Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Annabeth always has a plan, and tonight the plan is very very simple: she sits in hair and makeup for a little while, then she goes and puts on the best concert she possibly can, and then she marries the love of her life. For a plan that’s so simple, it’s currently feeling nigh on impossible to pull off.

“Annabeth, honey, you need to look at me,” says Silena, waving her hands in front of her friend’s face. “I know you’re excited and in love and all that jazz, but stage lights do favours for no woman and you’ll have more people watching you today than – well, ever, probably.”

“I think it was a good interview, though, right?” asks Annabeth, unwilling to totally tear her eyes away from the small screen above her dressing table that’s replaying yesterday’s chat show appearance promoting tonight’s concert.

“Yup, you really survived the tough questioning from hard-nosed investigative journalist Jimmy Fallon there,” says Silena, waving her brush in exasperation. “On the other hand, you will not survive my wrath if you go out there with your lashes only half done because you wouldn’t sit still and let me finish them.”

“But, I was convincing, wasn’t I?”

“Convincing?” Silena’s tone is incredulous. “You love him, right?”

“Well… yeah,” says Annabeth slowly.

“You sure?”

“I love him,” she says, more confidently this time.

“So who cares if you were – I don’t even know what to say to that question – I mean it looked like you were in love to me. You looked beautiful and happy and very much in love. Were you wanting to achieve anything more than that with the interview?”

“I mean the wedding, Silena! Is the wedding a good idea? It was Luke’s idea to do a joint concert and wedding, and he’s planned most of it, too. And that’s so sweet, but is asking millions of people to watch us get married, like, is that a good idea? And was I convincing that I thought it was? I don’t want him watching it and thinking I’m getting cold feet, cause I’m not, I’m just… a little nervous.”

There’s a slight pause, when Annabeth is sure Silena is about to tell her that if she’s having second thoughts, an hour before she gets married is a little late to be having them, but instead her friend sighs sympathetically. “When Charlie and I got married, you know it was just us, his mom, and my dad as our witnesses, right?”

“Right.”

“Because we wanted to get married and we didn’t want to wait. And that was what was important to us. So we just did.”

“Right,” says Annabeth again.

“So do you want to marry this boy?”

“I do,” she confirms.

“So you put on a banging concert and then you marry him, and the number of people watching isn’t important.”

Annabeth takes a moment to digest this. “Does your contract give you a bonus for when you’re particularly wise?” she asks.

“I’d much prefer a regular pay rise and for you to sit still, because your lashes are still not going to finish themselves,” says Silena, and Annabeth figures she definitely owes her that much, so she sits as motionlessly as she can and fights her ADHD to let the other girl get her ready for her big night.

Performing always ends up as a kind of blur for Annabeth, and the bigger the event the blurrier the blur. And tonight is – oh boy – tonight is blurry.

She knows the setlist by heart because she and Luke have gone over it a thousand times and then she’s gone over it another thousand times by herself to make absolutely certain that it’s flawless. They’re alternating fifteen-minute segments, playing three or four songs each at a time, in a marathon two-hour show before an encore unlike any other, when they’ll play their new duet – Marry Me – and then actually get married.

Luke’s half is a generous mix of his biggest singles, fan favourite album tracks, and then a couple of unreleased studio outtakes to please the die-hard fans, while Annabeth’s section, reflecting a career that’s been going for about five years less than his, includes more than half of the songs that she’s ever released, along with covers of some of her favourite love songs. Even before she gets married, she feels like she’s baring her soul in front of the whole world by essentially trying to sum up her whole life’s work so far.

And yet, as terrifying as the experience is, and as hard as it is to gauge the crowd’s reaction through the dazzling lights from her position onstage, she makes her way through each mini-set without catastrophe, eventually even – to her immense surprise – beginning to enjoy herself.

Finally, she finishes her last song, (a cover of Can’t Help Falling In Love, because it is, after all, her wedding day and she’s feeling a little sappy) and heads backstage to watch Luke and his band close out his half of the show before the big finale.

Onstage, her fiancé is otherworldly. His stylist has dressed him smartly in a light blue suit for the big occasion, and he holds the crowd in the palm of his hand as he pulls music from the strings of his guitar. They’re deafening when he plays the singalong hits, and silent enough that Annabeth swears she could have heard a pin drop when he’s on the quiet and emotional numbers. Finally, he reaches his most famous song, Stolen Your Heart, and she has to head to the trapdoor from which she’s shortly to rise to the stage while thousands of people just out of her sight chant Luke’s words like their lives depend on it.

Didn’t think it was a talent, didn’t think it was an art, she hears coming from the stadium floor, and mouths the words quietly along with them as Silena puts the finishing touches to her final costume change: a huge white wedding dress with a train the length of the Trans-Siberian Railway.

Her manager, Grover, hurries in through the door looking thoroughly frazzled, his phone in his hand, as Luke sings that he Didn’t think that I’d done anything wrong. That was no surprise, she figured, since this was pretty much the biggest night of Grover’s career too, even if he wasn’t one of the ones actually getting married.

But now you tell me that I’ve stolen your heart, finishes Luke. They’d decided on a big instrumental finish in this version to give her some extra time to get ready before the encore, but she still shivers in anticipation of the fact that in a few minutes time she’ll be marrying him. Stolen her heart he has indeed.

“Does she know?” she hears Grover whispering to Silena.

“Know what?” she demands, spinning around as much as the dress will allow her in order to look at them with their heads together.

“Nothing!” he says instantly. Unfortunately for Grover, this would have been unconvincing even coming from an excellent liar, and Grover is just about the most compulsively truthful person Annabeth has ever met.

“What is it?” she asks again, even more insistently this time.

Silena, frowning at something on Grover’s phone, gives Annabeth a worried look. “I don’t know if it’s a good moment…” she starts.

“Let me see that,” says Annabeth, holding out her hand for the phone, conscious that there’s – what, a minute left before she’s to rise up onto the stage? She’s lost track of the time. It could be less than that.

“We don’t know for sure that it’s real,” says Grover hurriedly, as Silena hands the phone over much more slowly than Annabeth would like. “It could just be someone who looks like him.”

Annabeth looks at the phone screen, and takes a moment to discern the headline: STOLEN HER HEART, TOO? LUCKY LUKE’S BIT ON THE SIDE! Her fingers shaky, she only gets the video underneath it to play on the second attempt, and there, sure enough, a little blurry but still recognisable, is the love of her life going into a restaurant with another woman, his eyes going where they shouldn’t and his hands following shortly after. Any possibly doubt that it could be Luke is dispelled when Annabeth realises that she recognises the woman with him, too – it’s Kelli, one of his backing singers. Annabeth knows that Kelli has feelings for Luke – she’s just never realised that they’re reciprocated.

The other two are looking at her with concern, but then the lift starts moving, and in a few seconds, Annabeth and her extravagant wedding dress will be the centre of the world’s attention. She tosses the phone back to Grover, who just about catches it, and turns to face the music as they’re cut off from her sight and she arrives at the top of the stage.

The lights seem more dazzling than normal. Is the roaring in her ears the noise of the crowd, or is it the sound of her own fury, or of her future whistling past as it disappears out of reach? It takes her agonising moments to recognise the opening bars of Marry Me, the big song of the moment. Annabeth sings the opening, so Luke’s in the wings, waiting for his cue, which means that for the moment, Annabeth commands the stage. There are no back-up dancers yet, and the musicians are all way off to the sides – this song is, after all, not really about them.

“Sorry, can you stop the music for a moment?” she finds herself saying. The excited screams and shouts of the crowd die down along with the music. Do some of them know about the news already? Are they confused, or worried, or are they just waiting to hear what they think will be some big emotional speech?

Oh, Annabeth’ll give them a big emotional speech alright. She looks over to her left, where Luke is waiting to come on stage with her. He’s smiling, a little confused, but largely supportive. His teeth are a dazzling white even from this distance.

“Can you turn the house lights up too, please?” she addresses the venue staff. She knows the lighting guy here, Beckendorf, who’s married to Silena and is just about the best in the business. He worked to plan the show with her and Luke, but he’s got the skills to improvise too, and a moment later she’s able to see the fans as well as they can see her.

Are there more of her fans or Luke’s here, she wonders? She knows that the arena holds about 20,000 people, and it looks like it’s packed to the roof.

“I hope you’ve all enjoyed the show so far,” she tells them, and is answered with a deafening roar of affirmation that must go on for a full minute. “And now we’ve reached the most special part of it. I’m sure you’ll be aware that this is the biggest night of my life, and I’ve really been looking forward to sharing it with you all, so thank you so much for coming and showing your support.” There’s another roar at that, as long as the first, and out of the corner of her eye she can see Luke getting a little antsy as he waits. He doesn’t know what she’s doing – though neither, to be entirely fair, does she. “I’ll admit, I’ve been a little nervous,” she says, like she’s confiding it to a friend rather than thousands of strangers in here and millions more watching the livestream. “But maybe the nerves die down a little when it’s your second time around – I’ll have to ask Luke about that.” That gets a small laugh from the audience, who all remember the disintegration of Luke’s marriage to Thalia Grace, which was well-documented in the tabloids. Many of them, though, must be wondering why she’s talking about his previous marriage just before their own wedding.

“The practice should be good for him, though, because after tonight, he can start planning for his third wedding,” she says, and the room goes deathly silent. There are tears pricking at her eyes, but she has no intention of letting them fall. She risks a glance to her left, where Luke’s eyes have gone wide and his smile has vanished.

She looks out over the crowd, and catches sight of a black-haired man about her own age holding a sign that says MARRY ME resting loosely on his shoulder. A very bad idea takes root in her head, and she knows that it’s a bad idea, but she wants to make some kind of a statement and so she decides she’s going to do it anyway. She doesn’t really know what the statement means except that her wedding is ending in one huge dumpster fire, but if that’s the headline of the gossip columns for the next month, then that seems appropriate. Why shouldn’t the world come and gawp at her unhappiness, unhappiness of the kind that breaks records and shakes nations?

“I guess I’m used to people leaving me,” she admits softly, holding the microphone close like it’s the last thing she has left. “And it hurts every time. It’s heartbreaking to trust someone, to put your life in their hands, and for them to drop it when they see something shinier… or a nice ass to grope.” She shoots another look over at Luke at this point, who’s trying to get out onto stage, but Grover and Argus, her security guard, are holding him back, and no-one looks particularly interested in intervening in his favour.

“Maybe it’s time for me to stop being surprised when things don't work out,” she says. “Maybe it’s time for me to stop expecting to be able to make anything that lasts. Maybe it’s time for me to try living in the moment a little more.” She pauses, waiting for a response from the crowd that doesn’t seem forthcoming, so she ploughs on. “In this moment, I’ve got a wedding set up, and millions of people around the world waiting to watch me get married, so don’t you think it would be a shame to waste it?” The crowd whoops again, maybe thinking that she’s going to marry Luke after all, that it’s all been a false alarm.

They’re all wrong, though. Annabeth has someone in mind who she figures, at the very least, can’t be any worse than Luke.

She points at the guy with the placard. “You, with the sign,” she says. Even from up on the stage, with him surrounded by a hundred people within a handful of square feet, she can see his eyebrows shoot up cutely. He points silently to himself, and mouths, me?

“Yeah, you,” she says, “with the sign that says ‘marry me.’ My answer’s yes.”

Chapter Text

Right up until one of the most famous women in the world told him they were getting married, Percy’s day was going relatively normally.

He’d spent the morning in the lab, sifting through the footage of last month’s expedition in the Gulf of Mexico and cataloguing all the deep-sea species they’d caught on camera, before meeting up with Nico for lunch.

“Do you want to come to Luke and Annabeth’s wedding with me this evening?” the younger man had asked, twisting the skull ring on his finger as he waited for Percy’s answer.

Percy paused. “Luke and Annabeth are… friends of yours?”

“If only,” sighed Nico. “They’re the most famous couple in the world and they’re getting married in a joint concert-wedding this evening at Madison Square Garden, and I’ve got a spare ticket.”

“I’ve never heard of them. Aren’t the most famous couple in the world, like, the Obamas?”

Nico had fixed him with a look at that point. “You,” said Nico, “are so, so, incredibly, old.”

“I’m twenty-four-”

“The Obamas?”

“Yeah? Everyone knows the Obamas.”

Nico paused. “I can’t believe I ever crushed on you,” he said, finally.

“Well, what are their surnames?” asked Percy.

“Obama and Obama.”

“No-”

“Luke Castellan and Annabeth Chase,” said Nico.

“See if you’d said that the first time around-”

“Then you’d still have been totally clueless and thought they were my friends,” Nico told him.

“I mean, the names are familiar… they’re singers, right?”

“Hence why the wedding is also a concert,” said Nico with exaggerated patience.

“And they’ve sold tickets to it?” asked Percy, still trying to wrap his head around what was going on and why and how it was working.

“There’s also a free livestream to give something back to their fans.”

“But you went and got two tickets to be there in person.”

Nico nodded. Percy considered this information carefully.

“Who were you meant to be going with?”

“Well, the tickets went went on sale about a year ago, and I was hoping I’d be able to take someone with me.”

“…you bought two tickets to a wedding so you could take a hypothetical future boyfriend with you to it,” said Percy slowly.

“The wedding of the century, to be fair,” said Nico. “Also, yes, I did do that. I thought it would be romantic.”

Percy shakes his head, trying to disentangle his brain from his friend’s antics and the logistics of a concert-wedding. “I can’t come anyway,” he said, “I promised Mom I’d look after Estelle for the weekend.”

“Actually I’ve got three tickets,” said Nico. “Leo was going to come and third wheel us, but he kind of blew up his garage, so he asked me if I could get rid of his for him.”

“You really have an answer for everything,” marvelled Percy.

“So you’re coming?” said Nico, a smile breaking through the brooding expression that his face normally sported.

“I mean… it’s not dirty, is it?”

“Dirty?” asked Nico, smirking.

"I don’t want to be put in charge of Estelle for two days and expose her to sex and drugs and stuff!” he protested.

"You're so old," Nico murmured incredulously. “Nothing explicit. It would all go over her head anyway, at that age.”

“I mean, I’m not sure…” he began, but Nico interrupted him.

“Luke is iconic and Annabeth is absolutely huge at the moment, and Estelle would think you’re the coolest big brother in the world if you took her to their wedding show.”

“I wish you’d stop using their first names like you know them,” said Percy. Then he registered the rest of Nico’s sentence. “You think she would?” he asked, perking up a little, because, like the absolute sap he knew he was, Percy really really wanted his little sister to think he was cool.

Nico leaned over the table conspiratorially, and then moved Percy’s hot chocolate out of the way so he could lean even lower. “I know she would,” he whispers.

And after that, there was really no escape.

To be fair, Percy enjoys the concert. He particularly likes Luke Castellan’s half of the set, as the man reminds him a little of his one true musical love, Bruce Springsteen, even if he’s not quite of the same standard.

He doesn’t really listen to much modern pop music, since the boat that he spends months of the year working on has internet of far too poor a quality to use streaming services, and when he’s at home he tends to relax in the company of a handful of classic rock CDs, but he’s impressed by Annabeth Chase’s performance, too. Her songs seem more carefully chosen to suit a wedding than those of her other half, they’ve got a beat you can dance to, and she’s got a hell of a voice, even if there’s one song with a chorus that goes “I want you in my room, on the bed, on the floor,” for which he has to cover Estelle’s eyes and ears.

“TO BE FAIR,” Nico bellows in his ear over the sound of the music, “THIS IS A COVER AND I DIDN’T KNOW SHE’D PLAY IT. ALSO IT’S REALLY NOT AS BAD AS YOU’RE PRETENDING!”

Percy nods faintly as Chase informs them that “I wanna do bad things to you.”

Nico’s spent the whole night chugging cider and waving a huge sign that says MARRY ME on it whenever Castellan is on stage (“Marry Me is their new song together, and it’s iconic,” he’d informed Percy when they’d arrived), possibly mourning the absence of the man he’d hoped to come here with a year ago. At the tail-end of Stolen Your Heart, however, the drinks finally catch up with him, and he thrusts the sign into Percy’s hands and rushes off to find a toilet, swearing in Italian that he’d better not miss the big finale.

The crowd goes wild, realising that they’ve reached the end of the main set and euphoric with the prospect of what comes next, and Percy stands there with the sign propped up on his shoulder in one hand, and one of Estelle’s hands in his other while they’re surrounded by whoops and cheers for what must be several minutes.

He leans down to his sister, who’s yawning, and he realises that it’s further past her bedtime than he’d expected it to be. “You OK down there?” he asks, having to shout to make her hear him, but pleased when she smiles and nods up at him. “You want to go home?” he asks, already half-ready to make a quick exit through the crowd, but she shakes her head.

“Without seeing the wedding?” she asks, like the suggestion is obviously a crazy one, so he’s agreeing to stay until the end with her when the first chords of a new song sound, and a spotlight focuses on a figure emerging from the back of the stage.

The rest of the crowd don’t seem to notice, but Percy, able to see well from their spot relatively near the stage, can immediately tell there’s something wrong. Annabeth Chase is stiff and motionless in a way she hasn’t been for the whole show, and in any other song she’d be moving to the music already.

Then she asks for the music to stop and the lights to go up, and he’s filled with second-hand dread. He doesn’t cheer when the rest of the crowd does, he simply stands, waiting for her to announce, as he’s sure she will, that the wedding’s off and sorry for disappointing everyone, but they can all go home now. She talks briefly about her night and makes a couple of references to her and Luke’s lives that he figures everyone else here understands a lot better than he does.

Then she says something about not wasting the wedding now it’s been set up.

And then she points straight at him and Nico’s stupid sign, and says “My answer’s yes.”

Percy can feel every eye in the arena, maybe in the world, turn to him, feel the glare of camera lenses and confused and disappointed gazes.

“Is this a joke?” he hears someone nearby ask. You tell me, pal, Percy thinks.

Nico chooses this moment to re-emerge from the crowd, snatching his sign and Estelle’s hand from Percy’s limp grip. “Go on,” he says, like it’s weird that Percy hasn’t already leapt towards the stage.

“What?”

“You’ll be great for each other, I can tell already,” says Nico. “Now get a move on, she’s waiting.”

Percy looks back up at the stage, where she’s waiting, wearing what might be the largest wedding dress he’s ever seen. It doesn’t take a psychologist to see that she’s distraught, and he figures that the last thing she needs is to be turned down in front of all her fans by some random guy in the crowd, but also surely he’s not about to actually get married to her, is he? None of the fans who are parting in front of him like the Red Sea seem likely to have the answer, so he lets himself be ushered and manhandled towards the stage, asking himself as he goes what in the world is going on.

Maybe they’re all just caught up in the excitement, and if he does get married now (which he’s still not certain he will), then tomorrow, in a calmer state of mind, she’ll quietly tell him that it’s been fun or some equivalent emotion while it lasted, and maybe the papers will have a page or two about the mystery man Annabeth Chase married for less than twenty-four hours, but they’ll have no way of finding him and everyone will be able to move on with their lives.

Security guards lift him over one of the barriers like he weighs nothing, and moments later, he’s onstage with the guy performing the ceremony, who looks as confused as Percy feels, and the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen.

And she is beautiful, even as undisguisably upset as she is. Her blonde hair glows as it flows down over her shoulders, her skin is rosy and tanned, and her eyes shine like pieces of silver. Percy, who’s always worked from the basic assumption that nothing about celebrities is real, finds himself thinking not about how well her makeup has been applied or that this woman’s stylist needs a pay-rise, but about the way that his breath is catching in his throat and his skin bursts into goosebumps as she takes his hand to pull him to the centre of the stage.

“Let’s get going, then,” she tells the official, who seems to have decided, like Percy, not to swim against the current of what Chase has decided she wants.

“Will you, Annabeth Chase, take… this guy to be your lawfully wedded husband?” he asks.

“I will,” says Annabeth.

The official looks at Percy. “Same question, buddy,” he says.

Percy meets Annabeth’s gaze, and thinks he sees the faintest trace of appreciation that he’s going along with this. Maybe there’s a touch of humour in there, too. She’s very obviously smart enough to know that what she’s doing is outrageous and absurd. She’s very obviously furious enough not to give a damn about what the sane option is. Something tells Percy that even if the night is on the whole ruined, she’s somehow enjoying this moment, and he finds his face breaking into a smile that he doesn’t think he could prevent if he wanted to. “Sure,” he says.

Things move quickly after that. She gives him the ring she’d been going to give to Castellan, but he doesn’t have one to give back to her. When they’re told that they may kiss, there’s another cheer from the crowd, who he reckons must be desperate for something to root for, as Annabeth crushes her lips into his more forcefully than he’d expected, her nose rubbing against his cheek as his own nose is tickled by her lemon-scented hair. He reacts automatically, holding her in his arms and kissing her back.

The train of her dress is, mercifully, detachable, so with the ceremony over, she detaches it and they head backstage, away from the multitude of flashing lights and directly towards a row of getaway vehicles in the basement. On their way, they run into a tall blond man who must be just a few years older than Percy, and it takes him a minute to realise that it’s Luke Castellan, his face like thunder.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Castellan demands of Annabeth. “Are you mad?”

“I’m leaving, Luke,” she says. “It was nice knowing you.”

“You listen to me, ‘Beth,” he says, pushing an aide out of the way and stepping towards her with clenched fists.

“Woah, man,” says Percy, stepping between them. “She doesn’t have to marry you if she doesn’t want to.”

Castellan looks him up and down, and then laughs, caught halfway between contempt and disbelief. “Yeah, and now she’s got her ideal husband, hasn’t she?”

“The best I could have asked for,” says Annabeth before Luke can make his verdict any clearer, her tone sickly-sweet as she loops her arm through Percy’s elbow and pulls him away down the hall.

“You’ve made a fool of yourself, Annabeth!” Luke shouts after them, but mercifully, he doesn’t make to follow them. Percy can feel her bristling alongside him like she's ready to hit someone, and thinks that if he'd been in her shoes, he might already have done. Moments later, they’re in the back of one of the cars, accelerating out of the building’s basement.

Annabeth flops against the seat opposite Percy, the tension disappearing from her shoulders as she lets out a huge sigh that turns into a slightly hysterical laugh. “Thank you for going along with this,” she says. “And I’m sorry about Luke. You’re clearly very sweet, and he’s… well, he’s an asshole.”

“I’ll be honest, there wasn’t a whole lot there that made me understand why you’d want to marry him,” Percy jokes weakly, but his words seem to deflate her as the adrenaline of the moment wears off.

“I’m sorry I dragged you into my mess of a life,” she says. “I was just… I was just so angry. I wanted to hurt him, and – I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“I get it,” says Percy. “I get being so angry that the most important thing feels like making sure everyone knows how mad you are, and I get that once you’ve done that it’s hard to figure out what comes next.”

“Wow,” she says, sitting back. “We’ve been married five minutes and you’re already psychoanalysing me.”

“Sorry,” says Percy, but she shakes her head.

“No, you’re right. I was mad. What I did was mad. I’ll drop you off wherever you need to be, and… I don’t know. Figure it all out tomorrow.”

Percy peers out of the tinted windows to try to identify the New York lights streaking past. “Yeah, I don’t live far from here,” he says, and gives her driver a few directions until they’re pulling up at an empty spot on the kerb where he can climb out of the car to the welcome sight of his apartment building.

“Wait,” says Annabeth, and he turns around in surprise. “I, um.” She blushes and grins bashfully. “I don’t actually know your name,” she says. “And since we’re married and all…”

He laughs. “I’m Percy,” he says. “Well, strictly speaking, I’m Perseus Jackson, but as my wife, I think you have permission to call me Percy. Also, I prefer Percy, so please don’t call me Perseus.”

She nods. “I’m Annabeth Chase,” she says, sticking out a hand. “But if you shorten it to Anna or Beth or some terrible third option I haven’t even heard before, I’m afraid I’ll have to kill you. Nice to meet you, Percy.”

“Nice to meet you, Annabeth,” he agrees, shaking her hand. They’re both sporting bashful grins, the ridiculousness of the whole situation not lost on them.

“And – I know we’re doing this all backwards – do you think I might have your phone number?”

She hands him her phone to add himself, and he pulls out his own cell to seek out his number only to be greeted by the sight of a missed call from Nico.

“Oh, crap,” he realises. “I left Estelle there.”

“Your girlfriend?” she asks.

He shakes his head. “My little sister. I mean, she’s with a friend I trust, it’s not like I just abandoned her or anything, they’ll just be wondering where I am – I should phone them in a minute.”

“I’m sorry about all this,” she says again. “You’ve been so cool about it all, and I’ve just been making chaos.”

“No, no,” he insists, “it’s fine.” He jabs his number into her phone on about the third attempt, unused to the different style of keyboard she has, and hands it back, their hands touching briefly as she takes it from him. There are those goosebumps again, just like when she’d taken his hand on stage earlier.

“I just want to say – I can’t thank you enough for how chilled you’ve been tonight,” she says.

Percy thinks of the word chilled, thinks of how he’s feeling inside (a little like a bouncy castle, except instead of children throwing themselves around, it’s emotions and questions and chaos and confusion), and then thinks that maybe she’s not reading him perfectly right now.

She reaches for the handle of the door and flashes him a smile. “I’ll call you tomorrow.” Then she shuts it, and the car drives off into the New York night, leaving him on the roadside with his phone to his ear, waiting for Nico to pick up.

“How does it feel to be married to the most beautiful woman in the world?” asks the younger man the moment he picks up Percy’s call.

“I am figuring that out, and I’ll get back to you once I have an answer,” Percy tells him. “Are you guys okay? I’m back at the flat, if you’re okay making your way back.”

“We’re fine!” Nico informs him in a gleeful tone that doesn’t really suit him. “Estelle’s pretty pleased her big bro’s a celebrity trophy husband now.”

“Ha ha. Don’t let her get any big ideas about me and Chase, please, it’s not as if it’s anything permanent.”

“Why not?”

“Did you miss the bit of the show where we married each other despite being complete strangers and it was entirely motivated by spite for her ex?”

“Ah,” says Nico dismissively. “Definitely not entirely. There’s something there, I guarantee it. After all, I set out specifically intending to break up their marriage, and you did it without even trying.”

“Right, so-”

“To an extent, I blame straight privilege,” his friend informs him airily. “But mark my words, this is the beginning of a love story for the ages.”

“I’ll see you in a bit,” Percy tells him.

“Yeah, at your golden wedding anniversary-” Nico’s saying as he’s cut off when Percy hangs up.

He takes a deep breath, and pauses to listen to the sounds of the city around him. He knows already that he’ll sleep badly tonight, buzzing as he is with the events of the last couple of hours, questions swirling around inside him as he stands looking up into the New York skyline as if it will have answers for him. He knows that in a few days the whole thing will be fading into a the past like a particularly strange dream, but here, in the moment, he wonders if the world is already humming with the news of his wedding, if tonight’s events will cause ripples far off in his future or if they’ll be lost behind him without a trace. He wonders if he’ll have to cover his face when he goes out, or if he can use tonight to raise any money for his deep-sea research.

Most of all, though, he wonders at the possibly borderline-insane woman who dragged him onstage and married him in front of millions of pairs of eyes.

And then he looks away from the sky and all the stars it holds just out of his sight, and he goes inside.

Chapter Text

Grover calls Annabeth early in the morning, before she’s even finished her breakfast. “We need to talk,” he says.

“Do we?” she asks. She knows instantly that she’s being more difficult and combative than Grover, who’s never been anything other than a rock to support her, deserves, but she’s still hurting from Luke’s betrayal and the cold light of day has made last night’s events seem even more farcically awful. She’d turned the TV on to spend the last half hour watching grumpy anchors speculating about her mental stability, and from what she can see on her phone, last night’s wedding is front page news even for serious news organisations that usually focus on the economy and other disasters.

“Annabeth, I know it’s not a great time, but if we handle this badly it could end your entire career,” he tells her gently, and she makes a face that she’s glad Grover can’t see in recognition that he’s probably right. Annabeth always, always has total control of herself, of the things she does and the music she makes and even of many of the things that are printed and said about her, and now… now she’s another star who flew too high too soon, and without some genius damage limitation, it may well stay that way as far as the public are concerned.

“Everyone knows that Luke is the one who cheated, so you’ve got a lot of sympathy from the public, even if they’re… a little confused about what happened last night, so we just have to play it off as a moment of madness, we thank Percy for going along with it, get him to sign an NDA, and everyone can go on with their lives like it never happened, OK?”

“I doubt that,” Annabeth says bitterly. For it to be like it had never happened, she’d need to still be with Luke, and her heart aches at the loss of the life she’d planned with him. Until last night, he’s been the one she calls when she needs help working out something as difficult and crazy as this – although, to be fair, until now she’s never been in a situation quite as difficult and crazy as this one. He’d pushed her relentlessly not only to be better, but to be the best. Every decision was challenged with a whys and hows and whens and whos that forced them into perfection.

Grover’s silent, and she can tell he’s struggling to work out what to say to her, but the silence makes it easier to admit the painful truth. “Luke was the best part of me,” she chokes out, and she hears a sympathetic sigh on the other end of the line.

“I’m coming over,” says her manager finally, “and I’m bringing Silena with me.”

So, an hour later, the three of them are sitting in Annabeth’s kitchen while Silena plies her with hugs and food and Grover tries to work out a plan of action.

“Obviously we can pay him for his help if we need to,” says Grover.

“That feels tacky,” says Annabeth. “Is it prostitution to pay someone to marry you even if you don’t have sex?”

“It might be necessary,” says Silena, topping up Annabeth’s coffee and sliding a plate of biscuits onto the table as she sits down, “and it’s the person selling who’s prostituting; what you would be doing is solicitation.”

“If you haven’t actually…” begins Grover, waving his arms vaguely to try to convey what he means.

“Oh, what’s the word for it, now?” asks Annabeth sarcastically, and Silena cackles.

“I think it might begin with an S and rhyme with brewed,” says the other girl.

Annabeth shakes her head. “No, I’m pretty sure the word I was thinking of starts with an F and rhymes with eruct.”

To his credit, Grover blushes less than she’d expected him to. “I don’t know what eruct means or why we’re even talking about this, but legally speaking, if you haven’t done it, it’s not solicitation or prostitution from either of you. The point is that everything will run much more smoothly with Percy’s co-operation.”

“How do you know his name, anyway?” asks Annabeth, at the same time as Silena says “Percy’s a nice name.” Annabeth shoots her a Look, and continues, “I didn’t even find out he was called Percy until we dropped him off at the end of last night.”

“I’m your manager, so it’s my job to know these things,” says Grover. “Also, I’m ninety percent sure you married Percy Jackson who I went to school with for a year in middle school, until he got expelled. Beckendorf’s busy tracking down his history since then.”

“He got expelled?” asks Annabeth her voice rising until it was a squeak in her own ears. “Wasn’t your school really rough? Have I just married a gangster or something?”

“It wasn’t really his fault, and I’d be surprised if Percy grew up to be in the mafia or something,” says Grover. “He was a nice kid.”

“But you don’t want me married to him, so what is it about him you don’t trust?”

Grover blinks. “No, really, Percy was lovely – he was my best friend for that year,” he says, but then he hesitates, and she knows that his next words are going to be on a subject that Grover hates: feelings. “The two of you…” he begins, “are basically strangers. And I feel like maybe the reason why you married Percy wasn’t because you really wanted to marry Percy. It might have been more to do with Luke and how you were feeling at that moment. And that’s okay. That’s fine. But it’s probably not a great basis for a relationship, and now we have to figure out what comes next.”

“Stop being so… perceptive and empathetic and stuff,” Annabeth snaps tiredly, sinking her head to meet her coffee cup, but there’s little bite in her words. “So everyone realises I did it because I was mad, not because I was making some radical statement about feminism and womanhood and marriage and romance and society and… more stuff?”

“Afraid so,” says Silena. “Hey, these bookies are offering odds on how many hours it’ll take until you get divorced.”

“Silena!”

“I’m just saying-”

“That’s not what we need from you right now!” Grover tells her.

“Hours?” asks Annabeth, raising her head.

“You don’t need to listen to her-” starts Grover, but Annabeth cuts him off.

“What if I didn’t get divorced?” she asks.

Her friends exchange a look. “Sorry?” says Silena.

“What if I stay married to him – to Percy?”

“What if the sea was red and Shell Oil never did anything wrong?” says Grover. “I don’t really understand what you’re getting at.”

Annabeth looks at him. “You know, in Homer’s poetry, he describes the sea as being the colour of wine. Sometimes it can look kinda purple, in the right light at dusk.”

“Would hot chocolate and brioche help you make more sense?” asks Silena.

“Hot chocolate and brioche would be fantastic,” says Annabeth, “but my point is that sometimes you just have to look at the world a little differently to make sense of it. I married him to get back at Luke, it’s true. But is that a reason to get divorced?”

Grover looks at her like she’s speaking gibberish. “I’m not sure it’s a reason to stay married,” he says.

She sighs and rests her head back on the table, giving up. “You’re probably right,” she admits, and pulls out her phone to break the news.

“You know you married the one guy in the crowd last night with zero social media?” asks Beckendorf, his voice tinny down the line as they turn into the street Annabeth recognises from last night as being Percy’s.

“So we know nothing about him?”

“Oh ye of little faith,” retorts Beckendorf, “that’s not what I said at all. He was a troublemaker at school, it looks like – kicked out of more than I can count, and no grades worth writing home about. He was married once, but that ended three years ago. Those are the only skeletons in the closet, as far as I can tell.”

“I guess it’s good he’s not currently married,” she says weakly. “That could have been awkward."

“Since then, it looks like he’s come good. He’s a world-leading marine biologist with Columbia University, doing research into giant squids.”

“The plural is just giant squid,” Annabeth corrects automatically, “like fish. You’d only say squids if you were talking about multiple species of squid or something.”

“I can tell you’re a good match already,” Silena tells her drily, as Argus pulls up. “Thanks Charlie, love you lots.”

“Love you more,” responds Beckendorf, and Annabeth does her best to shut her ears to her friends’ outrageous romance as she clambers out of the car.

Percy’s waiting at the door for her with another man and a little girl, who Annabeth guesses must be his sister Estelle and Nico, the friend who’d looked after her last night. She feels a surge of guilt that she’d dragged him away from them to get involved in her petty romantic drama, but musters up a smile and a wave as she approaches. Percy sticks out a hand to shake hers just as she moves in for a hug, but after a moment of fumbling she wins out and they share an awkward embrace.

“I brought some friends, hope that’s okay” she tells him, gesturing to Grover and Silena. “And you must be Estelle,” she says, shaking the little girl’s hand, “nice to meet you, I’m Annabeth.”

“Hi,” says the child, looking up at her in that sweet, slightly awestruck way that kids often do.

“Nico,” says Nico, when she reaches him. He’s dressed entirely in black apart from the trim of his sneakers, and is skeletally thin and pale, meaning that the only thing ruining the image of him as the Grim Reaper is the fact that he’s slightly shorter than Percy and has a small child clinging to his arm like she’ll never let go. Estelle shuffles around behind him, suddenly intimidated by Annabeth despite what Annabeth herself thought had been a good first encounter.

“Sorry if I robbed you of the chance to be Percy’s best man,” she apologises to Nico.

“There’s a price to be paid for that,” he tells her, deadly serious. “And it must be paid in autographed merch.”

“Let’s head in,” interrupts Percy, moving between them before she can try to come up with a response that would be suitable whether or not Nico was joking.

Indoors, Percy takes hot drinks orders and disappears round a corner to make them Estelle tries to pull out Grover’s beard and Nico and Silena start bonding over a shared admiration for Annabeth’s many wardrobe changes last night. Annabeth takes the opportunity to quietly follow Percy, who starts when he realises he’s not alone in the kitchenette. As well as surprise, there’s a touch of wariness in his look, like he’s not totally sure that she’s not about to stab him.

Is that a fair reaction, she wonders? It’s not like she can judge from past experience exactly how comfortable they’re supposed to be around one another. They’re complete strangers, but, then again, they’re not. They’re married, in theory 'til death does them part, so it’s not an insane thing to do for her to seek him out for a little privacy to talk, right?

“So, my team all think we should get divorced as quickly as possible,” she says by way of an ice-breaker.

“Okay,” says Percy. “And you think so, too?”

That gives her pause. She’d meant that her team speak for her, that they’re all in agreement, but that little voice from earlier pops up in her ear again: what if I stay married to him? “It seems like it would be the wise option,” she says, keeping her voice as neutral as possible. “But… do you want to stay married to me?”

He twitches his eyebrows like he hadn’t expected to be asked his opinion on the matter. “I hadn’t really thought about it.”

She looks at him, really looks at him, sizing him up in a way she hasn’t before. His eyes are green and honest, he’s an inch or two taller than her, and she knows for a fact that Gordon Ramsay would kill for a knife as sharp as that jawline. Besides being incomprehensibly calm about the situation he’s found himself in, Percy looks… alright. He looks alright, she decides, not wanting to travel any further down that path. “So, we got married last night, and… you didn’t even think a little bit about what would come next?”

“Did you?” he asks, which is a fair point. “Honestly, I kind of assumed that you’d wake up today and want to end things as quietly as possible and that would be that.”

“It was probably kind of a dick move of me to assume that because you were holding a ‘marry me’ sign you wanted to actually marry me,” she says by way of agreement. “Considering it’s the name of the song and all.”

“It was actually Nico’s sign, as well,” he tells her. “He did mean it as a proposal, but it was aimed at Luke.” He winces visibly the moment he says Luke’s name. “Sorry.”

“It’s fine,” she says. “The whole world’s obsessing over my aborted marriage at the moment; I can handle people saying his name. So… do you want me to get Grover to send you the divorce papers as soon as possible?”

He hesitates. “That’s not exactly what I’m saying. I just kind of expected it. And I’m heading on an expedition to the Mariana Trench in a few months, so I’m not like… around for the long term anyway.”

She’s letting that sink in when Nico interrupts. “I don’t know what you’re trying to pressure Percy into,” he says, rounding the corner and reaching past her to snatch a mug of something that absolutely stinks as he lifts it past her nose, “but you can just make a fat donation to saving the ocean and he’ll do literally anything you ask him to.”

Annabeth considers this for a moment. She considers other things, too: Luke; the gaggle of reporters who are probably already loitering on Percy’s doorstep; her mother’s disapproval (no doubt already in full swing); the fact that in a rare moment of grace the fates had helped her pick out a stranger in the crowd who seems like a basically decent kind of guy. She thinks about what she’d said last night: words that were more honest, in retrospect, than she’d have liked them to be. About the foolishness of expecting anything to last. “Grover,” she calls into the other room, “would it be so bad for PR if I took my husband along to some awards ceremonies and things?”

Grover and Silena’s heads pop around the door moments later, Estelle following shortly after so as not to miss out on the excitement. “I’m sorry, what have you been talking about in here?” asks Grover.

“Saving the ocean, huh?” Annabeth turns back to Percy. “You’re a big fan of giant squid, right?”

Percy smiles. She can tell he’s trying hard not to, but he fails and the bashful expression runs across his face like a burst egg yolk. “Yeah” he says, and then, like he can’t help himself, “but not as big as the squid themselves.”

Grover snorts, Nico groans, Silena sighs, Estelle says “Yuck!” – though Annabeth isn’t totally certain that this is related to squid – and Annabeth herself realises that she’s smiling more than the joke strictly deserves.

“You don’t owe me anything,” she tells Percy. “You can walk out any time you like. We can have divorce papers sorted out faster than anyone else in the world, if you want. But I like proving people wrong, and you like giant squid.”

“I like most things that live in the sea,” he says. “It sounds a lot weirder when you only mention the squid.”

“Okay, let me rephrase: I like proving people wrong, and you like marine wildlife.”

“And you say it like there’s an obvious overlap,” he says.

“Like I said, you can stop any time you want to. But if you’d be happy to do some media rounds with me, to go to some events, and just to be seen to stay married to me – say till you head on your next expedition, or earlier if you feel it’s not working out – we could make some donations to conservation projects and your research or any other cause of your choice. And it would be all expenses paid, of course. We wouldn’t interfere with your life at all apart from public appearances, and when you go, you go. You’d have saved the planet and my career. How does that sound to you?”

“That sounds… okay,” Percy says slowly.

“I’m not sure that does sound okay,” interjects Grover from the doorway.

Percy narrows his eyes at him, and for a moment Annabeth thinks her new husband is about to start a fight with her manager. There’s a long pause, and she can practically see beads of sweat forming on Grover’s forehead.

“Grover… Underwood?” asks Percy slowly. “Did you go to Yancy Academy?”

Grover smiles nervously. “Hi Percy,” he says, “long time no see.”

“G-man!” exclaims Percy, squeezing past Annabeth and Nico to wrap Grover in a warm embrace, a grin of genuine pleasure taking over his whole face.

Joy, Annabeth considers carefully, is a good look on him.

She considers this fact a little longer, a little more carefully, and decides she wouldn’t mind seeing it again.

She wouldn’t mind that at all.

Chapter Text

“Sit still!” scolds Silena, whom Percy has grown to like immensely in the two meetings they’ve had so far. She’s got no time for anyone’s nonsense except her own, which to judge by the whirlwind summary of her marriage that he’s just received, she particularly enjoys indulging in when she has a captive audience in the make-up chair. “Just because you look great in real life doesn’t mean you’ll come out that way under all the lights and cameras if you don’t let me do my job.”

“Is she always this bossy?” he asks Annabeth, who’s standing to the side with a smirk a mile wide on her face, while Silena assaults his chin with her brush.

“Always,” his wife confirms.

“And you’d be lost without me,” says Silena.

“Also true,” says Annabeth, and her fond smile is full of a history between the two of them that Percy knows he wouldn’t be able to totally understand even if it was explained to him.

“To be totally fair to you,” Silena confides to Percy, “one or two lapses aside, you are much better at sitting still when you’re told to than your better half is.”

“Uh… thank you?” he says.

“And now you’re ready!” she announces with a flourish. “Go get ‘em, tigers,” she orders, waving them up and through the door.

“Are you ready?” asks Annabeth, as they head out into the corridor.

“Eh,” he says, uncomfortable in Silena’s choice of shirt and blazer that are stiff and uncomfortable on his shoulders (‘it’s about how you look, not how you feel’), and more uncomfortable still at the prospect of journalists about to ask him about himself, about his life, just through the doors ahead.

“It’s easy,” she tells him. “You’ve got nothing to worry about. You just have to stay calm, stay friendly, be your usual charming self, and try to give them the most boring answers possible.”

“Am I usually charming?” he asks, slightly surprised that he’s managed to give her that impression considering that they longest amount of time they’ve spent together so far was in the car ride back to his apartment the night of the concert. “How did I manage to trick you into thinking that?”

She raises her eyebrows. “Don’t let it go to your head, now, but yes, I think you’re likeable enough not to be eaten alive out there.”

“This is easy for you,” he realises, “you do this all the time.”

“And that means I can tell you as an expert that if you keep your head, it can’t go too badly wrong.”

He almost asks her whether her definition of ‘too bad’ involves death and/or the end of the world, but she’s already pushing the doors open, and he follows her into a buzz of voices and an explosion of camera flashes.

They find their way to a table on a small dais, a cluster of microphones in front of each of them like bouquets of flowers, Annabeth gives a small spiel about living in the moment and liking Percy and being excited for the press and her fans to get to know him the way that she’s getting to know him.

Then, the first question comes from a middle aged guy with a beer-belly who looks like he’d rather be literally anywhere else in the world. “Are we supposed to believe that this is some kind of love at first sight deal, then?”

Percy can’t make out his name tag, though he’s pretty sure it begins with a D. Mr D, he decides he’ll call the guy.

“Like I said before,” says Annabeth, “for me, this is about trying something new. It’s about jumping into the pool without dipping your toes in first. Maybe that’s rash and reckless and ridiculous, but as far as I see it, that’s my choice to make. Percy and I are going to try to make this work, but if it doesn’t, then who’s really lost anything? I’d already paid for the wedding.”

That raises a chuckle from most of the room, but Mr D points his pen in Percy’s direction. “And how do you feel about it?”

Percy leans into the microphones – Grover was very clear that he should get closer to them than is totally comfortable – and pauses as dramatically as he can before he speaks. “What she said,” he says, and cracks a relieved smile at the ripple of chuckles that these are his first words to them. “I think I’d have been crazy if I’d said no when one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen asked me to marry her, and from then on, it’s one step at a time. We’re getting to know each other without any expectations. If it goes somewhere, that’s great; if it doesn’t… then it doesn’t.”

“You’re not afraid that it’ll fail like your previous marriage did?”

Percy blinks. Grover had warned him that the press would likely know about the entire history of his love-life, but he hadn’t really expected them to actually know about him and Calypso. “That’s a possibility,” he says, as diplomatically as he can. “But I’m not afraid of it, no.”

“You don’t think that your romantic history makes you a risky prospect as a partner?”

Percy takes a deep breath, unsure of how to deal with the outright dislike for him that Mr D seems to have. Before he spends too long opening and closing his mouth like a fish, though, Annabeth comes to his rescue.

“There’s risk in anything you do, Dionysus,” says Annabeth. “You should know that from your time as the Times’ wine correspondent.” There’s a laugh at that which draws a heavy scowl from the journalist, and Percy figures that his wife probably just landed an insult of her own. “But we’re ripping up the rulebook, here. It’s not about what happened before – it’s not even about what happened next. It’s about what’s happening now. My first wedding didn’t work out exactly how I’d imagined –” there’s another nervous laugh at that. She’s good at this, thinks Percy. “but if you’ll forgive the cliché, every cloud…” She tails off to look at Percy, who realises too late to hide it that he’s watching her with a goofy smile on his face. “Sometimes you’ve got to make your own silver lining,” she tells the room. “Even if it feels a little crazy.”

“What made you pick Percy out of the crowd, Annabeth?” asks a woman wearing a hot pink pantsuit that Percy guesses must have become the height of fashion in the couple of years since he spent any length of time in the city.

“You mean aside from the sign that said ‘marry me’ on it?” his wife asks. “He was the best looking guy I could see in the room, and… he looked nice. He looked kind.”

An elderly man with a gleeful glint in his eye speaks next. “Mr Jackson, what were you thinking when Miss Chase called you onstage?”

Percy leans in to the microphone before realising he’s got no real memory of what he was feeling in the moments before he got married except generally feeling sorry for Annabeth, which he wasn’t sure was the right thing to say. “You know, it was all kind of a blur,” he says. “Probably something along the lines of ‘what’s going on?’”

“Then, once you were married?”

“Er…” he hesitates again, before deciding it’s probably safe to say the overriding thought he’d had while still onstage with her. “I was thinking about what a good kisser she was.”

There’s a gentle ooh from the assembled journalists. “Is the feeling mutual?” someone calls from the back of the room, though Percy can’t see exactly who.

There’s a crazy glint in Annabeth’s eye as she holds up a hand to call for a moment’s silence, and motions Percy to lean over to her with her other. She tilts her head into his, and their lips meet gently. She smells of lemon and tastes of strawberry, and then she’s pulling away and Percy’s head is spinning like he’s been launched off a diving board from ten metres up. He distantly hears the intake of breath from the assembled journalists. It sounds like it comes from a long long way away.

“Yeah,” says Annabeth, returning to her microphones. “He’ll do.”

The next questions are much more low-key: Percy gets to talk a little about squid conservation, and Annabeth informs the room that the brief North American tour she’d planned for the end of the year will still go ahead. Pens scratch, heads nod respectfully, and in another five minutes, it’s all over.

When they get backstage again, Grover’s beside himself – Percy initially can’t tell if he’s worried that they’ve blundered or just pleased that they survived, or more likely knowing Grover, both feelings in spades, but either way he’s so carried away with excitement that he hugs them both before saying a word.

“That was good,” he says. “That was good, right? Did you think it was good, Annabeth? I thought it was good!”

“I thought it was good,” offers Annabeth, trying to hide her laughter.

“They’ll be going nuts over the two of you, to be fair! It’s going to completely kill National Enquirer’s theory that you’re the Zodiac killer, Percy.”

“I’m sorry?” asks Percy, but Annabeth’s already agreeing with her manager.

“You did great,” she tells him. “Everyone knows Dionysus is… well, you saw – he hates his job and everyone it makes him associate with – but you dealt with him really well. I think the rest of them liked you.”

“Thanks,” he says, “Zodiac killer, Grover?”

Grover waves his hands like it’s no big deal. “It’s no big deal,” he says. “And anyway, you killed it stone-dead! They’ll start calling you puncture-proof Percy or something if you keep dealing with the press that well, like you’re as invincible as Achilles but with the media instead of swords. I tell you what, Kanye’s manager is going to be so jealous of me…”

“Grover, focus,” says Annabeth. “Go get a glass of water.”

“Right, yeah, good idea, good idea. You both did great. I mean, the kiss was a little over-the-top, maybe?” He looks at them expectantly, and Percy can’t decide whether to agree that kissing to make a point to the press is a little bit ridiculous, or to point out that she kissed him and he’s mostly been quite good about not kissing his beautiful famous wife a whole lot more than he has been and anyway Grover should try resisting her charms sometime.

“Water,” orders Annabeth, and Grover finally goes, shaking his head as he does.

She looks at Percy then, laughter dancing in her eyes. “So,” she says. It’s a statement.

“So,” he answers.

“As good a kisser as you remember?”

He feels himself blushing. Somehow, here, with just the two of them, it’s a more personal question than anything the journalists in the other room had wanted to know. “I think so,” he says.

“You think? Do you need a bigger sample size to determine exactly where my kisses rank in your long and storied romantic history?”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to – yes, it was really good. You kissed great. And it’s not like I have a super complicated love-life, I just-”

“Percy, I don’t really care if you’ve been married ten times before.”

“Right,” he says, realising belatedly that it’s all for the cameras: here, backstage, with just the two of them, there’s nothing between them but a business contract. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to assume-”

“No, no, I should be sorry,” she interrupts him again, like she the conversation is shifting under her faster than she can keep track of. “It wasn’t fair of me to drag you into a kiss like that without asking – I mean, since we…” She tails off, but they’re saved by Grover returning with his water.

“I think that was good,” he tells them again. “I think it went well.”

“If you say it enough times, does it become true?” asks Percy.

“Would you rather they all agreed that you’re the Zodiac Killer?” Annabeth asks him.

“I wasn’t even born when that was a thing! They can’t bring charges based on that, right?”

“Don’t worry,” says Annabeth, “I have a good lawyer, so you’ll be fine as long as you burn the evidence ASAP.”

She’s laughing at him, but he finds that he doesn’t mind all that much.

A day and a half after marrying Annabeth, Percy is beginning to think that no donation towards the protection of marine wildlife, nor the opportunity to hang out with the funny and attractive woman that is his wife, is worth the paperwork involved in getting married to a pop star.

He’s called in ‘sick’ to work for two days in a row (is it still calling in sick when everyone knows it’s to retrospectively legalise his wedding?) and even now, towards the end of the second day, he’s still got mountains of documents to affix his signature to. This is partly because his mum always impressed on him the importance of knowing what he’s signing, so he’s trying to read – or at least, skim – and more or less understand everything that’s been put in front of him. As well as that, though, he’s been trying to wrap his head around this strange new reality where he’s sort-of famous. He’s been reading profiles of himself and Annabeth in OK! and Star magazines, checking if anyone else thinks he’s a historic serial killer, and trying to learn a bit more about his wife, though the bulk of what he’s actually learned is that OK! likes their chances of staying married, but Star not so much. He’s beginning to get the feeling that Annabeth is so famous that it’s assumed that everyone already knows everything there is to know about her.

On the plus side, Grover’s hope that yesterday’s news conference went well seems to have come true. HE’LL DO is the headline most of the papers have gone with for their gossip columns, apart from Dionysus’ article in the NY Post, which is titled HE’LL DOOFUS. Percy can live with that, especially since the article’s substance seems to be about how Dionysus doesn’t like Percy much, but he could have been worse. And in every single paper and magazine, there are pictures of the kiss everywhere.

Percy hasn’t quite figured out how he feels about that, yet.

“Sorry,” says Grover, depositing another sheaf of paper on the table. “People usually have lawyers to do this for them.”

“By people, do you mean celebrities?” asks Percy.

“I guess I do,” says Grover. He hesitates, drumming his fingers on the desk for a minute, clearly debating internally whether or not to say what’s on his mind. Percy’s pretty sure that once his friend has reached this stage, the thing on his mind always finds its way to his mouth, so he just waits until Grover speaks again. “Do you think that I’ve lost touch with reality?”

That’s not what Percy had expected. “No, I-”

“I wonder if I did something terrible in a past life to deserve this,” his old friend says, fixing him with a worried look. “I never wanted to manage musicians. I was going to join Greenpeace and fight Big Oil, but I met Luke at college and he asked if I’d help out this singer-songwriter he thought had a lot of potential, and that was Annabeth, and now here I am. Or is it something I did in this life? Is it because I didn’t keep in touch with you after you were expelled? You know, I’ve felt guilty over that for years, I should’ve-”

“G-man, Grover, I love you, breathe, just breathe,” says Percy, not equipped to deal with the emotional avalanche of what seems like a decade’s worth of stress when he’s been stuck inside reading legalese all day. “We were twelve, neither of us were allowed cell-phones, and I was on the other side of New York,” points out Percy. “You couldn’t have done more than you did.”

“I was thirteen because I had to repeat second grade.”

“…I forgot that. But the point still stands, right?”

Grover swallows. “I guess so.”

“You really don’t like managing musicians?”

“I’d do it for Annabeth for free, because she’s my friend,” says Grover. “I don’t mind it. I like it! But I have about twenty other clients where I barely understand what their deal is. Do you know Chrysaor?”

“No,” Percy shakes his head.

“Do you know what pirate metal is?”

“...No…”

Grover points at him. “You are now as well equipped to be their manager as I am. Except I am their manager.”

“Okay, so, at some point soon you tell them you’re thinking of cutting back on the managing and maybe they should look for someone new, or you could introduce them to someone who you think would be better for them, right?”

Grover grimaces. “The lead singer’s kind of scary. But you’re right, I should… grasp the nettle. Rip off the band-aid.”

“Rip the band-aid off from the band,” agrees Percy. “If it makes you happier in the long-term, it’s the right thing to do.”

Grover shakes his head. “This isn’t relevant. What would make me really happy right now is if you’d just sign all this and get it over with. You’ve done all the bits that actually need reading, this stuff is just about how you don’t get all her money when – I mean, if you divorce.”

“I know, I trust you,” says Percy, choosing to ignore his old friend’s dilemma over how secure his marriage was – of course, Percy himself has the same problem – “I just feel like I oughtta read it. And when I finish I have to fight my way home through about fifty thousand reporters on my front doorstep.”

“I’m sorry,” says Grover, “when Annabeth said we wouldn’t encroach on your life any more than for public appearances she was telling the truth, it’s just-”

“I know, you can’t make the same guarantee for anyone else. I’ll tell you what, getting Estelle back to Mom’s yesterday was not fun.”

“We might need to look into getting you some security even when you’re not with her.”

“I’m sorry?”

“To protect you from jealous fans, or kidnappers.”

“Grover, you’re talking in celebrity-speak again. Who’d want to kidnap me?”

“You’re married to someone very rich and very famous. It’s not inconceivable that someone would take you hostage and try to make ransom demands on you.”

Percy blinks, taking that in. “Okay. And jealous fans?”

Grover raises an eyebrow. “You know what a fan is? You know what jealousy is?”

Percy snorts. Of all the craziness to come out of his marriage, Grover being back in his life is certainly a major plus. The other man might not be as outspoken as Percy, but deep down he’s got hidden reserves of exactly the same brand of sarcastic humour. “It’s just not something I ever considered having to worry about,” admits Percy.

Grover shrugs. “It won’t be, most of the time. But sometimes they get too attached, and don’t like their favourite singer to be with someone they don’t approve of, or just to be with someone who isn’t them.”

“Or to look like they’re with someone who isn’t them.”

Grover lets out a sound that’s amusingly similar to a goat’s bleat. Maybe it’s a little mean of Percy to take such pleasure in his friend’s uncertainty about the wedding, but to be fair, it’s an expression of his own discomfort at the whole arrangement. He still doesn’t really know if he’s going to see Annabeth at all socially, or if their time together will be completely limited to public appearances.

“Percy, I know it’s really none of my business,” says Grover, “but I need to know something about your relationship with Annabeth.”

“Grover, you’re literally running my relationship with Annabeth. Our relationship is, like, entirely your business at the moment, as far as I can tell.”

He grimaces. “I just – you’re both my friends, okay? And I’m trying to look out for you with the press and your privacy and all of that, but I’m also trying to look out for Annabeth, and by marrying you she’s made herself really vulnerable, and I’m worried about her. The world of pop music turns really quickly, and if the press ends up deciding that her marrying you was a bigger mistake than Luke made by cheating-”

“That’s insane,” objects Percy, but Grover cuts him off.

“It’s insane and it’s how the world works,” he says firmly. “And we just have to make the best of it that we can. If they take against her then it jeopardises everything she’s been working for these last few years, okay?”

Percy looks up into his friend’s slightly watery, slightly desperate eyes, and remembers another reason why he was friends with Grover all those years ago, beyond the humour and the fact that when you’re roommates at a rundown boarding school you get along or you die. There’s a deep-seated integrity to him, an unshakeable, slightly naive belief in right and wrong, and despite the impression of spinelessness people often get of him because he hates conflict, there’s an inner steel too, a determination that he will do the right thing – even if he’ll often try to do it in secret to avoid attracting attention. “Okay,” Percy says. “I think I get it.”

“And because she’s vulnerable to the media, she’s also made herself vulnerable to you.”

The idea that Annabeth is vulnerable to Percy of all people is so absurd he wants to laugh. On the one hand, rich, famous Annabeth Chase, totally at ease with the madness of the media circus, who never goes anywhere without an entourage of about ten people; on the other hand, Percy Jackson, who only got a smartphone a year ago, who doesn’t read the news, and who was unknown to the world at large until she picked him out of a crowd. He’s a nobody, and she’s the definition of Somebody with a capital S. “Really?” he asks Grover.

“Because you’re married to her, you’re a part of her public image now, and if they take against you, they take against her too, alright? Yesterday went great. It was fantastic! It went so so well I couldn’t believe it. But you need to do that well… regularly.”

Suddenly, this seems like a lot more responsibility than Percy signed up for – he hadn’t even considered that his showing at the press conference yesterday would reflect on anyone other than himself – but Grover isn’t finished.

“She’s still hurting over Luke, and I know that there’s not really anything between the two of you, and she married you because she doesn’t expect this to last, but… it’s a whole mess,” he sighs.

“You’re telling me,” agrees Percy.

“Do you like her, at least?”

“Sure,” says Percy, shrugging.

“I mean platonically,” Grover amends. “Do you like her as a person?”

“I guess. As much as you can like someone you’ve known for about two days.”

“That’s good!” says Grover, a little too fast. “That’s a great start, then. So it’ll be alright for the two of you to work together for a while. She needs good friends around her. And… I hate to ask it, but do you like her… romantically?”

He doesn’t have an easy answer. She’s funny and he likes the confident way she carries herself and he’s gone on the public record saying how beautiful she is, but he’s painfully aware of how little he knows about Annabeth. She’s a super-cool stranger to him, more than anything else right now. Albeit a super-cool stranger who happens to kiss him in public occasionally. “I guess I’m still figuring that out,” he admits.

“Okay, okay,” says Grover. “That’s fine. That’s fine. That’s totally, totally fine, y’know? The thing is… it’s just…” he tails off uncertainly.

“What?” asks Percy.

“It’s alright for the two of you to play it up for the cameras and the media and everything,” his friend says hastily, but Percy’s still lost.

“I don’t follow,” he says slowly.

“I need you not to fall in love with her, Percy. And more importantly, I really need you not to let her fall in love with you,” Grover says wretchedly, avoiding eye contact. “I don’t know how she’d cope if it didn’t work out.”

Chapter Text

When she gets a text from Athena after the press conference, it takes Annabeth three days to work up the courage to open it, and when she finally does – in the back of a limo with Percy on the way to a red carpet premiere, where she hopes she’ll be too busy to think about her mother for most of the night – it’s both ambiguous and incendiary.

Don’t be foolish, it reads.

Annabeth frowns at it, first because of the time it takes to translate the symbols on her screen into words, and then at their actual meaning. She scrolls up on the phone to the last message between them, two years ago. The songs are good, that one says. It had come just after the release of her first album, and remains just about the highest praise Annabeth’s mother has ever given her.

And that’s it. That’s the extent of the communication the two of them have had over phone since Athena came back into Annabeth’s life at seven years old. It’s too little too late taken to the furthest extreme.

“Everything okay?” Percy asks her, and she sticks the phone in a cup-holder and squeezes his hand as Argus pulls up to the kerb. Athena has no business meddling here, she decides.

“Everything’s fine,” she says, and it’s a testament to Percy’s reassuring presence that she actually means it.

Five minutes later, they’re at the New York premiere of King of Sparta 4: The Sea of Monsters: all dresses, tuxedos, and hordes of reporters and fans there to capture the perfect photo or some autographed memorablilia.

Annabeth wrote the end credits song, Anacyclosis, but fortunately isn’t expected to perform it tonight. Instead, with Percy on her arm, she gets to enjoy the red carpet experience, during which time Grover has carefully and repeatedly instructed both of them that they’re to attract as little attention to themselves as possible.

That might be easier, she thinks, if Percy looked less good. Despite his protestations, Silena’s managed to wrestle him into a tuxedo, and suddenly he’s putting the stars of the film and their model other halves to shame. His hair has been left almost untouched, adding an ever so slightly wild edge to his otherwise impeccably cut jaw and cheekbones, but Annabeth is considering asking Silena to make him prune it soon, purely to make him less distracting.

Doubly unfortunately for Grover’s plan of a low-key night, the two of them seem to be the most tabloid-ready people there, and their way up the red carpet is slowed significantly by reruns of all the questions they’ve already answered twenty times before, along with a handful of new ones including Annabeth’s all-time least favourite, ‘Who are you wearing?’

“Is it always like this?” Percy asks her as they pose for a photo, taking her slightly by surprise – he blends in so well with the other celebrities, is so personable and affable with the reporters, that she forgets how new he is to all of this.

“I’ve not done many movie premieres,” she tells him, “but it’s pretty similar to all the awards ceremonies. The press are usually a little less interested in me personally, but you’ve gone and made me newsworthy at the moment.”

“I’m pretty sure you’ve done that all by yourself,” he says, smiling, and something inside her buzzes at the compliment.

The film itself is… fine. Annabeth can’t help but feel that it’s a handful of exceptional action scenes dressed up with two-dimensional characters, clunky dialogue, and somewhat questionable politics, but it’s gratifying to watch Percy enjoy it, and she takes note of the way he sits up attentively as her song plays at the end, even as she sinks into her seat at the sound of her own voice. She watches his silhouette as he watches the credits rolling with rapt attention, his mouth slightly open as if he’s forgotten to close it, up until the closing lines:

Even if you never shared the blame , you couldn’t hide how you were glad,

To sit and stare at the flames, watching good things turn to bad

He sinks back slowly into his seat so that she can’t see his expression so well in the dim light, before he turns his head slightly towards her. “Are all your songs that good?” he asks.

Another compliment, another warm and fuzzy feeling inside, at least until she runs his words through her head a second time. “What do you mean, are they all that good?” she asks.

He seems as confused by her question as she was by his. “I mean… I really liked that. I thought it was great. It fit the film well, but it was really moving by itself, and…” he tails off as he looks at her face, and apparently her confusion is still showing. “What do you mean, what do I mean?”

“Percy,” she whispers, hoping no-one overhears her because this is the kind of thing she does not want the press getting hold of, “have you not heard any of my songs?”

He hesitates, so she knows the answer even before he says it. “I mean, I know the ones that you played the other night,” he says defensively. “It’s just a little different when it’s live, you know?”

“So, what, you were at that show… to see Luke’s half?” she asks, dreading finding out that her husband, who on the whole she’s grown to like over the last week, is a massive fan of her cheating ex.

“I was there for Nico,” he says, like it’s a guilty secret. “He kind of just bullied me into going on the day.”

“So you went to our concert despite knowing approximately none of the music?”

“He said Estelle would like it, too. And she did, to be fair. And I liked it too! Just in case there was any doubt about that – I thought you were great.”

Annabeth thinks for a moment. She kind of hates being the kind of celebrity who just expects people to know her and her work, but equally she figures that her husband should probably have a rough idea of what it is she does. “At some point, you’re going to be asked what your favourite song of mine is,” she starts, but he answers before she’s able to finish.

“This one,” he says confidently.

“I mean…”

“No, it’s this one. I’m sure. It’s…”

“It’s about self-destruction,” she says drily. “I’m not sure if that’s the message I want to be pushing about myself right now.”

“I can listen to your other stuff too if you want,” he says, and then, hastily: “I’d like to listen to your other songs. And I’ll be able to go on TV and give interviews about why all of them are great, but this one is… I dunno, it’s just, moving, I guess. It feels… honest, I guess. I don’t think you should be ashamed of it just because you went crazy and married a stranger.”

She lets out an undignified snort that makes the film’s star, Tristan McLean, look over his shoulder from the row in front, and is pleased to see Percy grinning, too. “I tell you what,” she says. “Are you free tomorrow?”

He nods. “I can be.”

“Come over to mine in the morning. We’ll have coffee and do your music revision and hang out, if you’re up for it. I’d like to do that without all… this.”

He nods again, more slowly this time. “I’d like that too,” he says. His voice is husky and low, like he’s admitting something he shouldn’t, like she’s some kind of forbidden fruit.

And there go those butterflies in her stomach again.

“Because I know that you’re a sensible and well-rounded person,” says Percy the next morning, “you may feel that the cannons at the museum should not be loaded.”

Annabeth cackles. “You’re asking for my sympathy now?”

“You may even feel,” continues Percy, undeterred, “that the person to blame is the one who left the cannon both fully loaded and ready to fire at the slightest spark.”

“It was a lit cigarette.”

“It was Nancy Bobofit’s lit cigarette,” corrects Percy. “If you’ve an ounce of feeling in that cold cold heart of yours, you may feel that the twelve year-old who dropped said cigarette onto the fuse of the civil war cannon was not responsible for the damage dealt to the bus.”

“You should be in jail right now,” Annabeth tells him. “You’re clearly very dangerous to be around.”

“Wow Mrs Dodds, I didn’t realise I’d accidentally married one of the teachers who got me thrown out of school,” he tells her.

“Mrs Dodds is the kind of name,” says Annabeth, slowly enough that her words take on the weight of a pronouncement rather than a mere opinion, “where she’s either your favourite teacher or your worst.”

Percy makes a face. “She was definitely not my favourite.”

Annabeth pauses, reluctant to ruin the moment. “You realise it’s not unlikely that at some point she’ll crop up on Fox giving an interview about how you were the student from hell, right?”

Percy makes the same face as a moment ago, except this time worse. “That’s a terrifying concept. I didn’t know what fear was until thinking about my fury of a Math teacher digging all the skeletons out of my school locker.”

“Sorry,” says Annabeth, suppressing another cackle at his misfortune.

Then he speaks again, softly this time. “What do you know about my first marriage?”

She can tell instantly that this is a subject he’s uncomfortable with, and is struck again by the way in which she’s foisted a life on him that he in no way asked for. Besides, for her own part, listening to Percy talk about loving and falling out of love with – or failing to fall out of love with – someone else sounds like no kind of fun. “We don’t have to go into any of that,” she tells him. “You came here to revise my music, right?”

“I feel like you kind of have a right to know about me,” he says.

“I know some things about you. I can tell you don’t like the media stuff,” she says. “You don’t like people asking you about yourself. Maybe you spend a lot of time on a boat because you don’t like talking about yourself a lot, or maybe you don’t like talking about yourself because you spend so much time on the sea, but I don’t want you to feel like you owe me explanations about yourself. You’re not actually a serial killer or anything like that, right?”

He smiles weakly. “No.”

“Did your first marriage end because you cheated?”

“No.”

“Great, no more questions. You can tell me if it’s something I really need to know, if, I don’t know, if it could bite us in the ass in an interview or something, but if it’s just some years-old gossip that some tabloid is going to run to get a few more eyeballs on it, then forget it. I don’t want you to feel like you have to tell me anything you don’t want to revisit. You don’t owe me that.”

He’s very still as she heads over to the shelf and pulls out her first album, My Grand Plan, slotting the vinyl disc into place on her player. “It feels like you already know plenty of the important stuff about me,” he says.

She pauses, holding the needle over the record. “How do you mean?” she asks.

He waves a hand to dispel any worries she might have about what she’s just said. “I guess it’s no big deal,” he says, “I’m just surprised you noticed that. Seems pretty perceptive.”

“What can I say, there’s a reason why Rolling Stone called me the sharpest voice in pop,” she informs him, trying to lighten the mood a little. “Speaking of which, you may recognise some of these bops and bangers from the show, but you’re right that it’s very different live, so I hope that it doesn’t disappoint too much after Anacyclosis.”

“What does that actually mean?”

“What, Anacyclosis? It’s kinda dumb – it’s this Ancient Greek political theory.”

“Now you’ve really got my attention,” he says drily, leaning forwards to listen.

“That’s another thing you do!” she objects.

“What?”

“That. This. You say something sarcastically and then you act like you really meant it.”

“Really?” he asks, looking at his body as if it’s out of his control.

“It makes you difficult to read,” she scolds him.

“Genuinely! I’d really like to know. Anaphylactic.”

“Cyclosis.”

“That’s what I said.”

She narrow her eyes at him, but does explain. “It’s the idea that any form of government that has the interests of the people at its heart is unstable and is inevitably corrupted.”

“And you just woke up one day and decided that was your next song?”

“They asked me to do a song for the film, and the original draft of the script was supposed to be an exploration of that idea. I figured it was an interesting thing to think about, but maybe not so interesting for a song, so I wrote one about how relationships all turn bad instead. And I didn’t have a lot of faith the theme would survive in the movie once it had been rewritten by fifteen different people, anyway. It was – obviously, it was before Luke and everything.”

“Do you believe that?”

She sighs. “Yeah, Hollywood isn’t the place to go for genuine artistic expression most of the time. I know that pop music might not be what people think of as-”

“I mean about relationships,” he says.

His eyes are kind and he’s sitting relaxed on the couch, and even so Annabeth feels cornered somehow. Honest, he’d called the song last night. It was the reason he’d given as to why he’d thought it was so good. Maybe she’d been a little perceptive when she’d noticed that he doesn’t like talking about himself much, but this question feels like an arrow shot straight into her heart.

He’s already promised her that in a few months he’s leaving her for the sea, and Luke, the man she’d thought was her soulmate, had moved on from her before they’d even married…

“It’s hard not to believe it, sometimes,” she says.

She drops the needle onto the record, and lets a past version of herself sing them songs of love and heartbreak and hope.

Thirty-three minutes and forty-eight seconds later, assuming My Grand Plan’s Wikipedia page is to be trusted, the eight songs on the album have run their course.

Annabeth’s been moving around, checking her phone, making herself a drink in the other room, and generally struggling to stay still. She doesn’t hate the sound of her own voice quite as much as some singers, but it puts her on edge in a way that’s amplified by her ADHD. She can’t imagine sitting still and listening to it for over half an hour.

Percy, on the other hand, who she’s noticed is something of a fidgeter himself, has sat largely motionless in the same spot for the duration of the album, a small smile tugging at the corners of his mouth for every song with the notable exception of the final third of Princess, when it had turned into a full-on grin after the big key change. That was especially gratifying as she remembers arguing with Luke in the studio over it, as he’d tried to convince her it was too melodramatic to work, not understanding that the whole song had been written as a vehicle for that very moment.

Something inside her curls up as she realises that she’ll never have him by her side when she’s recording again, challenging her at every turn and in doing so pushing her to new heights. She’ll never see him grimace and pretend to run away at the sound of his own voice coming out of tinny speakers, or watch him sit down with his guitar and dramatically declare that he’s written her a new song and if she’ll give him a week or so it might even get a second verse.

Percy says something, and she jolts back to the present day, here in her apartment with her really rather sweet husband.

“I’m sorry?” she asks.

“The album, it’s about proving yourself, right? I was kind of expecting it to mostly be love songs, just cause that’s mostly what I’d heard from you, and there are love songs in there, but the whole thing seems mostly about expectations and – is that right?”

She blinks, more than a little surprised that he’s got it so quickly. “Of all the reviews I read of it,” she admits, “the only one who actually noticed that the album was about self-fulfilment was from Pitchfork. Alas, he thought it was too immature to go down as one of the great debut albums: six-point-eight out of ten.”

“I’m sure there’s a lot of interesting stuff in there I missed the first time around, I just thought it was a really interesting idea, and really well done,” says Percy, the words spilling hastily out of him like he feels that identifying the theme of the album is an intrusion on her privacy. “It’s a solid ten out of ten from me,” he continues. “Maybe even eleven.”

“Everyone else gave it nines and tens out of ten, which is what made it so offensive that the one who actually understood what it was about didn’t like it,” she tells him. “But thank you, I’m glad you liked it. Anything on there that trumps Anacyclosis?”

He makes a thoughtful humming noise and checks the back of the record sleeve for the track titles. “I really liked Turning Invisible.”

“Do you always gravitate towards the sad ones?”

“Alright, alright, the one where the chorus was like, uh -” he hesitates, and then, in a rough approximation of the tune - “‘she’s just a princess in a tower, yeah!’”

“Princess.”

“I guess that name makes sense. Yep. Great tune.”

“Could you tell which one I wrote when I was seven?”

“You wrote one of those when you were seven?” he asks, disbelief evident on his face.

“That’s a no, then?” she smirks.

He turns back to the record sleeve. “The Keeper,” he tries.

“Wow, I think being at sea so long might have filled your brain with seaweed. I’m actually offended that you think a seven year-old could’ve written that.”

He runs a hand through his hair. “I wasn’t expecting to get tested on this kind of thing so soon,” he says. “But I feel like if I get the answer wrong too many times, you’ll throw me out.”

“You’d better believe it,” she tells him. “Don’t get too comfortable in that seat, Jackson. Strictly speaking, only the chorus was from when I was seven, if that helps.”

He frowns at the song titles like he can intimidate them into giving up their secrets.

“I was planning on heading back into the studio next week to record a couple of new tracks I’ve been working on for the next album,” she tells him as she waits for his next guess. “You should drop by if you’ve time.”

“Mmm,” he says, and suddenly she feels like an idiot.

“I mean, it would be good to get a couple of publicity shots ready for whenever the next album is, but it’s not a big deal, only if you’ve got time,” she stammers, cursing herself for forgetting that he’s only here for the money to help his precious squid. He doesn’t answer, and she feels her face heating up as she tries to find another way to fill the silence, until –

“Runaway,” he says finally.

“What?”

“You wrote the chorus to Runaway when you were seven,” he says, proudly handing her the record sleeve like it’s evidence of his choice. “And I’d love to come to the studio! I’ve always wondered what it’s like when people are actually recording music, and it’d be awesome to see a real master at work. Find out where all the magic comes from. Speaking of magic, were you wanting me to listen to both albums today, or were you planning it in instalments?”

“It was Runaway,” she agrees slowly, more impressed than she hopes he can tell. She takes the case from him and turns to put the vinyl away, conveniently hiding the fact that she’s blushing again, this time not from embarrassment, but from something better. “I can’t promise magic, but I’ll be there Tuesday-Wednesday. And for the next album it’s really up to you if you want to-”

She’s interrupted by the doorbell buzzing.

She frowns, not able to remember having scheduled for anyone to come round this morning. There was an interview with Vanity Fair… that was tomorrow, right?

She peers through the camera, and sees Grover’s anxious face on the other side of the door, druumming something against his leg that’s too distorted by the lens to make out properly. She unlocks it hastily, and he stumbles in, looking behind him like he’s worried he might have been followed.

“Annabeth,” he says, “I’m sorry, but I thought you should know – oh, Percy, hi!”

“Grover, hey!” grins Percy.

Grover’s return smile, though, doesn’t reach his eyes, and he looks quickly, uneasily, between Annabeth and Percy.

“What’s going on?” Annabeth asks him.

Grover gives her a hopeless look, and then, rather than struggle with words, tosses the thing he’s carrying – a newspaper – onto the table.

Her eyes automatically focus on the largest text, about a senator who’s been caught taking bribes, and she opens her mouth to ask Grover why he thinks this is important. Then she notices an insert box on the front page of the kind that papers often have for celebrity gossip. This one holds a picture of Percy with his arms around a woman Annabeth doesn’t recognise, his lips on her lips.

And then, the headline: A GIRL IN EVERY PORT? PERCY’S EX TELLS ALL!

Chapter Text

At first, Percy simply doesn’t recognise the boy on the page. He sees the messy black hair and the ugly sweater he hung onto for longer than he should have done, but the first thing he actually recognises in a real, identifying way, is Calypso.

She looks more or less like he remembers her, albeit a little younger – that makes sense, of course. She must be, what, in her late teens in the picture? There’s the caramel hair and bronze skin and the floating white dress that she’d made herself and wore at every opportunity. Her hands are on the boy’s forearms, gripping tightly as she stands on tiptoes to press her lips to his, and that’s when Percy has the woah, holy- moment where he realises that the boy is him – that he’s the one in the picture.

Percy’s spent years thinking of himself as only just entering adulthood, and though he knows it’s a false image of himself, a photo like this hammers home just how wrong it is, how much he’s grown in recent years, and how much he’s changed for better or worse. The boy in the picture is so young that there seems to be little connection to the way he is now. What was Percy Jackson like back then, almost a decade ago? He probably thought less and worried more about his future than the Percy standing in Annabeth Chase’s living room. There’d have been ways in which he was angrier, or stupider, but there were ways, too, in which he was kinder or more patient. Sometimes, standing on the deck of the boat at night with nothing but the ocean for company, Percy has found himself wondering if at sixteen he was the best version of himself.

“You did warn me they were likely to get in touch with Calypso,” he says, the words thick and muddied in his mouth by memories he’s tried not to think of for years.

Annabeth doesn’t answer him, picking up the paper like it’s liable to burst into flames, and turning to the page with the full offending article.

“I’ve had a skim,” says Grover finally. “Most of it’s not too bad, just an account of your relationship. But, the big headline is that she says…” He looks between the two of them. “She alleges that you cheated, Percy.”

He hears rather than sees Annabeth scrunching up a fistful of newspaper, and when his eyes flick back to her hands, they’re clenched into white fists. “I didn’t cheat,” he says instantly.

“Okay,” she says.

“Whatever she says, it-”

“I said okay, Percy.”

“Does, um,” Grover begins nervously, “does the name Rachel Dare mean anything to you?”

“How does Rachel come into it?” asks Percy, frowning. He’s spent so many years trying to suppress the unhappiness of his time with Calypso, and yet Rachel’s name is one that he’s not even thought of almost since their relationship ended – it’s actually surprising to have her brought up. Rachel had been Calypso’s polar opposite, and when it had ended with Rachel, there had been no arguments, no sluggish decline, only an almost-silent agreement between them that it had been fun while it lasted, and now was over.

“Well…” Grover’s reluctance is palpable. “The cheating, mainly.”

“Calypso thought I cheated on her with Rachel?” Percy asks.

“Looks like she still thinks it,” says Annabeth. What’s that tone of voice? Is it cold and distant, is it controlled anger? If it’s anger, is it directed at Percy, or at the article?

“She’s wrong, then,” he snaps, irritated at the implicit accusation before he can remind himself exactly why the idea of cheating will be a particularly tender spot for Annabeth. “Look, I – if you don’t believe me, you can ask Rachel. Calypso and I were separated by the time we started dating, and I wouldn’t – I mean, it wouldn’t be fair.”

“Okay,” Grover nods eagerly, obviously ready to accept Percy’s version of events in the name of keeping the peace. “That’s great. If we could get her to say something publicly, that’d be even better. Have you got her number?”

“Yeah, we’ve stayed in touch,” says Percy. He digs in his pocket for his phone and opens his contacts for Grover. He knows where he’ll find Rachel’s name, lodged between Pollux and one of the newest additions to the folder, Silena.

“I’m sure that will be useful so that you can go back to her once you’re finished here,” comes a voice behind him.

Percy whirls around to find its source: a tall, stern-looking blonde woman with piercing grey eyes just like Annabeth’s, albeit with an unfriendly glint in them that he’s never seen in Annabeth’s. She’s holding a lit cigarette pinched tightly between two fingers, despite the fact that he’s pretty sure this is a no-smoking building.

“Perseus Jackson,” she says coldly.

“Who are you?” he demands. His immediate reaction that she’s an insane stalker only lasts a moment until he reasons that she must be known to the building staff for them to have let her in, but he’s missing vital details like what on earth she’s doing standing in his wife’s apartment glaring at him.

Those vital details fall unnervingly into place as he hears Annabeth’s resigned mutter: “Mother.”

“Daughter,” acknowledges the woman coldly. “I am Athena,” she directs at Percy. “And I believe that I have the misfortune of now being your mother-in-law – for the moment.”

He has to admit, that’s a hell of a way to make a first impression. “Oh,” says Percy. “Nice to meet you?” He doesn’t mean the words to come out as a question, but Athena’s cynical expression does a lot to dent his confidence.

“I rather doubt that,” she says.

She falls silent after that, like she’s expecting him to respond in some way. Her eyes rake over his body in a way that feels like she’s trying to peel back his skin to see what’s underneath.

“Mom, what are you doing here?” asks Annabeth. Her voice still has the same edge that it did when she was asking Percy about Rachel and Calypso, and he has the sense of being caught in the crossfire of a conflict he doesn’t quite understand.

“I am here to try to salvage what remains of your career, my dear,” says Athena, as if her presence is an act of extravagant generosity.

“I’ve got it under control,” says Annabeth briskly, but Athena frowns.

“I did not raise you to be tabloid fodder,” says the older woman.

“I’m not tabloid fodder…” Annabeth begins.

“The paper on the table would suggest otherwise, Annabeth, and tomorrow so will every other news outlet in the country.”

“They print that stuff about everyone-”

“Except you. Or, it used to be, before you abandoned your common sense altogether. If you wish to be regarded for your music then you had better get back to making it the most newsworthy thing about yourself, not your boytoy’s casual whoring.”

“Which is exactly what I’m doing,” grits out Annabeth.

“Exceedingly poorly, if his presence here is any indication. You are far too intelligent to let a moment of madness define the rest of your life like this.”

“I’m sorry,” Percy butts in, “but is that me? Am I the moment of madness?”

“Precisely,” snarls Athena. “What are you still doing here?”

“I’m here because I was invited,” he says as levelly as possible. “Were you?”

There’s a silence so frigid that Percy could have sworn that Athena had brought the Holocene to an abrupt halt and plunged the earth into a new ice age, an impression only slightly ruined by Grover gasping quietly behind him.

“I will not pretend to understand what game you think that you are playing, Jackson,” says Athena. She reminds him of the most judgemental of his old school teachers. She looks straight at him, and instead of seeing Percy Jackson, she sees trouble. “But even so,” she continues, “I know a parasite when I see one.”

“Mom…” says Annabeth in protest, but Percy can hear in her voice how reluctant she is to argue with her mother, and Athena takes no notice as she leans in close to Percy and jams her cigarette into his t-shirt. The ashy end crumbles into an ugly black mark and he’s overwhelmed with the nauseous feeling that he’s back in the tiny apartment that they’d shared with Gabe.

It is, all of a sudden, very hard to breathe.

“Leave,” says Athena.

Percy wants to argue. He already dislikes Athena, and there’s a part of him that sounds suspiciously like his Mom’s voice pointing out that it’s a bloomin’ cheek for her to come in without an invitation and kick him out of an apartment that isn’t her own, but then there’s another part of him…

How can he argue with her, really? How is he not a parasite? He’s sticking around to further his career, to spend some of Annabeth’s money on a cause that she has no interest in. He takes a paycheque for every appearance with her, offering nothing in return but his surely-underwhelming presence.

Athena’s gaze bores into him, a bored expression on her face, and he knows that he can’t fight this. She’s right, or close enough to right that the truth isn’t a hill worth dying on. He tries to shrug, to play it off like he was leaving anyway. “Whatever,” he mutters. He turns on his heel and heads for the door.

“Percy!”

He stops at the sound of Annabeth’s voice, and looks back. Athena’s back is turned and she’s looking at her daughter, but Annabeth’s gaze is flicking between the two of them. Grover, meanwhile, is doing his best to disappear without actively hiding behind the furniture.

“You’re right Mom,” says Annabeth. “We should leave.” She marches over to Percy and loops her arm through his, practically dragging him through the doorway as he’s caught in her path.

“Don’t be stupid, Annabeth,” Athena calls after them, and from the way she tenses against him Percy can tell that the words sting, but they keep on moving, through the door and into the elevator, where she jabs clumsily at the buttons until the machine starts moving so slowly that it feels like it’s travelling five-hundred floors as they descend in silence. She leans against him and lets out a slow breath. He leans against her and takes a deep one in.

There’s a soft ding as the elevator opens to reveal the ground floor, but Percy’s relief is short-lived as they step out to see the crowd of people beyond the main doors to the building. He wonders briefly about ducking back to take cover in the lift, but before he can suggest it, they’ve been noticed. The crowd seethes against the glass as if they’re at an aquarium to catch a glimpse of a particularly exotic pair of fish.

Annabeth disentangles her arm from his and instead takes his hand, squeezing it like a vice. “Ignore their questions,” she says. “Don’t answer anything, alright?”

“We’re going through them?” Percy asks. With the protection of the glass, it feels like they’re in an oversized fishbowl. Without it, he suspects it would be rather more like trailing blood through shark-infested waters.

“There’s a car in the basement,” says Annabeth. “...except the keys are back upstairs.”

A shiver runs up Percy’s back just thinking about Athena. He wonders if she’ll have settled down in the apartment and made herself at home like a spider in the centre of its web, or if she’ll be following them down to make her exit shortly. “Okay,” he says. “So we just pretend they’re not there.”

“As much as possible.”

Percy tries to squash the sick feeling in his gut, with limited success. The crowd outside is probably not that big, really, he can see that it’s not more than two or three dozen journalists and camerapeople, but he isn’t sure that he can push through them when like a single entity they will converge.

No, he doesn’t think he can do it, but before he can say so, Annabeth is already moving, pulling him towards and through the doors, into the glare of flash bulbs and microphones being held like morning stars.

“Percy, is it true you cheated on your last wife?”

“Annabeth, did you know about his affairs?”

“Do you endorse your husband’s actions?”

“Did Rachel Dare know you were married?”

“Annabeth have you met Calypso?”

The stench of smoke still curls in Percy’s nose, like Athena is there in front of him, jabbing the smouldering stub into his chest.

They’re just reaching the edge of the clamour, just reaching the point when Percy feels like he might be able to breathe again, when the crowd surges and overtakes them again. Microphones wave unsteadily in their faces as the people holding them try to keep up with Percy and Annabeth trying to powerwalk away, and there’s another cacophony of clicking as the cameras capture their pictures for tomorrow’s papers.

Annabeth’s grip on Percy’s hand tightens.

And then, as they’re struggling to the crossroads at the end of the block, a black car, its windows tinted, pulls up to the sidewalk. The driver’s window slides slowly down.

“Get in, losers,” says Grover. “We’re going shopping.”

Percy could cry with relief as they scramble in. He slams the door shut behind, blocking out the noise from outside and breathes deeply, steadying his heartbeat. The car glides into the middle of the road and Grover pulls the wheel gently sideways to turn left.

“Sorry,” says Grover, after a minute of silence. “That was a mean thing to say. I literally just watched Mean Girls last week and-”

“No,” Percy cuts him off. “It was pretty funny.”

“Really?”

“Yeah,” Annabeth agrees. “It was pretty funny.”

“Oh, nice.” There’s another long silence. “Ditching me with your Mom wasn’t very funny,” says Grover eventually.

Percy winces. Things had moved so quickly that he’d barely registered that they’d left their friend behind.

“Sorry,” says Annabeth. “That’s on me. I thought you'd come with us. I kinda freaked out.”

“Sorry,” echoes Percy. He hadn't even thought that, and shame curls in his chest.

Grover sighs. “No worries, I guess. She’s not happy – I mean, you probably know that already. She’s saying all sorts about how she’ll get the label to drop you if you stay married to Percy, and how you’re risking her business by behaving like this, and then I managed to grab the car keys and sneak out. She might still be talking to herself up there for all I know.”

“You’re a lifesaver, Grover,” says Annabeth sincerely.

“Agreed,” says Percy, “did you say she’d get Annabeth’s label to drop her? Can she do that?”

“She can’t,” says Annabeth.

“Probably,” comes Grover’s verdict from the front. “She probably can’t. She probably wouldn’t really want to.”

“...reassuring,” says Percy.

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but my Mom’s not a regular Mom,” Annabeth tells him.

“She’s a cool Mom,” says Grover. “Ah, I’m sorry, that wasn’t helpful, it’s like I said, Mean Girls is just going around in circles in my head at the moment. Listen, do you guys want me to drop you off somewhere? I’m kind of at the point where I’m just gonna start going in circles around the block and I’ve got to make like fifty phone calls to make to get this story under control and also to make sure that Scylla and Charybdis actually turn up to the Electronic Music Awards with an acceptance speech ready in case they win Best Duo.

“Did I mention you’re a lifesaver, Grover?” asks Annabeth. “We can just walk from here, it’s fine. I think we’ve left the crowd far enough behind.”

Grover pulls over to the side of the road and turns around in his seat to look at them. “When all this is over,” he starts, then pauses and rephrases. “When this has all settled down, I’m having a holiday. Probably in Maine. And it’s totally possible that I just won’t come back, you hear me?”

“You’ll have earned it,” she tells him. “See you soon, Grover.”

A few later, the two of them are outside in the sun. Percy blinks a couple of times as his eyes adjust to the brightness, before he recognises some of the buildings around them. “Oh, hey,” he grins, “this is my Mom’s neighbourhood.”

“Oh, right?” says Annabeth. She sounds less than enthusiastic, and he’s embarrassed to have been so obviously excited when he’s just learned that her relationship with her own mother is so rocky.

“I mean, we don’t have to go see her or anything, I just recognise the area,” he says, but she shakes her head.

“No, I don’t – it’d be cool to meet your Mom if you want me to. I mean, I don’t want to be a downer on the whole day after this morning, so, if that’s what you’d like…”

“Okay,” says Percy. “If you’re cool with it. It’s just a few streets that way.”

They start walking slowly. “My Mom… the long and short of it is that she had me, dumped me on my Dad and then did her best to disappear from my life,” says Annabeth.

“You really don’t have to…”

“I think I do, after that display earlier. She’s this expert in corporate law, but these days she runs a company that basically hires out lawyers to big firms to help their legal departments. Sometimes I’m sort of proud that she’s so good at it. Other times I think she’s basically just helping them find legal ways to break the law. It’s what she was so busy with that I’d have got in the way of if she’d kept me around. So she left me with Dad, and Dad didn’t really want me either, but these days you’re not allowed to just leave unwanted children on a mountainside to die like the Ancient Greeks did, so I stayed. Until I was seven, when I decided I was sick of staying, and I ran away instead.”

“Wait, you ran away?”

“I lasted about a week on the streets as well. I went back eventually because… I wasn’t sure what else to do. That song, Runaway, that I wrote the chorus of that year -”

“It was literally literal,” realises Percy.

“Literally,” she agrees. “Music was just another part of me that Dad wasn’t interested in, so I tracked down Mom and basically made myself a nuisance until she agreed to let me live with her instead. Except her definition of living with her was boarding schools and summer camps, and then doing exactly what she told me to twenty-four hours a day to get a foot in the door of the music industry, and… to be fair it worked. But she’s not good at giving up control. She’s not good at recognising I’m not a teenager anymore. So that’s why things can be a little… weird, between us.”

“I get it,” says Percy. “I mean, I don’t get it perfectly, but… my Dad runs a fishery from the Florida Keys – he sends a cheque once a month and a Christmas card every year. I’ve met him about five times in my life. Things have been ‘a little weird’ between us every single one of those five times.”

“Do you ever worry that if you had kids, you’d mess them up as badly as your parents did you?”

The question takes Percy by surprise. It’s not something he’s thought a lot about, partly because he doesn’t particularly feel like his parents have messed him up, but something tells him that this might not be the answer that Annabeth is looking for. “Not really,” he answers after a moment’s thought. “My Dad set the bar low enough that I can clear it without really trying. Sometimes I worry that I’d never be as good a parent as my Mom, but I think if I’m half as good as she was, then I’ll be doing OK.”

She stops walking. “You love her a lot,” she observes quietly.

It seems so obvious that Percy’s surprised that she feels the need to say it, and his heart breaks a little when he realises that it’s something that Annabeth hasn’t been able to take for granted herself. “Yeah,” he acknowledges. “I do. That’s her building, there,” he says. “You can meet her now, if you want. But don’t have to, though – if you’re not comfortable with it, if you’re not happy to, we can just walk around instead, that’s fine.”

Instead of answering, she says “About five minutes before Grover came in, I asked you if your last marriage ended because you cheated, and you said it hadn’t. Was that true?”

“It was,” he says. “I can’t remember if we were legally divorced by the time I started seeing Rachel, but we were separated. Our relationship was over. It might count as stupid and immature, but I don’t think it counts as cheating.”

She’s silent, and he can’t tell what it is she wants from him.

“I can probably prove it, if you need,” he says. “I can get in touch with Rachel and Calypso and figure out the exact timeline of who did what where and when. Would that help?”

She shakes her head slowly. “If we’re going to try and make this work, I have to trust you,” she says. “So I trust you.” Then she looks up at the building he’d pointed to. “So what’s your Mom’s name?” she asks.

He smiles. “Sally,” he says. “Sally Blofis. She married a guy called Paul Blofis when I was in high school, he’s Estelle’s dad, that’s why she doesn’t have the same surname as me, but -” he catches himself rambling and cuts it short. “Yeah,” he says, “you’re gonna hear this from her about five times in about five different ways, so I’ll spare you, but Sally. Her name’s Sally. She – I think she’s pretty cool.”

Chapter Text

“I think she’s pretty cool,” Percy had said about his mother, and it only took some basic observation from the moment of first meeting her for Annabeth to realise that he had been understating things.

Is Sally Blofis perfect? Is she, in fact, some goddess of joy, sent down from the heavens to spread peace, harmony and love among the mortals who walk the earth? Statistically speaking (and Annabeth is good at statistics) it’s unlikely, but having known Sally for a whole fifteen minutes now, she has to admit that the evidence lies largely on the side of yes.

Maybe there’d been half a second of surprise, of Sally being taken aback as she saw Percy and Annabeth on her doorstep without prior warning that they’d been coming – maybe there had been, but Annabeth couldn’t say for sure either way. What she can say for certain is that it had been Annabeth whom Sally had hugged first, as if they’d known each other for years.

“It’s nice to meet you dear,” said her mother-in-law, before turning to Percy and alternating between smothering him in a motherly hug and scolding him for his various failings as a son including:

a) never calling

b) not telling her that he was visiting

c) getting married without telling her

d) not introducing her to his wife for almost a week after the wedding

and two dozen others, all the way to

z) being too obvious in his attempts to avoid Paul’s cousin Colleen’s efforts to get him to give her a tour of the Hudson River three days ago (“I was busy, I’d just got married!” “That’s not how she sees it, Percy.”).

With that out of the way, along with an introduction to Percy’s stepfather Paul (offering some context, if not sense, to the Colleen thing), the four of them are settled around the dinner table, digging into a delicious variation on Caesar Salad that, for some reason that Annabeth can’t quite work out, is blue. No-one else seems to have noticed this, but if it’s poison, it tastes better than she’d have expected. A radio on the side plays James Taylor (or possibly Jackson Browne, because, despite having met James, Annabeth’s brain insists on confusing the two of them).

“Estelle’s going to be crushed that you dropped by while she was at school,” says Sally. “She’s a huge fan of yours.”

People regularly tell Annabeth that she’s a modern-day Aphrodite or that her music has saved their life, but for some reason this makes her blush in a way those comments never do.

“She’s met Annabeth already, Anyway, growing up’s about learning to deal with disappointment,” says Percy. “Like when I found out that even though my Latin teacher looked like James Bond and sounded like James Bond, he wasn’t Ja-”

“Estelle’s always been a much more realistic child than you were, dear,” says Sally, a twinkle in her eye. “You know, the first time I took Percy to an aquarium, he was convinced that the fish were talking to him?”

“Percy the fish-whisperer?” asks Annabeth, grinning.

“It’s better than what Estelle said when I took her to one for the first time,” says Percy indignantly. “She pointed at a Mekong Stingray – that’s a super endangered type of fish, and that one specifically, I’d brought to that aquarium after we found it injured – and she goes, ‘that one looks like it would taste good with syrup and cream!’ Can you believe it? Me leaving home and working my butt off to save its life and my little sister wants to eat it like it’s a pancake?”

“Very practical,” says Annabeth. “I’d rather be stuck on a desert island with her, of the two of you.”

“You know, Estelle complains a lot less than Percy when food’s short too,” says Sally. “She’s a real stoic.”

Percy’s jaw drops. He looks at Annabeth, then to Sally, then back to Annabeth. “This… this was a mistake,” he says slowly, which draws a cackle from Paul.

“I think it was an excellent idea,” says Percy’s stepfather, clearly enjoying the show.

“I have lived my whole life being a good upstanding person,” says Percy, shaking his head. “I’m a good husband, I’m a good son. And this is how you repay me?”

“I think it’s been pretty clearly established today that you’re just about the world’s worst son,” points out Annabeth.

“I am literally perfect and have done nothing to deserve this,” says Percy. In an apparent attempt to salvage some dignity, he loads his plate up with more food and crams slightly too much salad into his mouth just as the final chords of the song on the radio play, for a moment leaving the only sound in the room the crunching of lettuce in his mouth while the other three look on and smile.

“That was ‘Doctor, My Eyes,’ Jackson Browne’s” (rats, thinks Annabeth) “great debut single from ‘seventy-two. We’ll be leaving the records off the turntables for a little while now, though, as we’ve got a guest with us live in the studio,” says a voice she recognises as the DJ Apollo’s. “In his five studio albums so far, he’s covered everything from Chinese economic policy to Tom Brady’s role in deflate-gate, and what’s more, he’s made it fun to listen to: he’s picked up three Grammys and numerous other awards along the way, and his last three albums have all hit the top spot on the Billboard 100. For the last few weeks, though, it’s been his personal life that’s been grabbing the headlines, so I hope you’ll join me in extending a warm welcome to Luke Castellan!”

“Oh, I’ll turn that off,” says Sally, “we don’t need to be listening to interviews while we’re eating.”

It’s a kind gesture, but Annabeth doesn’t want sympathy. She doesn’t want anyone to think that she can’t stand to hear Luke’s voice when he’s probably going to be talking about anything but her, the girl that everyone knows he cheated on. “You don’t have to on my account,” she says, smiling weakly. “Really, it’s fine, I’m not bothered.”

Sally, mercifully, doesn’t push it, though Annabeth catches the worried glance that Percy sends her way when he doesn’t realise she can see him.

“…I’m really not comfortable talking about my personal life in general,” Luke’s saying.

“So Percy, when are you due back on the ship?” asks Paul.

“Um, five months,” says Percy hurriedly through a mouthful of food. “But there’ll be like two months of delays probably, so, longer.”

“...in fact, I’ve always tried to let my music do the talking for me,”

“Do you know where you’re headed this time?”

“Yeah, Mariana Trench. I don’t know why, it’s not like we have the tech to get to the bottom of it, I think it’s just a prestige thing for the guys funding it. We’ve got backing from the Avatar guy this time around.”

“… I never thought I’d find myself in a situation where I couldn’t write the lyrics, or the music to express my feelings in the right way…”

“The Avatar guy?” asks Sally.

“Yeah, and Titanic.”

“James Cameron,” supplies Annabeth, only half-paying attention.

“That’s the one!”

“… fortunately I’m not the only person who’s ever made a mistake, and other people have been better at writing songs about it than I have, so the first one I play is going to be a cover.”

“There’s lots to do before then obviously,” says Percy. “And I was thinking it would be nice to drop in on Annabeth in the studio next week, see the master at work. I could take Estelle then to help her over her disappointment. Even though she’s already met Annabeth, because I’m a perfect brother as well as a perfect son.”

“I know there’s exactly zero chance she’ll have stuck around to listen to me talk, and I probably deserve it, but I’d like to dedicate this song to Annabeth.”

Time slows to a crawl, and Annabeth’s painfully aware that everyone at the table is working very hard not to look at her.

“She’s got you wrapped around her finger,” says Sally, but the comment’s a relic of a dead conversation, and there’s silence after she speaks except for the sound of Luke’s guitar. She catches a glimpse of the future there, sitting at the Blofis dinner table, of a life spent motionless, waiting for the next blow, the next reminder that Luke loved her once, a life spent as so much jetsam caught in her ex’s wake. It feels like she sees it all stretching out before her, but she can’t have spaced out for long, because when she’s brought back to earth by Percy gently taking her hand under the table, Luke is still singing.

“I love to see

Your hair shining in the long summer’s light

I love to watch

The stars fill the sky on a summer night

The music plays

You take his hand

I watch how you touch him as you start to dance

And I wish I were blind

When I see you with your man.”

Her palms are so sweaty that she doesn’t need to drop Percy’s hand so much as simply slide out of his grip as she stands abruptly. There’s a moment of silence when clearly no-one knows what to say, but they needn’t worry: she’s no intention of keeping them waiting. “Sally, could you point me to your restroom, please?” she asks.

Annabeth’s moving as soon as the door down the hallway is pointed out to her, and by some miracle even manages not to run there.

She stays in the bathroom longer than anyone who wasn’t suffering from extreme constipation would, but the Blofis-Jacksons are kind enough to leaver her alone with her thoughts. She shivers at the feeling of violation, at the feeling of Luke intruding into this home like he’s grasping at her with his hands, at the sense that he’s trying to make her a part of his story, of his brand. She knows that she’s going to have to make statements, give interviews of her own, for people to view her as anything more than Luke’s ex-fiancée. She hates that he can do this to her without even knowing it.

At the same time, she hates herself for caring. There is, simply, no way that what Luke thinks or wants or is doing should matter to her, no way that she should respond with anything other than a dismissive shrug of her shoulders. She has her whole life ahead of her, she has a marriage to figure out, she has a new album to record, she has, more or less, a plan.

And here she is, sitting on a stranger’s toilet with her head in her hands and trying not to cry because it would ruin her makeup, for a reason that she knows and that makes her all the more angry. She hates the soft, human part of herself, the part that wants to forgive and forget, to kiss and make up, the part that asks her in a whining voice, wouldn’t you be happier if you were still with Luke?

And she can’t tell it it’s wrong, because, at least a little bit, she’s still in love with him.

She leans sideways to press her head against the cool times on the wall. She breathes in deeply. She stands up and flushes the toilet even though everyone will know she’s not been using it for all this time, and dabs some of the roll at the corners of her eyes, and then steps back out into the hall.

Lunch has been cleared away, but she can hear Percy’s voice from the kitchen along with the clinking of crockery being cleaned.

“…think I should go check on her? She’s been in there a while.”

Annabeth stops as she realises they’re talking about her, presumably not having heard the flush. Sally’s voice answers Percy’s.

“I’d give her a few more minutes. It obviously shook her a lot, poor thing.”

“You like her a lot,” observes Paul.

“Sure,” says Percy. “She’s cool.”

“I think that’s called avoiding the question,” says Sally.

“No-one asked me a question,” defended Percy. “And I answered anyway!”

“Oh?”

“You should probably know that it’s not really relevant in the way that you mean, anyway. We’re married, but we’re not, like, married married. “

“I’ll need that one explaining to me.” Paul’s voice, bone-dry.

“So – I mean, I won’t pretend to understand exactly how it all happened, it’s all a blur, but you’ve seen the YouTube highlights of the concert, right? It was all pretty spur-of-the-moment. I think anyone else would’ve woken up in the morning and started the divorce right away, but we’re going to keep going for six months or so until my trip to the trench, then bring it to an end.”

“Say if it’s not my place to ask, Percy,” says Sally, “but why? How’s it better to pretend to be married for half a year than to carry on with your lives as they were?”

“From my point of view, Annabeth’s funding my research for about a decade,” he says. “Basically the agreement is that I’m being employed as her husband, which is fine. There are much worse jobs in the world. For her, I think it’s all to do with image, and brand and stuff. I think the idea is that if we divorced instantly, the whole thing would look like one major meltdown – obviously the whole night of the concert was a mess, but it looks worse if she too obviously regrets it straight away. I think the idea is that if we divorce in a few months’ time, the news frenzy isn’t so bad, and people say, well she gave it a go, probably I wasn’t the world’s worst possible choice. It shows accountability for her choices, or dedication, or a bunch of other stuff people like. An image thing.”

“It sounds like you’ve got it all figured out,” says Sally. Her tone is measured and neutral.

“It’s weird,” says Percy. “But the weirdest thing is that it doesn’t feel that weird. She’s easy to be around. I like her team. Speaking of, do you remember Grover Underwood, from, what grade was it-”

“Percy, darling, just be careful,” says Sally gently.

“I think it would’ve been eighth-” He pauses. “Careful of what?”

“I don’t like to think of you getting hurt.”

“I mean… we’re both expecting it to end. I don’t think there’s any illusions about that.”

“No, and I’m not saying you’re making a mistake, but… well, you know what it’s like to be married. I can’t speak for the way you’re working things out with Annabeth, but I think being married necessarily means you have a certain amount of intimacy with each other. I don’t think you can have a business relationship like that without a personal one. So…” Sally laughs to lighten the mood. “I’m not good at this. I’m not trying to tell you how to live your life. But be sensible about it.”

“Yeah,” says Percy quietly. “Yeah, of course.”

There’s a brief silence, and Annabeth takes it as the opportunity to rejoin the world of the living. She offers a weak smile as she rounds the corner. “Hey,” she says. “Sorry about that, just had a bad turn for a minute.”

Her apology is waved off with assurances that it’s nothing to worry about and that they hope she’s feeling alright now.

She thinks of the way that Percy took her hand under the table when he saw before anyone else what Luke’s song was doing to her.

It’s not really relevant, he’d said. She’s funding my research for a decade. Fair enough. He doesn’t owe her anything more than she’s paying him for.

She picks up the stack of plates on the counter that Percy’s just dried. “So,” she asks brightly, “where should I put these?”

“Hi, Rachel speaking, who’s this?”

“Hi Rachel,” says Annabeth, already squirming uncomfortably. Grover sits across from her, scratching nervously at his beard. Percy’s stayed at his parents’ house for the afternoon, leaving the two of them at Annabeth’s dining room table, still trying to deal with the fallout of Calypso’s allegations. “I’m, um.” She pauses as she tries to figure out how to introduce herself. “My name’s Annabeth, I’m Percy Jackson’s wife.”

“Oh,” says Rachel. Even down the phone line Annabeth can tell it’s a loaded term. “Annabeth Chase, right?”

“That’s me.”

“I figured you’d be in touch soon. Well, I figured it would be one of your team, but it’s good that it’s you.”

“I guess you’ve been following the news, then?”

Rachel scoffs. “You got me, I’m not a hermit. I assume you’re calling to ask me if it’s true?”

Annabeth hesitates, but only for a moment. “I’m not, actually,” she says. “I was wondering if you might be willing to make a statement saying that it isn’t?”

“I don’t really want to get involved in all this gossip stuff…”

“I know, I appreciate that, but I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t think it was important. He needs some protection against some of the stuff that’s being said about him.”

There’s a crackling down the phone line, like Rachel’s just sighed. “Look,” she says slowly. “I’ll make your statement. I know couple of guys who can get it into tomorrow’s gossip columns, and if you want to put me in touch with anyone else I’ll give it to them too. But I’m doing it for Percy, not for you.”

Annabeth frowns. “I wouldn’t expect you to do it for my sake.”

“Yeah,” Rachel says bluntly, but doesn’t follow it up with anything. The conversation feels over, but the other woman doesn’t hang up, like there are still words waiting to be spoken.

“I’m sorry,” says Annabeth. “Is there anything else you want to say about it?”

That seems to wipe away Rachel’s hesitation. “It’s not very kind,” she says. “I won’t pretend to know what kind of understanding the two of you have come to, but you should look after Percy better. He’s a good person. He doesn’t deserve this.”

“I know-” begins Annabeth, but Rachel cuts her off.

“Do you?” she asks. “It doesn’t look much like you do. He can’t just disappear into the background, because you’ve stuck him in front of the cameras too many times, so everyone wants to know more about him, but you’re not actually sharing anything, so all the papers have to go on is his crappy school record and a couple of badly written local news pieces about teenage hoodlums from about ten years ago. Maybe you haven’t been paying attention, but Eris’ article is just the latest. I know that’s not what Percy’s like, and if you’ve actually spent any time with him, you should know it too, but you’ve done nothing – literally nothing – since that first press conference together to challenge that image.”

“I didn’t think-” started Annabeth, then cuts herself off. Rachel, mercifully, doesn’t hit her with the ‘obviously’ that Athena would have done. “You’re right,” she amends. “I forgot he was… normal.”

“I get it,” says Rachel, sounding like she means it. “There comes a point where you forget that most people don’t have a personal publicist, right?”

“Right,” echoes Annabeth.

“I did see that press conference you did, though,” says Rachel. “That was good. You worked well together. Both beautiful, both charismatic. You can make it work, if you’re not deliberately setting him up to fail.”

“I’m not,” says Annabeth strongly.

There’s a pause. “Ok,” says Dare. “It was nice speaking to you then, Annabeth. Best of luck to you – I hope this thing works out for everyone’s best.”

The phone cuts off with a beep like a brick wall. Grover’s phone returns to the screen with her contact information, with a red R in place of a profile picture.

“We’re not setting him up to fail,” says Grover, quietly.

“Not deliberately,” says Annabeth, but she sees how it looks from the other woman’s perspective: the marriage has been sold from the start as a whim, an eccentricity, and barring the press conference they hadn’t done a whole lot to present him as anything more than an accessory on Annabeth’s arm. “We need to do a big PR push for him,” she tells Grover. “Find out the sexiest things you can about his work and shove it at any journalist who’ll listen.”

“Sexy?”

“He risks his life in the deepest parts of the ocean to help save our planet for the sake of the children, that kind of thing. Sexy.”

“I had a mental image of a giant squid in a bikini, but your version’s way better,” says Grover. “I’ll sort it.”

Annabeth starts thinking of a squid in a bikini. Annabeth quickly chooses to stop thinking of a squid in a bikini. “In the meantime,” she tells him, “I’m going to write him a song. The sort of thing that people will look back on as really awkward in a few years because we broke up after it hit the charts.”

“You say that like lots of people have written that kind of thing,” says Grover.

Annabeth shrugs as she picks up a guitar from next to the bookcase. “Billy Joel, Shania Twain. Taylor does it all the time.”

“Most of those weren’t exactly written for the same reasons as you’re writing this one,” her friend observes.

She gives a gentle strum and lets the sound warm the apartment. She smiles. “No,” she agrees. “No-one’s got anything quite like what Percy and I have.”