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Rachel Elizabeth Dare is too loud for the apocalypse.
She throws her head back laughing around their little trash fire, voice echoing through the abandoned mall. The whole world was thrown into chaos when the Titans won the war, but Annabeth has a plan.
A bad plan, but a plan.
It's super convoluted, but their part is to get Rachel back to camp to take on the spirit of the Oracle like Apollo said they're supposed to.
They don’t have time to change their minds or reassess or stop for snack breaks, but that doesn’t stop Percy and Grover from splitting up to race for whoever can find a snack kiosk first.
Leaving Annabeth alone with Rachel.
The mortal glows by firelight, looking set on fire herself or maybe burning up from within, and she won’t shut the hell up.
“But maybe that’s just my dad. What’s your dad like?”
Whatever look crosses over Annabeth’s face makes Rachel choke on her tongue. Her freckles are glowing like embers beneath two eyes that glitter like jewels. Her pink smile fades, lips closing to hide her white teeth, but that fire doesn’t.
Annabeth gets it. She gets why Percy wanted her. If this had been waiting for Annabeth in the mortal world, she would have run away too.
“I’m sorry,” Rachel says, always so genuine and so good with people, and Annabeth kind of wants to hit her. “That was too personal. I just… I talk when I’m scared.”
Annabeth never would have admitted to that in front of a stranger. “You’re scared?”
Rachel laughs again, a bark that rings through the mall. “You aren’t?”
Annabeth bristles. “Do you think I’m scared?”
Rachel tilts her head, dirty curls spilling over her shoulders. “You’d be stupid not to be.”
It’s a trap, carefully laid with words, and Annabeth can’t not smile at that. Rachel lights up again.
“So stupid or scared then?” she asks and the redhead shrugs. “Why would I tell you?”
Rachel looks around the empty mall. Somewhere, Percy and Grover are running down its abandoned corridors, but here beside this fountain, it’s just the two of them.
Annabeth slides her tongue over her teeth and deliberates her options. Scared like Rachel or stupider than Rachel?
Neither is particularly appealing.
Rachel licks her chapped bottom lip and Annabeth remembers suddenly why she hates her. Invisible against her small, pretty mouth is a kiss from Percy and even though Annabeth can’t see it, it’s making her head spin.
“There’s a store with lip balm by the entrance,” Annabeth says instead of anything that makes sense.
“What?”
“You need some,” she says and it would have been easier if Rachel glared at her, but this strange half-smile is indecipherable. Annabeth can’t tear her eyes from Percy’s kiss.
“Wow, thanks,” Rachel chuckles, an actual ball of joy. Annabeth feels kind of like a miser beside her. The mortal extends both hands for Annabeth to help her up and she lets the demigod pull her to her feet fearlessly, even though Annabeth would clearly rather drop her into the fountain.
But then Percy would probably know.
The two girls walk in and out of shadows cast by the skylights, keeping one eye out for monsters, but Clarisse is doing a great job of keeping the battle raging in the city.
Rachel talks the whole way, asking questions about camp that make Annabeth’s heart hurt, but it’s nice to talk about it anyway. Or whatever is left of it. When they get there, they’ll probably have to fight their way through.
But Rachel isn’t asking about that. She somehow has endless questions that skirt the war and keep Annabeth locked in a comforting nostalgia. It pisses her off to think this is what Percy gets with Rachel when all Annabeth has to offer is a constant dread and bitchy attitude.
“And you guys do that every day?” Rachel asks as they turn a corner. The atrium of the front entrance opens up and they’re both cast in light from the outside world.
Somewhere in the distance, New York City must still be burning.
“Yeah,” Annabeth answers because she likes this conversation better than the one inside her head. “I think you’d like arts and crafts.”
“Me too.”
They pull up in front of the purplest place Annabeth has ever seen, its window display still boasting the same colorful array of chapsticks she’d seen on the way in.
“Claire’s,” Rachel says almost wistfully. “I haven’t been in one of these since middle school.”
For some reason, the threshold is daunting, almost like on a quest when she knows the second she crosses through, the trial will whir into beginning. Rachel doesn’t let her deliberate much though, just grabs her hand and pulls her in. Annabeth stares down at her pale pale fingers and then up at her pink pink lips. Percy’s kiss is still there, taunting her.
If Rachel notices Annabeth’s glare, she does a great job of hiding it by rushing over to the makeup.
“Ooh, strawberry!”
She pulls open a plastic jar of lip balm that immediately diffuses the air around them with the scent of sticky sweet strawberry jam, too sugary to be real. Annabeth thinks that Rachel would love the strawberry fields too. If they live through this, she wants to show them to her.
Her finger dips into the jar and comes away with something translucent and pink. Rachel smears it on her own lips until they shine like all the rest of her.
Annabeth licks her own lips.
“Look, they have a lemonade one,” Rachel says and, as soon as she does, her face flushes red. Annabeth tilts her head, trying to figure out how Rachel knows that her shampoo smells like lemons. She definitely hasn’t washed her hair recently.
Honest to an admirable fault, the redhead mumbles, “It’s Percy’s favorite.”
Now it’s Annabeth’s turn to flush. Rachel tosses the jar to Annabeth and it feels like a decision has been made between them, but neither of them know what it is. At least, Annabeth doesn’t.
She unscrews the jar and sniffs it, sour and sickly sweet all at once.
“This smells like it would dry out my lips more than hydrate them,” she says, screwing it shut again. “I feel like lemons might not be great for that.”
Rachel nods, cheeks still red. “It isn’t really about that. It’s about the flavor. But I get that. Look, here’s a honey one.”
Rachel unscrews the jar and dips the same finger she’d used on herself, that she’d slid across Percy’s kiss on her own lips, to collect a dab of translucent golden goo.
She doesn’t ask before sliding it across Annabeth’s lips. The smell is as sickly sweet as expected, but the knowledge that this finger has touched Rachel’s mouth, had touched Percy’s kiss, makes Annabeth’s mouth water.
“Thanks,” she says lamely when Rachel pulls away. The redhead clears her throat and tucks her curls behind her ears. “Oh, earrings!”
Her eyes are drawn away by a wall of shiny jewelry, some of it pretty and some of it stupid. She pulls out two tiny golden owls on the end of golden chains and holds them up to the light.
“Your mom, right?”
Annabeth nods. When Rachel turns again, she holds them up to Annabeth.
“Want them?”
“Oh… my ears aren’t pierced.”
Rachel’s grin is terrifying. “Then you’ve come to the right place, Chase.”
She scurries behind the counter and holds up a plastic purple gun. Annabeth pulls out her dagger.
“Relax,” Rachel laughs, crossing the room back to the window display where the light is the brightest. “Come see.”
Annabeth follows tentatively and obeys when Rachel tells her to sit on the display’s pristine purple ledge. Rachel parts her knees and steps between them.
“Don’t worry,” she whispers into the sickly sweet air between them. “I used to do this in the Goode bathroom all the time. With a much worse gun than this.”
Annabeth nods, not so much because she wants an ear piercing but more because she wants all the honesty Rachel has to offer. She hadn’t realized how starving she is for it until Rachel started talking and didn’t shut up.
The first sting makes her wince, so for the second, she’s sure to keep her face solid as stone and Rachel laughs at her. But Annabeth can’t feel shame because her lips are so close and Percy’s kiss is on them.
When she realizes she could steal it back, Annabeth can’t think about anything else.
Rachel pulls away and helps her up, dragging her to a mirror by the wall. The owls are cute and small on her earlobe and the chain cuffs around her helix with a studded golden band.
She looks cool and older and mortal, the way she imagined Thalia would be when she was younger and fantasized about being a normal family.
As normal as three homeless teenagers could ever have been.
Behind her reflection, Rachel is biting back an excited smile. Annabeth zeroes in on those white teeth on her pink lip.
“Pretty,” Rachel says. Annabeth feels like her whole body is on fire.
She jolts back, knocking Rachel into one of the stands and sending it crashing to the ground.
“Annabeth?” she hears echo through the mall. It’s Percy, back already and looking for her. She sees her window closing.
Rachel is laughing and holding her arms out for help again. Annabeth steels herself and yanks her up and into her arms, crashing their lips together.
It hurts, but Rachel is unfazed, pulling her forward by the hips like it had been her idea. She shows Annabeth how to make it soft, how to make it sweet, and it’s sickly so. Strawberry and honey and Percy’s kiss between them.
Her fingers tangle in Rachel’s curls, tugging her head this way and that as she presses her up against the mirror of the Claire’s. Rachel nips at her lip and sends her head spinning again. She wedges a knee between Annabeth’s legs and Annabeth moans into her mouth.
She honestly forgets entirely about Percy until she hears him behind her.
“Holy shit.”
The two girls break apart with a gasp. Annabeth spins to face him, his gaping mouth, his red face. Behind her, she can hear Rachel gulp.
Annabeth can sense it before she sees it, that even through his confusion and his dilating pupils, Percy’s getting angry.
Well, screw him.
Annabeth reaches back to grip Rachel’s wrist.
He starts to complain, but Annabeth shoulders past him, dragging Rachel behind her. When she looks back at him, Rachel is holding an L up with her fingers and Percy is flipping her off.
She tries to hold onto that anger, but she giggles with Rachel the whole way back to the fountain, too loud for the apocalypse.
Beside the trash fire, Grover asks why they’re covered in chapstick.
Annabeth laughs louder.