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
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.