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Percy has become well acquainted with death over the past forty years, but not in this way. Not in the way that everybody else knows it. Death is temporary. Death is a farce. Death is but another page to be turned in an endless book.
But today a story must end.
He sits facing the sea with the wind in a torrent around him as the words carry themselves around and around inside his head. Your mother is dying. Your mother is dying. Your mother is dying. This day has always been coming. An inevitability. And he still isn’t ready for it.
There’s a gentle hand on his shoulder and then Annabeth is sitting down next to him. Her chin is set and her grey eyes stare out at the sea and she could be a statue of herself next to him. Perfect and immortalised forever. Except this version will not be chipped away and eroded over time. She will outlast every statue ever built to any hero or god.
“You need to leave before dusk,” she tells him, still staring at the ocean.
Percy lets out a long breath. “I don’t wanna go without you.”
Annabeth takes his hand and it’s a steadying anchor. “I have to stay. I have to finish things here and you cannot wait another day before you leave.”
It’s logic and he can’t bear hearing it right now. He wants to be by his mother’s side, holding her hand and hearing her tell him that everything is going to be okay just as she did when he was a child. He wants to join Annabeth to finish their mission tomorrow and know that she is safe and sound and alive.
“I’ll be fine,” she tells him, like she has read his mind. “You know I will be.”
He breathes in and then out again, deeply. It grounds him a little. “My mind knows it.”
“I’m scared too,” she tells him in a quiet voice.
Annabeth is not easily vulnerable, so this is somewhat monumentous. He looks at her and finds her already looking back at him. She is truly too beautiful for him to describe. There aren’t words to explain what she means to him. The building blocks of her spine and the roadmap of her veins are a map of his home town. Her hands are his anchor to this world. Her heartbeat is an echo of his own. Her voice is every melody ever written. He would know her, the sound and shape and smell of her, no matter where he went, no matter how much distance is between them.
Percy drops his forehead to touch hers. “I’ll come back to you.”
“Always,” she returns the promise. “You’re not getting away from me.”
They both breathe in the same air, with their foreheads and their noses pressed together. He closes his eyes and leaves the whole world behind for a moment. Nothing else matters. Nothing else even exists. It’s just them. Just as it always will be.
“I love you,” he tells her.
Annabeth kisses him. And with her hands cradling his face, she tells him, “I love you too. This is only temporary.”
He nods. “We are always.”
“I’ll see you again soon, Perseus.”
“That’s a promise.”
She lingers there, kisses him again, and then she is gone. He is glad, because he doesn’t think he would be able to walk away. She has always been the stronger one out of the two of them. Staring out at the sea once again, he thinks of his mother’s wrinkled hands and how he will hold them between his own and how she will look at his unchanged face and know his secret before she leaves this world. And then he will have to turn the page and carry on living.
It will burn through him in a fiery ache which won’t be quenched for years to come. He knows this. He also knows that he will heal and that when he returns from his trip home, Annabeth will be waiting for him and that forever will be awaiting them both.
With a heavy heart, Percy stands and turns away from the sea and takes his first steps towards home.