Chapter Text
Percy's room smelled like shit.
It smelled like rotten cereal and unwashed laundry, with the faint, almost apologetic trace of deodorant underneath — as though something had tried, once, to be clean. He hadn't noticed any of it until now. The mess, the smell, the general collapse of the place — none of it had registered while he slept. He'd slept fine, actually. Deeply, even, the way you only do when your body has given up arguing with you, until the nightmare pulled him out, and then the morning came in after it, and with the morning, the day.
Today, Annabeth and Grover were coming over.
It had been his mom's idea. Sally had noticed that Percy hadn't seen either of them in months. She thought it would be good for him. She said it so gently, and Percy had agreed, because she was probably right and because it was easier than explaining why he hadn't seen them, or even iris-messaged.
But that was before he'd thought about Annabeth — about the strange, careful distance that had grown between them, the way they'd been orbiting each other without ever quite landing. He'd agreed before he remembered that.
Now he was awake, and the room smelled like shit, and he had no idea what he was going to say to Annabeth.
"I like your braids." He turned the sentence over in his head. It was fine. It was normal. People said that. He immediately decided he would never say it.
"I got my driver's license last month." He held this one at arm's length, examining it for usefulness. It had none. She would look at him. He would have to keep talking. He let it go.
"Are you mad at me?" The answer to this one was so obvious that asking it out loud would somehow make everything worse. He knew that. He knew that, and he'd still almost said it.
"You got taller." He actually winced. If he opened with that, he deserved whatever happened next.
He stood in the middle of his room, surrounded by the wreckage of five failed sentences, and arrived at the only reasonable conclusion: he was going to open the door, and whatever came out of his mouth first was going to ruin everything, and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it.
But this was the part that bothered him most.
Of all the people Percy had encountered in his life — and it was, by any measure, an unusual list — there were only two who could follow him. Sally, who had been decoding him since birth, who could reconstruct a whole emotional crisis from a shrug and a cereal bowl. And Annabeth, who did it differently, sharper, cutting straight through the noise to find what he actually meant, sometimes before he meant it.
With both of them, he could just talk. Not perform talking, not manage it or shape it into something presentable, just open his mouth and let the mess come out, and somehow it would land, and somehow, they would hand it back to him in a form he recognized.
Annabeth, more than anyone, was who he went to when the demigod world stopped making sense. She was the person he looked to for clarity — his fixed point, the one reliable thing he could orient himself around when everything else went sideways.
And now she was the thing that didn't make sense.
Sally had been standing in the doorway for a while now, shoulder leaned against the frame, watching him with that particular look she had.
"You're nervous, huh?"
"A bit," Percy said.
He picked up a jacket from the floor — unwashed, almost certainly — and turned toward the laundry basket. His skateboard had other ideas. His face met the floor with a sound that was both immediate and conclusive.
He lets out a sigh. "Okay, a lot," he said. Face still down.
Sally laughed, not unkindly. She crossed the room, crouched beside him, and ran a hand through his hair, which was doing what it always did, which was whatever it wanted.
"You don't have to be," she said. "They're your friends. It's just Annabeth and Grover."
Percy rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling. He let out a long, slow exhale —it doesn't actually help but feels like it should.
"I know," he said.
Sally studied him. Her eyes moved across his face in a careful manner reading the parts he hadn't said out loud, which were, as usual, most of them.
"Is it because of Annabeth?"
Percy kept his eyes on the ceiling. He didn't answer. With Percy, silence was never nothing. Sally knew that.
"What happened between you two?" Sally asked. Not pressing — just genuinely curious, the way she got when she could tell a thing mattered.
What happened? Percy turned the question over like he might find the answer on the other side of it. He'd been turning it over for months. He still hadn't.
The honest answer was that he didn't know. The past year had felt like walking across a floor he couldn't trust — every step careful, every word measured, the constant low-level fear that one wrong move would send the whole thing through. Something had shifted between them, and he could trace it back to a single point, a single moment: the kiss. After that, whatever he'd already felt for her had tightened, something that sat in his chest and made it harder to breathe right.
But he couldn't explain it. Not clearly. Not even to himself.
He just knew that being around Annabeth hurt — the hurt of wanting something you can't quite reach. And being away from her hurt too, deeper, the kind that settled in and made itself at home.
There was no good option. There was just Annabeth, and the fact of her, and Percy stuck somewhere in the middle of it all — still on the floor, staring at the ceiling, with absolutely no idea what he was going to say when she walked through the door.
"Just — stuff," Percy said. "Things."
Sally nodded slowly. She understood him completely — had always been able to fill in the spaces he left blank. "Difficult things," she said. Not quite a question.
"Yeah." He didn't elaborate. She didn't push.
A moment passed between them. Sally sat down on the edge of his bed — moving a hoodie out of the way first, without comment — and let the quiet settle before she spoke again.
"At the bottom of it all," she said, "they're still your best friends." She said it simply. "The demigod world doesn't hand you much that's fair. But it gave you them. You still have that, Percy. You still have them."
He didn't say anything, but he was listening.
"And Annabeth knows it too," she added, softer. "Whatever's in the middle of all this, she knows."
Percy looked up at his mom. Not saying anything. She looked back at him, and for a moment he saw himself in her eyes — literally, his own reflection looking back, in the same shade of blue they'd both been born with.
"Thanks, mom," he said, and smiled — small, relieved.
Sally leaned down and kissed his forehead. Then she straightened up, put her hands on her hips, and turned to face the room.
"Percy."
"I know."
"There is a plate under that shirt."
"I was going to—"
"There are two plates under that shirt."
Percy sat up and looked. She was right. He didn't remember either of them. "I feel like this is as much a mystery to me as it is to you," he said.
"It is genuinely not." Sally picked up a sock with two fingers, held it at arm's length, and set it back down. "Where do you even start."
"That's what I'm saying."
"I wasn't agreeing with you, I was despairing." She nudged a textbook with her foot. It revealed another textbook. She looked at Percy. Percy looked at the textbooks.
"Okay," he said, standing up. "Okay. I'll clean it."
"You have forty-five minutes."
"That's plenty of time."
"Uh-huh."
"I'll start now."
Percy got his room to look like — well, less of a disaster. It wasn't clean, not by any honest definition of the word, but the floor was visible and the plates were gone and the general atmosphere had shifted from condemned to lived-in. It was, in the end, perfectly Percy.
He retrieved the last sock from the narrow gap between his desk and the closet — how it had gotten there was a question for another day — and called the room done.
Then he showered, scrubbed everything off, and stood in front of his closet. He pulled out a blue sweater and dark jeans, held them up, decided they were fine. He considered the plaid blue polo for approximately four seconds before putting it back. Too formal. Too much like he was trying. This was a normal Tuesday afternoon. He was going to eat with his friends. They were going to have a good time. He was going to have a good time.
He stood there a moment longer, sweater in hand.
Right. That's exactly what this was.
"Percy! Help me set up the plates." Sally calls from the kitchen.
"Coming!" He was already moving.
He rounded the corner into the kitchen and the smell hit him before anything else did — earthy and deep, Lentils and mushrooms slow-cooked into something hearty, lifted by thyme and rosemary, with the gentle sweetness of carrots underneath it all. A thin thread of garlic running through everything. And over the top, the warm, starchy comfort of mashed potatoes just beginning to brown at the edges.
Vegan shepherd's pie. The smell of a deliberate, loving effort. And underneath that — something sweeter. Buttery and soft, with the particular comfort of melted chocolate.
Blue chocolate chip cookies. He knew that smell the way he knew his own name.
"Mom," Percy said, reaching for the mismatched stack of plates — no two of them the same, never had been — "that smells incredible."
Sally glanced over her shoulder from the stove, wearing her favorite blue apron, looking quietly pleased in the way she did when she'd been cooking for someone she loved. "Set the table first, compliment later."
"I can do both." He set down a plate.
He'd never really thought about the plates before, not consciously, but standing here now, laying them out one by one, he noticed them the way you sometimes notice ordinary things when you're trying not to think about something else. No two of them matched. A faded blue one with a chip on the rim. A wide cream one Sally had gotten from a garage sale years ago. A smaller yellow one Percy vaguely remembered dropping once and being stunned it survived. Each one from somewhere different, gathered slowly over the years, kept not because they were a set but because they were still good.
He found it unexpectedly adorable. Very home.
He set the last one down and stood back to look at the table — small, a little crowded, already warm from the kitchen — and thought that Annabeth and Grover were going to sit here in a little while, and eat off these ridiculous plates, and it would probably be fine.
The doorbell rang and reverberated through the small apartment. Percy stiffened.
"Oh, perfect timing — I'm almost done. Percy, answer the door," Sally called from the kitchen, not looking up.
He didn't move. His hands had gone sweaty. He could hear his own heartbeat, it felt unnecessary and unhelpful. What am I going to say, what am I going to say, what am I going to say— the thought looping, gaining no traction, going nowhere.
He stood in the middle of the hallway and panicked quietly and thoroughly.
"Percy."
He blinked. Sally was looking at him now, a dish towel over her shoulder, something knowing in her expression.
"Huh?"
"Answer the door." There was a laugh tucked somewhere in her voice that she was being kind enough not to let out.
"Oh," he said. "Right. Right."
His feet moved. The rest of him followed, mostly on autopilot, in the general direction of the door. Percy's hand closed around the doorknob. He stood there a moment, breathing — in, out, slow and deliberate, like someone about to defuse something.
Okay, he thought. It's fine. It's Annabeth and Grover. You've faced worse. You've faced the Minotaur. You've beat Ares. You drowned a volcano once, probably. This is a Tuesday. You are fine. You are so incredibly—
He opened the door.
The first thing he saw was Grover, beaming, holding a basket of fruit with the energy of someone who had spent real time on it — oranges, grapes, a mango, something Percy didn't recognize. The colors were almost aggressively cheerful.
And then, just beside Grover, Annabeth.
Her hair was in braids, half-up and half-down, loose pieces framing her face — the same way it had looked at Westover Hall, the day they'd danced. She was wearing a soft lavender top, the fabric light and slightly draped, with a white collar peeking out at the neck — simple, easy, and somehow exactly right. Over it, an oversized denim jacket, sleeves pushed to the elbows. Dark blue jeans, fitted, tucked into clean white sneakers. In her hand was a bottle of kombucha — blue, of course. Percy noticed it the same moment he noticed he wasn't surprised.
She looked like herself. She looked like, something he'd been trying not to miss and had been missing anyway.
He stood in the doorway and stared at both of them and said nothing, which was already going better than most of his rehearsed scenarios.
"Percy, hey!" Grover announced, lifting the basket slightly. "I brought fruits."
Percy didn’t say anything.
"I missed you, dude. How are you?" He moved forward to hug Percy, arms open, then stopped. His nose twitched. His eyes drifted past Percy's shoulder toward the kitchen. A look came over his face that could only be described as spiritual.
"Wait." Grover's voice dropped. "Is that — is that lentils?"
He brushed past Percy entirely and followed his nose into the apartment like a man with a higher calling.
"Wow, missed you too," Percy called after him. Grover didn't look back.
Percy stared at his retreating figure for a moment, then turned back to the door. To Annabeth, still standing on the threshold, kombucha in hand, watching him with an expression he couldn't quite read. He stuffed his hands in his pockets.
"Hi," he said.
"Hi," she said.
A weighted beat.
"You look—" he started.
"How are—" she said at the same time.
They both stopped.
"Sorry, you go—"
"You were say—"
Another stop. Annabeth pressed her lips together. Percy looked briefly at the ceiling, as though it might help.
"You look pretty," he said.
He had promised himself he would never say anything like that.
"Oh." Annabeth reached up and tucked a braid behind her ear, almost unconsciously. A faint color rose in her cheeks. "Thanks. I, um." She glanced down at the kombucha. "I brought you this. It's blue."
"I can see that."
"I know you can see that. I just—" She exhaled a small laugh, more at herself than anything. "Hi."
"Hello."
"Right," she said, smiling now, helpless against it. "Can I come in?"
"Oh — yes, of course, sorry, come in."
She stepped past him into the apartment, and Percy stood at the open door for exactly one second longer than necessary before remembering to close it.
Annabeth stepped inside, a little shy in the way people get in spaces they haven't been before — taking it in quietly, eyes moving along the hallway, the framed photos on the wall, the general warmth of the place. Percy followed a step behind her, hands still in his pockets, mentally delivering a thorough lecture to himself.
You look pretty. Of everything he could have said. Of all the sentences in the English language, available to him for free, at any time.
She did look pretty. That wasn't the point. The point was that he didn't have to say it out loud, to her face, in the first four seconds.
Normal Tuesday afternoon. Totally normal. Completely fine.
"It smells good in here," Annabeth said, looking toward the kitchen.
"Yeah, we made Vegan Shepherd's Pie," Percy said. His eyes drifted to her jacket — small embroidered flowers scattered across the denim, the kind that looked like they'd been chosen one at a time, each one slightly different from the last. Uneven in the way that only handmade things are, the petals a little lopsided, the stems wandering.
Annabeth glanced back at him. "We? You helped?" One eyebrow up. The corner of her mouth threatening something.
"Mom made it," he admitted.
She laughed — short, quiet — and turned back toward the hallway. Percy looked at her, the camp bead necklace at her throat, worn smooth at the edges, the cord darkened from years of wear. Her eyes, brown and deep, catching the light in a way that made them look like something you could lose track of time in — steady and curious, always mid-thought, like the world was a problem she was perpetually three steps into solving. There was a small scar above her brow, pale and thin. He'd noticed it a hundred times. Had never once asked where it came from, never found the right moment, and now it felt like the kind of thing you couldn't ask about anymore without it meaning something.
Sally came out of the kitchen wiping her hands on a dish towel, and the moment she saw Annabeth her face broke into something open and genuine.
"Annabeth!” She crossed the hallway without hesitation and pulled her into a hug. Annabeth's arms came up after a beat. Just a breath too late.
It wasn't that she didn't want it. She did, that was almost the harder part. Sally's hugs were easy in a way Annabeth didn't entirely know what to do with. There was no transaction in them, no accomplishment required. No theorem proven, no standard met. Just arms around her shoulders and the smell of a kitchen that had been cooking all afternoon.
Affection, in Annabeth's experience, had always had a condition attached. Prove something first. Earn the compliment before it's given. With Athena, love had always felt like a finish line — always visible, always slightly out of reach, moved further the closer you got. Annabeth had spent most of her life in a sprint she hadn't chosen, toward approval that arrived rarely and never quite warm.
She knew, intellectually, that not everyone operated that way. She just hadn't had many chances to feel it.
So when someone offered it freely — no achievement required, no prior notice given — it still caught her a little off guard. Still felt like putting on a coat that almost fit. Unfamiliar in the way that good things sometimes are — the way sunlight feels strange on your skin after a long winter, not unwelcome, just startling. Like your body has to remember, all over again, that it's allowed. But she held on anyway.
Sally pulled back, but didn't let go entirely, hands still on Annabeth's shoulders, eyes moving across her face with the unhurried attention of someone who actually wanted to know.
"How are you?"
The question was simple. It shouldn't have been hard.
Annabeth opened her mouth. The honest answers were right there, lined up and waiting — exhausted, stretched thin, carrying things I don't know how to put down. A prophecy that lived behind her eyes like a splinter she couldn't reach, working itself deeper every time she tried to ignore it. A tiredness that had settled so deep into her bones she'd stopped noticing it the way you stop noticing a sound that never turns off. And underneath all of it, quiet and persistent as a leak in the wall, a hopelessness she'd been managing so carefully for so long it had started to feel like a personality trait.
"I'm okay," she said.
Sally looked at her. Not through her, not past her — at her, the way very few people ever bothered to. And Annabeth knew, in the half-second that followed, that Sally didn't believe her. Not entirely. But she didn't press, didn't pry. She just lifted Annabeth's chin gently with two fingers, the way you might with someone who'd been looking at the ground too long.
"You strong, strong girl," Sally whispered. Her eyes had gone glassy. Like she was seeing something that deserved to be grieved a little.
Annabeth didn't trust herself to respond.
Percy stood a few feet away and watched all of it. He watched the way Annabeth's expression moved — not dramatically, not in any way most people would catch, just a small, tectonic shift beneath the surface, the kind that only happens when something true gets too close to the skin. He knew those eyes. Had looked into them across battlefields slick with rain, across arguments that burned hot and fast and left them both singed, across a hundred impossible moments that had no business happening to people their age. He knew the exact quality of light in them when she was fine — sharp, forward-moving, already three steps ahead. And he knew what they looked like now. Slower. Heavier. Like something in there had been treading water for a very long time and was getting tired of pretending it wasn't.
They were glassy. They were tired. Somewhere behind them, deep and quiet, something was asking to be seen — the look of someone who had been holding too much for too long and had gotten so good at it that most people forgot to ask. Percy hadn't forgotten. He just hadn't known how to say so.
"Okay," Sally said, clearing her throat gently, "Give me a few minutes and the pie will be ready." She glanced between them. "Percy, why don't you take them to your room for a bit?"
Percy and Annabeth both went very still at the same time.
"My — room?" Percy's brain, which had been running at a deficit all morning, stopped entirely.
"Just for a few minutes," Sally said, with a smile that Percy recognized and did not appreciate. "Play a board game or something. Mini-games. You know."
"Uh." Percy looked at Annabeth. Annabeth looked at a point just past Percy's shoulder. "Okay," he said. "Sure. Grover, you coming?"
Grover, who had positioned himself approximately six inches from the oven and had the expression of a man at peace with the world, looked up.
"Oh, no, you two go ahead." He waved a hand. "I'm going to ask Sally about the recipe."
"The recipe," Percy repeated.
"For the pie, yes." Grover turned back to the oven, entirely unbothered. "Go on."
Percy glanced at Annabeth, she was now looking at the floor with the focused intensity of someone reading something very important there. They stood in the hallway for a moment, the two of them, with absolutely no one left to hide behind.
"Um," Percy said. "Okay. Follow me."
He turned toward the hallway. His second thought, arriving just slightly too late to be useful: did I clean everything?
"Welcome to my humble abode," Percy said, pushing the door open and gesturing inside his room. Annabeth stepped in.
She didn't say anything at first. She just observed, taking inventory slowly and thoroughly, like a place could tell you things about a person if you paid enough attention. Percy watched her do it and tried not to feel like he was being read.
Her eyes moved across the posters — Pirates of the Caribbean, Star Wars, a couple of anime prints he'd had since he was little, arranged with the chaotic confidence of someone who had never once considered interior design. The lego sets on the shelf, each one finished and displayed. The blue sheets, the blue pillows, the fire escape window cracked open on the far side.
She walked slowly toward his desk. Ran her eyes over the textbooks stacked on top — Chemistry, Calculus, the usual casualties of a student — and Percy watched her file each detail away. Then she drifted to the mirror beside the desk.
He knew what was on it. He'd looked at it every morning for months and told himself it was fine, it was normal, it didn't mean anything particular.
Photos tucked into the frame — his mom laughing at something off-camera, Grover mid-bite at a picnic, the three of them squinting into the sun somewhere upstate. And then, slightly apart from the others, taped carefully at all four corners with small strips of washi tape: her.
The photo she'd sent him after spring break. Washington D.C., late afternoon light, her grinning at the camera with a thumbs up. She'd sent him the physical print herself, and he'd taped it to the mirror and told himself that was a normal thing to do. Annabeth leaned in. Looked at it closely. Reached out and touched the edge of the washi tape.
"Oh, that —" Percy said immediately. "That's just — I use that mirror to, um. I do a memory exercise. For school. You put up images and you — it's a technique, actually, it's called a memory palace, I'm working on my…Chemistry. So."
Annabeth turned and looked at him. She held his gaze for a long moment, the kind of look that didn’t need words because it had already read them. Percy Jackson, as always, was an open book—just not one he realized anyone else could read.
And Annabeth had been reading him for a long time. Too long to miss the pattern. "Okay," she said simply, and turned to examine the other side of the room. Percy faced the wall and collected himself.
She stopped at the shelf of legos, studying them with the same careful attention. Up close, they were more impressive than they had any right to be — each one finished cleanly.
"You made these yourself?"
"Yeah." Percy came to stand beside her, hands in his pockets. "Mom used to buy them for me all the time when I was a kid. Then I ran out of space." He shrugged. "Now she only gets me one on my birthday."
Annabeth hummed softly, eyes still moving across them. She moved toward the fire escape window — already cracked open, the way Percy kept it. She leaned in, poked her head out into the open air, looked left and right at the narrow ledge and the city below, then pulled back in.
"Do you sit out here?"
"All the time," Percy said. "It's pretty cool."
She looked at him. "Can I?"
"Uh, sure."
Percy pushed the window up the rest of the way and climbed out first, stepping onto the fire escape landing with the ease of someone who'd done it a hundred times. He turned back, offered his hand. Annabeth took it— just used it to steady herself over the sill, one leg and then the other, and then she was out.
They settled side by side against the railing, backs to the brick wall, close enough that their shoulders were almost touching. The city moved below them, their feet dangled over the edge, Percy's sneakers beside Annabeth's white ones, swinging slightly in the open air.
For a moment, neither of them said anything.
"How is everything?" Percy asked. He paused. "At camp."
Annabeth was quiet for a moment, eyes out on the city. A bus moved slowly down the street below. Someone's laundry hung from a window across the way, turning in the breeze.
"It's been hard," she said finally. "Everyone's on edge. Training's gotten stricter. Counselor meetings are more frequent now, more serious." She paused. "It feels like we’re preparing for something. Like the reality of it has already settled in for everyone else."
Percy looked at her profile — her warm brown eyes, the stillness she put on like armor when something inside was moving too fast to show. The afternoon light fell across her face the way it falls across old paintings, softening the edges, finding the gold in things. He made himself look away.
"Like the calm isn't actually calm," he said.
"Yeah." She exhaled quietly. "Exactly like that."
"And Luke —" Percy started, then stopped, then made himself finish. "Have you heard anything? About where he is?"
The name landed between them the way it always did — heavy and slightly off-center, like a stone dropped into water that never quite finished rippling. Neither of them had ever figured out how to hold it without something giving way.
Luke was the argument that had no bottom. The thread they kept pulling, knowing it would unravel something, pulling it anyway. Percy couldn't understand it — had turned it over a hundred times and still couldn't find the angle from which it made sense. How Annabeth could look at everything Luke had done, everything he'd chosen, and still hold a place open for him. Still believe there was something salvageable in there, worth the effort of reaching for.
It wasn't that Percy thought she was wrong to care. He knew her loyalty was one of the truest things about her — the kind that didn't fray at the first sign of difficulty, the kind that cost her something and kept going anyway. He understood that. He even respected it, in the abstract, the way you respect something that also quietly baffles you.
He just couldn't follow her there. And the distance between where he stood and where she stood on this particular thing had a way of making everything else feel further apart too.
"No," Annabeth said. Clipped, clean.
"Do you still think he can come back from it?" Percy asked. Quieter this time. The question sat in the air between them, neither kind nor unkind. Just honest, and long overdue.
"You know I do," Annabeth said.
Percy looked away. He tried to keep his face even and mostly succeeded.
He let it go. For now.
"Why haven't you sent a letter?" he asked instead. "Or an iris-message. Anything."
Annabeth turned to look at him, caught — just for a second — then faced forward again. "I've been busy. Chiron's been depending on me, the whole camp has. There's barely been time to think, let alone—", She stopped. The excuse was true enough that it almost covered the rest of it.
The rest of it was this: she didn't know what to say to him. Every draft she'd started in her head had collapsed somewhere in the middle. There was too much underneath it, too much she couldn't put in a letter — couldn't say hey, I've been spending every waking hour trying to decode a prophecy so that you make it past your sixteenth birthday. Couldn't say that and then ask him how his week was.
"I wrote," he said. "Once. You didn't write back."
Annabeth remembered the letter.
She'd read it twice, sitting cross-legged on her bunk with the curtain drawn, and then she'd folded it carefully back along its creases and tucked it under her pillow and not replied for so long that replying eventually started to feel impossible.
It wasn't that it said anything enormous. That was almost the problem. It was just Percy — rambling and honest in the way he only ever was on paper, like the distance made it easier to be sincere. He'd told her about a dream he'd had. About something funny his mom said at breakfast. About how camp felt far away, and how some things felt far away that didn't used to. She knew what he meant.
So she'd said nothing, and the days had accumulated, and here they were — sitting on a fire escape in Manhattan with their feet dangling over the city, and the letter still folded somewhere in her bunk at camp.
“I read it. I just forgot to reply.” She provides as an excuse.
"That makes sense." Percy nodded, mostly convincing himself that it did. Annabeth's memory was sharper than her blade — details were everything to her, always had been. He knew that. And for once, he chose not to push. This was the longest they'd been in each other's company without one of them getting mad, and he wasn't about to be the one to ruin it.
Annabeth smoothed her hands along her jeans, eyes dropping to the road below them. "So are you coming to camp?" A pause. "This summer?"
"Uh, yeah." He leaned back slightly. "Need to brush up on my sword skills." He said it the way he said most things — like it was nothing, like it wasn't an olive branch.
Annabeth laughed. She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, still looking at the road. "Well, good luck." The corner of her mouth stayed up. "Training has been brutal."
"Oh gods," Percy started, "if it's been brutal for you, what chance do I have?" He let the thought hang between them for a second before continuing. "You've always been the one people measure themselves against, you know. At camp. In a fight." He shrugged, like it was obvious. "In general, really."
The words were out before he could stop them.
Annabeth turned to look at him. He met her eyes — and watched something shift in her expression before color crept up her cheeks and gave her away entirely. She cleared her throat and looked back at the road below them.
Percy faced forward too.
Why do I say things like that? He pressed his lips together. Geez.
The silence that followed wasn't uncomfortable exactly. Just — charged. It sat in the space between something said and something understood, where neither person is quite ready to acknowledge the distance has closed. Just a bit.
Annabeth stared at her fingers in her lap. Then, she said, like she'd weighed it first: "You're not bad yourself, you know." She looked up right after saying it and found him already looking at her. That always seemed to happen between them, they were always half a second ahead of each other.
Percy smiled. The full, unguarded kind that had no business being that disarming. "Was that a compliment?"
Annabeth rolled her eyes and bumped her shoulder against his. "Savor it. I don't give them often."
"Oh, I will," Percy said, with the sincerity of a man making a binding decision. "I'm going to frame it. Put it above my bed. Maybe get it engraved."
"Don't push it."
"A small plaque. Nothing excessive."
She laughed, and then the laughter faded, and neither of them filled the space it left behind.
The silence came in gently. The kind that doesn't ask for anything, that just settles between two people who have run out of safe things to say and haven't quite decided what to do about it.
Percy was looking at her. She could feel it before she turned to meet it — that particular weight of his attention, the way it always managed to be both familiar and terrifying at once.
She turned anyway.
His eyes were already there. Still. Searching. His eyes were already there, fixed on her like they’d never left. Searching her face with an intensity that made her pulse stumble. The easy grin had vanished, softened into something quieter now — something sharp-edged and dangerous in a way Percy rarely let himself be.
She didn’t look away. And then, almost against her own better judgment, her gaze dipped. Not far. Not long.
Just enough to catch the shape of his mouth.
The shift in Percy was immediate.
He went completely still, like the world had narrowed down to that single moment between them. His eyes darkened almost imperceptibly as they flicked downward too, tracing the same path hers had taken before dragging themselves back up.
And when their eyes met again, something in the room tightened.
The air felt heavier suddenly, charged with the kind of silence that presses against skin. Annabeth became acutely aware of everything — the warmth radiating off him, the inch of space between their knees, the way Percy’s breathing had gone slower, like he was concentrating very hard on not moving too fast.
Neither of them spoke. Couldn’t, maybe.
Percy leaned forward just slightly, hesitant enough to give her time to stop him, close enough that her pulse jumped anyway. His gaze dropped once more, slower this time, lingering openly on her lips before returning to her eyes with something dangerously close to a question.
“Food is ready!” Sally’s voice cut through the moment like sunlight through glass — warm, oblivious, devastatingly well-timed.
Both of them pulled away abruptly. But the tension didn’t disappear. It lingered there, stretched taut between them, unfinished.
Annabeth dropped her gaze toward the street below, though she couldn’t have said what she was looking at. Beside her, Percy scrubbed a hand over the back of his neck, exhaling quietly like he was trying to steady himself.
“We should—” he started, voice rougher than before.
“Yeah,” Annabeth answered immediately, too quickly.
But neither of them stood.
Not yet.
They stayed there for one suspended second longer, looking everywhere except each other while being painfully aware of the other’s every breath. Like if either of them looked back now, they’d end up right where they almost had been.
Percy pushed himself to his feet, and Annabeth followed a second later.
He climbed through the window first, tugging absently at the hem of his sweater once he landed inside. Then he turned back toward her and held out a hand. Annabeth took it.
Her fingers slid into his easily, familiar enough that neither of them should have thought twice about it. Percy braced himself and pulled her through the window carefully, steadying her when her sock caught briefly against the frame.
But when she landed in front of him, she didn’t let go. And Percy didn’t either.
The room had gone dim around them, washed gold by the streetlights outside, and suddenly Annabeth was standing impossibly close — close enough that Percy could see the tiny shift in her breathing, the way her lashes flickered once before she looked up at him fully.
Her head barely reached his shoulder. Still, somehow, Percy felt cornered by her gaze.
Their joined hands hung forgotten between them as the silence stretched, heavy and trembling with something neither of them seemed willing to name first. It felt like standing at the edge of something irreversible — one more inch forward and there’d be no pretending this was still normal.
Percy’s eyes dropped briefly to her mouth again before he could stop himself.
Annabeth noticed, and she cleared her throat. She let go of his hand slowly, fingertips dragging against his for half a second too long before she stepped back. Then she gave him a small nod — composed in the way Annabeth only ever got when she was trying very hard to be.
“We should go.” She didn’t look him in the eye when she said it. Just turned and walked out first, pulling the door halfway shut behind her.
Percy stayed where he was. For a moment, he just stared at the door. Then down at his hand. Then back at the door again.
A slow breath left him through his nose.
Okay.
Okay, so that was— something. Definitely something.
Unless it wasn’t. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe he was reading too much into it. Annabeth held his hand all the time. During quests. During battles. While running for their lives. This was probably exactly the same thing.
Totally identical, actually. He nodded once to himself. Right.
Because friends always stare at each other like that for thirty straight seconds in near silence.
He dragged a hand down his face.
That had to mean something, didn’t it? Unless it didn’t. Maybe people just looked at mouths sometimes. That was normal human behavior. Probably scientific, honestly. People watched mouths when other people talked. It was communication. Biology. Reflexes.
Except neither of them had been talking. Percy groaned quietly into his hands.
“This is confusing,” he muttered.
“Percy!” Sally called from the kitchen. “Food is getting cold!”
“Coming!” Percy yelled back immediately, voice cracking just enough to betray him completely.
He stood there another second, staring at absolutely nothing. Then he inhaled sharply, squared his shoulders, and headed towards the kitchen wearing the expression of someone who had everything under control.
He did not have anything under control.