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– I’m not even my own
Nothing about Camp Half Blood feels real in the aftermath of Gaea’s awakening. Things calm down somewhat, as they have before. There are activities and campfires and sing alongs and a subset of the camp pretends to be okay. This is the way they know how to be, how to go on. But the infirmary still overflows. Many cabins are choosing new counselors. Chiron wanders through the grounds with a troubled expression etched upon his timeless face. Annabeth knows this one, she’s seen it before. She feels as though time has dislodged around her and thrown her back a year, or even two. It all bears such a striking resemblance to days past, but it doesn’t feel the same – at least, not to her.
The events of Annabeth’s pre-Tartarus past are fuzzy at best. The things she did and how she felt seem like something from a stranger’s memories, a world apart. Unimportant, she sometimes thinks, and then in a sharp moment of abrupt, guilt-ridden clarity, she will see Luke’s face swimming before her mind’s eye before even that fades into background noise alongside everyone else that she’s lost. Everything is so out of focus these days. She can’t tell memory from nightmare, or family from friends, from strangers; but Percy Jackson, she knows by heart. He can’t make her jump the way others can, because every one of his movements lives somewhere in her muscle memory. She knows the sound of his footsteps like you would know anyone’s, if you’d walked ten thousand miles with them. It is so easy to reach out to him without looking, find his hands, his lips, even in the dark.
Percy, she knows, struggles with his own nightmares. She knows the way he trembles when he’s caught in them. In Tartarus, they slept back to back and rarely lost hold on each other’s hands, tightening their grip in the darkness. Even on the Argo, they found their way to each other in the nights. Giving in to the vulnerability of sleep seemed impossible without him there to trust with her life. It still does. Since returning to camp, Annabeth has spent weeks sneaking past the cleaning harpies at night to his cabin. Each evening, she can’t help mourning the loss of her invisibility cap, but she has walked through more deadly places than Camp Half-Blood in the dark. She would find him wide awake, eyes as bloodshot as her own. And even after all they had been through, there was something shy in the way she would slip into his bed, and something scandalous about holding him this way. So she would turn her back to his and clutch at his hand and there was something comfortable even in the familiarity of the worst nights of her life.
One night, Annabeth is sitting, awake, beside him. He is curled into himself and breathing evenly, one arm sprawled into her lab, where she holds his hand in both of her own. Sleep is too ambitious a goal tonight. Percy’s birthday, and their anniversary, is fast approaching now. It will mark one year’s time since they got together after the first war. She remembers the relief that accompanied every day after the fighting stopped. The feeling that it was finally over, the prophecy realized. How earnestly she believed that she could begin some new era of normalcy and safety. She grieved, of course she grieved. But more than anything, she hoped. It doesn’t feel like that this time – instead, the air is heavy with the weight of the cycle she is beginning to realize has no end. What prophecy, she wonders, might upset their whole world next? How many years will they spend saving the world from gods before he is killed, or she is. It’s the same difference, she realizes, knowing this is a thought she once would have dismissed as destructively codependent. It is dangerous to place so much of who she is on a man. Such caution was a luxury of the past. There is so little of her left at this point anyways.
Percy tenses next to her and she can feel the pulse in his wrist speeding up and see the rapid movement beneath his eyelids. His breaths grow shorter and shakier and he clenches his fingers around hers instinctively. Percy always has such quiet nightmares. He will never wake himself up, and as much as she wants to shake him away from the world he is trapped in, Annabeth knows it is worse for him to be woken now. Come morning, he probably won’t even remember. She strokes his hair gently, feeling the pain he is in for herself, and willing that he might feel some small comfort however many worlds away he is from her. This is why she needs him so desperately. Why she can’t imagine a world where they aren’t side by side. He is the only person on Earth who knows what they went through. She questions momentarily if there is a difference between need and love , then decides that there must be. Annabeth has loved him since the first summer she knew him. It’s harder to say how long she has been in love with him, and hardest to know exactly what the difference is. But she doesn’t think she has ever needed him before now, not like this. She wonders if that will ruin them, the thing that they could be together. They are forged in fire, but still so fragile.
After all, though she sometimes forgets, they haven’t been dating that long at all. Their timeline is so confused; it goes backwards and forwards and pauses entirely. They had false starts and false ends. Annabeth remembers kissing Percy for the first time, remembers the first time she thought he was dead. They both let the moment slip by, something precious that she was terrified would shatter if she handled it clumsily. They were fifteen and had even scarier things to distract them. It was the end of the world – some things never change. She remembers months of doubt and jealousy, about Rachel, about Calypso. It all seems so stupid now. There were times, back then, when it made her feel something adjacent to normal. Like all that high school bullshit still applied in even the most extraneous of circumstances. Like she would live long enough to care about silly things like love.
Annabeth can’t help but audit the time they have lost so far. How much of this year really counted for them as a couple? Surely not the six months he was stolen from her. What of the weeks they were in Tartarus, or the short few they had, reunited, before the fall? Was any of this quality time spent with a lover? She struggles now to think back to those first sweet months before his disappearance last December. The memories are rose-tinted, but blurry. The newness of their transformed relationship was so fresh, exciting but restricted by the refreshingly ordinary obstacles of living in different boroughs, and going to different schools. She remembers Iris messages that lasted hours, until the last ray of sunlight refracting through the prism on her windowsill would fade. They were undistracted by cataclysmic disaster (for once). It was something like she always imagined a regular mortal romance. And yet, even that one quiet, happy semester only tallies to three months and some change before everything went wrong.
The winter and spring were agonizing, she knows, though she barely remembers the raw feeling. When Percy disappeared, there was nothing to grieve for and no acceptance to be reached. Initially, she threw herself into the search, convinced that if she was clever enough, bold enough, she could bring him back herself. And then it was Jason, a boy she hardly knew, who broke the case wide open – not really through his own merit, but she still held some resentment that she couldn’t do this one thing for Percy. Being asked to sit and wait for six long months while the Argo II was being built was worse than any of it. It was all she could do not to buy a plane ticket to San Francisco the moment she understood what must have happened. Time and again, it was explained to her that Jason needed to be there, that the symbol of bringing the camps together was important, and that they had to be ready to defend themselves if met with hostility. It seemed like a lot of bullshit to her. But it was Grover who convinced her in the end, telling her seriously one day, “I really don’t think you’re supposed to go yet.”
Annabeth had been quick to anger, “They’re not going to do anything to me. Alone, I’m not a threat to them! Besides,” she reached for the cap in her back pocket, “I won’t let them see me, anyways.” Grover had looked awkward, searching very carefully for his next words.
“It’s not that. I’d go with you in a heartbeat if it was.” He hesitated, “I have this feeling.” She remembers being taken aback at the graveness of his tone, tinged with fear that he wouldn’t be believed, “I don’t think he’s there.”
Annabeth blanched. “He has to be there!” she had said firmly. Grover could probably could see the terror in her face; this was all she’d had to hold onto.
“No, no,” he hurried, “I don’t think it’s the place that’s wrong. It’s the time.” She had cocked her head at him and he explained the deep, cosmic instinct he had telling him that there isn’t anywhere in the world they could find Percy at that point in time. That his empathy link wasn’t blocked, there was just nothing to feel. And finally, “Don’t you think that the, uh,” he glanced skyward, “queen of Olympus has planned this whole thing out? I think she’s playing games with the timing too. I think Percy will be at the Roman camp. I just don’t think he is yet. I think you’re supposed to go on the Argo.” And she met Grover’s eyes, one of her oldest friends, who she had never known to have such certainty on anything short of Pan, and who she knew loved Percy just as much as she did, and trusted him. And she waited.
When Annabeth found Percy again, they fell back into step like it was almost nothing. Romantic or not, they’ve always known each other like this – there was an implicit trust between them. There were moments, still, when the pain of it all would spill over and he could see a little of what she had spent the past months feeling. She worried at times that it would be too hard to conquer that new gap between them. But still, she held on a little tighter, not willing to lose him again. He did too, maybe a little too tightly. At the edge of the pit, he probably should have let her go. But she shudders to think what would have happened if he had. Could she have survived Tartarus alone? She isn’t certain she would have wanted to. The place drains you of any and all will to survive. The only reason they made it out is her stubborn, insistent need for him to live, and his for her to do the same. There is a part of her, though, that hasn’t yet escaped from the icy grip of Hades. She can feel it behind her sternum.
Percy has stopped trembling under her fingers and she feels his breathing gradually returning to normal. She is grateful for the end to his nightmare, not least because she can feel herself slipping towards a waking one of her own. Though his grip has slackened, Annabeth tightens her own around his hand and he squeezes back reflexively. Finding an impossible-to-focus-on spot at the right edge of her vision, she holds her eyes on it and does her best to remember a grounding exercise that Will Solace taught her once, breathing in through her nose. She loses count twice and shifts her focal point to the left. Percy moves beside her and she devotes all of her remaining energy to getting oxygen into her lungs. In. Out.
Time slides out of focus and then there is a hand at the small of her back, rubbing small circles to the rhythm of her breathing. The chaos in her body is rarely concrete. Her chest aches, her vision blurs, the way she holds herself is stiff and flexed. Loosely themed fogs of intermingling anxieties and terrors swirl abstractly through her brain without any distinct form or target. She retains some lucidity, at the surface level of her mind. It’s just enough to wonder if, maybe, she does have the control to make it all stop and some part of her simply doesn’t want to. It is all she can do to keep breathing, slow and deep. Percy is saying something oh so softly to her, and she doesn’t have the presence of mind to parse it, but it sounds nice in his voice.
Annabeth regains her senses gradually. When her muscles start to loosen, she sighs tiredly, leaning into the arm at her back. A headache is setting in. Percy is ahead of her and already reaching for an orange water bottle on the nightstand. He pops up the cap and tilts it towards her and she takes it from him, drinking like she’s never tasted water before.
“How long have you been awake?” he asks, green eyes full of measured concern. There is still sleep in his voice.
She shakes her head. “I couldn’t sleep.” Percy frowns.
“Anything you want to talk about?” he ventures, hesitantly. They are on unsteady ground. She can read his feelings so well, and she knows he understands her in the same way, but they’ve never been good at talking plainly in words. One of them will always flinch first; make a joke and wait for the vulnerability to dissipate. This is something, she thinks, that they might have gotten past already, if they had really been together a whole year.
Annabeth opens her mouth to speak, then closes it again. She really is tired now. “Maybe,” she murmurs, “we can talk in the morning.” She drops her head against his shoulder and lets her eyes close for a moment.
“Okay. Yeah, we can do that.” And there is so much quiet affection behind his voice when he says it, looking down at her. “C’mon, I think it’s your bedtime.” He leans back carefully and pulls her down with him, keeping an arm draped around her. She hits the pillow and repositions herself slightly, a little lower on the bed so that the top of her head falls beneath his chin and she can preserve the physical closeness. She presses her head to his chest and lets herself believe that they will have more time. His heart beats steadily in her ear.