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i.
When Connor first came to camp, nobody was surprised to see that he and Annabeth hit it off. The two of them were practically inseparable from the moment they laid eyes on each other.
Their first three years were filled with pranks and jokes and smiles. Three years of chasing each other to the strawberry fields and sneaking off to booby trap the woods for capture the flag. Three years of Luke laughing and running after them and Chiron’s exasperated head shakes; of pranking the Ares cabin and running for their lives, giggling as Clarisse chased them. Three years of sneaking out past curfew with blankets and gummy bears and the pack of Oreos Connor stole from his brother and tip-toeing past the cabins towards the strawberry fields. Three years of lying under the stars with smiles and bright eyes as she taught him the names of all the constellations she knew.
Those were the years of Connor and Annabeth and the chaos that came with them.
And then Percy came to camp.
Connor hadn’t felt the shift at first, but it was obvious after Annabeth came back from her quest with Percy. She had sidelined Connor, although he’d never believed it was intentional. She still talked to him, of course, but it didn’t feel right—they weren’t them anymore, Annabeth wasn’t Annabeth anymore. But she had put aside their pranks and jokes in order to help Percy save the world, and Connor couldn’t be mad at her for that.
The days they were at camp were now spent with Annabeth trying to spend time with both of her boys, but it was only a matter of time before she began to choose Percy over Connor. She stopped sneaking out at night to look at the stars with him and she never pranked the Ares cabin with him anymore. Connor found himself doing whatever he could to try and get her attention, but it never seemed to be enough now that Percy was around.
He missed his best friend.
ii.
By the end of Percy’s second year at camp, Connor was feeling the hole Annabeth left in his life.
The days they had spent together were few and far between, the phrase “Percy and Annabeth” had become far more frequent as “Connor and Annabeth” faded into the background.
He watched as Percy and Annabeth grew even closer; watched as Annabeth bit back her fear and hatred of the cyclops because Percy had asked her to; watched as she ran off to the Sea of Monsters to save the world.
Again.
He stood there and watched her as cheers erupted from the campers. Watched as she leaned over and kissed Percy’s cheek in victory when they won the chariot race. He watched as his best friend found a new best friend and she started to fall for him.
He got to see Thalia for the first time, to see Annabeth’s eyes filled with happy tears as she ran towards her surrogate sister. Connor thought that Percy might get cast aside, too, a new friend consuming Annabeth’s attention for the time being.
He was wrong.
Again, the words shifted from “Percy and Annabeth” to “Percy, Annabeth, and Thalia” and Connor hadn’t been sure of how he felt.
Eventually, when Annabeth’s fascination with Thalia wore away and she had run off to join the Hunters, it was once again “Percy and Annabeth.” Connor swears you couldn’t walk two feet in that place without hearing ‘Percy and Annabeth this’ and ‘Percy and Annabeth that,” but maybe he was listening for it.
He got sympathetic looks from people sometimes, but they made him angry.
His heart ached. He thinks that maybe in the three years it took for Connor to grow from 10 to 13, his feelings for Annabeth had grown from those of a childhood best friend to those of a boy in love with a girl who would never love him back.
He never blamed Annabeth, even as he watched a boy who wasn’t him steal all of her attention. How could he? She seemed to smile a lot brighter these days, anyway.
iii.
Connor would be lying if he said it didn’t hurt. It did. It hurt like hell watching the two of them look at each other like they held the stars in their eyes.
It hurt to watch them hold each other and dance on the solstice.
It hurt to watch her lay her head on his shoulder and his arms wrap around her.
It hurt to see that smile on her face when he wasn’t the one telling the joke.
Connor wished he could have been the one to save her, to take the burden of the sky away from her. He has to wonder if she would be looking at him like the stars were in his eyes. If she would be holding him while they danced. If she would rest her head on his shoulder and he could wrap his arms around her.
It hurt to know he stood by while another boy risked his life to save her. It hurt to admit Percy was the one that had to; that Connor didn’t have the means to do it.
It seemed like a cruel twist of fate—to have the daughter of Athena become best friends with the son of her mother’s rival, to have them become best friends—but he supposed that’s what the Fates did.
Connor had heard a sad song as he stood with his brother and their other friends, watching the girl he loved smile and pull another boy closer.
He wondered what kind of song the two of them heard.
iv.
A bright-eyed daughter of Apollo had come to camp that summer. Her name was Gemma, and Travis said she and Connor had hit it off even better than he and Annabeth.
He had really liked Gemma, don’t get him wrong, but it hadn’t felt right to him.
She’s not Annabeth .
Connor pushed the thought aside, opting to listen to his brother and ask Gemma out.
It was nice for a while; Connor felt like he was finally getting over this thing he had for Annabeth and he was genuinely happy for the first time in a long time. Annabeth and Percy had been inseparable for years now—gone were the days of pranks and chaos, of sneaking out past curfew and egging the Ares cabin because Clarisse had said a mean word to Annabeth. The days of Connor and Annabeth were nothing more than distant memories with the power to squeeze his heart and make him ache head to toe.
The whole Gemma thing didn’t last very long, only about a month and a half. He had felt awful when she asked to walk with him one night and they made their way to the strawberry fields, only for her to tell him that she didn’t think it was going to work between them anymore. It was obvious, she said, that he was in love with someone else.
It seemed fitting she had taken him to the strawberry fields to dump him; the irony of it was painful. Those fields were their fields—his and Annabeth’s. He couldn’t begin to count the number of hours they had spent there. From her teaching him constellations to crying into his shoulder when they found out Luke had turned and everything in between, those fields held their memories.
He realized then that the laughter frozen in the wind and the tears swallowed by the ground were nothing more than fossils of a past time where he was a main character in her story.
v.
It was a weird experience going from somebody’s best friend to someone they waved at in passing.
It was even weirder to be thrust back into the best friend role because the person who took that role was most likely dead.
He was there for Annabeth the entire time Percy was missing. He was the one who held her while she broke down—the one whose shirt was soaked with her snot and tears because her new best friend was missing.
He let her drag him to the strawberry fields. He let her cry and recount stories from their quests together.
“Can I tell you something?” she had asked him.
“Always, Chasey,”
“I kissed him, before the explosion. I kissed him and now he’s not here and it’s my fault because I left him. How could I do that? I left him there to die! It was my quest, Connor. It should have been me.”
His heart broke. It broke because Connor loved her, because she had kissed a boy who wasn’t him. But more than that, it broke because he was holding a broken girl. A girl drowning in grief over a situation she had no control over.
For a second he felt a sick sort of contentment—the kind you feel but would never dare say aloud. It made his stomach hurt, but it went away as quickly as it came. It wasn’t fair to Annabeth, for him to think like that. He was holding her while she spilled her sorrows on his shoulder, he shouldn’t have been thinking about how he had a shot with her now that Percy was gone.
Connor had squeezed her hand when Chiron told her it was time. He pulled her into his embrace as tears spilled out of her eyes. He was her crutch as they walked down to the amphitheater.
He saw how broken she was when she talked about him. “He was probably the bravest friend I’ve ever had,” she had said.
He watched as her tear-filled eyes lit up and her face turned red. He watched as she shouldered her way past the other campers and rushed to hug the boy she thought she lost.
He watched heartbroken as she ran off to save the world with him again.
vi.
Connor hates the look of hurt in Annabeth’s eyes. Even more than that, he hates that the boy she’s in love with is the reason the hurt is there.
Percy’s hardly at camp these days, but everyone knows where he is—or who he’s with, rather.
Annabeth barely shows up for activities anymore. She seals herself away in her cabin, mulling over projects on Dadaelus’ laptop. She doesn’t eat, either. Connor and Malcolm take turns bringing her food and distracting her to the point she’ll clear a third of her plate before she notices. She always pushes it away after.
The noose around his heart tightens every time he sees her. She’s no longer Annabeth Chase, bajillion time saver of the world, the girl with a dozen tricks up her sleeve and wit to rival her mother. She’s the empty shell of a girl who thinks she isn’t good enough, slowly collapsing under the weight of the world, wondering what she did wrong.
“She’s everything I’m not, Connor,” she had told him. “I just want to be good enough for someone .”
You’re good enough for me.
He suspects that Percy didn’t know she was hurting. Connor doubts he would continue to hurt her like this if he knew.
Thinking about it made him want to scream at Percy. Scream at him until he realized how much Annabeth was aching; how much he was hurting her. He wanted to fight and yell until his arms gave out and he felt like his lungs were engulfed in flames.
He doesn’t, though. Instead, he smiles at Annabeth when she approaches him. She doesn’t smile back, but she grabs his hand and pulls him with her.
He knows where they’re going immediately—they’ve walked that same path too many times to count. She doesn’t say a word, doesn’t even look at him until they’re at their spot, a small patch of grass in the center of the fields. Her eyes were glazed over and rimmed in red, tears slipping silently down her face. Her cheeks were pink and puffy. She looked so broken . He wanted to mess up whoever did it to her, but he knows who did, and he knows it’s not a fight he’d win.
She throws herself at him, burying her head in his shoulder as a sob wracked her body. He wraps his arms around her and guides her to the ground. They sit there for a while, her legs thrown over his, arms around his shoulders, and nose pressed against his neck. He rubs his hand up and down her back, tugging on a curl here and there just to see it bounce back into place. His heart aches.
Eventually, she stops crying, but an occasional hiccup makes its way out. She lifts her head and is sniffling and she most definitely got snot on his shirt, but Connor’s used to it. He had been her shoulder to cry on for years now.
He asks her a silent question and she closes her eyes, a grimace making its way onto her face.
“I iris messaged Percy…” she trails off but he doesn’t pry; he knows how much pain she’s in from the look in her eye.
“I—I wanted to know if he was coming back to camp tonight, ya know, because of capture the flag. I was going to have him on my team, but—but he was with Rachel.” She closes her eyes again and sighs.
“I don’t think—no, I know he didn’t realize I called,” she hiccuped again. “He—all I heard was ‘...needed to get away from Annabeth,’ but,” her voice broke. “Connor? Am I really that bad? Am I that awful that my best friend doesn’t even want to be around me?”
She was crying again and all he wanted to do was tell her that he’s sure that’s not what Percy meant, but in all honesty, Connor wasn’t sure it was his place to speak for him.
Anyone with eyes could see that Percy and Annabeth were in love with each other.
Sometimes Connor wishes he didn’t have eyes.
vii.
Connor remembers sitting in the field with her for hours after that. They skipped dinner to sit and talk like old times. It felt good to have a long conversation with her; he could hardly remember the last time they talked about anything other than Percy.
The sun was setting over the horizon, painting what little they could see of the ocean peeking over the hills in a beautiful orange. They were lying on the ground now, Annabeth tucked into his side with his arm around her. Connor vaguely remembers having a capture the flag game, one where the Athena cabin was in charge of a team. He thinks he should tell her, but she’s smiling and pointing out the start of the forming constellations she taught him all those years ago, and he just can’t bring himself to do it. It was selfish, sure, but he thinks she needed some time away, too.
“Annabeth?” he hears, and then Percy is making his way through the fields towards them.
“Capture the flag is getting ready to start, I was told to come...find you...” he trailed off, and Connor picked up the bit of jealousy that crept into his voice. The smug satisfaction appeared for a moment, but he felt Annabeth tense against him and it vanished as quickly as it came.
She sat up fast and looked like she was going to spit out an excuse, but then she stopped. He wasn’t sure what she was thinking, but a look of defiance made its way to her face. It was short-lived, however, and was promptly replaced by guilt. She stood, brushed off the grass from her legs, and Connor stood up behind her. He was pretty sure he caught Percy glaring at him, but when Connor moved to look it was gone and Percy was staring at Annabeth.
“Thanks for telling us, Percy,” she smiled at him, but it didn’t seem genuine. Connor doubts it would have been, so he took that as his cue to get her out of there.
“Yeah, thanks. Let’s go get ready, Chasey,” he grabbed her hand and pulled her back towards the dining pavilion, but not before smirking at the scrunch of Percy’s face when he used his nickname for her.
viii.
Percy’s at camp even less now, and Annabeth seems like she’s starting to feel better. She ignores Percy when he’s at camp though, instead opting to find Connor and go do something.
Connor can’t say he’s too broken up over it.
Travis was throwing one of his small parties, and after continuous pestering from Connor, Annabeth agreed to go.
She was sitting beside him, and maybe it was the alcohol in their systems, or maybe it was the want to have someone close, but his arm was thrown over her shoulder and her legs over his own. He had just finished telling a joke and the group erupted in laughter. He felt something against his jaw, and it took a second for him to realize that it was a pair of lips.
A twig snapped, and Beckendorf’s head shot to the side. “Hey, Percy! Come join us!”
Percy made his way into their view, with a “Hey, guys!”
Annabeth immediately pulled away from Connor and moved over on the bench. He saw Percy eyeing the space she left between them, but he moved to the other side of the fire and sat. He looked like he was going to be sick; regardless, he jumped into a steady conversation with Beckendorf.
A glance at Annabeth and he can see that she doesn’t look any better. Her leg was bouncing and she was wringing her hands together. Her eyes were downcast and—maybe it was the light of the fire that made her look like a ghost, or maybe it was the guilt settling deep in her stomach—she looked just as sick as Percy.
The tension in the air could have been cut with a knife, and Connor wanted to do it himself. He wanted to escape the game of tug-of-war he and Percy have been playing for the past three years. He wanted to look Annabeth in the eye and tell her he couldn’t do this. He couldn’t keep fighting a pointless fight—one he was destined to lose to Percy. But he wanted to scoot closer to Annabeth, too. Connor wanted to wrap his arm around her shoulder again and pull her into him because she was warm and her hair smelled like lemons and it was Annabeth and he wanted her to kiss him again.
And Connor likes Percy, really. It’s never been about him not liking Percy, but he supposed somewhere along the way they lost sight of how well they got along when Annabeth wasn’t around.
He wanted to go back to simpler times; the ones where he and Annabeth and Percy were nothing more than kids spending time with their friends.
ix.
A distraction , he tells himself.
That’s what he is to her.
But it doesn’t feel like it when he’s drunk and she’s drunk and her lips press against his ear and she whispers something that would have been a joke if either of them were sober. It doesn’t feel like it when she sits up, lifting her legs off of his own, and grabs his wrist to pull him with her to the woods, or when he’s pressing her back against a tree and his lips to her neck. It doesn’t feel like he’s a distraction when her arms are around his neck and her hands are tugging on his hair and his own are making their way under her shirt towards her waist and her back. It doesn’t feel like it when he sees her the next morning and his head is pounding and he notices the purple spot peeking out of the collar of her shirt.
Connor knows she didn’t mean to hurt him, that she was only trying to save herself. He knows she didn’t mean to drown him while trying to stay afloat—but she did and it happened and now he’s the one drifting along in the ocean, carrying the weight of both of their anchors, struggling to keep his head above the water.
He doesn’t realize until his headache goes away that he’s only ever been the distraction, that he will only ever be the distraction
x.
Connor thinks they should stop.
He debates telling her but he can’t bring himself to do it. He hears the whispers as he passes, ones of “Connor and Annabeth” just like he wanted for so long, but it doesn’t feel right. He tried to ignore the whispers, but he heard Beckendorf and Percy talking about her, too.
He didn’t mean to eavesdrop, he swears, but he was there and they were talking and he couldn’t not listen, especially after he heard his name.
“I don’t know, Beck. I just—I can’t lose her. But I am. She won’t even look at me anymore and she’s always with Connor, anyway,” Percy sighed. “I don’t know what to do,”
The word distraction bangs around in Connor’s skull, searching for a way to make his voice say the words he doesn’t want to.
And he loves Annabeth—he really, really does—but he can’t keep doing this. He can’t keep wishing and watching and waiting for her to make up her mind—because if they’re being honest, it was made up a long time ago.
He doesn’t want to tell her, doesn’t want to see the look of realization that crosses her face followed by guilt and pain. He hates that he’s going to be the reason it’s there, hates that he would do anything to prevent it, but he knows if he doesn’t they’re both going to drown, and keeping her alive and safe—and happier in the long run—is far more important to him.
xi.
She cries when he tells her.
He doesn’t think it’s because of a loss, but rather the realization that she had unintentionally pushed the boy she loved away from her and hurt the boy who gave her attention instead.
He wanted to reach over and pull her into him, wanted to wipe her tears away and let her get her snot on his shirt, but he stopped himself. He thinks he knew, deep down, that this is his role in the story. It has to happen this way. What the Fates stitch together may not make sense, but he knows that his and Annabeth’s stings were knit together for a reason, just not the one he may have wanted.
Connor doesn’t think he’ll ever stop loving Annabeth. It hurts to give up trying and he doesn’t know if he really feels good about his choice—but he made it and now he’s living with it.
xii.
If Annabeth doesn’t kiss Percy soon, Connor’s going to lose his shit.
He’s been telling her to tell Percy for months now, especially with the war coming. He knows she’s scared—she sat with him in the strawberry fields the other night and told him—but honestly , who will it hurt?
The tension between the three of them was long gone, the murmurs of “Percy and Annabeth” finding their way back into the gossip of camp, and Connor feels good about his choice for the first time.
And when he and Travis find their way to the dining pavilion, a group of campers following in suit, to find Annabeth sharing the cupcake with Percy, Connor smiles. He knows he’s going to be okay, and he knows that Percy and Annabeth are going to be okay, too.
Connor loves Annabeth— he will always love Annabeth—but more than anything, he loves that she’s happy. That’s all he’s ever wanted for her, anyway.
He smiles and laughs as the group of campers toss the two of them into the lake, and he knows that this was how it was supposed to be.