Work Text:
"Oh, please." Hera waved her hand dismissively. "The son of Hades said it himself. No one wants him around. He does not belong."
"Hephaestus was right," Percy growled. "You only care about your perfect family, not real people."
Hera's eyes turned dangerously bright. The air around her seemed to pull taut, like a bowstring drawn back to its limit. "Watch yourself, son of Poseidon. I guided you more than you know in the maze. I was at your side when you faced Geryon. I let your arrow fly straight. I sent you to Calypso's island. I opened the way to the Titans' mountain." Her gaze swept sideways. "Annabeth, my dear, surely you see how I've helped. I would welcome a sacrifice for my efforts."
Annabeth stood still as a statue.
The silence stretched. She could've said thank you. She could've promised to throw some barbecue on the brazier for Hera and forgotten the whole thing — let it go, moved on, kept the peace. But her jaw clenched, and she wore the same expression she'd had standing before the Sphinx. She wasn't going to accept the easy answer. Not even now. Not even here.
"Percy is right." Annabeth turned her back on the goddess. "You're the one who doesn't belong, Queen Hera. So next time, thanks… but no thanks."
Hera's sneer twisted her face into something worse than any empousa Percy had ever seen — uglier somehow, despite the perfection of her features. Her form began to glow, light bleeding from the edges of her silhouette, building and building until it was unbearable.
Percy turned his eyes away as the goddess shifted into her true divine form and vanished in a blaze of light that scorched the back of his eyelids even through closed eyes.
The hilltop settled back into its quiet, indifferent peace. Over at the pine tree, Peleus the dragon dozed beneath the Golden Fleece as though nothing had happened at all. As though gods came and went like weather.
"I'm sorry," Annabeth told him. Her voice had lost its edge, softer now, and somehow that was harder to hear than the defiance had been. "I — I should get back. I'll keep in touch."
"Listen, Annabeth —" He stopped. He thought of Mount St. Helens, and the way the volcano had roared beneath his feet. Thought of Calypso's island — of her garden, and her quiet sadness, and the raft he had sailed away on. Thought of Luke and Rachel Elizabeth Dare, and the way everything that had once felt simple had slowly become anything but. He wanted to tell her. He wanted to say that the distance between them wasn't something he'd chosen — that he didn't know how it had grown so wide, or when, only that he didn't want it anymore.
"I—" he started, then stopped. How do you even begin when everything has piled so high that urgency has lost its meaning — when every single thing feels like it's screaming at once? "I — I guess I want to say I'm sorry."
Annabeth's eyes snapped to his. "For what?"
Percy lifted both arms slightly, a helpless gesture. "I don't know. It's just—" He exhaled slowly. "I feel like I need to. I snapped at you. A lot."
A ghost of humor flickered across Annabeth's face, but Percy had known her long enough to recognize a real smile, and this wasn't it. "I did too," she said quietly. "A lot."
Percy nodded. In the distance, Argus laid on the horn, a blare that rolled up the hill like a warning.
Annabeth cleared her throat. She straightened slightly, pulling herself back together. "You should get going. We don't want Argus mad." A short, awkward laugh escaped her, and then she turned, moving to jog back down the hill.
Percy watched her go. Just for a moment he stood there, rooted to the grass, following her with his eyes while the late afternoon light caught the gold in her hair. Then he turned toward the van.
"Wait — Percy!"
He turned back. Annabeth had stopped on the slope, one hand already shoved deep into her jacket pocket, searching for something. Percy jogged back without thinking. He reached her just as her hand emerged, and he recognized what was in her hands immediately.
Movie tickets.
The tickets to the movie they never got to see.
Such a small thing to break over. It was just a movie — just two hours where Percy wouldn't have to be a hero and Annabeth wouldn't have to be anything except a girl sitting next to a boy in the dark. Where the world could end or not end without consulting either of them.
That was all they'd wanted. That was the thing they were grieving.
Another ordinary memory that would never exist. Another version of themselves left behind in a future this life had already decided they didn't get to have.
"Take these," Annabeth said. Her voice came out smaller than she probably intended. She held them out, arm extended, not quite meeting his eyes. "They're no use now. But it — it feels like you should keep them."
Percy stared at the tickets for a long moment before taking them. He turned them over in his hands slowly, "You already bought them?" He glanced up at her. "I thought we were going to get them together. At the window."
Annabeth lifted one shoulder in a shrug that was trying very hard to be casual. Her eyes slid somewhere past him — toward the treeline. "I was anxious we wouldn't get seats," she said. "So I made a stop before I came to Goode." A pause. "Just in case."
Annabeth had bought the tickets weeks ago. She'd checked the dates twice, picked a showing that fit both their schedules, and tucked the tickets somewhere safe. She'd counted down the days without letting herself get too excited. Percy had been the same. Looking forward to it in that earnest way he did, he thought about the popcorn, the sticky theater floors, and the jokes he'd whisper that Annabeth would pretend to hate.
And somehow, even that had been too much to ask.
Percy folded the tickets once, gently, and tucked them into his pocket. "Bummer," he said. "I really wanted to get to know Rocky."
Annabeth let out a small laugh this time. They had been planning to watch Project Hail Mary, a sci-fi film she had practically campaigned for. Percy had resisted at first, insisting it looked like the kind of movie that would put him to sleep in the first ten minutes. But then Annabeth had told him about Rocky — the alien, the impossible friendship — and mentioned that Ryland Grace reminded her a little of Percy. He'd been sold before she finished the sentence.
A thought moved across Annabeth's face. She smiled, and it almost looked like the real thing. "You could watch it with Rachel," she offered. "I'm sure she'd love it."
Percy hesitated. He watched Annabeth's face for a moment — the neutrality of it, the smile that didn't reach her eyes — and felt the familiar discomfort of not knowing what the right answer was. "Yeah," he said slowly, reaching up to scratch the side of his head. "I guess."
Annabeth nodded once and began to step back.
"We could reschedule." He blurted out, his voice had more hope in it than he meant to show.
Annabeth stopped. She blinked at him, and for just a breath, something lit up behind her eyes. Something that looked a lot like relief. Then she turned toward camp, and whatever had been there was gone by the time she looked back at him.
"I can't," she said. Percy felt something in him sink.
"I have to help Chiron, and I still need to get into Daedalus' laptop, there's something I think I missed in the—" She was already crossing her arms, already building the wall back up, brick by careful brick. "Just go with Rachel. You two watch it together."
"You're doing it again."
Annabeth's mouth closed. "Doing what?" she asked carefully.
"Pushing me away."
"I'm not pushing you away. I'm offering you an alternative—"
"No." Percy shook his head. "You're pushing me away. You've been doing it the entire summer, Annabeth.”
The air between them changed. Annabeth's jaw tightened. She looked away, and Percy could see the muscles in her throat move as she swallowed whatever her first response had been. When she finally spoke, her voice was firm. "You want to know why?" she said. It wasn't really a question. "Because for two weeks, Percy, I thought you were dead."
The word landed like a blow.
“No iris message, no sign, nothing. And at some point you just—" her voice fractured slightly on the edge of the sentence, "—you have to start grieving.”
Percy held his breath.
"And then you were alive." Her voice was unsteady now, the control beginning to fray at the edges. "You were alive and you were fine and you were here, and I didn't—" She stopped. "I didn't know how to be angry about it, because how do you be angry at someone for being alive?"
The horn sounded again from the bottom of the hill, but neither of them moved.
"I don't know how to just be around you again, Percy, without feeling like I'm still waiting for you to disappear." She finally says.
Percy felt uncomfortable, frustrated, everything at once — a storm with no clear eye, no direction to pour itself into. He racked his mind for the right thing to say, turning words over and discarding them before they fully formed. Everything felt too small. Too late. Too much.
"But I came back."
Percy said it like the words themselves could close the distance between them. He was right in front of her now, close enough that she couldn't look anywhere without looking at him, his eyes searching hers, with equal parts desperate and certain.
I'm here. Not there. Here.
Annabeth stared back at him. She was blinking too fast, doing a terrible job of it, the tears building anyway despite everything she was doing to stop them. She shook her head and looked away.
Percy reached for her face. She pulled back. His hand stayed in the air for a moment — suspended, caught between the reaching and the letting go — before it dropped to his side.
"Isn't that what matters?" His voice was quieter now. "That in the end, I came back. That I chose—"
"I know." Her voice came out smaller than she wanted it to. "I know it matters. I know you chose us. I know that's what I'm supposed to hold onto."
And she did know. Percy had chosen. Percy was standing in front of her right now, which meant that Calypso’s island was behind him. But Annabeth had never been able to look at something and see only the surface of it. Had never been able to take the answer and stop asking how it got there. The details mattered to her — the small ones, the inconvenient ones, the ones that complicated the clean narrative of he came back and made it something harder to hold.
"But some part of you wanted to stay," she said, and there was such quiet conviction in her voice that he couldn't bring himself to look away. "Didn't it?"
The question landed between them like something irreversible.
Percy opened his mouth.
And said nothing.
The answer was complicated, it felt like a betrayal no matter how he shaped it — and Annabeth was standing right there, watching his face with those brown eyes that had always been able to find the truth in him before he'd even finished hiding it. He watched her search him. Watched her move through his eyes like she was looking for a door marked wrong — something she could point to, something that would let her exhale and say see, I was wrong. He could see how much she needed that. How much she was begging for it without saying a word.
He couldn't give it to her. And that was answer enough.
Annabeth's expression dimmed. Like the fading of a distant star—so gradual you almost missed it, until you looked up and realized the light was gone. She nodded once. Small. Quiet. As though she were agreeing with something neither of them had said aloud.
"Okay," she said.
Just that. Okay. And somehow that single word was worse than if she had screamed at him.
"Annabeth—" Her name came out rough, urgent, like Percy could pull back the last thirty seconds if he said it fast enough.
Argus honked again, longer this time, and it cut through everything like a blade. Annabeth stepped back. "You should go," she said. "Really."
Percy didn't make one move. He looked at her and felt the words pile, because how do you compress something this large into the thirty seconds you have left while an immortal many-eyed driver leans on a horn?
Yes. That was the honest answer to her question.
Ogygia had been quiet. It had been warm. Nobody on that island handed you a prophecy and called it a destiny. Nobody there looked at you like you were a variable in an equation that the gods were still solving.
He had been offered an escape. He was human enough to have wanted it, at least for a moment — or however long a moment lasted on an island outside of time. You couldn't blame a person for that. You couldn't stand in the middle of their life, the one that handed you unused movie tickets and prophecies instead of anything ordinary — and hold it against someone for briefly, desperately wanting out.
So yes, some part of him had wanted to stay. That was the truth of it.
But that wasn't the whole truth either.
The whole truth was that even from Ogygia, even exhausted, even half-dying, something in him had kept pointing in her direction. He needed her to understand that. Not the wanting to stay — she already knew that part, it was written all over his silence — but the other part. The part that mattered more.
That even now, standing here with two creased movie tickets in his pocket, he would do it again. Tomorrow, if someone gave them the chance. He would circle the date. He would show up at the theater. He would buy the tickets — in person, together, the way they'd planned — and he would sit in that dark room next to her and watch Ryland Grace stumble through space and he would not take a single second of it for granted.
He would risk it again. Even knowing how it usually ended.
Even knowing that the world they lived in had made an art form out of finding the exact thing they had quietly looked forward to and pulling it apart at the seams. Even knowing that hope, for them, had a long and humbling track record of ending in disaster.
He would still choose it.
A stolen afternoon. A bad theater seat. Her shoulder maybe an inch from his in the dark. The ordinary possibility of a few hours that belonged to nobody but them.
Over the quiet of Ogygia. Over the warmth of it, the stillness, the merciful absence of anything that wanted to kill him. Over every beautiful, painless, empty day that island had offered him like an open hand. He would trade all of it, for one afternoon that might not even happen. For two tickets that would probably go unused again.
But then Argus honked his horn down at the road, and he lost his chance.
"You'd better get going," Annabeth said. She met his eyes one last time, and whatever lived in that look, she tucked it away before he could fully name it. "Take care, Seaweed Brain."
Then she turned and jogged down the hill.
Percy watched her go. He kept waiting for her to slow down. To turn around. To give him something to hold onto for the drive back.
She didn't look back once.
He walked to the van. Climbed in. The door shut behind him with a dull, final sound, and Argus pulled onto the road, because the world didn't pause for things like this. Percy turned in his seat.
Through the rear window, camp shrank. The cabins, the hill, the pine tree at the border — all of it pulling away like something being taken from him slowly. He pressed two fingers against the cold glass without thinking. He couldn't find her in the diminishing landscape.
And then the road curved, and there was nothing left to look at.
Annabeth made it through the doors of the Big House. She leaned back against the wood, hands braced on her knees, and the breath she'd been holding since the top of that hill came out of her all at once — ragged, and nothing like relief.
She thought about Percy. About his silence, and everything it had confirmed. About the way she had understood it immediately. She thought about the tickets still in his pocket.
Sometimes Annabeth thought that was what being a demigod really meant. Not the dying, not the fighting — but becoming haunted by all the lives you almost lived. The ghost of every ordinary thing you reached for and came up empty on, following you around forever.
She was fifteen years old and she was already full of ghosts.
She pressed the back of her wrist to her mouth.
And mourned every movie they would never get to see.