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Annabeth starts almost as soon as Percy leaves with the rest of the summer campers.
The night before the summer session lets out, the cleaning harpies are always lax. Chiron and Mr. D turn a blind eye, for one night, to everyone sneaking out in the dark to have one last hangout before the madness of packing and dismissal the next morning.
Thalia vanishes to hang out with some of the Demeter and Apollo kids she’s gotten somewhat close with. Annabeth’s siblings mostly end up with the Hermes cabin. Her brother Malcolm winks at her when she rolls out of bed an hour past lights-out and pulls on her cap.
She hikes through the darkened camp. The braziers burn all night, oases of light in the inky landscape. Campers giggle and run through the paths, laughing and shoving and shushing each other ineffectively. It’s part of the fun of the night, the perceived rule-breaking.
When she gets to the Poseidon cabin, all the lights are out, but she can hear Grover’s laughter behind the walls. She bangs on the door. There’s a scuffle and a yelp and a burst of bright, brilliant laughter. Percy swings the door open, clearly having won the battle to get there first, and he’s grinning. In the pitch black past sunset, his phosphorescence is even more pronounced, ripples of blue-white light pulsing across his skin. It’s a joy response as often as it is a stress response, she has discovered. It always reminds her of stars.
His eyes flick over the seemingly empty space before him, and he snorts. “Come on, don’t ding-dong-ditch.”
She grins, wide enough to hurt, and says, “Okay.” She grabs him by the collar of his shirt and hauls him out the door, prompting a loud cackle and some snickering from Grover, who follows easily, prancing out of the doorway.
They race all the way down to the beach, running through the woods, sprinting down the dirt paths and vaulting fallen trees. Grover wins by a mile, as always, nature spirit cheater that he is, and by the time they reach the beach, both Annabeth and Percy are heaving. He flops down into the shallows, submerging his whole head and breathing heavily, water rushing in and out of his gills. Annabeth throws a handful of sand at his back, and gets promptly soaked by a wave for it. Grover says primly, “That’s what you get,” and then shrieks as he is doused by a second wave.
Percy surfaces, dripping and grinning and glowing like a deep sea creature, and Annabeth, drenched and salty and overflowing with joy, laughs and laughs and laughs.
They settle in the sand, legs tangled, heads on each other’s shoulders, and stare up at the stars. They talk for hours about nothing, until Grover is snoring on Percy’s shoulder and Annabeth’s eyelids are drooping. Against the crown of her head, his gills pulse rhythmically. “Hey,” she murmurs to him. “Will you promise me something?”
“Depends,” he says. “Are you gonna make me promise to eat vegetables while I’m gone? Because that’s gonna be a no.”
She snorts. “Don’t be stupid. Sally has that covered.” She bites her lip. The Hydra dances across the sky above them. “If anything else happens, like… with the monster stuff. IM and tell me?”
His stillness goes from gentle to weighted. He exhales slowly. She feels it on her scalp, warm from his lungs. “Okay,” he promises. A pause stretches between them, like taffy. “...Do you think anything else will happen?”
“I don’t know,” she admits, and hates her lack of knowledge. Hates not having a good answer for him.
He sighs. “Just my luck. Yeah, Wise Girl. Promise. You’ll be my first call.”
Annabeth doesn’t lift her head, just reaches down his side and flails for it. She finds his hand and squeezes. The scales on the back of it are smooth and warm. They stare up at the stars together as Grover snores on Percy’s shoulder, and in the corner of her eye, Percy glows, soft and gentle and constant, a faint happiness that his skin betrays.
The day after that, everyone leaves. The fifteen or so year-rounders are left behind in the quiet and the sweltering heat of early August.
And Annabeth starts making her sacrifices at every meal. One at breakfast: Lady Hestia, keeper of the home and the hearth, protect my friends in their homes far away from me. One at lunch that she feels less and less strongly about: Lady Athena, grant me the wisdom to protect my camp and my loved ones. And one at dinner that feels strange to give, but so, so important, one that always comes with the best cut of her meal: Lord Poseidon, tell me if Percy is done changing.
The first few nights, she’s respectful.
Lord Poseidon, if Percy’s body will change more, please send me a sign.
Lord Poseidon, Percy is trying to handle this, but it’s been so long since we had a child of yours here. Please help him.
Lord Poseidon, you don’t even have to speak to me. Just give him some guidance, please.
Annabeth is used to prayers with no answer. It should be routine. It should be easy. She should be able to accept it.
But for some reason, she can’t. All of Athena’s years of silence, Annabeth has accepted with equanimity, with the understanding that the gods are busy. That they aren’t required to care.
The problem is that, she knows that Poseidon does care. Annabeth has a dozen siblings, all like her, all wanting attention and love. Poseidon has one son, one demigod child who he loves and wanted enough to break an oath sworn to the River Styx. He loves Percy.
So all his silence does is piss her off. It’s stupid to antagonize a Big Three god. It’s stupid to attempt to bother the Lord of the Sea, Earthshaker, Stormbringer. It’s the type of insane move she would scold Percy for. But she finds that she doesn’t care.
After about a week, her prayers turn annoying.
Lord Poseidon, he keeps biting the insides of his cheeks. Even if you could just get him a custom mouth guard, that would be great.
Lord Poseidon, the nictitating membranes are great and all, but does he also need to be wearing sunglasses all the time? If you know how fast he’ll get eye damage, I would love to know that as well.
Lord Poseidon, he could already breathe water. He’s wondering what the gills are for. Are they extraneous? Are they to breathe something else?
She keeps at her strategy of annoyance all through August, into September, and then October. In early November, as frost starts to come to the valley, and the trees start to lose the last of their leaves, the dryads settling in to sleep through the cold months, Annabeth’s patience snaps. She runs out of grace. Poseidon has one, one child. It’s his fault that Percy still doesn’t seem totally comfortable in his skin. He could at least have the decency to give him an explanation.
Annabeth’s prayers turn accusing.
Lord Poseidon, is this your first demigod child to have these features? Because it doesn't seem like you even know how to help him.
Lord Poseidon, these things come from you. Since you didn’t even have the decency to warn him before this happened, you at least owe it to him to let him know what might be coming.
Lord Poseidon, I’m just asking for some warning, if you know what might happen with him in the future. I don’t think this is all he could become, so you might as well tell me, if you know. Clearly you won’t be around for him, if this happens again.
She tells herself it’s a strategy. Percy has always responded more rapidly to a challenge than to gentle pleading. Maybe Poseidon is the same. Chiron always says they’re too alike.
The truth, that she knows deep in her heart, is that she is prideful and possessive and she watched Percy drag himself through the summer through sheer will alone, his body foreign and oppressive to him. She wants to protect him. She wants to be able to save him. She wants to be able to repair her mistake, of not knowing this would happen before they went to the Sea of Monsters.
In late November, her last drop of restraint evaporates. She sneaks out of her cabin late at night, all the way down to the beach, with matches and an empty soup can. At the beach, she slashes slits in the metal with her dagger. She collects twigs and bits of driftwood, salty with sea spray. She drops them in the can and perches it on a stone, looking over the vast ocean and the crashing waves. The air is salty and fresh in her lungs. It just reminds her of Percy. With icy fingers, breath steaming in the cold, she lights a match and drops it in the can. Flame blossoms like a golden flower, flickering up through the metal walls, sheltered from the wind.
Annabeth pulls out a Snickers bar from her pocket, one of her last from the bag Percy brought with him when he visited camp during his fall break. She unwraps it and dumps the bit of candy into the flame. It dissolves, and the smell of burning chocolate melts into something sweeter. Seaside honeysuckle, and saltwater taffy, and the clean scent of petrichor that always hangs around Percy under the ocean smell, if you pay attention.
Standing on the rocks, looking out over the gray ocean and the dark sky, Annabeth takes a deep breath. She means to say something biting, like, Fine, if you won’t look out for him, I’ll do it all on my own. He turned out great, and he turned out great entirely without you.
But her eyes catch on the swell and dip of the black waves in the dark. The wind tugs at her hat and bites at her nose, and it’s so vast before her, this impossible seventy percent of the world that spit out her stubborn, wonderful friend. It’s so vast and he’s so small and it could hold him so easily and it barely tries.
Annabeth wants to say something biting.
Instead, staring out at the dark water, her breath hiccups in her chest, and tears well in her eyes, and what leaves her lips, a heartbroken whisper swallowed up by the roar and swell of the waves and the wind, is, “It’s like you don’t even love him.”
All at once, the wind dies. The ocean, for hundreds of feet in all directions, collapses back in on itself. The surface of the water goes glassy and still. The smell of petrichor and salt swells. “Please don’t accuse me of that,” says a voice behind her, hurt but sharp, too. Dangerous.
Annabeth turns slowly, tears blurring her vision.
She’s been to the winter solstice council meeting countless times. She knows the gods’ preferred skins, the way they choose, most often, to present themselves. The disguises they like to wear, the fragile shells they wrap around immortal, abstract concepts, so as not to shatter their children’s minds and souls.
Poseidon’s mask looks like Percy. He stands in the icy November air, skin exposed, unbothered by the cold. He wears Grecian sandals, boating shorts, and a blue shirt. He watches her with eyes so darkly blue they are nearly black. But there’s something different this time; his skin sits uneasily, like a theater mask slipped slightly askew. The corners of him blur and pull too tight. Something beneath it swells like the tide.
It occurs to Annabeth that maybe all of her biting comments have been getting to him. Good.
“Why not?” Annabeth challenges, trying to summon up the energy that wraps around Percy when he tells off gods and immortal monsters alike, the two types of being so very similar, after all. “It’s not like you’ve given me many reasons to believe otherwise.”
Poseidon stands there and watches her for a long, long moment, with his poorly built mask of personhood and his edges that blur and warp against the corners of reality. “I don’t think,” he says finally, “that the demigod pride of Athena is foolish enough to actually believe that I don’t care, after I sacrificed an entire war to save his life. So would you like to tell me why, exactly, you’ve been antagonizing me for months?”
The lump in Annabeth’s throat grows. It expands, digging into her soft palate like an anchor into the seafloor, refusing to let the spite that drove her here drift out to sea. “He honors you,” she spits out, tastes it like venom.
(Percy’s serrated shark fangs have started to be venomous. Paralytic. They found out after he playfully bit Clarisse one day, the two of them roughhousing too hard as per usual, and it left her twitching and immobile for an hour. Percy had apologized enough times that she threatened to dunk him in the pegasus poop pile if he said sorry one more time. He had cried about it later. She wants to ask him what it feels like, but she’s so scared of that look he gets in his eyes. The look that Grover had worn when he confessed to Annabeth one night that Percy dreams of being Theseus. That his mind holds the idea of drowning close and affectionate, like a vicious lover.)
“He honors you, and you abandoned him,” she accuses. “He prayed to you. He prayed to you before he left, and you let him leave, and you didn’t even warn him.”
Poseidon watches her. The air and the ocean are still and cold, holding their breath. “What would you have had me do?” he asks.
“Tell him,” Annabeth all but yells. “Warn him. Help him now. He didn’t get these things from Sally. Tell him how to chew without biting the inside of his cheeks and tell him to stop peeling out his scales and tell him what should be in his diet now, because it can’t be the same. Help him! You’re a god. You could help him.”
Poseidon’s mask of personhood does not breathe. It doesn’t need to. Breathing is a farce for humans and monsters and demigods. For things that die. For things that live. Breathing is not for gods.
“Child, I am the Father of Monsters,” he says finally, and his voice echoes strangely, as if from underwater. “Do you think, truly, that my nearness would help him? Do you think that my presence would save him from his legacy? From the way he loves you all, enough to become something he hates to save you?” He steps closer, and the world shudders with him. The mask slips, and Annabeth glimpses a fractal corner of-
Scales and teeth and claws and frills and gills and glowing lights and the crash of waves and the howl of wind that parts before a tsunami and the push and pull of the endless tides and the shuddering of cracking earth and the snapping of a shark and the steady growth of coral and the warmth of tropical water and the crushing pressure of the deep and the acid of sea vents and the beating of feathered wings and the stretch of equine muscles charging through surf and fangs and fangs and fangs and-
“Do you think,” Poseidon challenges, as Annabeth gasps and retches and her soul tries to splinter before the whole, unbroken face of divinity, “that I am any closer to understanding him than you are? Do you think that I can help him without shattering something that I cannot put back together?” His voice is full of grief as old as the seas. “Mortals. You are small and strong, so strong, but you are fragile. I am not made to hold fragile things, Annabeth Chase. I am the Stormbringer, the Earthshaker, the Father of Monsters, and Percy-” His voice breaks. “Percy is my son. He is too much like me. He will break before he bends. And I will not be what breaks him.”
Annabeth spits up saltwater that shouldn’t be in her mouth. Her blood roars in her ears, liquid misbehaving. She wipes her mouth stubbornly. “You won’t break him,” she says. “You can’t.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Because he doesn’t love you enough for that.”
The silence sits between them. The taste of salt in the air grows from shocking to overwhelming. It occurs to Annabeth that he could smite her for this. She doesn’t care. Demigods die young all the time.
“Is he done changing?” she demands.
Poseidon does not exhale, because gods do not breathe or die or live, but the air around them twists, a sea breeze refusing to settle. “That depends,” he says finally.
“On what?”
“On Percy. On how far he is willing to stretch the divinity inside of him before it snaps.”
Ice crawls up her spine. “But he could keep changing.”
“He could.”
“How?”
Poseidon snorts. “I am not the Fates, child, nor am I my nephew. I gave up Prophecy long ago. It could be anything. Any features of a creature of the deep. Though the Fleece has already pushed him far. Anything from this point forward would likely only be an exacerbation of the features he has already claimed.”
Annabeth nods clinically. “Okay.” That’s enough. She can prepare for that. She can be ready for that. Athena always has a plan. “You should talk to him,” she says. “Tell him that. Tell him… whatever else he needs to know.”
The sea, still and silent, ripples. “Interference with our children is forbidden.”
“Sure. About as forbidden as Percy existing, right?”
Poseidon is still for a long moment, and then he laughs. It isn’t a pleasant sound. It is the chittering of dolphins and the crash of surf and the sudden splintering of a fault line. “My son is teaching you impertinence.”
She swallows. “We could all take a leaf out of Percy’s book some time. Sally raised him well.”
Poseidon’s face softens. “She did,” he says softly. Sadness crawls across his face. “I endanger him every time we speak.”
Annabeth’s fury is a living thing. It devours her heart, and something else, something weeping and raging and all-consuming, devours her fear. She looks the Lord of the Seas in the eyes and sees Percy behind them. You’re a coward, she wants to spit at him. But when she opens her mouth, what spills out, wobbly and tear-stricken, is, “You have three years.”
Poseidon stiffens.
Tears streak down Annabeth’s cheeks. “You have three years, and you’re wasting them.”
Percy’s father stands there and stares, and his skin is an ill-fitting mask for a creature vaster than time and space. The sea is a possessive, protective monster. The legendary wrath of the monster that chased Odysseus all the way back to Ithaca for offending his son is gone in this moment, replaced by a grief equally as deep and wide. Even the Seas are not stronger than Fate.
“I see you, you know?” Annabeth says. “And it won’t save you. Staying away won’t save you from missing him when he’s gone.” She should know.
They stand there, mortal and god, warped reflections of one another. The only difference is that Annabeth is allowed to love Percy before he dies. Not that rules have ever stopped Percy or his father. But fear does. Fear will. Fear of loss, as if loss doesn’t come either way, whether you run from it or toward it.
Poseidon smiles, and his skin settles. He looks almost human, for a moment. He looks like Percy. “You do your mother credit,” he says, and there’s something excruciatingly sad in his eyes. “Not knowledge. I have more of that than you could ever. But wisdom… that, I have always lacked.”
Annabeth blinks, stunned. Acknowledgement, the kind she has always craved from her mother, handed out by her mother’s enemy.
“You are a good friend, Annabeth Chase,” he says, easy as the tide returning. “I am glad Percy has you.”
A wave crashes over the rocks behind Annabeth. Wind rolls over the beach, biting and cold. The fire in her little can flickers and dies, the last of a melted Snickers hot over the coals. Annabeth is alone on a beach in November, her heart in her throat and tears crusting in salty streaks down her cheeks.
Poseidon is gone.
Annabeth restraints herself from kicking the can into the ocean. She picks it up instead, Grover’s voice ringing in her ears. She hikes back to her cabin in the dark, sneaks past the harpies and her siblings with her cap. She lays in bed and stares at the slats of the bed above her, patterns between the slats woven with glittering cords over decades by half a dozen campers that used this bed before her. She cups her bleeding heart in her hands and tries not to think about Luke saying, The gods don’t care about us. She mostly succeeds.
The next day, she’s in the middle of climbing the lava wall, which becomes much more pleasant in winter, somehow, when Percy’s voice says directly behind her, “What the hell did you do?”
She shrieks and nearly topples off the wall into the pool of lava at the base. “Give me a minute!” she yells at the Iris Message behind her.
“Oh shit, wall?”
“No,” Annabeth heaves, scrambling up to another foothold and trying to ignore the way her heart skips a bit faster, for unrelated reasons. “They’ve decided to cover the rest of camp in lava too, as a training exercise.”
He pauses. “That’s a joke, right?”
“Yes, Percy, that’s a joke.”
“Oh. Because, I’m gonna be real, I haven’t been there enough summers to not believe you. I can maybe actually see Mr. D deciding that’s a good idea.”
She snorts, scrambling the rest of the way up onto the top. She flops down, legs hanging over the back edge, and the Iris Message follows, settling against her.
Percy’s face ripples, colors distorting his curls and highlighting the way he’s half-grinning already. “Hi,” he says.
“Hi,” she echoes, grinning back.
His smile drops. “Anyway, don’t distract me. What the hell did you do?”
Annabeth blinks. “Um. Nothing?”
“Nothing? Nothing? I get a visit from my dad and when I ask him why he’s here he just says, ‘That daughter of Athena is a faithful friend’ and then vanishes like a ghost in a horror movie after the jumpscare is done, and you’re telling me you did nothing?!”
Annabeth gapes. “He actually visited?” she asks, dumbfounded.
“Yes!”
“Oh.” She pauses. He’s staring at her with his don’t-bullshit-me face, the one he inherited, glare and all, from his mother. She caves. “Well, in that case, I may have done something.”
“What?”
Annabeth shrugs. She doesn’t say, I summoned him and yelled at him and told him he was a bad dad and a coward and that you’re going to die in three years, which he already knows, but clearly needed a reminder about. She doesn’t need Percy getting even more ideas about how to piss off gods. “I sent him a few prayers,” she says.
He stares. “A few prayers.” His voice is flat, disbelieving. It’s sort of true, that she can’t bullshit him.
She does her best innocent shrug. “Kind of every night. I was very respectful,” she blatantly lies. “Appealed to his logic.”
“You,” Percy declares solemnly, “have got to get better at lying.”
“What did he say?” she redirects, with all the subtlety of a brick to the face.
He glares at her a little, but clearly loses steam as he reflects on the conversation. He wrinkles his nose. “Uh. This is gonna sound weird.”
“Weirder than any of the other stuff we’ve done together?” she challenges. “One time we stole from the god of thieves, Percy.”
He snorts. “Fair. I, uh- oh, gods, you’re gonna laugh so hard.”
“Probably. Lay it on me.”
He makes a face. “He said I’m mostly good to eat anything, even super super toxic stuff. And apparently I need to be eating more shellfish. Like, way more shellfish. And, uh. I have a second stomach now? I guess? So I need to-” Even through the rainbow light of the Iris Message, she can see the bright red flush travel down his neck, along with an embarrassed little flash of phosphorescence. He mumbles something that distorts in the message.
Annabeth leans closer, as if he’s actually there, and she can actually reach him by getting closer to the trick of the light. “What? I didn’t hear the last part.”
He sighs heavily, closing his eyes. “I have to eat shells, okay? Something about increased calcium intake to sustain teeth development.”
“For real? Di immortales. Grover owes me ten drachma.”
He gapes at her. “You knew I had a second stomach?!”
“No,” she says, and shrugs. “I just bet that you were going to start needing more calcium intake. Are you going to need a gastrolith, too, or does your second stomach have a higher acid content to dissolve them?”
“You are a freak of the mind, you know that?” he says. “No, I don’t need a- what is a gas-lich?”
“Gastrolith. A stone some animals swallow to grind things in their stomachs in place of chewing. I take it you have acid, then.”
“Yeah.”
“Cool. Is that all you talked about?”
He rubs the back of his neck. “Just… gave me some tips about, like, claws and stuff. Tooth care. He seemed really weird about it, but I guess it was cool. He didn’t stick around long. It was mostly like, ‘Here, son, have a dietary list, sorry I didn’t tell you you could go through demigod puberty, this hardly ever happens with my kids, anyway, try not to die this year.’ And then he left.” He huffs and shakes his head. “Gods,” he says, part understanding, part rueful, part bitter, part touched. The confusion that everyone at camp feels for the gods.
Annabeth exhales. It’s not quite what she was hoping for, but it’s better than nothing. It’s better than silence. She basks in the glow her partial victory for a quick moment. And then: “Can you mail me a copy of your dietary list?”
“What? Why?”
“Because I want it, Seaweed Brain. Next summer it’s going to be my job to harass you about calcium intake, not Sally’s.”
Percy grumbles. “Between you and Grover, I swear. You drive me crazy.”
“Good,” Annabeth grins.
“Yeah, whatever. I’ll mail you a copy, control freak. English or Greek?”
She considers this. On the one hand, Greek is easier to read. On the other, Percy’s translation skills in writing are terrible. “Can you get your mom to write one of both?”
“Wow, it’s like you don’t even trust my subpar language skills. Yeah, sure, I’ll ask her. I’m sure she’ll say yes. You all have that unholy alliance against me. It’s very annoying.”
Annabeth cackles. “My greatest achievement. Personal pain in your butt.”
Percy softens. He blinks, a double layered flick of eyelids, and his skin shines with faint light through the message. “Hey, Wise Girl? Thanks.”
Annabeth softens. “Always.” A grin. “Seaweed Brain.”
She stays on top of the lava wall, basking in the heat like a lizard and chatting with Percy about school, about the latest chaos around camp, about the frost in the valley and the fact that Percy thinks his mom is hiding a new boyfriend and the latest dreams he and Grover have shared and the fact that Annabeth’s brother accidentally ruined one of her sketches so she wedgied him for it and and and-
When they finally run out of topics, hours later, they hang up with affectionate goodbyes, and Annabeth is left alone in the brisk air on top of the wall. The sun is starting to set at the edge of the valley. It silhouettes a now-empty pine tree and a dragon and a glittering sheepskin at the edge of the hill. Annabeth stands and turns to face the other direction, out toward the dark sky and, beyond the sprawling forest, the sea that stretches to the horizon. She breathes in the frostbitten air. “Thank you, Lord Poseidon,” she says to the encroaching night and the vast ocean. “You’re alright, I guess,” she adds, because she likes having the last word.
An amused brush of salt air reaches her nose, far out from the waves. She grins, and leaves for dinner.