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“Why’d you do that?”
She could hear Percy swallow audibly, even over the gross squishing noises their shoes made with every shaky step out of the amusement park.
“Why’d I do what?” he answered.
Annabeth gave him a solid side eye.
“Don’t play dumb, Kelp Head.”
“I like Seaweed Brain better.”
“Okay, fine. Don’t play dumb, Seaweed Brain. Question still stands.”
Percy shifted the enormous, unwieldy shield from one arm to the other.
“I told you already,” he said uncomfortably. “You’re smarter and better at this than me. It makes more sense -”
“That doesn’t matter, though,” Annabeth interrupted. She stopped walking and he was obliged to stop, too. “It’s true that I’ve been doing this longer, but you were the one selected for this. Logic doesn’t mean anything when the gods and the oracle ordain someone for a quest.”
Percy shuffled his feet and looked at the ground.
“Well, I didn’t really think about that,” he muttered. “Because you know more than I do. Obviously.”
Annabeth sighed and crossed her arms.
“You know plenty. Stop pretending to be stupid,” she ordered, and waited. Expectantly, with her eyebrows raised. Percy set down the shield and chewed at the inside of his cheek.
“I didn’t want you to die, okay?” he finally admitted, rubbing the back of his neck.
Annabeth frowned.
“The chair didn’t kill Hera,” she said. “The original one that Hephaestus made to humiliate her. I didn’t think this one would kill either of us…it would just put one of us out of commission until it was too late to successfully complete the quest.”
Percy dropped his light blue gaze to the scrubby ground again.
“Gods don’t need to breathe, right?” he hedged. “Technically Hera could’ve stayed in that chair for thousands of years and been fine once Hephaestus let her out. I mean, probably really ticked off, but -”
Sudden, horrifying awareness had dawned on Annabeth as he rambled.
“Wait,” she interrupted. “You thought you wouldn’t be able to breathe in there?”
Percy looked at her wordlessly for six full seconds (she counted in her head) before he replied.
“I couldn’t breathe in there,” he said.
Now, Annabeth felt like she couldn’t breathe.
“You couldn’t breathe?” she asked weakly.
Percy shook his head and shoved his hands in his pockets.
“I’m not Hera. Last time I checked, anyway,” he joked feebly.
“So when you,” Annabeth started, ignoring his attempt to lighten the mood, “...when you asked me to come back after the quest was over to get you out of that chair, you thought you were asking me to…to recover your -”
“For my mom,” he said quietly. For her to bury, he didn’t say, but the words hung in the air between them all the same.
“How could you do that?!” Annabeth demanded, eyes stinging, and she shoved him with two hands this time, harder this time, and his back hit the rusty tin wall of the stall behind him. A “Hook A Rubber Narcissus Before He Drowns Again!” sign fell off the top of it and landed at their feet.
“I just - I just thought that maybe since I could breathe underwater, I could hold out longer than you could!” he said, hoarse voice rising defiantly, his ears turning pink. “And to be fair, I did!”
Annabeth blinked, momentarily diverted.
“You can breathe underwater?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Didn’t know that until this morning, though. In the river.”
Annabeth glared at him. Her chest felt tight with warring emotions - amazement, indignation, gratitude, fear, confusion, embarrassment, and Percy had the nerve to just stand there (a bit flustered and defensive, it was true), looking at her with more understanding than she’d seen on another person’s face in a long time.
She was tongue-tied and he seemed to sense it, because he looked away to retrieve their prize, giving her a moment to get her thoughts in order.
“We should get back,” he said. “Make sure Ares hasn’t started using Grover for field goal practice.”
He took two steps toward the gate and swayed, stumbling, and gratitude won the tug-of-war contest in her chest.
“Give me that,” she snapped, and she pulled the shield away from him, but gently. She wanted to punt it into the next zip code like she was now imagining Ares doing to Grover, but resisted the urge.
Percy looked really confused until she steered him toward the nearest park bench. She sat down, crossed her arms tightly, and glared up at him some more.
“Sit.”
“I’m fine, Annabeth -” he protested, but she interrupted him.
“Sit down, Percy. You’re exhausted.”
“Not any more than you are,” he said stubbornly.
“You don’t have to protect me, y’know,” she said rudely (and not caring). “The arch, the chair, pretending you’re fine when you’re clearly not. I am more than capable of taking care of myself, and you, and Grover. I don’t need your help.”
Percy finally sat down. He was looking very intently at her.
“I know you don’t,” he said. “But I want to -”
“Because that’s how Thalia died,” she continued fiercely. “And I can’t…do that. Again. I can’t.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Annabeth watched him lean against the back of the bench, hands in his jacket pockets. He closed his eyes and tipped his face back so that it was open to the night sky. She wondered if he was thinking about his mom.
“Yeah,” he replied after a long moment. “I get it.”
Annabeth dug the wrinkled plastic baggie of ambrosia (thankfully, the little pastry square was still dry) out of her coat and then broke off a piece the size of her thumb. She gave it to him. He ate it without complaint, and she saw him take a deep breath in relief as he chewed.
“What does it taste like?” he asked suddenly. “To you.”
She thought about not answering, but did anyway.
“Burnt popcorn,” she said as she put the plastic baggie back in her pocket. “You?”
“My mom’s blue chocolate chip cookies.”
“How can you tell they’re blue?”
He shrugged.
“I just can.”
“Okay, so why does your mom make you blue cookies?”
“Why does ambrosia taste like burnt popcorn to you?”
She huffed in mild annoyance, but answered.
“My dad…” she said, and looped her pointer finger through the heavy gold ring on her necklace. “He has a hard time paying attention to things. He leaves it in the microwave too long because he gets distracted by a book or a bird outside or whatever.”
Percy didn’t say anything, and when she looked over at him, he was looking at her necklace.
“That his?” he asked, nodding toward the ring.
She clasped it in her palm, hiding it from sight.
“Yeah.”
Percy didn’t push. He rubbed his eyes hard, and with a shock, Annabeth realized he was trying not to cry.
“My stepdad is a jerk,” he said. “When I was little, he got into this big argument with my mom after she asked me what flavor birthday cake I wanted and I said blue. I was like, 4? And he laughed at me. She got so mad at him and made me an all-blue birthday meal.” He smiled, even though his eyes were red and watery. “She made pizza dough and dyed it blue, plus blue soda and blue cake. With blue candy on top. It was kind of our thing. I mean...it is. It is our thing.”
His hands clenched so hard that his knuckles turned white.
“You’ve got a cool mom,” she said quietly.
He nodded and swiped at his nose with a damp sleeve.
“Yeah, and she’ll kick my butt if I don’t say this to you, so...I’m sorry for what I said about Thalia’s tree.”
“Thanks,” she said, and meant it.
“And the reason I tricked you guys at the arch - it was mostly because I was the one who sent Medusa’s head to Olympus. Not because I didn’t think you could handle it. I just wasn’t going to let you die because of my decision, especially when I was already dying of chimera poison.”
“Venom,” she corrected without thinking.
“Huh?”
“Chimera venom. If it bites or stings you, it’s called venom. If you bite it, it’s called poison.”
“So if I bit a chimera - then I could call it poison?” he asked, grinning at her.
She snorted, and the intensity between them finally relaxed into familiarity.
“Where would I need to bite it?”
“Shut up, Seaweed Brain.”
“I bet Chiron’s never considered biting as a form of demigod combat.”
Annabeth shook her head and stood, walking over to where she had dropped the shield. She picked it up and when she turned around, Percy was unexpectedly right behind her, rather than on the bench where she’d left him. She flinched in surprise, looking up into his face.
“Sorry,” he said in a low voice, holding both hands up. His previously mischievous smile had somehow changed, and it made her heart speed up a little.
“I can carry it,” he offered, reaching for it.
“No, I got it,” she replied firmly, and slung the shield on her back so she could wipe her palms on her pants, because they felt weirdly itchy all of the sudden. “You almost died today. Like, three times.”
His shoulders slumped.
“True,” he said. “But if you get tired or anything -”
“Percy.”
“Yeah, okay.”
As they walked back to the diner in relative silence, the realization that she had nearly left Percy to die encased in that gold hit her like she had run into a brick wall. Rattled, she snuck a look back at him and saw that he was already staring at her
“What?” she asked briskly, trying to cover her embarrassment.
“I, uh…” he said, looking back down at his feet. “I heard what you said. To Hephaestus.”
Her cheeks flamed with heat.
“And?” she challenged, and hated how high her voice now sounded.
He stopped walking. They had reached the parking lot.
“Did you mean it?”
She stopped, too, and turned around to face him. Took a deep breath. Squared her shoulders.
“Yeah, Seaweed Brain,” she said. “Any other stupid questions?”
Percy smiled that smile that made her pulse skitter again, which was very annoying, so she turned away to push the door open.
“Probably,” he said, and followed her into the diner.