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Being a kid stood out to him in brightness and taste; the sun that burned like fire in the back of his eye, the smell of bus exhaust in the back of his throat, the gloom of New York City in the back of his head. There were things about it he could hold in his hands. Percy could hold the edge of their chipped linoleum table in his hands, in his mind, run his finger along the cracked edge, and he could hold the cold metal leg of that table in his clenched hand, the feeling of his knees bruising on the gritty floor. He could hold even the rain in his hand, in its own way, the sound of his sneakers thundering on the pavement while his mom shouted at him to stay in her sight. Sometimes he slipped on the water because he taped the soles together and covered the tread, slipped on the curious, printed duct tape the art teacher in school that year had kept or the solid gray every other year. Being a kid had its moments, the ones that he remembered entirely in sensation, moments that felt like photographs of a feeling even to Percy himself. If he could take a picture of the sound of his mother’s voice, the drumming of her hands on the wheel of Gabe’s Camaro—if a polaroid could look like cut wood pencils and skipping lunch to hide in the auditorium because it was that or being lonely with an audience, he’d have a binder of them. Polaroids stayed in their crisp white boarders. The boarders yellowed with time and the picture faded but it only ever ached somewhere beneath his heart to look at.
But then others seemed to be cut by glass—he could remember, clearly, fourth grade, a plastic phone trembling in his hands and a curled cord wrapped around his fingers and mumbling, I miss you, Mom, and the squeaking of his sneakers on the floor. His fourth grade school had smelled like matches, the kind Gabe used to light his cigarettes when he couldn’t find his lighter of the week, and Percy had thought that maybe the blazing Arizona sky could strike the match and burn the building down. It’d been an old thing with an old frame, creaking wood and a mountain of bricks, and it’d have gone up like tinder in the desert. It’d have gone up like it’d never seen water and Percy wouldn’t have minded going up with it one bit. He hated it there, not only because everyone hated him, but because it was so far from water. Even New York City’s silt-and-oil slick waterways were better than the vast expanse of nothing, and the baleful pale sun, and the deep-seated stomachache he couldn’t get rid of, and the way he dreamed of water and a flat-gleaming surface and being low beneath it where the water stayed cold. It’d been Gabe’s old school, Gabe’s old military school, and as hard as Percy found it to believe that Gabe of all people had hailed from a military school—the place had him written all over it. It was a compromise, after years of expulsions and court-mandated attendance to schools with programs for the kids that grew up wrong. Percy could remember every miserable inch of fourth grade, from getting pulled out of his bunk by the ankles because the other boys wanted to torture the newcomer, to sitting beneath the bathroom sinks furiously trying to mop up his bloody nose before the math test he’d end up failing, to the day he got himself kicked out. His history teacher had held him after class and grabbed him roughly by his collar, furious with Percy’s outbursts after weeks of them getting more distracting for the other students, and Percy had panicked—his right hand found the nearest thing he could reach, a heavy old-style stapler, and he’d smashed it into Mr. Blakenship’s nose, scrambled away while it spurted blood and crawled beneath the bleachers in the gym and waited to be found. He remembered the taste of it, the dread, like sweat and iron. He remembered trying not to cry with the plastic phone in his hands, twisting his finger around the cord, mumbling, I miss you, Mom, but I think I messed up again.
Somehow Percy could be eighteen, and it still sliced him up to think about. Eight years in the rearview and whenever he remembered the Arizona midday slicing through the dusty windows, a stuffy room and men two feet taller than him talking about charges, it ached. He’d failed a lot more people than his mom, by eighteen, but it hurt almost as bad as getting off the train at a grimy station in New York, and his mom had taken off work to pick him up. And when he got home, late enough that Gabe was there, and Gabe leveled him with a look that snapped his hamstrings—he’d know that he’d earned it, then. That Gabe’s dislike of him had soured to pure hatred, and when Percy got up the next morning Gabe would shove him into the wall as he stalked by, snarling something like too stupid to know what’s good for you. But he’d earned it, then, with Mr. Blakenship’s shattered nose, and I think I messed up again and the days where he thought Gabe might have been wrong about him were long gone. Good kid, once, maybe, back when kids can’t be anything but good, but one hell of a bad run. Apples rotting at the core didn’t always show it on the outside. Sometimes the things he remembered sliced him open like glass.
Sometimes he looked at Annabeth and wondered what she saw in him, but most of the time, he was just glad that she was blind.
“This is so good,” she said. Her hair was in a French braid today, and Percy always liked that style on her, because her baby curls fluffed up around her face and gave her a kind of honey-gold halo. It was cute, and some of those curls were in perfect spirals, and Percy liked to tug on them to watch them bounce back up.
Percy’s eyebrows quirked upwards. “It’s guacamole, dude. It’s not that hard.”
“But it’s so good,” Annabeth said, scooping an ungodly amount of guacamole onto one chip. “It’s amazing, oh my God—it’s got, it’s got, I don’t know what any of this is. I don’t know what it’s got.”
“Start with the avocados,” Percy said.
Annabeth shoved the entire chip in her mouth ungracefully, and held up a finger, asking for a pause. When she’d chewed and swallowed, she said, “Avocados. Uh. I see some little leaves in there, too.”
Percy folded his arms on the table and buried his head in them, the rumpled royal blue sleeves of the one Mets hoodie he owned that he hadn’t let Annabeth steal yet. “Did you just call them little leaves.”
“They’re tiny leaves!” she said, gesturing at the bowl of guacamole in front of her with a chip. “They look like small leaves. I know it’s like, a spice, I guess? But it’s just like super small kale.”
Percy raised his head and propped it up with his hand, smushing his cheek. “Cilantro, baby. It’s called cilantro. It tastes a little bright. Kind of citrus-y. It’s strong, that’s the part that makes it taste good.”
Annabeth scraped her chip along the edge of the bowl, and then held up the chip, and pointed to a flash of tomato in the dip. “Salsa,” she said, confidently.
“No, that’s—not salsa. It’s just a tomato. Salsa has—other parts,” Percy said. His hand moved from his cheek to his mouth to smother his laugh, because Annabeth dropped a glob of guacamole on her shirt.
“I thought tomatoes in a dip made it a salsa,” she said, swiping the guacamole off of her shirt with a thumb. “You know, like how a hot dog is a sandwich.”
“Oh, fuck that,” Percy said, pushing himself out of his chair. He couldn’t watch her debate whether hot dogs counted as a sandwich, because then she’d do something—it wasn’t always batting her eyes, or biting her lip, sometimes it was unintentional. She’d smile the broad way she did when she was happy, and Percy’s heart would stop, and he’d concede whatever point he had. But he refused to concede on moral principles, like whether hot dogs counted as a sandwich, so he moved to the corner of the kitchen and the dishwasher.
Annabeth crunched another chip behind him. “What! It’s totally a sandwich.”
“It’s not a fucking sandwich, you gremlin,” he said, pulling open the dishwasher. He rinsed off the knife he’d just finished using and dropped it into the silverware crate with a clatter. “Hot dogs have never been fucking sandwiches. I thought you were supposed to smart, dumbass. Jesus, a sandwich? And tomatoes don’t make dips into salsas, what the fuck. The spicy cheese dip with tomatoes my mom makes on New Years’ isn’t a damn salsa.”
“Yes, it is,” she insisted.
Percy pulled out the top rack and dropped the mixing bowl into it. “Let’s review. You tell me you’ve never had guacamole. That’s an outrage, so we go to the store to get stuff for guacamole. It’s fucking February and it’s snowing, that was a nightmare, but I did it because I love you. I make it. Because I’m a decent person. And now you’re trying to tell me it’s a salsa? Fuck all the way off, Annabeth.”
Annabeth’s chair screeched against the linoleum floor. She moved almost silently, a holdover from her days when how loud her footsteps were could decide whether she lived or died, so he was a surprised a bit when her arms wrapped around her stomach and her face pressed just beneath his shoulder blades.
“Thank you for my guacamole,” she said, softly.
“You’re welcome.”
“Just know that this means you have to make me guacamole forever,” she said. “Every week, Sunday afternoon, I expect guacamole.”
Percy snorted. “It was not that good. It’s February, the avocados aren’t fresh.”
She poked him in the side. “I define the life-changing moments here, I say it was life-changing.”
“Oh, really,” he said. He wrapped a hand around her wrist and turned at the same time, so he was pulling her in front of him, and then Percy tucked a hand against the small of her back and dipped her down so the bottom of her braid brushed the ground. He pressed his lips to hers, and she tasted like cilantro and tomato and the cherry chapstick she got obsessed with every winter like clockwork, and every new thing Percy tasted on Annabeth’s lips was the best thing he’d ever tasted.
He pulled her back up. “Life-changing?” he asked, grinning.
Annabeth pressed a hand to his chest, and her eyes were shining in the way they usually did before she tried to say something sweet, but what she ended up saying was, “Five out of ten. Next time you have to be shirtless, if you want to get a ten.”
“Does me being shirtless really add that much to the final score?” Percy asked.
Annabeth bit her lip. “You’re right. I should check,” and then she pushed up his hoodie before he could pin it down, and he spent a good minute or so feeling unbearably ogled, and then she pulled the hem of it back down and said, “No, no, I was right. Eleven, if you’re shirtless and it’s raining.”
Percy smoothed down his hoodie, fingers catching on the Mets logo over the chest. “What the hell is sexy about the rain?”
Annabeth turned and braced her palms against the counter and pulled herself up on the space beside the sink. Percy mourned, quietly, the fact that she was wearing one of his hoodies—a Miami Dolphins one, and it wasn’t that Percy liked the dolphins in the least, but Travis had sent it to him one year for Christmas and Percy wouldn’t be caught dead wearing it in New York City—and not short sleeves, because he would have liked to see the flex of her arms as she did that. “It’s the—I don’t know. The feeling. The je ne sais quois of the rain.”
Percy reached into the sink and rinsed off the cutting board, and slid it into the bottom rack of the dishwasher. “What the hell did you just say to me.”
She flicked his shoulder. “Je ne sais quois. It’s French. I think.”
Percy groaned. “If I make you guacamole every week, you never speak French to me again.”
“I demand a microwave brownie whenever I ask, in addition,” she said.
Percy bent over and lifted the dishwasher door closed. “I will make you actual brownies, whenever you want, if you never speak French to me again. They’re not hard. They’re just brownies.”
“You’re so good,” she said. “Best human alive.”
“Second best. My mom exists.”
Annabeth swung her legs idly and then swung off of the counter—she was a bit all-over-the-place, but she had taken up tutoring another girl in a history class a grade beneath her, and she’d had a session that morning. Whenever Annabeth helped anyone with homework, Percy included, she was always a bit hyper afterwards. Percy thought it had something to do with the parts of her that came from Athena, kind of the same way Percy always felt more active the closer he was to the ocean, but he’d thought asking hey, does your godblood mean correcting my math homework is like a drinking a Red Bull to you was a little bit too weird to say out loud.
“When does she get back?” Annabeth asked. She leaned over the table and polished off the bowl of guacamole with one last chip, and it made him happy, in a deep, core part of him, that Annabeth had liked it enough to eat the entire bowl. It was guacamole, and he’d known his mom’s recipe for it since he was eight, and it took ten minutes—if Annabeth wasn’t trying to kiss him every three—but it felt good. In a seamless, gentle, internal way.
“Supposed to be later tonight,” Percy said. “You’re skipping tomorrow, right?”
Annabeth stretched her arms high over her head, and, again, Percy mourned the fact that she was wearing his hoodie—as cute as it was, it meant he missed moments like this, when her shirt would ride up and he’d have an excuse to watch the muscles of her stomach shift, the cut of her hip. “If you want me to,” she said. “I printed off the fake doctor’s note at the library, yesterday, in case.”
Percy grinned. “Nice,” he said. “Imagine going to a fancy boarding school, where you have to have doctor’s notes, and you can’t just fuck off when you feel like it.”
“Did you ever tell your mom you skipped your civics class for a full month while your teacher was out, because the substitute never took roll,” she said.
Percy’s smile faltered. “You’re not—you’re not planning on telling her, are you? Because—please don’t tell my mom I skipped civics class for a month, what the fuck, I made you guacamole—”
Annabeth snickered. “I’m not! I’m not. I’m just wondering if you ever did.”
He hadn’t, because there were certain things he tried not to tell his mom. Percy tried not to tell her about the more dangerous things he’d done, or some of the more stupid ones that could come back to bite him whenever the gods felt like it, like stabbing Ares in the heel or pinning Hades after bathing in the Styx. He couldn’t breathe a word to her about Michael Yew and the bridge and the way the saltwater had pounded in him, in his heart, and the nights he laid awake wondering if it was that saltwater that made him bloodthirsty or if it was just another piece of him he picked up along the way. He didn’t tell her about the snatches of time on Calypso’s island when he was aware, and healing, and he screamed himself hoarse before Calypso sent him back to sleep. He didn’t tell her about how it’d felt to stand before Poseidon the first time and remember that even if he was a god’s mistake, he was still at the center of himself a mistake, and it didn’t much matter whatever else he managed. It would always be tainted, irreversibly, by his nature. He didn’t tell her that even if Goode was the best school he’d ever been to, and even if he was mostly passing these days, sometimes he still couldn’t breathe in his history class because Mr. Coleman had a deep and rolling voice, and he’d never told his mom, why he’d hit Mr. Blakenship, eight years in the rearview. He’d never told her that there had been hands around the collar of his shirt, and that was too close to his neck, and he knew what it felt like, to not be able to breathe by force.
“I didn’t,” Percy said, finally.
He’d taken too long to answer, because Annabeth’s eyes on his were curious; on the list of things he loved about her, her curiosity ranked pretty high, but when turned on him it almost hurt. Cut like glass, almost. Annabeth’s eyes were the same gray as the glint of a butterfly knife and she used them with intent. Percy didn’t know if she knew that she could carve him open with just a look, but she could, and then she’d turn and look away and he’d be gawking at her, feeling like he ought to be pressing his hands over an arterial wound somewhere. Minutes to live, all because of the way she looked at him. Here’s the deal, he wanted to say, I’ll follow you while you discover anything and everything you want to, just never discover me.
They ended up on the couch. The couch, one Percy and his mom had gone shopping for when he was thirteen, was his mom’s favorite thing in the world, and every Saturday morning she wandered from her bedroom at six in the morning and dozed on it until nine. Percy thought that she just liked the freedom of having a couch, one that she had both the time and the ability to doze on, because sleeping on it made his back and his knees ache at all the points he had to bunch up to be able to fit. He liked sleeping in his bed a lot more, but the TV was in the living room, and Annabeth wanted to watch Breakfast Club.
Percy settled on his back and stretched his legs out so his ankles crossed over the arm of the couch, and then Annabeth slid on top of him, pressing her face into the side of his neck. Her breath tickled his skin. “Did you put the movie in,” he said, after a minute of staring at the blank screen.
“Fuck,” she said, and he laughed.
After a few minutes’ tampering with the DVD player, she settled back on top of him, this time with a blanket in tow to drape over them both. Percy put up a mild fight about getting hot, but then Annabeth had wiggled her eyebrows and Percy couldn’t contain his laugh, it was loud and came from the bottom of his lungs, so she got away with the blanket. He was awake for maybe five minutes of the movie, anyway, because between Annabeth’s lemon-scented shampoo, and his arm draped over her waist in a way that almost felt like it stood between her and the brutality of the world around them, he eased into sleep. Maybe the most mildly annoying effect of the Curse of Achilles was that he was never awake for movies, anymore. He even managed to fall asleep in theaters. He hoped Annabeth didn’t mind too much.
Annabeth did rouse him at one point, waking him up by kissing a warm line up his neck and down his jaw until his brain registered, this isn’t a dream, lucky ass. “What next,” she whispered, when his eyes flickered open.
“Uh,” he said, intelligently.
Annabeth ducked her head and laughed against his collarbone. “That’s my favorite! My favorite movie is Uh, actually, directed by lovable idiot—”
Percy swatted her shoulder. “Fuckin’ early,” he rasped.
Annabeth’s eyes lit up, the way they did when he said something pretty dumb. “It’s eight. At night,” she said.
“Don’t—just do the kissing thing again,” he whined. “That was nice.”
She did, taking her time, sucking on a particular spot on his neck for a while. Then she slithered off of his lap, despite his noise of protest, slid in another movie that Percy briefly recognized as Gremlins before she returned. Between feeling overly warm from her closeness, and the blanket, and the way her kiss lit a fire in his blood, he made it through only three minutes of Gremlins before he was asleep again. It was the blissful half-aware kind of doze, somewhere between sleep and not sleep. Sometimes he rose back to consciousness just enough to know Annabeth was drawing circles on his chest with her index finger.
The next time she woke him up, it was the brightness of her phone screen, the one she flashed in his face. It was a garbled mess of nonsensical text and some emojis. “They landed,” she said.
Percy scrubbed at his jaw. “My mom texted you first?”
“I told her not to freak if you didn’t reply. You were busy being a pillow.”
“I’m a good pillow,” he said, absently.
Annabeth scowled at him. “Fuck that. You drool. In my hair.”
Percy glared at her. “You know what,” he said, and then he twisted his hips and threw her off of him and onto the floor with a thud. “If you’re gonna be a mean bitch about it, you can get a new pillow, good God, Chase.”
Annabeth shrieked with laughter. She punched him half-heartedly in the thigh, but she was laughing too hard for it to really land. “Oh my God,” she said, snorting her way through a giggle. “I hate you. You slept through all the movies and then dumped me on the fucking floor, you’re the worst, I hate you so much.”
Percy leaned forward and yanked on her braid. “Suck it,” he said.
Annabeth batted his hand away. “If you keep pulling on my pigtails I’m going to think you actually like me.”
“I’m madly in love with you,” he groused. “It’s the worst thing ever.”
Annabeth raised an eyebrow, and suddenly he wanted to tell her, thank the stars and everything around them and the sky in Arizona that I made it here, just so I can see you every day. If you want guacamole and brownies every week and to kiss me shirtless in the rain you’ll get it, every day if that’s what you want. You fucking earned it.
But then she pulled off his hoodie and she was wearing a white tank underneath that clung to her, and she had a smattering of freckles over her shoulders and claw marks ricocheting over her left bicep. His mouth was dry. It was a little too much to process, waking up and loving her and seeing her.
“Did we eat,” Percy said, glancing at the kitchen, because if he didn’t he’d explode.
“I told Sally they might want to stop by the all-night pizza place,” Annabeth said, tying the arms of his hoodie around her waist. “Because you didn’t eat. I’m sorry, by the way, for eating all the guacamole.”
“I’m just glad it was a good first guac,” he said, rubbing at his eyes. He kind of wished he hadn’t said anything, about food, because being reminded of it reminded him that he was actually starving. The painful kind, too, that scraped at the walls of the stomach. Percy was enthusiastic about food but the worst at keeping track of when to eat it.
Annabeth rose, and then tapped his neck. “I really did try to give you a hickey, just to see if I could,” she said, absently.
“You had four damn days to try out giving a hickey where my mom wouldn’t be here,” Percy said, loudly, “and you chose the night she was coming back to try it? Fuckin’ unbelievable.”
Annabeth flushed. “It was a heat of the moment thing!” Percy lurched to try and hook an arm around her waist and drag her down to the couch, maybe tickle her or something in revenge, but she skittered out of his reach.
Annabeth helped him straighten things, get all the blankets folded and pillows fluffed. He’d forgotten to actually run the dishwasher, earlier, and she started it for him with a smarmy look. Percy had been fairly good about keeping the apartment straight while his mom and Paul had been visiting Paul’s sister in North Dakota. For one thing, he didn’t want to have to spend a Sunday night racing to clean everything when lazing around with Annabeth was an option he had. For another thing, he thought Paul’s sister was one of three people who lived in North Dakota, and he couldn’t imagine returning from a frozen, empty wasteland to a messy apartment. Even so, they ended up at the kitchen table, Annabeth’s legs in Percy’s lap and Percy’s hands massaging her calves, bickering back and forth for a good hour or so—airport traffic, pizza-related traffic, New York City-related traffic, there were all kinds of reasons, to be late. It still worried him, a bit irrationally.
Finally there was the sound of the key in the lock, and the door swung open, Paul balancing two large pizza boxes on his shoulder. “Hello!” he said, brightly. “We made it, finally, you won’t believe this—”
“You got me one,” Percy said, rising both to hug Paul and get closer to the pizza, but maybe mainly the pizza. Paul was in a thick puffy jacket and there was snow coating his cap, and he looked cold and miserable to hug, and—Percy was pretty excited about the pizza.
“And Annabeth,” Paul said.
“She can have a slice,” Percy said, ducking around her and avoiding the shove she aimed his way. She did flip him off, he saw it out of the corner of his eye, but Percy was thoroughly distracted because now he could smell the pizza.
Paul turned back to the doorway, saying, “Is it really bleeding again? We need to—” and Percy didn’t hear the rest, around the ringing in his ears.
His mom stood in the doorway, hair down and fluffed up around her shoulders and thick with snow. She was in an impossibly gigantic coat, probably one of Paul’s, but it was as if someone else noted all of that—Percy himself had eyes only for her busted head, and the long, dark red trails of blood running down her face. In that moment, his memories of being a kid cut like glass or something sharper than glass, something like a butterfly knife. He remembered holding the cracked linoleum table in his hands and running his finger along the broken edge, and his mom’s long, slow breaths beside him, and the stagnant smell of burning. A slam, somewhere behind and to the right of him, and his mom jerked awake and shoved him under the table and the cold table leg cupped in his hand—those next moments moved like an oil painting left out to be dashed away in the rain. There was shouting, garbled shouting that Percy didn’t understand, and a crack, and his mom hit the ground and twisted on her side, throwing up on the floor. He wondered, years after the fact, how hard someone would have to be hit in the head to throw up that quick—whether it had been that fast, or if he had seemed faster, when he was smaller and the world was larger. It took him years to figure out that Gabe had hit her. It had taken him years later to figure out that, when he’d crawled out from beneath the table, the frying pan he’d seen thrown haphazardly on the counter had been the thing Gabe had hit her with. And his mom stood in the doorway now, but Percy was standing in a different kitchen.
He’d have liked to say he didn’t remember doing it, but Percy did. He was too seasoned a fighter to go on the offense without at least knowing the next move in front of him, and here there was only one move, and it was crystal-clear to him; he socked Paul across the jaw, knowing that Paul would crack his head on the edge of the counter as he fell. Percy almost did worse, before lean and corded arms wrapped around his stomach and Annabeth put all her force into pulling him backwards.
The part Percy didn’t remember clearly came after that; he could hear Annabeth saying something, and then Paul saying something, and then there were tight fingers around his wrist, a door slamming, and the bed he was sitting on was his own.
His mom sat down in front of him. Percy noticed that she didn’t kneel, but folded her legs properly, and Percy’s tongue tasted like ash. She didn’t have the balance to maintain a kneel. The blood was running down her neck and disappearing beneath the collar of the too-big coat that belonged to the man Percy had just hit.
“Ice, baby,” she said. “I slipped on some ice. Do you hear me? I slipped on some ice outside of the pizza place. That’s all.”
“Ice,” he repeated, slowly. Not a frying pan, idiot, he thought, viciously.
“I have to go make sure we don’t need to take Paul to the hospital,” she said. “Are you going to be okay if I leave you here for a while?”
“Hospital,” he repeated, dully.
“You hit him pretty hard,” she said.
Percy’s stomach turned, and he thought, what was it like for her to watch me do to her husband what’s been done to her, and it took everything he had not to throw up on the spot. “I’ll be okay,” he said.
Her hand was warm on his knee. “I’ll be back. Just wait, and cool off.”
I am so sorry for being the worst possible son, he wanted to tell her, but he couldn’t make his jaw move. She rose carefully and left, brushing past Annabeth, who said something to her about Paul.
Then Annabeth sat beside him, her thigh warm against his. “You freaked,” she said, casually.
Percy folded his arms across his stomach. “How good of an idea is it to run away through the window and not come back,” he said.
“Terrible,” she said.
He shrugged. “That’s never stopped me before.”
“It hasn’t,” she said. “But you don’t run away from anything. No reason to start now.”
You don’t know me, he wanted to snarl, because if he was going to be cruel, he might as well own it. The older he got, the worse he got at keeping himself leashed; sometimes he dreamed of tidal waves and millions of gallons of water beating the earth, strong enough to rip trees that were hundreds of years old up at the root. The key, he knew, to calling the water was to call it home. Everything and anything came from the sea, and it would all, after the slow and steady march of time, go back to the sea. The key to causing a flood was to whisper, it’s yours, now come and take it, and the water would barrel down the line. Chiron had told him most children of the Big Three got better with their powers over time. Percy seemed to only get worse. Sometimes he wanted to be cruel, because maybe it was a warning, that he belonged to the water more than anything else and it would come and take him when it was time.
“Fair enough,” was all he said.
“Guess you don’t really want to talk about it,” she said.
“Not particularly,” he said.
Annabeth bumped his shoulder with hers, but she didn’t say anything, didn’t prod the way she sometimes tried to—and Percy would’ve liked to think it was a gentleness thing, that she wasn’t going to ask questions. But then he glanced over and the look on her face wasn’t her curious one, but the one where her lips flattened and her eyes went hard and stony, a grim look that meant she’d figured it out, but she didn’t like the answer she got. Percy didn’t want to talk about that, either. So he just didn’t talk at all. He leaned forward and braced his elbows on his knees and focused on his hands, flexing and unflexing his fingers, until Annabeth stood and Percy knew his mom was hovering in the doorway because Annabeth wouldn’t have left him otherwise.
His mom murmured something that sounded like help yourself, if you want, if you’re tired you can tell Paul and he’ll leave you the couch, and then his mom settled beside him. She turned so she was sitting with her legs crossed facing him, and when Percy glanced up, the blood running down her face and neck was gone, scrubbed away and there was a bit of gauze taped over her forehead. She’d changed, too, tied her hair back into a bun. It was already falling down. Her hair was too heavy, for buns.
She watched the track of his eyes, because she smiled, just slightly, and said, “It was a little embarrassing, if I’m honest.”
Percy huffed, which was as much of a laugh as he could manage. “Sure,” he said.
“In the future,” she said, pausing then to pick at her pajama pants, “I know to warn you, if I bust my head open on ice on the way home.”
“You shouldn’t have to,” Percy said.
“You shouldn’t have to assume the worst,” she said. “You can apologize to Paul now, or wait until tomorrow.”
“How—how the hell is an apology supposed to fix it,” Percy said.
His mom’s eyes softened at the corners. “The way good apologies fix plenty of things,” she said.
Percy rubbed his face, a rapid, jerky movement to release some of the building tension in him, and then said, “I could’ve sent him to the hospital. I could’ve done worse. I can’t fix that. God, Mom, I’m so sorry.”
She rubbed his shoulder. “Sweetheart,” she said, “sometimes an apology is an acknowledgement that you can’t fix it. That’s okay. People everywhere, every day, do things they can’t fix. That’s why we have that word. That’s why we give the choice to the people who were hurt, and see if they think it’s worth forgiving us. And Paul has forgiven you.”
“Why should he,” Percy said.
“Because he wanted to. And because he knows you, and he knows me, and he thinks that even if hitting people isn’t exactly right—you have had good reason to think the worst. The worst has happened.” Percy flinched, at that, and his mom took him by the shoulders and twisted him so they were facing each other, his legs draped over the side of the bed and hers still folded neatly.
Percy swallowed, and stared down at the twisted sheets. Baby blue. “I shouldn’t have done that,” he said, quietly.
She took his face in her hands. “Percy, love, maybe you shouldn’t have. But you’ve spent a lot of your life relying on seeing danger to others quickly, and reacting quickly. It’s saved lives. It’s saved your life. It’ll probably save your life again. You’re not unforgivable because your normal is different—we’ll work around it. I give you a heads up, if this happens again. If we find something else, we work around that, too.”
Percy’s face burned. “Okay,” he said.
His mom’s thumb tapped his cheek, and then she dropped her hands. She tangled them in his, and then her thumbs swept over his knuckles. Percy had punched people across the jaw before, and usually, it hurt like hell. It hurt less after he learned to do it the right way at Camp Half-Blood, but for how hard he had hit Paul to knock him over, Percy’s hand should ache. He should have broken it.
“We’re not done,” she said, finally. “Because I think I messed up.”
Percy jolted, and opened his mouth, but his mom gave him a don’t interrupt someone else while they’re speaking look, and his teeth clicked together. “You keep things from me,” she said. “You don’t have to tell me everything. I’m not expecting to know things you’re uncomfortable sharing. But I—I haven’t brought this up, and that was, that was maybe a mistake. Maybe one of the biggest ones I’ve made. I didn’t want you to have to tear open memories like that while you were—trying to survive the new ones. I thought that if you needed it, you’d come to me, but other than that—surviving the rest. It was about surviving the rest.”
Percy looked up, and it startled him, that his mom was crying. It wasn’t that he’d never seen her cry, it was that she would cry now, over him, crying while she recounted the ways she’d tried to balance the weirdness of his life for him.
“I fucking hate saying that,” she said, and her voice was impossibly soft. “I really do. I hate that enough has happened to you that—I didn’t want to make things harder, by intentionally dragging things up. You have so much on your plate still. But I think I made a mistake, by leaving it alone for so long. I’m sorry, Percy.”
Buried in there, Percy thought, was the hidden, I didn’t want to talk about it either. And he had a brief moment of clarity, like a lightbulb flicking on in the back of his head; that his mom had spent so long being silent to protect him, that he had learned that from her and tried to do the same, the utter irony of the two of them trying to manage the same impossible goal at the same time. Percy let go of her hands and pulled his mom against him, knowing full well that it was a probably a bruising, crushing hug, like if he could hug her hard enough he could press how much he loved her through the touch.
She hiccupped against his shoulder. “Oh, baby,” she said, rubbing his back. “I’m so sorry.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” he said, roughly. “You didn’t—that’s not your—you didn’t. You really didn’t.”
She was silent, except for one shuddering breath, and after a few minutes she pulled away. “Sometimes I forget how much you love me. I didn’t expect it to effect you that badly, but—I don’t know. You’re such a sweet kid.”
Percy ducked his head, because his eyes burned, both because unimaginable to him that his mother could forget, and that he knew why his mother could forget even if it rocked him, and even further down, the fact that he felt like she was lying. He wanted to say don’t lie to me, but it was unfathomable to him, the process of explaining how he knew that was a lie; so he said the next best thing.
“I lied,” he said. “About a lot. I’m sorry. I—I didn’t want to make anything harder.”
“What kind of lies,” she said, slowly.
Percy swallowed. His eyes skittered away, found his bookbag spilling out its contents halfway across the room, and focused on it. “Remember when I got expelled for hitting a teacher,” he said.
His mom’s hands tightened around his. “Baby,” she said, quietly.
“It was—he grabbed me by the collar. I thought he was grabbing me by the neck. I panicked, and I broke his nose,” Percy said, in a rush. “I don’t know why I still think about it.”
She pulled him into another hug, tucking his face against her neck, and in some sort of numb daze he repeated, “I lied. I—I do know why, I still think about it. Because Gabe did it once.”
His mom froze in his arms. Percy had always wondered to himself whether she’d known—it’d been a weird dance, him and Gabe, growing up. Percy avoiding being alone with Gabe, his mom avoiding leaving him alone with Gabe whenever the three jobs she kicked her own ass with to keep them afloat allowed it. When Gabe did something he covered it up. Most of the fights he’d started in school, he’d started to cover something that was already there. Looking back, Percy knew now that a lot of it had been the water, too, the way it washed away evidence—one shower, and there was nothing there for his mom to question. Nothing odd about a scrappy kid with a tendency to push back with a few bruises, even less odd if they washed away when he helped out with the dishes. But now he knew she hadn’t known, and that he hadn’t ever expected to tell her, and Percy had just cleaved his mom’s heart in two as cleanly as if he’d done it with Riptide. Percy ached inside of his bones, and he’d never felt lower in his life, somehow never felt like worse of a person than he did when breaking his mom’s heart.
“Say that again,” she whispered, into the crook of his neck.
“I can’t remember,” Percy lied.
His mom was out of his arms in a second, and then her hand was cupping his chin. Her expression reminded him of hawks, the way that even their resting expression was furious—her face was utterly flat except for her eyes, which were so intense they struck him like a matchstick. “Don’t you dare,” she said, thickly. “You don’t say that to me and then back down. You don’t run away from anything, do you understand? If you want to say it, you say it.”
Percy nodded, mutely. He looked away and spoke. “I don’t remember how old I was. I wanted water. I didn’t think he was still awake and he was. He was angry, he’d lost something. He noticed me, and—”
He couldn’t put to words, what being forcibly deprived of air was like; he couldn’t find words for the lightheadedness and his weak struggle against it, the way the room had spun and it had been too dark to see anything at all. He couldn’t describe the ways that memory had slipped and slid over time, just that these days, when he thought about it, he thought it wasn’t so bad. He’d been choked until he passed out since, by real monsters, the kinds intent on eating him. But he looked at his mom and realized that he didn’t have to put that to words, because she knew. He kind of wanted to throw up, and Percy thought that maybe she felt that way, too. Suffering the same household in two different ways and still somehow coming back together at the end.
“The water healed you,” she finished for him. “Because you took your showers in the mornings before school.”
Percy shrugged. “Yeah. Yeah. That’s—that’s it.”
His mom pressed the heels of her palms into her eyes. “You didn’t deserve that,” she said, after a long moment. “None of it. That’s the most important thing, sweetheart, is that you know that. You didn’t earn it. He was cruel, he was vile, and he deserved worse than what he got. You are—I love you, so much, and I would do anything to take that away. I would… I am so sorry.”
“You didn’t deserve it, either,” Percy said, quietly, and his mom’s head snapped up to look at him.
She lifted one of his hands and pressed a warm kiss to his knuckle. “Neither of us,” she said. “Why don’t we do this together, instead of trying to do it alone, like two total idiots.”
Percy laughed, a wet, small chuckle, at that. “Yeah. We’re—yeah. Somethin’ else.”
His mom cupped his cheeks again and then tilted his head forward and kissed his forehead. “Only so much we can do at once. What do you say, kiddo, that we try tonight again? One more time.”
“If I have to,” Percy grumbled, because he knew it’d make his mom laugh at least a little, and she did.
Starting over meant apologizing to Paul, which went over almost alarmingly well—when he saw Percy, his eyes brightened and he jumped off of the couch. He clapped Percy on the shoulder and started rattling off ninety-miles-an-hour about how it was an excellent punch, that was really some Bruce Lee work, son, Mike Tyson would’ve been impressed. He even called Percy slugger, and Percy tried not to die on the spot, because Annabeth was snickering, and if she got a kick out of it, Percy could learn to bear it. Starting over meant reheating the pizzas in the oven, and Annabeth getting more than a slice, and if he finally didn’t fall asleep during a movie, she didn’t mention it.