Chapter Text
He misses it the way you miss something you didn't know you were losing while you were losing it.
The weight of a body that got tired. The particular ache of sore muscles after a long run. The way hunger felt like an actual thing, not just a concept he remembers. The smallness of being human — the beautiful, terrible smallness of it — a life with edges, with endings, with a clock ticking somewhere in the background of everything.
He hadn't known to grieve it when it was still his.
Percy sits on the steps of the Montauk cabin, elbows on his knees, staring at nothing in particular. Waiting. The water is close enough to hear, but today it offers nothing. Today it's just sound. He used to feel the ocean before he saw it. A pull in his chest, like something in him recognized something in it. Now he hears the water and waits for that feeling — and it's there, technically. Faintly. The way an echo is technically still the original sound.
Grover is coming. One of their three times a year, the visits that exist in the narrow window where Percy can pretend, just for a little while, that the ground beneath them is the same ground it used to be. That they are who they used to be. Two kids from the same world, sitting in the same place, with the same sky above them.
Just for a moment, standing on the shore of something he can no longer fully touch — he feels human.
The salt is in the air. Sand has settled on the shoulders of his blue sweater. Small things, the kind he'd never thought to catalogue when he was still the kind of person who could be undone by them.
He notices them now. He has all the time in the world to notice them. That's the thing about immortality nobody warns you about, it doesn't make the small things more precious. It makes them quieter. Dimmer. Like a song you've heard so many times the melody has stopped reaching you, even though you remember, distantly, that it used to.
He doesn't feel the pull toward the water the way he used to. Doesn't feel the old curiosity when a wave breaks and somewhere beneath it fish scatter and regroup. Doesn't feel the specific, bone-deep settledness of stepping through the door of the Montauk cabin — the feeling that used to mean home without him ever having to think the word.
He has forever to feel all of it. He feels almost none of it.
And that, Percy thinks, staring out at the water that was his first language — that is the part that stays with him. Not the losing of mortality itself, but the losing of what mortality made possible. The way urgency made everything vivid. The way an ending made a thing worth having.
He had been so alive, once, because he could die. And yet here he is. Waiting. Nothing to look forward to, nothing to dread, nothing pulling at him in any direction. Just forever, sitting heavy and silent in his hands like something he doesn't quite know what to do with.
He hears Grover before he sees him — the familiar, unhurried sound of hooves on the path, uneven and certain all at once. Percy doesn't turn. Just keeps his eyes on the horizon, where the sun is pulling itself up from the edge of the water.
It's beautiful. Genuinely, absurdly beautiful. Orange bleeding into yellow, yellow softening into pink, pink dissolving at its edges into the faintest purple at the top of the sky. The colors shift the longer you look. New shades appearing between the ones you thought you'd already seen, like the morning is still deciding what it wants to be.
He stares at the purple. And he thinks of her. Annabeth — his mortal tether, his truest north, the one thing that has never gone quiet in him no matter how much else has. The one thing immortality hasn't dimmed.
If anything, it's the one thing that burns brighter.
"Hey, man." Grover's hand finds his shoulder — a familiar weight, solid and warm. Percy looks up. And somewhere in the looking, tries to leave the sadness where it was sitting. They only get this three times a year. Three. He refuses to spend one of them dragging Grover into the grey of it.
"Hey, G-man." He shifts right, making space. Grover settles in beside him without a word, the way he always has — no fuss, no questions, just the easy, unhurried presence of someone who has known you long enough to understand that sometimes sitting next to each other is enough. He pulls his gaze to the horizon. For a moment, neither of them says anything. The sun keeps rising.
"How have you been?"
It's the only place to start, really. Even if Grover isn't sure what answer he's hoping for. Even if there isn't a good one.
What do you say to your best friend who has been made immortal and forgotten in the same breath? What do you say to someone the world has moved on from — a world he bled for, repeatedly. Grover doesn't know. He's been trying to figure it out for years. He still comes up empty.
Percy opens his mouth. Closes it. Tries again.
"I've been—" He stops. The thing is, he's cycled through all of it by now. Anger first — hot and consuming, at the gods, at the world, at the particular cruelty of the arrangement. Then betrayal, the quieter, more corrosive kind, the kind that comes from having given everything and watching it get pocketed without acknowledgment. Then sadness, deep and shapeless, the kind that doesn't announce itself anymore, just sits.
And now — nothing. A flatness where the feeling used to be. Numbness so complete he can't tell anymore if it's peace or surrender. How do you explain that? How do you hand someone the shape of an absence?
"Honestly?" Percy says. "I don't know." A beat. "Just..here"
Grover looks at him. And the sadness that moves through him isn't the sharp kind — it's the slow, heavy kind. This is unfair. The thought arrives simply, the way the truest things do. This is so deeply, irreversibly unfair.
"How about you?" Percy asks, and the shift in his voice is deliberate — light, redirecting, the practiced move of someone who has gotten good at not sitting in his own sadness in front of other people. "How is everyone?"
Grover hesitates. He hates this part. The careful navigation of it — wanting to be honest, wanting to give Percy what he actually came for, while being terrified of what it sounds like from the outside. Look at everything you're missing. Look at the life that kept going without you.
But he also knows, has known for a while now, that these updates are not small things to Percy. They are not pleasantries. They are, in some quiet and essential way, the thing Percy holds onto between visits. Maybe the only thing.
So Grover takes a breath. And tells him everything.
"Well." Grover exhales slowly, like he's organizing the words before he lets them out. "Camp's still reconstructing. More demigods coming in every day — they're getting claimed the moment they step through the border now." A small pause, something like pride in his voice. "Rachel's been staying at camp more often. Chiron's helping her figure out the Oracle thing, what it means, how it works. Everyone's still adjusting."
Percy nods. He knows whose fault that adjustment is. Whose demand made claiming non-negotiable, made the gods actually look at their children for once. He doesn't say it. Just nods.
"Chiron's still activities director. Mr. D's still camp director." Grover's mouth twitches. "Still hasn't called anyone by their actual name." Percy almost smiles. Almost. He can hear it — Mr. D's flat, disinterested voice butchering names with the confidence of a man who simply cannot be bothered. Johnson. No —Peter. Whatever.
"Juniper and I are good. Still spreading the word about Pan." Something quieter moves through Grover's voice when he says it, the particular tenderness of carrying something sacred. "Tyson's been leading the Cyclops army training down in your father's forges. I'm sure you see him sometimes." He glances at Percy. "Word from some of the Nereids is he's getting promoted. Higher rank, bigger responsibilities."
Percy feels it before he can stop it — a warmth moving through the numbness, brief and real. His little brother. Lumbering, earnest, fiercely loyal Tyson, leading an army. He lets himself be proud of that. He lets himself have it.
"Your mom—" Grover stops. Clears his throat. Starts again. "Sally's second book is finished. She has a publisher now, a good one. She and Paul are well — he's still teaching." A beat, careful and quiet. "They have me over sometimes. For dinner."
He doesn't finish the sentence. It feels really weird when I don't see you there.
Percy stares at the horizon.
Mom. The word arrives the way it always does — soft, and then not soft at all. Sally Jackson, who raised him alone and loved him loudly and made him believe, against considerable evidence, that the world was worth saving. Who doesn't remember he exists. He lets the word sit. Doesn't try to move it.
"And Annabeth—" Grover's voice shifts, careful now. He notices Percy go still — the almost imperceptible straightening of his shoulders, the slight set of his jaw.
"She's been busy. The Olympus redesign is still ongoing — it's a big project, you know how she gets when she's in it. She stays in her cabin mostly. When she leaves camp she's been spending time with her father." Grover says it gently, like he knows what it costs Percy to hear it. "They're working things out, I think. And libraries, obviously. You know Annabeth."
Books equal Annabeth. Percy knows. He knows every version of that equation.
"So everyone's doing well?"
It comes out flatter than he intended. Bitter at the edges. And he knows how it sounds — he knows — but it sits on his tongue like something sour, the simple arithmetic of it. Everyone doing well. Everyone moving forward. And him here, on these steps, holding an eternity in his hands like a sentence.
Grover is quiet for a moment. "Not well," he says finally. "Not without you there." His voice doesn't break — not exactly. But something in it bends. "There's still a mark of your absence everywhere, Percy. Everywhere you look, if you know where to look."
Percy doesn't say anything. So Grover keeps going.
"Your cabin is still there. Your camp shirt is still on the bed — nobody touched it." He pauses. "I sit in there sometimes. When I miss you." He says it plainly, without apology. "The Aphrodite kids still grow blue flowers near your cabin every season. The newer demigods don't know why. And they're all confused about why the gods claim their children now, why it happens so easily, like it's always been that way." A quiet exhale. "They know something changed. They just don't know it was you."
Percy stares at the water.
"Sally and Paul still make blue pancakes. Still keep blue Gatorade in the fridge." Grover's voice goes softer here, careful with it. "She told me she doesn't really know why she does it. Just that it feels right. Like her hands remember something her mind doesn't." He lets that sit for a moment. "Tyson dreams of you. He says it's always hazy — but there's a boy on a hippocampus with him. Blonde. Laughing. He doesn't know who it is." Grover looks at Percy. "But we know."
Percy closes his eyes briefly.
"I still play Mythomagic," Grover adds, quieter now. Almost sheepish. "Just — you know. By myself."
"Annabeth goes to the ocean every morning." Grover says it carefully, like he's setting something fragile down. "That beach — the one where you were first claimed. She goes there every day, Percy."
Percy's head turns. Sharp. Involuntary.
Grover nods slowly. "She stands there for a while. And she does this—" He reaches up, gestures to the side of his own head — the place where Percy's grey streak used to be. The matching one. The one Annabeth still has. "She twists it between her fingers. Over and over. Like she's trying to remember something she can't name."
Percy doesn't speak.
"She still has your letters," Grover continues, quieter now, like he's confessing something. "There's nothing on them anymore, the ink faded. But she keeps them anyway. In her bunk. Right there." He pauses. "I asked her once why she doesn't throw them away. She said it felt wrong." Another pause, longer this time. "She said it felt wrong, Percy. She doesn't know why. She just knows she can't."
The sun has fully risen now. The colors that were so vivid minutes ago have settled into the plain blue of morning. The world, indifferent and bright, carrying on.
"We all miss you, Percy." Grover's voice is steady, deliberate. "They just don't know that they do."
And that — that — is the one that gets him. Every time. Not the forgetting itself, not the blank looks and the absence of his name on anyone's lips. But this: that there is a missing piece in all of them, a gap they can feel the edges of without knowing what used to fill it. That somewhere, without knowing why, Sally lingers over blue food coloring. That Annabeth stands at a shoreline every morning, turning a grey streak between her fingers, chasing something she can't name.
They are grieving him without knowing it. He doesn't know which is worse — being forgotten, or being mourned by people who don't know they're mourning.
Grover is quiet for a moment. Then, like he can't hold it in any longer — "Do you want to see her?"
Percy turns. Fast. "See her?" The word comes out like it doesn't quite fit in his mouth. "Annabeth?"
Grover nods, steady. "She's out of camp. Said she needed inspiration for the Olympus redesign. She's at one of the libraries in town." He pauses, giving Percy the space to catch up. "I can take you. If you want."
Yes. The answer arrives before the question has fully landed. Immediate, unthinking, the most certain thing he's felt in months.
Yes. I need to.
But then the other thing arrives right behind it, the way it always does. The thing he has learned, slowly and at great cost, to listen for. Percy has lived long enough — mortal and otherwise — to understand that nothing good comes to him without a price tag somewhere. That the universe has a way of balancing its books, and it has never once balanced them in his favor without first making him pay.
What would it cost, to see her? What would it do to him — to stand in the same room as Annabeth Chase, who does not know his name, who carries his letters in her bunk without knowing why, who goes to the ocean every morning like she's looking for something she lost and can't describe?
What would it do to her?
He should say no. The reasonable, careful, self-preserving answer is no.
Percy looks at Grover. "Yes," he says. "Yes, I do."