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“Give us a few days,” Nyssa says, peering at the blade as she turns it over in her hands.
“You’re sure you can do it?” Annabeth’s hip feels empty without anything in the scabbard—not that she’s had her dagger for over four months, now. It’s still a feeling she can’t get used to. Even letting Nyssa hold this stupid sword is making her itchy.
Nyssa rolls her eyes, sliding her thumb down the side of the sword, frowning at the jagged edges. “These teeth make it a little difficult—it’s serrated on this side, see?” And she holds it up, as if Annabeth hasn’t been stabbing giants, gods, and empousai with it for approximately a hundred and nineteen days, now. “Do you want the new ones with these, too?”
Annabeth shrugs. “Whatever’s easiest. I just hate how… unwieldy it is right now.”
Nyssa makes a gesture for Annabeth to step back—she obliges, and Nyssa swings the drakon-bone sword once, twice. She makes it look easy, like it doesn’t feel unbalanced, clumsy, useless in Annabeth’s hands. She’d made do with it down there because she had to, and she made do with it after because it was the only thing she had. It wasn’t like they’d brought backup daggers onto the Argo II.
Plus, some part of her got emotionally attached to it. As stupid as the thing was, as much as she wished she’d had her old dagger back, part of her mind clung to this sword like a crutch. Maybe it was just proof that everything was real.
“This is remarkably balanced, actually.” Nyssa raises a brow at her.
“Whatever. Can you do it?”
Nyssa turns the sword over and sets it back on the table between them—one of the many in every spare corner of Cabin 9. “Like I said, we’ll need a few days. Everyone’s a bit overwhelmed right now… especially since Leo…”
She clears her throat.
Annabeth nods. “Just let me know when you’re done.”
—
There aren’t many daggers in the shed to begin with. Annabeth remembers poring through the admittedly-sparse armaments and barely finding Katoptris for Piper, and that was one that had been there longer than the tool shed itself, probably. The dust on it alone had a good chance of being original.
Now, Annabeth stands in the doorway, staring at the maybe-five-total swords hanging on the wall, magically not rusted but surely would be if they were ordinary iron, and wondering just how good of a chance she has of finding another dagger.
Of course, Jason had offered her an Imperial Gold one, but that sat on her bed, feeling icy and foreign in her mind.
“Nothing?” Asks someone behind her, and she whirls in what would’ve been a deadly strike with a dagger in her hand, but her fist is empty and has been for days. Piper just gives her a sideways look, noting the positioning of her hand, fingers clasped around air.
Gods, she’ll never get used to this.
“I think that one,” and she nods to Piper’s hip, “was maybe the last Celestial Bronze dagger ever.”
“Makes sense,” Piper mutters. “It’s truly the worst vegetable at the bottom of the pile.”
Annabeth snorts, turning her attention to the disorganized shed in front of her, almost absentmindedly starting to pick up the swords and at least hang them on the racks—one next to a rake, one next to a shovel. She picks up a third with a broken-off blade and tosses it on the ground next to Piper. “Remind me to get one of the Hephaestus kids on that.”
“I heard you’re already giving them a tough time. Jake’s been bitching about carving up bones—no one knows what the fuck he’s talking about but… you’re changing the sword?”
Annabeth shakes her head. “It’s too big.”
“You didn’t need to keep it.” She knows Piper’s eyes are on her, curious, and she also knows that Piper is one of the most emotionally intelligent people that she knows. She sniffs out lies better than a trained bloodhound, and she must sense Annabeth’s trepidation now. Stupid Aphrodite and her stupid attunement to emotions.
“It’s a reminder,” Annabeth says, slowly, picking up the last sword and wiping it off a bit with her shirt—Celestial Bronze may be magically immune to rust damage, but the dirt on this one had still accumulated a bit more than would be healthy ordinarily.
She can hear Piper shift her weight. “Is that a good thing?”
Is it? Annabeth bites her lip, not responding right away—Percy had asked her the same thing the other day. He’d thrown out the clothes he’d worn and insisted she do the same, shoving them in a garbage bag almost immediately once they’d gotten back aboard the Argo II. Something about it made her hesitate, though, and she just ended up shoving them in the trunk, forgetting about them until Percy found them while they were cleaning for inspections.
Why do you still have these? He’d asked, holding up the most tattered, burned, pockmarked grey tee shirt, whatever band the logo was for completely illegible. The jeans, she knew, were sitting at the top of the pile he’d found.
Never got around to throwing them out, she said, lamely. For a moment, it almost seemed like he believed her—but Percy knew her, knew when she was hiding something, and Annabeth kind of wishes she didn’t have so many friends that know her so well so that maybe, just maybe, she’d be able to lie one time and not have to have conversations that she doesn’t want to have. Like everyone else but her seems to be able to do.
We can throw them out now. Sidestepping the interaction altogether.
Yeah.
Neither of them had moved to do it, though.
And now they’re back at the bottom of her trunk, shoved down where she doesn’t have to see them every time she opens it but there, tangible, real. A reminder.
Percy didn’t want to be surrounded by reminders. Annabeth didn’t know if she could live without them.
“I don’t know,” Annabeth admits. “It’s just—it means it was real, you know?”
She knows Piper has no frame of reference for this—knows that no living being has anything to measure this against, even Chiron. What she and Percy had been through is something no demigod has made it through alive, no demigod save them and Nico di Angelo.
Piper doesn’t say anything, but when Annabeth leans on the tool bench, a bead of sweat beginning to trickle down her nose as she sets the shotgun up on a high rack where no one can reach it accidentally, she’s got an expression Annabeth is all too familiar with—measuring, analyzing, calculating. Deciding on something in her head.
“Yeah.” Piper steps back as Annabeth surveys her work—still no daggers reveal themselves at the last second, so she locks the shed up behind her and faces Piper. “Just… don’t stay down there, okay?”
Annabeth doesn’t really know how to respond to that.
—
She feints left and slashes up Percy’s right side, a trick that usually gets her knife right in between the ribs of the monster, but he flicks her blade away easily, Riptide shining in the moonlight.
Technically, the arena is supposed to be closed at night. Also technically, Annabeth and Percy are both head counselors—and realistically, no one is going to interrupt them while they spar.
“You do that one all the time,” Percy pants, and Annabeth doesn’t dignify him with an answer—just grits her teeth and keeps jabbing. A stab to the left side, parried away. A roll around his right side and a jab at the calf, that one sidestepped and countered as he swishes Riptide around and brings it up to Annabeth’s chest; she has to duck out of the way to avoid getting skewered.
Her stance is wrong, and she knows it—her weight feels weird on her feet, and it’s not just the fact that they’re both barefoot in pajama pants and tank tops and tee shirts, shifting in the sand pit floor. It’s the weight of this dagger, the Imperial Gold that Jason had offered her. Percy had commented that he, Hazel, and Frank dragged up a lot of old weapons, and Annabeth suspected this was one of them—the etching on the pommel was too faded to make out, but the eagle standard looked a little antiquated. Eighteenth century, she wanted to say, but wasn’t too read up on the Roman activities at the time, and couldn’t really date it for sure.
Percy must notice her self-analysis, because suddenly, Annabeth’s on the defense. She dodges and ducks his slashes, bobbing her head to the right of a thrust and attempting her own countermaneuver by stepping inside his guard and taking a stab at his gut.
He catches her wrist in his free hand, and she realizes at the last possible second that he’d baited her into it—the knife falls into the sand with a gentle shunk, and she’s defenseless in the middle of the arena.
“You’re distracted,” Percy says, voice just above a whisper, gentle, concerned. Riptide hangs loosely at his side.
Annabeth lets the moment linger—close faces, hot breaths, struggling to regain composure as sweat beads on their faces. His eyes get so blue at night—during the day, the grassy reflections make them look more green, but in the middle of the night, with no light except the moon and a light on in the Big House, they’re just calm, ocean blue.
She closes the barely-there gap and kisses him, soft and sweet, enjoying the quiet of the evening and the feeling of his warmth around her. It’s everything her heart wants, always—the only thing that soothes the aching inside of her, the only balm for the blistering that his absence creates.
Riptide thwumps into the sand next to them.
Like lightning, Annabeth snakes a wrist under his ribs and flips him over her shoulder, breaking the kiss as she forces him over her and into the sand, hard, an ooof audible as his shoulder goes into the sand and Annabeth pushes him down with her knee.
“That wasn’t even fair,” Percy complains. “I totally beat you.”
“Fight’s not over until surrender or death,” Annabeth says, pushing her knee into his chest as she settles comfortably on top of him. She snags the dagger in her other hand and presses the point—lightly—to the tip of his chin. “And you fell for this again.”
“First time wasn’t even a fight,” he wheezes.
She just holds the knife to his chin, not pushing hard enough to leave a mark, staring at him.
He really is gorgeous—Annabeth can feel his chest muscles underneath her, expanding and contracting with each breath. Percy’s gotten even stronger since the summer, too—she swears every time she grabs his bicep (innocently or not), it’s bigger than before. Still, there’s the slight bit of fat to his cheeks that gives way to dorky smiles, and tangled black hair even longer still than the last time she ran her fingers through it. The saltwater smell, everpresent, is as strong as ever.
She can appreciate all of this even more while sitting on his chest, she thinks. A lovely angle to see the freckle smattering on his chin and neck.
“Fine,” Percy finally mumbles. “I surrender.”
Annabeth grins, but before she removes the dagger from his neck, she leans down and places one more kiss on his mouth.
He grins at her, and it’s so sweet and wholehearted that it makes Annabeth just sag into him, rolling off of his side and into the sand. After a minute, he takes her hand to his mouth and kisses the knuckles slowly, one by one—Annabeth’s nerves untangle and decompress with each one, until by the end, she’s about ready to fall asleep into his shoulder.
She hums contentedly.
“You were distracted, though,” Percy says.
“Wasn’t.”
“Annabeth.” The way he says her name always makes her breath catch in her chest—she didn’t know you could hear someone’s love until she heard Percy say her name. It’s maddening. “You don’t make those mistakes. You’re always thinking, always planning—usually you’re three steps ahead of me. Right now, you’re…” He blows out a breath, and Annabeth thinks he’s done until she hears him roll over, and his fingers touch her cheek. “You’re somewhere else.”
She looks over at him—despite the darkness, she can see just about every pore on his face, lips pursed and brows knitted. There’s a nick on the corner of his mouth from a razor, not even her own knife. He’s right—she’s slow today.
“I don’t like this dagger,” she admits, turning it over in her hand. The weight is wrong in her palms, like it’s been balanced for someone who didn’t know what a dagger was for. “It just doesn’t feel right.”
Percy’s quiet for a moment, just brushing the hair out of her face with a contemplative look.
“Is it because it’s not yours?”
The reminder feels like a punch to her stomach, winding her.
Imperial Gold instead of Celestial Bronze, Roman instead of Greek, made for a demigod fifty-some years ago instead of a scared seventeen-year-old with an attachment to the same knife she’s had for ten years.
“I don’t know. Maybe I’m overthinking it.”
Annabeth didn’t think what she said was funny, but Percy laughs—the same one when someone tells a corny joke or when he goes to scoop his dinner offering into the fire but it misses and hits the ground next to the coals. He laughs and kisses her forehead, warmth emanating from the point of skin contact, and it makes her smile, too.
“I think overthinking it is what you do. Like how I breathe underwater and control the ocean and whatever. Like, that’s part of the job description.”
Annabeth rolls her eyes. “Oh, so you get to talk to fish, and I get to never have peace in my own head?”
“Hey, take it up with your mom. I just call it how I see it.”
She humphs and rolls onto her stomach, taking the knife out once again to look it over—the longer she looked at it, the more it felt wrong to her. Too stocky, too thick at the base, too… unfamiliar. Like picking this thing up meant learning how to fight with it all over again.
“Maybe you’re right.” She drops it. “It is what I do.”
“All the time,” Percy says. He lets go of her hand, and for a short moment she misses the contact like she misses air on an exhale—and then his arm wraps around her waist, his face snuggling into her shoulder at the base of her neck, warm and smiling and oh, this is so much better. This makes every bone in Annabeth’s body turn to goo. “I don’t get how you do it.”
“If I could turn it off, I would.” His speaking sends vibrations through her chest and stomach, and she closes her eyes, absently tugging a hand through his hair. “It’s just… lately, it’s all worrying. Wondering if I could’ve done something different.” She doesn’t say the other part out loud—that she knows she could have done something differently. That she should’ve been smarter, should’ve been paying more attention, should’ve noticed that stupid spiderweb and should’ve made Percy let her go. Should’ve—
“Hey.” His lips press against her neck, just above her collarbone. “You’re gonna go crazy if you spend all your time thinking about that.”
“I can’t stop,” she protests, drawing breath to keep arguing but it hitches when he kisses her again.
“It’s okay. Hey, it’s okay. You just need to—I don’t know, distract yourself.”
Annabeth glances down at him. He looks concerned but sheepish, like he knows his advice sucks but he can’t think of anything better to say. It does give her comfort to know he’s listening, he’s aware, he’s suggesting solutions. The fact that they’re bad ones isn’t his fault.
“Do you have any amazing suggestions?”
“Well, one, but we’re outside and it’s sandy…”
She knees him in the groin and receives an appropriately wounded groan in response. “ Serious ones.”
“I was serious,” Percy complains, his voice an octave higher than normal and still cracking.
“Yeah.” Annabeth starts massaging his scalp again. “Sorry about that.”
He wheezes some kind of response and the quiet resumes for a few minutes, crickets chirping in the silence and a slight breeze carries a splutter of sand into both of their faces.
“You couldn’t have done anything,” Percy finally says. “You couldn’t have known.”
“I feel like I should have. I knew that pit went… there. I wasn’t careful enough.”
“You had a broken ankle. You were alone and scared and—and you already did so much more than anyone else did.” Percy’s voice is gentle, not berating—still, what he says isn’t reassuring. “I wish I was there.”
Annabeth shakes her head, mindful of her jaw at the top of his skull. “You couldn’t have been. You know that.”
“Yeah. But I still wish it.”
Annabeth thinks she might understand how Percy feels, now—knowing something is true but still wanting it to not have been the case. Wishing she could’ve broken heaven and earth apart for a different outcome. Powerless to change what already happened. Nothing makes her feel so small, so unimportant, so fragile, as knowing she can’t undo her mistakes.
“Me, too.”
—
On her bed in the Athena cabin, Annabeth finds a folded sheet of notebook paper.
“Did you see who left this?” She asks over her shoulder to Malcolm, who’s standing behind her nervously like he’s never seen her in the cabin before. “Also, quit hovering around me.”
“Sorry.” He doesn’t sound sorry, but he does take a step backwards. “Um, Will left that, actually. He said to tell you that you should talk to him when you get a second.”
“And you’re telling me this now?” She opens the piece of paper to see what’s so important that Will couldn’t wait until dinner this evening or the campfire after.
Scrawled out on the top line, in Will’s neat pencil—
Percy says you need some recommendations. If you call, let them know I’m referring you. If you need someone to talk to at camp, I’m here.
If you didn’t tell Percy to talk to me, leave me out of whatever happens.
Good luck.
Folded into the bottom of the note is a business card.
“I’m gonna fucking kill him later,” she grumbles, folding the note back up and tucking it into her pocket for the moment.
“Who?” Malcolm shuffles his feet.
“Percy.” She shakes her head, sighing—other than the note, her bunk is basically spotless. It doesn’t see much use nowadays, but she keeps it tidy for inspections and everything she doesn’t want to leave lying around Cabin 3 gets tucked into her desk and pinned to the corkboard above it. Glancing over it now, she sees a few new pictures—her and Piper getting bubble tea in Manhattan, one of her, Piper, and Hazel that Piper had taken a few days into their journey aboard the Argo II , a polaroid Thalia had sent her of the two of them, years younger and grimy from crawling through the backcountry of Michigan. That one twisted her heart—she knows Luke is the one that took it, and that knowledge feels fresh and painful every time she looks at it. Maybe eventually the reminder will stop hurting so much.
There’s old ones on there, too. Pictures of her, Percy, and Grover getting lunch together, exploring Brooklyn together. Percy and Grover having an argument about something she doesn’t even remember, but Percy’s hands are thrown in the air and Grover’s arms are crossed but they’re both smiling in the way that she knows means they’ll be back to laughing within ten minutes.
A few sketches line the outside of the board—blueprints, vague ideas for machines that might work given the right Hephaestus kid sicced on it, designs for Olympus and feverish math done at late hours of the night. Some of it’s been up there so long, she doesn’t remember what’s important and what’s not, anymore. A lot of them predate her designs for Olympus by a long shot, but some part of her always got sad throwing away old ideas, old concepts—she always feels like with the right breath, the right tug, it could become something new, fresh, beautiful.
Annabeth sweeps the crumbs and the granola wrapper off of the corner of the desk into her hand, and throws it in the garbage can underneath the chair.
“Tell Katie we’re good for inspection,” Annabeth says, turning on her heel to leave. “I’m going to go find Will.”
Normally, she would be able to find him in the Big House in the infirmary, but the rate of teenagers that have injured themselves this week has been surprisingly low—partially because the lava wall is off, and partially, Annabeth suspects, because they’re saving up all of their injuries for Capture the Flag tomorrow night. And anyway, it’s inspection day, which means Will is probably in the one place he’s nearly never found—the Apollo cabin.
She passes Katie Gardner poking her head into the Hephaestus cabin, saying something to Jake Mason as she shakes her head. Annabeth notes the smoke curling out of the window and decides she’d rather not tangle with whatever that means.
The Apollo cabin’s windows have been freshly cleaned and the whole place smells like citrus, which isn’t terribly unusual. Annabeth has always been fond of the feeling of this cabin more than its patron. She pokes her head in the door.
Will looks like he’s having a conversation with a camper Annabeth barely recognizes—a young girl, maybe thirteen?—but he glances up at the door and sees her almost immediately, and he gives her a nod of recognition.
“What did Percy tell you?” Annabeth asks as soon as he steps out of the front door, excusing himself from the conversation inside. Will sighs.
“I told you to leave me out of it—“
“I just want to know how much you already know.” That’s true. “And I want you to tell me about this.”
She holds out the business card— Dovetail Counseling, with a name, phone number, and address printed underneath the logo of an all-too-familiar bird. In gold ink, across the bottom: “Daughter of Aphrodite—specialist in crisis counseling.”
“She’s a really good demigod therapist,” Will starts, slow, like he’s expecting Annabeth to lash out at him with her dagger. She considers it. “Penelope Waters. She went to camp about twenty years ago, went to school in Tennessee, and came back up here to set up a practice. The clinic’s in Manhattan. She specializes with demigod problems—ADHD, dyslexia, PTSD, and trauma related to… you know, normal demigod life.”
Will studies her face. Annabeth looks away, pretending she’s less interested than she is.
“What about not normal demigod life?” The words are hard to get out without her voice cracking, but somehow she does. She knows Will knows what she’s referring to, and doesn’t think she can meet his eyes when she asks. He’s quiet for a long moment.
“I think… you would have to try it to find out.”
Annabeth nods, exhaling slowly. Turning the idea over in her mind. Penelope Waters, demigod counseling. It sounds better than nothing—but the idea alone is still daunting. Going back down there, even just in her head…
As if he reads her mind, Will interrupts her thoughts. “If you’re not ready, you don’t have to. In fact, you shouldn’t —you’ll just make yourself more upset, maybe even re-traumatize yourself. You can’t force yourself to deal with it before you think it’s time.”
She doesn’t say that she’s tired—tired of tiptoeing around the topic, tired of pretending like she doesn’t spend every day reliving it in her head, tired of exhausting her mind running it in circles, replaying it over and over, searching for something she missed. Something different, something she could’ve done. Something that would’ve made it less consuming.
It’s been four months and six days since Annabeth came through the Doors of Death. It’s been zero days since she made it out.
“Yeah,” is all she says. “Thanks, Will. I’ll check it out.”
She makes a mental note to kiss Percy instead.
—
“You want me to come with you to therapy?”
Percy does not sound enthusiastic about the prospect—in fact, the tone of his voice was more along the lines of regarding it with the same suspicion he might give to a mall kiosk salesman.
“You don’t have to,” Annabeth amends quickly. “But it was your idea in the first place, if I should add.”
“You’ve reminded me six times in the last minute.” Percy shifts, the mattress creaking as he does. Annabeth likes lying with him in his apartment—the cots of Camp Half Blood paled in comparison to a decent mattress and relative privacy from cabinmates. “I just… don’t think I would have a lot to talk about.”
Annabeth stares at him, incredulous. She’s unsure if he’s serious or not for a moment until he looks at her with an expression of intense, deep though—then she reaches over and flicks him in the forehead.
“That’s the most Seaweed Brain thing you’ve ever said.”
Percy opens his mouth to protest, but Annabeth bulldozes over him.
“Percy, we fought a war last year. We fought another war this year. We lost—” She chokes for a moment, fingers instinctively reaching for her clay bead necklace, the names of her friends engraved permanently into the surface of that last bead. “We lost people.”
Percy’s silent, seemingly contemplative. “Yeah… I mean, yeah, that’s all bad. Like.” He hesitates, rolling a thought around in his head. Annabeth can see the processing behind his eyes. “I don’t know. We’ve been doing this since we were kids, you know? It’s just always been like this.”
Annabeth takes his hand, the one nervously raking his hair, and starts gently kissing each knuckle, slow, deliberate.
“We were kids. And everything that’s happened to us is shit that kids shouldn’t have to deal with. Have you ever thought about how the monsters and the quests affected your relationship with your mom? With Paul?” She doesn’t add with me? Annabeth knows that they both know exactly how the constant, life-threatening peril has affected their relationship. They have the scars to prove it—the nasty, puckered scar on her shoulder still twinges, some days. But they also fight like one person—one brain, one goal, one shared understanding of their respective strengths. Hardly having to communicate at all to take a monster down. The danger made them paranoid, maybe even codependent, but it also made her more in tune with Percy than her own self.
Which is why Annabeth knows, now, that Percy’s hesitance is trepidation—it’s the fear of revisiting everything that they’ve been through and maybe realizing how truly, deeply fucked it all was in the first place.
“I’ll be right there,” Annabeth reassures him, still holding tightly to his hand, now pressing it to her cheek. He’s just watching her, wide-eyed, looking like the gears are turning but maybe slowly, maybe still resisting from anxiety, maybe some fears Annabeth doesn’t even know are there. “We can go together. Or you can go by yourself. But—” Annabeth hesitates, not wanting to scare him too badly but also wanting to be honest, “I want us to be able to talk about it, you know? Everything. Process it, deal with it, heal from it. We’re important enough to do that for us, don’t you think?”
Percy’s silent, just looking at Annabeth with those sea-green eyes and mouth slightly parted like he wants to say something but can’t find the words, or maybe he can’t put them together correctly to form a convincing, cohesive thought.
“I think I’m just worried that… everything that’s happened to us. Everything that we did and everything we went through.” He reaches out his hand, breaking Annabeth’s hold but running his fingertips over the scar on her shoulder, which she knows he still hasn’t forgiven her for taking. “I’m scared that if I try to deal with it, if I look at it directly and I stop just pushing it away, it’ll be that much more real. Like… if it happened, and I lived, then I’m fine. But if it happened, and I lived, and now I have to carry it around for the rest of my life, then that means everything ever has those consequences. That I have to deal with everything. And that’s…” His eyes glaze over. “We were twelve, Annabeth.”
“I know.” Annabeth scoots closer to kiss his forehead, feeling his eyelids flutter closed as she does. It feels searing. She tries to put as much reassurance as she can into the short contact, leaving their faces close when she pulls away—for as much her own sake as his. Percy’s closeness always gives her strength, always brings her center of gravity back down, grounds her. “I know, sweetheart. I know.”
She wraps the free hand she has around his back, pulling him close to her, letting him bury his head in the crook of her neck.
“I still think about when I lost you,” Annabeth says quietly. “I think all the time how that felt. How every day I was desperate, clawing for something, anything that would prove you were even alive. ”
Percy’s hands in her shirt tighten. “Annabeth—”
“Don’t say you’re sorry.” She keeps her voice stern, chiding, trying to hide the shaking that always happens when she even thinks about this time period. “It wasn’t your fault. But I just… never want to feel like that ever again. I don’t think you realize how much I need you.”
Percy snuggles closer to her, turning his nose to her jaw, his lips right next to her ear. “I need you, too.”
I need you felt so different from I love you. Love could come and go—Annabeth wasn’t sure it was much more than a feeling, anyway. Need is different. Need is the need in a human body to eat and breathe and blink. Need is the burning in your eyes when emotions get overwhelming and beg for release in the form of tears. Need is the clawing hunger in the stomach for sustenance. Need is fundamental, primal, the most basic of all human nature. Annabeth needs Percy, needs his presence and his stable arms wrapped around her right now, his breath on her neck, his warm smile on good days and his quiet, clinging hands on bad ones, like she needs her nervous system. Without it, everything falls apart. He felt even more necessary to her than her bones.
“You’d better always come back to me, Seaweed Brain.” She turns her chin a little, managing to kiss his forehead again by straining just a bit. “Or I’ll find you and drag you back. From the dead, if I have to.”
He laughs, quiet and humming contentedly in their lazy embrace. Sunlight streams through the window—late afternoon sky tinted orange gleams just behind the skyline. Annabeth doesn’t often get to appreciate moments like these, but ever since Percy’s disappearance, she tries to, more. Tries to capture these minutes in her mind for remembering forever after.
“You know I’d follow you anywhere, right? I’d always come back. Even if Hera wipes my memories again and dumps me off the coast of Antarctica, I’d come back. I’d find you again.” He kisses her cheek, gently, and Annabeth’s insides feel like they all spontaneously combust at the same time. “You wouldn’t even have to drag me out of the Underworld—if they threw me in there without you, I’d crawl my way back.”
Annabeth sniffs, pretending tears aren’t welling up in her eyes. It’s so hard to love Percy with everything else in their lives—gods, giants, wars, everything else thrown in their paths that made it seem like fate itself was against them. But they always made it through, didn’t they? Every war, every monster, even hell itself. They’d come out the other side closer and stronger for it.
“I love you,” Annabeth says, meaning it more than she ever has—if love is just an emotion, she’s never felt it more. “So much.”
“I love you, too, Wise Girl.”
—
Nyssa hands her two scabbards, one slightly longer than the other, but both roughly the same size and shape as her old knife.
“Drakon-bone daggers,” she says proudly, and Annabeth can see the gleam in her eyes as she hands them over to her. “And we added Celestial Bronze tips to oomph the monster-killing ability.”
Annabeth takes a sheath from Nyssa and draws the blade—the same bone she’s familiar with shows itself, with slight reshaping to make the blade more durable as a shorter, deadlier dagger than a full-length sword. Heavier at the bottom, more tapered at the top. Just the way Annabeth is used to balancing a blade in her palm.
The Celestial Bronze tip gleams wickedly—though the bone itself seemed to have no trouble slaying monsters for whatever reason, Annabeth was sure that the added security only served to make the knife deadlier.
She holds her hand out for the other one, and Nyssa draws it and hands it over.
The second dagger is slightly shorter than the first, meant for an off-hand, not really used as anything more than a second, quick jab before retreating once more.
Nyssa steps back to allow Annabeth to take a few experimental swipes with the blades.
They’re perfectly balanced in her hands, like her palms were designed for these grips, like the knives themselves are just extensions of herself. Even two-weapon fighting, something Annabeth has never really tried her hand at, doesn’t feel unnatural with these knives—though she suspects she’ll have to practice for a bit with both of them before she’ll be a whirlwind of blades and grit on a battlefield. Still, both of them feel like they were made for her hands. Given Nyssa’s thoroughness, they probably were.
“These are perfect,” Annabeth says. “Thank you.”
“Sorry it took so long. Not a lot of us have worked with bone before.” Nyssa scratches the back of her neck. “Jake tried at it for a bit before we ended up turning it over to Grace—she’s a fucking genius with a chisel and hammer.”
Annabeth nods. “You can tell her I think they’re amazing. And I’ll make sure to get her a very nice present as a thank-you.”
“She’s been eyeing a set of tools—I’ll give you the information later.” Nyssa nods at the knives. “You’re gonna have to get used to fighting with two.”
“I think it’ll be a nice change.” Annabeth holds them both up, feeling their weight in her hands, pondering how different her style would be after she’s had a chance to practice with them. She’ll have to get Percy to spar with her again once she’s mastered it. “It’s… not like they’re the same, you know? Might as well get to new things.”
Nyssa shifts. “I’m sorry about your old one.”
“Me, too.” Losing that knife felt like losing a leg. Even still, Annabeth knows she’s lucky to have only lost it and the laptop. “But these will do just fine.”
Nyssa looks somewhat relieved at having been disburdened of an awkward conversation, and she leans against the support column in front of the Athena cabin. “Take those for some test rounds, maybe go hunting in the woods with them, and keep me updated, okay?”
Annabeth nods. “Will do.”
She hooks a scabbard to each hip as Nyssa dips her head and heads back to Cain 9, always with the slight lilt to her left side. Having a knife on each side of her makes Annabeth feel that much safer—even in Camp, she was always antsy with nothing on her person. Now, it feels like an important bone has been restored to her body, a sense of safety and comfort.
Not quite the same as her old knife, an object just as comforting to her as it was deadly. A knife given to her by an old friend turned enemy, honed by her own hands for no less than ten years, eventually lost to the trials and tribulations of her life. A knife that had seen so much with her, finally lost. These knives were new, different, and Annabeth isn’t sure quite exactly how to gauge them yet—if they’ll be friendly, warm companions, or deadly, cold implements. She supposes she’ll just have to wait and see.
Either way, they’re free of history, ready to start fresh.