On her busier days, when she forsakes meals, Percy will appear right in front of her and force her to take a break.

Like today, Percy sets down two takeaway coffees and a small goodie bag from a café Annabeth made brief eyes at on a walk one time. He plucks the protractor she’s holding and sets it down too, ignoring her protest. He tosses away her three-lobed ruler, and removes the pencil she has tucked into the shell of her ear.

‘C’mon, Annabeth,’ he encourages, ‘Apollo’s golden bathroom – or whatever this is – it can wait.’

But she’s picking up each item he discarded, stubborn. She re-aligns her ruler, and marks off the keystone on a dome. ‘It’s not Apollo’s bathroom,’ she tells him. ‘I got done with that weeks ago. I’m redesigning Artemis’ shrine, which is important –’

He interrupts her with a noisy sigh, real forceful, real puffed out. Like ugh, like he’s so, so disappointed. It’s boyish and endearing and pulls a laugh out of Annabeth.

‘Alright,’ he groans. It’s a nice groan, the one he always makes when he’s giving in to Annabeth. He throws himself onto a rolling chair next to her. ‘Fine, but I’m sitting here with you – I don’t care what the snotty receptionist thinks.’

Annabeth hums.

He splits the carrot cake and fluffy pastry he got with her. Crumbs on her drafting paper, hot coffee warming her throat, smudged icing on her lips that he kisses off of her.

He shoves several things under his bed and whirls around again, palm in the air. ‘Don’t laugh, please.’ He always does that and he always says it. You’d think he’d start cleaning up.

She steps into his space and links her arms around his neck, wrists crossed. ‘Idiot,’ she says, smiling.

‘What, no lecture?’ he jokes, warm hands finding her waist immediately. It’s the look on his face – the sheer joy, the flush rising, the fervent look in his eyes that says he wants to kiss her.

She leans in and makes his wish come true.

They took their coats off at the apartment door, Percy had hung hers up politely on a rack and tossed his own at the sofa, and the pile of hoodies and jackets and half-day worn t-shirts on his bed aren’t making her eyeroll, rather she wants to lay in the pile and kiss him for many languid days.

When they part, she says, ‘Is that a mug on the windowsill?’

He turns his head and grimaces. His hair sticks up at the crown. ‘It’s probably cold now.’

She laughs. Sally Jackson’s apartment in the winter is like an old movie, the kind her dad’s been making her watch with him. The messy rooms, the lived in feel, the warmth of the radiator almost a shock when coming in from the sleet and shivering pavements of New York. Percy had tucked her into his coat on the bus. She’d been unable to muster the desire to shrug him off or raise an eyebrow. Her face had been warm and tucked into his neck.

‘I love being your girlfriend,’ she tells him, tugging him onto the bed.

His half-cocky, half-dazed, ‘Is that right, Chase?’ is knocked right out of him when she shoves his chest and he’s sprawled under her.

‘Woah,’ he says weakly, and her forearms on either side of his head feel like they might fold when they kiss. His nose is cold where it fits past hers, but his mouth is warm and sweet. She strokes that soft cheek of his, cupping his face as she angles better, kisses him deeper. The slide and pass of their lips feels like water spooling between them, and she lingers long enough that when she pulls away, a line of spit melts between their mouths.

Percy’s pink in the face beneath her. ‘Um,’ he says, intelligently. His voice is so low it’s all bass between them.

She smiles down at him. Pecks one chaste kiss on his cupid’s bow, for good measure, and then pulls back again.

‘Gods,’ he says. His gaze so dusky, so soft as he traces the baby hair framing her temples, then swipes his thumb at her cheek bone, right under her eye. ‘You’re so pretty.’

Percy and Annabeth tangle into that pile of laundry, the spaces between them warm and molten. Snow falls over Manhattan.

coda
–

It’s been months since the war, and it’s been months since they’ve gotten together but that fear which stings and leaves an ache to fester in Annabeth’s chest doesn’t really go away. The eldest Titan has been slain and banished back to Tartarus, but there’s another fearsome, terrifying, demon that Annabeth must face for the rest of her life, and it’s in the shape of Percy Jackson.

Because sometimes he’ll say something – like he is right now, out on the fire escape of his mother’s New York apartment, leaning on the dark rails, staring down at the streets below – something positively insane, and she has to steel herself against it, like she steels herself against the icy labrador current.

‘I don’t think I ever told you,’ he starts. ‘When I was down at the River Styx, I thought I was dissolving.’

Dissolving, Annabeth thinks.

She searches his eyes, and for her, Percy is always ready to be found. He looks up, meets her eyes, unabashed, unafraid of what he says next. It always comes so easy to him.

‘You were what saved me.’

‘What do you mean,’ she breathes, and she tries not to make it sound like it’s punched out of her, but it comes out rushed.

‘You were there. You made me remember who I was. I was so – I remember looking around for you, when I pulled myself out. I swore you were really, actually there.’ Those eyes of his pierce her. ‘I only got out because of you. You were what tethered me to the world, and everything I care about.’

Maybe when Annabeth was younger, or when the two of them weren’t being honest to each other, it was easier to steel away her expression, to harden her face and let her pride shine. But facing Percy here, in the crack between two apartment blocks and city traffic rushing beneath them, with no one around them – she can’t.

Her face breaks, and she knows he can see it, even as she ducks down and presses her palms to her face to hide it.

‘Annabeth –’ He stutters, voice hoarse as he reaches for her shoulders, but he hesitates, because what he saw – it was – ‘Annabeth, are you… why’re you scared?’

‘Gods, Percy,’ she says. Annabeth tries very hard to steady her breathing, but it comes in heaving, rough, wet. ‘You can’t just –’

He reaches for her, pulls her hands away from her gingerly, then cups her face. ‘You’re crying,’ he says, eyes flickering all across her face.

She wishes she were a kid again, maybe she could call him an idiot, punch him in the gut and run away, and maybe she wouldn’t be crying right now. She just puts up a hand. I need a moment. For some reason all he can think of is when he’d let her feel the small of his back, laid himself bare to her, offered up the single fatal part of himself to her.

Now he brings her back into the apartment, and sits her down on one of the twin barstools at their kitchen island, hands her a glass of water and then proceeds to bring out an assortment of things from the fridge. He stacks it all up in front of her – some raw cookie dough, tinted blue, leftovers from a Mexican restaurant him and Grover have been raiding. When he’s pulling out an entire rotisserie chicken from the deep freeze, Annabeth has to stop him.

‘Percy,’ she says.

‘Annabeth,’ he returns, chest heaving, left arm balancing the frozen meat, a dozen baby carrots in a pink grocery net, a can of whipped cream, and his right fist tightens around a handful of spinach which fans out like a bouquet.

Despite herself, Annabeth laughs.

Percy sets down his handful of ingredients he’d plucked up for some magical make-Annabeth-feel-better meal. A habit of care he has tended to from insisting on becoming her most annoying lunch buddy at work. He studies her. ‘Can I –’ He starts, and then his voice breaks, and he shakes his head. ‘I have to ask, Annabeth. What are you afraid of, is it my fault? Have I said something?’

‘All the time,’ she says, lightly.

‘What do you mean,’ he says, low.

‘For some reason, Percy, you’ve terrified me. Ever since we were kids.’

He looks like she’s breaking his heart.

‘Don’t worry, listen, I swear, it’s okay,’ she assures him, folding her hand over his. ‘You are so disarmed with me, maybe because of me. Your loyalty to me… I’ve loved it and feared it at the same time.’

‘You never told me,’ he says. ‘Annabeth – I’ve always told you, when you talk about things, it gets easier. If you told me before that I freak you out maybe I’d –’

Annabeth is smiling at him. She knows exactly what he’s about to say.

‘– You know,’ he grows shy. He smiles back at her sheepishly. ‘I’d stop laying it so thick on you.’

She leans into Percy’s embrace. His arm falls around her instantly. An invulnerable limb of steel cradling her back, an impenetrable palm curving at her waist – all because she anchored him to the world.

He drops a soft kiss at her temple, then rests his chin there. Annabeth’s nervous system physically slows down, and on her next exhale, it’s like her mind is melting slow onto Percy’s shoulder. It’s insane, how the same person she finds so much comfort from, she worries about constantly.

‘You’re right. I’ve not been afraid of you, Percy.’ That was never in question. Percy does to Annabeth the opposite of what fear does to her. ‘I’ve been afraid of losing you. But mostly, I’ve been afraid of how your loyalty to me is to the exclusion of all else.’

Percy is silent above her. He doesn’t have to voice it; Annabeth knows he doesn’t see how that’s a bad thing. ‘You know, Annabeth,’ he muses, the vibrations of his voice spreading down unto her. ‘When I feel worried – and I mean terrified, to lose you, that’s when I know my love for you is…’ He trails off, mouth parting, then he shakes his head. ‘I’m doing it again. Sorry –’

‘No,’ Annabeth cuts. Because now that it’s spelled out in front of her, she realises it’d all been so simple all along. Then Annabeth murmurs to herself, ‘Aphrodite and her son, Deimos.’

Percy squints, this small line folding under his left eye in the shape of a crescent. ‘Love, and her son fear?’

She nods.

He looks at her solemnly. ‘Because Annabeth – if this is what you’re worried about, you have to know that I’m the same. I’m terrified of you all the time. I’m horrified at what you can do to me, what you make me capable of. This whole time, I’ve just thought – that’s the point. All that fear, all that worry, it’s worth it for this. I’ve always seen it like worrying about you is part of getting to love you.’

Something inside Annabeth’s mind clicks. She blinks up at him. Like always, Percy says it all so easily, thoughtlessly. She feels like she’s flying, or walking on water with his hand brushing hers. Maybe it has been so easy all along.

Those earnest, stormy eyes of his are unyielding. ‘If you need reminding,’ he says. ‘I’m here for you. I’ll tell it to you again and again.’

Fear can’t be reasoned with. Neither can hate. They’re like love.
They’re almost identical emotions. That’s why Ares and Aphrodite like each other.
Their twin sons – fear and panic – were spawned from both war and love.
–
piper mclean, blood of olympus