Work Text:
It takes him three minutes and thirteen seconds to find her. Perhaps find isn’t the right word, as there are only so many hidden spots of solitude at Camp. Nothing about the beach calms Annabeth in this moment, but her feet carried her there faster than she could register where she was headed.
It’s cold, for the middle of June. Annabeth buries her feet into the damp sand, all the way to her ankles. The sun sinks below the horizon, leaving the sky a dark orange, purple, and blue.
He sits next to her. Neither speak. They’re so close, but not enough. She’s terrified that if she touches him, her hand will pass right through, proving his presence is a sick, twisted nightmare. Still, Annabeth can feel his body heat, and it’s like a rubber band has snapped across her arm, because she’s hit with the indisputable fact of him being alive that has her saying just that.
Percy doesn’t laugh, not like he would if the circumstances were different. “Yeah.” His voice comes out broken, and he clears it. “I’m alive.”
“You’re an asshole.”
He does laugh then, unexpectedly. Her heart unthaws a bit. “Maybe.”
“Two fucking weeks.” Annabeth shakes her head, unsure if it’s out of annoyance or disbelief. “You’re lucky I don’t finish the job now.”
“I’ll count my blessings.” He spreads his hands out, moonlight reflecting off his palms. “But I think the whole fake death thing fits for someone like me, right?”
“Don’t be cute. What took you so long?”
“I’m sorry.” Defect, deflect, deflect. Annabeth wants him to admit where he was and who he was with, though she knows his confirmation will just hurt her more. Maybe it would hurt him as well. “But I’m here now, and I’m not leaving again. Or, you know, blowing myself up.”
“Please don’t say that. You can’t promise permanence, not when…” She swallows the lump in her throat. “Neither of us can. Demigods don’t get that luxury.”
In fourteen short months, Percy Jackson will die. Sixteen isn’t an outrageous age for demigods to die. Everyone at camp is lucky to be alive no matter how old they are. Percy is both the luckiest and unluckiest of them all—he has a predetermined date of death. Annabeth has a clock counting backwards to the end of the world. 61 weeks, 427 days, 614,880 minutes, 36,892,800 seconds. It’s not enough. Thirty years wouldn’t be enough time with him.
Annabeth knew Percy would die from the moment he blinked up at her in the infirmary. She knew he would die when he was claimed, when he went to Olympus to return the master bolt, when he himself took responsibility for the prophecy. Though there’s a difference between knowledge and acceptance.
He wasn’t supposed to die in the mountain. He wasn’t supposed to sacrifice himself for her, though he’s been doing it for years. Fourteen days, 336 hours, 20,160 minutes, 1,209,600 seconds of not knowing where he went. Praying to every god he would come back. And he did. And Annabeth is furious.
“I hate you so much,” she whispers. She can’t fight the shakiness in her fingers. He can’t do that to her. He can’t disappear then walk back into her life like nothing happened. It was a trial run for the future, and Annabeth failed miserably. Her eyes burn and her throat is tight. “I hate you I hate you I—” Sobs wrack her body so uncontrollably, she lets it happen. She buries her head into his shoulder, and he holds her without hesitation.
A hand comes up to the back of her head, stroking her hair. It’s so sweet, so intimate, that Annabeth’s tears fall even faster. She takes gasping breaths against the fabric of his shirt, but Percy doesn’t seem to mind. He’s whispering little nothings to her, shushes and we’re okay’s and just let it out’s.
She wants to hold him and never let go. Damn the Great Prophecy, damn her prophecy. Percy is suffocating her, and it’s never felt more comforting.
The ocean is all around her. She thinks of the sea of monsters, where she was terrified and depleted, but a hug underwater felt like home. He felt like home.
She loves him, she knows she does, she’s probably felt it since their first summer together. Annabeth has given her heart freely to too many people who forced her away. They left with no penance. Annabeth doesn’t expect anything better from Percy, but gods does she want to.
Who will hold her when he’s gone, really gone? She doesn’t want to think about it.
“I made you a shroud,” she chokes out. The tears have emptied now, an ocean drained, but the brokenness in her throat stays.
“I know,” Percy says softly, a stark contrast to her own voice, and his arms tighten around her. “Thank you.”
She doesn’t know how long they stay like this, Annabeth leaning into him, her body twisted uncomfortably in their embrace. A sudden strong breeze makes her realize just how cold the night has become, and she disentangles herself from his arms. She’s just made it more awkward than it has to be, and they’re back to being twelve years old, lonely and objecting to friendship.
“We gotta stop meeting like this,” Percy says, with a lightness that tells Annabeth it’s supposed to be a joke. She cocks her head to the side.
“Hugging after we thought the other was dead,” he explains, his face a bit pink. Annabeth’s mouth twitches into a smile for half a second.
“I didn’t think you were.”
“You didn’t?”
The last line of her prophecy comes to mind, the one she has kept locked away since the Oracle spoke it. Lose a love to worse than death.
She had been terrified—and will continue to be terrified as her quest is barely complete—that Percy would be the subject of this line. He’s been trying to get it out of her, but it would be admitting a secret she knows they both know, yet refuse to bring to light. She presumed the line was complete when she returned to camp, when she was utterly alone after having left with three others.
Was being lost in oblivion worse than death? Annabeth knew Percy wasn’t dead, not really, so she knew his absence was the gods’ faults. To exist in the limbo between here and there, yes, it made perfect sense. Worse than death.
“Never.”
Percy gives her the side eye. “That eulogy said differently.”
He barely heard anything at all. Annabeth was going to say a lot more, though she didn’t know what. When Chiron told her she would be giving the parting words, she made herself sick attempting to bring pen to paper. Writing Percy in the past tense had her stomach twisting so uncomfortably that she barely conceptualized the first sentence before abandoning it completely.
Annabeth doesn’t want to know a life where she doesn’t have Percy. One where they can’t sneak out in the middle of the night to take a canoe out onto the lake, or stay up late watching movies at his apartment. No wasting days away in the hot strawberry fields, or giving up dozens of drachmas so she can help him study for tests.
How unfortunate it is this will be her reality in one short year. Will she give the parting words at his second funeral? She wouldn't allow anyone else to do it. Percy hides so much of himself from the world that there are few who truly know him. Annabeth doubts she would be able to paint the complex picture that is Percy Jackson in one speech, though she could try. She will try for him.
“I never fully believed you were gone. Everyone kept telling me I had to face reality. Chiron wanted me to start thinking about who I would bring with me when I went back in.”
Percy’s eyebrows raise. Then something changes in his gaze. “Connor?”
She could smack him. “Shut up. I don’t want to go back there with anyone but you.”
It sits between them.
“Sometimes I really don’t like this place,” Percy mutters bitterly. “Everyone telling you you’re lying to yourself then making you continue the quest like nothing happened.” He’s angry for her, and Annabeth feels a rush of something hit her chest. Percy runs a hand through his curls, passing through gray. The breeze pushes his hair right back. “We don’t get to breathe anymore.”
There’s something about this moment—the quiet push and pull of the water in front of them, the darkness of the sky. It’s just them and the earth. Annabeth considers the weight of what she’s about to say and casts it off to sea.
“I barely felt like I was living,” she admits. Percy’s fingers—which had been tapping against his knee—still. “What was I supposed to do or think? It’s not like we had your body as proof. I prayed, but there was silence on the other end.” Annabeth blinks hard. The blur in her eyes must be from the ocean and wind around them. “When everyone starts telling you to accept something you know is a lie, you start to self-destruct a bit.”
A beat. Then he says, “You start to believe it.”
“A little. Two weeks is a long time, but I’m glad it wasn’t more.” She looks at him, to find him already watching her. His brows are furrowed, with that crease between them that has Annabeth wanting to press her thumb against to relax. She and Percy are mere inches away from each other. Annabeth is taken back to being inside the volcano, where she was hot and sweaty and gross, but her discomfort was forgotten in the two seconds of pressing her lips against his. Annabeth has thought of that moment countless times since it happened. She could’ve sworn he leaned in just as she pulled away, but maybe it was her mind conjuring what she wished to be true.
“Be honest with me,” Annabeth says. “How long did you stay on that island after you were healed?” He walked into camp with a slight limp. Surely, that must have been on the recovery end of his injuries.
His face scrunches like the question makes him uncomfortable. “Days were different. It didn’t feel like a twenty-four hour schedule. But I woke up one morning—I had been there for a little while at that point—and I still felt really tired, but otherwise I was fine. I just wanted to go home. It was nice and everything, but I could never just forget about what I left. Hephaestus showed up a few hours later, gave me a choice, then a few hours after that, a raft showed up.”
Annabeth noticed he still avoided mentioning her. The one who cared for him and… and what?
“Why did you really come back? You could’ve stayed there forever. You would be safe.”
His expression twists into something akin to resentment. “I wasn’t going to leave everyone to fend for themselves while everything was getting worse.” His thinly veiled tone isn’t for the statement, it’s for her question. Like it is completely wrong of her to assume there was an appeal to apathy. Annabeth can sense things will only be like this for them more and more in the future, if they start keeping things from each other. They can’t afford mistrust; if Annabeth can’t trust Percy, she can’t trust anyone.
“You can’t blame me for having questions.”
“I’m not blaming you for having—”
“Yes, you are, you’re pissed because I asked—”
“It’s really not your business what I did when I was gone.”
“Okay, fuck you, I never asked that?”
“You implied it.”
“You can’t read my mind.”
“I know a lot more than you think.”
The sound of the waves crashing ahead seems to grow louder with their voices.
“Oh yeah? Then you should know that I know exactly who was on that island with you.”
“It doesn’t fucking matter—”
“Well I didn’t think it did until you kept avoiding talking about her!”
“Can I not keep one thing to myself? Jesus Christ, Annabeth, you’d think I know every secret of yours the way you’re demanding to know mine.”
It should be studied how Percy can go from being the only one able to comfort her to tearing her down completely.
“You love contradicting yourself if it means you’ll win an argument,” she says incredulously.
He rolls his eyes. “Had to have learned a few things from you over the years.”
Annabeth is one more bitchy comment away from smacking Percy across the face. “Fuck, you’re infuriating! Reset.”
He sighs, and Annabeth didn’t know until now that a breath of air could sound so annoyed. “Fine. Reset.”
For fighting so goddamn much over the course of their relatively short friendship thus far, Annabeth and Percy devised a little system for when stupid arguments got out of hand. Reset meant return-to-people-who-like-each-other mode. All is forgiven—or at least attempted to be forgiven. Annabeth loses a bit of her dignity whenever she’s the one to call it, but it’s better than not speaking to him for days out of pettiness.
Annabeth looks forward. The water is suspiciously still, but she notices far more sand is wet then it previously was before. Were they so distracted they didn’t notice the unnatural pull of the tide? It almost came to their feet. Percy doesn’t seem to notice. His eyes are closed, and that line in between his brows is back, like he’s concentrating on something. In all honesty, it’s his RBF. Annabeth has heard younger campers call this look scary, which doesn’t compute with Annabeth. Maybe it’s because Percy is angry more often than not, or at least a little miffed at all times, so that look is nothing more than annoyance in her eyes.
Annabeth catches the movement of his hand dragging back and forth in the sand, constructing lines and erasing them in the next wave of his hand. She looks back at the water, where the tide seems to mimic his rhythm. The puppeteering would be mesmerizing if she didn’t notice the angry red splotches running up Percy’s hand, skin raised and harsh. The scars travel up his arm like wild vines. Those weren’t there two weeks ago.
Annabeth moves her hand without thinking but comes up short to hover above his wrist. His eyes open, and he looks at her.
“Percy, are these from—”
He tugs at his sleeves before she can finish, but he’s still wearing that stupid cotton shirt from that stupid island so the ends don’t stretch past his wrists.
“I’m fine.” His expression is blank, but there’s something painful behind his eyes.
How was Annabeth so ignorant? He’s wearing fucking shorts and she now looks at his legs to find the same marks, ending just above his knees. Had she been avoiding looking at him, truly looking at him since he got back?
“No, no you’re not, that’s from lava and—”
“They won’t fully heal, it’s fine. I guess some magic isn’t strong enough.”
Annabeth feels a bout of sorrow replace her panic, a pang of guilt in her chest so deep she jolts away from him. Her body goes cold from the absence of him next to her.
Percy stands up with her. Everything is overwhelming, even his height advantage over her. “Annabeth, don’t,” he pleads, but she doesn’t know what for. He’s far too close, and she can’t breathe.
She left him, and gods, what happened? Did lava rain down from above before he made his escape? Was it targeted at him? Was he forced to endure it in a sick method of torture?
Percy Jackson has never and will never deserve a bad thing in his life. Even when he’s being a jerk, like five minutes ago. Yes, she deeply desired to hit him, but it was for the purpose of slapping some sense into him. He doesn’t need this new mark of pain with scars to prove it. If Annabeth could protect him forever she would. It’s why it hurts so much when he pushes her away to fight what should be a shared battle. He doesn’t deserve a single scratch on his skin or a threat to his life, ever.
Annabeth is reminded then that prophecies are threats. A single choice shall end his days. Percy is going to die. He might know it, he might not. Annabeth thinks he might suspect it, if he has deciphered anything from her and Chiron’s coded language over the years. There’s nothing that can be done to stop it. Fate can’t be rewritten to one’s selfish desires.
“I left you there,” says a trembling voice. Annabeth registers it is her own.
“Hey, no—”
“That isn’t what we do!” she cries. “We’re suppos—we’re supposed to stay together or else shit like this happens.”
The same red marks travel up his neck, which must mean they cover his arm as well. Annabeth is going to be sick. What else is covered? What else is he hiding from her? Are they riddled all over his body, proof of her betrayal?
Your fault, your fault. This wouldn’t have happened if you stayed. It’s your fault, it’s your fault he was nearly burned alive.
Percy takes her hands in a vice grip. It shocks her, bringing her back to the present to look him in the eye. His gaze is intense. “If I wasn’t my father’s son I would be dead. Full stop. You would be dead.” The weight of his statement sits between them. Quietly, he adds, “You’re too smart not to know that. You want to kill yourself to stay by my side?”
She swallows. “It’s what you would do. It’s what you did do.”
“This isn’t your fight,” he says with no room for disagreement. “If anyone in the fucking world deserves to be alive, it’s you.”
“That doesn’t…”
“What?” His jaw clenches. “Are you saying you’re not worth it? I’d take it again a million times if it meant you got out safe.”
She drops his hands. Percy can’t just say things like that without warning, without considering how thoroughly it will rock her. Annabeth can’t wrap her head around someone caring for her so deeply. It doesn’t make sense. There has to be something she’s missing, but she won’t be able to figure it out within the mess of tears and shouting this night has brought out.
“Don’t say that,” she pleads.
Percy shrugs a bit, like the truth is so so simple. (It’s not.) “Fatal flaw, right?”
Annabeth crosses her arms to shield herself from the cold. “How do we always manage to fight?”
“You’re you, and I’m me.” They are their parents’ children, after all.
She hums. “Makes you wonder.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
He smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. He understands, though it remains unspoken. Annabeth is alright with that for now. Their prophecies loom over their heads. Meaningful glances are all she can handle. Anything more would just hurt worse after he’s gone.
He touches her elbow, and she looks from the sand to his eyes. They’re dark, reflecting from the world around them, so late into the night. There’s a little dot of white, and Annabeth has a crazy, probably embarrassing thought that it’s a star trapped within his gaze, sized down and existing in his eyes just for her.
“We’re okay?” he asks.
Annabeth has met death before across its various iterations. Their names are marked on her skin: Grace; Castellan; even her own, Chase. She won’t allow Jackson to be added so carelessly.
Annabeth nods wordlessly. They sit back on the sand, close, their arms pressed together. She takes his hand.
“Don’t leave,” she whispers.
“Not going anywhere. Not if I can help it.”