Latest Posts by njkhis - Page 4

This is the biggest news to come out of the 2020 election so far!!!!

**Two Senate runoff elections in Georgia means WE CAN STILL TAKE BACK THE SENATE!**

WE CAN THE SENATE RIGHT OUT OF MITCH MCCONNELL’S DISTURBINGLY PURPLE HANDS.

**It’s a long shot, but if Democrats win both seats, the Senate will be 50-50.**

If you live in Georgia, go to votesaveamerica.com/register to register to vote if you haven’t already. Then remind three friends to register or check their registration and VOTE AGAIN! The special election for both seats will be on January 5th. 

Everyone else, get ready to organize/volunteer/call every single voter in Georgia! Let’s take back the Senate!

If you voted for tr*mp or support him unfollow me now

noo dont turn red you’re so sexy aha

stay down

An AU in which Grover is on the Argo II as protector instead of Hedge, because I say so. He and Percy get to have an actual conversation about the aftereffects of Tartarus + that godawful conversation with Jason.

Percy is tired. That’s what he tells Grover when he asks how he’s doing (and Grover asks often).

I’m just tired.

Saving the world for the fifth summer in a row gets tiring, you know? I’m gonna go nap. Wake me up when I’m on watch.

It’s nothing. Just haven’t been able to sleep. Since the world is ending again.

Everyone else has stopped asking.

It’s not for lack of caring. Percy’s loyalty outweighs his self-deprecation; he can’t think lowly enough of the people around him to claim they don’t care about him. He just makes it easier for them to forget. Indifference is more comfortable than concern. How can Percy explain himself to Jason, Piper, and Leo, who don’t know him; to Frank and Hazel, who admire him; or to Annabeth and Grover, who love him? He tried with Jason after the incident with the poison, and the guy gave him that hard-pressed grimace—lips pulled tight and to the side—before dismissing the topic entirely. Jason paused, perhaps to think, and Percy heard rejection in the silence. It was just like when he set fire to the band room at Goode: Percy was standing with his face sooty and his skin torn apart by debris, looking out at the horror and disbelief on the faces of his peers. So he did with Jason what he did then. He ran.

Maybe Jason truly thought nothing of it. The guy was raised by wolves, after all. He doesn’t seem like the type to sit in his emotions. Maybe the conversation took a turn down a road Jason can’t walk either; maybe he’s a runner, just like Percy.

Tired gets everyone else off his back. Annabeth narrows her eyes with that analytical stare that used to break Percy, but even she can be fooled. That stare worked when his problems were smaller—the weight of the world instead of the weight of himself. After a lifetime of shouldering impossible burdens, the thing that makes his legs shake is getting out of bed in the morning. Just the weight of sixteen years, of five straight summers being a hero. If he lives to see a time where the world doesn’t need a hero—when it doesn’t need Percy—who will he be? Childhood turned to dust alongside the first monster he plunged Riptide into. What story will he write when it comes time to put down the sword and pick up the pen?

PLEASE HEED THE TAGS BEFORE READING 

read on AO3

Because I remember disinformation being spread around the last election and I’m sure Russia will bring it back:

YOU CAN’T VOTE ONLINE.

YOU CAN’T VOTE FROM YOUR PHONE.

IN MANY STATES THERE ARE LEGAL CONSEQUENCES FOR PHOTOGRAPHING YOUR BALLOT.

DO NOT WEAR CAMPAIGN GEAR TO THE POLLS.

DO NOT TRY TO PERSUADE PEOPLE TO VOTE FOR A CANDIDATE AT THE POLLS.

DO NOT ENGAGE IN ANY KIND OF POLITICAL DISCOURSE AT THE POLLS.

NO ELECTION IS EVER A SURE THING, EVEN IF YOU’RE IN THE BLUEST OR REDDEST OF STATES.  IF SOMEONE TRIES TO TELL YOU THAT YOU CAN SIT THIS ONE OUT, THEY ARE EITHER IGNORANT OR MALICIOUS.

VOTE.

A lot of people are genuinely terrified about what will happen if Donald Trump wins reelection and it's really weird how some of y'all are acting like everyone begging you to vote for Biden is some privileged, rich, out of touch, neo-liberal when a lot of them are just vulnerable people who don't want to like...die in a brutal civil war or watch all their remaining rights get stripped away by an increasingly authoritarian Republican Party.

I do not know how to express to you how much worse it can get.

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.

if you're ever in the mood to hurt our feelings some more do you think we can maybe see the follow up conversation percy has w. sally 👀👀👀 for science and also for ripping out our hearts and stomping on them

who am i to deny you your whims, anon, who am i. so here’s the second part to this fic, which wasn’t supposed to have a second part, but you know me, parental emotions is my THING i love it SO MUCH. the trigger warnings apply, for anyone stumbling across this post minus context, those TWs are suicidal thoughts, discussion of that, and this particular part involves some description of picking at scars, so if reading about skin picking triggers you, do avoid that. i think i made it both worse and better. anyway! onwards.

Royal Flush

AO3

The car ride back was tense, and maybe it wasn’t the worst car ride Percy had ever had in his life, but it was up there. He felt rude doing it, but he slumped against the car door and closed his eyes and feigned sleep, the way he did when his mom checked on him in the night sometimes—the same low, deep breaths, the almost-sleep of people who couldn’t quite reach it. Percy didn’t sleep as much as he laid back and closed his eyes and tried not to think. It was a good excuse to stop being, for a moment, if he was asleep, or as close as he could get to sleep.

He knew it frustrated Annabeth that he spent so much of their time together half-present, but it was easier, than looking at her and the eyes she had that looked like stratus clouds and thinking I don’t know what I did right, and sometimes I think I didn’t do anything right at all. It was a good excuse to forget that he wasn’t passing a single class, and that it would take monumental effort to pull his grades up to passing at this point, and that the idea of doing anything at all made him wonder if he could pull the ace up his sleeve he’d used on Akhlys on his own self. His own throat, his own lungs, his royal flush the liquid sloshing in them, a kid who could breathe underwater dying by drowning on land. Feigning sleep was a good excuse to think about the ace up his sleeve, the drowning, the royal flush, the one shot that would hit home in six hundred thousand shots. Drowning had scared him once but he wasn’t sure he was scared of much, anymore, except headstones without his name on them.

 He knew it frustrated her, the way he knew Annabeth was crying in the backseat. His mom wasn’t mean enough to force her to talk in space where Annabeth didn’t have anywhere to escape to, and even if Percy could hold her, he didn’t think he’d be welcome to. He’d done enough for one night, and he was out of words to give her, words to reach her—his head pounded and his stomach throbbed and his muscles were all beaten and weak, and the idea of doing anything else for the rest of the night made him queasy. He wanted to sleep, or not-sleep, wanted to be done with the living for the day. But every time he heard Annabeth’s breath hitch, he thought about throwing himself out of the car, laying flat in the road and not getting up, not the short frenzy of drowning but the prolonged battering of being crushed into the concrete by inches. At some point Percy did fall asleep, genuinely, somewhere between the roadkill and the hum of the engine and the fact that—as much as he deserved it—he couldn’t listen to Annabeth cry for a second longer.

 So when the door crashed shut he shook himself and blinked, glancing to the side. His mom was settling into the driver’s seat, but hadn’t she been driving? He twisted and the backseat was empty, and his heart was already picking up its pace, thinking of Zeus’s thunderbolts and the glint of lightning on rain-slick horns and the way his mom had died in front of him, when she pressed a hand to his chest.

 “Parking garage,” his mom said. Her eyes were soft, in the intense way she could soften them, the way that made Percy sit still and listen without feeling like she hated him. “Annabeth’s inside, having casserole with Paul. I wanted to give you another minute. You look pretty tired, kiddo.”

 Percy scrubbed a hand over his face. “Oh,” he said, feeling a bit stupid. The minotaur and Half-Blood Hill and the horn that was almost too heavy for him to lift was years ago. Another lifetime. It was time to learn to breathe during thunderstorms and car rides, maybe, if he had the energy to figure that out.

 “It looks like the two of you had a rough night,” she said, lightly.

 “Kind of,” Percy said. He looked away from her and at the orange-cast concrete wall in front of them, the old stains, the gloominess of it. He was starting to think New York City was ugly; profoundly, horrifically ugly, the kind of thing people let grow because of interest in its suffering. Why the hell the kingdom of the gods was rooted in New York City, Percy couldn’t fathom it, because every inch of it was gray and every inch of it was grimy and there was a rat around every corner, and they’d had roaches in their apartment when he was a kid. He could barely remember defending it and that’d been a year ago.

 His mom’s hair was pulled back into a braid, loose just because her hair was too curly to hold anything much tighter. He’d tried, when he was younger; his mom taught him how to braid on her own hair, and then in the mornings while she got ready for work, she’d hand him a lock and let him try, and it had felt like helping. Percy knew now it was to keep him busy, and away from Gabe, because in the mornings Percy was easily excitable, and Gabe had hated it when Percy was excitable more than anything. Gabe had taught him what a royal flush was.

 “Pretty rough,” Percy said, weakly, tapping his fingers on his pants. He never remembered leaving clothes at Annabeth’s. She was kind of a clothing thief.

 His mom’s fingers worked over her wedding ring, twisting it around and around, the way she did when she was nervous. Guilt tasted like ash in the back of his throat. I’m sorry that when you get nervous you play with your wedding ring, and I’m sorry that you were married to a bastard because of me, and the other things he’d never say to his mom out loud. “How badly hurt,” she said.

 “There was a boar outside of school,” Percy said. “After tutoring. Calydonian boar, if you know it, I think, because it spat lightning. Avoided the lightning. Got a little… impaled.”

 “Well,” she said. “I’d planned to make pork chops tomorrow, but I’ll hold off.”

 Percy laughed, hard enough that it pulled the aching wound on his stomach, but he didn’t care. It felt good to laugh. It felt like it’d been a while, but he couldn’t remember. His mom always knew, somehow, inexplicably, when he needed to laugh; she’d always said laughter was a kind of medicine, and something about laughing with his mom felt better. It felt like approaching another life he almost had, one where that happened every day, so close but never fully grasping it.

 “I’m going to assume you’re at least mostly okay,” she said, pinning him with a look, and Percy nodded. He tried not to think about Annabeth’s bloody hands, tried not to think about her panic, the way she’d checked his pulse. He was alive because of her, and as much as he loved her, as much as he wanted to kiss her senseless sometimes to prove it, in that moment he kind of hated her more than anything.

 “Lot of ambrosia,” he said. “It’s… hot. It, er, burns you up. Internally.”

 She knows that, stupid, he thought.

 “Do you want to head inside?” she asked, brows pinched together. “I had the heater on full blast. It’s still toasty in here.”

 Percy hesitated. Annabeth was inside. He wasn’t sure he could look at her. “Not yet,” he said. “Not—not yet.”

 His mom’s fingers wrapped around his wrist, lifting one of his hands up and then cupping it. “Can I ask what you’re not telling me?”

 No, Percy wanted to say. His throat felt thick and cold, like pack ice, the pack ice Poseidon’s bears lumbered across. He scrambled for an answer that wasn’t I scared the living daylights out of her and I’m never going to forgive myself and settled on a small, mumbled, “I don’t know.”

 His mom tugged his hand over the center console, and then toyed with his fingers, carefully, like he was breakable—her hands were smaller than his, now, and he had a clear memory of pressing his palm to hers and understanding how tiny he really was, when he was a kid. He’d never do that again. “Sweetheart,” his mom said.

 “I don’t want to talk about it,” Percy snapped. “I don’t—I don’t want to talk about anything.”

 His voice was louder than he’d thought it’d been, too loud for a closed-off car, and his mom flinched backward. Percy watched her jaw work and her shoulders move as she breathed long and slow, deep intentional breaths, because it was like having razor wire pulled through his nerves, because he couldn’t feel his own heartbeat around how much his chest hurt. He’d forgotten that his voice had gotten deeper, that when he spoke harshly or loudly around his mom she remembered someone else.

 Can’t even say ‘no’ right, he thought, and then he tore his gaze away, because whatever reserves he’d had, he’d run through them. He registered his mom getting out of the car, the kneejerk good, leave me here, I’ll suffocate, and then the door beside him was opening, and his mom was crouched on the concrete beside of him.

 She squeezed his knee. “I’m okay, baby,” she said, and maybe that was what undid him, the okay. He twisted in the seat and almost fell on top of her, with how fast he reached for his mom. Her arms were around him in a second, in maybe the most awkward hug they’d ever had, because he was hugging her while halfway in the passenger’s seat and she was crouched outside, but she was holding him. He didn’t know how he ever thought he could make it, without that, without her hand running up and down his spine through his hoodie.

 “Sweetheart, baby, breathe,” she said, and Percy realized he was crying. Crying the way wounded dogs did, from the bottom of the barrel of their chest, that it was tearing at his throat and the wound in his side, and it felt a little bit like drowning on air.

 “Sorry,” he managed, the word muffled against her shoulder. “Sorry, Mom.”

 “Don’t you ever apologize to me, not for this,” she said. “C’mere, sweetheart.”

 He didn’t know, exactly, how long his mom held him on the floor of a parking garage—he knew that he couldn’t bring himself to stop, and that her hand ran up and down his spine constantly. He knew that at some point she started saying sweet, small things, the way she always had. He missed the days where he could curl into her side and fit perfectly, because it seemed simpler to Percy, that even if they’d been going through hell then, it seemed simpler to him that he should fit together with his mom like a puzzle piece. Now it was awkward and his back ached from bending over and his stomach ached because he’d had a hole through it just an hour and a half ago, and it was horrific, the way time marched forward before he got a chance to live it. Had he ever been a kid with his mother, or had he grown up on a highway, speeding through it all? Had it been that long, since he’d last laughed with her?

 He stopped long enough to hiss, because the ache in his side had built to a furious, stabbing pain. He wouldn’t be perfectly healed for a while, and event then, healing with nectar and ambrosia left phantom pains, almost like the wound healed too fast for the nervous system to keep track.

 “Inside,” his mom said, and Percy almost argued, but she was rising and pulling him out of the car. He tipped too much of his weight against her, forgetting both that he was a lot heavier and that he had to carry at least some of his own weight, and they nearly toppled into the neighboring car before he managed to stay unsteadily upright.

 His mom let him go when he was full-body-trembling but on his feet, and ducked into the car and pulled out the hand sanitizer wipes Paul left in the glove box. Paul thought more germs were spread around by kids during the fall semester, despite having no evidence and the trend being against him, so from August to December, it was reliable that there’d be hand sanitizer wipes in the car somewhere.

 “Duck a little,” she said. Her eyes were glassy and bright, but she hadn’t been crying, not nearly the way he had.

 Percy bent his head and his mom pulled a few wipes out of the bag, and swept under his eyes and down his face, the way someone would cradle a baby bird. She’d done this for his entire life. He remembered being seven and coming home from school with a bloodied face, a black eye, because he’d inherited his sense of control from the sea, and the sea couldn’t restrain itself for anything. She sat him on the kitchen counter and flicked on their deadbeat little radio, and businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen they dig my earth had crooned through the static. She’d hummed along while Percy sulked and she stopped up his nose and made an icepack for his busted head. She poured dish soap into plastic bags and froze them, because they conformed to the body better, and Percy had thought that she’d been so inventive, so clever, and she still was, but now it turned his stomach to think about. He wasn’t the only one who’d learned what a royal flush was, from Gabe Ugliano.

 She tossed the bag of wipes and the dirtied ones into the passenger seat, and shut the door. “I’ll get them later,” she said. “Or Paul can just deal.”

 Percy hooked an arm around her waist and pulled her against him and buried his face in her shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he said, voice raspy from the scream-crying, the crying the way wounded dogs on the euthanasia table did.

 One of her hands rose to cup the back of his head. “I love you more than anything, Perseus,” she said. “But don’t ever apologize to me for being hurt. Don’t you ever think I want you to hide from me. If you’re not comfortable, that’s one thing, but don’t you ever—you are my son. Before I’m anything else, I’m your mom. And that means I’m here for you.”

 Percy barely restrained himself from saying I’m sorry again, and then settled on, “Okay. Okay, I—thanks, Mom.”

 She pulled away, and then cupped his cheeks, thumbing his cheekbones. His fingers curled around her wrists almost by instinct. Her eyes were sharp—more blue than green, while his were more green than blue, but he could see where he’d gotten them from, part of where he’d gotten them from. Percy liked to think he looked like his mom, but every shade was just slightly off; his skin was browner, and his hair was darker, and his eyes were greener. But they had the same curls and the same cheekbone and the same jawline, and when he’d been twelve and all he knew of Poseidon was the god of the sea thought he was a mistake, he used to stare at the mirror and count the ways he was his mother’s son.

 “One more time,” she said. “What are you not telling me?”

 Percy’s heart crawled into his throat. “A lot,” he said, and it was, at least, the truth.

 His mom nodded, and offered him a small, watery smile. It helped. “Closer,” she said. “Why don’t we go inside, before we both freeze.”

 She walked him home. She kept her hand hovering over the small of his back, pressing him forward, and even if he no longer had the Curse of Achilles, it made him shudder—just the value of it, his mother’s love. That there was no one person on the planet that knew him better, that would ever know him better, and she was still here, walking him home. That whatever was left of him in the wreckage, at least his mom saw something worthwhile, something worth saving, something worth bringing home.

 They kicked off their shoes at the door—the kitchen was empty, but not for long, because Annabeth came around the corner almost instantly. Her hair was wild and wickedly curly, because it’d gotten wet in the shower, and her hair always curled up like that if she didn’t brush it after a shower. Her face was splotchy and bright red and she had changed clothes again, into a Spider-Man shirt four times her size and plaid pajama pants, both of which were Percy’s.

 His mom reacted faster than Percy did. She moved around Percy, who stood stock-still in the doorway gaping stupidly at someone he’d seen a thousand times, and took Annabeth by the shoulders and kissed her forehead. “We’re alright,” she said, warmly. “How was dinner?”

 “It was great,” Annabeth said, quietly. “I’m sorry, I—”

 “You’re fine,” his mom said, cutting her off. “Where’s Paul?”

 “Living room,” Annabeth answered. “He’s grading papers. His students, they’re—they write the funniest stuff.”

 Percy swallowed against the knowledge that his stepdad had been there for Annabeth when he hadn’t, that it was Paul who had been making sure Annabeth didn’t work herself into a fit the way she did when she was worried, that it was Paul drawing laughs out of her. The feeling of inadequacy wasn’t new to him but it burned in his throat all the same, and he looked away, whatever spell that had left him staring breathlessly at Annabeth broken by guilt.

 “If you want seconds, of course, there’s probably leftovers,” his mom said. She gestured to the fridge. “What’s ours is yours, if you’re hungry, please eat. If you get tired, you can take Percy’s bed, he doesn’t mind at all.”

 Hidden in that was the coded but leave us alone for now, and Percy knew that had to ache in Annabeth—she could never stand the thought of people holding conversations without her, of people intentionally excluding her. People who should have loved her had done that to her all her life. He was torn between the knowledge that he’d never get through a conversation with Annabeth in the room, and defending her right to be there, but his mom had a way of gently letting people down. She had a way of saying things in the kindest way, even if they were hard to hear, because Annabeth’s brows only drew together the slightest bit, and she nodded, and slipped only somewhat reluctantly back into the living room. Percy could hear the sound of Paul’s voice greeting her, welcoming her. Paul had always liked Annabeth a lot.

 His mom squeezed his hand. “Did you eat?” she asked. She left today off of the question, but it was implied, because she almost always asked him did you eat today when he got home. She had the sharpest eyes of anyone he knew. She knew he slept through his lunch period without bothering to eat anything, and she somehow knew it before Percy himself even consciously realized it had become an everyday thing, instead of an every other day thing. But in leaving today off he tried to remember the last time he’d eaten more than a little, and couldn’t. Couldn’t recall eating more than a few mouthfuls of dinner or snagging an apple here and there. He stood there and gaped at someone he’d seen a hundred thousand times. For the first time in a long time, he realized how profoundly little he enjoyed anything, and how profoundly bad it really was.

 His lack of answer was answer enough, and his mom guided him to a chair at the kitchen table in the corner of the room. “Scrambled eggs,” she said, and it wasn’t a question, either. Percy almost asked why she’d go through the trouble of making something new, when she could just reheat leftovers; but then, if he couldn’t figure out how long it’d been since he’d last eaten anything real, she had even less of an idea. It had to be something light.

 Annabeth skittered through the room while his mom whipped the eggs with a fork, darting around for a glass of water. She cut her eyes at him as she left, and he looked back at her, and he offered him a small smile, and it meant the world to him. The world and everything in it, in one person, one place, one moment. His mom made him eat slow, and down two glasses of water—eating had the opposite effect it should have, it made him hungrier, even if the uncomfortable weight of food in his stomach made him kind of nauseous. He rose and loaded the dishes in the dishwasher before his mom could, and when he turned she’d pulled the prescription pain medication he took sometimes for the lasting, twisting pain in his burn scars, out of the cabinet.

 “It looks like it hurts, dear,” she said, by way of explanation.

 Percy nodded, tightly, and knocked back the pills with another glass of water. His mom pressed her hand between his shoulder blades, warm and soothing the ache in the muscles there, the one that seemed to live in him these days. Then her hand crossed and tapped his shoulder. “Your scars look dry,” she said.

 Percy’s hand rose and scrubbed at the left side of his neck, and the scars scrawled there, and sure enough they were dry and hot and itchy. He’d gotten good at ignoring them, while on a quest across the world. He scratched absently and then his mom’s hand closed around his wrist and pulled it down, and Percy looked away; the first adjustment had been miserable, fucking miserable, because they’d hurt enough that he kept tearing them open over and over with his nails because he couldn’t handle the pain being under the skin, it had to pour out of him, too. Being fifteen had been a year peppered with the white bathroom light in the middle of the night, because he clawed himself bloody even in his sleep, and his mom learned to check in on him and shake him out of the nightmares of burning alive. She’d rubbed ointment into the splits of the skin, where it’d dried out and Percy had torn it open, and bandaged it, while their deadbeat radio crooned all along the watchtower, princes kept the view, and she hummed along and sopped up his blood at the same time. What had been miserable to him then was bearable now. He’d discovered all new lows.

 “Keep forgetting,” he said, quietly.

 “My bathroom,” she said, and Percy slouched off down the hall, on the familiar route to his mom’s room. He crouched on the edge of the bathtub and waited, and then his mom appeared in the doorway a few minutes later, a bottle of lotion and a towel in hand.

 “Sweatshirt off,” she said, jerking up with her free hand. She dropped the bottle next to the sink, and Percy pulled his sweatshirt over his head, looking away while his mom registered the bandages on his stomach and the dried bloodstains that hadn’t quite washed away.

 She started with his hand, because it was the worst of the scars, the two last fingers on that hand. She worked the lotion in carefully and smoothly—her hands knew where to go, where to work it in and where to pass over. He missed the radio, and the garbled sound of Jimi Hendrix fading through it. He hadn’t seen it in years.

 “I didn’t want you to worry,” he said. “But Annabeth said—she said I needed it.”

 Her hands pressed into the side of his wrist and flipped his arm over, spreading cool lotion on the gnarled swirls. “You do,” she said. “But that’s not just you. Everyone needs to be worried over, sometimes. Everyone deserves a little worry for their sake.”

 Percy swallowed. “I don’t like that.”

 “You don’t like taking up space,” she said. Her thumb worked into one of the ravines he’d left in his arm by his own hand, a day where he’d been sent home during math class because he’d pushed his hand underneath the other sleeve of his hoodie and dug, trying to stay awake. “You love people, and you love having them. But you don’t want to cost them anything. You don’t want them to think about you, and you want them to see you enough that you have them, but anything further—you don’t want that.”

 Percy’s eyes stung. He didn’t have anything to say to that, so he fixed his eyes on the linoleum, the rumpled shower mat, the way one of his socks was a dark gray and the other was a black.

 “Letting people love you means that they’re going to worry about you,” she said. “That’s not a problem. That’s something you deserve.”

 The wreckage, and whatever his mom saw in him, and rot bubbled up in his chest. “I killed it. The boar. And then I covered up and went to Annabeth’s dorm. And I got there and I thought I was gonna ask, you know, the way—I should have. She was so scared, Mom. She was so—she was terrified. Because I just sat down and didn’t—say anything. I didn’t want to.”

 He watched his mom’s face, then, because it was like swallowing liquid fire. It was nothing dramatic—his mom’s poker face was the best one there was—but her eyes closed briefly and her brows pulled tight together, and then she leaned forward and kissed Percy’s temple.

 “What happened after that,” she said, almost deathly quiet.

 Percy swallowed against the ice that was back in his throat. “She… patched me up. She was terrified. I—I didn’t mean to scare her. We talked, some, after, and then she… she called you. And now we’re here.”

 “And now we’re here,” his mom repeated. His mom’s hands had stopped moving over his arm, but she still held it in her grip. It was getting tighter. “Tell me what you told her.”

 Percy was silent for long enough that his mom started working again, calmly, but he could feel it, the steel in her. The strength she hid, the way she was indomitable, the way she’d expected him to come home from Mount Saint Helens and he had and she’d expected him to come back from Greece and he had. His mom didn’t pressure him for a lot, but the one thing she had always asked of him was that he be good, and the one thing he’d always tried to be was half as good as she was. He wasn’t sure how to tell her how completely he’d failed her. He wasn’t sure how to tell her that he wasn’t good enough to ignore the saltwater in him, that he was as violent as the hurricanes that beat the land were, that he was as violent as the earth was easily shook.

 “I’m not good,” he said, finally. “I try to be, but I’m—not. I shouldn’t have survived, when—other people didn’t. I can’t do what people think I can. I don’t help people the way I should. This isn’t the first time I’ve scared Annabeth. In Tartarus, I—I choked Akhlys, the misery goddess. I asked the water to drown her and it did. I wanted it to. I wanted her to suffer.”

 His mom had stopped working again. She had stopped touching him altogether, and was wiping off her hands on the towel, and it was her lack of response that spurred Percy forward. “I think about drowning,” he said. “I think I could do it to myself the way I did it to her. That’s what you do, when—when people are dangerous, you—”

 Euthanize, he supplied in his head, but he couldn’t say that out loud. “Royal flush,” he finished, weakly.

 His mom took his face in her hands, the way she’d done in the parking garage, but now she was rigid. She looked almost angrier than he’d ever seen her, and somehow it didn’t hurt to look at—it was deserved anger, maybe. When she spoke her voice was sharp. “It took me years to learn this. It should’ve been the first thing I taught you, because it’s the first thing you needed to know. When I tell you to listen, Perseus Jackson, you listen to me, are we clear?”

 He nodded, jolted, knowing his eyes were wide like saucers.

 She took a long breath before speaking. “What you do in self-defense doesn’t define you. It isn’t who you are. You’re not bad because you reacted to being hurt by hurting someone else to protect yourself, baby. The only person to blame is the person hurting you. Wanting people who choose to hurt you to hurt in return is how people normally think. You are not uniquely bad, and you’re not bad at all. You’re doing your best. And your best, sweetheart, is pretty damn good.”

 “What if you’re wrong,” Percy mumbled.

 She raised a brow. “You’ve never thought I was wrong for murdering my ex-husband. Why do the rules change for you?”

 Percy flinched, and his mom let him go, letting him pull away. “I don’t know,” he said, working his jaw, looking everywhere but at his mom. “I don’t know. I don’t.”

 “You’re a great kid. You’ve just had a bad run,” she said, softly.

 Percy scrubbed his face. “I’m—I’m—I’m tired, of that, of it, of having a bad run, I’m tired of that,” he said, rapidly. “I want that, that, over. I don’t want this. I don’t want it at all.”

 His mom’s hand worked through his hair, ruffling it. “Take a minute. Take a deep breath. You’re going to be happy, Percy, we’ll make it happen. But that takes time.”

 Percy screwed his eyes shut, at that, and schooled his breathing. His mom worked lotion into the scars over his shoulder, and somewhere along the way, she started humming All Along the Watchtower, in the crooked way she did; her voice hitched and even just humming she was out of tune, but it settled Percy like nothing else. She’d been doing it all his life. He tilted his head to the side, baring his throat to her, so she could lather up the scars there, and then she backed away and wiped her hands on the towel, bending over to pick up Percy’s hoodie and handed it to him. He pulled it on, and let his mom lead him into the bedroom with her hand pressed to the small of his back.

 “You don’t leave my sight, tonight,” she said. “You don’t—you don’t leave my sight.”

 Her voice broke, and Percy’s heart twisted. She settled in the bed and he settled beside her, feeling somehow better and worse than he had in a long time, and his mom pulled him closer, until his head was on her stomach and her arm was over his shoulders.

 “What about school,” he mumbled.

 Her hands ran through his hair, and he leaned into it, maybe a little embarrassed that he felt desperate for it, but not enough to keep him still. “Do you think I could convince Chiron to forge some doctor’s notes,” she said. “For the rest of the week.”

 Percy blinked. “For—for?”

 “I want to take you to Montauk,” she said. Her thumb brushed his temple. “I don’t know. Get you away from the city, for a bit. Give you space to breathe. I’m good about deadlines, I can have some pushed back, the once.”

 “That sounds,” he said, and he couldn’t speak, around the emotion in him. He couldn’t say that sounds like the best thing in the world right now, couldn’t say that he sometimes he just didn’t want to be a hero, a savior, or a monster, that he just wanted to be the one thing he’d been born to be; Sally Jackson’s son. “I can’t,” he said, finally.

 She leaned over and pressed a kiss to his shoulder. “You can,” she said. “I’m the mom.”

 “I’m—failing,” he said. “My classes. I’m—probably not going to—I’m sorry.”

 Her hand rubbed small circles into his back. “Baby,” she said, “I don’t give one singular flying fuck if you fail your classes this year. I don’t care. You can drop out and get your GED, if that’s what you want. I don’t care. I want my baby boy alive and happy. We can figure the rest out.”

 Percy closed his eyes. It was a little embarrassing, that he’d cried something like his bodyweight in water already, but he wanted to cry again—pressed against her and hearing that the things that had stressed him out enough he’d been sick over it, they didn’t matter to her. That maybe it didn’t matter if he thought he was good enough to be deserving of every sacrifice his mom had ever made for him, that his mom thought he was, and that was a good place to start.

 He drifted off, next to his mother’s warmth, because when he roused next it was because there was a squeak of laminate flooring somewhere behind him.

 Annabeth stood in the doorway, silhouetted in the blue lowlight. He could see her well enough to make out her face, and her swollen eyes. Are you okay, she mouthed.

 He gave her a small smile, and hoped it meant the world to her. Better, he mouthed back.

48 for percabeth! I hope u feel better about the show

Annabeth has known that Percy was going to die from the moment she met him. Four summers. Best case scenario. 

Twelve-year-old Annabeth wasn’t particularly concerned about falling in love with the trouble-making son of Poseidon who drooled in his sleep. Freshly sixteen Annabeth sometimes wishes she had opted for the quiet life some children of Athena preferred: strategize, keep your head down, live a comfortable and unremarkable life. She hardly would’ve crossed paths with Percy outside of the occasional class or Capture the Flag. He and Grover could’ve found someone else to be their best friend, or maybe they would’ve bonded as a pair. And Annabeth would have kept her distance from Percy in the name of self-preservation, knowing they would only have four bittersweet summers together at best. 

The summer before the Titan War is not the best case scenario. Percy is hardly ever at camp except for quests and Kronos-related meetings. He chooses to spend what they both know is his last of their four measly summers away from Annabeth. Grover is nowhere to be found, Thalia is with the Hunters, Luke is hosting the Titan Lord, and Annabeth feels more like a scared little girl than she has in a long time. At least she isn’t the runaway. That title fell to Percy. 

It feels like an insult to Annabeth’s love for Percy to wish they hadn’t met. She is so much better for having loved him. For loving him—present tense. But she says this while he’s still here. His smile may not be directed at her that often, but he still smiles. Sometimes Annabeth can even stomach the jealousy of Rachel being the cause of that smile, because at least someone is giving him joy before this all goes to shit. When it does, maybe Annabeth will understand what it means to wish him away, if only to end the pain of having known and lost a person like Percy Jackson. 

The feeling isn’t new. Annabeth’s gut has twisted in previous conversations where someone would bring up high school and college plans. Percy would talk animatedly about getting his license at sixteen, and Annabeth was left with a dry mouth she could not twist into a smile. He would beam at Beckendorf’s plans to attend NYU in the fall and make the older boy promise to swing by Sally’s sometime. Even Beckendorf, who had never heard the full Great Prophecy, could not stop the microexpression of pity. 

When Annabeth first heard the prophecy, it was too much for her ten year old mind. There was no face to connect to the doomed fate, no cursed blade to reap the hero’s soul. Sometimes her young brain conjured an image of Thalia, but that was a nightmare of its own. Every night, Annabeth would watch Olympus fall at the hands of someone she hoped never to know. 

She still gets those nightmares, only the visuals have improved. Percy is in every single one of them, saving or razing Olympus depending on the night. He never survives. You cannot outrun fate. Annabeth has tried. 

Still, she is a daughter of Athena, and Athena always has a plan. When Percy dies, Annabeth will fall to pieces. In a lucky string of events, she might fall alongside him. It’s a war, after all. But she has a sneaking suspicion that she will outlive him. She has a plan for this as well. The shroud they made when he was stranded on Calypso’s island was nice and communal, leagues ahead of the one the Ares cabin shroud that still makes Annabeth’s blood boil. But deep in her soul, Annabeth knows that she alone will make his shroud. Just as she’ll burn it.; just as she’ll care for Sally in his stead; just as she will lay blue roses on his headstone every time she’s in the neighborhood; just as she’ll be there for Grover, for Clarisse, for all of camp when he’s gone. She will do it alone. Annabeth held the sky, once. She will shoulder this as well. How much heavier could losing her best friend be than the weight of the world? In her anticipation, they feel the same. 

She will build a monument for him, something to last the ages as he was supposed to, as permanent as the love he has given her. It will overlook the gods on Olympus, a reminder of the boy they failed. The boy who was too good for them all. Regardless of how the war goes, this will always be true. 

He was never built to last. Nothing good ever can, and he’s been burning the candle at both ends for a while now. He was meant to burn bright, not long. 

Annabeth sits in the dark of the Big House rec room, the only quiet space now that camp is in full war preparation. Well, the only quiet space apart from the beach, but Annabeth knows the smell of salt air and the sound of waves will be her undoing. That is another key feature of her plan: never go to the ocean again. 

She curls her knees into her chest, feeling every inch the child that she is. But children are not supposed to have plans for their best friend dying. Children are not supposed to have their first kiss out of fear that said best friend will die before their four summers are up. 

The door opens, throwing the room into harsh shadows and blinding light. 

“Um.” Annabeth can’t see who’s talking, but she’d know his voice anywhere. “Chiron said there was a war council meeting today.” 

She raises a hand to block out the light and give her eyes time to adjust. “Yeah, later.” To Annabeth’s horror, her voice is hoarse. Her throat is clogged with tears. 

Percy’s sneakers stop shifting in the carpet. “Are, uh... are you okay?” 

He sounds hesitant to ask, like he’s expecting vitriol to spew from Annabeth’s mouth. And, in fairness, sometimes it does. But Annabeth doesn’t have vitriol in her right now. The awareness that she does not have many days left with Percy is painfully acute. To spend them angry feels like a waste. 

“No, I’m not.” By now her eyes have adjusted to the light, and she looks at him through bleary eyes. 

Percy stills when he sees her face, looking ready to bolt. He points to the door. “Do you want me to...?”

Annabeth sniffles. “I don’t want to be alone.” 

What breaks her is how quickly he is by her side. For all their faults, it is the one thing she can count on. As long as she lets him, Percy will come to Annabeth when she’s hurting.

She doesn’t tell him how deeply that statement is carved into her, that she is carved from loneliness the same way he is carved from guilt—the pitfalls of pride and loyalty. 

A kid carved from loneliness cannot plan to be held the way that Percy holds Annabeth. Such a selfless love was unfathomable as a little girl; how could she ever have accounted for it? He just.. holds her. He doesn’t try to talk or look at her face. He’s just there, unwaveringly. It kills Annabeth to know he won’t always be. It hurts to be with him, but it will hurt so much more to be without him. 

The dam breaks, and Annabeth sobs into Percy’s shoulder. He’s taller than her now, grown only to be cut down young. Still, he is steadfast, grounded, secure in his roots. The way a towering oak has no reason to fear a chainsaw until the cutting has already begun. 

“You’re my best friend,” she tells him, because she’s not sure she’s ever said it and it’s something he deserves to hear. “No matter what, you’re my best friend.” 

Percy strokes a gentle hand along the back of Annabeth’s head. “And you’re mine,” he assures her. He doesn’t say you’re my best friend too. Just you’re mine. As if the fact doesn’t haunt her. She is his, irrevocably. 

A gentle knock at the door interrupts them. Annabeth recognizes Silena’s quiet footfalls and almost withdraws from Percy, but he makes no move to. 

Silena’s voice is soft, not smug like Annabeth expects. “War council in fifteen. Figured I’d give you two a heads up.” 

Annabeth meets her eyes over Percy’s shoulder. “Thanks.” 

The older girl ducks her head in something resembling shame. “It’s the least I can do.” She leaves. 

“How much longer?” Percy asks when the door clicks shut. It isn’t an impatient question. In fact, Annabeth doesn’t know exactly what he’s asking. 

She gives an honest answer. “However long we have left.” And the sun begins to set on the fourth summer. 

jersey if i may humbly request a fic in which annabeth is tenderly patching up percy on the bathroom counter... it's about the Hands... and standing entirely too close. go as ham as ur little h/c writer heart desires. maybe a dash of knuckle kisses if ur feeling benevolent

so, as you know, emma, because i liveblogged writing this to you, you got something a lot more intense than what you had asked for. because it ran away from me! this is intense. this is a lot. this is maybe one of the only times i’ll write a fic that references HOO existing, and you know, if i’m going to do that, i’m going to talk about things that frustrated me in that series. specifically the sad ones. everyone here has seen emma request “go as ham as ur little h/c writer heart desires” and no one is allowed to yell at me, you all have to yell at emma for asking this of me. TWs include graphic depiction of violence, and frank discussion of suicidal tendencies. yes i said fuck the way rick did that if he’s going to put that in his book series and do it badly i’m gonna be mad about it

Rubix Cubes

AO3

It’d taken Chiron paying a visit to the city, and some forged records, and liberal application of the Mist, but Annabeth and Percy had been able to slide right into their junior year of high school. It was harder than Annabeth had expected it to be, which was more than a little humbling, but if she wanted to attend the college of her dreams, she had to have the most spotless high school record she could, because her early education was fabricated almost entirely by the Mist, and she’d flip-flopped between high schools, on account of being a part-time world-saver. Anyone on an admissions board with half a clearsighted eye could’ve seen that she was lying through her teeth. Percy mostly just hadn’t wanted to be in high school longer than he had to, and joked a lot that skipping a year of school was a good way to get paid back, for the not-infrequent world-saving.

She’d thought she was prepared to adjust to the jump between years, she’d thought she’d patched the holes of her missing sophomore year fairly well on her own, but junior year was still the hardest she’d ever had to work for anything academically; and if she was struggling beneath the weight of her study schedule, she knew it had to be worse for Percy. At least she enjoyed it on some level—Percy hated it through-and-through, every inch of the process frustrated him. He wasn’t talking to her about it, the way he had sometimes before, over long Iris Messages, through emails. She used to like helping him through schoolwork, because there was an honest kind of joy in helping him figure out that he was not nearly as dumb as he thought he was, he was just designed to learn differently. But his jaw tightened now whenever she asked about it, and he was moody enough these days that she didn’t really feel like prodding him about it more, not when it’d just lead to a stilted, heavy silence. Not when it’d put him in a bad mood for days at a time. Not when it’d lead to sitting beside him and feeling like he might as well have been halfway across the world, not a tangible memory in his head, for how approachable he felt. He’d always been pessimistic, but she used to be able to talk him out of it, when she tried.

 She was curled around her trigonometry workbook when Percy let himself in—through the window, the one she always left unlocked for him, so he could sneak in after scaling the fire escape. There was a certain privacy to her dorm that they didn’t have at Sally’s, even though they were at Sally’s often enough.

 “Hi,” she said, tapping the end of her pen against the page. The word problem in front of her scrambled itself into trains of nonsensical letters. “I’m suffering.”

 Percy grunted. The noise made her turn and look at him, and he was leaned against the wall by the open window, head craned backwards and his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallowed. She gave herself a moment to trace the lean line of it with her eyes, the slice of shadow that dipped into his collarbone. He was in layers, against the bitter cold front New York City stood against, a jean jacket buttoned up over a hoodie—hastily, too, because the buttons were pulled through the wrong holes. She could see just that slice of shadow, and the sweat beading on his throat.

 “Did you run here?” she asked. Sometimes he did. She usually made him lay on the floor until he was mostly dried off, when he did, because she liked her bed not smelling like a sweaty, gross mess.

 He tilted his head forward, blinked at her. “It’s fucking cold,” he said, by way of explanation. His words were raspy. Slowly he settled on the floor in front of her bed, back pressed against the frame, the back of his head bumping into her knee. She leaned forward and ruffled his hair, and her fingers met thick, sweat-soaked curls.

 “You didn’t have to run here,” she said, the corner of her mouth quirking upwards. Excited, much, she wanted to say, but it was a bit too early to decide if he was in the mood for teasing.

 “I—” he said, and it was clear to her that there were words that were supposed to follow that he wasn’t offering, but he tacked on a miserable little, “did. Sorry.”

“How was your day?” she asked. She resigned herself to working one-handed, and knotted her fingers lazily in Percy’s hair, and he leaned into the touch with a soft, throaty noise.

 “Fine,” he said. “How’s… how—the, uh. The—uh.”

 Annabeth snickered. She shifted her knee and then pushed aside her workbook, cupping Percy’s cheeks and tipping his head back. His face was hot to the touch, and when his eyes flicked up at her, they were folded at the corners in an almost nervous way. His bruised eye was still swollen, but better than it had been yesterday, or the day before. She pressed a kiss to his forehead, and it was burning, too, but it was probably from the run. Excited, much. She tapped his cheekbone, beneath his bruised eye. “How’s this healing.”

 “Fine,” he said, thickly. “I… I love you.”

 Annabeth grinned. “I love you, too,” she said. “But that’s not a good diversion tactic, sorry to say. Did you see him today?”

 “Him,” Percy said.

 “Braxton,” she said. “The guy you knocked out.”

 Friday had been awful, because Percy had called her at five in the evening with a mumble, saying, remember that guy I told you about, the one I told to fuck off and stop bothering people, y’know. Stop, stop, I didn’t start it, I swear, I really didn’t. I just reacted. Strongly. I reacted strongly. He’s—unconscious. A little bit? I’m sorry, ‘Beth.

 Percy shrugged, and winced, his lip curling. “Fuck him,” he said, quietly, eyes drifting shut. “How’s—how’s the… can’t remember.”

 Annabeth frowned, and then moved to the corner of the bed, and patted the rumpled comforter. “Take a nap,” she said. She was starting to think that, despite the fact that Percy no longer had the Curse of Achilles, it had scrambled his sleeping patterns permanently; he slept more now than he had then, seemed to somehow need it more than he had, then.

 “M’good,” Percy mumbled, his head dropping back down to his chest. “M’good here.”

 She left it at that, would rather give Percy space to work through whatever mood it was that he was in, before she tried prying it out of him. He’d been off ever since Braxton. He’d lied about it to his mom, which Annabeth thought was maybe the first time he’d lied to his mom directly, instead of just offering lie after lie of omission. It wasn’t Annabeth’s place to question what Percy decided to keep from his mother, but she couldn’t figure out the reasoning behind this one—she couldn’t figure out why he’d find it so important to lie about something he did in self-defense. Something that Braxton himself was too embarrassed to press charges for. Annabeth refocused herself on her trigonometry workbook, sometimes stretching across the bed to pull out notes she’d made of online videos she’d devoured about Algebra II, the math course she’d missed in favor of saving the world. It didn’t take long for the nearly-winter night to fall, and Annabeth shuffled to stand up and turn on a lamp, because the word problems crawled even further across the page in the nearly-winter dark.

 She moved around Percy, who was slumped over, eyes shut and lashes dusting his cheeks, and pulled the cord of her bedside lamp. There was a thud behind her as the light flooded the room, and Annabeth turned—Percy had startled, bumping his shoulder against the wooden slat of the bedframe, was staring at her with wide, shocked eyes. His hair was curled against his forehead, soaked through with sweat, and she almost said you’re sick, let me call Sally, because he shouldn’t still be sweating. Then she spotted the wide, black-red patch over his stomach.

 Her world tunneled to a single point; the black-red, the way it glistened in the yellow light, its position over a fragile stomach, protected by no curse. “You’re bleeding,” she said, softly, though she’d intended to scream it. She worked through possibilities in an instant, but he hadn’t moved since he’d gotten here, and if he’d been attacked she would have seen it, and that meant his heart had been pumping blood out of his body this entire time. Annabeth’s cheeks flushed with rage or fear or both.

 Percy didn’t answer. He cut his eyes away, breathing hard, and Annabeth’s mouth tasted like cotton and her pulse roared in her ears. She crashed to her knees beside him, sliding her arms beneath his and hiking him upwards, staggering beneath his weight. Carrying Percy had been easier, when he’d been smaller than her, when they’d been the same size, and right now she missed those days more than anything in the world. If the gods had asked after her heart’s deepest desire, in that second, she would have asked to be twelve years old with Percy forever, just the two of them wading through the shallows of the lake catching frogs so Percy could try and find one he could talk to. Now he was taller and folded over her shoulders because he couldn’t stand up on his own, and summer was months away, and her heart was in her throat and beating there, because he’d been lying on the floor of her dorm and bleeding out while she did her fucking trigonometry homework.

 “Why didn’t you fucking say something,” tripped out of her mouth, hurried and rushed, filled with every ounce of her confusion, and she pushed him at the bathroom counter. He flopped on it more than he balanced on it, his back hitting the tiled backsplash and listing dangerously to the side, and he hooked a hand—his right hand, with the knuckles that were still swollen and bruised from the last time he’d been in a fight—into the ridge of the sink’s basin and held on to keep himself upright.

 It was sad, the way her hands were sure, the way even as her mind scrambled for purchase between the domesticity of five minutes ago and the bloodstains coloring her hands now, her hands knew what to do. She popped his jacket open, sending aluminum buttons knocking into the walls, one bouncing off the door, and she didn’t bother trying to have Percy take it off all the way. He was barely upright, and it would be a waste of time. The blue hoodie beneath the jacket had started pooling blood, the material too soaked to retain any more of it, and she ground her teeth and then bolted out of the room, rifling in her desk drawer for her scissors. She used them to cut her flashcards. Today they’d cut her boyfriend’s hoodie open, so she could clean a wound that would otherwise kill him.

 When she returned Percy had managed to pull himself up a little straighter, and his eyes were following her, utterly blank and half-lidded. The only tell that anything on him hurt at all was the severe way his brows were drawn together.

 “If you live,” she said, savagely, fumbling with the stitched collar of Percy’s hoodie, “I’m going to fucking kill you. And then I’m going to bring you back. And then I’m going to let your mom fucking kill you.”

 Percy grunted, and Annabeth’s heart pounded with rage and confusion and then rage because of the confusion. She couldn’t think about if she’d looked up later, if Percy had bled out just ten feet from her supply of nectar and ambrosia, just ten feet from running water, less than that from her. When she’d sliced through the collar, the thickest part of the hoodie, she took both sides in her hands and ripped it open. She didn’t have time to cut something cleanly.

 He hadn’t been wearing a shirt beneath the hoodie, the way she’d assumed, and with the force she’d used to rip the fabric in half, she’d torn it out of where it’d dried into the wound on his stomach. It poured fresh blood. Annabeth slapped a hand over his mouth to muffle his scream with her palm, the echo of it loud in the closed space, and the she pulled him forward and whispered, “Shh, baby, shh, you have to be quiet, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” over and over into his matted curls until the scream tapered off into hiccupping sobs against her hand. Her unoccupied hand curled into his hair, and Annabeth had to swallow against the tears crawling up her throat. Her fault. That sound was her fault.

 “I’m sorry,” she said, turning her face to press a lopsided kiss to his clammy temple. “I’m sorry, baby, I’m so sorry.”

 His chest bucked here and there, as he tried to muffle his own reaction, and somehow it made Annabeth’s heart twist even harder than before. She hadn’t known it was possible, to hurt worse than she did when she heard Percy scream in pain. She propped him back against the backsplash and pulled back the halves of fabric in order to peer at the wound—ragged, somewhat circular. He’d been impaled by something. Her stomach turned. It took every ounce of her not to throw up into the sink beside them.

 “I’m going to fucking kill you,” she said, her voice thready. “I don’t—you were sitting there, you were just sitting there, what the fuck is wrong with you—”

 She yanked open the door of the cabinet beneath the sink, leaving bloody smears in her wake, pulled out her first aid kid, flicked open the lid and pulled out the canteen of nectar. It was a risk, to pump someone full of the food of the gods before properly cleaning a wound—medical care for demigods was above her paygrade, even on the best of days, because there were a lot of catches and ugly surprises wrapped within it. Human bodies, even half-human bodies, weren’t designed to treat healing like a race to the finish, and the larger the wound and the closer to death the demigod, the more complicated it became. But he’d be dead in ten minutes if she didn’t give the ichor in him something to hang on to. She had to prize it, that ichor, because it was the only reason he was alive at all.

 She patted his cheek, peppering smudges of blood on his brown skin. “Look at me, look at me,” she said. “Eyes on me, baby.”

 His eyes flickered open, fixed her with a half-present kind of stare. She pressed the canteen to his lips and tilted his head back, pouring the canteen into his mouth, praying that he wouldn’t choke on it. Nectar had to be swallowed, to be effective, because the world of the gods was bound by its laws.

 Percy spluttered for a moment and then swallowed, and she’d only planned on giving him half the canteen at first, but between her panic and the shallow breaths rocketing in her lungs and the way his blood burned her, she tipped all of it into his mouth. It might’ve been a mistake. It might have saved his life. She wouldn’t know until his pulse evened out—if it ever did.

 She pumped hand sanitizer on her hands and rubbed it in, and then she prodded the wound, searching for anything that might be lodged inside; Percy hissed, and then swore, but this time the sound made her heart lift because he if he was aware enough to swear instead of scream, it was an improvement. If he was in pain, then at least he was still alive. She peeled out fluff leftover from the fabric, and then pulled out a stout, short but hard-and-sharp sliver of yellow-ivory bone.

 “Boar,” Percy gasped. “Calydonian boar. Got—got me outside of the school.”

 “It better be dead,” she said. Calydonian boar, she thought. The leaves were scorched by its breath and lightning came from its mouth, and its tusks were the size of an Indian elephant’s.

 “Headless,” Percy answered, and his grin was crooked, and even with Annabeth’s bloody handprints on his face, he was the most beautiful person she had ever seen. Beautiful, and she was angrier at him than she ever had been in her entire life.

 She didn’t grin back. She looked away and then said, “We have to irrigate it. Bathtub, now.”

 She slid an arm under his shoulders and helped him off the counter, one hand pressed flat against his sternum. She could feel the vibration in his chest, through her fingers, of every hiss and groan, but more importantly she could feel the butterfly-beat of his heart. She focused on it, let her world tunnel to that single point. Annabeth hobbled them both to the bathtub and flicked the water on, and pulled them both beneath the spray, backing herself against the far wall and spreading her legs so Percy could lay between them, the ragged wound on his stomach directly beneath the cold spray. This was the part that made her nervous, the part that was uncharted territory—for every other demigod, it was at least mostly reliable, to chug as much nectar as you could and then race against time to clean and irrigate a wound as best you could, before it healed on you. The nectar would keep you alive as long as you could make sure your flesh didn’t zipper shut with an arrowhead, or a talon, or anything lodged inside of it. But the water required for irrigation healed Percy, too—if he healed with shards of anything inside of him, the wound had to be reopened, and picked clean, and re-closed. The rate at which he healed always seemed different, too, something she couldn’t pin down, something she couldn’t rely on. It was guesswork, wondering whether the water would heal him fast enough, wondering whether it would heal him all the way. But he couldn’t die in water. She held onto that, and held it close to her.

 His head fell against her stomach. His knees were folded up, because her bathtub wasn’t overly large, or even a decent size, and it was maybe the most uncomfortable cuddling they’d ever had, but her grip on him was vice-like. Blood streamed into the basin in long, curling snatches of rose pink water. It would have been pretty, if it wasn’t the life she was tied to that was spiraling down the drain. If that hadn’t been close enough to her own blood that it felt like her heart was hammering against her sternum to compensate.

 “I don’t understand,” she murmured, after several long minutes. “I don’t—I don’t fucking understand.”

 “Can this wait,” he said, softly.

 “Can this wait,” she repeated. “Is that what you were thinking, bleeding out on my fucking—”

 “I don’t—want to fight,” he said. “I don’t… you know it’s not working. You can see it.”

 Annabeth’s eyes snapped to the hole in his stomach. It wasn’t any more closed than it had been before, the way she’d assumed it would—closed somewhat more than it had been, thanks to the nectar, but it was still losing too much blood, it was still far too wide for the water to have done anything. She couldn’t think about it. It was irrigated and that was enough for her, that was enough until he was stable in the way that meant she could breathe for three seconds, and he maybe wouldn’t die on her while she wasn’t looking, while she was breathing. “Why isn’t it,” she said, hating the way her voice shook. “Why isn’t it—stay here.”

 She pulled herself out of the bathtub. Percy made a cut-off noise in his throat, as she jostled him, and she swallowed hard. She snatched the bag of ambrosia squares from the medical kit and thrust it at him, and said, “All of it, eat it, now.”

 Percy took the bag gingerly. “It’s—it might torch me,” he said.

 “Do it and stay in the water,” she snapped. “It—you—you can’t die, in the water, just stay there.”

 It wasn’t enough. The more powerful the demigod, the higher the threshold for the food of the gods, and Percy was about as powerful as they came. There was every rational reason to believe he could take it, but he sounded hysterical to her own ears. She couldn’t imagine how she sounded to Percy, but, well, she wasn’t the one who had spent the night passively bleeding out on her floor without thinking to mention it. If she was hysterical, it was his fucking fault.

 Percy looked like he wanted to say something. You can see it, maybe, that the water wasn’t as kind to him anymore, and she got the sense from his heavy, resigned expression that he knew a lot more than what he was telling her. She was tired of Percy, and his incessant, unfathomable, inscrutable need to hide exactly the things she needed to know—she was tired of getting calls where he said I might have a concussion because things had escalated between him and someone else at his school enough that after-hours fights had broken out about it. She was tired of Percy tightening his jaw when she asked him how his day was, she was tired of never being able to predict which days he’d be mild and which days he’d jump down her throat for every little thing; she was tired of knowing things were tense between him and Sally and never knowing why, she was tired of the way she knew he was struggling in school and he wouldn’t ask her for help, and she was even fucking tired of how much he slept. Sometimes she wondered if Hera hadn’t taken more than just his memories, if Hera hadn’t ran her hands along the things that had made Percy himself, and snapped them cleanly in half.

 She fixed him with the harshest glare she could offer, and Percy looked away, and finished off the ambrosia without looking at her again. The hole in his stomach had closed more, the skin and muscle forcing its way together, enough so that she could possibly pack it with antibiotic ointment and gauze and hopefully it wouldn’t scar as nasty. Her stitches weren’t the best—her hands weren’t the steadiest. It wasn’t a deep tissue procedure, now, at least. It looked—okay, surprisingly enough, but now her hands were shaking and she couldn’t force them to stop.

 Annabeth pointed to the counter. Her whole arm trembled, and he could see it, and it burned. “Do, do you need—I have to—”

 She rose anyway, scrambling to help Percy up, and then help him slide back on her bloodstained white tile counter. She’d be scrubbing the blood out of it for a good while. She didn’t talk, while she swept ointment over what was left of the wound, and tried to push the following hitch in Percy’s breath out of her mind. Annabeth was still thinking about his scream, from earlier. She might hear it for the rest of her life. After it was slathered in ointment, she packed it with bandages, and then let her trembling fingers find Percy’s pulse. His skin was feverish where he’d had so much nectar and ambrosia, and his pulse fluttered, but it was strong enough for someone who had almost died on her bathroom counter. Strong enough that he’d see tomorrow.

 Annabeth’s head fell against his chest, and she forced her breathing to slow, until it matched Percy’s pulse, until it got slower. Percy’s other hand rose and cradled her neck, overly warm.

 “Sweetheart,” he said, softly.

 “Why would you do that,” she said. “I don’t—why, why, why the fuck would you do that.”

 Percy hummed, and bent to press a kiss to her shoulder, and then she knew he wasn’t going to answer. He was going to sit there and hold her and pretend like he hadn’t almost died, and she could see it, the way the future spread out in front of her; she’d let him curl up in her bed and she’d curl beside him and they’d sleep, and then he’d realize he needed to get home, race for his own apartment the way he always did. She’d ask him how his day had been tomorrow, and he’d say fine, and she’d ask him how his school was going, and he’d stop answering, and they’d do it day after day after day. She had been holding out for the hour that Percy was honest with her. She’d expected Percy would talk to her, when he could, when he wanted to, about whatever it was that bothered him, and now she knew that day was never going to come. That his plan, the entirety of it, was to bleed out on the floor of her dorm and never once mention it. That he was content to do that for the rest of his life. That his life was going to be a lot shorter, if he got his way.

 Annabeth pulled away from him and swiped furiously at her eyes. “You don’t get to do this to me,” she said, roughly. “No, fuck you, you don’t. Why didn’t you say anything? You were here for at least half an hour. You could have died, because you didn’t say anything, and I want to know why.”

 Percy ducked his head. “I’m stupid, I guess.”

 “That’s not true, either,” she snapped. “You’re impulsive and you can be reckless. That’s not stupid and that’s not this.”

 He took stock of her, eyes scanning over her, and she must’ve looked like hell, sopping wet and flushed and bloodsoaked and crying. Percy flicked his hand, and the sink beside him rattled to life. He held his hand beneath the water, and the bruises clouding his knuckles didn’t fade a single shade. “It stopped working,” he said. “The healing. I think he knows, my dad. I think he knows… maybe that’s why I don’t, uh, like the water, anymore. Because he knows what I did to Akhlys. Because I don’t deserve it anymore.” The water cut off. Percy’s hand was still dry, but he shook it like it was wet. “He’s right, though. I abused it. I shouldn’t get the benefits of it, after—after that. It’s like… you know what they do to dogs, when they start hurting people. They put ‘em down.”

 “Euthanasia,” Annabeth said, and her words weren’t words, not really, just the ghost of them. They put ‘em down, she thought. The nerves in her heart were beyond aching. She just felt cold, now. It surprised her, almost, how angry she was, how much she wanted to scream, you’re not a fucking dog, you’re the love of my life, you mean the world to me, are you blind? but she’d had enough of screaming.

 Percy wouldn’t look at her. “After Mount Saint Helens I wondered if I should stay dead, to you guys, at least. I’d set one of the most dangerous monsters the gods had ever faced loose. I displaced half a million people, I don’t know how many people I injured. It’s—it’s fucked up, that I don’t even know, that I don’t even know their names. But I can’t… I can’t do that to you. I know I scared you. You don’t deserve that. I don’t deserve you.”

 She searched his face, looking for the tell, waiting for him to be kidding—it had to be a joke, but his gaze on his hands was earnest and hard and sharp. He believed in his words the way he believed that his father was punishing him, the same way he believed that the sun rose in the morning and fell at dusk, the same way he believed in any objective truth. She could read it on every inch of him, how much he believed it, because if he had been lying to her it wouldn’t have looked like he’d just pulled barbed wire through his throat to say it.

 She was silent for so long that he looked up at her, and it was his eyes widening that told her she was crying. She swiped at her eyes, scrubbed her face with the inside of her t-shirt, and then looked at him again, the way he was slumped forward. The careful way he watched her, calculated her every movement, she knew it, she recognized it. He was expecting something to hurt, expecting it from somewhere, from the only other person in the room.

 “I have some of your clothes in a drawer,” she said, evenly. A little proud, maybe, of how steady her voice ended up being. “Change. And then sit on the bed.”

 Percy blinked, once, twice, and then realized she wasn’t fucking around, and slipped off of the counter slowly. He picked his way to her dresser, rooting around for his clothes. He changed and she kept him in the corner of her eye, riding the line between giving him space and making sure he didn’t take off because he felt like it. He perched lightly on the edge of the bed, when he did sit down, now in joggers and a sweatshirt, looking like he was going to dive for the window at any second. Annabeth took a moment to breathe, let the world shift around her, to let her mind sift through her recent memories of Percy, illuminating them, or darkening them. She held her knowledge in her hands and tossed it back and forth, and she ached to solve it the way she could solve a puzzle, a Rubix cube, but that wasn’t how Percy worked, and that wasn’t how anyone worked. When she was steadier than she’d been before she pulled out some of her own clothes, changed in the bathroom, and then padded out and sat in front of Percy, legs crossed beneath her.

 “In Mount Saint Helens, you were fourteen and about to die, and you did what you had to do to escape. That’s not—a moral failing. That’s not bad. That’s just what happened,” she said. Her voice shuddered but it didn’t matter. “You don’t know their names because you shouldn’t have to. You didn’t do anything but survive. I was scared, sure, when I watched you… with Akhlys. But it was Tartarus, baby. I was scared of everything. The only person punishing you is you. The water stopped healing you because you stopped wanting it to.”

 He was looking off to the side, muscles in his jaw working.

 “The thing you actually did,” she said, “was scare the living hell out of me just now. We’re never doing that again. Ever. I know you don’t believe me, or what I’m saying, but that part, that part we’re agreeing on. I don’t deserve that. You don’t deserve that, either.”

 “Okay,” he said, finally.

 She reached out and squeezed his knee. A little support, before she said what she said next; “It’s also never happening again because we’re going to talk to your mom.”

 Percy jerked. “No,” he said, immediately.

 “I wasn’t asking,” Annabeth said.

 “No,” Percy said, his shoulders tensing. “She’ll worry.”

 “And you need that,” Annabeth said. “You need that. You need people to do that. I’m not asking, Percy. Do you want her to hear it from me, or you?”

 “I don’t—” Percy cut himself off. He ran a hand through his hair, and then said, “I scared you,” like it wasn’t something that had occurred to him properly before. Guilt was carved into him. But she couldn’t make him feel better, about something he’d actually done.

 “You did,” she said. I’m going to have nightmares about you dying three feet away from me for maybe the rest of my life, she thought.

 “I’m sorry.”

 “If you’re sorry, then—stay alive,” she said. Her voice broke on the last syllable. “Just, don’t—”

 Leave me, were those last words, the ones that she couldn’t say, because she’d tapped out of whatever reserves she’d had. Whatever had kept her functional had run out. Percy eased himself off of the bed and onto the floor next to her, and pulled her against him, and then she wrapped her arms around his neck and held on with everything she had. He murmured a long litany of I’m sorry, I’m sorry, baby, and she let it ground her, because if he was sorry, even if he was guilty, even if he felt awful, he was alive. She cried until her ribs ached with it, and then she sucked air into her lungs and pushed Percy into her bed, because he’d have to sleep off the fever from the ambrosia and nectar, let it burn through him. She scrubbed her bathroom until it all but sparkled, and tossed the ruined and bloodstained clothes into her trashcan and buried them beneath paper so no one would see them, scrubbed the blood out from underneath her nails. Her hands knew what to do. Her hands carried her forward. Calling Sally was harder, but it was a four minute conversation, just Sally saying, I’ve been so worried, I’ve been calling you both nonstop, is everything alright, and Annabeth’s responding, it’s not, but we’re okay, we’re at my dorm, you might want to pick us up. I’m sorry.

 She forgot to wipe the blood off of Percy’s face, and it was the first thing Sally saw. Sally always looked Percy over first, and had the sharpest eyes for even the slightest of limps, even the tiniest of winces; the reason that he could hide his blood even from Annabeth. An inherited family trait, those lies of omission. But watching the way Percy leaned into his mom and she let him, and the way she licked her thumb to rub it the blood off and crooned at him and he let her, and the way she took care of him and he let her—that it might not have been much of a mistake at all. The blood on Percy’s face wasn’t going to be the thing that broke his mom’s heart, that night, anyway.  

Seafaring

continuing my grand tradition of posting fic at 2am, here’s a percabeth hurt/comfort one. percy and annabeth hug in a bathtub, both fully clothed, and sometimes that’s just you having a shit morning. don’t yell at me, this idea hails from audrey, go yell at her for making me write this. TWs for past burn injury, PTSD, annabeth’s consistent and intentional thievery of clothing, the things i’m always writing about. this was only mildly edited so be gentle

AO3

The bed shifted around her and Annabeth blinked the sleep out of her eyes, her hand fumbling for the dagger that sat idly on her nightstand casting its soft bronze glow, and then warm fingers wrapped around her wrist and tugged her hand back beneath the blanket. Percy, she thought, blearily, because even half asleep she knew the shape of his hand, the feel of it against her skin, the tug of the callouses and the silky strip of the scar that snaked across the meat of his thumb. She knew the feel of his hand on hers, the way she knew he smelled like the sweet breeze that rolled off the sea in the morning, all warm, all gentle, all for her.

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mob au: the island

“Woah,” Percy says. “This place is gorgeous, Annabeth.”

Annabeth smiles at the expansive mansion that stretches up to the sky before her. “It is pretty great, isn’t it?”

“It’s insane,” he says with a laugh. “And I thought your Montauk house was obnoxious.”

“You weren’t calling it obnoxious when we were having sex in every room,” she says pointedly.

“Since you brought it up, how many rooms does this house have?” he asks playfully.

Annabeth bites her bottom lip, tilting her head as she looks at the house. “Thirty-four on three levels. Thirty-five if you count the ballroom.”

“You’d have to be an idiot to not count the ballroom.”

Annabeth laughs, relaxed and at peace in a way that she’s only ever felt around Percy.

“Well, c’mon,” he says, playfully pulling her towards the house. “We are way behind schedule.”

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and they were roommates (chapter nine)

At a certain point Annabeth can’t be expected to keep her hands to herself. 

Sure, maybe her definition of keeping her hands to herself is questionable (her friends sure seem to think so), but there are boundaries. Some things she can’t bring herself to do without some sort of sign from Percy. And not the cosmic sort of listen-to-the-universe sign that Piper keeps finding—a concrete encouragement, something Annabeth can hold in her hands. 

She doesn’t get one until mid-February.

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might fuck around and post this bitch tonight who knows

percabeth + in the storm?? if u want to ofc💞💞💞

It’s an innocent thing, dancing in the rain. At a certain point you resign yourself to being soaked to the bone, and you take this moment to turn your face to the grey sky, to dance in the face of a force of nature. 

Percy and Annabeth are caught in such a storm on their way to Annabeth’s dorm. Initially they attempt to wait it out at Sally’s, but between Annabeth’s strict curfew and Percy’s water powers, the usual excuses to stay in for the night don’t hold up for long. 

He walks her back with their fingers laced and wrists crossed as always, but it serves more of a purpose now. Raindrops skirt around the couple, or maybe they hit an invisible barrier above them to keep out of the way. It doesn’t matter. What matters is the way the storm clouds reflect in Annabeth’s eyes. 

She’s several minutes into a rant about columns and arches that Percy lost track of after ten seconds, but he tries to keep up, to find something to quote back to her when she ends up repeating herself. Her face will soften, she’ll bite her bottom lip the way she does when she’s flustered, and Percy’s brain turning to mush from the mental gymnastics necessary to keep up with her will be worth it. 

Ideally, he could do that now. But she’s just so radiant even in a gloomy city; the sun has abandoned New York for the time being, but Annabeth is bright enough to light it all up. 

Unable to stop himself, Percy tugs on her hand and pulls her to him, interrupting her rant with a kiss. Terrible manners, but judging by the content hum in the back of Annabeth’s throat, she’ll forgive him. 

Annabeth pulls Percy closer, pressing up on her toes and wrapping her arms around his neck. She always does this after she gets passionate about something, even when Percy has the self-control to watch her without interrupting. When he asked, she said it was the way he looked at her. That was the extent of her explanation, but Percy has seen the way people look at beautiful things: all softness, slack jaw, and twinkling eyes. It’s hard to imagine himself looking at her with anything less. 

Rain is the last thing on Percy’s mind when he’s got Annabeth so close—he swears that girl does things to his brain. All at once, his shield fails and cold rain seeps into their clothes. 

Annabeth yelps and jumps back, then turns to Percy with a glare that is somehow both endeared and murderous. Like any sane person, he bolts. 

She takes off after him as he sprints in the direction of her dorm. Water pelts Percy’s face, rejuvenating him until his stride overtakes Annabeth’s, much to her fury. He’s able to plant himself in the concrete and catch her, using her momentum to throw her over his shoulder in victory. 

She nearly takes his eye out with a flailing shoe, so he settles for putting her down long enough to tug her close again and to splash in the puddles for some ridiculous dance. This time she’s all endearment; joy splits her face in a grin as water falls into her eyes, her gaze fixed on Percy. 

They dance in the rain like fools for the whole block to see. People holed up in their apartments might scoff at the idiots in love on the sidewalk below, but they don’t know the joy of dancing in the rain. Carefree moments don’t come so easily to Percy and Annabeth, two people who care so deeply. They have to take these moments as they come. 

It’s an innocent thing, falling in love. At a certain point you resign yourself to being soaked to the bone, and you take this moment to turn your face to the grey sky, to dance in the face of a force of nature. 

trembling hands / saccharine + any pairing 🥺

Percy doesn’t know how to do this. 

He should know, right? It’s Annabeth. The girl who he held at the bottom of Siren Bay, who kept him from dissolving in the Styx. He held up the sky for her at fourteen, but he can’t make a move on her now that she’s his girlfriend? 

But it’s Annabeth, and he wants to do right by her. He knows her, sure, but he wants to know her in this new light, this soft glow of almost-love. 

They sit together on the dock, their toes teasing the lapping waves that glint in the setting sun. Annabeth leans back on her hands and tilts her head to soak up summer’s swan song. The water slaps the dock like a kick drum underneath the cacophony of camp in the background. It’s more chaos than anything, but it’s music to Percy’s ears: the survivors all in the same place for the very last time. 

It’s that thought that drives Percy to reach for Annabeth, even if it’s with trembling hands. Sunlight caresses her with a bravery Percy doesn’t quite have yet. Someday he will touch her just as gently. 

He lacks finesse, but his fingers slip between Annabeth’s steadily enough. She eyes open slowly, her pupils adjusting to the brightness and then dilating once more at the sight of Percy. He’s half expecting her to laugh at him for grabbing her hand and staring at her all doe-eyed, but she just beams. 

For someone who said she wouldn’t make things easy, Annabeth is an easy person to be sweet on. Her cheeks betray her, turning as red as the strawberries growing in the distance. She’s just as saccharine, just as soft and homegrown. It’s easy to slip a hand to the soft skin of her neck, to tilt her jaw, to press his lips to hers. She tastes like nectar, a home that warms his chest. She tastes like healing. 

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.

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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.

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)

Markiehh Callout Masterpost

For the past few days, concerns have been raised against an artist who goes by the alias markiehh on both Tumblr and Instagram, who has drawn some fanart for the PJO fandom and others. The artworks mainly depict male teenagers from PJO and HoO shirtless with muscles and low-cut trousers or shorts, and have been accused of being sexually suggestive. In many of his artworks, the characters display an outward-facing navel, more commonly known as an outie, to the point of being “iconic,” as his fans put it, and thus has been a cause of suspicion that he has an ‘outie fetish.’ He has also been accused of attraction to minors at least five years younger than him, being 24 in real life, due to the suggestive artworks.

Following several confrontations through both direct messaging the artist in question on Tumblr and Instagram, he refused to delete his suggestive artwork, then proceeded to expose several minors’ social media accounts, falsely accuse one of the minors (@arrowsanonymous, age 13) of writing child pornography and encouraging his 28k+ following to harass her, gaslight several people, including minors, in private messages, and even threatened to sue the teenagers who confronted him, most of whom do not even live in the same country as him.

After attempting to negotiate peace between him and the callout group, Mark proceeded to make an insincere apology by attempting to justify his actions against the callout group who “harassed him,” because they were/are, in his words, “terrible to [him];” when the most harm the teenagers had been doing towards him were, for the most part, making memes which joke that he is a ‘clown’ and nicknaming him “Marky Moo.”

markinope was established as the primary source of opposition against Mark, aiming to gather all posts which condemn Mark’s problematic actions. Over the course of three days, we have gathered over 150 screenshots to prove the accusations against this man, sexualization of minors and gaslighting being the most prominent.

A post made by a member of the callout group sums up the discourse and part of the reason why we are calling him out. Arrows herself has too made posts which explain the situation, you can go check out her Tumblr yourself. This post is made to list out markiehh’s transgressions in depth. For further insight on the situation, please read all the links included in this post.

CONTENT WARNINGS FOR THE POST: Discussions of pedophilia, unhealthy body shapes and depictions, eating disorders, mentions of child abuse, sexual comments towards minors, discussions of trauma, guilt-tripping, harassment, entitlement, gaslighting, mentions of homophobia, mentions of death threats, and one (1) mention of COVID-19.

A TL;DR is included at the bottom of the post for those who do not wish to look into all of the details (the total word count of the post numbers at about 4000 words).

Keep reading

jacob blake was shot seven times in the back by cops in kenosha, wisconsin, on 23 august 2020. he is currently in critical condition and fighting for his life. here are a few links to support him and aid the pursuit of justice:

gofundme for jacob blake and his family

petition to charge the cops who shot jacob blake

milwaukee freedom fund: bail funds for protesters in kenosha

call or email kenosha state officials, compiled by twitter user @ankita_71

split a donation to bail funds across the country

feel free to add updated information or other links!

i got emo about percabeth and wrote some pure fucking fluff. that’s all this is. i

there’s a new chapter of 7sor up!

idk guys can we all report this etsy shop for like, actively trying to further covid during a global pandemic. can we please do that. is that allowed

Change.org

Sign the Petition

Justice for Lakeith Smith and A’Donte Washington!

Please sign the petition!!!

i am no orpheus

percabeth | angst with a happy ending | 4k | commissioned by @random-hallucinations 

major character death but not really

Ω

Hubris and loyalty. Fatal.

When Percy and Annabeth’s wars are won and the prophecies are about other people, it’s almost easy to forget. Hubris becomes Annabeth refusing to admit she’s wrong. Loyalty becomes Percy’s tendency to put the needs of others before his own. Peace lulls memory into rest, slowing the mind and the heart until they are fickle things. Peace itself is a fickle thing.

They still train—they are still demigods. War is in their blood, running through their veins alongside humanity and divinity. It’s never over.

Cold rain pelts Annabeth’s skin, soaking through her t-shirt and jean shorts. Her boots slip in the mud as she hauls a petrified fourteen-year-old girl toward Half-Blood Hill, brandishing her Drakon-bone sword to ward off the hellhounds in the surrounding woods. Their presence is scarce save a muddy paw print or a pair of gleaming red eyes in the treeline.

It’s not the hellhounds Annabeth is afraid of; she’s killed more of them than she cares to count. It’s the reason the hellhounds won’t move in, the looming figure shaking the slick earth with heavy footfalls.

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yes i think everyone should be wearing masks and i feel a blind rage when i see people not complying but i will not be your haven to feel morally superior to people in red states who have been left to suffer from covid not just by our criminally incompetent federal government but also their state and local officials who cannot give half of a shit if they live or die

A huge number of people are already getting fucked over when it comes to being allowed to cast a vote in the upcoming elections. Let’s try to minimize what that number COULD be as much as possible. It might also be useful to have the number for the ACLU written down (or already in your phone) so you can CALL THEM while still at the polling place and get whatever information is needed in order to see about having the ACLU sue them. Write down names. Get witnesses. Take photos. MAKE IT VERY CLEAR TO THE POLLSTERS THAT YOU ARE GOING TO HOLD THEM ACCOUNTABLE. (Unless you have reason to believe they’re going to be assholes and try to have you arrested for doing so, in which case, be as subtle as possible.)

Riptide Chapter 11 

“This feels like a bad idea,” Katie laments as she stands on the roof of a warehouse across from the one owned by Luke.

“It’s not that bad,” Percy says without much confidence. “I mean, it could definitely be worse.”

Katie scrunches up her face at him. “Are you hearing yourself?”

“Yeah, I didn’t love it,” he admits with a wince. “Can I start over?”

“Give it a shot,” she says with a dismissive shrug.

“Thanks,” he says, taking a moment to psych himself up. “Listen, it’s gonna be great. We went over the building’s layout, Blackjack staked it out for a while, and we’re gonna be a great team. In no time flat, you’ll be throwing yourself at your boyfriend.”

Katie straightens her posture to take a deep breath. “Fine, okay. Let’s just do this before I fully process what a bad idea this is.”

Percy nods and begins to descend down the building’s fire escape. “Remember, 15 minutes and then you follow me in.”

She nods. “See you in there. And don’t die.”

“Has anyone ever told you, you should be a motivational speaker?”

“Percy.”

“Right, sorry. Going.”

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How do you protect yourself from being stalked online by your parents?

I often get messages from teens living with their abusive parents telling me about how terrifying it is for them to even look at my blog in case their parent finds out. I was a teenager before social networking on the internet. Honestly, when I was a teenager there was barely an internet yet. So, I don’t know how people protect themselves but I feel like probably there are ways. If you know please do share! A lot of people would find it helpful.