Chapter Text
The note hadn’t said much and Annabeth wasn’t certain if she was meant to take it as a summons from her friend, Hazel, or her praetor. Still, she hadn’t been terribly worried when the runner had brought it to her apartment door. She’d been studying and, quite frankly, eager for an excuse to stop so she was content to accept the note at face value and didn’t fret much during her walk through New Rome.
The note hadn’t mentioned anything about urgency, just Please come to the Principia when you are able. Thanks. Hazel. x
So Annabeth meandered, enjoying the sun and the fresh air and the complete absence of Advanced Economics. She even stopped by her and Hazel’s favorite coffee joint and grabbed them both their usual orders. By the time Annabeth had reached the principia, she was in a better mood than she had been in hours. Maybe days. Midterms were in a couple of weeks and Annabeth was not feeling as optimistic as she would have liked.
Hazel was waiting outside, pacing between two columns, while Frank watched. Annabeth smiled and waved. “Hey! Sorry, Frank, I would’ve grabbed you something too if I’d known this was a group thing.”
Both Hazel and Frank seemed to freeze as she approached and Annabeth’s smile slipped off her face. Okay. So maybe this wasn’t a Friend Hazel summoning. “What’s wrong?” Annabeth asked, all the weight of her years and experience behind the question. She felt very silly suddenly holding two coffees.
Hazel took pity on her and grabbed her own cup. “Thank you. Sorry. I just—” She turned to Frank who looked just as lost.
“Whats. Wrong.” Annabeth repeated, heartbeat already racing.
“Nothing!” Frank assured. “Seriously. Nothing bad just…”
“...unexpected,” Hazel supplied weakly when Frank looked at her desperately, though she cringed as she said it. “I’m sorry. We’re not doing this right, but— to be frank, I have no idea what the right way would be.”
“Guys,” Annabeth said tensely. “I’m about to draw my knife on you if someone doesn’t start explaining why you’re both looking at me like… that,” she said, pointing to them with her damn cup of to-go coffee. There was nowhere to set it down and setting it on the ground felt silly but after everything Annabeth’s been through, her whole nervous system jumped to either war or nausea at the slightest nudge and neither of those paired well with her bitter fucking black coffee.
Still better than Hazel’s sugary caramel concoction if you asked her though. But that was besides the point.
“There was an intruder at the tunnel entrance,” Frank said.
“Well, not an intruder,” Hazel corrected. “More like a… stranger.”
“But not a stranger.”
“Well, not to us, but see, we had Alya and Matty on guard duty and they’ve only been here for a couple of years and—”
“Guys!”
“It was him!” Hazel squeaked. “The guards didn’t believe him so they called us and, well. We didn’t believe it either, but then we saw him.”
“Barely looked like him,” Frank muttered, eyes downcast and so, so sad.
“But it was. We talked to him. Let him get cleaned up a little.” Hazel stepped forward, eyes wide and watering and filled with some mixture of elation and desperation and maybe a little fear based on how closely she was watching Annabeth. “It’s him.”
Until that last bit, Annabeth would have said she had no idea what they were talking about, but — it’s him. There was only one him who mattered to Annabeth like this, that would put that level of apprehension in her friends faces. Only one person—
“Percy.”
She was rushing past her friends before her coffee had even hit the cement.
###
Annabeth didn’t like to think about that final day down there, Percy shoving Annabeth into the elevator at the last second, bodying her in without so much as a final goodbye because he knew she would rather stay and die beside him than leave and live alone.
So she didn’t.
She didn’t talk about it. Not when she rejoined the Argo II. Not when she made it back to camp, sat across from Chiron as he looked so concerned about her. Not when all of camp stared and whispered as she sat still and sullen with a full plate in front of her at the Athena table. Not when they begged her to get help when she woke up crying and screaming so often that she had started sleeping alone in the Poseidon cabin. She still had nightmares there, but at least she woke fewer people.
She talked about it only once and she made Grover come with her to Sally’s because he deserved to know too, but she wasn’t sure she had the stomach to get through it once, much less twice.
So she told Percy’s favorite person in the world and the best friend he ever had how Annabeth was only there with them now because Percy wasn’t and Percy was there because Annabeth had been careless. He fell for her and she hadn’t even been able to get him back out.
He was still there.
Maybe he was dead.
Maybe he was alive.
She went through her life wondering if today was the day Percy died. Maybe it would be better if he had died in that initial battle — quick.
She would never know the moment his life ended, so somewhere around the year anniversary, Annabeth simply decided he was dead. That felt more merciful, on top of more realistic, but that opened up a whole new slew of tragedy. If he died in Tartarus, would he still make it to the Underworld? To Elysium? Would she get to see him again even in death?
Had she condemned him to an eternity of hell? Had she condemned herself to an eternity of solitude.
There would be no moving on, certainly no moving forward.
For over two years, Annabeth very well could have been classified as dead herself, but that first year especially was existentially brutal. She cut herself off from her friends and her mortal family. She tried to be miserable and isolated at Camp, but it was filled with people who cared about her and thus were nosey and intrusive. Why couldn’t they just let her sleep all day, every day? Why couldn’t they let her waste away?
She’d drink fire if they had it. Seemed fair. It was all Percy would have to consume.
It was recommended — heavily suggested, demanded, etc — that she spend some time with Sally, who sent unending Iris Messages and letters, who was a big driving force behind Camp’s nosiness. She talked to Chiron and Grover and even Will as head of the Apollo cabin. Sally was kind and caring and loved Annabeth dearly and Annabeth could not handle it.
Percy was his mother’s son. He had her laugh, and that patient expression while he listened to someone he cared about, and he’d picked up her withering, knowing look when he knew Annabeth was keeping secrets. Annabeth didn’t want to see Percy in the woman she had stolen him from.
When the door to the Poseidon cabin had creaked open, Annabeth had assumed it was Will on his daily attempt to rouse and/or feed her. “Go away,” she groaned.
“Annabeth…” a shaky voice said and Annabeth jumped upright. Because there, in the Poseidon cabin of Camp Half-Blood, a place that only permitted entry to those mythical and magical, stood the entirely mortal Sally Jackson. The woman’s eyes were tearing up as she looked her over. “I’ve already lost my son. Please, dear. Don’t make me lose my daughter too.”
And that was all it took for Annabeth to rush into her arms and break down sobbing.
Guilt still felt heavy in Annabeth’s every atom, but the last thing she wanted to do was cause Sally Jackson any more harm and it was clear that was what she had been doing the last year or so. For the first few weeks, Sally and Annabeth and Paul all just kind of sulked together. On several occasions, dinner consisted of each of them spooning ice cream out of their own individual pint on the couch, all of them sitting in silence while some brainless sitcom was on the television no one laughed at.
But after a while, Sally and Paul both sat Annabeth down to discuss the future. She’d bristled. Hell, she was ashamed to say she’d even shouted and screamed and stormed out and spent the next two weeks at Camp again. But eventually she realized they were right.
Specifically, Sally was right that Percy wouldn’t want this for you.
That was the exact line that had made Annabeth crack open and kick her chair to the ground, fury and grief sharp and ravenous within her, but still. Sally had been right.
So she signed up for GED courses.
The anniversary made everything worse again, but she’d mourned with Sally and Paul even when she felt like she didn’t deserve to. And when Annabeth broke down in tears and apologies, Sally held her tighter, assuring her as she always did that Percy had made his own decision and that the only thing worse than losing him would have been losing both of them.
If the first year had been all the worst emotions in high definition, she spent much of the second year in a fog. Distantly, she knew that wasn’t healthy either, but at least she attended her courses, did passably well in them too. She ate regularly, even got back to a work out routine after wasting away. She slept regular hours and kept herself clean and tended. When her friends reached out, she said yes and went and counted the hours until she could be back on the Jackson couch, staring at the TV for hours until someone noticed and asked her why it wasn’t on.
She’d learned it was helpful to have a book sitting next to her.
And Annabeth had spent much of that year content with the idea that she might live her life like that. It certainly seemed better than how she had felt the prior year, where she hadn’t felt very convinced she ought to do much living at all.
When Sally had brought up New Rome University, Annabeth had agreed simply because that had seemed easier than explaining why she no longer had any interest in further education or learning or, quite frankly, permanence.
There was no permanence. Nothing would last. Everything would fall.
Entropy and bad luck and fucking over Annabeth Chase specifically was the law of the universe.
But she was self-aware enough to know that wouldn’t sound encouraging. So she filled out the forms instead.
Hazel and Frank, as praetors, helped get her a small apartment for herself. It would even be free while she attended New Rome University — that's the Saving The World discount, Frank had joked, though his chuckles faded when she didn’t join. On bad days, which was more days than she liked, Annabeth thought the price for saving the world was too high.
It would have been too high at Percy. Adding on Leo and then Jason… Annabeth’s exhaustion was the only reason she didn’t storm Olympus and raze every single temple she’d designed and built to the ground. At some point in her year of fog, she’d realized she’d never really quit her Olympus gig. Then she decided she didn’t care. She hoped it had caused problems, her simply vanishing from work.
She suspected it barely went noticed, if at all.
Year three was the first glimmer of hope. Annabeth suspected the change of location was a major factor, and she suspected even more that this had been Sally’s intention when she’d pressed for it. After all, Sally had been encouraging of Annabeth simply getting her GED even if Paul had pursed his lips just a bit. It never felt judgemental, even disappointed wasn’t the right word. Maybe just sad? He knew that Annabeth had been doing well in school before— well. Before. So Sally pushing for New Rome and further education was likely just a convenient way to try to break Annabeth out of her fog.
It worked, slowly but surely. Camp and New York were littered with memories of Percy, jumpscares for her grief around every corner. She had far fewer memories of New Rome, and the ones she had she actually held close. Percy whispering that he couldn’t wait to show her around. Percy confessing, not here but in the Argo II stables, that he could see a future for the two of them there.
And, yes, it was devastating to know he wasn’t here to give her the tour or complain about classes with her, but there was also a comfort in knowing she was doing what he would’ve wanted. He had wanted this life. She would try to live it for him.
It wasn’t all smooth sailing. Annabeth started New Rome a year after she should have graduated High School, which wasn’t uncommon, but when others asked her what she had done with her ‘gap year,’ she had to hold herself back from spitting Trying not to kill myself, Sarah. How about you? How was the backpacking?
She didn’t make friends easily.
But she loved the ones she already had, growing ever closer to Frank and Hazel, two people who knew and loved Percy, but without as much of a weight. They missed him fiercely, she knew, but it was something different than the shared grief she had with Sally and she found it was the perfect balance. She didn’t have to hide how torn she was, nor did she have to worry too much about stomping on someone else’s grief.
Not to mention her guilt was quieter here.
Grover visited frequently, too, and even Thalia had stopped by a couple of times. She stopped by Camp whenever she was back in New York, which was frequently. That third year was about feeling the sun and the air again, about allowing herself the slightest taste of joy and living. She tried to ignore how obviously relieved her loved ones were.
It had been nearly five years now and still that grief weighed her. Still she had nightmares more nights than not. Still she wasn’t entirely sure how much she cared about getting her degree in architecture outside of going through the motions. Still she had no interest in making new connections and an absolute fury in her anytime someone recommended she branch out romantically.
There would be no more romance for Annabeth Chase. She’d found and lost her soulmate and that was the end of that. On good days she considered herself luckier than most to have had Percy even for a short while. On bad days she considered the merits and strategies of tearing down Olympus brick by brick.
She was cleverer than Luke, surely. And more justified.
Those thoughts led to the worst nights and feeling sick the following days like a hangover. Sometimes a literal hangover. Alcohol had entered the picture sometime in year three after the obvious active effort to keep a rampantly depressed or horribly fog ridden Annabeth away from the stuff ceased. She understood why and still she tried to be careful with it, especially since Annabeth didn’t really have people to go out and drink with for fun so most of her drinking was the sad, self-destructive kind.
But those nights weren’t terribly common for her. Maybe once a month. Two tops.
The point being, nearly five years in and Annabeth felt better than maybe she should be allowed to and probably as good as she ever would. She had cried from true joy when she had learned that Sally was pregnant and she went back for every holiday she could to snuggle Estelle and whisper stories of her big brother. At Sally's insistence, Annabeth had even reconnected with her dad and brothers (and stepmom, by default) again. She loved her friends and she gratefully welcomed her support systems.
Things were fine. Annabeth was fine. And that was fine.
###
Annabeth was not fine. Annabeth was an amalgamation of remnants, sewn together hastily and poorly. She was a ghost of herself and an idea of a person. She would crumble at the slightest wind.
And the boy on the other side of the door was a hurricane.
When he hadn’t been in the main room, Annabeth had run towards the private quarters without any prompting, though she vaguely registered her friends calling after her. She’d had a vision of herself rushing in and rushing into his arms and rushing and
She froze. She got to the door and she froze.
She heard her friends slow behind her. “Annabeth?” Hazel asked quietly.
“Tell me it’s him,” Annabeth said, suddenly doubtful of impossibilities. She’d spent so long piecing herself back together again. If she walked through this door and it wasn’t him—
“It’s Percy. He’s back. I— I don’t know how,” Hazel answered.
Annabeth put her hand on the door gently, like she could feel his heartbeat on the other side of it. “Can I…?”
“We’ll give you some time,” Frank surmised and she was grateful for it.
“We’ll just be outside if you need us, okay?” Hazel asked, and lingered like she might have been hoping for a response, but Annabeth was barely breathing. When she could no longer hear footsteps, she placed her forehead against the door.
“Please,” Annabeth whispered, her first prayer in nearly five years. “Let him be back. Let this be real. Please let me have him again.”
With the total sum of Annabeth’s strength, she slowly turned the knob and opened the door.
There was a sound Annabeth heard in her dreams and nightmares alike and dark movement. A body rushing to standing, a sword summoned from its mundane form.
There was a pair of eyes like the ocean on her. A boy who seemed to be breathing too much while she struggled to breathe at all.
He looks rough, was the idiotic, unconscious thought that flitted through her brain. Of course he does, but Annabeth had been cataloguing Percy’s appearance to determine his well being long before… Well. Before. So, even though she wanted to be nothing but deliriously happy, she couldn’t stop the part of her that noticed how gaunt he was, how much longer his hair was and how choppy and obviously self done the cut was. How many more scars littered his body and how even his eyes seemed a different shade.
She noticed all of it in a fraction of a second. She cared about none of it.
“Percy,” she breathed right as he exhaled a silent, “Annabeth.”
Then they were moving, rushing in perfect unison and colliding in the center, sword tumbling from his hand. Annabeth threw her whole weight at him in a way this new frame seemed ill prepared for and his knees buckled and they dropped to the ground and still she didn’t let go. She held him tighter than she’d ever held anything, fingers in his hair, face in the crook of his neck, legs wrapped around him, sobbing with all the grief she’d been trying to bury since she left that first year of rampant depression.
She cried in a way she hadn’t permitted in four years so she could lie to even herself about being fine.
But she hadn’t been fine. She didn’t believe in better halves and being unwhole without a lover, but the way she had lost Percy had left her feeling utterly halved and perpetually bleeding. Getting to her place of fine had been a matter of perfecting constant triage.
Percy, for his part, didn’t seem to cry, but held her silently, almost entirely still except for the slight tremble throughout his entire body. He held her back though, just as tight, his face pressed to her hair.
Finally, years later, or so it seemed, Annabeth pulled away just enough to place her hands at either side of his face and meet his eyes. He had a scar now at his temple and a deep one at the side of his neck, but she was so much more interested in the way his eyes watched her with a simple reverence like he was equally amazed that she was here. With only the strength of a whisper, Annabeth asked, “How are you here?” Percy raised a hand to wipe at Annabeth’s tears, which only made her cry harder. “Tell me it’s real,” she begged. “Tell me you’re here.”
“I’m here,” he said, his voice hoarse. “I’m mostly sure it’s real.”
Annabeth meant to shove him, meant to scream at him, but instead she pressed her forehead to his, only half sure she was laughing as she cried and told him, “I should kill you. I should kill you for what you put me through.”
“I’m sorry,” he told her.
And that only threw her back into heavy, heavy sobs, it taking several minutes of hearing Percy mutter apologies before she could get out, “Don’t apologize to me.”
He just kept wiping away tears from her cheeks even as more fell. “I didn’t want to leave you,” he said, his voice properly shaky for the first time. “I said I would never leave you. I didn’t leave you,” he repeated like a mantra.
Like a lifeline.
“I left you,” Annabeth cried.
Percy shook his head. “No. Never.”
“You were only there because—”
Percy chose that moment to press his lips to hers.
Annabeth knew, logically, that when Percy had been taken by Hera, their relationship had only been a few months old, and how much time had they really had on the Argo II before… well. Before. She knew, logically, that her level of hang up over him didn’t match these details.
But she and Percy together were somehow both anything but logical and the only logical answer. There was no other possible route for the two of them. She’d lived through too much not to believe in destiny, and she and Percy were each others. So, yeah. Their relationship had intensified a bit more quickly than the average sixteen year old’s relationship.
So kissing Percy, even after all these years, even after such a brief foray into a romantic relationship, felt like coming home. It felt like her other half was starting to get stitched back to her. It felt like Annabeth had been lying to herself these last few years about feeling sunshine and fresh air.
When Percy pulled away, out of breath despite its brevity, he told her firmly, “I never want to hear you blame yourself for what I did. Everything was worth it because you got out.”
And Annabeth’s heart swelled, meeting his gaze and seeing the love and adoration in his eyes, but still grief swelled. She wiped the one stray tear of his as she smiled sadly and held his face. “And for me nothing was worth it,” she told him, “because you did not.”
He brushed some of the hair that had slipped from her braid away from her face, frowning contemplatively. “You kept me alive.”
“I’m the only reason—”
“I don’t care,” he said plainly. “I say you’re not the only reason, but fuck it, even if you are, I don’t care. If I could go back in time, I’d change nothing. You got out. You all won. That was good to learn. And I got out too, because I promised I wouldn’t leave you, so I had to try. Not trying would be leaving and I said I wouldn’t leave you. I pushed you out, but I wouldn’t leave you.”
It was painfully clear from the intensity of his assurance that Percy had had this conversation with himself over and over and over again. How many times had he simply wanted to lie down and die? How many times had that seemed like the easier, better route? And how many times had he kept moving because he’d promised Annabeth something permanent?
Annabeth using Percy’s memory to attend class now seemed so small and insignificant, almost insulting. But he was still staring at her like she was treasure and Annabeth kind of never wanted him to stop.
What could she offer him? She had nothing of equivalent value. She had only the paltry offering of, “I love you. I loved you always. I’ve never stopped.” But Percy grinned like all of hell was a walk in the park if it meant he got to hear those words from her, like half of the ghosts haunting him had simply been whispering lies to the contrary and her confession had been all that was needed to dispel them.
She suspected his other demons would be harder to exorcise, but she would spend her whole life working at it. It was the absolute, pathetically least that she owed him.
“I love you too,” he whispered, happy and reverent. “If that wasn’t obvious.” She kissed him, both of them laughing when he nearly tipped over. “Not that I couldn’t sit here with you for… literally forever. I’ll die here with you if that’s—“
“No dying,” Annabeth told him, serious in the face of his levity.
“No dying,” he agreed easily. “So what’s next then?”
Annabeth leaned back and brushed hair out of her face self consciously. “I don’t… I don’t know. Sally!” She exclaimed, slapping his chest. “Your mom, we have to— Oh, gods, Percy we need to, you don’t, we should—“ Percy kissed her, which was probably for the best as she didn’t seem capable of finishing a sentence.
Sally didn’t know her son was alive.
Percy didn’t know his little sister existed.
She didn’t know which was the greater tragedy.
She was about to spit out Estelle’s name for lack of a better opening when Percy asked softly, “Can we… can we wait?” Annabeth jerked back roughly and Percy grimaced, looking ashamed. “She deserves to be told in person. I need to go to her. But I am so…” Percy closed his eyes and Annabeth realized in that moment that kissing her might not be the only reason he was out of breath.
He looked exhausted. When had he last slept? When had he last slept well?
“I need to tell her in person,” he said, resting his head against her shoulder. “Not a call. Not an Iris Message.”
Thoughtlessly, habitually despite the years since the action’s last occurrence, Annabeth ran one hand through his hair and the other snaked around to the small of his back. She knew the curse had left him years prior, when he’d first come to Camp Jupiter, but still he shivered like he always did.
Except this time he didn’t stop shivering.
He thinks big news should be learned in person, Annabeth thought, biting her lip. So… so Sally should tell him about Estelle, right? In person. Whenever they got to New York.
Which would be very soon, but didn’t need to be today.
“I have an apartment,” she told him, lacking a better transition. “It’s a little studio and full disclosure, it’s a mess. I wasn’t expecting company.”
He tilted his head so he could meet her eyes again. “I’m not company,” he told her and Annabeth smiled against his lips. It was a twist of a line she’d heard dozens of times in his cabin. She’d tease him about the mess of his space and he would just scoff. It’s not like I’m expecting company, Annabeth. And inspections aren’t for a couple of days.
Inspections are in two hours and excuse me? What am I?
He’d thrown her a genuinely baffled look the first time he told her: You’re not company. You’re you.
They’d repeated the conversation countless times, Annabeth playing pretend at annoyed and Percy playing pretend at insulted, but Annabeth had always held that simple comment so dearly. She wasn’t company. She wasn’t other. She wasn’t someone to put a show on for.
Every time Annabeth visited her dad, the house was spotless and her half-brothers complained about how much cleaning they’d need to do. Her stepmom would smile and assure her that the guest room was made up for her.
Percy cleaned nothing and welcomed her wholly into his life, full stop.
Sure, sometimes he did actually need to clean his trash heap of a room, but it never bothered her as much as she pretended.
“Percy Jackson,” Annabeth said teasingly. “Are you asking me to bring you home?”
When he kissed her it wasn’t playful or light or anything other than desperate and when he answered her it was neither a tease nor an innuendo. It was a quiet, exhausted beg.
“Please.”