Chapter Text
The door shudders open quietly, the jingle of keys hastily smothered. Percy’s eyes crack open to behold his favourite sight in the world – Annabeth, coming home, after another long study session at the campus library. Her long intricate braids fall over her shoulder as she stumbles through the doorway, dropping her bags to the floor as gently as she can. Percy’s heart squeezes. She thinks he’s asleep. She doesn’t know he stayed up waiting for her.
He hears her sigh in that restrained, tired way of hers from his spot on the sofa, half-hidden in the dim lighting of the living room. Hears her move from doorway to bathroom, where he knows she’s running her hands under cold, cold water, because she’s tough and strong and brave like that – in that way that he so isn’t – before she’ll tie her hair together in two bulky pigtail braids like she does every night.
Eventually the urge to actually see her wins out over his inclination to keep pretending to be asleep – if only to jump scare her when she inevitably passes by the sofa later – and he gets up to make his way to the bathroom right as Annabeth walks out of it wearing a very frustrated expression.
“Oh – Percy?” Her face softens immediately, and the feeling it gives him is akin to the rush of going on a rollercoaster five hundred consecutive times, but of course he can’t really really know what that’s like because what moron’s gone on a rollercoaster five hundred consecutive times, and he can’t really stand right there in front of her without touching her for much longer, so he leans forward and waits just a second for the smile she gives him, for permission, and then he pulls her into his arms.
She’s warm. It’s strange, her hands and feet are always near-freezing, but Annabeth overall, Annabeth as a whole, is as warm as a lazy July afternoon at Camp. She’s unexplainably soft, too, but he knows she’d hate it if he called her that, so he keeps his secretly mushy thoughts to himself, and breathes her in.
He missed her.
He tells her as much.
“Percy,” she laughs softly against his chest, and pushes away slightly to look up at him. He doesn’t let her get far; his arms twine around her waist, holding her in place so she can’t escape and take her warmth with her. “I was only gone for a few hours.”
“Felt like forever.” He drops a kiss on her forehead, because he feels like it.
She rolls her eyes at him, and that’s how he knows she’s pleased and pretending not to be. “You’re horribly codependent, you know that?”
Percy shrugs, hardly bothered by the assessment. “You would be too, if you got to date Annabeth Chase, but whatever.”
That earns him a real laugh, and he brims with far too overwhelming feelings of love and affection for twelve thirty in the morning, and he knows it shows on his face, because she smiles back at him, bright and blinding and he’s sure he knows what that deer must’ve felt like when the headlights were cast onto it.
He’s lovesick, and he can’t believe he gets to be.
“Hey – I need to finish changing,” Annabeth tells him, bringing her hands up to his chest to shove lightly at it. “I’m tired too, Seaweed Brain.”
“If you say so,” he sighs, stepping back from her precisely one inch. “You study too much.”
She narrows her eyes at him and his proximity. “You don’t study enough.”
“Touche.”
“Percy, are you going to let me change my clothes?”
He looks around faintly. “I’m sorry, is someone stopping you?”
She sighs, one of her great, big, exasperated, put-on ones that he’ll never admit give him the biggest rush of serotonin ever, because riling Annabeth up is his favourite hobby, and it’s not a competition.
“Percy.” She draws out the name dangerously, and he resists the urge to back down.
He crosses his arms instead. “Annabeth,” he replies seriously.
She stares at him for a beat, squinting in that way that tells him she’s trying to figure out the best strategy to take him down. Metaphorically or literally. They have been prone to a few impromptu wrestling matches in this very living room, on occasion.
Finally, she presses her lips together. She’s come to a decision. “You know, I’m only going to let you stay because I actually need help getting my bra unclasped but that’s it. You’re going to take my bra off for me and then you’re going to go on somewhere and let me change in peace. Deal?”
“Done,” he says before she’s even finished her little monologue, grinning just to piss her off. It works. She makes a face at him before twisting around, shucking her top off unceremoniously. Shyness has no home in their little apartment, where they’ve seen each other at far barer states than this. He steps behind her easily, fingers coming up to tap the back of her bra lightly. Only one of the three sets of hooks is undone. He starts to fiddle with one of them, but he can’t keep the grin off his face.
“Stop smiling.”
“How do you even –”
“I can hear it.”
“Okay. That isn’t weird at all.”
Annabeth shifts restlessly, no doubt getting colder by the second, clad only in her bra and pajama bottoms. “I couldn’t get the stupid thing off in the bathroom. I was gonna figure something else out, you know. I don’t actually need your help.”
“Were you going to get scissors to cut the whole thing off, or…?”
“No! Well… if it still didn’t come off after trying the last few angles I had in mind – that I calculated that were supposed to work, by the way – then yeah, maybe.”
“Nerd,” he mutters under his breath.
She kicks him in the shin.
“Ow! Okay, you’re not a nerd! You’re very cool. And classy. And smart. And pretty and funny and kind.”
He can hear her smirk. “That’s right, Perseus.”
He scowls at her back. She points backwards, jabbing him in the ribs in the process. “I heard that.”
Percy splutters in response, and it’s her turn to laugh at him.
Predictably, it takes them a very long time to get the bra off, in the end.