Work Text:
to keep the light (from passing through)
The alarm tone on Percy’s phone is Achilles Come Down, because he has yet to graduate from an eighth-grade sense of humor. The first notes of it blare through the bedroom in a cacophony of low cello. Percy’s right arm is closest to the source, his other wrapped around Annabeth’s waist, so it’s his scrambling finger that finally manages to press STOP right before the singer takes his first breath.
“Gods,” he mutters, rubbing his eyes, “I need to stop watching Netflix at full volume before bed. I thought I was going to blow an eardrum.” Blearily, he turns his head to look at Annabeth, who took the wake-up call extraordinarily well.
(That is to say, she whimpered and squeezed her eyes even further shut than they already were, burrowing her head into the space between the pillow and Percy’s jaw.)
Percy strokes up and down her spine with his free hand, making her shiver and sending goosebumps up to where her shirt has pooled at her shoulder blades from nighttime rustling. The glow of morning in Brooklyn casts her into a golden landscape amidst the off-white duvet. The two of them turned twenty-one over the summer, and the nine years since they met have planted her in his head as something more than a person: he can’t really fully explain it, but looking at her feels like being submerged in something gauzy and bright, like the shimmers of light cutting through the clouds at Olympus.
He takes a deep breath. “You alright, Wise Girl?” He whispers.
Annabeth answers without opening her eyes, sounding pained: “I am going to throw your phone into the Hudson.”
“Fine,” Percy replies, lifting his arms to stretch them above his head. “But not until I beat 2048.”
“That game came out ten years ago. I can’t believe you’re still stuck on it.”
“I’ve told you a hundred times, the version I downloaded is clearly rigged to be impossible after 512…”
Annabeth doesn’t really respond to this, which he finds to be a cop-out. She does throw one arm over his chest and makes this cute little sighing noise, though, which sort of makes up for it. Percy checks the time. 7:15am. He only has one class today, at eleven-thirty, and his volunteer shift at the community center doesn’t start until three. It’s Annabeth with the early lecture, all the way in Morningside Heights — something he’s more likely to complain about than she is, on any given day.
Speaking of: she’s already shifting to get up from their bed.
As she crawls over him (“oh my gods, can’t you just turn for once, this is like five times more difficult…”), he brings his arms up around her, stalling her briefly.
“Hey there,” he murmurs.
“Hey there.” She smiles and then looks at him for a silent moment, scanning over his face as though for a quirk he isn’t aware of. “Do you want to come with me to school? I can swipe you into the campus gym.”
He’s softened and a little overwhelmed by her, when she says things like this. Fondness spreads across him like the syrupy warmth of nectar.
It’s not like he doesn’t know why she’s asking. Percy has insisted on it before, when he’s had a bad feeling or just a bad night’s sleep. He’d take the subway with her to Columbia and do his work or swim until she was done class, and then he’d wait outside of her lecture hall, sliding her under his arm the second she got out of the room.
And by the way: none of this was, like, controlling, or anything. Just precaution.
(The half-bloods will get it.)
Even now, he doesn’t love the idea of her on the subway by herself late at night, or walking to the bodega at odd hours of the morning when she can’t sleep. Even though she’s just as good (better, if he’s honest) of a fighter than he is and has been self-sufficient since, like, seven years old, it’s just a lasting itch from…well, from everything. Some sort of demigod scar tissue. He’s not proud of it.
It’s mellowed with time, though. It used to be a lot worse. Gods, was it worse. He cringes lightly as he remembers those first few months after Gaea. The person he used to be. The person the world had forced him to be.
He’s blocked a lot of it out, worked through even more with therapies and long, intense conversations and combat training. A lot of it, for sure. But not all.
He remembers one time — he couldn't have been more than eighteen — when Paul sat him down to talk about Annabeth. Well. About himself and Annabeth, more specifically.
Percy and Annabeth had been inseparable for weeks: only able to sleep with the other within reach, skittish and angry if they were separated for longer than a few minutes. It was starting to get better, Percy had thought, but even he could concede that they were just getting better at acting as one organism instead of learning how to function on their own. Not that he had a problem with it.
But, anyway. Paul sat him down on the living room couch of Sally’s apartment while Annabeth took a nap in Percy’s room — she’d had three nightmares in succession that kept them both awake most of the night — and told him about something called codependency: when two people become addicted to their relationship. It was unhealthy, Paul said, and unsustainable; especially at ‘young, impressionable’ ages. People need to be apart, sometimes. People can’t live their lives holding onto someone else.
All of this made sense in theory, but Percy was fresh from darkness and carved out with shadow, and his mind worked in war-wrought blacks-and-whites. He wants to take Annabeth away, he remembers thinking. He wants me to suffer.
So he lashed out and he yelled and he got in Paul’s face, saying things he wasn’t proud of, cruel things, things his mother had never raised him to say. He put air into his chest and shifted his shoulders and threw his arms out wide: you won’t take her. You won’t, you won’t. I’ve fought and died and bled and killed. I am half-god and you are mortal, and you won’t get past me. You won’t.
It wasn’t until his bedroom door creaked open and a soft voice said, “…Percy?” that the roar in his ears began to subside. His vision swam (endless dark, Iapetus and the Doors, Gaea’s laughter, dark skies of pyre smoke).
Annabeth was leaning on his doorframe. She looked tired. Anaklusmos was in her hand.
Without another word to Paul, Percy stalked back to his room and pulled Annabeth in with him, his hand around her wrist, light and barely-there like his grip might break her or break himself. She let herself be pulled. The cap went back onto Riptide, the covers pulled back; the world righted itself. Closed doors and drawn shades.
He doesn’t remember a lot from that day, after that. Not in concrete memories, anyway. More like a few lingering sensations. The feeling of Annabeth’s breath on his chest. The sound of his mother’s wobbling voice from the other side of the door. The pinprick rage sitting between his collarbones, at the very base of his throat, like a foreign object waiting for removal.
They don’t understand, he remembers thinking. This part of that day is clear. Percy was steadfast about it — Paul was wrong about them, was asserting some clinical bullshit onto their relationship because it made him uncomfortable, or scared, or whatever.
It wasn’t even his fault, really. Mortals just couldn’t understand. What Paul called codependency surely had some explanation in Percy’s bloodstream; something old and battle-ready, like the ghost of heroes past. The writing of their lessons etched across generations. Orpheus telling him not to look back. Perseus telling him to close his eyes against the gorgon.
But it would be fine, he remembers reasoning. This had happened before. He was told he was hyperactive and slow, diagnosed with mortal disorders that didn’t account for his ancestry, for the way he’d use his trick-start brain to save the world.
(Annabeth had been the cure to those diagnoses, then, too.)
“…Earth to Seaweed Brain?”
He blinks.
Annabeth is still hovering over him, and her hair is falling down onto his torso, tickling the hairs on his chest. She looks placidly amused, but he knows her well enough to know that she was probably remembering something similar.
“Nah, I’ll get a swim at the Y,” he says, shifting back to sit up against the headboard. “I’ll meet you after your studio class for lunch, though.”
“Thai food?”
“Gods, it’s like you can read my mind.”
She smiles. This is the work they do for each other, he thinks, this healing stuff. Little questions and answers. Little open doors.
Percy leans up and kisses Annabeth softly, both hands on her face to cup her jaw, and then he lets her go, smiling as she shuffles to their bathroom to brush her teeth. The yellow daybreak from the shadeless windows covers her briefly as she tiptoes on creaking hardwood.
Even when the bathroom door is shut and he’s alone again, the light doesn’t waver once.