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Annabeth’s fan spins overhead, one time.
Then two.
Three.
Four.
Five.
She keeps counting.
She counts until she reaches forty, and she still can’t muster the energy to get out of her bed.
And it’s not like the bed is comfortable, or anything. Her dorm bed sucks; the frame is creaky, the mattress hard, the blanket scratchy, the sheets always weird-smelling no matter how many times she washes them. Annabeth regards this bed as one of her most uncomfortable sleeping arrangements to date, which says a lot, considering the amount of trucks and forests and cave walls she’s spent some of her nights in.
And still, the itchy blanket feels like some sort of safe haven for her, at the moment. Not that anything feels safe, particularly, but you know. If she’s curled up in a blanket and tricks herself into being asleep, maybe she can hide from the stupid pit that’d settled in her stomach about last month.
Or maybe it was before that, she’s not sure. She thinks it was last month because last month was when it happened; last month Annabeth’s dad decided he didn’t want her. Again.
She’d managed to live with him and his wife and the two boys that didn’t feel like her brothers in San Francisco for all of a few weeks. It’s not that it’d been all that nice, what with the awkwardness between her and her dad and the weird, judgmental side-glances her stepmom graced her with whenever she entered the kitchen in the morning and the noise her half-brothers never stopped making, but she had a room. She had a comfortable bed.
It only took three monster attacks (a feeble number, really), for Annabeth’s parents to sit her down in the living room and tell her that maybe it’d be a good idea for her to go back to the boarding school she’d gone to last year, all the way in Brooklyn. They’d poised it as a question, an offer, but her dad had already gotten her signed back up before she even knew about it.
That was a month ago, and Annabeth would like to say that she’d settled back into school easily, but that’d be a lie. Mostly because she hadn’t been very settled last year, in the first place. She doesn’t like her school. She knows that isn’t some largely unpopular opinion, most fifteen-year-old girls hate their school, but she especially hates hers.
Annabeth’s never liked to admit when she feels helpless. But in this city she doesn’t know, with these kids that ignore her in the hallways, with boring lessons in a language that jumbles together whenever she tries to read it, and with her handful of friends scattered across the globe, she can’t help but feel a little powerless.
She knows, theoretically, the one person she should call. Or, well, Iris Message. The one person that would understand what she’s going through, because he’s been through it so many times himself. Percy is actually her only friend that isn’t currently in some faraway corner of the country or the earth; he’s only a few miles away, living with his parents in Manhattan. It’d be no feat to go visit him, if she wants. But things have been sort of… weird, between them. She’d tried IM’ing him once, since she got to the city, about a week ago, and regretted it sooner rather than later.
Percy seemed to be so happy now, with his life. For years he used to tell her that he loved his mom but he hated going home, to schools where he was inevitably made fun of and homework that made his brain go numb, but Goode High School seemed to have a different effect on him. He was smiling as he told her all about the wonders of his school, the friends he was making and the way he was beating out everyone on the swim team. She’d offhandedly mentioned that she was in New York, as well, at her old school, and he’d seemed so happy about it for all of two seconds before he’d launched into telling her something funny that happened to him and Rachel Elizabeth Dare. Annabeth does not like Rachel Elizabeth Dare.
Usually, an Iris Message with her best friend can cheer Annabeth up in the worst of times. But during that conversation, she was all but happy. She had this feeling tug at her gut, this familiar thing that she felt when Thalia joined The Hunters and Luke left camp to never return again and her parents helped her bring her suitcase to the train; abandonment. Annabeth knows she’s dumb and dramatic about this stuff, but sometimes, when yet another person leaves her behind, she tends to feel a little unwanted.
She hasn’t talked to Percy, her best friend, the one person who’s supposed to understand what she’s going through, since. She misses him, more than she does most years, more than she’d like to admit; because if she admits it, the pit of dread and tug of abandonment might just burst inside her like an appendix.
It’s Saturday, now, exactly seven days since the IM, and Annabeth has nothing to do but stay in her dorm. Her roommate, Nancy Popofit or Bobofit or something (Annabeth just calls her Nancy Throw-A-Fit in her head, because she does throw a lot of fits), is visiting her parents for the weekend. So everything is quiet, an eerie kind of silence that someone who’s spent most of her life in a camp is far from used to.
The only sound is the white noise of the overhead fan, that’s been turned on since Annabeth had woken up about an hour ago and is already starting to drive her a little insane. The distribution of the cold air is way off, since one of the blades is almost broken in half, and the uneven spins make this ridiculously annoying sound, an indecisive combination of a hiss and a buzz. Whooshz, whooshz, whooshz. Annabeth swears she could break the damn thing.
It’s better than silence, though.
Her stomach is grumbling, a little, but even that’s not enough to get her out of the uncomfortable sheets. The food in her school is pretty atrocious, really, especially the breakfast food; and Annabeth might be hungry, but not enough to shove a bowl of stale Cheerios or a plate of shriveled fruit and watery eggs down her throat. So, she stays in bed, in her pajamas, staring at the ceiling.
She’s never considered herself a super energetic person, per se. She can be restless, sure, amazing battle reflexes (or ADHD, if you want to be mortal about it) tend to do that to a girl, but she’s never been too bouncy. Or bubbly. Or whatever you choose to call it. And mornings are never really her time to shine, she’s a lot more of a night owl.
Still, these kinds of days, where she just lays in her bed with unjustified tiredness, have become almost routine for her recently. Days where she can stare at her ceiling fan and count uneven spins until she reaches forty, and then a hundred, and then one-thousand-eight-hundred-and-thirty-nine whooshzes, and still not be able to stand up.
Eventually, a knock on her door cuts through the noise of the fan. She’s not sure what time it is, she’s been up since about twelve (really not a morning person) and hasn’t checked since, but she can assume it’s somewhere around lunchtime. It might be a teacher, coming to scold her for missing breakfast.
Annabeth sighs. She slowly pushes the prickly blanket off of her, just a bit, letting it slide to the floor in a slow heap. Slow feels good right now. She sluggishly sits up for the first time all day, noting the headache making its way from the back of her skull to right behind her eyes, and almost groans. She stands up, blinking at the new point of view she has of her room, and goes to open the door for whichever teacher is here to ridicule her.
But what she sees isn’t a teacher. It’s, surprisingly, a familiar pair of ocean green eyes, just an inch or two above her own, shining the way they’d been a week ago when the mouth of their owner was spouting off some nonsense about an irritating redhead.
“Hi,” the green-eyed person greets.
Annabeth blinks. Then she blinks again. The green eyes are still there.
“Percy?”
Percy gives his signature troublemaker grin, the kind Annabeth sometimes wants to smack and sometimes kiss off his face. “In the flesh.”
“How…” Annabeth stammers. “You’re here. Why? How? Why?”
“You’re curious today,” Percy notes. Annabeth stares at him, eyebrows furrowed as her tired brain reroutes and lags like an old, broken GPS.
“Can I…” Percy gestures towards something unclear, and it takes the broken GPS that is Annabeth’s brain a few seconds to step aside and let him into her dorm. There’s a rustling sound as he comes in, and only then does Annabeth notice the bulgy paper bag in his hand.
“Cool hair,” Percy says, the troublemaker grin widening. Annabeth lamely brings a hand up to her head and remembers the state of her curls; they’re put down, tangled from being slept on and she hasn’t washed them yesterday. With their blonde color, they make her look like she’s got a head full of hay. She’s too confused to punch Percy over the comment.
“What are you doing here?” she questions, looking back at him.
He shrugs one shoulder. Annabeth knows him enough to see the lack of casualness dripping from the gesture.
“Haven’t seen you in a bit,” he states the obvious. “And you’re in my city now, so I figured I’d visit.” He’s beating around something, Annabeth can tell, and she’s not sure she wants to know what it is.
Percy clears his throat, the overconfident demeanor that infuriating grin always gives him now long gone.
“Plus, when we talked, you seemed a little off.” Annabeth raises her eyebrows. Her brain’s not lagging anymore. Percy seems to get even more sheepish at her look.
“When you talked about being back,” he explains, but it doesn’t really explain much. “I just wanted to check if you were, you know. Doing okay.”
Annabeth blinks again; and there Percy still stands, green eyes and concerned comments and all.
“Oh,” she says simply.
He was worried about her.
Percy has always had this ability to notice things about Annabeth before she noticed them herself, to care for and about her even when she truly didn’t want him to. She’s not used to people caring about her, not this way; maybe that’s why she tends to assume the worst. Why Goode High School and Rachel Elizabeth Dare seemed like a threat, on the call last Saturday.
The tug of abandonment doesn’t burst. But Annabeth feels it relax, dissolve into her body very slowly until it’s nothing more than a phantom of a feeling surrounding the pit from last month. Slow still feels good.
“So… are you?” Percy asks, looking her up and down. “Okay?”
Her immediate response is yes, it’s always yes. This time, it dies on the tip of her tongue and dissolves into her body like the tug.
“How did you find my dorm?” she asks instead, her voice still as surprised and baffled and maybe a little pleased as she feels. “How did you even get in here?”
Percy shrugs, and this time it is casual.
“As for the first thing, I bribed some kid to find your room number,” he says, and Annabeth feels a different tug. It’s on the corners of her lips now, turning them upwards. “And I’ve climbed worse things than a second story window.” If he feels a tug, too, he succumbs to it, and the genuine smile resulting from it is something Annabeth has learned to appreciate since she’d been twelve years old.
“You should’ve told me you were coming,” she says, more bewildered than scolding as she looks down at herself, at the faded camp shirt and the bright blue shorts she slept in. She brings a hand up to the hay on her head again, and one of her fingers gets caught in a tangle. “I would’ve cleaned up…” she trails off as she looks around the room; her side of it is impeccable. “Myself,” she finishes eventually, since she’s too tired not to surrender to her own train of thought.
“I’ve seen you covered in blood,” Percy reminds her. “This seems pretty clean to me.”
She doesn’t bother to tell him how wrong he is.
“Can you leave your dorm on weekends?” he asks her suddenly. Although it’s not sudden, because it’s Percy and that’s how he is, and Annabeth is so used to it that it scares her sometimes.
She nods. “Yeah.”
“Do you want to come to dinner at my house tonight?” Percy offers, seemingly a little embarrassed of the question. “We’ll take the train, you won’t have to navigate by yourself, or anything.”
And she’d love to, she really would, but maybe the pit in her stomach feels just as unwanted as the tug.
“I wouldn’t want to just drop on your parents like that,” she reasons, even if her stomach is dying for blue chocolate chip cookies, or any fresh homemade food, really.
“You won’t,” Percy says hurriedly, like he should’ve known this would be a problem. “I told my mom I was coming here and she, like, begged me to ask. She misses you like crazy.”
The pit starts feeling smaller. “She does?”
“Yeah,” Percy says, and it sounds a little like a duh. “And Paul’s dying to meet you.”
“Why?” Annabeth asks, very intelligently.
Percy seems a little caught off guard by the question, because the tip of his nose turns pink.
“I talk about you,” he admits. “My mom does, too.”
“Oh,” Annabeth says simply again. She’s not very eloquent today.
Percy smiles timidly. His nose is still pink. “Yeah.”
The pit is more like a pinhole now. It’s never been a pinhole back in San Francisco.
A familiar noise sounds in the quiet of the room, once again cutting through the irritating whooshz of the fan; the soft rustling of a paper bag. Annabeth gives Percy a look, that’s not really a look and more so her curiously turning her eyes to him, and he seems to remember something.
“Oh, I almost forgot,” he starts, still pink and sheepish, lifting up the bag that’d somehow ended up on the floor next to him, “I got you something.” Annabeth’s eyebrows raise, and Percy looks even more awkward. “Don’t beat me up.”
She smiles at that, giving into the good tug for the first time today and trying not to think about how great it feels, as she holds out a hand to be handed the bag. Percy lets go of it like it’s on fire. She opens it and reaches inside, immediately feeling something soft; clean, fuzzy. A little heavy. She grabs onto the fabric it’s made out of, pulling it out. It takes a few seconds, but eventually she drops the bag and is left clutching a bright pink fleece blanket. It has hearts on it.
When she looks up, Percy is awkwardly scratching the back of his neck and seems very interested in his own shoes.
“Dorm blankets suck,” he tells her. Like she doesn’t know. “I hated mine at, like, every single school. My mom and I would buy a new one every year. They’re always scratchy, right? Or too thin? Or thick. They’re the worst, I could never sleep well with them.” Annabeth sympathizes with that.
“I figured you should have your own, so you could sleep well,” Percy continues, self-consciously tapping his foot on the ground. He looks up, but still doesn’t catch Annabeth’s eyes, only looking at the blanket in her hand. “I’m sorry about the color, I was looking for a heavy one, the store only had this.” Annabeth inspects the pile of fuzz in her hand closer; the hearts have smiley faces on them. Some are winking, rather creepily so.
“I figured a heavy blanket should be good,” Percy continues, and Annabeth finally realizes that she hasn’t said anything in a while, “since they help me sleep when I feel anxiou-“
Percy cuts himself off abruptly.
“Um. Cold,” he changes quickly, his voice a little quieter. Annabeth looks down at a particularly creepy red heart.
She doesn’t like when people pity her, she’s always hated it. That’s the nice thing about Camp Half-Blood; compared to other demigods, Annabeth’s had a pretty standard life, overall. She’s never been considered a lucky one, but people at camp respect her enough to see that she’s over it all. That she came out strong on the other side.
And then there’s Percy. Stupid caring Percy with his stupid caring mom and stupid caring stepdad and a stupid caring life to come home to every year. The line between care and pity is so thin, in Annabeth’s opinion, and Percy tends to play with it like a jump rope.
Annabeth knows that his life isn’t perfect, but Sally raised him perfectly enough to see when people act a little off and help them, or hear his best friend is in New York and visit her dorm with a blanket.
Or know that no matter how strong she tries to be, how strong she is, Annabeth is still a little broken. A little anxious. A little lonely. A little too little to handle a lot of things that’ve come her way over the years, maybe too irresolute, as well. And she knows it makes him pity her, since he’s stupid and caring, and she hates pity. Because it’s not that it makes her feel weak; it shows that she is.
So, she clears her throat and looks up. Strong. Resolute. Not the girl who spent the better part of two hours today staring at a ceiling fan.
Instead the girl who feels the pit in her stomach get blocked, stuffed with hot pink fabric that winks at her.
“Anxiou-cold?” she questions, trying to come off teasing. She hears herself sound mostly blank, even if she doesn’t feel it.
Percy still looks a little embarrassed, regardless. Then again he’s always been easy to fluster. “Just… cold,” he corrects. “Help me sleep when I feel cold.”
“That’s what blankets are for, Seaweed Brain,” Annabeth reminds him. She sounds a little more like herself, this time. It might be the nickname.
“Guess so,” Percy nods, scratching the back of his neck again.
Annabeth looks back down at the blanket. It’s starting to make her palm sweat, furry and warm and heavy that it is. The hearts are smiling and winking, the brightness of the whole thing is giving her a headache. She’s never liked pink, much.
“Percy…” she says, rubbing the fuzzy fabric between two fingers. It’s a kind of warm that she hasn’t felt since summer, she realizes. The kind of warm that only shows up when she feels something she isn’t used to; wanted.
Percy awkwardly clears his throat. “Yeah?”
Annabeth looks up at him, not speaking for a few seconds.
“This…” she starts, trailing off, but not because the words are hard to find. Because she has to bite the inside of her cheek before the smile that’s pulling at her lips breaks free again. “This is the stupidest blanket I’ve ever seen.”
Percy’s eyes widen in surprise, and Annabeth doesn’t try to stop herself anymore; she bursts into laughter. Percy does, too, at the exact same millisecond.
“I’m sorry!” he cackles, his face turning bright red. It makes Annabeth laugh even harder, so much so that she knows her ribs will be hurting soon. “That’s the only thing they had!”
“It’s so dumb,” Annabeth wheezes. Percy lets out a particularly loud laugh, and she folds into herself in an attempt not to fall. “Why is it smiling at me?”
“I don’t know!” Percy exclaims. Annabeth feels her knees buckle.
She keeps laughing, doubled over in unflattering cackles that are almost as loud as his. They don’t really relax, not for a good minute or two, and by the time she manages to stand up straight and look at him, she’s still giggling and his eyes are still shining.
“Seaweed Brain,” she mocks, her voice soft and giddy and maybe a little relived.
Percy grins, his eyes like shiny ocean rocks. “Wise Girl.”
Annabeth grins back.
There isn’t much distance between them, she notices. Enough for her to be able to throw her arms around his neck, the hot pink blanket tangling somewhere between her right elbow and his left shoulder. Percy’s arms rest around her waist like it’s second nature to him. Annabeth wishes that it was.
“Dinner?” Percy asks into her hair.
“Dinner,” Annabeth affirms.
Percy smells like the ocean. He always smells like the ocean. He’d told her, once, that he feels like the ocean makes him braver; not only the shield it gives him, but all of it. The feel of the waves, the scent of the salt. And he might be rubbing off on her, a bit, because it’s the seawater smell in her nose that makes her hold him a little tighter as soon as she realizes he’s not planning to let go.
“Thank you,” she says into his shoulder. She’s not only talking about the blanket, but if Percy were to ask, then she is. “I like that it’s smiling at me.”
Percy snorts and squeezes his arms around her, hard, and she takes it as the better form of a you’re welcome.
“The blanket that smiles back,” he almost whispers.
He catches her when her knees buckle with laughter.