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Percy Jackson was known for many things: he defeated the minotaur with no training at twelve, he helped retrieve the Golden Fleece at thirteen, he held the sky and exploded a mountain at fourteen, he saved the world from ending at sixteen. Those are just some of the highlights.
If you ask Percy Jackson himself what he is known for, you’d get a very different answer; Annabeth Chase’s lover.
Growing up, Percy had never imagined being someone’s lover. While all the kids around him were holding fake weddings, he was pretending to be a merman. When the other kids were pretending to be knights falling in love with princes and princesses, Percy was the fierce dragon that hoarded gold.
Romance had never been on the table for him.
Until Annabeth Chase.
She was his best friend, his guide, his muse. Everything about her was ethereal and otherworldly.
Gods, he was in love with her.
It was a slow process, like dipping his toes in water, at first. He needed to acclimate himself to being her friend before romance was involved. But, Annabeth was just so easy to befriend.
Once you look past their child-like rivalry, that was.
Falling in love was a new territory for Percy. He never really had crushes growing up; sure, he found classmates and celebrities aesthetically pleasing, like a painting in an art museum, but never a crush. He had thought Annabeth like that too, at first. Her hair was pretty like a princess, and her accent, which was rough and monotone with the slight over-annunciation of certain letters that made the fact she spent seven years in the south evident, was something Percy could listen to for hours on end. And he also just wanted to be her friend.
Percy could pinpoint the exact moment his first, and only, crush had formed.
He was thirteen, lying on his bed with his head dangling over the edge, on an Iris Message with Annabeth. She had a book in her hands, and her eyes sparkled as Percy watched her and he just wanted to pull her into a hug, kiss her lips, and never let go. He had to sign off the call to reorient himself.
He had heard of crushes before that; the other seventh graders were always gushing about their crushes and their dates, but if he was being honest, Percy thought they had been lying. That they were overexaggerating the truth. There was no way someone could feel like that.
Then he did.
Still, there was something a bit off about everything. His classmates would gush about girls they didn’t know, and Percy would frown.
“Yeah, but is she nice?” He had asked.
Matt Sloan had raised an eyebrow at him. “Even if she isn’t, that doesn’t change the fact she’s really good looking.”
“Yeah, but you don’t know her. You can’t like someone you don’t know ,” Percy had argued back.
Tyson, sweet Tyson had backed Percy up on that, but Sloan and his posse had laughed themselves silly at “Naive and dumb Jackson”.
Percy didn’t think he was naive; he just didn’t understand.
Unsurprisingly, Annabeth had been the one to introduce the term to him: demiromantic. It had been years since he’d last seen Matt Sloan or any of his other classmates at Meriwether Prep (barring Tyson), and he finally started dating the girl of his dreams. He had laughed at the term for ages, the irony of that all.
But the term fit him like a glove. It was Annabeth for him, only Annabeth. Annabeth had been the only one he dreamed of kissing in the moonlight. (Sure, he and Rachel had shared something that summer before he turned sixteen, but in hindsight that was just Percy attempting to hold onto the mortal world and Rachel attempting to hold onto the mythical world.) Annabeth was the one he wished would tend his wounds. (He hadn’t to admit that on Calypso’s island he had wished Annabeth could have tended to him, nurturing him back to health.) Annabeth was the one he wanted to wake up beside when he was old and could barely walk.
He didn’t need anyone else either.
He had Annabeth and that was enough.
And he couldn’t imagine liking—or loving—anyone else.