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The decision had come down to instinct, but as with all events that factored into the equation of her life, this final sum was proof. Destruction always trailed two steps behind Annabeth Chase, and its spindly fingers had finally caught her around the ankles.
She was relieved, really. The satisfaction of being right scratched that itch she bore like a birthmark, even if it hollowed her out and left her bleeding too. For good, this time.
In the cacophony of war, the silver slicing through her body should have been just another event folded into the seams of swords and hooves and bloodied lips to be told and re-told at the campfire later, but the world came to a halt. Any and all other sounds were buried beneath the ringing in her ears building to a mocking lullaby, or a funeral march. She was still listening, waiting for the drop.
And yet – there. Percy’s voice carried a defiant rage she’d never witnessed – not with this ferocity. The words he spat out on her behalf swam too far above her dimming consciousness to grasp as she drowned. Annabeth felt like she was tumbling downwards into nothing, but some distant part of her hummed at this new emotion he showed, happy that she could carry some new part of him with her as she fell.
Even now, he was there with her. Her only relief was that maybe this time he would have to finally let her go.
When she came to on the terrace, a billion screams buried beneath her thin skin doused in sweat and curses stuck between her clacking teeth, she wondered what her body was still fighting so hard for. Her mind was barely there, and it hurt. Everything hurt like her organs were on fire but her nerves were made of ice and her brain was so damaged she couldn’t latch onto a single real thought.
Just- just try to think about something else Annabeth.
Silena, the younger girl finally placed, thick black curls framing her sweet heart-shaped face, soft hands curling around hers.
Annabeth felt – objectively – an out-of-body sensation of too-nice hotel duvets being piled onto her withering frame, and it warmed her to watch her friends try. They had all tried endlessly to defy fate, her more than anyone else, but as she laid there burning up and freezing, all the signs Fate had left her over time flashed in her mind as she lost all control of her cognisant abilities.
Her father, her stepmother, a closet and monsters that would follow her and no one else. A pseudo-brother who didn’t keep his promises, because she had given him no reason to. She’d turned him away to lose his life – like it made no difference to her, like she didn’t still love him. A sister who always chose to leave, shaking off the loose and fraying ribbons she had so gently tied around their wrists, a way for Thalia to find her way to a home she would never come back to.
When Annabeth was younger, she had dreamt of someone like Percy. Stubborn, loving, so desperate for her to see her through his eyes like doing so could change who she was.
The signs told her that his love couldn’t change a thing.
The corner of 75th Street still stood for the day she got her heart broken, and she knew it would stay that way. Why had she built the nerve to believe there was any chance that an afternoon at the movies was something that could belong to her, she’d forgotten.
And still, she’d had the gall. To forget about Bianca, about burning it all down in her name until she ordered four people on a quest for three, kissed him and he finally killed himself in her place so the fucking gods could show him how good he could have it without her. As if she didn’t already know. How safe, how clean, how steady.
She’d been stupid enough to hope that the empty gap between Percy and his shadow could belong to her. That because it’d felt right to stand there, that it must have been true. But that spot was an easy one to fill, because he was so easy to love – that was the part about Rachel that hurt the most. That if Annabeth had been anyone else, maybe she could’ve claimed it just as quickly as the girl had.
This year apart had proven what she had settled for so long ago – that there was no space for her anywhere other than the front lines.
Stupid.
The poison crawling up her shoulder struck her now, needles and pins that knew exactly which nerves to strike to make her sweat or shock her into momentary paralysis, her whole body still so cold and hot the sensation was deafening. Risking a glance at her shoulder as Silena fruitlessly changed her bandage for the third time in however fucking long she’d been on that terrace, her downturned eyes caught her mottled brown skin which now looked like a fifth grader’s science project. Scabs circled a bloody, swollen gash that protruded, oozing purple and red and white pus through holes she didn’t even realise she’d forgotten to patch up.
"Annabeth…” a choked echo of her name rang on the balcony, and it was only about 30 seconds after the fact that she realised the scuff of more sneakers on the terrace had announced the arrival of her best friend. A shallow exhale went loose from her lungs, shifting her ribs.
Percy looked alive. Too alive for the death around him, the death eating at her, his golden curls tangled by the wind and eyes bright with a feverish worry that Annabeth felt herself collecting whatever was left of her coordination skills to remember how to form words.
"Poison on the knife,” she finally managed, slowly, the words so light they nearly dissipated in the thin morning air. “Pretty stupid of me, huh?”
Will stood next to her, studying the crawling wound without touching it, eyes fraught with worry he was trying to swallow down. She wondered briefly where Michael was.
"It’s not so bad Annabeth,” the younger boy exhaled, brushing her wound with menthol-tinted hands that seared like a forest fire, however gingerly he’d touched her. Her body screamed for her, throat opening up so her vocal chords could tear through the air.
Percy opened his mouth to say something, but shut it just as quickly. He merely clasped her clammy fingers in both hands in answer, on his knees by the daybed. Her fingers curled around his without any instruction. His touch was so soothing she nearly closed her eyes, but he was so close now, leaning in to overtake the entirety of her field of vision. She was so greedy.
“Breathe with me,” he instructed in that same low voice he’d always used with her when he was begging her to listen, so pleading and gentle her mind wished to contradict him and remind him that she had her own will, that he couldn’t compel her to do anything. Her heart, on the other hand, just wanted to give and give and give.
Fresh gauze, ready to be bloodied, was now plastered on her shoulder, accompanied by incantations murmured into a song on Will’s lips that sounded like a child padding across carpeted floor, afraid to bother anyone in the house, even though they’d wet the bed again. Annabeth screamed into nothing, gripping Percy’s hands with a viciousness he accepted wordlessly, shifting even closer to her on the lounger so his elbows pressed into the cushions by her hip, like he would jump into her body and take her place without question. It was the last place he deserved to be.
The wound smarted, like a popped pimple deflating, but her skin was still wet with that hot blood and syrup-thick white pus and the painting they melted into together made her groan with the bone-deep exhaustion and pain she’d known for years, the tears running down her cheeks no longer a stream but a waterfall.
“Something’s wrong,” Will muttered, his voice stricken with panic, regulating his own emotions with short staccato breaths as he cleaned his hands off roughly with one of the few towels they had left that wasn’t dyed with evidence of onset death.
“What the fuck do you mean something’s wrong?"
Annabeth watched his golden head turn to Will in terror, his hands squeezing hers like he could perform CPR on them, like it would put a stop to fate. She loved him for it.
"Percy. The poison’s not stopping – it’s just – slowed. I- I need to talk to my siblings,” Will muttered, feet carried far off from Annabeth’s rotting in real-time.
Wrung towels and cracked voices overtook the terrace as Percy barked out instructions to change her blankets and pillows so he could clean up the pus and the blood re-infecting the wound. Silena left her side for the first time since Annabeth woke up in deference to the boy on his knees for her, always begging for something. It was something they always had in common. Except she prayed for, and he prayed to.
"Just- just hang on, okay, Wise Girl? Will’s coming back-”
Her head shook imperceptibly, but with a finality that made Percy’s breath catch. She watched his chest heave in slow-motion, and wondered if this was how memories played in your head before the end like people said they did. Golden sunrays illuminated all of him so each individual blond curl on his hair looked like it was made of pure light.
It wasn’t so bad, to go, if this was all she had in the end.
"Maybe… we’ll catch it in the next one,” she muttered, bringing her eyes to his so he stopped fussing, focusing all his attention on her in the way that made warmth spill over, shooting straight down to her toes.
"The next one?” Percy answered, brows furrowed even harder, confusion bleeding into the worry lines so deep-set on his face that she couldn’t help but raise her clammy left hand up to hold it, him, however much effort it took.
"I…” she tried again, though her chest burned at the effort. He held her wrist.
"Annabeth,” he continued, urgent, the skin of her cheek prickling against his other forearm where it brushed her face in an effort to keep her temperature down with the cloth on her forehead. “Just rest, please. Let me take care of you now- I- Gods why did you take that knife?”
He always cared for her like this. Like his hands could erase any trace of the life that she’d lived before him, baptise her in his waters and start anew.
She brushed her thumb across his cheekbone and memorised the way it made his breath hitch. Percy leaned in – whether to hear her weak pleas better or because he just always seemed to be drawn in to her gravity centre instead of his no matter how much she pushed him away, she couldn’t say. It didn’t matter now. He would have to find another girl to orbit.
Red locks and green eyes stuck to her peripheral vision, an apparition of all of Annabeth’s faults, a silent taunting in the form of a mortal ghost.
“The movie,” she answered, so quiet in her devotion. She really meant it. “So… you can see the movie.”
The frantic pressing of cool cloth on her forehead stilled, when he caught her meaning. It didn’t take him long, never did.
Percy lowered his head to meet her eyes again. God, they were so blue, crystal clear and inviting – no, begging for her to dive in, one more time.
"You mean we, right?”
Her eyes fell to her lap, but she couldn’t bring herself to pull her hand away from where it warmed his flushed cheek too.
"We’re going to see that movie. Tomorrow. When this is all over. They’re showing the Wizard of Oz on 75th Street again – I haven’t seen it yet, obviously. I know better than to watch it without you,” he chuckled, though the sound was coughed out like he had to force it, his usual smile a strained photocopy that couldn’t capture the same mirth and cheek the real one held. “I’m not that stupid. You’ve gotta start giving me more credit than that.”
She fought down a smile, even now, at the broken butterfly-wings of hope lying in the pit of her stomach, helpless.
“It’s the least I can do,” he smiled weakly, rambling on just so her brain could latch onto something in this horrifically painful limbo. Her wound was breaking her inside out, like her body was made up of twenty tiny natural disasters, so it could only half-work enough not to stop her heart, yet.
“The largest bucket of plasticky popcorn my allowance can buy, two blue raspberry and grape slushies. I’ll even let you pick out the Sour Patch Kids. It’s not all that good a payment considering you literally saved my life again, but it’s a start,” he said, stroking the tip of her nose with his thumb, so easily accessible where his cloth-wrapped palm was pressed to her forehead. “I would’ve died, Annabeth.”
An uninterrupted afternoon with the person she loved most on this mortal plane was all that she’d wanted – would’ve traded the world for. She’d bought him enough time to make it a possibility by taking his place.
Annabeth thought maybe that was what she was doing now, letting go in the hopes that her sacrifice would finally count for something, and that Percy would live and love and spend his time here with someone else, so she might be born again in the one world where that uninterrupted afternoon belonged to them.
It sounded easy enough to her now, however painful it had been up until now. Her shoulder was begging for it, for rest, for no more fighting, no more war, no more loss. Please, she felt every cell in her body scream for release, that same buried scream that had sat at the base of her throat since she was seven years old and knew what it meant.
She should’ve let go earlier. This round was always going to be a bust. Except for him – him, she would always find. Annabeth knew that now.
"Think you’ve gotta take someone else, Seaweed Brain,” the girl whispered, with something she hoped looked like a smile. “That’s how this works.”
Understanding began to dawn on his features, but the stubborn set of his jaw stood its ground despite the fear and rage hooking into him. It was just like him to do this – refuse the meaning of her words, see the world for something other than it was. She loved him for that too, even if he was wrong.
"Annabeth,” Percy’s voice drifted, his eyes tearing from hers to whip around and search for Will, terrified with his hand shaking around hers. Her fingers had lost their ability to hold on as tightly as she had before, feather-light and untethered, though she found they were still wrapped in his.
“Wh- what’s the poison doing – where the fuck is Will-“
She coughed and he cradled her head to help ease the pressure in her lungs, caving, collapsing, finally giving way to all the times she couldn’t breathe in the last year.
"I’m sorry,” she barrelled on, the poison in her shoulder stripping her senses raw, so all that remained were the feelings she never gave voice to. “You’re always getting hurt because of me. Like in the volcano. But I saved you this time, right? You aren’t hurt? So I can —“
“No- no,” Percy interrupted fiercely, his fingers on the back of her neck pressing the towel harder to her skin, nearly scraping it clean. The water felt cool, and she wondered if that was something he was doing on purpose. She didn’t have the strength to ask.
“Don’t finish that fucking sentence. Don’t.”
His eyes darted between the wound on her shoulder and the one in her eyes, gaping open in its hurt and defeat. She was finally vulnerable enough for him to read everything she hadn’t said like it was spelled out on her body, and he looked like he was on the verge of breaking himself as tears pooled in his blue.
“Don’t do that- don’t cry Percy,” Annabeth heard herself mutter on instinct, but the words were all cotton-y and oddly-shaped in her mouth. “It’s for the-“
"Annabeth you’re going to have to fight this thing. If you think I’m gonna let you martyr yourself for me because you have some- some sick fucking idea of what my life should look like then you don’t know me at all.”
His rage was ferocious and all-consuming, still on her behalf like she’d glimpsed on the Williamsburg Bridge, but directed at her with equal fire as at the others. At Luke.
"If you- if you do this, I will find a way to Elysium myself and drag you out of there. I will kill every monster and raze every temple and palace to find you and bring you back to-“ he stopped himself off here, like it would cut him down to say it. “You know I will."
“We haven’t fought so hard for you to… for this.”
The shadow of a shiver shot down her spine, though her body was too locked up to accommodate it just then. He would, she knew, as she catalogued the begging and the way his voice cracked on the last word, like he couldn’t really believe what he was saying either.
"I almost died. I would’ve died without you,” he stuttered out.
"I know,” Annabeth answered, her voice kind, patient, like in their younger days. She really thought she did. That was the whole problem with them – it was always someone for the other instead of both. And if it came down to it, Percy had to live. He belonged.
His fingers tightened around hers, now drawing them to his back.
“No, you don’t. You’re not hearing me.”
The hem of his shirt lifted beneath their joined hands, and her skin met his lower back, just at the base of his spine.
Annabeth gasped.
She gasped like her body had rebooted, finally recalling the act of breathing. It felt like pure sunlight speared through her. Blue crowded out any other hue in face, with his eyes awake and brighter than they’d ever looked in the glassy waters collecting in its corners. Ocean blue, sky blue, every colour she’d ever felt she now saw in him.
“I would’ve died without you. You- happy. Alive. Reminding me why I,” Percy continued, pressing her fingers harder to the spot on his back that made him grit his teeth and breathe so hard it looked like it hurt, just so she could feel it, how alive he still was. “Why I’m here.”
“I- I don’t,” she stuttered, wide brown eyes finally wide open as she searched his blue for meaning. “What?”
“In- in the Styx,” he shuddered, lightening the pressure on his back but keeping her fingers tethered to his skin, warming them both on the livewire. “I had to think- of something that kept me here. I nearly dissolved Beth- just- like fucking disappeared. I would’ve been nowhere. Not Elysium, or Tartarus- just, nothing."
The revelation came like a cold shock, freezing every open flame and roaring fire in her body as she gripped whatever inch of him she could reach. The base of his t-shirt, his forearm, suddenly unsure if he was actually here. She thought about Sally, and hated herself for being childish enough to have argued with him for so long. He was so brave, so kind, so much better than anyone she’d ever known. So much stronger than she could imagine.
“Percy why- why did you do that?” she cried now, a dry sob strangling her. “How could you?”
The boy only shook his head, dipping into the little distance between them to press his temple to her forehead, shaking his head.
“I need you. Not a fucking shield. You, not in war, just- laughing around a stupid campfire and hating on Jaws because of some continuity bullshit and sitting next to me at the dinner table and burning pancakes on the stove and holding my hand on the way to school.”
"That’s how I came back from the Styx. Why. It’s- I need you. I want you. I want the movie, the afternoon, every fucking day after. I wanted it so, so bad that you- you were the one who pulled me out of there."
Annabeth quieted. Every sensation, thought, painful reminder of her demigod birthright imposing on a mortal life burned away at his light. The same light that she craved so much she had to look away to remind herself that it didn’t belong to her. He always made it sound like it did- like he did.
She had no choice but to look today. To recalibrate as she always did, even like this, barely hanging on to the cliff as her body just screamed and screamed and screamed for an end to the pain. The secret he’d just told her stoked a different fire from the one trying to burn her alive, and suddenly she remembered her own anger, for him, for her, for them all.
"Do- do you want that too?”
He was so quiet, so unsure, and she heard his insecurity even as the waters tried to drown her. Her love fought harder against her self-control than it ever had, just to hold onto him and the possibility of doing it forever, to be selfish and just give in – they had both paid too high a price for gods sake – but the words got so tangled on the way out that it took all her strength to simply nod.
"Tell me,” Percy pleaded with a calloused palm on her cheek, hot breath and desperation and love warming her face. “Please – try.”
“I,” she started, rendered incapable of denying him again, not like this. Not after proof, a different sign. A golden chair that she had managed to yank him out of. An island and an escape. The defiant signs he invited, compelling her to resist, to pick up shards of hope even when they cut her palms open and demanded she opened her eyes to another long day.
“I want…” she exhaled, making conscious attempts to breathe through the pain now. “To… do homework in your kitchen, with… Sally’s cookies on the table.”
A bright smile finally broke on his face, so beautiful Annabeth clung to it like a lifeline without a second thought, absorbing all of its vitality to last one more second.
"Only you would ever want to do homework,” he chuckled, a wet sound that rang like a windchime in a rainstorm, so magical that she didn’t notice Will and Silena’s return, with an armful of stolen health supplies and herbs from Chinatown. “Keep going.”
“I want to go to prom… I think. Get better at Mario Kart so I can finally beat you – there’s still no way you aren’t cheating. Play more board games. Try… more fiction.”
Each want came almost too easily, and if Annabeth had been in her usual state of mind, her pride would have stopped her from voicing any of these thoughts while Will stripped her flooded bandages to clean them out with a newfound supply of nectar and repeat his incantations. Her pride was currently distracted, completely taken in by Percy’s undivided attention, though the pain in her shoulder was now white-hot and red and her throat was raw from screaming.
"Beth, it’s okay, I’ve got you,” he soothed as her chest heaved in recovery. His fingers were purple from how hard she’d gripped them, and he hadn’t complained once, brushing her braids out of her face as Will finished working his magic, his curls matted with sweat and stuck to his forehead.
“I’m not cheating at Mario Kart, but we can play. Everyday. You’ll probably get too good at it and I’ll get annoyed as fuck, but we can,” he smiled, reassuring her of a future she still wasn’t sure was hers to claim, but it was so close now.
“I’d… I’d like to build something,” she admitted, quietly, so only Percy would hear. “A dream house.”
"Yeah?” he grinned, gentle and curious and so Percy, Percy, Percy. “What’s it like?”
"A lot of windows, some French doors so we get natural light. Floor to ceiling bookshelves, and dark wooden floors. A big garden with jasmine and roses and herbs and tomatoes. Some colour, but mostly in the furniture. I think mid-century.” Her mind looped a playback of the vision as it came to life. Her and Percy wearing matching socks at Christmas, with the guest rooms done up for Sally and Paul and Grover and a home library and a garden with a shed of corrugated sheets they slept in during the hot summer nights, so they could count the stars.
“Do I get a room in this house?” Percy murmured, eyes bright and awake again as he brought his hand to the curve of her neck, smoothing the skin over her steadying pulse, though she was still burning, for more than one reason now.
She nodded, not trusting the words that would fall out in this moment as her senses began to find their way back to her. He let her take the second she needed before she spoke again.
“More than one.”
His lips brushed her temple, pressed to her skin with a reverence that made her clutch his t-shirt tighter, pull his arm to her waist.
“Then we just need to make sure we get to build this house, don’t we?” he asked, though the weight of each word made it sound like a promise. She let him lie next to her in place of an answer, afraid to shatter the tentative vision between them so soon. Percy took it, settling for the deep, slow breaths his best friend was finally taking, rubbing soothing circles into her hipbone.
When the poison finally waned, with Will lying exhausted in his own bunk back in the hotel suite they’d overtaken, Annabeth finally let her eyes rest, with Percy’s frame curled around her.
In her mind, there was only the house and his eyes and her hand in his, holding on for one more day.