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Chapter Text

It's 12:43AM and Percy has a six o'clock shift, but he's still crouched under the sink, a wrench in one hand and a scowl on his face. He can feel the way the water is trying to move, where it's getting stopped up and the pressure is changing, forcing little drips through a small crack and several layers of duck tape, but none of that helps him with the physical flaw in the pipe that's causing this sleep-depriving nightmare. Still, he's spent the last two hours trying to fix this stupid thing, he's not about to give up now. His landlord doesn't want to pick up the gods-damned phone? Fine. Percy fought Kronos when he was 16; he's walked through Tartarus itself; he taught himself how to install a car seat. A little sink leak is not going to stop him.

He's not quite sure what happens, just that he twists the wrench one more time, hears a sharp CLANG, and instinctively bolts back fast enough that he slams his head against the sharp underside of the cabinet.

"Fuck!" he shouts, somewhere between startled and angry and in a lot of pain all of a sudden. He's blindly reaching for one of the towels he knows is on the floor behind him so that he can wrap some ice up when he hears crying starting from the next room; all the noise must've woken up Estelle.

"Fuck," he says again, more softly this time. He carefully, gently, puts his head back against the drawer, pulling his knees up to his chest and sitting on the kitchen floor for a minute. He just--he needs to breathe. He needs to close his eyes and take a deep breath and remember that things will look better in the morning, except that it is morning, that he has work in like five hours and he needs to get his sister to sleep for the third time tonight and the sink is leaking and he forgot to stop at the ATM so he doesn't have cash for a cab which means he has to walk and he hasn't seen Annabeth in months and--

Percy forces himself to take a deep breath, to think about nothing but the way the air feels moving in and out of his lungs. Nobody said this was going to be easy, and besides, he's made it this far. He's not about to let himself get overwhelmed over something as small as a leaking sink.

The crying is still going on in the other room. If she gets any louder, Mrs. Claudizfah will come over and tell him to "pipe down, young man".

Percy stares at nothing in particular and tries very hard not to think about how he hasn't had his mom's chocolate-chip cookies in almost a year. How he never will again.

"I miss you," he whispers, just in case she's listening. "I love you. We're gonna be okay."

Then he pushes himself to his feet and goes to warm some milk.

*

The thing is that it had all gone wrong so suddenly and spectacularly that the whole thing completely blindsided him. Percy was used to things going wrong, of course, but--this was a new level.

It had started with a phone call, as most bad things do. His emergency flip phone (Leo had pressed it into his hand months ago, babbling about his patented chicken nugget smoke screen technology. Percy was still too afraid to find out what the big orange button in the middle of the keypad does.) had starting ringing at some ungodly hour of the night.

After he mumbled his way through a quick "hello?", the person introduced herself, asking if this was Percy Jackson, saying this was the only number on file. She said she was a CPS agent and she wanted to know when he wanted to get the process started; that they could hold Estelle for a little while but they really needed to place her in a home as soon as possible.

He sat up, his stomach curled into a tight ball of dread, Percy distantly heard himself ask why they have his little sister.

"Oh," said the woman on the other side, her voice suddenly thick with pity. "I'm sorry to be the one to inform you of this, but Sally Jackson and Paul Blofis passed away earlier this evening."

Everything just kind of--fell away, after that. He remembers the night in snapshots: Annabeth's laughing face growing tight and pale when she sees this isn't some impulsive romantic gesture, when he stutters through an explanation and says it for the first time out loud: my mom is dead; flashes of light against the trees while they drive; the unmoving face of the CPS agent in charge of handling his sister's case when she informs him that no, they are not going to hand over a child to him unless he has a legal residence--not a summer camp, she scoffed--and a job. He has to prove that he can take care of the child before he's allowed to see her.

Percy staggered away, barely feeling Annabeth's light touch on his arm. He thought he was going to cry, but the next thing he knew, he was walking into the police department, demanding to know what happened to a woman named Sally Blofis earlier that night. The hardened deputy gave him a look and told him to sit down and take a breath, that running around yelling like that wouldn't accomplish anything.

When he had come back, though, there was something softer in his voice, his eyes. He told them that there had been an apartment fire earlier this evening--no one's fault, just a freak accident with old wiring.

"Hey, kid," the cop had said as they got up to leave, "I recognize you. You're that kid who got kidnapped a few years ago, right? The one who had that fight in LA?"

Percy nodded, too tired and overwhelmed to even speak.

"I'm sorry this happened to you."

"Me too," he thought he heard himself say. "Me too."

*

Things had moved pretty fast, after that. He had been halfway through filling out an apartment application, a dozen online job applications pulled up on Annabeth's computer, when she told him he needed to stop and seriously think about this.

"Are you sure this is what's best for her? I'm sorry, Percy. I hate to even ask, but I need to know: are you sure this is what's best for her? I'll support you no matter what you decide, but you need to make this decision thinking about what she needs, first and foremost. She's with Paul's parents right now, right? They might be better equipped to take care of her than you are."

Percy, after a few sleepless nights, decided to go check it out for himself. Paul had never talked about his family, and Percy, like an idiot, had never thought to ask.

It didn't take long to figure out why. Percy knew, as soon as he opened to door and smelled stale beer and heard the loud crackle of TV static, the fainter sounds of someone cursing, why Paul never talked about his family. One glance around the apartment was enough to send Percy's mind straight back to his days with Gabe--the aging woman who pulled the door open slurred a question and he knew.

There was no way in hell he was leaving Estelle here.

Still, Annabeth's question rattled around in his mind while he was taking the subway, while he was sitting in job interviews, while he was training at camp. Is this what's best for her?

Yes, Percy loved her. He knew her and he remembered their mom, her parents. He'd babysat her enough to know her cues; to know what she needed and her favorite foods and her allergy to cherries.

But he was also a demigod, and he knew that there would always be monsters coming after him. The fate of the world would always be at risk. He knew himself and he knew that he'd never be able to completely curb that itch to run headfirst into danger, to make the threat disappear by whatever means necessary. Estelle deserved someone who would always be there for her, who didn't bring chaos and tragedy wherever he went.

Beyond that, Percy was barely nineteen. He didn't know how to do any of this--he'd been struggling to figure out how apartment applications work (he had planned to, he and his mom were going to go apartment hunting in the fall and she was going to teach him but now--), how to get insurance, how to pay for utilities. Give him a monster any day, but he'd never even thought about how to set up a monthly budget.

There was a chance that Estelle would be better off in foster care, finding a nice family who would care for her.

Still. Something in him couldn't let go of the thought that there's no one better than family when it comes to taking care of each other. And besides that, the foster care system was a gamble at best. For every decent, loving family out there, there were plenty that just want the monthly stipend, or worse. 

He might have been making a massive mistake, trying to do it. Trying to make it work. But his gut was telling him to try, to never give up, and it hadn't served him wrong yet. 

He clicked send on another application and stretched, felt the bones in his neck crack. He needed to get up and move, soon. He had set up a meeting with some of the nymphs to learn how to cook actual food, and he needed to leave soon if he was going to make it. He took a deep breath in and let it out slowly, trying to remember what it had felt like before there was this weight in his chest. 

Annabeth walked into the cabin--she must've be there to grab her laptop, he knew he'd been hogging it quite a bit--and her hand skimmed across his back, and some of the tension bled out of his shoulders. 

"You breathing?" she asked. It'd become her refrain, those past few weeks. 

"Yeah," Percy said, like always. 

"Good. Let's go." She grabbed his hand to pull him up, smiling softly. The bags under her eyes were bigger than they were before, and he couldn't help but feel a pang of guilt. 

"Go where? I have a--"

"A cooking class, I know. I'm coming with you."

Percy's forehead wrinkled in confusion. "But don't you have archery with the cabin right now? I don't want you to miss--"

"Come on, Seaweed Brain. You didn't really think you were doing all this alone, did you?"

Percy blinked, surprised to feel heat building up behind his eyelids. There was pressure in his throat, but he swallowed it back. "I--Thank you. I love you."

Her eyes softened a little, and she stepped closer, kissing him lightly. "I love you too. And you never have to thank me. We're in this together, no matter what." She squeezed his hand and he remembered, for the millionth time, why she was the only thing he could hold onto when Hera mind-wiped him. "You'll always have me."

"That goes both ways, you know," he finally said when they were walking in the shade of the trees. "You'll always have me, too."

She smiled and bumped against his side. "Yeah, I know."

*

The problem is whenever things had started to go wrong, evidently Percy hadn't noticed it.

In his defense, he'd been a little busy, between moving and starting his job and going Goodwill furniture shopping. Annabeth had been a godsend, there for every step and then some--she had collapsed on the rickety but plush old couch they'd scavenged right after they finished hauling it up the four flights of stairs the first night, but since then, she'd just been sleeping in his room. There wasn't a ton of space, considering it was a discount mattress being sold by a college that had just updated their dorms, but it was still better than the awkward, curled-up position the couch forced you into. And besides, they slept better together--they had for years, ever since Tartarus. It was like they scared away each other's nightmares. 

But the point was this: between the two jobs he'd been working all of a sudden, the independent ghost writing Annabeth had been working on, and the way that they both collapsed, completely exhausted, every night, there hadn't been much time to go think about larger plans. There definitely hadn't been time to go home to Camp Half-Blood. 

There were days when he was aching with homesickness, only it was more than that--it was this gut-deep feeling of wrongness with the way everything was; he should have been at home in his cabin, teaching sword fighting, taking the train uptown on Saturdays to kiss his mom on the cheek and play with his baby sister. The weight of all that should be pressed down on his chest and he couldn't breathe with it all. 

But then Annabeth would walk in muttering to herself about policy reform, a too-large sweater hanging off her frame, and try to put the milk in the cupboard and the cereal in the fridge and Percy couldn't do anything but smile. Sometimes, when he got in a mood and she wasn't neck-deep in articles, she'd take him by the hand and walk until they found a used furniture store and tried every couch in the shop, pretending to be 18th century nobles getting ready for tea time. Other times, when they were both stressed out and over whelmed and the pizza budget for the month was already well past gone, they'd walk the blocks over to the library and sit in the maker space. Percy watched Annabeth pick up bits of thread and scrap metal and start weaving, a skill she never really dropped after her solo adventure in Rome, and after a little while everything fell away and there's only the beauty being made around him, only the hum of the little old ladies' sewing machines and the buzz of the printer and the lights. Once and a while, he'd ask her to teach him, but he never got very far with the infuriating little pieces of yarn before he had to admit defeat. 

By far the biggest--and the best--distraction came in the form of Estelle. The social worker came a few times before she was convinced, and they had to meet with different pro bono lawyers and financial advisers and counselors, so many appointments that it felt like their lives were a revolving door into office buildings. The process was a pain but they did it. 

Social Services was less than thrilled to be giving custody to a kid who was barely nineteen, especially considering his long history of getting kicked out of schools and the national manhunts he'd been involved in, but the social worker had also been out to Paul's parents' place, and she vouched for them. It took a more than slightly uncomfortable conversation wherein Percy and Annabeth had to explain that they'd been together for almost two and a half years, that they'd been best friends for about eight, that they'd survived life and death together and nothing would ever stop them from being in each other's lives and in Estelle's, but they did it. It took a while for the paperwork to go through but eventually they were able to go and pick her up, to bring her back to the little apartment across town where she had a bedroom and food and diapers waiting. 

Taking care of a kid was exhausting. Percy knew that long before he signed on to be a pseudo-parent, but actually doing it, day in day out, wore him down faster than fighting Titans. Annabeth was amazing, using all the tricks she had learned from her cousins and her brothers, reading every book she could find, but it was still a lot. One week turned into two, and before he knew it, it had been months since that fire that took everything. 

In the early hours of the morning one Tuesday, after Annabeth had finally been able to get Estelle to sleep (she was so much better at that than he was, it was a little embarrassing), they were sitting on the couch together. Percy's head was in his hands and he wasn't sure if he wanted to cry or to scream. Both, maybe. 

"What is it?" Annabeth asked. Her words came out blurred together as a yawn escaped. 

"I just... I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know how to do any of this," he admitted. 

"Percy," she said softly, kneeling in front of him to meet his gaze, "you're kind of an idiot, you know that? You're doing it right now. You've been making this work, we both have. Yeah, it's a terrible situation, but it's not like that's a new thing. You already know what you're doing, you just need to have faith that you'll get it right."

"I know you're right--"

"I always am."

"--but it just feels like we're, I dunno, treading water? Like everything keeps getting worse and we're just barely keeping our head above the surface."

"Okay, so maybe that's true for right now. It won't always be--we'll find a way to get ahead, we always do."

Percy forced the tension out of his shoulders. Annabeth was right. She was always right, and she was right about this too. Things would turn around once they got in a rhythm. 

"Thank you," he said, kissing her lightly. "I love you."

"I love you too," she murmured. Across the apartment, the sun was just starting to break the horizon over the city. "I've got your back."

"And I've got yours."

"We're going to get through this. Things will get better," she promised, a familiar steel in those grey eyes. 

So of course, that's when everything went terribly wrong. 

*

When Annabeth left, she kissed him goodbye and made a joke about bringing back a weaponized playpen from Leo. She was supposed to head back to Camp Half-Blood for a few days to check in on the demigod side of things, say hello to Chiron, maybe invite the rest of the Seven over for a long-overdue housewarming party. He and Jason had been in correspondence a few months ago, right when he was moving out, but they hadn't heard from anyone in a while. 

The weekend passed quickly, between him playing with Estelle and picking up extra shifts at the cafe. He tried to send an Iris-Message once or twice, but he didn't think much of it when it didn't connect--she had gone home on a Capture the Flag weekend, she was probably busy strategizing with her half-siblings or challenging Chiron to chess matches. 

But then another day passed, and a few more, and before long, she was more than a week overdo to come back. She still wasn't answering any of his messages. Perhaps even more disconcerting was the fact that he hadn't had any demigod dreams while she was gone. He didn't know what to begin to make of that. 

Finally, on Saturday, he gave in. He asked Juliet, his coworker at the coffee shop down the street who was always babysitting, to keep an eye on Estelle for a few hours while he went to go check in with Annabeth. 

Things kept getting stranger from there. 

First, when he called the Grey Sisters, they wouldn't respond. He waited for fifteen minutes before giving up and calling a regular cab, panicking the whole time that something must have gone terribly wrong and how could he be so stupid, isolating himself when anything could happen? When the world was always one prophecy away from ending?

Only, when he got to camp, everything was fine. The strawberry fields were blooming. Satyrs were playing a game of pick-me-up volleyball against some dryads, while the Demeter cabin practiced flying in tight circles on pegasi far above. In the distance he could hear the clang of metal, either from the forges or the practice fighting ring. He walked through the camp in a stupor, caught somewhere between relieved and bitterly homesick. A couple of times campers would give him odd looks as he walked by, but he hardly even noticed--people had been giving him weird looks since a glowing trident appeared over his head all those years ago. 

Still, he had to admit that something in his gut twisted unpleasantly when they murmured quietly to each other and walked away, glancing back at him. Something felt off, but he chalked it up to all those months away and kept moving. 

The first time someone asked him who he was, he laughed. Then he frowned and said, "Wait, seriously?"

The kid rolled their eyes and walked away, muttering something about not having time for pompous strangers. 

Percy stared after them, feeling kind of lost. Their name was Max. He had done one on one tutoring with them for weeks before everything. 

Okay, he thought, his unease growing. That's pretty weird. 

It kept happening. Kids he had taught and fought beside and shared food with looked at him like he was a stranger. Even Clarisse had stopped barking orders to the Ares kids long enough to squint at him, like she was trying to place an unfamiliar picture. 

Oh, I get it. Leo convinced everyone to pretend to not know me, as payback for being gone so long. 

But when he went to talk to Leo, he couldn't even get into the forge. 

"Sorry," Nyssa said, scowling as she crossed her arms. "We're already behind on orders. We'll let you know when you can add to the queue."

"Okay, but I just need to talk to Leo real quick--"

"I said no."

"C'mon, Nyssa, it'll be like one second--"

Her arms tensed, her hands curling into fists. "How do you know my name?"

Percy blinked. "Wow, you guys are taking this really far. I can't believe Leo actually got you in on the joke, I thought you swore to stay neutral after the whole Stoll Fiasco last winter."

Nyssa crossed the line from "wary" to "actively attacking" astonishingly quickly, as it turned out. In less than a second, she had her sword out--if Percy had been even a fraction slower to defend himself he would've been splattered across the forge's front door. As it was, Riptide just barely deflected her jagged blade, and he still wound up with a stinging gash across his cheek.

"Who the hell are you? What do you want?" she demanded, pressing closer. Percy stumbled back a step, head swimming with the sudden combination of pain and confusion and hurt. 

"Nyssa, I know you, we always partner together for Capture the Flag! Come on, cut it out, you have to remember me!"

"I don't have to do anything. And I've never met you before," she snarled. Her eyes flickered past him and she nodded slightly. Percy had just enough time to think oh, shit, and then the world went black.

*

When he woke up, his head was throbbing like there were satyrs tap-dancing in his brain. He went to put a hand to his head, only to find that he couldn't--his hands were tied down, as was the rest of his body. 

Well, he was definitely awake now. 

As he blinked the lingering fuzziness out of his eyes, he breathed a sigh of relief. He was in the Big House--there was the pool table, and there Mr. D's creepy leopard head. Maybe something was seriously not right with the camp, but he was awake in a familiar place with all his memories--he knew from experience that it could have been a lot worse. 

On one side of the room, a bunch of the camp counselors were huddled together, having a whispered discussion with Chiron. There was something different, though--there was an extra kid, someone he vaguely remembered from the Hestia cabin with floppy reddish hair. 

"Hey," he said, interrupting their frantic hushed conversation. He knew he should be tactical about this, but his head was throbbing and he suspected that he was well into overtime pay for Juliet, so he gave in and threw caution to the wind. "Where's Annabeth?"

"How do you know her name?" snarled Clarisse, looming over him. 

"Is this a joke?" Percy demanded. "Why wouldn't I know her name? We've been best friends since we were twelve."

"Who the hell are you, and what kind of shit do you think you'll be able to pull here? You think this is funny? We know better than to fall for your pathetic lies!"

"What lies?" he snapped, loosing patience. Something in his gut told him that this wasn't a joke, that it had gone too far. There was something really wrong here, in the camp that had been his home for so many years. 

Percy had had enough of people messing with memories--his or his friends'. 

The unfamiliar Hestia kid--Grant, maybe? Or Grey?--studied him with eyes that were darker than Percy remembered, like he was thinking about all the ways that he would skewer Percy if he even thought about hurting one of the other campers. 

"Clarisse," the kid said, his voice perfectly calm. "Let's give him a chance. We don't know what's going on here. Piper?"

Piper stepped forward, but there was no recognition in her eyes--only wariness and distrust. Something in his chest panged, like a piece of metal falling out of place. What had happened to that girl who was always smiling, who braided harpy feathers into her hair, who had had picnics on the deck of the Argo II when he felt so claustrophobic he couldn't go into his cabin without smelling stale well-water?

"Tell us your story," she said, her voice laced with Charmspeak. Percy welcomed it--that's what he had been trying to do all along, after all. 

The cabin leaders' eyebrows rose higher and higher as he spoke, exchanging glances that were somewhere between doubtful and amused. When he got to the end, throat parched, he watched with a sinking feeling as a heavy silence settled in the room. In the corner, the Stolls were snickering under their breaths. 

"That's quite a tale," Malcolm said, his grey eyes glittering dangerously. "There's just one problem."

"And what is that?" Percy asked with a scowl. He didn't like the knowing look on the other boy's face.

"I'm the hero of Olympus," the Hestia kid said, stepping forward. "You just tried to take credit for everything I did."

*

By the time he made it back to Juliet, he owed her an extra $75 that he most certainly could not afford. The world was ringing in his ears, his whole torso feeling strangely hollowed out and brittle, like his rib bones could crack at the slightest pressure. He kept picturing her face: the way her eyebrows had furrowed, her head tilted just barely to the side, blonde hair still smoking slightly from the climbing wall where she'd been rescuing a newly-singed camper. The way she'd looked, confused, like something was on the tip of her tongue as they marched him past. The way the only thing to come out of her mouth was "who's this?".

Juliet must have seen something in his face, because she cut herself off before she even finished her first sentence. "Hey," she said, tentative in a way she'd never been with Percy, "What's going on? Where's your girlfriend?"

"She's--" he started, and didn't know how to finish that sentence. Gone? She's forgotten who he is? Everyone he has left thinks he's some nutjob stranger who's trying to play at being famous and failing badly?

"She's not coming back," he managed in a minute. Juliet's face was uncharacteristically soft, her rainbow-streaked hair and otherwise goth get-up at odds with the sympathetic look on her face. He thought he saw the faintest hint of anger, buried somewhere deep in the line of her jaw, but mostly he just saw a friend, trying to reach a hand out.

"Is there anything I can do?" she asked, and Percy shook his head mutely. He needed--he needed something. Extra shifts. A car. A strong drink. Forces of primordial power to stop messing with him.

"Where's Estelle?" he asked, "Did she give you any trouble?"

"No, she was perfect," Juliet said, watching him critically. He felt like a support structure under Annabeth's gaze, and oh did that thought hurt somewhere deep inside him. "You've got a good kid there, Jackson."

"She's not mine," he murmured, but it sounded distant even to him. Something in Juliet's face soured even more, but he didn't pay it any mind.

"Listen, I'll get you the extra money by Thursday at the latest," he promised, rubbing a hand over his face. Gods, he's so tired.

"Don't worry about it," Juliet said, swinging the strap of her messenger bag over her shoulder.

"I don't want your pity," he said, probably a little sharper than he should've. (Okay, definitely sharper than he should've.)

She just tossed him an amused glance over her shoulder. "Who said anything about pity? You work at that Mexican place a few blocks away, right? I'm still calling in my debt, I just want it in free chips and salsa. You guys salt those things just right, there's nothing better when I'm studying."

"That's still not enough to--"

She actually shushed him, managing to look like the world's weirdest teenage librarian. "Chalk the rest up to a discount for friends."

"I thought you said we weren't friends?"

"Yeah, well," she said, shrugging loosely. Her toe scuffed the ground, and she watched it with interest. "Every once in a very, very long while, someone proves me wrong."

Percy felt the ghost of a smile slip across his face. He still felt hollow, defeated, but he wasn't alone. He had a friend, even if she was a high school junior with more snark than Arion.

"I should get you home safely; do you have a subway pass? I can--"

"Shut your yapping, prep school boy," she said, scowling at him. "I've got mace, I can take care of myself. Besides, one of us has a dependent and it's certainly not me."

Percy raised his hands in surrender. "I never meant you couldn't take care of yourself. I just want you to be safe. Be smart when you're walking, okay? It's getting dark out there."

"Yeah, yeah. I want those chips, you hear me?"

"Yes ma'am," he said, doing a little salute. When she closed the door, he expected it to bang, but she shut it so quietly he almost wasn't sure she was gone.

*

In the morning, things looked a lot better. He woke up early so he could jog down to the tiny, ten foot square "park" that butted up against the apartment building, a pocketful of drachmae clicking together. The sprinklers kicked on pretty early and he wanted to catch them to make some phone calls without having to carry Estelle too far. She was sleeping soundly in her stroller next to the bench while Percy took a deep breath and waited for the rainbow to appear.

"Reyna, Camp Jupiter!" he sid, but the drachma just sailed harmlessly through the mist, plunking on the ground on the other side. Percy frowned. Maybe the connection wasn't strong enough? He waited for the rainbow to shimmer more fully in the sunlight, then tried again. And again. And again. He tried the rest of the Seven, Reyna again, Rachel, his brother Tyson. He tried just saying locations, like the camps or common questing areas, but nothing happens. He even tried to get the harpy Ella on the other line. The golden coins just fell harmlessly through the mist, landing with little plunks against the wet grass.

Percy scowled at the sky, quickly edging past frustration and into that deeper, burning anger. His stomach churned like molten lava.

The gods didn't want to help him? Fine. He could do it himself.

*

The next few weeks passed in a blurry haze of sleeplessness. He was pretty sure he hadn't been this tired since he and Annabeth were trudging across Tartarus, barely sleeping and staggering their way through the hellscape.

He kept pushing.

Whenever he wasn't at work, he was at home taking care of Estelle, or out wandering the city and picking fights with any monster he can find. Riptide was a steady, familiar weight in his hand in a world of bills and rent payments, where nothing else was familiar. Maybe he had to put up with ever-obnoxious customers at work, but as soon as he was off-shift he could do find some dracanae to question. The sooner he could get Annabeth and the rest of the camp back on his side, the sooner everything could get back to some semblance of normal. The problem, of course, was that none of the monsters seemed to know anything--there're no whispers of some great power stirring, no murmurings on the street of the gods going quiet or communication going down. There was no sign at all that anything was wrong, except for the way that no one seemed to remember him.

In the end, it was Juliet who did it. She sat him down when he stumbled in one night, dead on his feet and banged up from a run-in with a pack of Hell hounds in Central Park, and made him some hot coco, concern flickering in her brown eyes.

"You've been a lifesaver, you know?" he said, trying hard to focus on the taste of chocolate and not on the way his whole left half was throbbing like one giant bruise. "Babysitting Estelle all the time."

Juliet sat for a moment, the silence heavy around her. "Are you ready to tell me whatever's going on now?"

Percy choked on a laugh. "I told you, I'm just trying--"

"To find a way to bring her back? Yeah, but that's not the whole truth. If you're just trying to win your girlfriend back you should be buying flowers and chocolates, not coming home looking like you got hit by a bus."

"Yeah, well, we don't have the most conventional relationship."

"No kidding," she muttered, frowning slightly. Percy felt a surge of affection for her--this girl who was like his second little sister, who had stepped up so easily, who stole all the Lucky Charms as soon as he put them in the cupboard. He didn't know how he could have done the past few weeks without her. He didn't know if he could've done them.

The silence lingered for a few minutes, growing thicker and thicker as he watched her open and close her mouth, evidently struggling to find the right words. Finally, she took a deep breath, her eyes fluttering closed as her shoulders curled inwards for just a second. She forced the air out of her lungs and straightened, and for a second, Percy could see the face of a demigod sent on a suicide mission in her posture. He should know; he'd seen it in the mirror plenty of times.

"Are you sure you should be doing this?" she finally blurted out.

Percy frowned down at the tarnished mug between his hands. "I mean, probably not. I know you can get, like, diabetes and stuff. But I like hot chocolate too much to give it up, to be honest."

"No," she said, rolling her eyes. Not for the first time, he thought she'd get along with Thalia. "I mean... all this. The working too hard and spending all your free time away, chasing after some girl. Shouldn't you be, you know, here?"

Percy swallowed down the shout that's building, the one that's been building in his throat for months. He forced back the way he wanted to scream about all that they've been through, all that they've fought and bled and sacrificed to get to this point only to have her ripped away, to have everything ripped away. Lately, when he collapsed in bed exhausted and with only four hours before he had to get back up, he found that no matter how tired he was he couldn't wind down. His head was going too fast for that, thoughts circling themselves so quickly that it makes him dizzy. He couldn't stop wondering if this was how she felt, all those months he was gone--like one of her limbs had been cut off and she was walking around with a bloody, exposed wound.

Once, Annabeth had taken a poison dagger she had no logical way of knowing would kill him. She's had his back, literally and metaphorically, for more than a third of his life. He hadn't felt this alone since he woke up with Lupa, only this time, there was no quest to finish, no irritating goddesses laughing in his ear and and taunting answers. There was just him, sitting alone and bruised and bloody in this apartment they had bought together, with no idea what to do and no one to call for backup.

He couldn't say any of these things to Juliet, though. She was mortal. She wouldn't understand, and worse, she'd think he was crazy; he knew how much she loved Estelle and he knew that she would take her away if she ever thought he was a danger.

Instead, he forced himself to take a breath, to push that current of useless rage away. The sea does not like to be restrained, but Percy has had plenty of experience with swallowing his pride. There was no reason to take out months of frustration on a friend who was just trying to help.

"What do you mean?" he asked. He imagined lake waves, slow and rolling and rhythmic, small and gentle enough to barely crest before washing on shore, and his breathing felt easier.

"I just mean--look. I know that you're upset Annabeth is gone. I get that, okay? I promise, I really do. But what you're doing isn't healthy or safe, for you or Estelle. What happens if the social worker comes here while you look like you've been cage fighting or something? What if they take her away?"

Percy's stomach dropped out beneath his feet. He knew that was a possibility, he's known it since the beginning, but the thought of it still always made his mind white out with terror.

"You have a visit this week," Juliet was continuing in the background, looking somewhat uncomfortable but plowing ahead anyways. "And no offense, but this place is kind of a mess. As much as I hate to say it, this might come down to a choice between Estelle and your ex."

"She's not--" Percy started, but he didn't finish that sentence. What was he supposed to say. She's not technically my exgirlfriend, she's just forgotten that I exist, along with everyone else I used to know. That would go over great. "I see what you're saying, but Annabeth and I have been through everything together. I would never forgive myself if I stopped trying."

"Then don't. Just... try less violently. You need sleep and actual meals, and you need to spend time with Estelle. I don't mind spending time with her, she's a cute kid, but she needs actual family around. If you don't want to loose her, you're going to have to tone something back."

Percy put his head in his hands, cringing as his ribs protest the movement. He had run out of ambrosia about a week ago, and he didn't know where to get more if no one at Camp remembered him and none of the gods appeared to be willing to communicate. His dad hadn't answered any of his prayers in months, either.

He closed his eyes and imagined that Annabeth was sitting next to him, smiling fondly as she nudged his side. Her eyes would be light, her hair pulled back into a tight ponytail. What would she say? Don't be stupid, Seaweed Brain. You know what the priority is. 

They'd find their way back to each other, they always did. Estelle might not. She was the one he ran the real risk of loosing; Annabeth was safe at camp, even if they weren't together.

"Okay," he breathed. "Okay, you're right."

Juliet sagged a little with relief, and he wondered just how out of it he'd been to make her nervous like that. He'll be a better friend, he resolved. Starting now.

"You should get some sleep. You've been exhausted for days, don't even try to lie to me."

Percy laughed a little as she grabbed his arm to pull him up and started pushing him towards his room. He turned around when they're at the doorway and smiled at her, doing his best to remember what it had felt like when he didn't feel so heavy all the time.

"Thank you," he said, trying his best to show her that he means it, "for everything."

"Yeah, well, we all know you'd be lost without me. Like a helpless little kitten, really."

"Hey!" he protested, but she just pushed him through the threshold and swung the door closed in his face. When he got in bed, he didn't feel lighter exactly, but maybe--calmer? He imagined how the next day would go: work, then home to play with Estelle, no monster hunting until it got dark enough that even he didn't quite feel safe. Maybe he'd take her to the park and blow some bubbles for her to try and grab out of the air. He'd clean the apartment and make an actual dinner instead of just protein bars, maybe even something like the food at Camp that the nymphs taught him about.

Annabeth's absence was still a glaring hole at his side, still felt fundamentally wrong in a way he couldn't quite explain. He'd keep trying to find answers, when he could--maybe look into myths about similar things happening, or try to find resources who never knew him before and wouldn't be confused or angry when he showed up.

He thought about Estelle, tucked into her crib and safely sleeping a wall away. He and Annabeth had celebrated her first birthday a few months ago, a weird and bittersweet occasion. For the first time, he let himself acknowledge that he might have to celebrate the next one without her. The thought stung, but the world moved on. The world has moved on, while Percy was taking out his anger on empousai around the city.

He needed to start moving forward, too.

*

A month later, the kitchen sink breaks. 

Chapter Text

Tyler's excited whoop turns every head in the bar, and Percy wills himself not to turn bright red as eyes from all over land on them.

"What did I just say ," he grits out, scowling. The other boy shrinks back a little, turtle-ing into his sweater.

"Sorry," he mumbles. Juliet snorts from across the table, brushing broken peanut shells off the table with her elbow. A few cling to her sweater, flying off in different directions when she moves her arm to thwap him.

“So,” he says, leaning forward and lowering his voice. He looks like he’s plotting a murder, not picking the color scheme for a toddler’s birthday party. “Did you have anything in mind?”

Percy feels the headache growing in the back of his mind, but pushes it away. He did this last year with a lot more emotional distress, and a lot less help. He can do it again, no problem. So what if he had never imagined that more than a year would pass with no progress? It was fine. He was fine. He had a job and a car and everything, and it was all working out just fine, especially now that they were (finally! finally! ) reaching the end of the “buying diapers” stage.

“Just,” he says, muffling a yawn, “don’t go excessively bright pink, alright? She likes purple and blue and red, if that helps. Whatever you pick is fine, I trust you.”

“What about the rest of us?” Juliet demands, propping her weight on her elbows as she leaned in. The scuffed, shiny table below her distorts her reflection on its surface, making her serious face look twisted like a mirror fun house. “What do we get to do?”

“You’re sure you want to help? None of you have anything better to do with your Saturday afternoon?” he asks again. Fariha gives him what is possibly the harshest what do you think stare he’s ever received, which is saying something, given the personalities of his older and more mythologically entangled friends.

“Come on, man,” Matt says, shaking his head slowly, his lingering British accent coming through, “you know we all love Stella. We want to help.”

“Estelle,” Percy corrects on reflex. It’s a habit that he hasn’t shaken, even after he gave up on trying to talk his friends out of giving her a nickname. “And okay, if you want to help, I’ll put you to work. I already have a couple of people I’m going to invite, but if you guys know anyone who would want to come, feel free to bring them along. Like I said, Tyler, you’re in charge of color scheme and decorations–do your best, I trust you. Juliet, I’d like it if you could work with him, finding a place to host it–after last year, I am never risking my apartment getting covered in cake again. Speaking of which, Fariha and Matt–you guys are in charge of food and drinks. You can split it up amongst yourselves however you’d like, just let me know if you need anything, and remember, she’s allergic to–”

“Cherries,” they all finish in unison. 

“We know, mate,” Matt says, grinning at him lopsidedly. 

“Don’t worry, Percy, we’ve got this,” Fariha says, beaming at him. There are bags under her eyes–the twins must be keeping her up late again–but she’s still here, huddled around a table on a Monday night to help plan his little sister’s birthday party. They’re all here, for him, and for a minute he chokes on all the gratitude he feels for these wonderful people who helped him stumble his way through those first shaky months, and through everything after. Juliet, who still shows up to babysit on random afternoons and orders him to go take a nap; Tyler, who always seems to swing by with a blue slush just when Percy is having a rough day; Fariha, who sat next to him and smiled when everyone in the pediatrician’s waiting room was shooting them both dirty looks and muttering about delinquent teenagers. Even Matt, who just happened to tag along with Tyler once, now routinely shows up at Percy’s apartment without calling first, bearing bags of Chinese takeout and an extra side of white rice just because he knows Estelle loves the stuff.

Yeah, Percy thinks. He’s made some pretty good friends, for a hot mess of a demigod with no idea what he’s doing.

*

When he gets back to the apartment, Mrs. Claudizfah opens the door on the third ring and reluctantly passes Estelle’s sleeping form over to him. She smiles at him and quietly reminds him that she can watch the girl anytime, really, she loves the company, and oh, wait a second young man, I have to give you her gift!

Forget defeating Gaea, winning over the finicky old Polish woman is his greatest achievement to date. 

Percy fumbles with his key, trying to juggle the sleeping three-year-old and his bag and the hand-knit hat Mrs. Claudizfah had pressed into his hands so carefully. He swings the door open, shifts some things around, and drops everything but his sister on the couch before continuing to her room. It’s fuller now than it used to be–the same peeling off-white walls as when he and Annabeth had moved in, but covered in pictures and posters and bookshelves, stuffed animals and handmade crafts littering the floor. Percy scoots them out of the way and lays Estelle down carefully, making sure to tuck her in tightly, surrounding her in the bright, sea-foam green blankets. He closes the door quietly and returns to the couch, where he sinks down with a sigh, feeling the best kind of empty–quiet and content, the way you feel after a long, productive day when you can finally relax. There’s a pile of wood in the corner, waiting for him to assemble his next commission--something that had started when he was frustrated with the impossible-to-follow IKEA furniture instructions; he had finally given up and decided that he could do better (and cheaper) on his own. You don’t get to be friends with people like Annabeth and Leo without picking up a thing or two about how to build, so he had relied on his powers to pull pieces of wood to himself from the ocean and build them into bookshelves and chairs and whatever else he needed. Since then, he’s been selling more and more through word of mouth as a surprisingly nice side income, although he should probably set up some sort of online store or something soon. The bookshelves are ridiculously popular; he’s considering increasing the price again just to make it so he doesn’t have to make so many of them. 

The point is this: he has to be at work tomorrow morning to help teach the “make your own picture book” session the children’s library is putting on, and he has a tiny profit on the side, and he paid all his bills on time this month and just for this moment, he feels something like happy. Not complete–he hasn’t really felt that since when Annabeth had kissed him, the beginnings of laugh lines around her eyes, and promised to be back soon. But he’s happy. He’s proud of himself, for what he has accomplished. Even if the feeling doesn’t last, even if everything goes wrong tomorrow, he wants to take this moment to bask in the fact that for one, glorious night, he can at least feel like he has it all under control.

So of course, that’s when there’s a knock at the door.

Percy heaves a sigh and pulls himself to his feet, making his way across the room. It’s probably Mrs. Claudizfah, reaching for an excuse to spend more time with Estelle, or Vicki, who has forgotten her key and needed him to pick the lock three times already this week, but he was having a moment , there, did they really need to–

Percy opens the door and something in his chest stops. He opens his mouth to say something, anything, like where have you been or what have you been doing  or do you remember me , but because he’s apparently still twelve, what comes out of his startled mouth is, “G-man?”

Grover breathes out with relief as soon as he sees Percy, launching at him with a hug and sending them both stumbling backwards across the threshold.

“Percy!” his best friend shouts as they crash to the floor. In some distant corner of his mind, Percy thinks I hope that didn’t wake Estelle . The rest of him is too busy freaking the fuck out to pay much attention to anything. 

It takes a minute to get themselves settled, and Percy gets up on autopilot in a daze to get a glass of water for Grover before slumping onto the floor, cross-legged and staring blankly at the satyr sitting across from him. 

It’s been more than a year since he’s seen--well. Not since he’s seen a friendly or familiar face, since Percy has, by some stroke of luck, gotten to know plenty of those. But it’s been more than two years since he last saw his family, almost a year and a half since he last saw Annabeth, and it doesn’t matter that Grover has been in and out of Percy’s life for years now, working with nature spirits--Grover is the closest thing to family Percy has left. Between the years of questing, traumatic experiences, and empath bond between them, Grover is Percy’s constant, whether or not he’s in sight. 

Percy has felt so, so alone, for so long. And now Grover is sitting on his apartment floor, choking on the water as he tries to speak even while he’s swallowing, and Percy is pretty sure that somewhere behind the numbness and disbelief, there’s pure joy welling up in his chest. 

“--so anyways, when I came out I couldn’t feel the bond, it was just gone , like you were dead or something. I couldn’t believe that was true, though, so of course I reached out to a dryad who knows a faun who knows a cop and she found your information, and I got on the bus to come here, but I still don’t get it. What happened ?”

Percy’s exhale comes out shaky, and he feels like laughing but he’s also blinking tears out of his eyes. He doesn’t know where to start, he realizes somewhat belatedly, because he’s never said any of it out loud before--why would he? He would just be talking to himself, or Estelle, who was too young to understand, or his friends, who would lock him up in an asylum. 

He takes a breath to steady himself, and instead says, “I really missed you, man.”

“Well, obviously,” Grover sniffed, his chin jutted out. “What would you do without me? I was the backbone of every quest we went on.”

And that’s all it takes for the tears to start. 

Percy scrubs at his eyes angrily, frustrated with himself and with the lump in his throat. He doesn’t know why he’s crying, to be honest--he hasn’t cried, not since the first night back from camp, all by himself with no one to hold on to. He’s happy that Grover is here; he should be ecstatic, not a crumpled mess, and why the fuck is he crying?

“This is weird,” Grover says, and Percy glances over at him reflexively. “The watching, I mean. I’m not used to not being able to tell what’s going on with you. I’m supposed to be feeling whatever you’re feeling, not just sitting here trying to figure out how to not make things worse.”

Grover sits up, leans forward a little. He’s perched on his hooves in a crouch, and his face is uncharacteristically serious. “Percy. What happened?”

Percy opens his mouth, closes it. He stands up and makes his way to the kitchen, where he pulls out the tool kit that rests beneath the sink, and brings it over to sit down next to the driftwood. 

“I need something to do with my hands,” he explains, even though Grover didn’t ask. He needed to do this tonight anyway; he promised to have it ready for pickup by Wednesday and there’s a potluck tomorrow night that his boss roped him into attending. 

He reaches for the screwdriver and lines up the threads of the first screw with the first of the holes he had drilled earlier, doing his best to quell the shaking in his hands.

“The first thing you need to know,” he begins, “is that my mom and Paul died in a fire two years ago.”

*

By the time the bookshelf is complete, tools have been put back away, and the piece of furniture has been pushed to stand against the wall rather than taking up the majority of the remaining space in the living room, Grover’s face is pale, his mouth twisted into an unhappy frown. 

“I should have been here,” he says decisively, standing and pacing. 

“Grover, man, you couldn’t have known--”

“But that’s just it!” he interrupts. “I should have known. I have an empath bond with you, Percy; I should have known . I don’t understand how this happened. I should’ve been here , with you and Annabeth, figuring stuff out, not off chasing ghosts--”

“What ghosts?” Percy asks. He pats the ground next to him, waiting for Grover to stop pacing. “What have you been up to, anyways? I haven’t heard from you in a while.”

Grover lets out a distressed bleat. “Does it matter? I wasn’t here, that’s all that counts.”

“Grover,” Percy says, catching his hand halfway through a wild wave. “It's okay. You have important, nature-y duties. I don’t blame you for not being here, I promise.”

Grover slides to the ground with a huff, still looking vaguely miserable. 

“I’m serious. Tell me about what you’ve been up to,” Percy tries again. “I bet you get to meet all the cute dryads as a Lord of the Wild, huh?”

“Yeah, but I’ve got Juniper. And besides, things are--well. They’re kind of...wonky, since everything with Gaea,” Grover says, grimacing. 

“What do you mean?”

“Well, it’s no secret that things haven’t been going well for the natural world lately. Climate change, widespread pollution, the destruction of so many wild habitats… All over, the land is dying, Percy,” he says, mournful. “And then the battle with Gaea… I know that she was evil, that she wanted to destroy everything, that she needed to be stopped. But you can’t literally kill the Earth and not have some ripple effects.”

Percy winces. That day had been long and bloody, and he won’t ever forget the way the heat had simmered off of ancient stone in the August humidity; he doesn’t think he’ll ever forget the way Camp Half-Blood had looked, a living sea of demigods prepared to slaughter each other. He had tried so hard, in the aftermath--but he hadn’t thought of the environment, to be honest. His focus had been on the lives of kids under his care, on rebuilding the camps, on healing his own fractured mind. Maybe he would’ve gotten around to damage control for everything else once things were more under control, but--

Well. Then there was the fire, and the apartment, and the sudden legal guardianship of a child, and there wasn’t really any time to look back at reconstruction efforts at all. 

“It’s nobody’s fault, really. There was nothing else to be done, no other way to fix that once she was awake. You guys did what you had to, I know. But things haven’t been going well ever since, at least for the Council. So when I heard the rumors… I knew they had to be false, but I couldn’t resist looking, just to see. I’ve always wanted to be a Searcher, you know that,” he smiles ruefully. 

“What rumors?” Percy asks, leaning forwards. 

“That Pan is back.”

Percy feels himself blink, slumping backwards. “I--wow. But we saw him die, didn’t we? Or fade, or whatever.”

“Yeah,” Grover sighs, “which is why it was so stupid of me to run off chasing that ghost story. I was in a sacred grove, communing with spirits, and when I came out, the link was gone and I couldn’t feel you.”

“How long were you there?” Percy asks with a frown. “If that’s related to everyone forgetting me, it must’ve been, what, a year and some change ago?”

Grover shakes his head helplessly. “Time doesn’t move the same in places with a lot of wild energy, Percy. I honestly don’t know--it felt like a few hours to me, and as far as I can tell, it was months to the rest of the world.”

“This is a bit of a shot in the dark, but I don’t suppose you’d know anything about what might be causing all this, do you?” Percy asks halfheartedly. It must be the millionth time he’s asked that this year: why . 

“I don’t know,” Grover says, hesitating as his eyes flicker to the side, “I’ve never heard of anything quite like this. But if I had to guess… I’d say it sounds like a curse.”

*

Percy would like his refund now, please and thank you. He’d like to go to bed and wake up two years ago, or with all his problems fixed, or to a world where his life is even remotely fair. Fuck the universe, honestly. And fuck adulting, too, because even as all the pieces come together while he and Grover kneel on the living room floor, he can’t go out and confirm the theory or do anything about it; he has a shift at work and a kid to take care of and a potluck for a work party tonight that he’s already agreed to bring homemade queso for. 

Which is how he ends up agreeing to meet up on Saturday morning, a whole six days away. He puts it into his phone calendar as “m. hunting & fixing life”, which feels ridiculous because A) this is the ultimate proof that he’s now old , he has a calendar where he regularly schedules events because otherwise he’d forget them, and B) who schedules something like that in? Percy’s been on and off quests to save lives/groups of people/the world since he was twelve; penciling in times to meet that work best for everyone is definitely not part of the process. 

But hey, now he has the aforementioned kid and job, and generally speaking, all’s not fine and dandy for adults who have responsibilities to just vanish for several days, so blocking off Saturday it is. Julia gives him kind of a weird look when he asks her to babysit for an undetermined amount of time on Saturday but doesn’t ask any questions, so he’ll count it as a win. 

The days creep by, every hour feeling like eons. It’s been so long since he’s had a lead this good--he wants to be out there, chasing down answers with Riptide in hand, not making sure none of the kids are eating the glue instead of using it to make snow globes. Everything feels pointless: the work party, meeting up with the buyer for the bookshelf, going grocery shopping. It’s been more than a year since he’s seen Annabeth and he finally has a shot at fixing this, at fixing everything, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re out of milk. It’s kind of surreal, the way life doesn’t stop even when it feels like he’s holding his breath. 

Finally, Saturday comes. Percy is up and moving at six, too much pent-up energy to sleep in any later. He uncaps Riptide and takes a few practice swings, a little guilty for how little he’s used it in the past few months. As soon as Julia’s through the door, he’s out and bolting for the park, anticipation humming in his veins. He spends an impatient five minutes waiting for Grover to show up, anxiously pacing back and forth and flipping his phone open and closed. When the satyr shows up, groggy and yawning, Percy’s already just about ready to jump out of his skin. Almost, almost, almost , his blood sings. 

“What now?” Grover asks, using his knuckles to rub at his eye. Only one of his shoes is tied and his hat is slipping off, exposing the curly horns underneath. Percy beams--it feels so good to have his best friend back. 

“Now,” he says, something suspiciously like hope caught in the back of his throat, “we get my life back.”

*

In the end, it’s rather anticlimactic. Those Iris Messages Percy’d tried all those months ago hadn’t connected for him, but he still had the drachmas, and whatever was going on with him didn’t mean Grover couldn’t use them. It took a few minutes and several IMs to convince anyone of the truth, including one incredibly cranky goddess of magic who told them if they ever called her so early again they’d be lucky to live as weasels for the rest of their lives, but they did it. Ultimately, it was Hestia who believed them and convinced the others--where everyone else had scowled or laughed in their faces, she just frowned slightly, studying them carefully, before saying, “I know a thing or two about being forgotten and overlooked, and it is not something I would ever wish forced on somebody. I will do my best to help you.”

From there, it’s a matter of talking to the right people, really. Percy doesn’t even get to kill anything, which is oddly disappointing--it would’ve been much more satisfying to be able to literally slice through his problems--but hey, so long as he’ll be able to see Annabeth in the end, he’s happy. Hestia talked to a minor deity who talked to a wood nymph who talked to a guardian in the Underworld, and so on. Percy kind of lost track of the phone line after the first few people, if he was being honest--it was mostly a lot of waiting around for other people to get done talking about logistics and bureaucracy, and while he’d had to learn to compensate for a lot of demigod issues over the past two years, he hadn’t found a magical cure for ADHD. 

In the end, he couldn’t even exactly say who figured out what, but the facts aligned themselves to fit with the same rough idea he and Grover had pulled together a week ago, and it boiled down to an arai that got away, temporal differences between dimensions, and sheer coincidence. 

There were still a lot of details that no one along the way had been able to work out, but the longer, messier version which hurt Percy’s head just thinking about went something like this: while in Tartarus, where space works differently and time is more of a rough outline than a universal law, Percy had fought and killed a whole bunch of arae , way too many to keep track of. One of those curses had gone wonky--maybe it was because he injured one of them badly but it got away and died later, maybe it was because of some sort of weird if-then magic that applied to multiple curses, maybe it was because the universe just liked to laugh at him; no one could pinpoint an exact reason. The point is that it hadn’t actually activated while he was still in Tartarus, probably because he left just before it could hit, and it took awhile for the magic to make its way through the temporal differences and layers of protective magic checkpoints and up into the mortal world. When it caught up, the curse--which was that Percy be left alone in the world, which some enterprising mage spirit had been able to trace back to the sole survivor of the Mt. St. Helen explosion--kicked into place, sparking some old wires in his mom’s building and causing the whole place to go up. When the magic hit the borders of Camp Half-Blood and Camp Jupiter, the protective magics around the Camp had negated the fatal part of the curse, equalizing into something that just meant he was forgotten by everyone around him--it was pure luck that they hadn’t had any campers he knew out on quests at the moment the curse hit, or those campers all would’ve died. A similar thing happened with most of the gods and immortal spirits; you can’t kill something that’s immortal (or rather, not with a minor curse), so instead it just wiped all thought of Percy from their minds. 

There were plenty of people who still had questions, Percy among them: why had Estelle survived? Why did Annabeth remember him for as long as she did?

The string of dryads and skeletons and minor deities who were helping didn’t have any precise answers, just theories. Estelle had probably survived due to the protective blessings the gods had bestowed upon her at her birth, and hadn’t had much of a memory to wipe anyways, given her young age. Annabeth might’ve escaped because the curse was too weak to cover so many people and there were some lucky gaps, or because she was also affected by wonky time in Tartarus, or--in the words of one particularly romantic nymph who spent more time sighing than speaking--because their love for each other was too strong to be stopped by a curse. The most popular was that it was overridden for a while since they were always together, but that once she didn’t see him for a few days the curse kicked in for her, too. Percy was pretty sure that the perplexed group could’ve gone on for hours, trading ideas and counterpoints, but he didn’t really care about the minutiae of what had happened, just that they could fix it. 

“Oh, of course,” the aging satyr says, blinking, when Percy interrupts by saying so. He adjusts his grandpa glasses (it’s odd to see a satyr who lived long enough to need corrective lenses, but there’s plenty of stranger things that Percy has seen, so he lets it go) and flips through a thick stack of paperwork, mumbling to himself for a moment before looking up again. “Your request will be processed within three to five business days, officially speaking, but just between us, I’ll see what I can do to get you moved up in the queue. Your case seems a bit more urgent than the standard ‘ex-girlfriend gave me boils’, if you don’t mind me saying so.”

“Thank you,” Percy says, the relief making his knees weak. “Thank you so much.”

“Of course, of course. I’ll just send your case tracking number to Lord Underwood, if you don’t mind, seeing as his Iris Mail account is already approved for system messages.”

“That won’t be a problem at all, thank you Dennis,” Grover interrupts. He looks older, more confident, than the middle school boy Percy’d once been friends with, but he’s still family. For the millionth time this week, Percy thanks the gods that Grover had shown up on his doorstep. 

All this time, and he just needed someone to submit a claim request on his behalf. Percy’s pretty sure that once it all gets cleared up and he can breathe again, he’ll be furious there wasn’t some kind of fix for this earlier, but for now--for now, all he can think about is finally getting to go home . 

*

Dennis must be good for his word, because he gets a call from Annabeth halfway through Tuesday. He’s in the middle of setting up for a Bob Ross paint-along, and when his phone lights up with Annabeth’s contact, he doesn’t even think about it, just drops the Costco sized bucket of Crayola brushes and runs . He shouts a hurried sorry-be-right-back-emergency-call to his boss on the way out and bursts into the open air, where he sits on the stairs outside with shaking hands to answer the call. 

“Annabeth?” he asks. He’s not breathing, he can’t breath with the weight of everything that this might mean. 

“Percy, thank the gods!” she shouts from the other end. He can hear wild car honks and squealing tires in the background of her call and wonders vaguely what’s going on, but everything is overshadowed by the fact that Annabeth is on the phone with him , she called him and she knows who he is ! His hands are still shaking but for a whole other reason now. 

“What happened?” she demands from the other end of the line. “I’m on my home now--”

There's another screech in the background followed by a muffled bang, and Percy cringes in sympathy for whatever poor driver had gotten in Annabeth’s way. 

“--but I don’t understand what happened, I just-- remembered , all of a sudden! How could I ever forget you? If this is Hera again I swear to the gods--”

“I’m at the library, actually. And it’s not Hera,” Percy interrupts, relishing in the way it feels to have air in his lungs. He knows he must’ve been breathing the whole time, but it feels like this is the first time he’s been able to inhale since he left Camp Half-Blood a year and a half ago. “It’s a long story, but it’s not Hera.”

There’s silence from the other end for a moment. Annabeth must be stopped at a light, because beyond the normal honks that go along with New York traffic, there aren’t any distance crashes or shouts as she speeds through traffic. 

“A year and a half,” she says after a minute. She sounds… small, in a way that Percy never thought he’d hear her again. With all they’ve been through, he had just kind of assumed that they had maxed out the badness that could at them--a stupid assumption for any demigod to make, which is why he’d never said it out loud, but one he’d made. And now, Annabeth on the other line, too far away and sounding small and scared--well. It puts a damper on the giddy relief that’s swirling through him. 

“A year and a half,” he agrees. “Gods, I miss you.”

“I’m almost there,” she promises, and he kind of wants to break down crying, but also to run down the street screaming to every uncaring stranger that he has Annabeth back. As soon as the camp van rounds the corner, the rest of the world fades to the background--there just Annabeth, hurriedly parking in a space he’s not quite sure is legal and running into his arms. 

It’s not like she was never gone, because she was , regardless of the lack of choice in the whole thing, and they’ve both changed. She smells like something more fruity than floral now, maybe some kind of apple, and she has a new bead on her camp necklace that he doesn’t get and new scars that he wasn’t there for. He has an extra half inch of height and actual work experience under his belt and about a thousand times more knowledge of how to take care of a kid than he did the last time he saw her; Percy knows that she’s probably changed in other ways, ones that he can’t see, too. 

But all the same: this is Annabeth . They’ve been separated for months before and always found a way around it, always circled back to each other in the end. This is the longest he’s gone without seeing her since they met when they were twelve, but in the end, they would fight and live and die for each other and that’s all that counts. When he kisses her again for the first time, the world doesn’t go into slow-mo or play romantic music; it keeps turning and loud pedestrians on their phones keep passing by and life moves on. But when he kisses her, he isn’t thinking about any of those things, he’s just thinking about watching fireworks on the beach and blue birthday cake and the way she judo-flipped him in front of everyone at Camp Jupiter and gods, he loves this girl so much . 

When they pull apart, there’s a regular named Karen who’s staring at them, scandalized and ushering her children away. He’s 90% sure he just guaranteed a write-up, and it’s quite possible that he’ll have to go and listen to a lecture from his boss’ boss about appropriate conduct during work hours, but--

Annabeth is back at his side. With her watching his back, for the first time in a long time, Percy feels at least a little bit invincible. 

*

“Everyone’s dying to see you,” Annabeth says, halfway between one bite and the next. There’s a giant pizza in a box on the living room floor, and Annabeth is pressed against his shoulder while Grover nibbles on the cardboard and Estelle steals bits of cheese and pepperoni from her spot in his lap and this is legitimately the happiest that he’s been in years. 

“Hopefully not literally,” he says, and there it is, the Annabeth eye roll that he’s been missing so much. 

“No, Seaweed Brain, not literally. But don’t be surprised if the whole Seven and then some invade pretty soon, they’re all pretty freaked out.”

“You’re telling me,” Percy says with a sigh. “Stupid arae .”

“Yeah,” Grover chimes in, “as much as I hate that we broke up the squad, I’ll admit I’m glad I missed that particular quest.”

Percy shakes his head, amused. “I think you’d be pretty crazy if you weren’t. It wasn't exactly a barrel of laughs."

On his lap, Estelle lets out a loud burp and claps in delight.

"So," he says, finally letting his curiosity get the best of him as he leans forward to get a better look at Annabeth's necklace, "what's that bead mean?"

Wry amusement flashes across her face as she rubs it absent-mindedly. "It's a long story."

"I'm guessing you'll have a lot of those to share," Percy says, trying for light and funny and missing the mark. It just keeps hitting him, how much he's missed. How he'll never really be able to make that time up.

Annabeth is watching him carefully, something cautious in her eyes. "I'm sure you do, too."

"Yeah," Grover says, swallowing come cardboard, "I mean, he works in a library ! Who could've seen that one coming?"

And then they're all laughing again, throwing little bits of food at each other and pulling out old memories just to give each other shit. Percy is sitting on the floor in a tiny apartment with his two oldest friends and even though this time a year ago it felt like everything was crumbling around him, right now he's the happiest he's ever felt. 

It will take time, he knows. It'll take patience and afternoons together and the thousand stories that they've missed from each other's lives. Annabeth and Grover have crazy adventures he wasn't there for, people he doesn't know--and so does he. At some point he'll need to introduce his old friends to his new ones, the people who have kept him afloat for the last eighteen-months-and-counting. He'll need to decide whether it's safer for him and Estelle to live at camp or in the city, where she'll be best off growing up. 

And then there's he and Annabeth. It's been more than a year and while he knows that they both still love each other, a lot can happen in a year. He knows they love each other more than anything but he also knows that two people can love each other and still grow apart, still not fit, still break each other's hearts. 

Still. He looks at his family, sitting around him; he thinks of all the friends he'll get to see soon. He misses his mom and Paul like crazy and he doesn't know if all this will turn out okay and even after two years, he's still feeling his way through taking care of Estelle one day at a time, but right now, he's sitting on the floor beaming like an idiot. Things are different, now, and they might not ever be quite the way they were. It will take time and care and effort to figure out what comes next. 

Luckily, Percy thinks, he's got some great people here to help him figure it out.