PSA

noo dont turn red you’re so sexy aha

28, gimmie your hand

sequel to this photographer percy au 

When Percy took pictures of Annabeth before they started dating, she could never tell if he was looking at her through the lens of artist or lover. Now, she’s beginning to think it’s the same thing. There’s a delicacy to his gaze, as though his smile is meant both for Annabeth and the light shining on her. His taking a picture so often looks like gratitude, like the fear of forgetting his luck in a moment so blissful. And he immortalizes her on film, takes his care to capture and develop her image. It is no small thing, being a muse. 

She envies it, sometimes. Percy gets to show Annabeth and the world exactly how he sees her, while she is left with her words, which can only ever fall short. He captures time and frames her suspended in the golden glow of sunlight, he makes her laugh moments before the flash, and he does not believe in bad photos. He photographs her bedhead, her soft stomach, her bent posture, and her chewed fingernails. He photographs her genuine laugh, her pouted lips, her pensive expression, her golden curls. Annabeth has never liked the sharp upturn of her nose, but Percy photographs her profile with such care that she can’t help but soften to it.

They’re at the beach for what feels like the last warm day of September. The Atlantic ocean is too vast to be swayed by the local weather, so they stay on the sand until they need to cool off. Percy’s camera is buried in their beach bag as they soak up the day—not every moment needs to be captured. Sometimes happiness demands to be fleeting. Nostalgia wouldn’t be as powerful if Annabeth could remember exactly how many freckles the sun kissed into Percy’s cheeks today. The longing comes from the fear of forgetting.

Sunset brings a gentle chill and sends Annabeth into Percy’s side. He pulls her bare legs into his lap and rubs his hands up and down them. It only works for a few seconds, but she’ll take any excuse to keep his hands on her. (She thinks he will too.)

One of the best parts about being in a relationship, she thinks, is not needing an excuse. There is an agreement between them that says you can touch me. I am trusting you to handle me at my best and my worst. I think that’s love. Please touch me.

Annabeth shifts her weight and straddles her boyfriend in a way that’s a bit indecent for a public beach, but the closest people are specs on the horizon and Percy is leaning back on his palms, his face to the orange sky and throat exposed. His skin looks golden, dripping in sunlight like honey, and Annabeth watches his Adam’s apple bob as she tastes. Even his smile is sweet. Annabeth is not an artist, but sometimes loving him makes her rethink that.

“Baby,” he whispers, and Annabeth opens her eyes to him chewing his lip. “You know the last thing I ever want to do is stop making out with my beautiful girlfriend on the beach, but...” He juts his chin to the sun, then to her general face. “I‘ll kick myself if I don’t get this.”

Annabeth pretends to roll her eyes as he lays back on the beach blanket with his camera in hand, but the way he looks at her is too profound for her to do much else. She’s always loved the way he looks at the world, though it wasn’t until recently that she discovered she likes the way he looks at her more. All that wonder, all that love, plus a surety that is so rare on him. There is the boyish boldness that makes her want to strangle and kiss him, plus the sly cockiness that has her leaning toward the former, but that gleam in his eyes cannot compare to this glimmer. His fingers slide along her chin, angling her kindly from  the harsh angle he captures her at.

She chuckles, gestures to his hand. “We wouldn’t get anywhere without this. Piper says I can’t pose for any camera you’re not behind.”

Percy pokes her in the side quickly, snapping a photo when she laughs. “That’s because Piper is a terrible photographer.”

“I’m sure she’d love to hear that.”

“I’m just saying, it’s more than landscapes and lighting. If you’re taking pictures of people, you should try to capture something real. Something human.”

“Her Instagram feed is very focused on humanity.”

She said it to rile him up—passionate Percy is one of her favorite versions of the boy she loves. She’s snuck more than a few photos of her own during a long-winded rant about camera lenses and color editing.

But this passion is quieter than what Annabeth is used to. Honest. Soft. Percy rests the camera on his chest and trails his fingers from Annabeth’s wrist to her elbow, his eyes following the slow migration.

“I don’t always know why you’re looking at me the way you do. I think that’s why I picked up a camera in the first place—my mom looked at me like I was the best thing that ever happened to her, and I was scared that one day she’d come to her senses. I wanted to remember that face before it disappeared.” He doesn’t look at her. Can’t, maybe. “It’s been over a decade, and that look is still there. I guess now I take pictures to try and understand it. Because I don’t— I want—“

Annabeth takes hold of his wrist. It’s then that he looks at her, propped up on an elbow. He breathes.

“You look at me like I’m a good thing.” And he’s opening his mouth like there are more words he wants to say, but they won’t come.

Annabeth kisses him, sweet and soft and a bit desperate. The lens of the camera presses into her chest, and she slides it out of Percy’s grip as she presses a kiss to his nose, his forehead. 

“Lay down for me,” she says. And, at his hesitation. “C’mon, Jackson. It’s hardly the first time I’ve had you on your back.” 

That earns a laugh, which earns the first picture. The camera may be out of Annabeth’s league, but she’s seen Percy use this thing enough to know that the big black button is all she really needs for what she’s trying to do. 

She says, “I love you,” says, “You’re everything to me,” and, “You are so beautiful,” for the sake of his smile. She sits a little lower in his lap and photographs the way his eyes darken, and his hands, still itching for the camera, busy themselves with her thighs. The sun is disappearing quickly, but Percy is glowing with the last of the New York summer. His skin is still damp from the kiss of the Atlantic, and Annabeth thinks that he was born to look like this. Love and light, gentle and summer-warm by the seaside. Percy Jackson summed up in a time, a place, a feeling. 

And Annabeth isn’t great with words, but he needs to hear them. 

“The sun is gonna set,” she leans in, throwing her shadow over his face, and sets the camera down, “and it’s gonna rise, again and again and again, and I am never gonna stop looking at you like this. Even if you never take my picture again.” She plants her hand over his shoulder to lean down. “You’re gonna spend your entire life by my side waiting for it to go away, and one day you’re going to forget to worry. Just like you help me forget to worry.” 

And then he smiles a bit sideways, a dimple pressing into his cheek. “You proposing to me, Chase?” 

She rolls her eyes, but smiles back. “As if you won’t know when I propose.” 

Percy’s hands skim up her back, where the last of the light stretches over the horizon of her skin. “Not if I beat you to it.” 

He pulls her down for a long kiss. When Annabeth comes up, it’s nearly dark out. 

“I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to photograph your own wedding.” 

“Yeah, well.” And he’s arching up for one last kiss before they have to leave, a comma on the page of this long day turned night. “We’ll cross that bridge when we get there.” 

college!percabeth after a hard week

hello! i wrote a lot of fluff for this one! and i’m not even lying, it is purely, genuinely fluff, not a singular angst in sight. it is dopey and sweet and there are flower metaphors, it is that dopey and sweet. hope you enjoy <3

Helianthus

AO3

The only good thing about Percy being gone was that Annabeth felt a lot less guilty about the work she got done.

She’d known from the outset that being an architecture major would be a lot of work, and she’d been, in her mind, prepared for that. She lived with her boyfriend, who had a regular job, and she had a decently-sized pool of scholarship money disbursed every semester, and even then sometimes her father sent her money; Cornell came with a high price tag, and so did her books and supplies, but they weren’t starving and they had a roof over their heads. Annabeth didn’t have to worry about working through school, and she had support where she needed it, so if it was tough, she was of the belief that she could handle it. She had taken a blade to the shoulder and grit her teeth against that pain, she had shared Atlas’s burden and grit against it too, she had watched her friends die and muscled through it, she had slept in alleyways and picked herself up the next day, and she was still alive. She had a hard-earned faith in her ability to survive. Annabeth hadn’t realized that it would be so much harder to adjust her ability to survive to something—banal, almost, in its stress. It was almost harder to figure out how to handle stress that wasn’t life-threatening.

 Annabeth’s first semester had hit her with all the force of a fist to the gut, and for the two weeks leading up to her finals and the submission of her final projects, the only thing that had kept her together was Percy’s steady presence. He made sure she ate, even going as far as to use his lunchbreak to drive all the way back into town and make her something quick, often just to pull her out of her work. On the days she was in the studio, he called her over and over until she picked up and promised to eat, and he did it again and again, even when she yelled at him for it. And when Annabeth yelled at him for it his response was always an even, you just need a reminder, baby, it’s okay, everyone does, because somehow he understood Annabeth’s unspoken, I can watch out for myself, I can take care of myself, don’t take that away from me before Annabeth herself did. For a long time Annabeth’s ability to care for herself had been all she had, and Percy respected that. He made sure she ate, and then one time she’d called him in the middle of the day, called him from the floor of the women’s bathroom on the top studio floor and sobbed into the phone, just wordless, aimless sobbing driven by panic, and he’d taken off work to pick her up. I said it was a family emergency, he’d told her, later. She’d been holding a mug of hot chocolate in her hands and her face was tear-streaked and Percy looked at her like she was lovely anyway. He pulled her away from her studying at home, too, when it’d been too long, or the clock was skirting past one in the morning—when she was too stubborn to sleep, Percy had a routine where he’d work his fingers into her shoulders, soft at first and then digging deeper until it was a genuine massage. He had a way of distracting Annabeth without her realizing she was distracted at all. And then of course when they slept together he’d throw a heavy arm over her shoulders and tug her close, pressing his lips to the base of her neck and falling asleep that way, and it was so much easier to fall asleep when he had her back, it was so much easier to fall asleep when she could feel his presence through the night. The only thing that had kept her together was Percy, who did so quietly and gently, and then after she’d gotten her project reviews back and the notes had been mostly good he’d beamed at her the way young sunflowers beamed at the sun. The way older sunflowers looked forever East and always greeted the sun first thing in the morning, and Annabeth had stood in the doorway with tears in her eyes and felt like the morning sun.

 Now in the early spring, she was winding down the clock until final project season ripped her to shreds; she felt more confident, though, knowing that she had Percy, and knowing that when she succeeded she’d have Percy’s arms around her and his soft, of course you could do it, dumbass, it’s you murmured into her hair. He celebrated her successes almost more than she did, sometimes, and Annabeth couldn’t name the feeling she had about that, but she knew that it squeezed her heart until the walls of it shuddered. But a lot of aching work went into those successes, and a lot of the time it was tedious, balancing the hours she needed to spend in the studio with the hours she spent with Percy. Hours with Percy that she often spent slugging away at schoolwork for her general education classes, or designing and sketching until her hand cramped and Percy got annoyed enough with its consistent twitches to take her hand in his and massage it with his thumbs until it felt usable again. You need to take more breaks, he’d grunt, and then Annabeth would want to scream at him, because Percy had opted out of college and didn’t understand how much she had to keep up with. Annabeth’s brain sometimes felt like it was melting out of her ears, with the constant pressure of designing, matched with the constant pressure of memorizing, of learning, of intake and the ability to utilize it—she had migraines, all Athena kids did, but now she was having them at least once a month and Percy kept needling her to see someone about it. She didn’t want to tell him that a doctor couldn’t solve her homework.

 She knew, even if he’d never say it out loud, that it frustrated Percy, how little real time they spent with each other. He’d never say it out loud. The sunflowers didn’t condemn the sun when it ducked below the horizon—they waited patiently until morning. There was something to be said for basking in someone’s mere presence, but there was only so much basking someone could do before it felt like you never spoke at all. Annabeth knew that he found a lot of their conversations one-sided, because Annabeth was always half-buried in her work, and Percy had left his behind when he’d come home that day, and she could see it in the twist of his mouth, the way he ducked his head when she looked up because she’d only realized he’d asked her something several minutes after he’d said it. It was written all over him; the taut line of his shoulders, a bitten-off sigh, his brows drawn together. Annabeth missed talking to him like a physical ache in her chest, but she had classmates, a tangled network of people she’d met through group projects and mutual long hours chipping away at designs and models in the studio. Her words found a place to go, even if it wasn’t her favorite place. Percy worked almost entirely by himself and even took orders mostly from himself—he did the distant, menial tasks, the things people with money hired other people to do for their horses. As far as Annabeth knew, the only other person he ever talked about working with was Kathleen, the eccentric barn manager—and even then, he talked far more about the horses than he did Kathleen. Sometimes, before he knew she was there, she would creep around the edge of the hallway and see him sitting alone on the couch with his hands folded in his lap, shoulders slumped and think that he looked horrifically lonely. You need friends that aren’t horses wasn’t exactly one of the things she could say to him, even if it was probably the thing he needed to hear.

 But that Saturday morning Percy had flown off on Blackjack to find a missing demigod and her satyr, and the whole thing had gone a little to the left, on account of them being nowhere they could be found. It had been both a nightmare and a godsend. She hated it when Percy took missions without her, but she had so little spare time these days whatever Chiron asked her to do went to him by default—Percy was ambivalent about it, because he’d always nursed a quiet belief that he should do more than he did, because of his invulnerability. That invulnerability didn’t stop Annabeth from imagining Percy dying the way Thalia had, alone and against the world and nothing more than bait for beasts. That invulnerability didn’t stop Annabeth thinking about Percy’s blood watering the grass, about the cold, gray look of dead eyes when the soul left them behind and how awful it would look, when Percy’s eyes were always so bright and full of life—and on a deeper level, a level below her conscious thought, sometimes she thought he would just walk out. No death, no dying, no goodbye other than it’s not working out and the emptiness of their drawers without his clothes in them. The emptiness of the word theirs when it didn’t apply anymore. Annabeth knew, logically, he never would. That if they ever broke up, it would be her doing the breaking, that even if Percy wanted to leave he would rather sit there and eat his heart out before saying so. But the life she lived beneath herself wasn’t often rational. So she soothed herself with the sunflowers, and the way Percy looked at her, and when that didn’t work—she distracted herself, ran from the intensity of it all, until the sunflowers settled her again. She was good at that, the running. She got a lot of work done in that process of running, between Saturday and Wednesday night, and maybe she didn’t feel guilty for ignoring Percy for any of it, but it had been nerve-wracking. It’d been one long tension headache and three-hour stretches of sleep with half-aware nightmares, Thalia’s blood watering the grass and Luke’s arms around her and a scream ripped from her throat like barbed wire as the lightning shuttered ever downward. If Poseidon loved his son, he’d turn him into a white-water river rather than something still and slow-growing; stillness wasn’t something Percy took to easily.

 Percy had kept her updated through Iris Messages, mostly, because with monsters in the area using his phone ran too much risk, but finally around midnight on Wednesday evening he’d texted her, getting tf out of arkanysas hat this plac and Annabeth had smothered a laugh into her hand. She’d tried staying up for him, she really had—she’d turned on a movie to a too-loud volume and settled in on the couch with a Red Bull, but then somewhere between Teen Wolf and Fast Times at Ridgemont High she’d slithered off into sleep. Then there was something that smelled warm and sweet and in her dream she was drinking nectar, and it tasted like cheap dye in icing, and salt, and laughter. She could drink nectar until her blood boiled and her heart began to sizzle, if it meant more of that laugh.

 “—out cold,” she heard, and then she registered a hand pressed to her neck, a thumb running up and down her jaw. She would’ve startled and lashed out, if she couldn’t smell Percy’s bodywash, and the sea breeze that followed him.

 She leaned forward and pressed her face against his chest, all without opening her eyes, and mumbled, “I tried to stay awake.”

 It came out slurred, almost entirely without vowels, but Percy rumbled a low laugh—the one that she could feel when she was laying on him, the one that she loved feeling so much that she sometimes saved her funnier anecdotes from the day until they were cuddling—and his hand moved to cup the back of her neck. “I see,” he said, warmly. “Good effort. Technique needs a little work.”

 “What year is it,” she said.

 “The year is Thursday,” he said. “You have class in two hours.”

 “Was really hoping I’d hibernated through those,” she said, snaking her arms around him. He was wearing one of the sweaters his mom liked to knit for him, for them both—they were thick and unreasonably warm and Percy usually only broke them out for winter because otherwise they were sweltering, but there’d been a bit of a cold snap. He hadn’t packed them away yet. She could tell what it was by the almost overly-soft feel of it, and it melted some cynical piece of ice in her whenever she saw him in one of his mom’s hand-knit sweaters. Both because he looked really good in a deep, heavy navy color, it always made his eyes stand out, and because it was simply sweet.

 His fingers worked into her hair, thumbing behind her ear and into the dip of her jaw on their way. “Wrong season for hibernating,” he said.

 “Thank you for coming back alive,” she said.

 Percy snorted. “There was, what, one hellhound. I just got lost in bumfuck Arkansas the rest of the time. You know how annoying it is, to have to use a map? The print’s so fucking small. I’m never going back to fucking Arkansas, if Chiron asks me to go to fuckin’ Arkansas ever again, I’ll let Blackjack kick him, I swear.”

 Annabeth laughed into his chest. She pulled away, and then her breath stuttered, and she said, “Oh, you’re fluffy.”

 One of his dark, thick brows raised. The right one had a pale scar slicing through it, but for the life of her, Annabeth couldn’t remember how he’d gotten it. “Did you just—fluffy? Did you just call me fluffy?”

 She reached up and cupped his cheeks with both hands, ruffling the decent length of scruff there, and maybe taking a moment to squish his cheeks together. It would annoy him. “Oh my God, you’re so fluffy. You’re—I’ve never seen you with scruff before, you’re actually fluffy.”

 “I was in the middle of fucking nowhere,” he whined. “Don’t mock me. I’ll shave, I just wanted pancakes first.”

 She ruffled his scruff again, relishing the rough feel of it. “This is new. I have to do research. I think you should kiss me, for research.”

 Percy’s nose wrinkled. “Brush your teeth, dragon breath, Jesus Christ. Research can wait. Did I mention the pancakes?”

 Annabeth breathed in deep. “It smells like bananas,” she said, immediately.

 Percy appraised her. “Impressive,” he said.

 She grinned at him, and then he stood—he’d been kneeling in front of the couch, she registered—and hauled her upright. For a moment she stood, unsteadily, as the world tipped and she adjusted to being both awake and upright. Percy’s hand pressed flat between her shoulder blades and then he bent over and pressed a kiss to her forehead. His newly-acquired scruff was rough, and a little scratchy, but it made Annabeth’s heart stop and then slam against her chest, once, twice, like a hammer.

 She turned and beamed at him. “It feels different,” she said, excitedly.

 Percy rubbed a hand over his eyes. “Yeah, I would—yeah, I’d fuckin’ hope so. I’ll shave, okay, after pancakes, I’m starving.”

 Annabeth pressed a hand to his sternum, and he paused, eyes on her curious. Upright, and with clearer, less groggy vision, Annabeth was truly seeing him, and—she didn’t often describe things as life-changing. She knew what real life-changing looked like and it was never small, miniscule. But when she took Percy’s chin in her hands and tilted his head side-to-side, taking care to study him from a variety of angles while his brows drew together in perfect, abject confusion, it was utterly life-changing, the way he looked with a little scruff on his face. She hadn’t even registered, before, that Percy was technically capable of facial hair, because he was beautiful in a way that turned her blood to fire anyway. Annabeth didn’t need more when she could already stare at him for hours. She hadn’t considered that he could be beautiful in a different direction, because she had enough trouble thinking straight with just the one direction, and now she was standing in the middle of her living room staring at someone she’d seen a thousand times like she’d never get to see him again, because of her oversight. Her brain scrambled for words, and what came out was, “No, no, that’s—no. Not necessary.”

 “Are you having a stroke?” he asked. He looked genuinely concerned, as he said it.

 “No, I’m—maybe,” she said. “It’s just, you know, when life gives you lemons. You—when life gives you lemons. Nice, the—lemons.”

 Percy’s eyebrows crawled to his hairline. She was starting to think he had most of his thoughts with his eyebrows, that there wasn’t a thing he could think that she couldn’t read off of one arch or furrow. “Are you—what the hell, Annabeth?”

 “Shut up, this is the highlight of my week,” she said.

 “What in the fuck,” he said. He actually reached up and twisted his wrist and pressed it to her forehead, and then it struck Annabeth that he was genuinely lost, because she sounded genuinely insane.

 She lowered her hand and gestured over her own face, in the vague placement of where scruff would be, if she had it. “The this. It’s—it’s. You know, as someone with an interest in your face. I like it. I think we should take this as a sign, you know, like when life gives you lemons, you… throw out your razor. I think that’s a normal thing to think. I think that’s a decision that could be considered.”

 “When life gives you lemons,” Percy repeated. He had a dazed look on his face, like she’d really pulled the rug out from under him. Then his lips spread into a grin.

 Annabeth covered her face with her hands. “Don’t say a word. Don’t—if I say the dumbest shit imaginable, it’s because it’s, like, six in the morning, and you springing this on me at six in the morning is cruel. It’s cruel. It really is. It’s—just, take it under advisement, it’s—”

 Percy pulled her against him and he was laughing, not his softer, rumbling laugh, but the deep one that was loud and from his belly. “Baby,” he said, wheezing, “it’s nine. It’s like nine forty.”

 Annabeth laughed, too, against his too-soft mom-sweater, because as dumb as she felt she couldn’t help laughing when he did. “I hate you right now,” she said, muffled by the cotton. “Fuck you and fuck your pancakes.”

 “I thought you were having a stroke,” he said into her hair. He was still laughing; it had just leaked into his voice, instead.

 “You had to ruin the highlight of my week,” she said.

 Percy said something offhand about it being a shitty week, then, and Annabeth kind of wanted to kick him. I didn’t have a short mental breakdown because of your face so you could make some self-deprecating joke might’ve been the thing she ought to have said, but she couldn’t articulate her thoughts around her desire to kick him in the shin, even if said kick would do absolutely nothing. Then he nudged her in the direction of the bathroom with another dragon breath comment, and Annabeth marched down the hall and flipped him off behind her back and scrubbed her teeth, and then the smell of the pancakes finally sunk into her.

 This part, the early mornings, the mundane grind of living, had never been in her grand plans. As a kid, maybe she’d thought that if she were good enough, she would be exempt from the small little processes of taking care of herself, of eating and sleeping and the tedious small tasks that made up living; if she could be good enough, impressive enough, she wouldn’t have to care for herself when no one else seemed to want to. No one wanted her, and somehow Annabeth wanted herself even less than that. She wanted achievements to stack onto herself, and not the body that would achieve them. The early mornings, the mundane grind of living, she had never thought of it, had cut it out of her thinking, even. Annabeth thought that maybe Percy had thought of it, somewhere in his tangled relationship with normal; she’d never asked, but he never looked happier than he was during the smallest moments of life, and maybe she didn’t have to hear him say it to know it was true. And he liked doing it for her. He liked braiding her hair for her in the mornings, and he liked buying her leave-in conditioner before she knew she needed it—Annabeth could take care of herself just fine, but for a long time she hadn’t wanted to and hadn’t seen the point because no one had ever thought she was worth it before. But Percy reveled in it. She thought it was almost his favorite thing to do. And if someone with Percy’s heart could love her as much as he did, in all the tiny ways that he did, then there had to be something in her worth loving, something worth wanting. She held onto that on her saddest, bleakest days—that even if she’d been unloved, that even if her own father saw nothing in her worth sticking around for, Percy did, and Percy was better. As unloved as she had been, she was loved by better. If Percy of all people took the time to make her feel like the morning sun, then there was a reason, even if she hadn’t found it.

 When she ducked back into the kitchen, her mouth already watering from the lingering smell alone, Percy was standing over a plate, slathering a stack of pancakes with butter. She wrapped her arms around his waist from behind and pressed her cheek against the small of his back, and mumbled, “You know I love you.”

 “Is it really that hot?” he said. His voice was loud, and he clearly hadn’t meant to say it, because he stiffened against her.

 Annabeth scowled. “Loving you a little less right now.”

 Percy reached around and flicked her on the shoulder. “I love you, but I’ve got questions, alright? You looked like you were about to die. I thought you were sick and hallucinating, or something.”

 “Love’s going downhill as we speak.”

 “Oh, that’s a lie,” he said. “That’s a lie. Four minutes ago you told me you had an interest in my face. I think that’s love.”

 “That’s not love, that’s objective appreciation,” Annabeth said. “Love is the fact that I still say that after you drool in my hair, and I have to wear a hat because I woke up late for my morning class, and I don’t have time for a de-drooling shower.”

 He reached around and flicked her again, and then lifted a plate of pancakes and held them out to the side. “You don’t deserve these, you mean ass.”

 She snagged the plate. “If I’m a mean ass, you’re the meanest ass.”

 Annabeth knew she’d made a tactical error when he turned to her and his grin was open-mouthed. “So now you’re complimenting my ass,” he said. “You really do think I’m hot. That’s so embarrassing. When will your objectification end?”

 My turn, she thought, because there was always a sure way to win banter, and it was to surprise him. “Let’s see,” she said, and slid her plate on the counter, and then she tugged Percy down by his collar and pressed her lips to his. He tasted like pancake batter and bananas and it was one of those kisses where she wanted more of him but couldn’t get closer than they already were—Annabeth’s hands rose of their own accord, curling in the hair at the base of his neck, twirling it in her fingers. The scruff didn’t bother her as much as she’d thought it would, when she’d been planning this kiss over their bathroom sink. She thought it’d feel like sandpaper, and it did, but it didn’t touch her face as much as she’d assumed it would.

 She pulled away first, and said, “Never.”

 Percy’s eyes were as wide as saucers. “Good—good morning, to me,” he said, breathlessly.

 She pulled the dish towel off from where it hung on the handle of the stove and twisted it absently. Percy absolutely did not notice anything she was doing, because he was locked in that hazy post-kiss fugue state he fell into when Annabeth kissed him with intent. She wouldn’t admit to any wrongdoing, but sometimes she kissed him specifically to get that look, that expression, the blissed, surprised daze. To put the nail in the coffin, Annabeth snapped the dish towel at his backside and said, “It is a nice ass, though.”

 Percy scrubbed at his eyes with a hand. “Jesus. I just wanted some pancakes. Chase, do you have any plans on letting me live long enough to eat my damn pancakes, or are you just going to torture me all morning.”

 Annabeth grinned wickedly and slid her plate off of the counter. “All morning, and the rest of your life, Jackson.”

 They ate in the living room. Annabeth turned something on, whatever she’d been watching when she fell asleep, but the pancakes were too alluring for her to pay any mind to it. Annabeth had a bad habit of eating quickly, a holdover from when she’d been on the run and food hadn’t been a certainty, and Percy had a bad habit of eating quickly, both because he was Percy and also because the Curse of Achilles meant his metabolism burned through him the way fire did to a matchstick. In junior year of high school, he’d started sleeping through lunch instead of eating—his sleep schedule had gotten twisted into knots somewhere along the way, a byproduct of nightmares and his natural restlessness. It wouldn’t have been terrible if he’d still been wired to handle a sleep deficit, but he wasn’t, and he’d crashed at all sorts of random times, making up for not sleeping in a long stretch by sleeping in cat naps. Sleeping through lunch, though, meant not eating as much, and he’d shed weight like ducks shed water. It was maybe the first time that Annabeth had held the material consequences of the Curse in her hands; a mortal body wasn’t designed to stray so close to immortality, that invulnerability came at the cost of real function. Not even the gods were invulnerable the way Percy was—as fast as they healed, the gods still bled their liquid gold. Annabeth hadn’t seen Percy bleed since he was fifteen. It was an almost guarantee that he’d never bleed again. They’d figured it out, the way they always did, and with a lot of fussing from Sally. But ever since Percy was pretty careful about it and had a tendency to wolf down his food because he ate a lot of it. Their bad habits fed into each other, and sometimes their meals were almost like a race to the finish. Ill-mannered, maybe, but they were perfectly matched even in that.

 “I feel like I owe your mom monetary compensation,” Annabeth said, wiping her mouth with a napkin. She’d finished, but the stickiness of the syrup wasn’t rubbing off.

 He raised an eyebrow at her. “For?”

 She flicked a hand to their plates, stacked on top of each other on the coffee table. “Your cooking skills,” she said. “That’s your real talent. You can talk to horses, sure, fine. But those pancakes… holy fuck.”

 “I’ll take that as a good review,” he said. “But that wasn’t my mom’s recipe. I don’t think she’s ever made banana pancakes. I kinda guessed.”

 Annabeth cocked her head to the side. Less in the curious way, and more in the, what the fuck do you mean way. “You guessed.”

 He shrugged. “I mean, it’s—pancakes. You make one pancake, you pretty much know how to make most pancakes, no matter what’s in them.”

 I hate you and how much you love me and how you wait for me the way the sunflowers do, and I hate you and how hot you are but I really fucking hate that you can just make amazing pancakes whenever the hell you want, she thought. “You’re ridiculous,” she said.

 He pointed a finger gun at her. He could only really pull it off with his right, because of the nerve damage in his left hand. “But it’s ridiculousness you think is hot, so, I mean. Who’s the embarrassing one here.”

 Annabeth stood and raised their plates off of the coffee table, sticking her tongue out at him, and said, “It’s not embarrassing to be right all the time.” Percy laughed, because he always found humor in how cocky she could be, and sometimes she played it up just to see which of his laughs she could draw out of him.

 She dropped their plates off in the sink, because she was pretty certain she hadn’t unloaded the dishwasher yet—she couldn’t quite remember the last time she’d ran it, but she’d probably ran it in the time Percy had been gone. Emphasis on probably.

 When she padded back into the living room, Percy had sprawled over the couch, ankles crossed and resting on the arm rest she’d been balancing her plate on five minutes ago, the smirk he threw at her saying you’re not the only one who can be insufferable. Annabeth cocked a brow at him. Two can play at that game, and then in a smooth motion she folded her leg and pressed it beside him and swung the other over his waist. She liked straddling him; there was something gratifying about the way the muscles in her hips and the insides of her thighs had to stretch to pull it off, and it was one of the easiest ways she had of driving Percy crazy, because he was more than a little obsessed with her legs. Sure enough, his hands cupped her knees and ran over her bare quads and pushed up the material of her basketball shorts.

 Annabeth swatted his hand away. “I haven’t shaved,” she said.

 Percy snorted. “Do you really think your leg hair scares me,” he said. His smile was carving his dimples deep into his cheeks, and Annabeth wanted to lean down and kiss them. “You could never shave your legs again, I wouldn’t give a damn.”

 Annabeth gave into the urge; she craned her head down and pressed a quick kiss to both corners of his mouth, but then one of his arms hooked around her middle and pulled her against him, and she slid her legs down and hooked her ankles around his until their legs were tangled. There, with her ear pressed to his chest, she desperately wished she had something funny to say, something that would pull out the rumbling laugh that she liked to feel. She couldn’t think of anything. But she did slip her hand beneath his sweater and run her fingers along the troughs and crests of the burn scars scoured into him, noticing that he’d already slathered them with lotion earlier, likely before he’d woken her up.  She drew the swirling lines of them at first before digging her thumb in and alternating between clockwise and counter-clockwise circles, working from the lighter damage at the top of his hip upwards to where the scars looked like furious, dark hurricanes, like the wine dark sea. Percy had let her do this enough, now, that she knew the topography of them, knew the spread over his ribcage where it was raised and brutal like the walls of the cyclone’s eye, and then further out, closer to his sternum and the hollow beneath it, where it leveled out the way the storm surge did as it ran against the land.

 The year after her quest through the Labyrinth had been one of the worst of her life, not only because of how naturally awful it had been, but because she only spoke with Percy to fight. It had been like having her a piece of her ripped out—even when they hadn’t been physically near each other, she’d always had him, and then it was thrown into question. Annabeth hadn’t seen the full scarring from Mount Saint Helens until later, until the after, until they’d started fumbling their way through dating and mindlessly she’d pushed a hand beneath his shirt and his answering grip around her wrist had been almost bruising. She could see what everyone else could; the opaque storms gnarling his hand, the spirals that crawled up his neck, but mostly he wore hoodies and jackets and long sleeves even in the summer heat, but she could also see that they extended into what he could hide. In the year before they’d started talking again, Annabeth had latched onto the only way she could find to be close to him, and it’d been research—burn scars, and how to care for them. She learned to focus on how to care for them in the after, because she’d made the mistake of reading a document that described a burn victim being put under to heal, simply because the pain was that incredible. She’d had the stray thought of that was only a house fire, imagine what molten rock can do to someone, and she’d thrown up in the cabin sink and Malcolm had forced her to take the next day off. Annabeth couldn’t take it away. She couldn’t swallow the guilt like ice in her throat. But massages loosened the scars, made it easier to move, and if she could press I am so fucking sorry I left you, and I will never forgive myself for it into his skin, she would. Eventually he learned how to let her.

 “I think we should make a deal,” he murmured, when her hand had worked all the way up to just under his collarbone. He sounded sleep-drowsy, and Annabeth figured he’d probably fallen asleep, for a good while there, before rising out of it.

 “A deal?”

 His hand lazily cupped her side, rucking her shirt up, and his thumb drew circles against the soft skin there, and then it rose until his hand was pressed against the side of her lower ribcage. “You wear a bra a lot,” he said. “And you’re not wearing one now. And I’m just, y’know, thinking. We don’t do cuddling minus bra enough.”

 Annabeth snickered. “That’s—not what I was expecting,” she said, because in truth, whenever Percy suggested a deal of some kind, he was usually asking for them to take a nap together. But he was right, she’d shed her bra after her shower last night and hadn’t seen fit to put it back on, yet; she wore bras more than she liked, because she was almost always going somewhere, bouncing between the studio and the library and the gym and night runs with Percy.

 “Deal is,” he said, “I shave less. You wear a bra less. Let’s do uncivilized. I think if we’re going to have shit weeks like this, we should get to be a little uncivilized.”

 Annabeth shifted and pressed a kiss to the hollow of his throat. “Sounds fun,” she said against his skin. “Sexy, cool. The works.”

 “Can it be sexy tomorrow.”

 Annabeth’s hand, still beneath his sweater, thumbed a crest of scar tissue on his chest. “That’s a quitter’s attitude, Jackson.” That earned her the laugh, the low one that thundered like waves on the beach. She closed her eyes to soak it in.

 His hand, lingering on her side, pinched her—gently, but still a pinch. “Okay. New idea. It can be sexy immediately after the nap.”

 “Eleven fifty-nine tonight, I’m waking you up,” she said, and he laughed again.

 “Oh, man, one minute to go from sleepy to sexy,” he said. “Can I at least have two. You’re asking for a lot, here.”

 “You’re the one asking for the nap.”

 Percy chuckled. “C’mon. Skip your classes and take one with me. You can miss, what, it’s Thursday? English, Art History, fuck those. You don’t need those.”

 Annabeth was struck, then, that Percy didn’t just sound like someone who’d spent the last several days hiking through the backwoods of Arkansas on a goose chase for a satyr and a demigod—he didn’t just sound tired. He sounded excited. He sounded excited, excited for something that they did on most days, excited maybe because it was something they did most days. Facing Eastward was never boring, for the sunflowers, because the sun rising never got old. They could sleep in the same bed together, a mess of limbs and warmth, and Percy wouldn’t ever be tired of it, wouldn’t ever be tired of her. He would always look at her like the morning sun. And Annabeth didn’t know if she was capable of love like that, the kind that found its strength in the everyday realities of living—but damn if she didn’t feel like trying.

 “Fuck it,” she said. “Uncivilized. I’ll ask Diane for her notes.”

 Damn, if she didn’t feel like trying.

Deregulation strikes again.

“Free market” capitalism does NOT care about raging forest fires, it does not care about endangering firefighters, it does not care about people dying due to lack of healthcare insurance. Unregulated capatilism cares only about making profits, apparently at any and all costs.

riptide: chapter one 

Annabeth rolls her eyes, as per usual. “Here we go with the Mr. New York vibes. I get it, I’m from Virginia and don’t understand the city or whatever.”

“Get over yourself, Chase. All I’m saying is since that bank robbery last month, things have felt weird. Like something big is coming.”

“Could this big thing happen next Tuesday so I have more time to prepare for this job interview? Cause that would be great.”

“Oh, please! You’re gonna do so good in that interview they’re gonna beg you to start architecting on the spot. Trust me.”

“Can you even spell architecting?” Annabeth asks.

“Can you?”

“Fair enough.”

TBC since tumblr’s posting methods changed

and that’s a wrap.

thank you so much to everyone who has submitted, supported, reblogged, etc our posts over the 3? years of this blog’s existence lol. we appreciate it so much! but both of us felt like it was a good time to retire bpi. we’ll leave the blog up and maybe periodically post on it but since its been pretty inactive anyways this was the next logical step. 

thank you for the laughter and joy!

love from @makoshark & @transannabeth,

badpjoideas (jan 13 2017-aug 30 2020)

do yall ever just….. remember TLO and weep

Sally dies before Percy, the way parents should die, the way parents *want* to die. She dies before Percy, who now has to figure out how to live in a world without her.

hi @nikkisha16 i know it’s you <3 and because @nerdylizj sent a similar ask, you’re getting it loves <3 please check the AO3 listing for specific warnings, because, uh, yeah, it’s a little sad haha.

read on AO3

Who Carries the Fire

His father had been present, and Percy wasn’t sure whether he’d expected that or not; he hadn’t spared much of a thought for the god of the sea, had never wondered whether the gods wandered into the funerals of the mortals they’d loved once, or if they watched from marble towers. His father had been present, in a black suit sharp enough to cut, a black undershirt, a black tie, not a spot of color on him until you saw his eyes, and then they hadn’t been green. They’d been black, black like the polar sea, black like the water a thousand feet deep. With his hair combed back and his beard well-groomed he looked startlingly like Zeus, for all that he didn’t share a single physical feature with his brother—it was the way ground beneath him seemed to tense, the way the land lent itself and all its power to him, the way he didn’t play at masking himself as a mortal. The way a pair of eyes could skate over him and know that the world would bend to do his bidding, that the world would leap at the chance. The sea does not like to be restrained, Percy had learned, was just this side of wrong—the sea would happily restrain itself if Poseidon willed it, the sea would happily do as Poseidon bade it, but it was Poseidon himself in all his caprice who would never ask the question. It was not the sea that refused restraint; its god did, and its god hid behind the excuse. Broad-shouldered and tall and as visibly unmovable as the mountains his rage crested, dark brows furrowed over a prominent nose and a regal profile, head held high almost in challenge, and Percy had never in his life felt less like Poseidon’s son.  

His own knees had been unstrung and every inch of him had trembled and he was only there at all because Annabeth was behind him. Even if could have opened his mouth to speak, he couldn’t have formed a single word. Somehow, he was cold to the bone on a bright June morning while the sun blazed down as hot as it could; somehow, he was cold even as he felt the sweat trickle down the back of his neck, cold the way fourth-degree burns incinerated the nerves so instantly as to be painless and numb. His hands wouldn’t stop shaking so he thrust them in his pockets, and then his fingers had fumbled around a well-worn lump of paper, and he’d pulled it out and unfolded it while his hands shook so badly he couldn’t read its faded words. He didn’t need to, to recognize the shape of a ticket, to recognize a souvenir from the last time he’d worn this suit—a souvenir of his senior prom with Annabeth. He didn’t know what had made him stop staring at it, that offensive little piece of paper, and he didn’t remember walking forward, and he didn’t remember speaking, and he didn’t remember listening. The only thing that kept him upright was Annabeth’s hand on the small of his back, even the electric current of her hand on his mortal tether somehow dulled by the oppressive cold, and the slice of Poseidon’s back, standing alone, some distance away. Poseidon and his earth and the sea that he brought with him and all of his unimaginable, earthshaking power, and Percy had never in his life felt less like Poseidon’s son, and he’d never in his life wanted to wrench Poseidon’s trident from his hands and spear him on it more. The anger kept him upright.

 But that had been the funeral, and there would only ever be the one funeral. A few hours of carrying his stabbed heart in his hands while the blood soaked between his fingers and ran down his arms, and then he could put it back, then he could say, my mother is dead and my father speaks to me so rarely I might qualify as an orphan, but I maybe have a stepdad I have no idea how to talk to anymore, and I guess orphans don’t have anyone at all, and of course his heart would fit. There would only ever be the one funeral but no one had told Percy that the one funeral wasn’t the hardest part—the hardest part was every day after that, the hardest part was the life he was expected to live with a solid iron harpoon through his stomach, shattering his spine into two distinct halves. There would only ever be the one funeral. There were a thousand days that followed it and a thousand days ahead of him and if Percy felt like being honest, he didn’t want to see a single one.

 There were several soft clicks, and Percy shifted, glancing at Annabeth, eyes slithering away quickly, unable to look at her for too long. He wasn’t sure where the aversion to looking had come from, in the past week and a half. There was something in her face that was unbearable to him—it could’ve been pity, but Annabeth wasn’t really one for pity, and as pathetic as Percy could be, she’d never pitied him. Maybe it was the dark circles under her eyes and the red, irritated rims, the lasting evidence that he wasn’t the only one who’d lost something. It made him feel guilty in the back of his throat, guilty in the way that made him want to claw out of himself, the kind of guilt that tasted like blood and had a hundred names. The kind of guilt that still felt like Charles Beckendorf grinning at him under the beating sun and Nico di Angelo’s black eyes watering with tears because his sister was never going to see him again. Percy had been slowly reconciling himself to waking up every day with the aftertaste of blood in his mouth, that guilt, had started to think, this isn’t so bad, I can live around this, and now he couldn’t sleep at all.

 “I think the pizza place is still open,” Annabeth said, pulling the keys out of the ignition. The night was too quiet without the rumble of the engine—Paul had passed them his old Prius, the one Blackjack had semi-trampled, when he and Sally had gone to buy a new car. Percy had half a mind to drive it into the middle of nowhere and set it on fire. “Regular?” she asked. “Or—or not.”

 I’m not so fucking sensitive that I can’t eat the same kind of pizza my mom liked, Percy wanted to snap, and he almost did. The only thing that held his tongue was the intimidating effort of speaking. He felt unkind and he tasted blood and thought of guilt, and ruthlessly he tried to shove it to the side. He rolled his shoulders and swung open the car door and stepped out, grateful to be out of the car. Annabeth had offered to come alone. She hadn’t wanted to put Paul through the trouble of picking up the stuff they’d left at the cabin, but she’d said, I can go by myself, if you want, in the tone of voice that meant, I’d be calling Rachel to come stay with you, and it had all sounded so exhausting Percy would rather a miserable car ride and an infinitely more miserable day and a half. The car ride hadn’t been awful. If Percy were honest, he didn’t remember it—the sound of the engine and the roar of cars swirling past them on the highway had turned his head into a pitchy, black-and-white static.

 “Pepperoni it is,” she said, softly, and maybe Percy loved Annabeth as much as he hated her, sometimes. Maybe it wasn’t her that he hated—it was what she knew about him. The things she knew about him, that she collected and stored away in her filing cabinet of a brain, and sometimes, when Percy kissed her, he felt like he was trying to convince her to forget all of that. That if he could love her the way he wanted to, it would be wiped clean, it would stop mattering. Sometimes it felt like he was saying I’m madly in love with you, and I like to think I’m a pretty good kisser, and please forget everything else you know, because sometimes I think I’ll wake up and you’re gone because of it all but in the only way she couldn’t hear him, because he was too much of a coward to risk it. Risk saying that, to her, and the saying being the last thing she could take.

 He was halfway to the steps of the cabin before he remembered that he had a bag in the backseat, too, but when he turned Annabeth already had it over her shoulder. She smiled at him, a watery, half-sure smile, and if he’d thought he’d held the weight of the sky before, it was nothing compared to the weight of that one smile. Let Atlas look at Annabeth and see if he could carry the weight of her.

 “I was thinking,” she said, when they were in the cabin, and she was dropping their bags on the unused kitchen table, and Percy was fumbling for the light, “I downloaded a few movies, on the laptop, before we left. I know there’s no Internet service here, and—okay, I downloaded the worst James Bond movies that exist. I thought it would be fun, maybe.”

 Percy flicked on the light, and flexed his hand a couple times, as if he could talk the muscles and tendons out of their nonstop tremors. “If you didn’t download Octopussy, I will walk into the ocean and not come back,” he said.

 She beamed. “Good thing that was the first one I downloaded.”

 The cabin was cool, which was surprising—usually when they arrived it took a few hours for the air conditioner to cool the place down, as small as it was—but then Percy remembered that they’d never turned the air conditioner off before they’d left, because they were supposed to have come back. They had just been out for a drive, and they were supposed to have come back. He braced his palm on the kitchen counter. It kept him upright. “Which other ones?”

 “Casino Royale,” she said. “Uh. Moonraker, too, I think. Goldfinger, because I like that one.”

 “Goldfinger isn’t a bad Bond movie, shut up,” Percy said. “It’s a great Bond movie. Everyone loves that one.”

 Annabeth shrugged, kicking off her sneakers. Sometimes Percy tried to tell her that she could get cheaper sneakers and they could look cooler, but Annabeth invariably insisted on black-and-white sneakers, upwards of the seventy-dollar range. It was maddening. “We can’t just watch all the shitty Bond movies. There has to be something to look forward to.”

 “Uh, yeah, it’s bad jokes about the fact that people named a movie Octopussy. A movie doesn’t need to be good if it’s named Octopussy.”

 Annabeth wrinkled her nose. “So the appeal is your jokes?”

 Percy crossed his arms. “Yeah, that’s the appeal. I’m funny.”

 Annabeth’s brows crawled to her hairline. She slipped her phone out of her back pocket, tapped the screen a few times, and all the while her eyebrows remained sky-high, like she couldn’t shake the disbelief.

 “I’m funny,” Percy said, again, louder.

 Annabeth pressed the screen with her thumb and then the phone hummed a tone.

 “This is the part where you say I’m funny,” Percy said. “You know, like a supportive girlfriend.”

 “I’m on the phone, I’m sorry, I’ll have to get back to you,” she said, with a sly twist of her mouth, and if Percy hadn’t needed his palm braced flat on the countertop to stay upright he would have crossed the kitchen and kissed the corner of her mouth. She always laughed, when he did that.

 “You’re mean,” he said.

 “Excuse me, I’m mean? Are you twelve?” she said. “You have to have a better insult.”

 Percy shrugged. “You don’t deserve a better insult, you’re mean.”

 “I know you are but what am I,” she said, and Percy was about to lay into her for calling him childish and then immediately saying the most childish comeback that existed, but a clerk picked up the phone, and Annabeth applied her sugar-sweet customer service voice and ordered. He noticed that she ordered the cinnamon twist things, which she knew Percy loved, and as hard as he tried to convince himself she’s your girlfriend and your mom just died, she’s allowed to order you the cinnamon twist things about it, it grated on him, like dragging the backs of his nails on chalkboard.

 Annabeth shut her phone off with a click. “We can do leftover pizza for breakfast, I guess.”

 There were there for the night to pack everything up, everything from a weekend vacation that had been cut off at the neck; both Percy and Paul had forgotten entirely about it, between the hospital and the funeral, and then the renter had left an unbearably gentle, I know things are tough right now but I do have to rent the cabin out again soon, please collect your things when you can. Percy had listened to the voicemail and waited for anger to pound through his blood. He waited for the heat of it, the feeling of breathing in pure smoke, the coil of it in his gut—and however much of that fire was his, or the rage of Achilles handed down through time and the leathery bond of a shared curse, Percy would never know. He’d always been angry, but now when he was angry, he called for blood, the way fighting dogs did. But his rage had failed him. He’d been left cold and aching, standing in his kitchen, listening to a tinny voicemail on repeat until Annabeth had pulled his phone out of his hand. He hadn’t realized he’d been shaking so hard he was about to drop it, until she’d slipped it away and cut the voicemail off and looked at him like she was about to cry.

 And then she’d said, I can go by myself, if you want, with that running undercurrent, the implication that she’d call Rachel and ask her to stay with Percy for the night left unsaid. It hadn’t only exhausted Percy, the idea of trying to handle yet another person with eyes so soft it made him want to carve his own out with a spoon—he’d resented it. His mom was dead. He didn’t need his friends trying to step into that role. He could be alone for a night and be fine.

 There were hands cupping his cheeks. Annabeth was speaking, and Percy blinked, as if he could re-orient his world by looking at her, and, truth be told, he probably could.

 “Hi,” she said. “You zoned out a bit.”

 Percy looped his fingers around her wrists. “I zoned out a bit,” he agreed.

 “Focus on the pizza, it’ll keep you strong,” she said.

 Percy snorted. “Please don’t mock my love of pizza. I am in a very committed relationship with pizza.”

 “I didn’t know my name was pizza,” Annabeth said.

 “Cheeky,” Percy hummed, and he bent down to kiss the corner of her mouth the way he’d wanted to earlier. True to form, she giggled, a sound high and loud like church bells. It was gratifying, too, the way he had to lean down to kiss her, when she’d been taller than him for two years when they were younger. Slow and steady won the race.

 Percy dropped his hands to her waist, and then her hands moved from his cheeks to the nape of his neck, fingers tangling in the back of his hair. “You need a haircut,” she said.

 “Yeah,” Percy said, and his voice sounded like he’d swallowed gravel. His mom used to cut his hair every year when he got back from camp—something of a tradition, his mom sitting him down in the kitchen and pulling out the barber scissors, the shitty old radio they’d had since what felt like the dawn of time crooning a Pink Floyd song. He’d chirp the details at her, while she worked, the stuff that no one but his mother cared about; how many arguments Annabeth had won, Grover getting in a fight and getting stuck in a tree for an hour, the Stolls putting hair dye in Chiron’s tail shampoo. She would interject, sometimes, offer a, you know I love Annabeth, sweetheart, but she’s a real terror when she wants to be, or a, if you really want to mess with Chiron, you should bedazzle his ping pong paddle. And then Percy would have to admit that he rarely saw Chiron play ping pong, because he slept through most of the camp counselor meetings, and his mom would swat his shoulder, would say something about respect, but she’d be laughing. Annabeth didn’t know any of that. Annabeth had no reason to know any of that.

 Annabeth’s hands fingered the collar of his hoodie, and then tugged, gently. After a few years Percy had learned what she wanted, when she did that, and he scrunched down, so Annabeth could rock up on her tip-toes and press a warm, dry kiss to his forehead. She lingered there for a moment, her breath hot on his face, and then she was flat on the ground again, over a head shorter than him. He pulled her closer by her waist, and then laid his head against her hair, breathing in the scent of her new strawberry shampoo—she’d switched from lemon-scented, somewhere in freshman year of college. He kind of missed the lemon, but he’d feel like a freak, saying, hey, girlfriend of mine, love of my life, I pay a lot of attention to how your hair smells, can you please go back to the lemon one because it’s the one you’ve always had and it smells like falling in love with you. Also can you pick up some eggs on the way home, thanks, love you, bye.

 “You’re going to be okay,” she mumbled into his chest, so low he almost didn’t hear it, as distracted as he was, between the lemon shampoo and the strawberry shampoo and the things about Annabeth he loved and lost as she changed around him. Her arms squeezed his chest. “I promise.”

 “Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” Percy said, roughly, and he pulled away. He could’ve stood there breathing in the scent of Annabeth’s shampoo for a lot longer, but he could feel ice in his throat, his blood, and he didn’t want to talk about it. He’d rather eat glass than talk about it, as much as Annabeth had been needling him, as much as Paul and Grover and Rachel—and God, even Thalia, although when Percy had said, if you ask me how I’m doing, I’m going to walk into traffic and wait, Thalia had said, thank sweet fuck up above. It had been a nice phone call, after they’d gotten that out of the way. At least Thalia hadn’t treated him like a pathetic-looking rescued dog, emaciated and teary-eyed.

 Then again, Thalia was the only one who hadn’t visited in person. Percy’s hands still shook where they were braced against the counter. His teeth still rattled. His heart still skipped every few beats, stuttering, like it kept having to restart. Thalia didn’t have to look at any of that.

 “Casino Royale or Octopussy first?” Annabeth asked, and if her voice was tighter than normal, and if Percy couldn’t look at her, neither of them breathed a word of it.

 “Casino Royale,” Percy said. “You have to earn the right to my jokes.”

 “I would do anything and everything other than do that,” Annabeth said, and that sly grin was back, even if it was faded and worn. Percy didn’t kiss the corner of her mouth again, though he wanted to. He couldn’t bear to hear you’re going to be okay, I promise again, not the way it felt like the too-sharp talons of a hellhound, the initial shredding that didn’t hurt until he was on the ground and his head was pounding and he was soaked in his own blood. Didn’t hurt until he remembered that he could die, there, that he hadn’t said goodbye to his mom that morning because he’d been late for school, and it was a gritty New York City alleyway, and he could die. He still remembered what those felt like, sinking into his stomach—the fall semester after they’d sailed the sea of monsters, before Annabeth had been kidnapped, a hellhound had stalked Percy home from school. He’d been slow, and stupid, and the thing had scoured three-inches-deep, two-inches-wide scars into his gut, and hadn’t that had been a miserable Iris message to Thalia and Annabeth at their adjacent boarding school? I was slow, and stupid, please come bring god food before I die in a New York City alleyway surrounded by rats, thanks, had been what he’d tried to say, but it had probably come out slurred, the words like alphabet soup. He’d lived, though, and he’d healed enough that he’d been able to tell his mother he went out with Annabeth and Thalia and forgotten to warn her first. She’d been stern, but relieved, and Percy had held a hand to the still-aching, still-healing gouges when her back was turned, because the pressure took the edge off of the pain. He’d learned that at thirteen. He’d learned that at ten. Maybe his entire life was learning that, over and over and over.

 Annabeth’s fingers were wrapped around his wrist. She tugged on him, made an expectant noise, and it took half a minute for Percy’s brain to connect with his joints, to shuffle forward after her, because he couldn’t help but think that maybe things might have been different, if he’d told his mom about the blood, the hellhound, the alley and its rats. Thalia pouring nectar down his throat, Annabeth frozen beside him, like she hadn’t been the one who’d taught him how brutal the life of a demigod could be in the first place. At the time he’d thought it was justified, because hadn’t his mother spent his entire life hiding her blood from him? Sopping up her bloodied noses with black towels where he couldn’t see? Didn’t he owe her the same kind of protection?

 They were standing by the couch, an old, tattered, floral-patterned thing with awful springs. Percy folded himself up on it, elbowing deep into the cushions, dropping one leg to the ground so Annabeth had a space where she could reasonably fit on top of him. She was holding her laptop, and when—when had she grabbed it? He was tired. He was losing time. Didn’t he owe her the same kind of protection?

 Annabeth settled against him and flicked open the laptop, punching in her password and scrolling through her files. Her background was a group picture, her and Clarisse and Katie and Rachel and Thalia, a kind of girls’ hiking trip they liked to take when their schedules aligned. Usually spring break, since Clarisse came back to Camp Half-Blood for spring break every now and then. Percy’s arms settled around her stomach and he slipped one hand just under her t-shirt so he could rub circles into her side with his thumb, and she shivered, and wriggled until her head notched perfectly under his chin. Strawberry-lemonade hair. He was caught up by the presence of her, the closeness of her, that he didn’t realize Casino Royale had started, that he didn’t realize the doorbell had rung until Annabeth was clambering on top of him and rifling through her wallet for cash. He supposed it was the cabin getting to him, the memories of him and his mother pressing down on him, her tired eyes and her three jobs and the way it had never, ever felt like it was him that she was tired of.

 Annabeth shut the door with a click. “Come eat,” she said.

 He stared at his hands and tried to will them to stop shaking. They failed him, but that was nothing new. “In a bit,” he said.

 Annabeth was silent for a long moment, and there wasn’t the sound of her rifling through the cabinets for the pack of paper plates they’d left behind, the cracking sound of her opening the two-liter she’d got because the water here tasted like shit. Then she said, “You haven’t eaten today. Come eat,” in a hard voice.

 He wanted to say that he had, that she wasn’t his keeper—but the day was a wall of gray and black-and-white static in his head, a day that began and ended at the car ride that seemed to have cleared his mind of everything except for the aching. Percy shifted until his feet were on the floor—he’d forgotten to take off his shoes—and stopped, stilled, trying to think through the process of walking into the kitchen, failing. Failure tasted like blood, and so it tasted like guilt.

 Annabeth’s hand on his knee was warm. “I knew this was not going to work,” she said.

 Percy had a primal moment where he thought Annabeth had meant them, the two of them, the whatever-you-call-this they had. His heart all but stopped and his lungs shuddered to a halt, and he worked his jaw and tried to say, you knew this wasn’t going to work, how long, why didn’t you tell me sooner—

 But then Annabeth said, “I should’ve made you stay home,” and Percy remembered the voicemail, and her hands on his, and the way seeing that expression on her face had skinned him alive.

 “It was the car,” Percy said, in a moment of clarity, because he could at least track the way he’d unfurled. “Fucking car. It—”

 Annabeth squeezed his knee. “I’m sorry,” she said.

 “Why would you be sorry,” he said, mumbling. “Why would you be sorry, if I’d been—why would you be sorry, please don’t be sorry.”

 “If you’d been what?” Annabeth pressed.

 “Awake,” he said, stumbling over the word. “I was asleep. If I had been awake, I would have seen the truck coming before she did.”

 That had been everyone’s question—how had he survived a car accident so bad his mother had died on the way to the hospital, and how had he survived without a scratch? Percy had shrugged and forced out words about being lucky between his teeth, and it had felt like pounding rusty nails into his spine to breathe the word lucky about his mom’s death. It had felt like an insult to her. But he’d always been good at disappointing his mom.

 “So you stopped sleeping,” Annabeth said, pointedly, and Percy fixed his gaze on her hand and the silvery scar that crossed her knuckle. They’d already fought about that, the not sleeping, and it wasn’t something Percy was eager to revisit—it had been the two of them screaming at each other in the kitchen, Percy shouting things designed to hurt that were almost incomprehensible, Annabeth in tears shouting, you’re not normal, Percy! I know that’s what you want, but you’re not, and you can’t go three days without sleeping, the Curse will kill you, you have to—get over yourself!

 “Let’s not,” Percy said.

 “You’re not like the rest of us,” Annabeth said, and even in her softest voice, the words were like a knife to the chest. “You know you’ve been running a fever, right? I can feel it. Because it’s burning through you.”

 Fever, she said, but he’d never felt colder in his life. “I’ll be fine,” he said, and he scrubbed at the side of his neck unconsciously, the side with the twisted scar branded into his skin by Mount Saint Helens, the gnarled hurricane shape that meant he tried to avoid mirrors when he could. The skin there was dry and hot and he hadn’t realized how itchy it was until he touched it.

 Annabeth tugged his arm away. “Stop that,” she said.

 “It’s not fair,” Percy said. “It’s not—it’s not fair. What kind of life is it, if—my mom barely got to live for herself. It’s—”

 Didn’t he owe her the same kind of protection?

 “Soul for a soul,” Percy murmured, and he wrung his hands, thinking. Thinking that he should have thought of it sooner, thinking that he should have remembered his fear that Nico would try to trade Percy’s soul for Bianca’s, the quiet, maybe he has a right to in the back of his mind.

 He didn’t see dark circles beneath Annabeth’s eyes, or the red, irritated rims around them, when he looked at Annabeth’s face. He saw her rage. “So it’s something permanent until it gets hard for you,” she snarled.

 “Annabeth—”

 “It’s something permanent until you decide it’s time to make a sacrifice,” she said. “You’ve got a guilt complex, Percy, and we let it slide. But if you think anyone is going to thank you for making an exchange like that, you have lost your fucking mind. You have more than lost your fucking mind. It is not your fault that people die in accidents. It is not your fault that people die in wars. No one, anywhere, is asking for you to trade your life to fix something you didn’t do.”

 Percy stared at her, unblinking. He couldn’t think of anything around the overwhelming, I desperately want you to forget I said any of that, so he tilted her head up by the chin and kissed her, in the bruising way he did when he didn’t want her to leave, when he didn’t have the words to convince her to stay.

 When she pulled away, she said, finally, “You’re out of your fucking mind,” and cupped his face. “It sucks right now. I know. It’s awful. But it’s going to get better.”

 “You don’t know that,” he whispered.

 “I do,” Annabeth said. “From experience. I met you, and things got better. I can be optimistic enough for the both of us.”

 She stood, then, and settled on the couch beside him, her thigh warm against his. He was usually pretty good at articulating how much he loved her, where he loved her, why he loved her; but that night the emotion rattling around his ribcage was too intense for words, equal parts respect and awe. How a girl who ran away from home at age seven, a girl who had lost almost everyone close to her in one way or another, how a girl who had spent the better half of her life acutely aware of all of the things that wanted to hunt her down and kill her—how that girl managed to hold such hope, Percy would never know. She was the one who carried the fire.

 “I didn’t learn to write in school,” Percy said, his voice almost too loud for the night. “Well, kind of. During lessons, they—my teachers hated me? I could never sit still, I was always interrupting, I was too loud. So during lessons, they’d just kind of, I don’t know. Not help. Kind of embarrassing, sitting there with your hand raised for ten minutes and the teacher doesn’t come to you.”

 Annabeth’s eyes were bright. “And?” she said, when he stopped, because his throat had closed around a shame he’d thought he’d forgotten a long time ago.

 “My mom taught me,” he said. “She would write out letters, and then have me trace them, over and over. Then sentences. She did that when she was exhausted because she worked so much. She carved out time at night to do that. We would sit in the bathroom and she’d be trying to fix her hair and I’d be—tracing letters. Because nobody else would.”

 Annabeth swiped at his face with her thumb. He was crying, now, he supposed, but he hadn’t cried yet, and it hurt, like prodding a blackening bruise.

 “I used to do it at breakfast, too, but I had to stop,” he said. “Because once I got distracted and knocked over a cereal bowl and it spilled on Gabe, and he wasn’t happy about that.”

 Annabeth plucked at his hoodie, peeling off a strand of her own hair that was stuck to it, and she was frowning in the way she always did when she wanted to press further, but refused.

 “He wasn’t happy,” Percy repeated, and then he said, “He grabbed me by the hair, slammed my head into the table. Broke my nose. Had to duck beneath the table and act like I was reaching for a dropped spoon, so she wouldn’t see, and then he told me to get into a fight at school that day, and I did.”

 She gripped his hand like a vise. She didn’t say anything, but she didn’t have to, because every thought she was having was written in her eyes, if he could just look at them for longer than a moment. She picked up his hand and pressed a kiss to his knuckles, instead.

 Percy scrubbed at his eyes. “I don’t know where that came from,” he said.

 “You don’t have to,” she said, and then leaned over and pressed a kiss to his temple. “Sleep it off, okay? Half of this is probably because you’re tired. You mope more when you’re tired.”

 “Pizza’s probably cold,” he said, awkwardly, trying not to think of the things Annabeth knew about him, had memorized about him. It was comforting, sometimes, but now it prickled his skin, the uncomfortable idea that he wasn’t a singular, that so much of him was held by someone else.

 “You like cold pizza. All the more reason to go to sleep,” she said, and with that she shoved him down on the couch, rolled so she was on top of him, like a very bossy, albeit beautiful, blanket.

 “This couch is too small for this,” he said.

 Annabeth pillowed her head into the crook of his neck, and he could smell the strawberry shampoo, and maybe it wasn’t the lemon but he could adjust. “You’re the one making it necessary for me to lie on top of you so you will sleep.”

 “Point taken,” he said, and he absently scrubbed at his face with the sleeve of his hoodie, hooked around his thumb. “I don’t know how you love me enough for this.”

 “This is nothing,” Annabeth said. “I love telling you that I love you. It’s the Octopussy jokes that are hard.”

 “You are so mean,” he said. “I’m baring my soul out to you and you are still so mean. You are a mean bitch, Annabeth Chase.”

 But she wasn’t, not really, because when they’d packed everything up the next day—a process which was entirely more painful than the night preceding it, a process that left Percy dead on his feet and maybe ready to walk into the ocean and just sleep among the sharks for the rest of his life—Blackjack was grazing by the sad little patches of grass surrounding the gravel driveway. He raised his massive head and offered a wordless nicker in greeting, teeth working a mouthful of grass. And Annabeth’s hand was on the small of his back, keeping him upright, carrying the fire.

Women in Mexico disappear.

Today is a historic day in my country, we’re fed up with gender violence in Mexico. They’re killing us. Picture this, you can’t walk outside your own house because you fear the worst, you fear that your clothes are too revealing, you fear that you’re too alone, you fear that you’re walking the wrong streets. Day after day you wake up to the news of another feminicide. They’re killing us. You see it, you hear it, you fear it. What if I’m the next one? You’re always wondering. They’re killing us. 

10 women are killed every day, only because they’re women. And it doesn’t matter where we are, what we’re wearing, who we are. It’s not our fault, because they keep killing us. 

If we keep up at this rate? What’ll be of us? 

Yesterday we marched. 

(None of the pictures are mine) 

 “I march because I’m alive and I don’t know until when.” 

“Today, all our voices aren’t together because, from death, one can’t scream.” 

“We’re not hysteric, we’re historic.” 

“Mom, if you don’t find me, look up for me in the stars.” 

Yesterday we screamed. We flourished. 

“Mom, don’t worry, today I’m not alone in the streets.” 

Our monuments bled to represent us. 

We screamed. 

But not today, today march 9th 2020. We silenced ourselves. 

Today, we disappeared. No social networks, not a single woman in the streets, not a single woman working, not a single woman studying, not a single woman at any store.

What would Mexico be without us? If you don’t want us in the streets, fine we’ll disappear.

Without us, you’ll collapse. 

Mexico woke up with no women ticket-sellers in the subway stations, no women tellers at the bank. 

No women’s column on the newspapers. 

No women at their jobs. 

No women at school. 

No women on the streets.

Mexico woke up with no women. 

We can’t accept what we can’t change, but we will change what we can’t accept. 

We are angry, and we will rise. Because without us, you’re nothing.