Chapter Text
The truth is.
The truth is she would never have known, it never occurred to her what it would be like to fall in love with Annabeth, because she’s a girl and Annabeth’s a girl and she didn’t think about wanting to kiss her until Annabeth grabbed her face in the hot ashy air of the Labyrinth and made her heart thunder as loud as Zeus' storming rage.
And now, wrapped in clean white linen and soft with almond oil, she suddenly remembers that she had been in love with her all along, ever since the first moment she stared into her fierce gray eyes - she had never thought about loving girls but maybe she does. Or at least she loves Annabeth. And it explains the possessiveness, the thundering tension of their arguments, the way everything in her body tingles when Annabeth’s tan skin brushes against hers.
So she’s in love with Annabeth. She looks up at the sky on Calypso’s island and thinks about how some people love so much they become constellations.
She would put Annabeth in the stars, she thinks, but Annabeth would rather be built into the greatest temple in the world. She wonders if she will live to see it, or if the island is her home for the rest of eternity. Calypso’s sweet scent wafts by, clean and smelling of salt. Maybe she has fallen a little bit in love with Calypso, too. She could stay here forever.
But Percy misses lemons, the warm awkwardness of their hugs, the way they’ve come to trust each other the way young women do when it is them against the world – quite literally. She thinks about the anguish on Annabeth’s face before she disappeared, and her heart feels split open like pomegranates.
She is here, and she is pretty sure she is in love with Annabeth Chase, which even in the sea crash of her grief feels astoundingly like coming home.
When Hermes arrives, she sobs, and he hugs her, and she thinks he understands.
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