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It's two in the morning when someone shakes her awake. Annabeth groans and rolls over, knife at a throat before she can blink.
The wars have left their mark.
Malcolm raises his hands in surrender. "Sorry, sorry," he says. "Just me."
Annabeth blinks. She's home, Camp Halfblood, her cabin. She's home. In a few weeks she and Percy will leave for New Rome University. Her birthday is tomorrow, or, rather, today. The war is over.
It's still two in the morning.
"What's going on?" she asks. She won't be able to go back to sleep now.
"Your boyfriend is doing something," Malcolm says, and… yeah, she should have expected this.
"What?"
"He snuck past the harpies and he's in the kitchen," Malcolm says, his voice rising higher like a question. "We… don't know what's going on. Someone woke up and found him and then woke me up and—"
"Then you woke me up," Annabeth concludes, "to solve your mystery."
He nods. "Everyone wants to know."
A dozen heads stick out of bunk beds. They are all much too curious to let this rest; it is a curse of their nature.
Annabeth sighs. Sometimes she feels much too old for this.
"Have you considered it's my birthday?" she says.
"Oh," says Malcolm. It echoes in a dozen voices around the cabin.
"It's probably a surprise," one of the newest cabin members deduces. Annabeth valiantly does not roll her eyes.
"I better go see what he's up to," she decides.
"You'll ruin the surprise!" someone says.
Annabeth does roll her eyes, then, shrugging a camp hoodie on over her pyjamas and sticking her feet into socks and her boots. "I will, will I?"
That gets her a chorus of apologies. She leaves through the front door and marches down towards the cafeteria. She's 18 now, officially, and thus not bound by any curfew, and by the gods she'll act like it. Those are the rules: you come of age in the eyes of the gods at 16, become an adult in the eyes of the law and camp rules at 18, and at 21 the US government decides you're probably mature enough to drink.
It is what it is.
The harpies let her pass without comment, which she hadn't expected, despite knowing she should be allowed. They're all slightly damp and muttering.
Percy's still seventeen. He's definitely not allowed to be out.
When she finds him in the kitchen, he's humming, wearing an apron, and doing the washing up, the lava searing the dishes clean.
"Seaweed brain," she says, and he turns to her smiling.
"Wise girl," he says, moving towards her and then thinking better of it, taking off his gloves first. "Is it later than I thought? I could have sworn I'd been here less than an hour."
"It's two a.m.," she informs him.
He puts his hands on her waist, and smiles like he's won a prize. "Happy birthday!"
She tilts her head up to accept his kiss, luxuriating in it for a moment.
"What are you doing?" she has to ask, eventually. Something smells like vanilla, maybe with a whiff of caramel.
"It was meant to be a surprise!" Percy says. "Ah, okay. Fine. Wait, how good are you at baking?"
"Terrible," Annabeth says, flatly. His look of surprise is as sweet as it always is, when she admits to not knowing something. "When do you think I would have learned, Percy?"
He ducks his head. "My mum taught me a bit," he says, "but I have no idea what temperature these ovens are at, so I'm going to be guessing at timing, when I take them out."
"Cake?" Annabeth guesses.
"It's a surprise," Percy repeats, which means yes. She kisses him again. Cake, not appearing magically on the table, but made by her boyfriend, because he loves her. Birthday cake, made by hand. The sweetness of it makes her throat clog up.
They hold hands in front of the oven. Percy's right: there's no temperature indicator. It's heated by real fire underneath.
"Smells good," Annabeth tells him, because it's true.
He beams at her. "I couldn't decide what to go with," he says, "so there's one that should be, like, caramelly popcorn flavour, or at least that's what the recipe said. I don't know how you make a cake taste like that, but I'm pretty sure I got all the steps right, so I guess we'll find out. Then, in case that one was messed up, I made vanilla too. And then I panicked and made chocolate cake, 'cos that one's easy and I found a lot of chocolate chips."
"Are you trying to feed the whole camp?" she asks, overwhelmed in the best way. It's a half-thought-out plan, as it often is, but executed with so much care.
His eyes widen. "I should do a gluten-free dairy-free option," he says. "And vegan."
Annabeth shakes her head fondly. "Cake for breakfast," she says, laughing. "Okay. Hand me an apron. Show me how we do this."
In the end, the first batch of cakes comes out slightly burnt, and the gluten free one doesn't rise properly, but it's hard to care. They kiss and talk while the first lot cool and the ones she helped with bake. It's a better start to her birthday than she'd feared, when she was woken up at two. She's got flour in her hair; Percy's apron is covered in batter. They both wear smiles.
Percy ices the cakes with frosting or cream, his tongue sticking out slightly as he does. The sun is rising through the windows. Campers are starting to appear there too, yawning or bright-eyed.
"Ready to serve breakfast?" she asks, and he laughs.
"Almost," he says, and sticks eighteen candles in one of the cakes. It wobbles, slightly.
"Then one for luck," he says, and adds it. "Ready."
The camp cheers when they see the cakes.
"That is overboard," Malcolm says. Connor and Travis, behind him, are whispering to each other.
Percy lights the candles. Annabeth blows them out. The people she grew up with cheer and clap and sing, a warm buffer of joyous noise.
"If you hit the bottom you've got to kiss the cook!" Connor yells, when Annabeth picks up the knife.
She rolls her eyes, neatly cuts the cake, and sets down the knife to dip Percy, to general shouting and applause. The cake, when she eats it, doesn't taste exactly like popcorn. It's closer to salted caramel. She already knows that the next time she eats ambrosia, it'll taste like today.
She watches Drew take a suspicious mouthful of a slice of the gluten free cake, watches as she goes back for a second, less hesitantly. Travis and Connor steal what's left of the vanilla one: she stopped them with a knife and a raised eyebrow when they came for the caramel.
"Not bad," Clarisse says, taking her third slice of chocolate cake as Annabeth puts the knife down again. "Happy birthday, I guess."
"Thanks," Annabeth says, and means it.
"What cake do you want for your birthday?" she asks Percy, much later, as the sun sets. She feels warm the whole way through, like her smile will live inside her forever.
"Cookie cake," he says, instantly.
"What?"
"It's when you make cookie dough but bake it like a cake," he explains. "Crispy on the outside, still like cookie dough in the center."
"People do that on purpose?"
He laughs, shoulders shaking against her own. "Well… not the first time."
It's so sweet she has to kiss him, sugary and open-mouthed. She wants this next birthday and the next and the next and the next, forever, until every hair on her head is grey and his smile has lines at the corners. She knows with a warm certainty, without bluster or envy or pretense, that they can have it.