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“Hey babe?”
Percy looks up from where he’d been blearily studying his textbook, hoping to get in some last-minute studying before his exam tomorrow. It’s kind of hopeless—according to everything he’s learned about study habits over the last three and a half years, you usually know everything you’re going to know about a subject by twelve hours before the exam. Anything you try to shove into your brain after that likely won’t be retained. But given that Percy would actually, you know, like to ace a course that he needs to go into his desired field, and given that after this week he and Annabeth will have a whole month off from classes to recover from the semester . . . Well, maybe Percy has more reasons than usual to try a little harder.
That doesn’t mean Percy enjoys studying any more than he ever has, though. So he is grateful for the break—grateful for the sight of his beautiful girlfriend standing in the doorway of their small kitchen, wearing nothing but a large T-shirt and presumably underwear, not that he’d complain if she wasn’t. She’s just woken up from a nap—she’d been asleep when Percy got home from his shift, snoring loudly (but cutely) in their bed with a textbook facedown on her stomach. Finals seem to have been even more draining on Annabeth than Percy, this semester—she’s been exhausted, going to bed earlier and sleeping in late. Percy had to actually shake her awake yesterday morning so she wouldn’t be late to her class after she missed her alarm. Annabeth never sleeps through her alarm.
“Hey, gorgeous,” Percy says, mouth lifting in a half-smile in spite of the gods-awful crick now lodged in his neck from being bent over so long. “Sleep okay?”
“Yeah.” Annabeth toys with the hem of her shirt, not meeting his eye, but he can still see the tiredness plainly in hers—deep gray made dull with it, all her usual sparkle diminished. Not that she’s any less beautiful, for it.
Gods, after all these years, Percy really thought he’d stop waxing poetic about her every time she walks into a room. Annabeth would tease him relentlessly if she knew just how deep his lovesickness for her went.
Lovesick, he thinks, is a good word for it. Lovesick is why he tripped over himself all through their teenage years trying to impress her, even when he didn’t know that’s what he was trying to do. Lovesick is why hers was the only name he could remember when he woke up with godly amnesia, and lovesick is why he dove headfirst into Tartarus for her.
Lovesick is why, after twelve years of friendship and seven years of being in a relationship, Percy’s heart still pitter-pat- slams into his ribcage every time she smiles at him, or holds his hand, or kisses him on his dumb mouth and rolls her eyes and says, “Seaweed Brain.”
And lovesick is why, when Annabeth says, “Could you go to the store for me?” Percy falls over himself immediately to do so, without even a second’s hesitation.
“Of course,” he says, already half-rising out of the rickety dining table chair he’d planted himself on, reaching to grab his keys from the basket on the counter behind him. “What do you need?”
Annabeth presses her lips into a thin line for a moment, and Percy has half a second to feel the flicker of worry twitch in his chest. Then Annabeth smiles, tired and sheepish but still beautiful, and she says, “A pregnancy test.”
Percy drops his keys on the floor.
Standing in the family planning aisle in one of the half a dozen corner stores in New Rome at ten thirty-eight p.m on a Thursday night is not actually one of the worst things Percy’s ever done. Of course, that doesn’t mean much when several of the worst things Percy’s ever done have included watching his friends die in front of him or having a nosebleed that almost brings about the end of the world as humanity knows it. But as he stands there, staring at the handful of different pregnancy test options, Percy doesn’t feel dread or horror so much as overwhelming confusion—which is what he feels on a normal basis, so is basically the equivalent of being Just Fine in Percy Jackson’s dictionary.
He reaches into his pocket for his phone to call Annabeth and ask her which one to choose, only to realize that in his panicked haste to do what Annabeth requested, he’d left it at home, and she probably wouldn’t know anyway and would only get stressed out. Believe it or not, he and Annabeth have never had a reason to go pregnancy test shopping. They’ve never had a reason to think Annabeth was pregnant before. They've been using birth control for their entire relationship, and Annabeth’s never even been a day late for a period—even on lengthy quests that probably should’ve fucked up her biological calendar at least a little bit—but she told him before he left that it’s been two weeks.
Two fucking weeks. He should’ve—should’ve realized. Even with the stress of finals for some of the hardest classes he’s ever had to take and working full time, he should’ve noticed something was off. Something more than Annabeth just being a little tired.
Gods, he’s the worst boyfriend on the face of Gaea. Annabeth must’ve been thinking about this, at least a little, since the first or second day she was late, and Percy was oblivious.
But he doesn’t have time to wallow in his self-guilt and pity for long. Annabeth’s waiting for him, which means Percy’s got to channel the Annabeth inside his head to figure out what she would do. What would Annabeth do, what would Annabeth do . . . ?
Annabeth would not, probably, buy one of each test the New Rome Zippy Mart has to offer, but that’s all Percy can think to do that is least likely to be the wrong fucking thing. He’d hate to get home and realize he bought like, the only malfunctioning pregnancy test in the whole store. Pregnancy tests can malfunction, right? Like, they can be wrong? He thinks he’s heard that somewhere before.
Either way, he’s certain the poor young employee working the evening shift isn’t prepared for him to dump them all on the little counter, tossing in a couple dark chocolate bars from the shelf by the register for good measure because it’s the kind that Annabeth likes. The kid just blinks, wide-eyed, before shaking their head and beginning to scan each item.
“Good luck . . .” They murmur to Percy as they hand him the receipt, their smile not completely able to hide their discomfort. Percy appreciates the sentiment anyway, manages a tight smile back before thanking them and heading out as quickly as he’d rushed in.
The apartment looks exactly the way it had before Percy left, and for some reason that surprises him, even though he was only gone for about twenty minutes. The overhead lights and the stove light in the kitchen are on—for maximum studying light—, and his textbook and notebook sit right where he left them, his phone resting askew beside them. He sets his keys down and continues through to the living room, where he finds Annabeth sitting on the couch with her back to him, so the only thing he can really see of her is her hair, pulled back in a clip and spilling out behind her like she sprouted a cute golden tail from her head.
Somehow, though, her energy feels a million times calmer to Percy than his own does. She looks up calmly when Percy comes in, her smile only a little off as she closes the same textbook that she’d fallen asleep reading earlier.
“You got it?” she asks, and Percy bites his lip as he nods, coming around the couch to sit with her.
“Sort of. I may have gone overboard. I didn’t . . . didn’t know which one was the right one.”
Annabeth’s eyebrows shoot up almost to her hairline when she examines the bag’s contents, but she doesn’t criticize Percy for it, so he assumes he made the right decision. Or at least, not a completely terrible one. She finds the chocolate bars at the bottom of the bag, and for a moment, her smile goes soft and completely genuine.
“Thanks, Perce,” she says, and leans in to kiss him on the cheek. And it feels normal—painfully normal—but it’s not, and he’s hit with it so viscerally that he reaches out on instinct and wraps his hand around her wrist, where her hand had landed on his shoulder when she kissed him. She stills, and he holds her there, and all Percy can hear for a solid minute is the roar of his heart in his ears.
And then, when he can probably hear his voice around it again, he forces himself to choke out the only words that have been flying through the back of his mind for the past forty minutes.
“Are you—how are you?” He dares himself not to be a coward—he lifts his head and makes himself look her in the fucking eye, because she deserves that much. “You . . . I mean, you’re so calm, but I know—I mean, I would understand if you weren’t. I don’t—it’s just, I know you, and I know this . . . this is not part of the plan. This isn’t supposed to happen for—for at least four more years. So . . . so you—are you okay?”
Percy knows he’s stammering and babbling and making an absolute idiot of himself—and probably a bit of an asshole, too, somehow—but he can also feel that he’s halfway to a panic attack, and knows that Annabeth can probably sense that too. That’s just kind of how it goes, when you’ve been in a relationship with your best friend for so long. When you’ve seen all the darkest parts of each other, and all the brightest ones too. When you’ve experienced the unimaginable with them, and come out not only still alive, but stronger and more in love for it.
Percy feels Annabeth’s hands—always cool, always colder than his, have they always felt so small against his cheeks?—and he doesn’t know what the fuck he’s supposed to do or how he’s supposed to react when she’s being so . . . so this. It’s finals week during their seventh semester of university, and unplanned pregnancy was not anywhere on Percy’s eight-semester plan, and he knows it’s not on hers either, so he doesn’t understand why she’s looking at him without any anger or blame or even frustration, even though he knows she’s tired and stressed and probably way more scared than him.
And she says, “I’ve had over a week to speculate and panic and worry about this—you haven’t. Just take a breath, Percy. Nothing’s certain yet.”
But it is, Percy wants to blurt, almost hysterically. But as hysterical as it may be, he can—he can feel it. Something in the air has changed, and he didn’t notice it before but he knows it now, Annabeth’s pregnant and Percy does not know what he’s supposed to do.
Because here’s the thing. Percy was . . . of course he wants to have kids with Annabeth, he’s wanted that for as long as they’ve been together, but they’ve both talked about it. They were going to be ready for it. They were going to finish their degrees in New Rome, and save up so they could move out of their one-bedroom apartment into one of the nice houses on the other side of town, and they were going to both have extremely well-paying jobs so they could give their kids all the damn luxuries that they never got as kids—so they’d never have to go a day hungry, or with the water cut off, or have to stare longingly through a shop window at a pair of light up high-top sneakers that their parents just couldn’t afford. Any kid of Percy’s deserves the coolest fucking light up shoes on the market, godsdamn it. He wasn’t going to deny them anything. Neither of them were.
But here they are—undergrads, making enough income between the two of them that they can afford their place and a diet a tier above ramen on the healthiness scale, but not much else. And Annabeth still has four more years of school after this, and Percy hasn’t worked through even half of his Mount Olympus of Shit with his therapist that he’d planned to resolve before becoming a dad, and he’s too . . . He may be twenty-four-years-old, twelve times two and therefore twice the age he ever thought he’d make it past, but he’s so fucked up in the head, that it’s hard to imagine himself being capable enough to take care of a baby. His baby.
His baby. Fucking gods. Percy can’t—Percy can’t breathe.
“Percy— Percy.” Annabeth’s hands disappear, but he only has a second to panic about it before he feels one settle on his chest, over his heart, while the other wraps around his own hand and pulls it to rest over her chest. “Breathe with me,” she instructs, leading by example, and he listens to her exaggerated inhales and feels the way his hand rises and falls against her heart, and somehow, some way, Annabeth leads him back out of the haze like she always does.
It doesn’t take away the feelings, though—the thoughts in his head, so terrifying and overwhelming. “I—I’m gonna fuck up our kid, Annabeth. I don’t know . . . I don’t know how to be a dad. I barely know how to get myself through the day, most of the time. Our kid—our kid doesn’t deserve someone like me. I’ll ruin them.”
“You’re not going to fuck up or ruin anything,” Annabeth tells him. Her voice is still so calm, soothing like a balm on his scraping, bruising thoughts. She lifts a hand to his face again, her thumb soft where it brushes over his jaw, up to the corner of his mouth. “You think I know how to be a mom? You know as well as I do what mine’s like. We’re nowhere near as prepared for something like this as either of us would like to be. But when do we ever really get to be prepared for something like this?”
“I wanted to be ready,” Percy whispers. He closes his eyes, hates himself for the guilt clawing at his insides, screams at himself to just shut the fuck up, he’s probably going to make all of this worse for her. “I . . . I wanted to be prepared—for you. You deserve a partner who won’t be scared when things like this happen.”
“Seaweed Brain,” Annabeth says, and there’s reproach in her voice, but she leans in and kisses him and for a moment, Percy thinks maybe the world isn’t ending for real this time. And when she pulls away, she stays close enough that Percy can feel her breath, and he squeezes her hand tight where he still holds it as she tells him, “I don’t want you to not be scared. I don’t need that. I just need you to be here with me.”
And that . . . Well. If there’s anything Percy knows he is good at, it’s that. He can’t imagine being anywhere without her, ever. He would never want to be. No matter what.
So he inhales deeply enough to fill his lungs to max capacity, and as he exhales, he opens his eyes to find hers. Beautiful gray, like pieces of gleaming silver, rarer than gold and a million times more breathtaking.
He is so, so in love with her. She can get him through anything.
He wants to be the same for her.
“Of course I’m here, Wise Girl,” he tells her, and he brushes her stray bangs out of her face so he can kiss her forehead, long and lingering and soft. “I’m never going anywhere. No matter what.”
Annabeth wraps her arms around him, and they hold each other just like that for a long time, and she whispers into the silence, “That’s all I needed to hear.”
A while later, they sit on the bathroom floor and dump all of the pregnancy tests onto it. Percy has no idea how to tell which one is best, so he leaves that to Annabeth and passes her pieces of chocolate as she reads the instructions on the back of each box.
“Why does it say ‘results as early as six weeks?’” he frets, reading the phrasing over her shoulder. “Are you telling me we’re going to have to wait that long to know? Isn’t that—couldn’t a doctor just do a test and tell you immediately?”
“It means it can tell if you’ve been pregnant for six weeks, Perce. We only have to wait three minutes to know.”
Percy’s next inhale is a little sharp. Three minutes? “Well . . . well isn’t that a little fast? I mean—shouldn’t it need longer to like, really check your pee and make sure?”
“I think, considering how many tests you got, we’ll be able to make sure for ourselves,” Annabeth replies, with the first audible notes of amusement in her voice.
Gods damn it. He did get too many, didn’t he?
“Okay, well . . . Well, what do you need me to do?” he asks. He feels utterly, completely useless in this situation. He would prefer to put his hands on something, go get her something, do— something.
But Annabeth makes this cute little grunt, like a laugh that doesn’t quite make it all the way out of her throat. “This isn’t really a two person job, babe. You just sit there and look pretty while I take a piss. Then I’ll let you hold my hand while we wait.”
Percy lets out a long, measured exhale. He’s trying to be very conscious of his breathing, because he’s worried he’ll stop again. He nods, anxiously taps his fingers against his knees. It’s a very long twenty seconds, give or take.
After Annabeth sets the pregnancy tests—she’d only taken three, and Percy has no idea what the hell they’re going to do with the rest of them—on the bathroom counter and washes her hands, she returns to the floor and lets Percy wrap his arm around her shoulders while she sets a timer on her phone. She opens her second chocolate bar, and Percy doesn’t say anything about the way her fingers tremble before she tears the wrapper.
“What do you want to do?” she asks, and her voice is almost aloof—but Percy’s well-trained in the art of reading through her, and he can hear the uncertainty beneath it. “If . . . if it’s positive. Do you think we should keep it?”
Percy’s throat works. He watches her fingers, deft and calloused from years of knife work, break apart the pieces. “That’s not really my call, Annabeth.”
A piece of chocolate goes into Annabeth’s mouth. One side of her cheek divots from it as she shoves it there with her tongue, so she can speak around it. “No, I—I mean, I know. But . . . We’re in this together, right? I want you to feel like—like your own future was considered, you know? Like you weren’t totally left out of a decision that will change your life forever.”
Percy thinks, long and hard, about what the right thing to say here is. He knows he’d probably made too much a fool of himself earlier, and even though she doesn’t seem upset about it, and even though she’s not delicate and she’s never scared easily, he knows this is a fragile thing. He doesn’t want to say something that makes her think he’d prefer one decision over another—he doesn’t want to make her think he could be disappointed, or upset, or worst of all, angry.
“It’s . . . a big decision,” he finally says. “And it isn’t—wasn’t part of the plan. But we’ve experienced crazier, more world-ending situations than this. I mean, after all we’ve been through . . . having a kid in our almost mid-twenties doesn’t sound impossible. We could . . . I think we could do it.”
Annabeth is quiet. Percy fumbles when one second of silence stretches into two, three, four.
“But we don’t—you don’t have to,” he stumbles on, feeling stupider by the second. “I mean, you’ve got another four years of school after we graduate to get your doctorate, and we’re not married yet, and you should . . . should get to choose when your body gets snatched by a parasite. I wouldn’t be mad at you for not being ready. I mean, I’m not even ready. That’s not to say, if you are ready, that I wouldn’t support you because I would—”
“Percy,” Annabeth finally—praise be to the gods—interrupts. “I’m not worried about you not being supportive. I know that.”
She breaks off another piece of chocolate and presses it into his hand as she continues, “I just want you to be honest with me about this. So I know where you stand—so we don’t get a few years down the line and you wish we’d waited, or regret the what-ifs.”
The way she’s phrasing things . . . A few years down the line. What-ifs. His breath hitches in his lungs again, and Annabeth silently taps on his chest to alert him.
He sucks in a breath. Exhales. “Do you . . . What do you want to do, Annabeth?”
Annabeth quiets again. She fidgets with the string of Percy’s hoodie, wrapping it around her finger. The seconds tick past.
“I just think . . .” Annabeth hesitates. Percy squeezes her shoulders, a silent encouragement. “Maybe . . . Maybe it’s a sign, you know? Like, maybe it’s time. It’s not like the gods really favor us—we probably should’ve known that things were never going to be perfect, especially considering a certain goddess of family and motherhood.”
Hera. A moment of silence for mutual disdain. Then Percy gently prods, “So . . .?”
“So.” And there’s the confidence in her voice that Percy knows and loves so much—the confidence that clicks it all into place for him. “We’re adults now, Perce. We’re about to graduate. We’ve got jobs, and some savings. The world hasn’t tried to end since we were seventeen. And . . . As long as I’ve got you by my side, I think we could do anything. Even this.”
This. A baby. Parenthood. With Annabeth, in New Rome, in the home they share.
Somehow, when Annabeth says it, it doesn’t seem nearly so daunting. It sounds almost . . . right.
Annabeth’s phone begins to chime, announcing that their time is up. Just like that, Percy’s throat closes back up.
“It’s time.” Annabeth sits up, and Percy drops his arm from her shoulders, watching her rise up to face the results with her face open, as readable as one of her favorite books. He can only see her side profile, but with trepidation, he watches as her brow furrows inward—as her mouth twitches, and she lifts the three sticks to turn them around and show Percy.
A pink plus sign. A simple, three letter YES. The word: PREGNANT.
Annabeth is pregnant. They’re . . . they’re gonna have a kid.
Annabeth’s mouth lifts into a full smile, now, visible between her words when she says, “Guess we’re gonna have to draw up a new plan, Seaweed Brain.”
Percy’s on his feet with her in the next instant, drawing her to him and reeling her in as close as he can so he can kiss her fully, deeply, with no hesitation.
That’s not to say he’s not afraid, or uncertainty—he thinks he’s one wrong move away from shitting his pants, that’s how terrified he is. And he knows Annabeth is scared, too—he can feel her fingers, still trembling, when she raises her hands to rest against his jaw.
They’re scared. And uncertain. And not at all ready. But Annabeth is right—when have they ever really been ready for anything? Was Percy ready, when he was thrown into the world of gods and monsters at the age of twelve? Was he ready to promise forever when he kissed the most beautiful blonde in the entire universe at the bottom of a lake in the summer camp where they fell in love? Was he ready when he followed her into hell—and then staggered right back out of it into the sunlight to face the reality of the future ahead of them?
The future. With Annabeth, and their baby, in this beautiful life that they finally have. Percy will be damned for all eternity before he lets any god or monster rip it away from him, now that he finally has it.
Yeah . . . As terrifying as it is, Percy thinks, it’s a kind of terror that he can live with. Stepping into the unknown with Annabeth. Building a family with the most reliable, intelligent architect in the world. Embracing the future with all the care of a newborn baby tucked into their arms.
The future, Percy thinks, for all its possible flaws and curveballs, just may be a little closer than he ever thought. And with Annabeth by his side, he just might be ready to meet it.