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5.
With Athena’s words still ringing in his ears, he goes to find Annabeth.
I do not approve of your friendship with my daughter.
The gods don’t approve of most— maybe any— of the things he does, but this warning sits with him a little differently than the others.
He spots her standing off to the side with her hands shoved into the pockets of her jacket, probably balled into tight fists like they’d been when he untied them on Mount Othrys. Her skin then had been freezing, unnaturally cold to the point it hurt his skin to even touch hers, but he held onto both of her hands anyway, trying to will himself to produce more body heat by thinking of other warm things.
Hot chocolate, pizza rolls straight from the microwave, beach sand in the summer, the sun, fire— anything, everything.
Both of them returned with all their fingers still intact, so he figures it must’ve helped somehow.
Tonight, the bags under her eyes are only slightly better than yesterday, but her face is clear of blood and dirt, so she looks a little bit more like herself.
The flames in the torches flicker slightly as he passes them. Olympus produces its own strange and immortal glow, so the torches aren’t really necessary and neither are the real flames inside them, but the gods take ambiance seriously apparently.
She’s watching Grover on the dance floor, being spun around by Thalia like he's not dancing on hooves.
“Hey,” he says. Very good opener, clearly something he spent all evening working on.
Actually, he’d been trying to think of something better when Athena crossed his path and now whatever thought that was almost fully formed is gone again, so ‘hey’ is all he’s left with.
She turns as he stops beside her, but doesn’t say anything yet. Clearly trying to figure out a response on the same level as his impressive opening line.
Instead, she studies his face, her eyebrows knitting together just slightly. Slowly, she pulls her hand out of her pocket. She hesitates briefly, then reaches up to touch the two gray curls right over his face. Her expression isn’t quite one he recognizes, not like the look she gets when she’s curious, but something a little sadder. Her fingers barely brush his hair, but she lingers there for a moment before pulling her hand back.
She has the same matching streak in her hair, three braids by her ear, their scars from carrying Atlas’ burden. The light shifts differently in her eyes with each small movement she makes.
“So,” she says finally. “What were you going to tell me?”
His stomach drops the same way it had in the gym at Westover Hall, right before Dr. Thorn interrupted, and it feels really unfair that his own body would shut down twice over the same sentence.
I need to tell you something. I couldn’t stand it if—
And then nothing else comes, because apparently his brain stops working in any moment that actually matters.
He thinks about the pamphlet again with its silver letters and how Thalia handed it to him while Annabeth and Grover ducked off to see if they could spot the Di Angelo kids.
“Did she even tell you that she was going to join the hunters?”
After that, he couldn’t stop picturing it. Annabeth dressed in silver instead of orange, with a bow slung over her shoulder instead of her camp necklace. Immortal and totally unreachable. He spent the past week trying not to let himself finish the thought, and now here it is anyway, on the tip of his tongue, right in front of her.
I couldn’t stand it if you left.
The music slows, at some point when they weren’t looking Grover and Thalia must’ve gone to find a pig in a blanket or whatever snacks they have at this party, either way they’re nowhere to be found.
“I, uh…” The words get stuck again and he rubs the back of his neck. “I was thinking that we got interrupted at Westover Hall. And I think— I think I owe you a dance.”
Her eyes narrow slightly again and he swears he can actually see her making the real time decision on whether to call him out or not. He waits for it, but she doesn’t.
“Alright, Seaweed Brain.”
So he takes her hand, it’s cold but in a human way this time. They don’t move all the way to where everyone else is dancing, just enough to get away from the edge.
Neither of them really knows what they’re doing. He puts one hand on her waist because that’s what people always do. She lets him keep one hand in his, and then moves the other to his shoulder.
Technically they’re not even dancing, more like swaying in one spot, but that means he’s not stepping on her toes which is something. Grover and Thalia find their way back, judging by the dance that Thalia is trying and failing to teach Grover, Percy assumes they must be hearing faster music now. The coolest thing about Olympus is that the music is different to each person. It’s whatever you want to hear.
He wonders what specific song Annabeth is hearing.
“You’re staring,” she says. “Staring at your feet doesn’t actually help.”
“You’re cold,” he says back.
She lets out a huff that's probably some combination between annoyed and amused. “It’s winter, Percy.”
“I noticed.”
Her hand is still icy in his, and he is trying very hard not to think about it, but now that they’ve run out of words to exchange, it becomes the only thing he can think about.
He stops and lets go of her waist, which earns him a strange look from her.
“Give me your other one too,” he says, holding one hand out, palm up.
She raises an eyebrow. “That’s not really how this works.”
“Neither is frostbite probably, but here we are.”
She rolls her eyes but she does it and he wraps both of her hands up in his as if that’ll do anything against the weather. It probably won’t but he does it anyway and she stares up at him, trying her hardest to look annoyed. The torchlight in her eyes is kinda ruining the effect though, and mostly all he sees is that they’re a different shade of brown in this light than they usually are.
With her hands warming between his, his brain offers something incredibly unhelpful.
Don’t look at me like that or I’m gonna end up doing this forever.
It’s a stupid thought, forever is a very long time and he knows better than anyone that demigods don’t usually get much time, but he can’t stop remembering how cold her skin was on that mountain. For some reason that’s the detail he keeps coming back to, how unnaturally cold and numb she was, to the point she wasn’t even shivering anymore. In that moment, he would’ve done anything to fix it. Truthfully he still would.
The words almost fall out without permission. He almost says I couldn’t stand it if you left or something else that would ruin the evening if she took it wrong, or if he said it wrong which, knowing him, he probably would.
They’ve basically stopped dancing by this point— just standing there, swaying slightly, a little more out of habit than actual intention. No one around them seems to notice, or care.
“Since when do you know anything about frostbite?” she asks after they’ve been quiet for too long.
“Since Grover made me watch a documentary about it. It was very traumatic.”
This gets an actual laugh out of her, a quiet but real one that leaves him with a terrifyingly large feeling in his chest that he pushes down immediately. There are too many questions and too much danger ahead of them to have time to examine that particular feeling, so he doesn’t. For now, they just keep swaying, he doesn’t let go of her hands and she doesn’t ask him to.
4.
The week before Christmas, Annabeth is sitting next to Percy on the couch while the lights from his family’s tree fill the room with warm rainbows. It’s their first Christmas as a couple, and since she intends to fly out to San Francisco to spend the holiday itself with her father, she lets Percy talk her into Home Alone.
She half pays attention to it because she can understand why he enjoys it, but she spends most of it secretly watching him watch it instead. When it ends, she says it was fine, and he acts like she’s just shot him.
“It’s Home Alone!” he protests. “You didn’t love it?”
“I said it was okay.” She shrugs. He stares at the carpet, wide eyed for a moment as if he’s just learned something life altering.
“Okay,” he says eventually. “Show me a holiday movie that you think is better.” He passes her the remote.
“Close your eyes,” she says.
He sighs but goes along with it and without warning, she clamps her left hand over his face and continues doing whatever the hell she’s doing on the TV with her right.
“Wow, you seriously think I would look?” he asks, trying his best to sound like somebody genuinely offended.
“Yes,” she says plainly.
Okay, so maybe he’d considered taking a peek before she physically took the option away. It’s not his fault for being curious. What is a girl who doesn’t even like movies’ favorite Christmas movie?
She takes her hand back and tells him he can open his eyes now. When he does, there’s a snowflake on the TV, swirling through the wind.
“Annabeth, I know you don’t really like the holidays but… How the Grinch Stole Christmas?”
“What? It’s funny!”
“I mean I don’t hate the movie,” he says, “just an interesting choice for you.”
The narrator goes through his opening monologue and Percy sits forward to grab the bowl of popcorn they’d abandoned towards the end of Home Alone. Whatever his mom is making for dinner in the kitchen is starting to smell good which is making him hungry enough to settle for cold snacks
After a moment, she says, “The Grinch might’ve done all of this bad stuff but he makes up for it at the end. And everyone forgives him. Because he made it right.”
Her eyes lock on the TV, allowing herself one sideways at him, only to find his attention already trained on her face. She goes back to staring straight ahead at the screen like nothing is wrong and she didn’t just say something that clearly gives away more than she intended it to.
Unfortunately for her, the older they’ve gotten, the more Percy has learned about the way she deals with hard things. And by ‘deals with hard things’ he means she refuses to, and he’s just become good at noticing it.
Luke’s death affected her in ways she won’t admit. If she brings it up, it’s strictly objective. She’ll lay out the facts, tell you exactly how it happened. She will also withhold all of the emotions that go along with it.
Every once in a while, she slips up, and he’ll ask if she’s okay and she’ll say yes and then change the subject and he’ll let her do it. If he keeps letting her pretend, she will push it down until there’s nowhere left for it to go.
“I think I need some air,” he says, tossing the blanket off his lap as he stands. “Will you come with me?”
She nods and doesn’t bother to pause the movie before she follows him down the hall. His bedroom door creaks as he pushes it open, just like it always does, and he pushes the top pane of the window up so that they can climb through.
“The weather is supposed to get worse soon,” Annabeth says as he helps her out.
“It’s fine,” he insists, swiping some of the snow off the window ledge so that they can both sit.
“I think it should snow more at camp,” she decides. “It’s kinda nice.”
He grins and turns to look at her. “Which snowflake do you think is the one with Mount Crumpet?”
She hums thoughtfully and tilts her head. “Maybe it was one of the ones you just shoved off the windowsill.”
“Maybe.” He watches a tiny one land on her eyelashes. “Personally, I think it’s that one,” he says, nodding towards her.
Her expression shifts into something softer, her smile warm in the snow. “I like to think all of them hold tiny little worlds in them. Ones without monsters, hopefully.”
“Definitely,” he says.
He reaches for her hand and laces their fingers together. Without hesitation, she puts her other hand on top of them.
“Cold,” she says.
“Likely thing for you to be,” he jokes, covering both of them with his own.
A small smile crosses her face and she glances down at the street below. The snow falls in clean blankets that will be mucky within the hour from tires and shoes. Eventually the plow will come through and leave snowbanks on each side of the road. For right now, it’s largely untouched.
He’s not sure how to ask it again. He asked in the middle of September after they managed to have a real date— just lunch at a diner, but one not interrupted by any immortal beings or other things that wanted to kill them.
He asked on Halloween when they sat out here and watched trick or treaters running up and down the block, dressed as princesses and superheroes and monsters.
He asked a week before Thanksgiving after they finished grocery shopping for his mom.
Every time, she insisted she was fine, which, he realizes now, means that asking isn’t really the way to go about it. Annabeth will keep insisting she’s fine for the rest of her life.
“You’re not okay,” he says before he can talk himself out of it.
Her eyebrows knit together as she turns to look at him. “Huh?”
“You’re not…” He takes a breath. “I can tell— that you’re having a hard time right now, I mean.”
She looks like she wants to protest, but the words die somewhere in her throat before she can get them out and she turns her head back towards the street.
“I just think about it a lot,” she says after a while. She squeezes his hand a little tighter and he squeezes hers back.
Instead of responding, he lets the silence hang in the air. This is what his mom does to him sometimes. She says if you leave the silence alone then people are more willing to fill it.
“Luke, and everything that happened. I keep getting stuck on the same things, like could I have stopped it before it got to that point?”
He wants to tell her it’s not her fault and that these were choices he made that she can’t let herself feel responsible for, but she’s heard that a thousand times.
“The night after he came back from his quest was so hard. I could tell something was really wrong. I remember I ran straight to the big house as fast as I could make my legs go. I had a million questions for him, I didn’t care that he technically failed.” She pauses, and he feels her hands tense between his. “And he just walked right past me.”
“The one for the golden apple?”
“Yeah,” she says, quietly. “Things were different after that.”
He knows that she thinks about this a lot, she’s probably combed through every moment that feels like she maybe could’ve made a different choice. You can’t outthink a prophecy, they both know that better than anyone, but knowing things doesn’t always make believing them any easier.
“How were things before that?” he asks.
She pauses again, he watches her jaw tighten and her lips twitch once. The bad things are most of what he’s left with of Luke, all the lies and the stuff he did that hurt the people he cared about.
Percy knows he probably hasn’t made it easy to talk about the real parts of Luke, the stuff that existed at a time before they knew each other and a titan had corrupted his mind. But the good things are what Annabeth should hold onto.
“We got to camp two weeks before my 8th birthday,” she says. “Thalia was gone and nothing was really making sense to me. Like, I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t allowed to sit with Luke at meals after I was claimed. I was the youngest in the Athena cabin for a while and I was really lonely, it was one of the first times I can ever remember not understanding why things were the way they were.”
Percy nods even though she isn’t looking at him. Most of his time at camp, he ate dinner alone. It sucked sometimes but at least he had Annabeth and Grover to be with afterwards. Eating with other people and still feeling alone all the time seems worse.
“I don’t know how, since we were so new— I never asked how— but he got everyone to sing me happy birthday at dinner.” She laughs, but the noise comes out sad. “It felt like that was the first time anyone even realized I was there. I’d never even celebrated a birthday before. My birth was never really something my family wanted to celebrate, you know?”
He’s never heard this story, and she never actually told him that she hadn’t celebrated a single birthday as a kid. The first summer he spent at camp, the day came and went and she let it pass without saying anything to anyone.
Somehow, she may have forgiven Frederick Chase, but Percy knows in his heart that he never really will.
His 8th birthday was spent with his mom at Montauk, a weekend away from Gabe who barely noticed their absence anyways. He insisted on putting more and more blue food dye into the frosting, even after his mom told him it wasn’t going to taste very good. She let him add as much as he wanted, and it tasted like plastic after. But that’s how 8th birthdays are supposed to go. Annabeth should’ve been allowed to ruin her own birthday cake if she wanted to— Annabeth should’ve gotten a birthday cake.
“That was really nice of him,” Percy says. “Everyone should feel like they matter, all the time, but especially on their birthday.”
She clears her throat. “Yeah, they should.” He can tell by her voice that she’s holding back tears, so he lets her share this good memory with him, and doesn’t push for anything else.
“I miss him sometimes,” she admits, quiet like she needed to get it out, but didn’t want anyone to hear it.
“That’s okay,” he says, and he finds that he genuinely means it. “You loved him.”
She nods, and they sit there for a few more minutes before he says, “We’re missing the movie.”
A laugh escapes her and she sniffles. She pulls one of her hands out of his to wipe her face and he pretends not to see her do it.
Behind them, his mom pokes her head through his bedroom door.
“I was wondering where you two went,” she says.
They both turn around to find her there in the doorway, one hand resting on her hip. “You guys are missing your whole movie just to freeze to death out there!”
He hears Annabeth laugh again as she climbs through the window, then he follows behind her.
“Sorry, mom.” He grunts as his foot gets caught on the windowsill, then hits the floor hard enough that the downstairs neighbors probably hate them.
She raises both eyebrows and then exchanges a look with Annabeth that he can’t translate but figures probably has something to do with him having to push himself up off the carpet.
“Come on.” His mom places one hand between Annabeth’s shoulder blades to guide her down the hall. “I made pork chops.”
Annabeth spares him one amused glance over her shoulder as he trails behind them, rubbing sorely at his elbow.
3.
He knows he hasn't been asleep for very long because he’s not drenched in sweat when he wakes up, which means it was still the first nightmare of the evening. Tonight, Annabeth’s voice, afraid and begging him to come back and asking why he left her. Her hands blindly reach out for him, except he’s not there. In the dream, he’s never there, so all he can do is watch and listen until the dream ends.
This is somehow one of the less disturbing ones he has, which says a lot because he wakes up sick to his stomach over it every single time.
The floor is cold beneath his feet so he flattens them there and sits on the edge of the bed for a while. He massages both hands slowly, he counts each knuckle and pinches his palm once at the end for good measure. Okay, this is real. This is the Argo II and he is safe— well, as safe as a demigod can be.
He’s met with silence when he taps on her door, which means she’s not in her room at all because they’ve both become even lighter sleepers than they had been before. He’d been a light sleeper for a long time, it got worse with each quest he went on, but he swears now he’d wake up if Leo dropped a sheet of paper down the hall.
Despite the nightmares, Percy forces himself to sleep because as miserable as it is, he thinks it’s the lesser of the two evils. He feels worse when he’s sleep deprived because then he’s physically exhausted and cranky and anxious about everything. Annabeth, on the other hand, sleeps less to avoid them altogether.
Whenever he wakes up in the middle of the night she’s almost always awake and anywhere but in bed. The stables, the deck, or volunteering to keep watch more often than anyone else. On multiple occasions he’s watched the others exchange a glance and then tell her that someone else is already handling it tonight. Even on those nights, she usually doesn’t sleep.
Sometimes she just knocks on his door and lays in his arms for a while with her head on his chest. This is what he prefers, of course, selfishly just because she’s already there when the nightmare ends so he knows for sure that she’s okay. He suspects that she presses her ear over his heartbeat for similar reasons, but he’s never asked. She told him once that she could tell he was having a nightmare because she heard it in his pulse.
Tonight he finds her on the deck with her knees pulled up to her chest, staring out at nothing in particular. He doesn’t bother to ask if she’s okay, neither of them have really been okay in a while. At least, not in any of the important ways. Now the question has just become a meaningless thing you ask when you don’t know what else to say and neither of them needs that.
Instead, he sits down next to her. The metal is freezing through his sweatpants, which is good. This kind of cold is good because it's very real, and not something his brain could lie to him about.
Neither of them says anything for a while and he just listens to the ship creak underneath them, he keeps hearing the some grinding noise that Leo would probably explain to him if he cared to ask.
The wind tonight is sharp enough to sting but he doesn’t flinch at it. Some nights he catches himself checking— is that actually wind, is that cold real? Sometimes he almost convinces himself that he’s still there and his brain is just trying to create something familiar, grasping for something natural in a pit where ‘natural’ can’t exist.
The sting is the only sort of thing he’s found that he trusts to answer those questions. The specific way the wind cuts through his clothes and bites at his skin isn’t something he can create from memory. He’s tried it, just to see. Against his better judgment, he has tried to recreate many sensations in his head recently, just to see which ones he can make seem real, to see if his brain can be trusted or not. The conclusion so far is that he either has a really weak imagination or his brain is just too stubborn to let him knowingly trick himself.
Two nights ago he spent twenty minutes trying to imagine the feeling of crunching a handful of cereal in one hand. He laid in bed with his eyes clamped shut for thirty minutes trying to construct it. For a moment, he’d done it so convincingly that he needed to get up in the middle of the night and go to the kitchen, just to crush some Frosted Flakes in his fist. Then he felt like a certified crazy person, standing there barefoot in the dark with crumbs everywhere.
“You’d think being inside would make it better,” Annabeth says eventually, nodding towards the deck. “Quiet. Safe. It should feel like the opposite of down there.”
“Does it?”
She thinks about it, or at least pretends to. “Sometimes, I guess. Most of the time it just feels like being on a boat.”
This is about as close as either of them gets to talking about it most nights. He’s learned not to press the issue once she shuts the door on it. To be fair, he does the same thing when anyone asks how he's doing, and the pressing never works then either.
He scoots to sit closer to her and comes up with something mundane to say instead, because mundane is what tonight calls for.
“Today Leo explained to me what makes the ship aerodynamic,” he says, pressing their sides together until the only warmth he feels anywhere on his body is where she is.
She rests her head on his shoulder and her hair tickles the space below his ear. Another sensation he’s pretty sure is real. He adds it to the list of real things that he’s been keeping somewhere easily accessible in his brain. You never know when you might need a list like that to reference.
“So what makes it aerodynamic?” she asks.
He pauses and tries to recall a single sentence Leo said to him earlier. There were a lot of words he’d never heard before. Now that he tries to piece any of them together he realizes how much zoning in and out of the conversation he must’ve been doing. “I don’t think I was listening that well.”
She lets out a small huff that might’ve been a laugh under different circumstances.
The sky opens up above them, starry and endless with nothing but air and clouds beneath them. At one point in his life this probably would’ve felt too exposed. These days it's nice to actually have anything below them at all, and nothing overhead boxing them in.
“He ranted about the landing gear for 30 minutes earlier,” Annabeth adds. Another gust of wind blows through and she finds a way to squeeze closer to him somehow.
“What was he ranting about?”
She shrugs. “I don’t know. He lost me about 2 minutes in, then after that I was just saying 'yeah that makes sense' a lot.”
It’s not much of a conversation, but it's not like it was meant to be either. He reaches over and takes her hand and she threads their fingers together without missing a beat, like everything is normal and there's not some version of them still stuck in that pit that can't be brought back.
Her hand is cold, maybe colder than the metal deck, and for once he doesn’t try to warm it up right away, he just holds it and concentrates on the feeling of it there until he can count each of her knuckles one by one. Another night without talking about it seems okay, at least they are still here to be cold together.
“Percy?”
“Yeah?”
He waits for the question, but she abandons whatever it was going to be and squeezes his hand once instead. He squeezes hers back, and apparently neither of them needs anything more than that.
Somewhere behind them, either Jason or Frank sits at the helm of the ship keeping watch. He’s not sure which because he was sent to bed halfway through the discussion like a little kid, which he sort of resents but hasn’t had the energy to bring up to them yet.
They stay out there for a long time, until the sky starts to turn orange and his skin is cold enough to trust that this can't be anything other than real.
2.
“I would argue that the rules don’t apply to non-campers,” Percy says, leaning forward against the railing of the Big House porch as the cicadas start their nightly shenanigans. “Especially ones that have now saved the world, what… twice? Probably more, if you think about it. We’ve probably somehow prevented a third war and didn’t even realize.”
Annabeth’s eyebrows lift. “I don’t think that’s how it works. You are definitely supposed to be in your cabin right now.”
“Is this your way of telling me to leave you alone?” he asks, turning to look at her, right beside him with both hands resting on top of the wooden railing.
“I’m saying I think Mr. D is still looking for any excuse to turn you into a dolphin.”
“You’re probably right,” he agrees, looking out in the direction of the beach. “That’s why we can’t let him see us.”
He starts down the stairs, stepping lightly so they don’t creak underneath his feet. Once he gets to the bottom he turns back and waits for her to follow. With her still standing on the porch, she looms over him and the fact that she can see the top of his head for once just feels wrong.
“We?” Her head tilts. The porch light illuminates her silhouette so her face is mostly obscured by shadow, but he’s pretty sure she’s giving him the same look she always does whenever he’s being irresponsible.
“We!”
“Then he’s going to turn us both into dolphins,” she argues.
“At least if we’re already by the lake we won’t suffocate,” Percy says. “Or do you think we’ll pop up in the lake anyways? He wouldn’t turn us into dolphins in the middle of the volleyball court, right?”
She pauses, he still can’t see her expression. “I think you overestimate Mr. D.”
“That’s fair, but it just means we better go instead of hanging out around here.”
“And what if they check my room?”
A few weeks ago, Chiron asked them to assist with some training for the youngest campers. They let Annabeth use one of the guest rooms in the Big House, because having her in the Athena cabin as a non-camper just didn’t feel quite right.
“You’re an adult, why would they come looking for you in the middle of the night like you have a curfew?”
She scoffs. “There is a camp-wide curfew.”
“Annabeth.”
“Percy.”
For a moment, they’re at a standstill. She can be impressively stubborn sometimes, but he can also be very persuasive. Especially when he knows it’s something they both agree on but she won’t admit.
“Fine, but I’m not going to be sharing my shrimp with you,” she finally concedes.
Camp in the dark is different when you’re just sneaking around like normal teenagers instead of sneaking off on a quest that you’re not even supposed to be on— which Percy has too much experience with. It makes the shadows seem slightly less threatening.
“Leo was supposed to fix that,” she says as they pass the climbing wall. The handholds on one section of it popped off while one of the Hermes campers was using it and the Ares cabin had decided it just made the challenge more fun. Chiron advised everyone to stop using that portion of the wall immediately but they’d gotten very good at not getting caught and a week later Leo still hasn’t gotten around to it.
“He probably forgot,” Percy says. “He needs a calendar.”
“That’s interesting coming from you.”
“I think he might be worse than me.”
“It’s close,” she says.
The beach starts to come into view, their footsteps start kicking up sand shortly after.
“Bad day for sneakers.” He glances down at her feet.
Her eyes follow and she shrugs. “I think it’s a perfect day for sneakers. There’s no sand between my toes.”
“Well there definitely is in mine.”
“You’re wearing Converse,” she points out. “There’s literally holes in the sides.”
“They’re ventilated.” He says as their feet start to thump against the dock.
“They’re bad for your ankles.”
He snorts because they’ve had this conversation about his un-ergonomic footwear on multiple occasions.
“It’s not my fault all the coolest shoes are bad for your feet,” he argues. “Who needs arch support when everyone can look at you and say ‘wow that guy has so much swag’ instead? I think one of those things is more important than the other.”
“You’re an idiot.” She tries and fails to contain a laugh.
He starts to sit down on the edge, and she starts to follow. The second she goes to crouch down he grabs her hand and pulls her in with him. They hit the water with a loud splash and he finds himself more thankful than ever that he can’t drown, because she might try it right now if he could.
As soon as she surfaces she’s gasping and cursing at him at the same time. He may not be able to drown but as far as he knows it’s not impossible for him to laugh himself to death, which isn’t helping the situation.
“Percy Jackson I am going to strangle you,” she chokes out.
Okay, so she found a loophole.
“You’d have to catch me first,” he says, pushing himself just out of arms reach for her.
“You could’ve at least made the water a little bit warmer.” She wipes at her face, only to find it and her hands dry.
“I could, but that’s not as fun.” He gestures towards her. “See? You’re not even wet. It’s not so bad.”
She gives him a look, blank and unamused, and swims in his direction. He floats just out of reach again and has the audacity to laugh as she splashes water at him.
“Quit moving so I can kill you,” she says, making one last effort.
He could move again without even needing to think about it, but this time he doesn’t. Once she gets close enough, she places her hands on both sides of his face. The sudden cold sends a jolt through his entire body and he inhales sharply.
“See? Cold!” She flips her hands to press the backs of them against his cheeks, which are even colder than her palms.
He ducks away and grabs both of her wrists so she can’t follow. “Okay. Maybe a little cold.”
“Let go of me so I can warm my fingers up on your face,” she insists.
Instead, he slips his grasp from her wrists to her hands and presses his lips to her icy knuckles. “Close enough?”
She considers the question for a moment, then says, “still cold.”
He wraps his hands around hers and pulls them to his chest, where they already begin to warm as they find themselves nose to nose.
“Well that’s definitely close,” she jokes.
“This is warmer than my face would’ve been.”
“Yeah, but not as fun,” she echoes his excuse from earlier. Her words tickle his lips as she speaks.
“You know, almost exactly two years ago you kissed me in this lake,” he says.
“I think that was a mutual decision, so…”
“Well you did kiss me once before that—”
“That one doesn’t count!” she protests, she hates whenever he brings this one up so naturally he brings it up as much as possible. “I thought you were going to die.”
“Why would that not count?” he asks.
“Because it doesn’t.”
He nods and the tips of their noses brush together. “No, you’re totally right. Somehow that one doesn’t count.”
“Don’t be sarcastic,” she says.
This isn’t really something he knows how to do. So instead of saying anything, he just looks at her. She’s blurry from the proximity, but he’s pretty sure he’s memorized every inch of her face anyways, he doesn’t really need his eyes to see it.
He lets go of her hands so that he can tilt her chin up just slightly, and presses their lips together.
She pulls back just enough to whisper, “This might be our last kiss as humans. I feel like I just heard footsteps.”
“I guess we’d better make it a good one,” he says quietly, just before their lips touch again.
1.
The very first warm day of the year is the one that sticks with him.
Sometimes the winter months start to blur together and his brain gives up on the sun and accepts that this is simply how life is now. Then he wakes up on that first 40° day and remembers that there is still hope in life and the world is not ending (this time). Even in the weeks that usually follow, where winter and spring play tug-of-war with the weather until he can’t be sure if it's safe to put his hoodies away yet. When the random April blizzard comes, he holds onto that first sunny day.
Annabeth Chase is kind of like that. The reminder that warmth still exists between snow storms. The proof that no matter how cold the winter is, spring still comes.
When you find someone made up entirely of this special sort of sunshine— the kind that stops you in your tracks right there on the sidewalk, just so you can soak it in for a moment— you hold onto them for as long as they’ll have you.
So in his vows to love her forever, this is what he tells her. That she makes every day feel like the first day of spring.
Her eyes are glossy while he says it, and he can feel that his are too.
That morning, while everyone was getting ready, his mom and Paul had made a bet on who they thought would cry first.
They both bet on Percy, and now he owes them each dinner. Truth be told, he knew it would be him, but betting against yourself feels like cheating and he could name multiple professional athletes who got in trouble for doing that exact thing.
Annabeth watches the tear roll down his freckled cheek and then finally blinks, giving a few of her own permission to fall. Even at their wedding she still manages to be competitive which is one of the things he loves most about her.
The tear trails down his face, down his neck, into the collar of his white linen shirt, and he simply lets it. Her perpetually cold hands are too warm in his today for anything to feel worth pulling away for. They survived an abyss of eternal torment together, fought side by side through battles and stopped two wars, and found their way back to each other every time the universe (*cough, cough*thegods*cough*) tried to separate them. These tears were hard earned.
Something in her expression shifts, the corners of her soft smile turning upwards just a little more.
“Very poetic. Did Will help you write that, by chance?” she asks, no longer bothering to hide the amusement in her face.
Percy chews the inside of his cheek, trying his hardest to bite back a laugh. “He proof read. There were… a few grammatical errors. It may have taken a while and there may have been a lot of red pen ink involved.”
Her grip on his hands tightens as she lowers her head to contain a fit of giggles, but he could stay there listening to it for the rest of his life and die happy. Her laugh is one of his favorite sounds, and it has been since their first quest, when they found themselves with Grover in the back of a truck sandwiched between a crate of antelopes and a crate of zebras. After that, he kept looking for ways just to hear it again.
Today, Grover stands beside them again, this time with his hands clasped in front of him and nothing but gratitude written on his face, maybe because there’s no zebras to argue with.
From the corner of his eye, Percy watches his mom dab a tear away and absolutely refuses to let himself look at her. If she’s crying then that’s definitely going to send him over the edge and it’s probably really hard to officiate a wedding if the groom can’t get it together.
A tiny ceremony had been the clear choice for both of them. They already spent way too much of their lives with way too many eyes on them— both mortal and immortal and everything in between. They could keep just this one thing for themselves. Parents and siblings only. Thalia and Tyson sitting beside Percy’s mom and Paul with Estelle in his lap, Annabeth’s stepbrothers with her dad and stepmom.
Finally she looks up again, with crinkles at the corners of her eyes and warmth across her nose and cheekbones. She takes in a deep breath and lets it out slowly, then nods once. “Okay. I’m ready now.”
She squeezes his hands again, and he swears that sunshine must pass through her fingertips, warming the space between the two of them.
“Okay,” Grover starts. He’d practiced this part for weeks, Percy watched him pace back and forth across his bedroom, cursing every time he stumbled over a word.
“You don’t have to get every single syllable perfect,” Annabeth had reminded him. “It’s not about all of that stuff. It’s about us, that includes you.”
“I believe we have rings,” he says. At her cue, Thalia stands from the bench and pulls a small wooden box from her pocket. If he looks hard enough, Percy can see the faint, silvery glow of Artemis’ blessing around her. He thanks the gods that Annabeth is not glowing like that.
“I made that,” Tyson says quietly, leaning in close to Sally. She reaches over to grab his hand in hers, and he sits up a little bit straighter.
As she passes the rings off, Thalia places a quick kiss on Annabeth’s cheek, and even spares an affectionate arm squeeze for Percy before she takes her place beside Tyson again.
“Percy, repeat after me,” Grover continues. He clears his throat and takes a deep breath. “Annabeth, I give you this ring as a daily reminder that you are my person, my best friend, and my home. With this, I promise to love, honor, and cherish you in all times, in all places, in all ways, forever.”
He manages to blink back all but one escaped tear as he repeats Grover’s words, and it follows the previous path of the first one. Her fingers are steady as his shaky ones slip the ring on, and it seems appropriate because she is often the steady one. Unless there’s a spider involved, in which case she will disappear fast enough to leave behind a cloud of smoke like a Scooby Doo villain.
Annabeth, however, sheds more tears than any of them had expected— herself included— and has to wipe her cheeks on two separate occasions.
“Sorry,” she says the first time. “It’s just… been a lot to get here. There were so many, so many, times I didn’t think we’d even survive to—” She cuts herself off to clear her throat.
Grover picks up where they left off, and she gets through another line before pausing again. This time, Percy’s hand makes it up to her face before hers can. He’s felt her tears on his skin too many times but none like this, never happy ones.
She gets through the rest, and Percy literally hears the smile on Grover’s face when he pronounces them married.
“And this is the part where you kiss,” he says, taking a half step backwards.
So they do, she smiles against his lips which makes him smile and for a second they’re more so laughing against each other’s mouths than kissing. When they pull back, she just looks up at him, brown eyes shining in the sunlight.
He thinks about that moment on Olympus 10 years ago, when she looked at him this same way and the feeling in his chest terrified him. She was exhausted then, both physically and emotionally from holding up the sky. Her hands were freezing in his and all he could think about was how much colder her skin felt on that mountain and how much it scared him.
Today, her face is lively and bright— actually, he’s pretty sure her skin is literally glowing in gold and wonders if Aphrodite is somehow involved, or if this is just a thing that happens when you get to marry the person that makes you do corny things like believe in soulmates.
Maybe it’s just a thing Annabeth can simply do on command, maybe she really is the spring sunlight in human form. Maybe the small braids on her head are actually rays of sunshine and the soft curls they fall into are actually the warmth that follows.
Or maybe he spent too much time with Will working on his vows and discussing imagery in poetry and there doesn’t need to be an explanation for why her hands are so soft and warm today. The important thing is that he gets the privilege of making sure they always feel this way, and he makes his own silent vow to himself that they always will.