Archive of Our Own ^beta

It came down to Percy having a minor obsession with Annabeth’s hair.

She’d cut it, over the summer. It had been spilling all the way down her spine, tickling the upper back of her thigh. At that length, the weight of it was too heavy to curl anywhere except at the very ends, and the ends were dry and splitting because Annabeth hadn’t cut her hair since she was seven, so even they didn’t curl nicely, even if they tried. He’d always liked her hair, because it smelled nice and it was a bright shock of blonde like the morning sun, and objectively it was a nice color for hair to be. But she’d finally cut it over the summer, citing the annoying weight of it, the way it was too heavy for a bun but it would still get caught on everything if it was in a ponytail. 

“Are you going to grieve too much if I cut my hair,” she’d mumbled into his stomach, curled up against him. Instead of her sneaking into his cabin, that night, they’d chosen to shake things up and sneak out entirely, laying down a towel on the beach and fighting for space to avoid getting covered in sand. As it were, Annabeth was lying almost entirely on top of him. That wasn’t something he minded; he liked holding Annabeth, liked the way she fit against him, liked being near her. He wouldn’t admit this to her, but he also liked the illusion of being between her and the rest of the world, liked the idea that maybe she felt as safe with him as he did with her.

Percy’s fingers, looped in her hair, stilled. “What?” he said.

“I was thinking of cutting it. It’s too much to manage.”

Percy tugged the strand caught between his thumb and forefinger. “Why would I—it’s your hair, why would my opinion matter?”

“Percy,” she said, slowly. “You never stop playing with my hair.”

Percy felt heat rise to his cheeks. “Oh. I’ll, uh. Sorry.”

Annabeth, not quite in the position to elbow him, shoved her shoulder beneath his ribs. It didn’t hurt, thanks to the Curse of Achilles, but a bit of air was forced out of his lungs. It was inconsequential. He spent most of his time with Annabeth breathless, anyway. She had that effect. “I like it, you dork,” Annabeth said. 

“Oh,” Percy said, grinning despite himself. “Well, okay, then.”

“I’m not cutting it all off,” she said. “It’ll just be shorter.”

“You could shave your head and I’d find something about you to be obsessed with.”

Annabeth twisted so she was looking up at him, her eyes—dark, usually, like steel, like a thunderstorm—were uncommonly bright. To be honest, when he thought of Annabeth, of the things that made Annabeth who she was, he thought of her eyes; dark, intense, and sharp at the edges. But there was a way they crinkled at the corners when she smiled, or was trying not to smile, and it didn’t make her eyes any less intense to look at, but it was a good, happy kind of intense. “You’re at a seventeen, I need you at a three,” she said. 

“A seventeen of what,” Percy said. 

“You’re a nightmare,” Annabeth mumbled, twisting back, so Percy was faced with the back of her head and the bright pink tips of her ears. “You’re a nightmare. You say things like that, and it’s not fair, it’s entirely too sweet. You’re going to rot my teeth.”

“Weirdest thing I’ve ever been accused of, honestly.”

But Annabeth had cut off about half of her hair, between junior and senior year—and wasn’t that annoying, that Annabeth could measure the time between her haircuts in years. The longest Percy ever went was during the summer, and by the end of the summer his hair was about twice as untameable as it normally was. It was tradition that on his first night home for the year, his mom sat him down in the bathroom and attacked him with the barber scissors, occasionally interrupting his babbling with a pointed comment about how it wouldn’t be impossible for him to find someone to cut his hair at camp, and Percy would whine about how no one would do it like his mom, and his mom would cluck something about flattery getting him nowhere in life. He could tell it was half-hearted clucking, though.

Annabeth had cut her hair to the middle of her back, after what Percy was informed was a heated debate between her and the Aphrodite kid she’d conscripted into helping her; the Aphrodite kid thought she had the bone structure to support a bob, but Annabeth wasn’t having it. If Annabeth had wanted her hair to be more manageable, she hadn’t anticipated that cutting her hair shorter would make it curl more—it got tangled on other things less, but now the curls got tangled with each other. She had to brush her hair more often, which she made a point of complaining about, and when Percy told her, I don’t know how you can look the way you do and not want to spend more time in front of a mirror, she’d blushed bright red down her chest. He thought, personally, that she complained more, after that.

Percy was more obsessed with it than he’d ever been, because now her curls bounced in perfect little ringlets that caught the light in a way they hadn’t before. Months later, in December, he was still obsessed with it, still hadn’t gotten used to the way her curls bounced when she moved, or when he pulled on them and let go. He’d started looking up YouTube videos for different braids, waiting for the moment when Annabeth would fall asleep in his lap and he could put the knowledge to use. All features of a minor obsession.

He missed the initial signs of her nightmare because he was busy trying to master a fishtail braid, looking forward to the way she’d elbow him in the stomach when she woke up and he gleefully told her he’d braided a pun into her hair. The hyperfocus that came with his ADHD seemed to kick in precisely when he didn’t need it to; he missed the way she stiffened, the rapid movement of her eyes, the twitching of her fingers. 

When she started mumbling incoherent strings of noise, but clearly distressed strings of noise, Percy froze. He’d learned pretty quickly that if Annabeth got to a certain point in her nightmares, she couldn’t just be shaken awake—they’d only started sleeping in the same bed, or on each other, with any kind of frequency last year. It’d been a learning curve. Annabeth had almost broken her hand on his face a number of times, because Percy had tried to wake her up too suddenly, and she’d reacted out of blind terror. Percy thought it might be something she’d learned as a seven year old on the run, as someone who’d lost almost every safe place she’d ever had—and it ached, thinking about that. Sometimes he stayed awake and tried to imagine Annabeth at seven, years younger than when he’d met her. When he was seven, he undoubtedly would’ve died on his own, without his mother—he didn’t know how awful a life would have to be, to drive her to the lengths it did, but he did know that he respected the fact that she’d survived it. 

Percy swallowed back the biting tang of guilt in his throat—something that, as often as he felt it, he’d never quite get used to—and untangled his hands from Annabeth’s hair, running his hands over her shoulders and down her arms. She jerked, violently, and Percy wrapped his arms around her chest, pinning her arms to her sides. He hated doing that, loathed it; pinning Annabeth like this made him feel awful for hours afterward, like a sheen of oil over his skin, sludging through his blood, that he couldn’t scrub off. But it was better than her breaking something accidentally by thrashing, because if she thrashed she would hit Percy, and the Curse made his skin about as forgiving as hitting concrete full force. It also generally escalated her panic, and he loathed that more than anything, because it was his fault her nightmare had even gotten this bad in the first place. 

“Hey, hey,” Percy murmured. “Relax. Relax.”

Annabeth jerked again, but this time her half-asleep brain recognized she was pinned, and years of demigod-trained instinct jerked her awake with a gasp and she lurched forward. Percy let her go, and she scrambled to the other end of the bed, the whites of her eyes flashing in the dark navy of the room.

“It’s safe,” Percy said, softly. “You’re safe.”

Annabeth swallowed a gasp of air, trying to pace her breathing. Her hand fumbled across the sheets, and Percy met it with his own, squeezing and rubbing a thumb over calloused knuckles. 

“You’re safe,” he said again. “We’re in your dorm room, at your school, in New York.”

Annabeth shuddered, a full-body, jerking motion, sucked down another breath. Percy reached across the bed and pulled her closer, but leaving a hand on her shoulder, leaving her at arm’s length. He ducked until he caught her gaze, and her eyes focused on him, the wild sharpness of her gaze something that he felt could have cut him, if he could be cut. It wasn’t uncommon for Annabeth to have a panic attack. He’d been helping Annabeth through panic attacks since they were twelve; what she liked, most of all, was a pattern. The coolness of logic. So he counted out breaths, a one-and-a-nice-pause-and-two, pushing her fingers to the pulse in his wrist so she could feel the rhythm. 

Her breathing slowed. Her eyes never left his face, almost owlish, but in the sense that owls were keen and sharp and always watching—unabashed intensity. Percy kept counting even after Annabeth’s breathing evened out, kept counting until she had slumped forward against his chest. One of her hands curled at the nape of his neck. Her fingers were trembling. She was trembling, down to her spine, and Percy wrapped his arms around her and held her as tight as he dared. 

“Oh, baby,” he murmured, and Annabeth’s rib cage heaved under his palm, and she was crying, tiny, breathy sobs. He shifted her closer. Her hand dropped from his neck and wormed beneath his arm, wrapping around him and grabbing a fistful of his hoodie. She pressed her face into the crook of his neck, and he could feel the hot stain of her tears against his skin.

Percy rubbed her back in broad circles, head bent low to her ear, murmuring a constant flow of—something, he wasn’t entirely sure what he was saying. They were words for Annabeth’s ears only. 

Eventually the heaving of her chest slowed, and her grip on his hoodie slackened, and she curled up so her head was just laying on his chest. Percy pressed a kiss into the half-braided half-free mop of hair. He didn’t stop rubbing circles into her back. 

“Do you want to talk about it?” he asked, finally.

“You have to get home,” she said.

She might’ve had a point. Percy may have made sneaking into her dorm room in the evenings a habit, but he wasn’t technically supposed to be there, and the longer he stayed the more he risked getting caught, or, infinitely worse, his mom saying something. He was pretty sure she already knew, because there was extremely little Percy did that she didn’t know about—but there was a difference between sneaking back into his room at eleven-thirty on a school night, and sneaking back into his room at three in the morning on a school night. He dug his phone out of his pocket, and his lockscreen blinked up a damning four-thirty three at him, and Percy swore.

“Told you,” Annabeth said. Her voice was flat, emotionless. He hated it, when she sounded like that, like she was cutting out parts of herself, trying to move on before she was ready.

“Fuck the time,” Percy said, decisively, shoving his phone back into the pocket of his sweats. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“Not really,” she said, but she was starting to pull away, letting him up. “Not right now.”

Percy didn’t move. “Don’t feel guilty that it’s late,” he said. “I chose to stay. That’s on me, not you. I can stay longer, if you want me to.”

Annabeth stared at him. “Why would you?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“Because—” she ran her hand through her hair, but her fingers got caught on the braids. She pulled one around to frown at it. “What?”

Percy felt the blood rush to his face. He was glad, for once, of his dark brown skin and the way she could never tell if he was blushing around her thanks to it. “I, uh. I was. You were asleep.”

“Me being asleep does not explain the braid in my hair,” she said, one eyebrow raised. 

“Braids.”

“Excuse me?”

Percy tapped a rapid pattern on the back of his hand, nervously. “Braids. Plural. There’s a couple. I was, uh—practicing.”

“You were,” Annabeth said, slowly. “Wait a second. All these little braids, that I thought I did and forgot about because I was bored, that was you.”

Percy swallowed and looked at the ceiling. It felt like emergency klaxons were going off in his head. “I, uh, will not be answering that question. I cannot confirm. Or deny.”

Annabeth’s face had split into a broad grin, when he glanced down, and maybe the momentary embarrassment was worth it, for that look on her face. Her cheeks were still splotchy, and her eyes were bloodshot and rimmed with red, but gods, she was beautiful when she smiled—the kind of beautiful that made his heart jackhammer in his chest, the please do that again, I would do anything to see that again kind of beautiful. He wanted to kiss the corner of her mouth.

“I didn’t know you knew how to braid,” she said. 

Percy shifted uncomfortably. “YouTube is a good teacher.”

Annabeth looked away, her smile impossibly growing wider, leaning into the corners of her eyes. “Let me get this straight. You watched YouTube videos to teach yourself how to braid, so you could braid my hair when I fell asleep on you.”

Percy scratched at the back of his head. “It’s your fault for having good hair. I think we should switch to laughing at you for having good hair.”

“You,” she said, “are absolutely unbearable.”

She leaned forward and pressed a kiss to his cheek. He looped an arm around her waist and pulled her against him, and said, “Would you talk to my mom about it?”

Annabeth made a startled noise. “What?”

“If I call my mom, she’ll pick up. No matter what time it is. You can talk to her,” Percy said. “If that… if that would help. I just want you to know, there are options here. You’re not just stuck with me. I don’t want you to be stressing over something if talking it out would help. If it won’t, that’s okay, I just don’t want you to—”

The look in her eyes stopped him. Her eyes flicked over his face, as if cataloguing his every microexpression, like she could read him the way she could plow through a book. Better, even. Percy thought she could. He doubted there was a thought he’d ever had that Annabeth couldn’t figure out.

“It was Luke,” she said, finally.

“Oh,” Percy said.

“It was—it wasn’t bad. Not really.”

Percy flicked her shoulder. “It sucked. It doesn’t have to be the worst thing in the world for you to be upset about it. No minimizing.”

“I have a lot of memories of him teaching me how to fight,” she said. “He—that was what we did, me and him and Thalia, and Grover, later. Day in and day out. I had to be able to hold my own, as much as a seven year old could. But Luke did most of the teaching. In the dream he was—it was just a memory, him teaching me everything he knew, which I know now wasn’t a lot. But it seemed like a lot to me, and—he made me feel brave. He made me feel like I could make it, we could make it. But in the dream he kept changing. He went from teaching to attacking and then his eyes, they were —fuck.”

Good to know, then, that Annabeth’s dreams could condense almost a decade of one of the most complicated, painful relationships she’d ever had into the span of an hour or two. Percy’s heart twisted, and crawled into his throat. If his arms tightened around her, he hoped she didn’t mind.

Annabeth rubbed at her eyes, breathing deeply. “I don’t know,” she said, finally. “Sometimes I wish he could’ve just—been evil, been totally evil, so that I could just feel betrayed without thinking that he—it’s too fucking early for this. It’s too fucking early to think about him.”

Percy could still hear it, Luke asking, do you love me? When he heard it, sometimes he’d desperately wished he’d said fuck yielding, actually and kicked Luke’s teeth in. There was a long list, of things Percy wanted to say, highlights including he was in his twenties, you were sixteen, and he spent as much time with you as he did leaving you, that isn’t love or he doesn’t have to be an irredeemable monster for you to hate his guts anyway. But if he said either of those things, especially right now, when Annabeth clearly didn’t want to talk about it, it would escalate into an argument. He hated it, that Annabeth seemed to think it had been her job to be chewed up and spat out for the sake of Luke Castellan’s crusade against the gods, but that wasn’t something he could talk her out of between now and when she’d have to get ready for school.

Percy kissed her forehead. “Thank you,” he said, “for telling me.”

Which sounded like bullshit even to his own ears; it sounded like a pathetic placeholder for the words he should be saying, but he can’t find them, between the rage thrumming in him over all of the ways Luke had hurt Annabeth, and the rage thrumming in him that Annabeth was sleeping in his lap, reliving that, and he didn’t notice until it was too late. The cloying feeling of being doused in oil, leftover from where he’d pinned her earlier, burned in him, like someone had taken a match to it. He tried not to think too hard about the sensation, because the last thing he wanted to be thinking about was burning alive, not after having lived it. The burn scars crawling up his left side, souvenirs from Mount Saint Helens, prickled.

Annabeth sniffed. “Why do you put up with me,” she said, finally.

“I don’t put up with you,” he said. “If I was just putting up with you I wouldn’t be here. So that part’s wrong. But if you were asking why I’m here, well, that’s kind of easy—I love you. You’re smart, obviously, and funny, obviously, but you’re… you are brave. But you’re the one who made you brave. You were brave before you met Luke, and you were brave after Luke, and you’re still brave now. The only person Annabeth Chase is, is who Annabeth Chase wants to be.”

Annabeth let out a long, shaky exhale. “I—I can’t say that back. I don’t have, I don’t have—I love you.”

Percy kissed her forehead again. “You’ve had a rough night. You can make it up to me later. I’m creative, I’ll think of something.”

They held each other for a little while, after that, but then Annabeth came to the realization that they were definitely cutting it a bit close on time, considering Percy had to get all the way across town so he could get ready before school. She all but shoved him out of the window, a cheeky run Forrest run sandwiched between apologies, and—Percy did end up running for a couple blocks, just to give himself a little bit more time to work with. Annabeth sent him a picture of the mess of braids and curls in her hair, with the caption hwo am i supposed to get this out, followed by, fuck im jstuy leaving it.

He had a smile on his face basically all day, because he imagined the raised eyebrows Annabeth was getting from the posh girls at her boarding school, and the fierce, gray-eyes-like-the-blade-of-a-butterfly-knife expression Annabeth would offer them in turn. 

-

Ithaca was a good compromise, all things considered. Not that she or Percy were compromising much, really—his one demand was that Annabeth choose a college in-state, because he wanted to be reasonably close to his mother. Annabeth herself hadn’t wanted to be far from Sally or Camp Half-Blood, so she settled on Cornell, which had been the school she was thinking of anyway, so it was less of a compromise and more of a, for once, something worked out for us. Percy had made a lot of noise about taking a gap year, and although Annabeth was a bit nervous it would be a permanent gap year, she guessed there wasn’t anything wrong with letting a guy who’d helped save the world multiple times before age sixteen have a breather. If anyone deserved a gap year, it was her boyfriend. And Annabeth might have had scholarships stacked on scholarships, a spoil of war from a vicious junior and senior year in high school, and money from her family (a complicated story, involving a lot of crying and screaming into a pillow, but the gist of it was that her father seemed to think monetarily supporting her education would fix the shattered fault lines in their relationship), but it certainly wasn’t going to hurt that Percy would be working, either. For whatever reason, when he’d initially floated the idea of him just getting a job, she’d imagined him in some normal minimum wage job. A waiter, a barista. Percy could be charming when he wanted to be, but he did not have the appropriate temper for a customer service job.

Moving in together wasn’t even a question, because Annabeth and Percy had spent most of the last two years of high school joined at the hip; they’d been pretty conservative, at first, but by the time fall of senior year rolled around, Percy spent most weeknights crawling through the window of her dorm. She stayed with the Jacksons on the weekends, and over the summer, Annabeth lived with the Jacksons, choosing to stay with them over navigating the web of complex emotions embedded into the relationships of the Chases; Sally and Paul welcomed her with open arms, even with enthusiasm, and Percy, of course, had been over the moon. They would navigate college and adult life together, the way they’d navigated everything since they were twelve. 

They’d gotten through the hell of looking for apartments, which had put Percy on edge for a reason Annabeth couldn’t figure out, and they’d gotten through the hell of packing and moving, which had put her on edge for a reason Annabeth couldn’t figure out. Percy could, though.

“You had a tech deck phase?” she’d asked, helping Percy sort his ridiculous closet into boxes. Percy was fond of throwing a bunch of things into a box, writing his name on the box, and then taping it up. Annabeth had suggested at least putting his clothes all in the same box, but Percy had said, what’s going to keep the lamp from breaking? and then padded a box with half his collection of joggers and tossed his bedside lamp on top. 

“You were there for that,” he said, from beneath his bed, from which he was excavating an incredible amount of junk. 

Annabeth pulled out a miniature skateboard, eyeing it. “No, I definitely don’t remember this.”

“Maybe I got out of it before I saw you again, that year,” he said. “I was—thirteen? Thirteen.”

“Interesting,” she said. “You don’t want them, right?”

“The fact that you think so little of me that you’d ask if I’d like to take my tiny skateboard collection into adulthood with me is so endearing,” he said, pushing himself out from underneath the bed, frowning at a mangled book he’d dug up. Half the pages were missing, and some pages were only ripped out part of the way, and dangled in the air. It looked something like a modern art piece, warning of the dangers of—it could’ve been anything from propaganda to illiteracy. The Importance of Being Earnest, apparently. “Did you know I owned a book?”

“I don’t think you owned that. I think a Tasmanian devil did.”

“Fair point,” Percy said, lobbing the book into the trashcan they’d dragged in here for the sole purpose of trashing what Percy no longer needed. Annabeth was already packed. It had taken her less than two hours, and she’d barely thrown anything away.

Annabeth was still holding the tiny skateboard. Percy didn’t want it. It was a relic of a bygone Percy-era, like The Importance of Being Earnest, and the stacks of old schoolwork and binders from grades he’d long since left behind. They were still sitting at her feet. She was supposed to throw them away. She wanted, suddenly, to dig through the trash and pluck out the ruined book and piece it back together—why did it matter? It was a book Percy barely remembered, and evidently, he’d hated it enough to deface it. She wanted to keep the dumb little tech decks, and the old schoolwork, and the school binders that had that awful picture she’d sent him when they were twelve taped on the inside cover. 

The tech deck had been pulled out of her hands, and Percy had cupped her face, and said, “You’re not used to the prospect of someone throwing away their stuff, because it feels like they’re throwing away their home, and you’ve never had a choice about what stuff you get to keep and what stuff you don’t. I promise you, it’s okay.”

And then he’d ducked down and flipped open the school binder with her picture taped on the inside, and swore loudly. “How have you not been mocking me ruthlessly for the last hour,” he said. “I totally forgot I did that. Holy shit, what the fuck. I think I might be whipped.”

Annabeth had proceeded to mock him ruthlessly, grateful for a distraction from the way Percy could string words together in just the precise way that would unstring her. He could be brutal, without realizing it, without being unkind; but sometimes he’d say something about her that she didn’t know about herself, say it casually, and she’d be left behind gaping like a fish. He was intelligent in a way she wasn’t, capable of making connections behind the reasons that people behave in the obscene ways they do without really thinking about it—when Annabeth unraveled Percy, it was like a puzzle, a riddle. She had an insatiable curiosity for him, spent a lot of time piecing together his likes and dislikes and gestures and mannerisms, but most of the time she was faced with a burning question; which came first, Percy, or the things that had happened to him? But when Percy unraveled her, it was neat, effortless. He knew her secrets, even the ones she herself hadn’t figured out yet. 

They’d gotten through the hell of packing and moving in and had spent a very exhausted, emotionally-wrung night after Sally and Paul and baby Estelle had left them alone in their new, barren apartment, snuggling on their new couch. If Percy spent that night with his face tucked into her shoulder, she didn’t mind, and if Percy called his mom later that night, she didn’t say anything about it. They’d gotten through the last week of that summer adjusting to the new normal, Percy landing a job at a stable through the pure dumb luck of rescuing a runaway horse they had gotten into the park, Annabeth gearing up for the long haul of her first semester at Cornell. They found a rhythm. Percy made breakfast before he left for work, and he left her a plate in the microwave because working at a stable required him to be up incredibly early. Annabeth did the dishes, and the vacuuming, because apparently Percy had something against vacuums, and Percy did the dusting and cleaned the bathroom and when her hair clogged the drain he fished the disgusting clump of hair out of the drain. Which was sweet, right up until he threw it at her, and she screamed bloody murder. It wasn’t as easy as she was expecting it to be, and they hadn’t hit their stride quite yet, and she didn’t see nearly as much of Percy as she wanted to. But she could be patient.

Friday nights ended up becoming sweet, lazy nights, because Annabeth had one class on Fridays and she made sure to schedule her study groups during the day, so she could spend the night with Percy. Weekends were often a no-go, even though Percy was off, because now that she lived further away from Mount Olympus, weekend trips to oversee construction often took the whole weekend. Fridays she spent doing homework, cross-legged on the floor, and Percy would be in deep sleep on the couch behind her, because between the fact that the Curse of Achilles demanded he sleep more and the fact that his job required him to put in an appearance at five in the morning, he usually knocked out around nine at night. She lived with someone who kept the schedule of an aging grandfather, so quality time was scarce and if it came down to it, she’d rather be with a dead-to-the-world Percy than not be with Percy. Quality time was quality time. They could reconcile their schedules so he could spend time around her awake and she could spend time around him without studying, and it didn’t all have to happen at once. She could be patient.

Her general education classes were deeply annoying, and she was slogging through a mandatory Art Appreciation essay. She’d procrastinated on it, because Art Appreciation was, frankly, a bullshit class. She didn’t need a class to appreciate Greek frescoes, not when those frescoes depicted gods and monsters she’d met personally, but it was a required credit. She may have been rushing the essay, but, in her opinion, it was turning out nicely, for a bullshit essay going to be submitted to the bullshit professor of a bullshit class. 

Percy’s arm, draped over her left shoulder, jerked. The movement startled her in its suddenness—Percy didn’t move, when he slept. He slept like a rock. It was Annabeth who kicked out in her sleep, tossed from side-to-side. His arm jerked again, rigid, and Annabeth snapped her laptop closed and shoved it off her lap, scooting away from Percy’s arm and stumbling upright, shaking the pins and needles out of her leg where she’d been sitting in the same spot too long.

His brows were furrowed in his sleep, smushed together where his face was pressed into the couch. His fingers were twitching. It was best not to touch him, when he had a nightmare, or try to ease him awake, because he’d panic—Percy’s brain was incredibly good at jumping from non-functional to functional, but if the transition wasn’t fast he got lost in it. “Percy,” she said, loudly. He jolted, like he’d been shocked, and then she called out his name louder, and he bolted upright. His chest heaved like he’d been running a marathon, but, true enough, the wild, panicked look dissipated when he caught sight of her. 

“Hold on a second,” he said, and then he scrambled to the bathroom. Annabeth winced as she heard him throwing up, her heart slamming hard against her sternum in sympathy, and she moved into the kitchen and poured him a glass of water, and plucked the salt shaker off of the back of the stove. 

She waited in the doorway, leaning her shoulder against the door frame. The toilet flushed. Percy flopped against the wall, still breathing hard, but he glanced at her and nodded. Annabeth folded herself next to him, setting the glass of water and the saltshaker beside his hand. She was utterly unsurprised when Percy dumped the water on his head, rather than drink it. 

Annabeth twisted her hands in her lap. There was never a time when she caught him having a nightmare that she didn’t want to hold him immediately afterwards, the way he did for her—but touch made it worse, until Percy was okay with it. They’d learned that the hard way. It seemed that they learned almost everything the hard way, through brutal trial-and-error; but it felt like being sidelined, because what could she say? Annabeth wasn’t skilled with words. She couldn’t say exactly what he needed to hear, didn’t know how. Useless, she thought, at herself, viciously.

Percy was staring at her, when she looked up. His eyes never got any less startlingly sea-green, permanently caught between blue and green, all the brighter for the brownness of the skin surrounding it. “Sorry,” he rasped.

“Don’t apologize,” she said. “It’s not your fault.”

He shrugged. “Still. You were working on—you hated it, whatever it was, that’s all I remember.”

She smiled balefully. “Art Appreciation essay. On Greek frescoes.”

Percy snorted. “That’s awkward. You should be able to get out of that class by saying that you do not, in fact, need to see Zeus naked, because that’s your friend’s dad, and that makes things weird.”

Annabeth snickered. “I’d kind of detached myself from that, but thanks for reminding me.” 

Percy gestured with his hand. “I live to serve.” Then he snatched the saltshaker, unscrewed the cap, and dumped half of the glass bottle into his mouth. How he stood that, she didn’t know—Sally had mentioned Percy’s weird obsession with salt was something he and Poseidon shared, but it seemed to have no real benefit outside of being comfortingly like the ocean. She figured that it was similar to the effect olives had on her, which was a weirdly calming, softening one. 

“You’re too good to me,” he said, screwing the cap back on the saltshaker. “You just watched me do that and didn’t run for the hills.”

“I watch you do that daily, Percy,” she said. “There’s—there’s no such thing. For that, I mean.”

Percy squinted at her. “Run for the hills? That’s definitely a thing. It’s an Iron Maiden song.”

She resisted the urge to reach over and shove him. He was deflecting, of course, trying to draw her away from prying; it had taken her a while, to understand that Percy’s deflections weren’t always I don’t want to talk about it, but I don’t want you to have to talk about it. “I meant about being too good to you,” she said. “That’s not a thing. There’s, there’s not a good thing that you don’t deserve.”

Percy was suddenly fascinated with his folded knees. “Careful,” he said, thickly, “I’m starting to think you like me.”

“Yes, it truly would be unfortunate for you to know a true fact,” she said. “It would ruin your image.”

Percy’s hand skated across the floor, fumbling for hers, and Annabeth took it, wringing it tightly. It was the hand that had been damaged in Mount Saint Helens; the last two fingers were burned in the blast, and the nerve damage there meant he couldn’t grip as well with them, so his responding grip was weaker than what she was used to. She shifted so she was closer, pressed to his side, and dropped his hand in her lap, tracing over the swirling crests and troughs of the scar with her free hand. He twisted and pressed a kiss to her hair, dripping water onto her face from where he’d dumped the cup on his head. 

“You don’t have to talk about it,” she said. “But if you want to. If you don’t want to, even, but if you still… need to.”

He pulled his knees to his chest, wrapping an arm around them, resting his chin on top—he was several inches taller than her, now, overtaking her in the final stretch of puberty, but he looked smaller, folded like that. She kind of missed it, when Percy was shorter than her. Not only because of the beautiful ribbing opportunities it afforded, but because when she hugged him, she could hug all of him. When she hugged him, she had the wild thought that maybe he felt as safe with her as she did with him.

Percy let out a long, low breath. “I hated my old stepdad.”

“I got that impression,” she said, wryly.

“I still hate him, to be honest, even though maybe it’s a bit useless to hate someone who’s dead and got exactly what they deserved,” he said, “but I didn’t hate him because he—he was awful, sure, and I hated him for that. But I hated him because he was right about me. I hated that he could be the worst and still be right about me.”

Annabeth’s fingers paused where they were tracing Percy’s scar. She studied it, for a minute, wondering why she’d never noticed how similar it looked to frothing, raging waters, the spirals and loops and ridges of valleys of the seascape of a hurricane branded forever into his skin. Maybe it was because she didn’t like looking at these scars, the living, breathing reminder of the miserable two weeks where she’d thought he’d been dead. The living, breathing reminder that she’d left him behind, and he’d gotten burned alive for it, on her own quest. Self-directed hate burned in her throat.

“What was he right about,” she said, slowly. If she flat-out told him he was wrong he’d get defensive, but she desperately wanted to say, if he was the worst you can fairly assume he was wrong about you by virtue of being the worst, but she had no real footing here. Percy didn’t talk about his first stepdad often, and that was one of the things about Percy’s childhood that Sally had never breathed a word about; she knew, logically, that Gabe Ugliano had been awful, because Percy didn’t hate anyone that strongly without reason, but what constituted awful? 

“I dreamed about my mom dying,” Percy said, by way of explanation. “By the minotaur. But she didn’t disappear, she—it’s. She wouldn’t have been there, if not for me. That’s my fault.”

“She’s okay, Percy,” Annabeth said. “She survived. It was just a dream.”

Percy’s hand clenched into a fist in her lap. “He used to say I was the worst thing that ever happened to her. He was right. I was, none of that would’ve happened if—”

Annabeth sucked in a sharp breath. She grabbed Percy’s shoulders and turned him to face her, and then cupped his face with her hands and said, “Eyes on me, baby. No looking away.”

His eyes snapped to hers. They turned blue, when he was about to cry. “Why,” he mumbled.

“Because you’ll think I’m lying if you don’t see my face,” she said, fiercely. “Listen to me. Your ex-stepdad is an asshole. If your ex-stepdad was still alive, I would be on my way to beat the shit out of him right now. And I don’t know everything that happened, when you were a kid. But I do know that it doesn’t matter, what happened then, because Sally loves you more than anything, and if I called her right now she would say that you are the best thing that ever happened to her. I can guarantee that.”

“Just because she believes it doesn’t make it true,” he said.

Annabeth schooled her breathing. Anger was a luxury. She could be angry later, when she stopped by the gym, when she strapped on her boxing gloves and tore apart a sandbag. “Why would you believe a monster’s opinion of you over your mother’s? Because it’s negative?”

Percy all but jumped out of her hands, bumping against the bathtub. He was back to breathing hard, like a racehorse after a race, and Annabeth let her hands drop into her lap. He was looking anywhere but her. Her ribcage felt like it was made of razorwire, slicing through her with every inhale and exhale, and she would’ve liked to line up a list of people who had been unfair to Percy and slice their hamstrings with her dagger. She would’ve liked to be able to put the right words together in the right order that would make a convincing enough argument for Percy to never think that way again, but this wasn’t something she could talk him out of.

She reached out and squeezed his knee. “I’m going to email my professor for an extension,” she said, “and then we’re going to watch some really terrible movies. It’s not too late to go to that cookie place that’s open ‘til three, either.”

“You don’t have to do that,” Percy said.

“I know. That’s the beauty of me doing it anyway,” she said. 

He fell back asleep halfway through the first movie, head in her lap, sprawled over most of the couch like an annoyingly attractive octopus. He drooled on her sweatpants, but she was alright with that, because she was technically wearing his sweatpants. She half-formed a speech in her head that she’d offer to Percy later, one to helpfully needle him into calling Sally, but before it could take any significant shape, she was asleep with her head thrown back on the cushion.