Chapter Text
The dungeon classroom smelled like it always did on Tuesday mornings; burnt sugar, crushed beetle shells, and the faint sourness of a Draught of Living Death that someone in the first period had definitely gotten wrong.
Percy Jackson slouched at his usual table, chin propped on one hand, watching Professor Slughorn pace at the front of the room like a man building up to bad news. Slughorn had a talent for that. He could make roll call sound like a prelude to disaster.
"Now then," Slughorn said, clapping his hands together, rings flashing. "Sixth years. NEWT-level brewing begins in earnest this term, which means I'll be expecting considerably more from you than gently stirred cauldrons and hopeful guessing."
Beside Percy, Bianca di Angelo let out a soft groan and put her head down on her folded arms. "He's doing the speech."
"He's always doing the speech," Percy murmured back.
"Two feet of parchment," Slughorn continued, "on the theoretical applications of the Elixir to Induce Euphoria, with particular attention to counteragents. Due Friday. And before anyone asks — no, Mr. Jackson, 'attention to counteragents' does not mean you may simply write don't drink too much of it."
A ripple of laughter went around the room. Percy raised both hands in mock surrender, grinning, and didn't bother denying that he'd been about to write exactly that.
Across the table, Reyna didn't even look up from the notes she was already taking, precise and slanted and entirely too organized for eight in the morning. "You say that like it's not a perfectly good thesis statement."
"It's not a thesis. It's a warning label."
"With you those are usually the same thing," Jason said from Percy's other side, not looking up either, though his mouth had gone crooked with the effort of not laughing.
Percy elbowed him. Jason let it happen, unbothered, the way he let most things happen, like nothing in the world could knock him far enough off balance to matter.
One table over, where the Hufflepuffs who'd tested into the NEWT class were clustered, Will Solace turned around just enough to lean into the conversation without technically leaving his seat. "If it helps," he offered, "I already wrote mine over the weekend. Very boring counteragent theory, nothing controversial in it whatsoever, guaranteed at least an Acceptable."
"Nobody asked, Solace," Percy said, though without any real heat in it.
"I'm being a positive influence. You should be thanking me."
"I'll thank you when you stop bringing it up every time Slughorn assigns something."
"That's every week, though."
"Exactly."
Will grinned, entirely unbothered, and turned back around just as Slughorn cleared his throat pointedly in their direction, the four of them dissolving into poorly-suppressed laughter that took most of the next ten minutes of stirring instructions to properly recover from.
By the time the bell rang, the assignment had already dissolved into the general noise of four sixth-years gathering bags and arguing about whether the Slytherin-Gryffindor match this weekend was going to be a bloodbath (Jason's word) or a formality (Percy's, delivered with considerably more confidence than the team's last practice had earned him).
"I still think you're going to eat those words," Jason said as they climbed the dungeon stairs into the entrance hall, sunlight cutting gold across the flagstones.
"I think you're going to eat the Quaffle if you keep flying that close to the ring."
"That was one time—"
"It was three times, and Madam Hooch has a whistle specifically for you now."
Bianca laughed, the real kind, the kind that made passing first-years glance over. Reyna checked her watch and announced she had Arithmancy in six minutes and would, in fact, like to arrive before the lesson ended, thank you very much, and peeled off toward the west staircase without waiting for anyone to argue.
That left Percy with a free period and two feet of parchment he had no intention of starting today, which meant, naturally, that he was going to the library.
He told himself it was about the essay. It was, technically, about the essay. Slughorn's counteragent nonsense would require at least one real source, and Percy had never in his life successfully faked a citation past Slughorn, who read footnotes the way other people read gossip columns.
The library at mid-morning was quiet in the particular way libraries are quiet: not empty, just hushed, full of the small sounds of turning pages and someone's quill scratching too hard. Percy made his way toward the restricted-adjacent shelves where the useful potions texts always seemed to hide, half from actual restriction and half because Madam Pince clearly enjoyed making students work for anything worthwhile.
He found the section, tilted his head to read spines, and reached up for a heavy green volume wedged near the top Antidotes and Their Applications, Vol. II at the exact moment someone else's hand closed around the same spine.
Percy looked over. So did she.
Grey eyes. Unimpressed in a way that felt personal, though they'd never spoken in their lives, at least not that he could remember, and he thought he probably would remember.
"I had it first," she said. Not rude, exactly. Just certain.
"You had a hand on it. I had momentum."
"That's not a real principle of library law."
"It's an emerging principle. You're witnessing the founding moment."
She didn't let go of the book. Neither did he. For a second they just stood there, both gripping the same cracked green spine like it was a matter of state security, and Percy found himself fighting a smile he didn't fully understand the reason for.
"Annabeth," she said finally, like it was a concession. "Chase."
"Percy Jackson."
Something flickered behind her eyes at the name, recognition, maybe, or the beginning of it, the particular look people got when they were doing quiet math about who exactly they were talking to. He waited for it, the way he always did, half-braced for the conversation to tilt toward his father, his family, the estate, the name that wasn't the one he'd just given her.
It didn't come. She just studied him another moment, like he was a slightly unusual variable, and then said, "You're doing Slughorn's counteragent essay too."
"Everyone's doing Slughorn's counteragent essay. It's due Friday. It's practically a natural disaster at this point."
"Some of us started it in September."
"Some of us have priorities."
That got the smallest curve at the corner of her mouth, not quite a smile, but adjacent to one, filed for future use. She finally released the book, and he felt strangely like he'd won something he hadn't meant to compete for.
"There's only the one copy," she said. "Madam Pince won't order a second no matter how many people complain. I asked."
"So we're splitting it."
"I didn't say that."
"You implied it. I'm an excellent interpreter of implication."
Annabeth considered him for a long moment, long enough that Percy became unreasonably aware of the dust motes drifting in the window light, of the fact that he was still holding half a book hostage between them, and then she nodded once, decisively, like she'd run the numbers and the numbers had come back acceptable.
"Fine. But I'm not doing the reading twice because you skimmed it."
"I have never skimmed anything in my life."
"You have beetle-shell dust on your sleeve from a class you clearly weren't paying attention in."
Percy looked down. She wasn't wrong. He looked back up, and this time he did smile, full and unguarded, the kind of smile that made most people at Hogwarts assume they already knew everything worth knowing about Percy Jackson.
Annabeth Chase didn't look like she assumed anything at all. She looked like someone reserving judgment until the evidence came in.
He decided, right there in the aisle between Antidotes and Aging Potions, that he liked that better than he'd expected to.
They found a table near the window, split the book down an invisible line neither of them acknowledged out loud, and worked in a silence that turned, gradually and without either of them quite noticing the shift, into conversation.
By the time Madam Pince came around to announce the library would be closing for the lunch hour, Percy had learned that Annabeth thought the entire theoretical framework of Elixir counteragents was "needlessly circular," that she took notes in a shorthand no one else could read, and that she had absolutely no idea who his father was.
For the first time in longer than he could remember, nobody in the room was thinking about the name Olympia at all.
It was, Percy thought, gathering his half of the parchment while Annabeth argued with him about whose turn it was to return the book, a very good start to a very ordinary Tuesday.
He didn't know yet how wrong that assessment would turn out to be.