hi! have you ever thought about how the cover to "wide as the ocean is" would be if it was a book? i love the fic!
OH i LOVE your ask so much because yes I HAVE i am very delusional hihihi you have no idea how much i dream about pretty much anything at all
but bear with be
I don't have drawing abilities (as stated before in the very story you refer to) and all I have is canva, pngs and terrible ideas. BUT
my favorite would be one like this:
then two other options that I thought would be CUTE
I really wish I had the time to learn how to draw (i've tried before i am terrible should be banned from even trying) because i would really like doing silly things like these 'covers' or illustrating some scenes I love from my stories and other people's. and illustrating how I imagine them in particular AUs of mine (like this one)
thank you so much for the ask, sweetheart! i really like talking about these things, haha!
saw an edit on tiktok of wide as the ocean is and thought you’d might like it. much love to you and your writing!! https://vt.tiktok.com/ZSXmvsrLs/
you saw a WHAT WHERE of WHAT
you are kidding me oh my god you are kidding me you are not being serious i don't have tiktok wait let me download and create an account (this was written before i opened the link)
(the things below were written after 10 minutes of me watching what the link led to):
you are not kidding me oh my fucking god what the fuck how is this real
someone took time and talent and breath to do something out of something i wrote and shared it with people??????
i'm hyperventilating (it's a bit a joke) and crying (literal i really am cryin)
THANK YOU FOR WHOEVER IT IS THAT DID THIS BEAUTIFUL EDIT I HAVE SHARED WITH EVERYONE I KNOW THAT KNOWS I WRITE FICS THANK YOU SO MUCH I LOVE YOU
thank you anon for letting me know this exists you have made my entire day and week i am smiling like a fool and will keep doing so
thank you thank you thank you for all of you who deem my stories and words worth your time and care and kindness. i will never know enough words and never have enough stories to prove just how much it means to me. i love you lot. a lot.
TAKE A LOOK AT THE EDIT HIHIHIHI IT'S WONDERFUL IT IS
how is your thought process to write your fics? can you take us through it?
hi! oh, that's an interesting ask. I don't think I ever thought about it?
i don't know if I can explain it so it makes sense, but I can show you a bit of the documents? (this might be a long post)
okay, so. From top to bottom in a fic:
titles are either the first or the last thing i decide on. usually the last. a lot of the docs I have have these names, lol:
i usually choose song names, and I opt for songs that I believe to match the pairing I am writing.
[all the pics in this post are from unposted fics]
I like to begin fics with either a short sentence or a long paragraph, because (i don't always do that but I always leave it as a possibility) i like to make a 'full circle' in some texts. I like to match the last paragraph or sentence to the first one.
I really like instrospection. What I like most is to explore the characters and their minds and their trauma (especially, since I apparently am only devoted to the most traumatized characters possible). If my URL says anything, I really like poetry and metaphors, and I usually have a core metaphor for each fic, and I write the idea around it.
(this will sort of be oversharing of a fic I started last week but) I also outline what I want before the fic! like this:
(i write what comes to mind and I don't delete anything, which is why there is "OH IT COULD BE" because I was saying the plot out loud and talking to myself and just writing it).
As for dialogue scenes, they usually start like this:
very little description, because I'll come afterwards and describe reactions and actions, too. mainly I put the dialogue idea down so I don't lose what I imagined.
Most of the works mostly look like this while I'm working on them:
Each [...] - [...] marks a different scene. In this case, I know I'll add at least one more scene between the two with already written things (if you notice, there is some empty space after 'He dragged' and before 'She was', because those aren't the starter sentences of the scene. Just paragraphs I know will be in the scene, and just so I don't lose the core of what I want to write, I have them written down regardless of having the entire thing done.
I plan the scenes I want to have before I write them and have them entirely planned. Does that make sense? Another example:
even some scenes I have 90% done have brackets, too, with what I need to add:
there are also the times I come up with sentences I like a lot and want to use, so a bracket it is. Or when I don't have the words at the time to dive into the character's mind, I sign it too:
Essentially, in terms of creativity, I write what I have, the ideas I came up with, and not an entire scene. If I were to get stuck scene by scene, I wouldn't ever finish a single story.
Some days I have inspiration for a fight scene, and some other I have ideas for a date. Sometimes I have ideas for paragraphs and paragraphs of introspection but not one line of dialogue, and sometimes I think through an entire conversation but not even facial expressions.
It's a really back-and-forth process, which is probably why it takes me so long to finish anything. It is also, though, what allows me to write long things, I believe; I'm not too attatched to scene length or fic length as long I have the idea done and out of my head.
I'm not sure it's what you wanted me to reply, lol, I'm sorry if it wasn't. my head's a mess and so is the process of making a fic.
i thank you a lot for the kind ask, though, Anon! You're a sweetheart, and I thank you, too, for giving my fics and stories a chance.
if something's unclear, please, ask! if there's something specific you wanted to know, please, ask, too!
“Morning,” he chose to say, stupidly enough.
Annabeth’s mouth opened in an attempt to speak, and then closed with her speechlessness. Her mouth opened again.
“Did you…” she stared. "...Did you just climb my window?”
Red found its way to his cheeks, and he pressed his lips together.
“Aye?” and it sounded more like a question.
read it on Ao3
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chapter 39
impossibilities galore
Percy's mind was never once a quiet place.
He had spent the better part of two decades believing everyone else's worked exactly the same way. His whole life, regardless of being a young man still, he believed that every child found themselves distracted halfway through prayers because a bird had landed on the chapel roof, and that everyone else, too, forgot the beginning of a conversation because sunlight had caught beautifully in stained glass and someone else’s voice was nice to listen to across the room.
He grew up trusting the belief that every boy stared at maps and immediately imagined the smell of foreign ports, the taste of unfamiliar food, the weight of different winds against his face and then wondered about the pen and brushes used to desing that piece — was the paper worn by time or by use? Where did the paper and the ink come from? Did the map come from the same store? The same hands? The same mind?
Surely everyone thought six things at once.
Surely everyone lost track of time because they had started wondering how castles were built or why gulls preferred one chimney over another or whether fish slept or birds could swim or how thread was made to be turned into curtains.
Surely everyone forgot to eat because they had become occupied with something infinitely more interesting. Surely it was common to forget whatever it was that they were doing because there was some other chore they remembered to do halfway through the first one.
When he had been very small, his tutors had described him as curious. And, well, curious was good — it was a good trait to have, a nice thing to be, or so his mother convinced him. By the age of eight, they had upgraded the description to distractible.
It did not seem a word as sweet when they spoke it with shaking heads and a frown.
By the age of twelve, they settled comfortably upon impossible. His mother was unhappy with such a description for reasons she had never explained despite his questioning, but Percy had accepted each adjective with equal confusion.
He was never trying to be curious, or distractible, or impossible. He was never trying to be anything that would make her mother’s life a little harder or that could make his father, once he came back, disappointed in the son he sired — his only attempts were to be good, and kind, and intelligent.
Perhaps the only one he had achieved, he could not help but think, was the gentleness. And even that was sometimes misinterpreted as words a lot less flattering.
He had never understood how people chose what deserved attention. Ever since a child, he had always had the impression that everything deserved attention; clouds, conversations overheard in passing, the shape of leaves, the mathematics hidden inside everything around them, the sound rain, stories.
And every person carried dozens.
His father used to laugh whenever Percy interrupted himself three times before finishing a sentence.
“You are sailing four different oceans at once, son,” his voice would be kind, and his eyes would never carry the disappointment or lack of interest that the boy had feared for twelve years.
Percy had looked genuinely puzzled at Dom.
“Were you not?” he asked.
His father had smiled with gentleness, as if he could understand Percy’s confusion despite not sharing the same circumstance.
“No,” he said simply.
“Oh.”
He had thought about that for nearly a week. He was not sure what it was that caught his attention — it seemed, from his father’s answer, that there was not so much happening inside his brain all at once, and when Percy analized it further, considering how his father behaved and how he went on about his days, duties and chores, it was so much different from his own reality.
He could not help wondering what silence felt like. Not the silence outside, of course, because that Percy knew well enough. He had found it in the middle of oceans at dawn, where the world held its breath before sunrise and had found it after snowfall. He had met silence inside churches — and his leg would never stop bouncing throughout sermons when they were required to attend — and inside libraries, and also while watching stars.
He wondered about the silence inside. The one people occasionally referenced without realizing they were describing something almost mythical, clear minds and to think about nothing and to rest.
Percy had attempted each instruction exactly once before concluding they were impossible. His thoughts did not stop because someone politely requested they do so — and so many people have requested them to —, but merely changed subjects, rapidly and frequently.
Sometimes, he would have to confess, the subject changes happened quite brilliantly; some other times, they occurred rather terribly. His mother never seemed particularly bothered by it, at least, or his father; they had simply learned that conversations with Percy resembled rivers.
They wandered, occasionally disappeared underground and eventually returned to the original destination (usually). A lot happened on the sidelines, where grass and trees and forest and life happened very often and some people appeared to live their lives around it; there were entire scenes happening around, and still the words meant to lead somewhere.
His tutors fared less well than his parents did.
“Mr. Jackson?” they would call, their voice thin and restrained and bothered all in the same way.
“Yes?” he would reply.
“What were we discussing?”
And only then he would realize that he had yet again been adrift to the whatever it was the subject was.
“...Whales?” Percy guessed.
The tutors — different ones over the years — would always have the same expression of tiredness and annoyance in their faces. In his memory, they would also blend into only one person, and it was not very difficult to do so when all the tutors looked at him the exact same way.
“Greek,” the person would reply, with a long, deep sigh.
“Oh,” he mumbled.
It was disappointing, each time, because he had meant to pay attention. He truly had, and he tried so, so hard; the problem was that attention itself seemed unwilling to stay where directed. His thoughts chased one another like children playing tag across fields, one idea collided with another and questions bred more questions and connections appeared where no one else seemed capable of seeing them.
Sometimes it was useful, aye, he would have to admit — it saved his life or a limb a handful of times in his travels —, but so very often, it was exhausting.
Reading, too, was a problem that required unusual determination. Not because he disliked books, despite what some of his old tutors would claim, because Percy loved them desperately. The difficulty lay in convincing his mind to remain upon the same paragraph long enough to finish it before the words started swimming, waltzing around the page.
His fingers drummed unconsciously against tables, his feet bounced and he paced while memorizing things. He thought better while walking rather than sitting, which he accepted would be a lifelong situation he would have to accept at that point, and he breathed better at sea than indoors, better beneath open skies than enclosed ceilings.
Motion helped, always, and stillness rarely did. His mother had discovered that fact before anyone else, and rather than insisting he remain seated through every lesson, she walked gardens with him.
She asked questions while they wandered and listened while he gestured animatedly toward absolutely everything and followed — somehow — when his thoughts went somewhere else or were forever stuck in the same topic. Percy remembered asking her once whether she wished he were calmer, and his mother, bless her heart, had looked genuinely surprised.
“Nay, son. I never wished for such a thing,” she had said.
“No?” he had asked, genuinely surprised at the answer.
“I rather like your storms,” she said. “I would not change a thing about you, Percy.”
That answer had remained tucked carefully inside him ever since,when others had been less charitable.
The descriptions surrounding Percy, the child of Lord Jackson and not yet Mr. Jackson, varied vastly and still made sure to make the very same point. The boy was too energetic, far too unfocused, too impulsive bordering recklessness in human shape, and simply too much.
Percy never quite understood what that final criticism meant, were he sincere, and should she think about it now as an adult, it would still make little sense in depth. How could a person be too much? Too much compared to what, compared to whom?
Eventually, he stopped asking, and instead, he learned how to smile through forgotten details and to apologize when conversations outran themselves. He caught himself wanderig far with much more ease and quickness now, and he knew how to excuse his pacing.
When his limbs grew more and his responsibilities did the same, he learned quite fast how to appear patient while every instinct urged movement; and when his father was sent away once more, Percy became remarkably good at hiding restlessness to the point where only the people who loved him most noticed. His mother, his brother, Juniper and the staff that watched him grow into the person he became.
The sea, too, always noticed. It was a balm, and perhaps why he loved the ocean so much apart from the connection to his father and to the world at large — the ocean never apologized for constant motion, and waves were not failures because they refused stillness. Currents did not require justification, and the tide moved because movement belonged to its nature.
Perhaps that was the reason why restless nights had never truly frightened him — like the ocean, they were familiar companions. As a child, he had climbed from bed countless times to sit beside windows watching moonlight gather across gardens, and most of those nights were spent with him simply watching the stars until dawn.
His thoughts refused sleep long before his body ever did, and so, that night felt almost familiar.
Almost. Except for one impossible difference.
Returning to London should have been ordinary, like it had been in multiple times before when the same travel was traveled and businesses were handled. The journey from York had been long, following the last exhausting meeting and almost fleeing so no other business partner had any ideas to even consider a need to meet up.
The carriage had been more uncomfortable than usual, and perhaps because Percy had been in a terrible mood ever since the morning. He should have arrived home, greeted his mother, eaten supper, retired early, and awakened refreshed; and, surely enough, he did check every one of those things off that list.
And then Annabeth had appeared beneath his window, like a prayer somehow made flesh and like longing had borrowed bones.
Percy sat upon the edge of his bed, his head racing as he took in and tried to commit to memory each and every detail of that one night so far. When he looked around, the room looked precisely as it always had, with moonlight spilling through the open balcony doors.
Nothing had changed, but God, everything had.
He rubbed both hands slowly across his face.
He had kissed her.
Percy had kissed her — her being Annabeth Chase, and Percy being him.
Annabeth. Annabeth, the woman who had ridden across London because she could not sleep, the woman who had admitted she dreamed about kissing him, the woman who had leaned backward against his chest without hesitation.
The woman who had laughed, who had kissed him, who had promised tomorrow.
Tomorrow.
He laughed quietly, weakly, because saying it inside his own head still sounded entirely absurd.
He had kissed Annabeth, and Annabeth had kissed him. It felt impossible in both directions.
His fingertips drifted, absentmindedly, to his own mouth.
The warmth had long since faded from his lips, carried away by the night air on the ride back and the walk upstairs, but memory proved stubborn. His mind supplied it anyway, with the softness of her mouth, the way she had sighed against him as though relief itself had learned how to breathe, the hesitant confidence with which she had reached for him the second time, and then the third.
God, he had spent weeks convincing himself that he was grieving something he had never possessed, some future he had imagined alone, an impossible wish. He had cried over it, had spoken to his mother about it, to Grover — who would not learn about that night, or else Percy would never know peace.
He had mourned a story before giving it permission to begin, and then Annabeth had ridden through half of London in the middle of the night to tell him she could no longer bear not knowing.
He buried his face in his hands again. He felt like some character out of a novel, and it was like a midsummer’s night dream — he felt surrounded by magic and fairies and laughter, and so much more in love now that he was allowed to be.
For the night, at least. For the moment.
“Good Lord,” he muttered into his palms.
There was no reply, thankfully.
Had anyone told him that morning, while he was still half asleep inside the carriage, hair a mess, coat folded beneath his head, wondering whether the roads would ever end, that before the day was over Annabeth Chase would be kissing him beneath the moon, he would have questioned their sanity before his own.
Probably both.
His heart refused to slow, and it was exhausting. Wonderful, if he was honest. Terrifying, if he thought about it just a few seconds longer.
He stood from his mattress, and then sat again, a bit too breathless as much as he was restless. He stood once more, seeking movement — always movement — so maybe his heart could still.
He wandered toward the balcony without realizing he had begun walking, and the night greeted him kindly like it had before.
London breathed differently at the edge of morning, gentler, as if making path for the Sun to follow. The endless urgency of daylight, though, disappeared beneath silence, leaving only distant carriage wheels somewhere too far away to matter and the occasional rustling of leaves stirred by a wandering breeze.
He rested his forearms upon the stone railing, and watched the garden with such a foolish look on his face — Annabeth had stood down there, not two hours ago. Right there, and his eyes drifted instinctively toward the lawn.
He could almost still see her, wrapped tightly inside that familiar cloak, hair unruly from the ride, more beautiful each and every time he looked at her, looking up at him with eyes so frightened and so determined that he had forgotten, for one terrifying instant, how to breathe.
His stomach tightened.
She had looked afraid, when he first looked down to find her standing in the garden. Not of him, thank God, but it seemed that she was afraid of herself and of what she was about to say and had already decided.
Of course, he had not known at the moment, too lost in a sleepy haze and in delirium — it is certainly an odd dream was his very first thought when the pebbles woke him up —, but each image of the night seemed carved into his memory and eyelids and brain. He could rethink and have it all come back to him so, so beautifully, and so it was clear.
Annabeth was terrified, much like those feelings made him feel, and she had come anyway.
For all that counted, Percy understood courage. Multiple, multiple times, he had been a witness to it under skies and trees and ceilings — he had joined the stars in seeing courage unfold, and had been graced by it quite a few times. He had watched sailors climb rigging during storms fierce enough to throw men overboard, seen soldiers march despite fear, watched his father leave twice for wars no one wanted.
But Annabeth riding alone across sleeping London to speak her mind and open her heart because it could not sit still in her chest, that required another kind of bravery altogether.
It was not the courage that faced danger or the courage that faced rejection entirely — it was the possibility of heartbreak.
He closed his eyes, his muscles sore and mind tired, and sighed for just a second before immediately reopened them.
No, he would not sleep. He was tired enough that he could fall asleep standing, surely, but he would not dare sleep, not yet and not before he absolutely was about to collapse; his muscles seemed on fire and he seemed too aware, too awake to dare and attempt to sleep right then.
More than that, Percy was scared. Terrified, even, that perhaps, should he close his eyes for too long, he would wake up for real, not there and not then. In that very bedroom, perhaps, with everything unchanged; books untouched, his window undisturbed, without small stones against the glass. Without Annabeth beneath moonlight or a kiss lingering like a blessing against his mouth.
Perhaps, though, he would wake up back inside the carriage, with Grover snoring inelegantly across from him and York already miles behind and London still another day's journey ahead. His heart still broken, his hope still buried.
Or worse, he could wake up in Montauk, in that first afternoon by the sea, when the idea of loving her fully had been little more than an extraordinary stranger with clever hands and eyes too intelligent for his own good. Or he could wake up in London, and choose another table at the library.
One without a book, without a name, without a chance.
How many lives, he wondered suddenly, had been altered by conversations that almost never happened? And by introductions abandoned halfway through and people who nearly turned around.
His father had once told him that oceans were made not only by storms but also by countless drops of rain no one remembered individually.
Perhaps lives worked similarly. Great loves, great friendships, great griefs — perhaps they all began with tiny decisions that seemed insignificant at the time.
How laughably ordinary. How dangerously ordinary, even, the way such extraordinary things could begin.
Their first meeting had lasted scarcely longer than a few minutes. He had walked to the Chase residence with a volume tucked beneath one arm, scarcely thinking about it. Someone had forgotten it at the library, his brother had suggested that he use his restlessness to retrieve the book, and Percy, always taking a chance to move, had taken the suggestion seriously.
There was nothing more to any of it. There was no destiny or thunderbolts or choir of angels announcing that history had shifted permanently. There was only a woman in the garden, surprised and beautiful.
She had thanked him politely, and he had smiled. He had left, and nothing more.
For days afterward, she had remained no more than an unusually intelligent stranger who happened to own interesting books.
How absurd it was, when he thought about it. If anyone had asked him to identify the precise instant in which he had begun falling in love with Annabeth Chase, Percy doubted he could have done it. He could identify the moments in which admiration had deepened, certainly, or the afternoons that had remained with him longer than the others, but love, on the other hand, was silent.
Love had never announced its arrival. It had behaved more like the tide.
And he could understand it, almost — he had never once closed the door for Love to come in, and it was always a standing invitation for It to come visit.
One spent an entire afternoon walking comfortably along the shore, believing the sea remained far away and, suddenly, one looked behind. Every footprint had already been claimed, and perhaps that was why he had not realized it sooner.
It had happened quietly, patiently, without demanding attention. He had first thought she was fascinating, then he knew she was brilliant, and then he found out she was funny, though her humor often arrived so dry that it took him several seconds to realize she had made a joke at all.
Somewhere after that, he had begun searching for her in crowds without noticing he was searching, had started collecting stories because he wanted to tell them to her later. Smaller things, sillier ones, and he had begun reading books and immediately wondering what arguments she would make against the authors. Percy had caught himself laughing alone because she would have laughed harder — at some point, God only knew when, his thoughts had quietly rearranged themselves around the possibility of her presence.
Percy rested his elbows upon the balcony railing, and breathed in the night breeze carrying the scent of damp earth.
How strange it was, and how utterly fascinating. He had crossed oceans and visited cities whose names sounded almost mythical in London drawing rooms, he had stood upon cliffs overlooking waters so brilliantly blue they scarcely looked real and shaken hands with merchants, noblemen, scholars, sailors, fishermen.
He had met thousands of people, enough faces that memory occasionally blurred them together, and yet everything — absolutely everything — had hinged upon three almost laughably ordinary moments.
Returning a forgotten library book because it happened to fall within his route, looking around a crowded reading room and deciding that one particular empty chair seemed preferable to another, stopping on a beach because of a shark and then running away from the consequences of it were just happenstance.
That was all. There was not a grand design or a prophecy that carried his name or bloodline. There was no dramatic intervention by heaven, but only choices — small ones, human ones.
He wondered how many people unknowingly walked past the beginnings of their own lives every day because beginnings were rarely recognizable until they belonged to the past.
He had not looked at Annabeth and immediately thought that oh, there she is. She had simply become increasingly difficult to imagine life without.
He wondered whether that was how love usually behaved; not as fire and never all at once, but more like sunlight entering a room, so gradual that no one noticed the brightness until they suddenly realized darkness had disappeared.
He had loved adventures since boyhood, and Percy had always wondered what falling in love would feel like — if like crossing south-american forests or sailing atlantic seas, or not like anything he knew at all. He loved the uncertainty of maps with unfinished edges, loved asking what lay beyond the horizon, but this was the first time another person had made the future itself feel like unexplored territory.
Annabeth never promised certainty — in fact, Annabeth promised nothing. She never had and that, perhaps, was what made her so extraordinary.
She did not ask him to abandon the sea or to become smaller, to diminish his blabbering or his heart or his feelings. She did not demand that he fit neatly inside expectations she had prepared beforehand or that he went away because he fit nowhere at all in what she had so planned as her future.
She merely made him curious about tomorrows that included her.
Curious. Curious, and of course.
Love had arrived disguised as curiosity.
And what a gentle disguise it was.
Percy sighed, his eyes unfocused as they travelled the gardens and the trees and the stars that flickered a little weaker, now, as if preparing for morning that was not far ahead. His heart galloped inside his chest, untrimmed and wider where hope stretched it thin in the past few hours, and Percy closed his eyes for a second, for another moment.
He thought of the kiss again, because his mind and skin seemed addicted to that particular action now etched to the tissue of his memories and existence. He thought not first of her lips, not even of the impossible warmth, but of what she had said afterward.
My dreams only knew what I wished for, but they had never met you.
A poet’s son he was, but a poet’s soul she had. And, God, he did not think he could fall more and more for the same person and never once hit the ground that was swept from off his feet.
His throat tightened.
How many times had he feared disappointing her? Feared that reality would inevitably prove less kind than imagination? And instead, because faith came in such different ways when one was not a believer in books or prayers, it seemed that reality had surpassed dreams for both of them.
Perhaps that, too, was ordinary. Ordinary in its nature, because Love, he suspected now, was never truly built upon grand declarations. It was built upon mornings and forgotten books returned without expectation and empty chairs chosen almost absentmindedly.
Upon shared walks and rescued sharks and conversations stretched until sunset without anyone noticing the passing hours. It was built, he thought, upon repeatedly finding the same person at the end of one's thoughts, and choosing, every single time, to walk toward them.
If only fear agreed with rationality.
It never had, though, and it never would.
Percy sighed and pushed himself away from the balcony, already knowing the stillness would not last. He walked back inside his bedroom in large steps, and stopped beside his desk. He turned around and walked toward the fireplace, and forgot why he had gone there in the first place — there was some logic that he lost two steps in.
He turned around again. His room, generous by any reasonable standard, suddenly felt too small for the amount of thoughts determined to occupy it.
He laughed once beneath his breath. What a tragedy, a man who had crossed half the world and survived storms, negotiated with impossible merchants and learned to command crews older than himself, only so that now he was being defeated by the simple act of existing inside his own bedroom.
His fingers drifted absentmindedly over the spines of books lined upon the shelf. His eyes swiped over the volumes, and Percy smiled when he noticed one volume Annabeth had once argued with for nearly half an afternoon, one he had purchased solely because she said it would be nice to discuss it with him.
The author, she had declared, possessed an alarming tendency to mistake certainty for intelligence. He was not certain if he agreed — she was hardly ever wrong and she was very much the smartest between the two of them —, but it was a very nice afternoon to share.
His smile lingered, a small sigh escaping him until fear returned, swiftly and cruelly to the pit of his stomach. His mind ignored the hopes crawling over his skin, because what if that night had only been an impulse? The word settled unpleasantly, but still he could not get it off his head.
What if she had simply missed him, and perhaps absence made her heart twist a little bit its own sensations? People missed one another, of course; friends did. Surely friends sometimes behaved irrationally after prolonged absences.
Not like this, his own mind answered before he could continue. Not like this, but still.
She had been exhausted, and restless, and she seemed almost a little out of her mind. He remembered how pale she looked beneath the moon and how shadows rested beneath her eyes — she was still so, so beautiful, and she would forever and always be —, and she had admitted she had not been sleeping properly
She had admitted to having dreams and restlessness and emotion usually followed things like those. Perhaps (and it sent a chill down his spine) in the morning, clarity would return. Perhaps daylight would convince her the entire evening had been beautiful, necessary, wonderful and utterly impossible to repeat.
His chest constricted. Logically, she had never been impulsive; not Annabeth. She examined every angle before making decisions and measured consequences and prepared contingencies. She was rational through and through, except. she had ridden across London alone.
At wee hours of the night.
Because she could not stop thinking about him.
Percy closed his eyes briefly.
And even if what led her there was a collection of individual choices — getting up, getting dressed, getting Tormenta and making her way towards the Jackson estate —, what if she regretted the choices precisely because she had had so many chances to reconsider?
He groaned aloud.
"Brother," Grover would surely say, "you are exhausting."
“I know,” Percy answered the empty room automatically. Silence followed, obviously, and he blinked. “...I am talking to an imaginary Grover.”
That seemed an unhealthy development, and he resumed pacing anyway. The floorboards had probably memorized the rhythm of his footsteps by now, towards the windows and then his desk and then the door, all the way to the fireplace and back towards the window.
Again, again, again.
His breathing grew shallower without permission, and Percy stopped before the mirror hanging near his wardrobe. The young man staring back appeared slightly unhinged, the blonde hair thoroughly ruined and the loose shirt — that her fingers used to pull him closer, closer, always closer — still wrinkled.
His eyes were far too bright, both tiredness and awe glittering in them. Looking at himself in third person, Percy could only think that he looked happy, terrified and so entirely in love.
He touched the edge of the mirror thoughtfully.
“When did this happen?” he asked, and the reflection failed to answer. Reasonably.
His thoughts wandered again to Annabeth, and her smile and her asking him kiss me again. To the astonishing softness with which she had said his name and the ride home. To the moment she had leaned backward against him as though doing so had always belonged there.
What if she woke tomorrow embarrassed? What if she replayed every word and wished she had remained home? What if she decided friendship would be safer after all?
Percy stopped walking. The possibility struck him so suddenly that his vision swam, and he gripped the edge of his desk.
He searched desperately for certainty, and there was not any. There was only memory and the knowledge that she had kissed him first, and she had confessed first, and she had ridden there first.
But his brain was an old saboteur of his, and Percy was certain that there were multiple, thousands of ways he could find to break his own heart because so much happiness was certainly not usual.
His breathing steadied slightly anyway, because actions mattered as much as words. Annabeth had always believed actions mattered more than theories, surely, because it was only a theory if it could be tested, and he should grant her the respect of believing she meant hers.
Should he not? His mother, at least, would certainly say so, and beg him again to stop deciding for her.
He stared at the floor. Annabeth herself would probably be offended if she knew he kept assuming she was incapable of understanding her own mind.
He laughed this time, weakly, and the sound echoed strangely through the room. Percy inhaled slowly, one breath and another, but his pulse remained too quick.
He walked again even if movement did not solve anything, but remaining still made everything louder. Round and round and past the bed, past the window, past the chair where his discarded coat remained.
The room blurred slightly at the edges, and Percy barely noticed. His thoughts continued outrunning his body, but the floor tilted briefly. Black spots danced unexpectedly across his vision, and he halted so abruptly he nearly stumbled.
“...God,” he blinked hard.
He had scarcely eaten, barely slept. He had spent the past fortnight grieving, then the past two hours having every hope resurrected at once.
His body, it seemed, objected to such emotional excess, which was, well, fair enough. He sank slowly onto the edge of his bed, and sat very still.
His heartbeat gradually descended from somewhere near catastrophe toward merely unreasonable. Without removing his shirt — he rarely slept in too many clothes —, Percy lay backward across the bed and the ceiling greeted him, entirely ordinary.
He folded one arm beneath his head, and his eyes drifted toward the open balcony doors. Moonlight still reached the floor where, hours before, he had stood wondering whether happiness had permanently abandoned him.
How astonishingly quickly lives could rearrange themselves. Not entirely, because morning still waited and the future remained wonderfully, terrifyingly unwritten.
But somewhere in London, Annabeth Chase had gone to sleep knowing she had kissed him, and he would wake tomorrow knowing exactly the same.
Percy let out one final breath.
“I shall see her tomorrow.”
The room, unlike his imagination, offered no objections. For the first time since returning home, he allowed his eyes to remain closed.
Surely not because he was no longer afraid of waking, but because, whatever morning chose to bring him, he had finally decided that one perfect night was real enough to deserve believing in.
[...]
Morning arrived with all the quiet dignity the night had entirely refused.
The sun had only just begun to gild London's rooftops when Percy realized he had officially surrendered any pretense of sleeping when, honestly, he had managed perhaps an hour. Maybe less.
It was long enough to dream of absolutely nothing — which somehow disappointed him after all the dreams he would gladly have welcomed — and wake with the overwhelming certainty that if he waited until afternoon to see Annabeth again, he might simply cease functioning altogether.
His mother, thankfully, still slept, and he knew that the house would be in a slow day.
He slipped downstairs with practiced silence, accepted the amused glance from the cook preparing breakfast, stole precisely one piece of toast and an apple, and disappeared outside before anyone had the opportunity to remind him that civilized people generally ate more than three bites of food.
Tormenta lifted her head immediately when she heard him approach.
“Morning,” Percy greeted softly. The mare huffed in response. “You are entirely responsible for my current predicament.”
Please update wide as the ocean is, i need to go know what happenssssssss
The last chapter was the most perfect thing in the world. So, so worth the 37 seven chapters, 37 weeks of slow burn. I've read it twice already. Can't wait to see what you've got planned next!
Lots of love (and take care of yourself too)
hi, lovely! so, so sorry for the delay on updating!
i just did update it, though, and I hope you'll like it, truly. let me know?
thank you so, so much for being so kind, dearest. Truly, darling, you make my day! I was very anxious about this chapter and it warms my heart that you think it was worth the wait! (truly, you are the best)❤️
I hope you'll like how this story goes now that it's so close to the end :)
loads, loads, loads of love ❤️ hope you had a lovely, incredible day!
“Morning,” he chose to say, stupidly enough.
Annabeth’s mouth opened in an attempt to speak, and then closed with her speechlessness. Her mouth opened again.
“Did you…” she stared. "...Did you just climb my window?”
Red found its way to his cheeks, and he pressed his lips together.
“Aye?” and it sounded more like a question.
read it on Ao3
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chapter 39
impossibilities galore
Percy's mind was never once a quiet place.
He had spent the better part of two decades believing everyone else's worked exactly the same way. His whole life, regardless of being a young man still, he believed that every child found themselves distracted halfway through prayers because a bird had landed on the chapel roof, and that everyone else, too, forgot the beginning of a conversation because sunlight had caught beautifully in stained glass and someone else’s voice was nice to listen to across the room.
He grew up trusting the belief that every boy stared at maps and immediately imagined the smell of foreign ports, the taste of unfamiliar food, the weight of different winds against his face and then wondered about the pen and brushes used to desing that piece — was the paper worn by time or by use? Where did the paper and the ink come from? Did the map come from the same store? The same hands? The same mind?
Surely everyone thought six things at once.
Surely everyone lost track of time because they had started wondering how castles were built or why gulls preferred one chimney over another or whether fish slept or birds could swim or how thread was made to be turned into curtains.
Surely everyone forgot to eat because they had become occupied with something infinitely more interesting. Surely it was common to forget whatever it was that they were doing because there was some other chore they remembered to do halfway through the first one.
When he had been very small, his tutors had described him as curious. And, well, curious was good — it was a good trait to have, a nice thing to be, or so his mother convinced him. By the age of eight, they had upgraded the description to distractible.
It did not seem a word as sweet when they spoke it with shaking heads and a frown.
By the age of twelve, they settled comfortably upon impossible. His mother was unhappy with such a description for reasons she had never explained despite his questioning, but Percy had accepted each adjective with equal confusion.
He was never trying to be curious, or distractible, or impossible. He was never trying to be anything that would make her mother’s life a little harder or that could make his father, once he came back, disappointed in the son he sired — his only attempts were to be good, and kind, and intelligent.
Perhaps the only one he had achieved, he could not help but think, was the gentleness. And even that was sometimes misinterpreted as words a lot less flattering.
He had never understood how people chose what deserved attention. Ever since a child, he had always had the impression that everything deserved attention; clouds, conversations overheard in passing, the shape of leaves, the mathematics hidden inside everything around them, the sound rain, stories.
And every person carried dozens.
His father used to laugh whenever Percy interrupted himself three times before finishing a sentence.
“You are sailing four different oceans at once, son,” his voice would be kind, and his eyes would never carry the disappointment or lack of interest that the boy had feared for twelve years.
Percy had looked genuinely puzzled at Dom.
“Were you not?” he asked.
His father had smiled with gentleness, as if he could understand Percy’s confusion despite not sharing the same circumstance.
“No,” he said simply.
“Oh.”
He had thought about that for nearly a week. He was not sure what it was that caught his attention — it seemed, from his father’s answer, that there was not so much happening inside his brain all at once, and when Percy analized it further, considering how his father behaved and how he went on about his days, duties and chores, it was so much different from his own reality.
He could not help wondering what silence felt like. Not the silence outside, of course, because that Percy knew well enough. He had found it in the middle of oceans at dawn, where the world held its breath before sunrise and had found it after snowfall. He had met silence inside churches — and his leg would never stop bouncing throughout sermons when they were required to attend — and inside libraries, and also while watching stars.
He wondered about the silence inside. The one people occasionally referenced without realizing they were describing something almost mythical, clear minds and to think about nothing and to rest.
Percy had attempted each instruction exactly once before concluding they were impossible. His thoughts did not stop because someone politely requested they do so — and so many people have requested them to —, but merely changed subjects, rapidly and frequently.
Sometimes, he would have to confess, the subject changes happened quite brilliantly; some other times, they occurred rather terribly. His mother never seemed particularly bothered by it, at least, or his father; they had simply learned that conversations with Percy resembled rivers.
They wandered, occasionally disappeared underground and eventually returned to the original destination (usually). A lot happened on the sidelines, where grass and trees and forest and life happened very often and some people appeared to live their lives around it; there were entire scenes happening around, and still the words meant to lead somewhere.
His tutors fared less well than his parents did.
“Mr. Jackson?” they would call, their voice thin and restrained and bothered all in the same way.
“Yes?” he would reply.
“What were we discussing?”
And only then he would realize that he had yet again been adrift to the whatever it was the subject was.
“...Whales?” Percy guessed.
The tutors — different ones over the years — would always have the same expression of tiredness and annoyance in their faces. In his memory, they would also blend into only one person, and it was not very difficult to do so when all the tutors looked at him the exact same way.
“Greek,” the person would reply, with a long, deep sigh.
“Oh,” he mumbled.
It was disappointing, each time, because he had meant to pay attention. He truly had, and he tried so, so hard; the problem was that attention itself seemed unwilling to stay where directed. His thoughts chased one another like children playing tag across fields, one idea collided with another and questions bred more questions and connections appeared where no one else seemed capable of seeing them.
Sometimes it was useful, aye, he would have to admit — it saved his life or a limb a handful of times in his travels —, but so very often, it was exhausting.
Reading, too, was a problem that required unusual determination. Not because he disliked books, despite what some of his old tutors would claim, because Percy loved them desperately. The difficulty lay in convincing his mind to remain upon the same paragraph long enough to finish it before the words started swimming, waltzing around the page.
His fingers drummed unconsciously against tables, his feet bounced and he paced while memorizing things. He thought better while walking rather than sitting, which he accepted would be a lifelong situation he would have to accept at that point, and he breathed better at sea than indoors, better beneath open skies than enclosed ceilings.
Motion helped, always, and stillness rarely did. His mother had discovered that fact before anyone else, and rather than insisting he remain seated through every lesson, she walked gardens with him.
She asked questions while they wandered and listened while he gestured animatedly toward absolutely everything and followed — somehow — when his thoughts went somewhere else or were forever stuck in the same topic. Percy remembered asking her once whether she wished he were calmer, and his mother, bless her heart, had looked genuinely surprised.
“Nay, son. I never wished for such a thing,” she had said.
“No?” he had asked, genuinely surprised at the answer.
“I rather like your storms,” she said. “I would not change a thing about you, Percy.”
That answer had remained tucked carefully inside him ever since,when others had been less charitable.
The descriptions surrounding Percy, the child of Lord Jackson and not yet Mr. Jackson, varied vastly and still made sure to make the very same point. The boy was too energetic, far too unfocused, too impulsive bordering recklessness in human shape, and simply too much.
Percy never quite understood what that final criticism meant, were he sincere, and should she think about it now as an adult, it would still make little sense in depth. How could a person be too much? Too much compared to what, compared to whom?
Eventually, he stopped asking, and instead, he learned how to smile through forgotten details and to apologize when conversations outran themselves. He caught himself wanderig far with much more ease and quickness now, and he knew how to excuse his pacing.
When his limbs grew more and his responsibilities did the same, he learned quite fast how to appear patient while every instinct urged movement; and when his father was sent away once more, Percy became remarkably good at hiding restlessness to the point where only the people who loved him most noticed. His mother, his brother, Juniper and the staff that watched him grow into the person he became.
The sea, too, always noticed. It was a balm, and perhaps why he loved the ocean so much apart from the connection to his father and to the world at large — the ocean never apologized for constant motion, and waves were not failures because they refused stillness. Currents did not require justification, and the tide moved because movement belonged to its nature.
Perhaps that was the reason why restless nights had never truly frightened him — like the ocean, they were familiar companions. As a child, he had climbed from bed countless times to sit beside windows watching moonlight gather across gardens, and most of those nights were spent with him simply watching the stars until dawn.
His thoughts refused sleep long before his body ever did, and so, that night felt almost familiar.
Almost. Except for one impossible difference.
Returning to London should have been ordinary, like it had been in multiple times before when the same travel was traveled and businesses were handled. The journey from York had been long, following the last exhausting meeting and almost fleeing so no other business partner had any ideas to even consider a need to meet up.
The carriage had been more uncomfortable than usual, and perhaps because Percy had been in a terrible mood ever since the morning. He should have arrived home, greeted his mother, eaten supper, retired early, and awakened refreshed; and, surely enough, he did check every one of those things off that list.
And then Annabeth had appeared beneath his window, like a prayer somehow made flesh and like longing had borrowed bones.
Percy sat upon the edge of his bed, his head racing as he took in and tried to commit to memory each and every detail of that one night so far. When he looked around, the room looked precisely as it always had, with moonlight spilling through the open balcony doors.
Nothing had changed, but God, everything had.
He rubbed both hands slowly across his face.
He had kissed her.
Percy had kissed her — her being Annabeth Chase, and Percy being him.
Annabeth. Annabeth, the woman who had ridden across London because she could not sleep, the woman who had admitted she dreamed about kissing him, the woman who had leaned backward against his chest without hesitation.
The woman who had laughed, who had kissed him, who had promised tomorrow.
Tomorrow.
He laughed quietly, weakly, because saying it inside his own head still sounded entirely absurd.
He had kissed Annabeth, and Annabeth had kissed him. It felt impossible in both directions.
His fingertips drifted, absentmindedly, to his own mouth.
The warmth had long since faded from his lips, carried away by the night air on the ride back and the walk upstairs, but memory proved stubborn. His mind supplied it anyway, with the softness of her mouth, the way she had sighed against him as though relief itself had learned how to breathe, the hesitant confidence with which she had reached for him the second time, and then the third.
God, he had spent weeks convincing himself that he was grieving something he had never possessed, some future he had imagined alone, an impossible wish. He had cried over it, had spoken to his mother about it, to Grover — who would not learn about that night, or else Percy would never know peace.
He had mourned a story before giving it permission to begin, and then Annabeth had ridden through half of London in the middle of the night to tell him she could no longer bear not knowing.
He buried his face in his hands again. He felt like some character out of a novel, and it was like a midsummer’s night dream — he felt surrounded by magic and fairies and laughter, and so much more in love now that he was allowed to be.
For the night, at least. For the moment.
“Good Lord,” he muttered into his palms.
There was no reply, thankfully.
Had anyone told him that morning, while he was still half asleep inside the carriage, hair a mess, coat folded beneath his head, wondering whether the roads would ever end, that before the day was over Annabeth Chase would be kissing him beneath the moon, he would have questioned their sanity before his own.
Probably both.
His heart refused to slow, and it was exhausting. Wonderful, if he was honest. Terrifying, if he thought about it just a few seconds longer.
He stood from his mattress, and then sat again, a bit too breathless as much as he was restless. He stood once more, seeking movement — always movement — so maybe his heart could still.
He wandered toward the balcony without realizing he had begun walking, and the night greeted him kindly like it had before.
London breathed differently at the edge of morning, gentler, as if making path for the Sun to follow. The endless urgency of daylight, though, disappeared beneath silence, leaving only distant carriage wheels somewhere too far away to matter and the occasional rustling of leaves stirred by a wandering breeze.
He rested his forearms upon the stone railing, and watched the garden with such a foolish look on his face — Annabeth had stood down there, not two hours ago. Right there, and his eyes drifted instinctively toward the lawn.
He could almost still see her, wrapped tightly inside that familiar cloak, hair unruly from the ride, more beautiful each and every time he looked at her, looking up at him with eyes so frightened and so determined that he had forgotten, for one terrifying instant, how to breathe.
His stomach tightened.
She had looked afraid, when he first looked down to find her standing in the garden. Not of him, thank God, but it seemed that she was afraid of herself and of what she was about to say and had already decided.
Of course, he had not known at the moment, too lost in a sleepy haze and in delirium — it is certainly an odd dream was his very first thought when the pebbles woke him up —, but each image of the night seemed carved into his memory and eyelids and brain. He could rethink and have it all come back to him so, so beautifully, and so it was clear.
Annabeth was terrified, much like those feelings made him feel, and she had come anyway.
For all that counted, Percy understood courage. Multiple, multiple times, he had been a witness to it under skies and trees and ceilings — he had joined the stars in seeing courage unfold, and had been graced by it quite a few times. He had watched sailors climb rigging during storms fierce enough to throw men overboard, seen soldiers march despite fear, watched his father leave twice for wars no one wanted.
But Annabeth riding alone across sleeping London to speak her mind and open her heart because it could not sit still in her chest, that required another kind of bravery altogether.
It was not the courage that faced danger or the courage that faced rejection entirely — it was the possibility of heartbreak.
He closed his eyes, his muscles sore and mind tired, and sighed for just a second before immediately reopened them.
No, he would not sleep. He was tired enough that he could fall asleep standing, surely, but he would not dare sleep, not yet and not before he absolutely was about to collapse; his muscles seemed on fire and he seemed too aware, too awake to dare and attempt to sleep right then.
More than that, Percy was scared. Terrified, even, that perhaps, should he close his eyes for too long, he would wake up for real, not there and not then. In that very bedroom, perhaps, with everything unchanged; books untouched, his window undisturbed, without small stones against the glass. Without Annabeth beneath moonlight or a kiss lingering like a blessing against his mouth.
Perhaps, though, he would wake up back inside the carriage, with Grover snoring inelegantly across from him and York already miles behind and London still another day's journey ahead. His heart still broken, his hope still buried.
Or worse, he could wake up in Montauk, in that first afternoon by the sea, when the idea of loving her fully had been little more than an extraordinary stranger with clever hands and eyes too intelligent for his own good. Or he could wake up in London, and choose another table at the library.
One without a book, without a name, without a chance.
How many lives, he wondered suddenly, had been altered by conversations that almost never happened? And by introductions abandoned halfway through and people who nearly turned around.
His father had once told him that oceans were made not only by storms but also by countless drops of rain no one remembered individually.
Perhaps lives worked similarly. Great loves, great friendships, great griefs — perhaps they all began with tiny decisions that seemed insignificant at the time.
How laughably ordinary. How dangerously ordinary, even, the way such extraordinary things could begin.
Their first meeting had lasted scarcely longer than a few minutes. He had walked to the Chase residence with a volume tucked beneath one arm, scarcely thinking about it. Someone had forgotten it at the library, his brother had suggested that he use his restlessness to retrieve the book, and Percy, always taking a chance to move, had taken the suggestion seriously.
There was nothing more to any of it. There was no destiny or thunderbolts or choir of angels announcing that history had shifted permanently. There was only a woman in the garden, surprised and beautiful.
She had thanked him politely, and he had smiled. He had left, and nothing more.
For days afterward, she had remained no more than an unusually intelligent stranger who happened to own interesting books.
How absurd it was, when he thought about it. If anyone had asked him to identify the precise instant in which he had begun falling in love with Annabeth Chase, Percy doubted he could have done it. He could identify the moments in which admiration had deepened, certainly, or the afternoons that had remained with him longer than the others, but love, on the other hand, was silent.
Love had never announced its arrival. It had behaved more like the tide.
And he could understand it, almost — he had never once closed the door for Love to come in, and it was always a standing invitation for It to come visit.
One spent an entire afternoon walking comfortably along the shore, believing the sea remained far away and, suddenly, one looked behind. Every footprint had already been claimed, and perhaps that was why he had not realized it sooner.
It had happened quietly, patiently, without demanding attention. He had first thought she was fascinating, then he knew she was brilliant, and then he found out she was funny, though her humor often arrived so dry that it took him several seconds to realize she had made a joke at all.
Somewhere after that, he had begun searching for her in crowds without noticing he was searching, had started collecting stories because he wanted to tell them to her later. Smaller things, sillier ones, and he had begun reading books and immediately wondering what arguments she would make against the authors. Percy had caught himself laughing alone because she would have laughed harder — at some point, God only knew when, his thoughts had quietly rearranged themselves around the possibility of her presence.
Percy rested his elbows upon the balcony railing, and breathed in the night breeze carrying the scent of damp earth.
How strange it was, and how utterly fascinating. He had crossed oceans and visited cities whose names sounded almost mythical in London drawing rooms, he had stood upon cliffs overlooking waters so brilliantly blue they scarcely looked real and shaken hands with merchants, noblemen, scholars, sailors, fishermen.
He had met thousands of people, enough faces that memory occasionally blurred them together, and yet everything — absolutely everything — had hinged upon three almost laughably ordinary moments.
Returning a forgotten library book because it happened to fall within his route, looking around a crowded reading room and deciding that one particular empty chair seemed preferable to another, stopping on a beach because of a shark and then running away from the consequences of it were just happenstance.
That was all. There was not a grand design or a prophecy that carried his name or bloodline. There was no dramatic intervention by heaven, but only choices — small ones, human ones.
He wondered how many people unknowingly walked past the beginnings of their own lives every day because beginnings were rarely recognizable until they belonged to the past.
He had not looked at Annabeth and immediately thought that oh, there she is. She had simply become increasingly difficult to imagine life without.
He wondered whether that was how love usually behaved; not as fire and never all at once, but more like sunlight entering a room, so gradual that no one noticed the brightness until they suddenly realized darkness had disappeared.
He had loved adventures since boyhood, and Percy had always wondered what falling in love would feel like — if like crossing south-american forests or sailing atlantic seas, or not like anything he knew at all. He loved the uncertainty of maps with unfinished edges, loved asking what lay beyond the horizon, but this was the first time another person had made the future itself feel like unexplored territory.
Annabeth never promised certainty — in fact, Annabeth promised nothing. She never had and that, perhaps, was what made her so extraordinary.
She did not ask him to abandon the sea or to become smaller, to diminish his blabbering or his heart or his feelings. She did not demand that he fit neatly inside expectations she had prepared beforehand or that he went away because he fit nowhere at all in what she had so planned as her future.
She merely made him curious about tomorrows that included her.
Curious. Curious, and of course.
Love had arrived disguised as curiosity.
And what a gentle disguise it was.
Percy sighed, his eyes unfocused as they travelled the gardens and the trees and the stars that flickered a little weaker, now, as if preparing for morning that was not far ahead. His heart galloped inside his chest, untrimmed and wider where hope stretched it thin in the past few hours, and Percy closed his eyes for a second, for another moment.
He thought of the kiss again, because his mind and skin seemed addicted to that particular action now etched to the tissue of his memories and existence. He thought not first of her lips, not even of the impossible warmth, but of what she had said afterward.
My dreams only knew what I wished for, but they had never met you.
A poet’s son he was, but a poet’s soul she had. And, God, he did not think he could fall more and more for the same person and never once hit the ground that was swept from off his feet.
His throat tightened.
How many times had he feared disappointing her? Feared that reality would inevitably prove less kind than imagination? And instead, because faith came in such different ways when one was not a believer in books or prayers, it seemed that reality had surpassed dreams for both of them.
Perhaps that, too, was ordinary. Ordinary in its nature, because Love, he suspected now, was never truly built upon grand declarations. It was built upon mornings and forgotten books returned without expectation and empty chairs chosen almost absentmindedly.
Upon shared walks and rescued sharks and conversations stretched until sunset without anyone noticing the passing hours. It was built, he thought, upon repeatedly finding the same person at the end of one's thoughts, and choosing, every single time, to walk toward them.
If only fear agreed with rationality.
It never had, though, and it never would.
Percy sighed and pushed himself away from the balcony, already knowing the stillness would not last. He walked back inside his bedroom in large steps, and stopped beside his desk. He turned around and walked toward the fireplace, and forgot why he had gone there in the first place — there was some logic that he lost two steps in.
He turned around again. His room, generous by any reasonable standard, suddenly felt too small for the amount of thoughts determined to occupy it.
He laughed once beneath his breath. What a tragedy, a man who had crossed half the world and survived storms, negotiated with impossible merchants and learned to command crews older than himself, only so that now he was being defeated by the simple act of existing inside his own bedroom.
His fingers drifted absentmindedly over the spines of books lined upon the shelf. His eyes swiped over the volumes, and Percy smiled when he noticed one volume Annabeth had once argued with for nearly half an afternoon, one he had purchased solely because she said it would be nice to discuss it with him.
The author, she had declared, possessed an alarming tendency to mistake certainty for intelligence. He was not certain if he agreed — she was hardly ever wrong and she was very much the smartest between the two of them —, but it was a very nice afternoon to share.
His smile lingered, a small sigh escaping him until fear returned, swiftly and cruelly to the pit of his stomach. His mind ignored the hopes crawling over his skin, because what if that night had only been an impulse? The word settled unpleasantly, but still he could not get it off his head.
What if she had simply missed him, and perhaps absence made her heart twist a little bit its own sensations? People missed one another, of course; friends did. Surely friends sometimes behaved irrationally after prolonged absences.
Not like this, his own mind answered before he could continue. Not like this, but still.
She had been exhausted, and restless, and she seemed almost a little out of her mind. He remembered how pale she looked beneath the moon and how shadows rested beneath her eyes — she was still so, so beautiful, and she would forever and always be —, and she had admitted she had not been sleeping properly
She had admitted to having dreams and restlessness and emotion usually followed things like those. Perhaps (and it sent a chill down his spine) in the morning, clarity would return. Perhaps daylight would convince her the entire evening had been beautiful, necessary, wonderful and utterly impossible to repeat.
His chest constricted. Logically, she had never been impulsive; not Annabeth. She examined every angle before making decisions and measured consequences and prepared contingencies. She was rational through and through, except. she had ridden across London alone.
At wee hours of the night.
Because she could not stop thinking about him.
Percy closed his eyes briefly.
And even if what led her there was a collection of individual choices — getting up, getting dressed, getting Tormenta and making her way towards the Jackson estate —, what if she regretted the choices precisely because she had had so many chances to reconsider?
He groaned aloud.
"Brother," Grover would surely say, "you are exhausting."
“I know,” Percy answered the empty room automatically. Silence followed, obviously, and he blinked. “...I am talking to an imaginary Grover.”
That seemed an unhealthy development, and he resumed pacing anyway. The floorboards had probably memorized the rhythm of his footsteps by now, towards the windows and then his desk and then the door, all the way to the fireplace and back towards the window.
Again, again, again.
His breathing grew shallower without permission, and Percy stopped before the mirror hanging near his wardrobe. The young man staring back appeared slightly unhinged, the blonde hair thoroughly ruined and the loose shirt — that her fingers used to pull him closer, closer, always closer — still wrinkled.
His eyes were far too bright, both tiredness and awe glittering in them. Looking at himself in third person, Percy could only think that he looked happy, terrified and so entirely in love.
He touched the edge of the mirror thoughtfully.
“When did this happen?” he asked, and the reflection failed to answer. Reasonably.
His thoughts wandered again to Annabeth, and her smile and her asking him kiss me again. To the astonishing softness with which she had said his name and the ride home. To the moment she had leaned backward against him as though doing so had always belonged there.
What if she woke tomorrow embarrassed? What if she replayed every word and wished she had remained home? What if she decided friendship would be safer after all?
Percy stopped walking. The possibility struck him so suddenly that his vision swam, and he gripped the edge of his desk.
He searched desperately for certainty, and there was not any. There was only memory and the knowledge that she had kissed him first, and she had confessed first, and she had ridden there first.
But his brain was an old saboteur of his, and Percy was certain that there were multiple, thousands of ways he could find to break his own heart because so much happiness was certainly not usual.
His breathing steadied slightly anyway, because actions mattered as much as words. Annabeth had always believed actions mattered more than theories, surely, because it was only a theory if it could be tested, and he should grant her the respect of believing she meant hers.
Should he not? His mother, at least, would certainly say so, and beg him again to stop deciding for her.
He stared at the floor. Annabeth herself would probably be offended if she knew he kept assuming she was incapable of understanding her own mind.
He laughed this time, weakly, and the sound echoed strangely through the room. Percy inhaled slowly, one breath and another, but his pulse remained too quick.
He walked again even if movement did not solve anything, but remaining still made everything louder. Round and round and past the bed, past the window, past the chair where his discarded coat remained.
The room blurred slightly at the edges, and Percy barely noticed. His thoughts continued outrunning his body, but the floor tilted briefly. Black spots danced unexpectedly across his vision, and he halted so abruptly he nearly stumbled.
“...God,” he blinked hard.
He had scarcely eaten, barely slept. He had spent the past fortnight grieving, then the past two hours having every hope resurrected at once.
His body, it seemed, objected to such emotional excess, which was, well, fair enough. He sank slowly onto the edge of his bed, and sat very still.
His heartbeat gradually descended from somewhere near catastrophe toward merely unreasonable. Without removing his shirt — he rarely slept in too many clothes —, Percy lay backward across the bed and the ceiling greeted him, entirely ordinary.
He folded one arm beneath his head, and his eyes drifted toward the open balcony doors. Moonlight still reached the floor where, hours before, he had stood wondering whether happiness had permanently abandoned him.
How astonishingly quickly lives could rearrange themselves. Not entirely, because morning still waited and the future remained wonderfully, terrifyingly unwritten.
But somewhere in London, Annabeth Chase had gone to sleep knowing she had kissed him, and he would wake tomorrow knowing exactly the same.
Percy let out one final breath.
“I shall see her tomorrow.”
The room, unlike his imagination, offered no objections. For the first time since returning home, he allowed his eyes to remain closed.
Surely not because he was no longer afraid of waking, but because, whatever morning chose to bring him, he had finally decided that one perfect night was real enough to deserve believing in.
[...]
Morning arrived with all the quiet dignity the night had entirely refused.
The sun had only just begun to gild London's rooftops when Percy realized he had officially surrendered any pretense of sleeping when, honestly, he had managed perhaps an hour. Maybe less.
It was long enough to dream of absolutely nothing — which somehow disappointed him after all the dreams he would gladly have welcomed — and wake with the overwhelming certainty that if he waited until afternoon to see Annabeth again, he might simply cease functioning altogether.
His mother, thankfully, still slept, and he knew that the house would be in a slow day.
He slipped downstairs with practiced silence, accepted the amused glance from the cook preparing breakfast, stole precisely one piece of toast and an apple, and disappeared outside before anyone had the opportunity to remind him that civilized people generally ate more than three bites of food.
Tormenta lifted her head immediately when she heard him approach.
“Morning,” Percy greeted softly. The mare huffed in response. “You are entirely responsible for my current predicament.”
I would love to see an emotional, soft fic with the reunion in mark of Athena. Maybe a little angst involved? Preferably with black Annabeth and blonde Percy if you enjoy writing them that way :)
your wish is my command, darling o'mine!
(just so it's known, i'll only write black Annabeth/blonde Percy. there is no other option for them in my stories).
just a little disclaimer: it's been almost ten years since i read that book, and i still haven't reread it (my mistake, i'm working on fixing that), so there might be a few too many inconsistencies to the book, but i tried the best my memory allowed. hope it doesn't ruin your experience and i really, truly hope you like this story :)
why i went to war (there you are)
read it on Ao3
Absence, ultimately, was familiar to Annabeth.
It wasn’t welcome or wanted, but it was familiar. It had threaded itself through her life so early that sometimes she wondered whether she had learned its language before she learned any other. It had shaped the edges of her childhood, settled into the spaces between words, followed her from place to place like a shadow that never quite detached itself from her feet.
Her father meant absence.
Frederick Chase had been there in the literal sense. He had occupied rooms and driven cars and sat at tables; he had tucked books onto shelves and filled notebooks with equations and diagrams. But there had always been a distance to him that Annabeth had felt long before she possessed the vocabulary to describe it.
A man could stand three feet away and still feel impossibly far; she had learned that young.
Her mother meant absence too. Maybe more than anyone.
Athena existed in stories and signs and expectations. She existed in the impossible standards Annabeth carried on her shoulders and in the intelligence that seemed to separate her from other children before she understood why. She existed in victories, in lessons.. in pressure, in architecture and in strategy — she existed bound to Time like only gods could be.
But not in bedtime stories or visits throughout one’s life. Athena was present in everything and absent from everything at the same time.
Her mother meant absence, for even her birth had only been a passing thought.
New York had meant absence, as well. Not because the city lacked people, obviously — oddly enough, the opposite was what made it truer. Millions of people existed within it, of voices and lives, and yet loneliness had found her anyway.
Loneliness was clever like that; It didn't require empty rooms, but only the feeling of standing inside a crowd and believing nobody would notice if one disappeared.
Camp Half-Blood had meant absence too, and that realization came later. It didn’t happen when she first arrived, when she was seven and frightened and exhausted and clutching what remained of her childhood in bruised hands; back then, camp had felt permanent. It had felt safe, and it had been home.
It took years to understand that even homes could be temporary. Summer always ended, cabins emptied and friends left. Some came back, sure, but others didn't. Demigods disappeared, and demigods died.
The campfire burned every night, and every year there seemed to be another face missing from the circle. Another name spoken softly, and another story ending too soon — people left, because that was what people did.
Thalia, too, had become absence. Even if not by choice — though that would eventually come true, also —, for years she had been a pine tree on a hill, a memory frozen in sacrifice and a promise Annabeth carried so tightly that it hurt.
Then she returned, and then she left again. Not cruelly, but Hunters belonged to the road and the moon and eternity.
Annabeth had found her only to lose her in a different way.
There was Luke, too. And Luke was absence carved into bone. The oldest wound, the one that never healed correctly even now. It had been some (short) time, and wars had ended and were starting to begin again. The world had survived, and he had not, but there were still moments when she thought she saw him. Moments of insanity where she saw a flash of dark hair in a crowd, a familiar laugh carried on the wind or a shape standing where nobody stood.
Then reality returned, and reality always remembered what grief refused to learn.
Luke was absence forever. And forever was a difficult word; Annabeth hated it, because it sounded a lot like a closed door, like something she couldn't outthink or outplan or fight her way around.
Forever meant absence that would never change its mind.
She swallowed, and the deck of the Argo II was quiet beneath her. The sea stretched endlessly beyond the railing, dark water, dark sky and a world painted in shades of blue and silver.
Most of the ship slept, or tried to. The events of the day still felt unreal enough that sleep seemed impossible, so Annabeth drew her knees closer to her chest and stared out toward the horizon.
Her fingers curled around the sleeve of her jacket, and the fabric still smelled faintly of salt.
And Percy.
The scent itself wasn't remarkable. Sea water, salt. Something clean and familiar and distinctly him. If she closed her eyes, she could almost imagine she was standing on the beach at Camp Half-Blood again, Percy beside her, the ocean rolling endlessly beyond them.
Normal and ordinary, and the sort of memory that should never have felt precious, but it did.
Because Percy had always been precious in ways she rarely allowed herself to examine.
Annabeth had spent years convincing herself she was practical, reasonable and smart enough not to build her life around things that could disappear, and somehow Percy Jackson had slipped through every defense she possessed. Not all at once, but slowly and steadily and throughout time, the way roots cracked stone and tides reshaped coastlines.
The way certain stars became part of navigation before anyone realized they were using them, Percy had simply remained.
At first he had been an irritation, she would have to admit — a walking headache with which she had to learn how to be, with far too little luck and way too much confidence in improvisation and the power of recklessness. Then, he was a companion. Then a friend.
Then something so deeply woven into her understanding of the world that separating him from it felt impossible.
When she thought of camp, she thought of Percy. When she thought of quests, she thought of Percy. When she imagined the future — however reluctantly, however vaguely — Percy was there too, and she didn’t consciously placed him there.
He simply belonged, as naturally as the sea belonged to the horizon. As naturally as breathing, as naturally as gravity.
Percy was never related to absence.
Until he was.
Until he was ripped out of her hands and her sight and her knowing. Until he was gone and no one, human or immortal or undead or divine, knew a thing about it.
Even the memory of it hit her bones with such force that Annabeth's chest tightened. Before last year, she had never truly considered the possibility — never as something serious, not as something real, because of course, Percy left sometimes — of him being anywhere near the absence she knew so well.
Sure, quests happened and sometimes things went awry (like someone having to hold the sky or someone being taken to the Underworld or gods know where, or them getting separated), and summers ended and there were days and weeks when they weren't together, but those were temporary things.
Predictable things.
That was the kind of distance that came with an eventual return, because Percy had always come back. There was no reason not to, after all. Always, even when the odds were impossible and when every logical calculation suggested otherwise.
Percy came back, and that was a fact.
Looking back, that had been her mistake. For some illogical, terrible, naive reason, she had begun believing it was a law of nature. Something fixed and permanent, like sunrise and the tides and the stars.
And then a goddess had stolen him, just like that. One day he existed, and the next day he didn't — there wasn’t a warning, an explanation, a note or a trace; there was only emptiness.
And suddenly Percy Jackson had become absence too.
Finding that out had nearly destroyed her, because losing Percy hurt more than losing anyone else — while she had prepared herself for that grief before the Battle of Manhattan, he hadn’t died. He had stayed, again, almost out of spite, and it was a relief so big that she forgot the fear.
It hurt more than losing anyone else, and she had never been brave enough to measure grief that way. It had shattered her because Percy had occupied a place inside her life that nobody else ever had.
Luke had taught her how devastating loss could be, and Thalia had taught her how complicated reunion could become, but Percy had taught her what constancy felt like. What certainty felt like. And when certainty disappeared, the world tilted; nothing stayed where it belonged anymore.
The months after his disappearance had felt wrong in a way she struggled to describe, as though somebody had removed a pillar from a building and expected the structure to continue standing, as if a familiar constellation had vanished from the sky and the ocean itself had forgotten how to reach the shore.
Everything had continued — the sun still rose, camp still functioned and quests still happened. She still woke every morning, after all, but something fundamental had gone missing.
A piece of reality.
A piece of herself.
It was difficult to explain. The grief itself had been familiar, because Annabeth knew grief. She knew fear. She knew loss so intimately that sometimes she wondered whether it recognized her on sight or would have to introduce itself when it inevitably came to shake her hand.
But this had been different. Percy's disappearance had not felt like someone leaving as much as it had felt like someone reaching into the foundations of her life and removing a support beam. Sure, the structure remained standing, but every day afterward had carried the terrible certainty that something was wrong and something essential had been misplaced.
Percy had never belonged among the missing. Percy was supposed to be there.
He was supposed to be standing beside her when she rolled her eyes at somebody's stupid plans, but the world had continued existing while Percy didn't, and people had expected her to keep moving. She was expected to keep talking, eating, sleeping, thinking, as if losing him was merely another tragedy in a life already crowded with them.
They acted careful around them anyway, because they weren’t insane not to, but everyone still expected her to behave as if she had not spent years building parts of herself around his existence and he had not become woven through her life so thoroughly that removing him felt like tearing threads from a tapestry and pretending the picture remained unchanged.
The ship was quiet, at that point in the night.
Most of the crew had retired hours ago, exhaustion finally winning over adrenaline and celebration — of finding their missing camper and finding new allies to the chaos — and relief. The only sounds came from the occasional footsteps overhead, those assigned to watch for threats in the darkness beyond the ship.
The sea murmured below, and wood creaked softly. The world slept, but Annabeth didn’t.
She paced around the small cabin over and over and over again, restless still like she had been for months now.
Back and forth.
Back and forth.
Back and forth.
Back and forth.
The cabin wasn't large enough for the amount of restless energy trapped beneath her skin. She crossed from one wall to the other, turned and walked back. She turned again and walked and turned around and walked more — those months of searching had taught her how to keep moving. How to keep looking and how to function while carrying fear.
Apparently, nobody had informed her body that the search was over.
The moonlight spilled through the porthole, painting silver across the floorboards. The Moon had become her most loyal companion over the past months of sleepless nights and spent staring at ceilings. Months spent imagining impossible scenarios and impossible endings, and spent searching so much that worry became habit, eventually.
Fear became routine, and Annabeth learned how to carry it over all of the layers of nightmares and trauma and loss.
Percy was back. The objective fact existed, and she knew it. She had seen him, touched him and held him, and yet her mind still behaved like a hunted thing. Her brain still expected disaster around every corner and her nerves were still braced for loss.
Night after night she had sat awake beneath the moonlight, thinking, planning and worrying. Praying, occasionally, though she'd never admit it aloud.
Tonight should have been different.
Tonight Percy was alive.
Tonight Percy was there.
If only her heart could believe her senses.
It was suddenly that the door of the cabin opened, silently enough that most people might not have noticed it at all were they in similar turmoil.
“Wise Girl?” the shadows called, and the familiar voice stopped her immediately. Annabeth snapped her head in his direction, watching as Percy — Percy, Percy, Percy — entered the room and stood just a couple of steps away from the closed door. “Hey,” he greeted.
Percy stood there.
Percy.
The sight of him still hit her strangely, as if her brain required a moment to process what her eyes were seeing. Blond hair, blue eyes and faint crease between his brows when he was worried.
Alive.
He stepped inside and shut the door quietly behind him.
“Hey,” he said, turning his head towards her again.
She was more than a little out of breath.
“Hi,” she greeted back, her brain running overtime and overdrive to encapsulate his presence.
Brilliant response, her mind supplied, and nothing else. She stared, because apparently that was all she knew how to do anymore — stare at him and reassure herself that he was still there.
Percy's expression softened at the sight of her — and oh, she could die — and the corners of his mouth twitched upward.
Annabeth swallowed nothing, for her mouth had been a little dry ever since she had seen him in that roman attire, and she scrambled for anything to say.
“I—uh,” she babbled. Excellent. Very eloquent.
Percy arched a curious eyebrow.
“I’m sorry,” Annabeth decided to say. “About the judo flip,” she clarified.
She was. She really was sorry — she knew it hand’t offended Percy in any way, if his smile at the time was any indicator whatsoever, but she wished she had just tackled him to the ground with a hug and stood there. For hours, preferably; forever, ideally.
For half a second after she spoke, though, Percy simply blinked. And, for some reason, then he looked genuinely offended.
“Are you kidding me?”
Annabeth felt herself shrug at his question, lowering her eyes from his for a moment.
“I mean it,” she promised.
Percy blinked again.
“Wise Girl,” he said, a little breathless and a little revolted, but lightweight.
“I launched you into the ground,” she explained, as if it was any good explanation.
It was his turn to shrug, nonchalant.
“You were happy.”
She pressed her lips together, and lowered her head.
“I could've hugged you.”
Percy's grin widened, and something a little wicked flickered inside his eyes.
“I'll take you on top of me anytime."
Annabeth made a strangled sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a groan.
“Percy.”
"What?" he asked, entirely unrepentant and pleased with himself.
Completely pleased, even, like making her cheeks heat up so easily after six months apart was some tremendous personal achievement.
Which, unfortunately, it probably was, and for a moment the tension eased a little, and her shoulders loosened. The moment of her muscles were small, but more than enough for Percy to notice.
That much — and him — hadn’t changed.
His smile faded gently, and his eyes followed her as she resumed pacing, restless and wild and a bit too out of her senses. Annabeth didn't even realize she was doing it until she caught him watching.
Concern had settled across his face now, the type that came from knowing somebody too well.
“Beth?”
She halted at once. The name caught her off guard so completely that she almost stumbled.
Percy noticed that too.
“Beth,” he repeated softly, taking a step closer. “What's going on?”
He didn’t usually call her that. He didn’t usually call her anything other than “Wise Girl” whenever there was a chance someone could be around — on quests or at camp when there was daylight. He called her “Annabeth” when talking about her to other people, and nothing else when there were ears and a soul around.
But Percy was a loving, very much in love, very much cliché man (that wasn’t a complaint whatsoever), and Annabeth was the person he loved the most. Inevitably, and she knew that when they first started dating, he would get around to pet names.
The surprising part was just how much she loved each and all of them.
He called her whatever sweet thing came to mind, whenever it came to mind. Love (she melted every time) and dear, and darling, and sweetheart (she had a soft spot for that one in particular), and ever more stupid things such as “curls” or “owl” or “pretty” just because he liked to say it.
Beth, however, was rare. It was something she didn’t hear often, and he didn’t use it often either. Anything related to her actual name was something they didn’t use — it wasn’t like she didn’t like her name, but it was what everybody else called her. That, and the fact that once, Thalia called her “Beth” for some reason at random, and Annabeth told her not to call her that.
Percy had heard it, and took it as an order, too. Percy, being Percy, had apparently interpreted that as a sacred commandment.
And obeyed it ever since.
That was one of the strange things about him.
People often mistook Percy for careless instead of a reckless person (he could argue with the wall about that; it was clear as day). They saw the jokes, the impulsiveness, the way he threw himself into danger first and worried about consequences later. They saw someone who forgot homework assignments and directions and occasionally his own train of thought.
What they failed to notice was that Percy remembered everything that he considered to hold importance for anyone he knew. He remembered every preference, every fear and every offhand comment she made and forgot five minutes later.
He remembered how she took her coffee even if she changed it every month. He remembered that she hated when people touched her sketchbooks without asking, and how anyone should stay away from her hair (except for him and Grover, because she liked the caresses). He remembered exactly which constellation she had pointed out to him years ago during a quest and which myth she had attached to it.
He remembered things she had never expected anyone to notice, and when Annabeth told someone not to call her Beth, Percy had quietly accepted it as law. Not exactly because he was afraid of upsetting her or because he thought she would be angry, but just because she had said she didn't like it.
And that was enough.
Sometimes she thought love lived in moments like that. Not in grand sacrifices, and definitely not prophecies or in battles, but in those small, almost invisible decisions people made every day to accommodate one another's hearts.
Percy had always been full of those decisions.
Which was why she remembered so clearly the first time he had broken that particular rule.
He first used Beth when they were lying together in his bed, on Cabin Three — in broad daylight, a lazy weekday Chiron had granted them when he looked at the pair and decided they looked a little too much like they had been visiting Hades often and not seen daylight in at least a year. There was not a problem with her being in the Cabin, mostly (Poseidon didn’t care at all, and Percy had asked about his friends being there), and Chiron was a little hesitant to be too harsh on them ever since Luke had killed himself with her dagger right in front of whoever had eyes to see.
And ever since Percy, the Hero of Olympus, hadn’t died, and had not known what to do after he hadn’t died at the blooming age of sixteen.
There was a strange kind of exhaustion that followed survival, and it angered her that nobody talked about it. The stories she heard and learned always ended after the victory when the monster was defeated and the world was saved and all the living heroes celebrated.
Nobody ever mentioned the morning after, or the week after, or the months spent learning how to live inside a future that had almost never happened.
Percy had carried that uncertainty like an extra shadow. He had survived, yes — and thank fuck —, but then he had looked around and realized there was no next instruction.
Annabeth thought that that had frightened him more than most monsters ever had.
They did take advantage of Chiron’s pity as much as they could, because, as it turned out, Annabeth loved being held (by Percy) as much as Percy loved having her (especifically) in his arms.
She didn’t know what they had talked about before, but they had been quiet for a while; she had plastered to his side and had a leg thrown over his own, while his arms held her close and he was very much on the verge of counsciosuness — mostly out of it.
Hearing and feeling his breathing was soothing, after all they had been through. It was calming, and at the time, it had been the only thing to still her mind and heart enough so she could rest.
The cabin had been warm from the summer sun. Life outside continued, and for once, neither of them was required to save it.
It had felt miraculous.
“Beth,” he had called, drowsy with a bone-deep tiredness that was allowed to be present, that day. She hummed in acknowledgement of his calling, and she hadn’t really thought about what she had called her — her name, and everything related to her, was so sweet and so cared for in her voice, that she didn’t even hear anything other than that.
“Hm?” she hummed, tilting her head upwards just a bit to look up and find the side of his face. His eyes had remained closed, and his fingers had traced idle patterns against her shoulder.
“Thank you,” he said, and she frowned softly, huffing a breath from her nose.
“What for?” she asked.
A smile bloomed on his face.
“Tolerating me,” he said, and there wasn’t anything else but gratitude in his voice. “All these years.”
She had stared at him then, a little too stunned to speak, and found there wasn't a trace of teasing there, as though he genuinely believed she had done him some tremendous kindness by staying.
She decided it wasn’t worth arguing over how she didn’t “tolerate” him at any moment. For all that was worth, Annabeth had loved him, one way or another, from the very start — he wasn’t a quest to be put behind or a problem to solve; he was the reason why reason made sense, and the solution to the chaos in her mind and, apparently, in the world.
They did have that discussion later. It did earn her kisses and smiles Annabeth wished she could have had painted and hanging on walls just so she didn’t risk forgetting a thing about his face or his touch or his love over her skin.
And standing now in the cabin of the Argo II, she found herself remembering every single one of them.
The problem with six months apart, she thought, was that memory became dangerous when it wasn’t absent like he had been. At first it helped, really; it sustained her sanity and the certainty that Percy wasn’t a made up thing her mind manipulated into her memory when loneliness took over her head.
She remembered a laugh and survived another day, then remembered a smile and survived another week. Utimately, she remembered the feeling of his arms around her and convinced herself that one more month would not kill her even if it felt like it would.
Eventually, memory started becoming cruel, because no recollection was ever as good as the real thing. There wasn’t a dream that ever felt enough or amount of remembering that could replace presence, and now Percy was standing right there.
Close enough to touch, close enough that she could see the concern growing in his expression. close enough that she could hear his breathing over the distant creaking of the ship and close enough that all the fear she had been carrying for months suddenly had somewhere to go.
Which was perhaps the problem. For months she had been forced to carry it alone, and she wasn’t sure when she would be able — if at all — to share with someone she knew would willingly share the burden with her. And now Percy was there, and now Percy could see it.
Annabeth didn't know what to do with that.
“Hey,” he called again when she hadn’t answered for the better part of a minute. Annabeth’s eyes snapped back towards him. “What’s going on, love?” Percy asked once more, and she didn’t know what to do with what was in her chest.
Love, he had called her, and the pet name should not have affected her the way it did. It was the thousanth time she had heard it, perhaps, but Percy never seemed to understand the effect he had on people. Or maybe — unlikely, but he did have the talent to surprise her — he did, and simply chose to weaponize it whenever possible.
The concern in his voice made it worse, the gentleness and care and the way he wasn't pushing her. The way he was waiting, like she had been for months to even hear his voice; as though she was something precious and breakable.
Gods— no. She wouldn’t call for them. They didn’t deserve to be even remembered, at that point; some more than others, she wanted them to rot wherever Kronos had been for however long it’s been since he was chopped into nasty pieces of tyranny. She wouldn’t call for them, not after everything. Not after Hera (or Juno or whatever the fuck her name was), and not after six months of more unanswered prayers.
She wouldn’t risk calling for any of them after searching every corner of the country for a boy who had been stolen because immortals had decided that was acceptable collateral damage, after waking up every morning wondering if Percy was alive, after falling asleep every night wondering if he was scared.
Not after imagining him alone, lost and gone for months.
But, damn, was she tired of feeling those things. The fear and grief and the pretending that she wasn’t angry. She was tired of carrying around an absence so large it had nearly swallowed her whole.
I would love to see an emotional, soft fic with the reunion in mark of Athena. Maybe a little angst involved? Preferably with black Annabeth and blonde Percy if you enjoy writing them that way :)
your wish is my command, darling o'mine!
(just so it's known, i'll only write black Annabeth/blonde Percy. there is no other option for them in my stories).
just a little disclaimer: it's been almost ten years since i read that book, and i still haven't reread it (my mistake, i'm working on fixing that), so there might be a few too many inconsistencies to the book, but i tried the best my memory allowed. hope it doesn't ruin your experience and i really, truly hope you like this story :)
why i went to war (there you are)
read it on Ao3
Absence, ultimately, was familiar to Annabeth.
It wasn’t welcome or wanted, but it was familiar. It had threaded itself through her life so early that sometimes she wondered whether she had learned its language before she learned any other. It had shaped the edges of her childhood, settled into the spaces between words, followed her from place to place like a shadow that never quite detached itself from her feet.
Her father meant absence.
Frederick Chase had been there in the literal sense. He had occupied rooms and driven cars and sat at tables; he had tucked books onto shelves and filled notebooks with equations and diagrams. But there had always been a distance to him that Annabeth had felt long before she possessed the vocabulary to describe it.
A man could stand three feet away and still feel impossibly far; she had learned that young.
Her mother meant absence too. Maybe more than anyone.
Athena existed in stories and signs and expectations. She existed in the impossible standards Annabeth carried on her shoulders and in the intelligence that seemed to separate her from other children before she understood why. She existed in victories, in lessons.. in pressure, in architecture and in strategy — she existed bound to Time like only gods could be.
But not in bedtime stories or visits throughout one’s life. Athena was present in everything and absent from everything at the same time.
Her mother meant absence, for even her birth had only been a passing thought.
New York had meant absence, as well. Not because the city lacked people, obviously — oddly enough, the opposite was what made it truer. Millions of people existed within it, of voices and lives, and yet loneliness had found her anyway.
Loneliness was clever like that; It didn't require empty rooms, but only the feeling of standing inside a crowd and believing nobody would notice if one disappeared.
Camp Half-Blood had meant absence too, and that realization came later. It didn’t happen when she first arrived, when she was seven and frightened and exhausted and clutching what remained of her childhood in bruised hands; back then, camp had felt permanent. It had felt safe, and it had been home.
It took years to understand that even homes could be temporary. Summer always ended, cabins emptied and friends left. Some came back, sure, but others didn't. Demigods disappeared, and demigods died.
The campfire burned every night, and every year there seemed to be another face missing from the circle. Another name spoken softly, and another story ending too soon — people left, because that was what people did.
Thalia, too, had become absence. Even if not by choice — though that would eventually come true, also —, for years she had been a pine tree on a hill, a memory frozen in sacrifice and a promise Annabeth carried so tightly that it hurt.
Then she returned, and then she left again. Not cruelly, but Hunters belonged to the road and the moon and eternity.
Annabeth had found her only to lose her in a different way.
There was Luke, too. And Luke was absence carved into bone. The oldest wound, the one that never healed correctly even now. It had been some (short) time, and wars had ended and were starting to begin again. The world had survived, and he had not, but there were still moments when she thought she saw him. Moments of insanity where she saw a flash of dark hair in a crowd, a familiar laugh carried on the wind or a shape standing where nobody stood.
Then reality returned, and reality always remembered what grief refused to learn.
Luke was absence forever. And forever was a difficult word; Annabeth hated it, because it sounded a lot like a closed door, like something she couldn't outthink or outplan or fight her way around.
Forever meant absence that would never change its mind.
She swallowed, and the deck of the Argo II was quiet beneath her. The sea stretched endlessly beyond the railing, dark water, dark sky and a world painted in shades of blue and silver.
Most of the ship slept, or tried to. The events of the day still felt unreal enough that sleep seemed impossible, so Annabeth drew her knees closer to her chest and stared out toward the horizon.
Her fingers curled around the sleeve of her jacket, and the fabric still smelled faintly of salt.
And Percy.
The scent itself wasn't remarkable. Sea water, salt. Something clean and familiar and distinctly him. If she closed her eyes, she could almost imagine she was standing on the beach at Camp Half-Blood again, Percy beside her, the ocean rolling endlessly beyond them.
Normal and ordinary, and the sort of memory that should never have felt precious, but it did.
Because Percy had always been precious in ways she rarely allowed herself to examine.
Annabeth had spent years convincing herself she was practical, reasonable and smart enough not to build her life around things that could disappear, and somehow Percy Jackson had slipped through every defense she possessed. Not all at once, but slowly and steadily and throughout time, the way roots cracked stone and tides reshaped coastlines.
The way certain stars became part of navigation before anyone realized they were using them, Percy had simply remained.
At first he had been an irritation, she would have to admit — a walking headache with which she had to learn how to be, with far too little luck and way too much confidence in improvisation and the power of recklessness. Then, he was a companion. Then a friend.
Then something so deeply woven into her understanding of the world that separating him from it felt impossible.
When she thought of camp, she thought of Percy. When she thought of quests, she thought of Percy. When she imagined the future — however reluctantly, however vaguely — Percy was there too, and she didn’t consciously placed him there.
He simply belonged, as naturally as the sea belonged to the horizon. As naturally as breathing, as naturally as gravity.
Percy was never related to absence.
Until he was.
Until he was ripped out of her hands and her sight and her knowing. Until he was gone and no one, human or immortal or undead or divine, knew a thing about it.
Even the memory of it hit her bones with such force that Annabeth's chest tightened. Before last year, she had never truly considered the possibility — never as something serious, not as something real, because of course, Percy left sometimes — of him being anywhere near the absence she knew so well.
Sure, quests happened and sometimes things went awry (like someone having to hold the sky or someone being taken to the Underworld or gods know where, or them getting separated), and summers ended and there were days and weeks when they weren't together, but those were temporary things.
Predictable things.
That was the kind of distance that came with an eventual return, because Percy had always come back. There was no reason not to, after all. Always, even when the odds were impossible and when every logical calculation suggested otherwise.
Percy came back, and that was a fact.
Looking back, that had been her mistake. For some illogical, terrible, naive reason, she had begun believing it was a law of nature. Something fixed and permanent, like sunrise and the tides and the stars.
And then a goddess had stolen him, just like that. One day he existed, and the next day he didn't — there wasn’t a warning, an explanation, a note or a trace; there was only emptiness.
And suddenly Percy Jackson had become absence too.
Finding that out had nearly destroyed her, because losing Percy hurt more than losing anyone else — while she had prepared herself for that grief before the Battle of Manhattan, he hadn’t died. He had stayed, again, almost out of spite, and it was a relief so big that she forgot the fear.
It hurt more than losing anyone else, and she had never been brave enough to measure grief that way. It had shattered her because Percy had occupied a place inside her life that nobody else ever had.
Luke had taught her how devastating loss could be, and Thalia had taught her how complicated reunion could become, but Percy had taught her what constancy felt like. What certainty felt like. And when certainty disappeared, the world tilted; nothing stayed where it belonged anymore.
The months after his disappearance had felt wrong in a way she struggled to describe, as though somebody had removed a pillar from a building and expected the structure to continue standing, as if a familiar constellation had vanished from the sky and the ocean itself had forgotten how to reach the shore.
Everything had continued — the sun still rose, camp still functioned and quests still happened. She still woke every morning, after all, but something fundamental had gone missing.
A piece of reality.
A piece of herself.
It was difficult to explain. The grief itself had been familiar, because Annabeth knew grief. She knew fear. She knew loss so intimately that sometimes she wondered whether it recognized her on sight or would have to introduce itself when it inevitably came to shake her hand.
But this had been different. Percy's disappearance had not felt like someone leaving as much as it had felt like someone reaching into the foundations of her life and removing a support beam. Sure, the structure remained standing, but every day afterward had carried the terrible certainty that something was wrong and something essential had been misplaced.
Percy had never belonged among the missing. Percy was supposed to be there.
He was supposed to be standing beside her when she rolled her eyes at somebody's stupid plans, but the world had continued existing while Percy didn't, and people had expected her to keep moving. She was expected to keep talking, eating, sleeping, thinking, as if losing him was merely another tragedy in a life already crowded with them.
They acted careful around them anyway, because they weren’t insane not to, but everyone still expected her to behave as if she had not spent years building parts of herself around his existence and he had not become woven through her life so thoroughly that removing him felt like tearing threads from a tapestry and pretending the picture remained unchanged.
The ship was quiet, at that point in the night.
Most of the crew had retired hours ago, exhaustion finally winning over adrenaline and celebration — of finding their missing camper and finding new allies to the chaos — and relief. The only sounds came from the occasional footsteps overhead, those assigned to watch for threats in the darkness beyond the ship.
The sea murmured below, and wood creaked softly. The world slept, but Annabeth didn’t.
She paced around the small cabin over and over and over again, restless still like she had been for months now.
Back and forth.
Back and forth.
Back and forth.
Back and forth.
The cabin wasn't large enough for the amount of restless energy trapped beneath her skin. She crossed from one wall to the other, turned and walked back. She turned again and walked and turned around and walked more — those months of searching had taught her how to keep moving. How to keep looking and how to function while carrying fear.
Apparently, nobody had informed her body that the search was over.
The moonlight spilled through the porthole, painting silver across the floorboards. The Moon had become her most loyal companion over the past months of sleepless nights and spent staring at ceilings. Months spent imagining impossible scenarios and impossible endings, and spent searching so much that worry became habit, eventually.
Fear became routine, and Annabeth learned how to carry it over all of the layers of nightmares and trauma and loss.
Percy was back. The objective fact existed, and she knew it. She had seen him, touched him and held him, and yet her mind still behaved like a hunted thing. Her brain still expected disaster around every corner and her nerves were still braced for loss.
Night after night she had sat awake beneath the moonlight, thinking, planning and worrying. Praying, occasionally, though she'd never admit it aloud.
Tonight should have been different.
Tonight Percy was alive.
Tonight Percy was there.
If only her heart could believe her senses.
It was suddenly that the door of the cabin opened, silently enough that most people might not have noticed it at all were they in similar turmoil.
“Wise Girl?” the shadows called, and the familiar voice stopped her immediately. Annabeth snapped her head in his direction, watching as Percy — Percy, Percy, Percy — entered the room and stood just a couple of steps away from the closed door. “Hey,” he greeted.
Percy stood there.
Percy.
The sight of him still hit her strangely, as if her brain required a moment to process what her eyes were seeing. Blond hair, blue eyes and faint crease between his brows when he was worried.
Alive.
He stepped inside and shut the door quietly behind him.
“Hey,” he said, turning his head towards her again.
She was more than a little out of breath.
“Hi,” she greeted back, her brain running overtime and overdrive to encapsulate his presence.
Brilliant response, her mind supplied, and nothing else. She stared, because apparently that was all she knew how to do anymore — stare at him and reassure herself that he was still there.
Percy's expression softened at the sight of her — and oh, she could die — and the corners of his mouth twitched upward.
Annabeth swallowed nothing, for her mouth had been a little dry ever since she had seen him in that roman attire, and she scrambled for anything to say.
“I—uh,” she babbled. Excellent. Very eloquent.
Percy arched a curious eyebrow.
“I’m sorry,” Annabeth decided to say. “About the judo flip,” she clarified.
She was. She really was sorry — she knew it hand’t offended Percy in any way, if his smile at the time was any indicator whatsoever, but she wished she had just tackled him to the ground with a hug and stood there. For hours, preferably; forever, ideally.
For half a second after she spoke, though, Percy simply blinked. And, for some reason, then he looked genuinely offended.
“Are you kidding me?”
Annabeth felt herself shrug at his question, lowering her eyes from his for a moment.
“I mean it,” she promised.
Percy blinked again.
“Wise Girl,” he said, a little breathless and a little revolted, but lightweight.
“I launched you into the ground,” she explained, as if it was any good explanation.
It was his turn to shrug, nonchalant.
“You were happy.”
She pressed her lips together, and lowered her head.
“I could've hugged you.”
Percy's grin widened, and something a little wicked flickered inside his eyes.
“I'll take you on top of me anytime."
Annabeth made a strangled sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a groan.
“Percy.”
"What?" he asked, entirely unrepentant and pleased with himself.
Completely pleased, even, like making her cheeks heat up so easily after six months apart was some tremendous personal achievement.
Which, unfortunately, it probably was, and for a moment the tension eased a little, and her shoulders loosened. The moment of her muscles were small, but more than enough for Percy to notice.
That much — and him — hadn’t changed.
His smile faded gently, and his eyes followed her as she resumed pacing, restless and wild and a bit too out of her senses. Annabeth didn't even realize she was doing it until she caught him watching.
Concern had settled across his face now, the type that came from knowing somebody too well.
“Beth?”
She halted at once. The name caught her off guard so completely that she almost stumbled.
Percy noticed that too.
“Beth,” he repeated softly, taking a step closer. “What's going on?”
He didn’t usually call her that. He didn’t usually call her anything other than “Wise Girl” whenever there was a chance someone could be around — on quests or at camp when there was daylight. He called her “Annabeth” when talking about her to other people, and nothing else when there were ears and a soul around.
But Percy was a loving, very much in love, very much cliché man (that wasn’t a complaint whatsoever), and Annabeth was the person he loved the most. Inevitably, and she knew that when they first started dating, he would get around to pet names.
The surprising part was just how much she loved each and all of them.
He called her whatever sweet thing came to mind, whenever it came to mind. Love (she melted every time) and dear, and darling, and sweetheart (she had a soft spot for that one in particular), and ever more stupid things such as “curls” or “owl” or “pretty” just because he liked to say it.
Beth, however, was rare. It was something she didn’t hear often, and he didn’t use it often either. Anything related to her actual name was something they didn’t use — it wasn’t like she didn’t like her name, but it was what everybody else called her. That, and the fact that once, Thalia called her “Beth” for some reason at random, and Annabeth told her not to call her that.
Percy had heard it, and took it as an order, too. Percy, being Percy, had apparently interpreted that as a sacred commandment.
And obeyed it ever since.
That was one of the strange things about him.
People often mistook Percy for careless instead of a reckless person (he could argue with the wall about that; it was clear as day). They saw the jokes, the impulsiveness, the way he threw himself into danger first and worried about consequences later. They saw someone who forgot homework assignments and directions and occasionally his own train of thought.
What they failed to notice was that Percy remembered everything that he considered to hold importance for anyone he knew. He remembered every preference, every fear and every offhand comment she made and forgot five minutes later.
He remembered how she took her coffee even if she changed it every month. He remembered that she hated when people touched her sketchbooks without asking, and how anyone should stay away from her hair (except for him and Grover, because she liked the caresses). He remembered exactly which constellation she had pointed out to him years ago during a quest and which myth she had attached to it.
He remembered things she had never expected anyone to notice, and when Annabeth told someone not to call her Beth, Percy had quietly accepted it as law. Not exactly because he was afraid of upsetting her or because he thought she would be angry, but just because she had said she didn't like it.
And that was enough.
Sometimes she thought love lived in moments like that. Not in grand sacrifices, and definitely not prophecies or in battles, but in those small, almost invisible decisions people made every day to accommodate one another's hearts.
Percy had always been full of those decisions.
Which was why she remembered so clearly the first time he had broken that particular rule.
He first used Beth when they were lying together in his bed, on Cabin Three — in broad daylight, a lazy weekday Chiron had granted them when he looked at the pair and decided they looked a little too much like they had been visiting Hades often and not seen daylight in at least a year. There was not a problem with her being in the Cabin, mostly (Poseidon didn’t care at all, and Percy had asked about his friends being there), and Chiron was a little hesitant to be too harsh on them ever since Luke had killed himself with her dagger right in front of whoever had eyes to see.
And ever since Percy, the Hero of Olympus, hadn’t died, and had not known what to do after he hadn’t died at the blooming age of sixteen.
There was a strange kind of exhaustion that followed survival, and it angered her that nobody talked about it. The stories she heard and learned always ended after the victory when the monster was defeated and the world was saved and all the living heroes celebrated.
Nobody ever mentioned the morning after, or the week after, or the months spent learning how to live inside a future that had almost never happened.
Percy had carried that uncertainty like an extra shadow. He had survived, yes — and thank fuck —, but then he had looked around and realized there was no next instruction.
Annabeth thought that that had frightened him more than most monsters ever had.
They did take advantage of Chiron’s pity as much as they could, because, as it turned out, Annabeth loved being held (by Percy) as much as Percy loved having her (especifically) in his arms.
She didn’t know what they had talked about before, but they had been quiet for a while; she had plastered to his side and had a leg thrown over his own, while his arms held her close and he was very much on the verge of counsciosuness — mostly out of it.
Hearing and feeling his breathing was soothing, after all they had been through. It was calming, and at the time, it had been the only thing to still her mind and heart enough so she could rest.
The cabin had been warm from the summer sun. Life outside continued, and for once, neither of them was required to save it.
It had felt miraculous.
“Beth,” he had called, drowsy with a bone-deep tiredness that was allowed to be present, that day. She hummed in acknowledgement of his calling, and she hadn’t really thought about what she had called her — her name, and everything related to her, was so sweet and so cared for in her voice, that she didn’t even hear anything other than that.
“Hm?” she hummed, tilting her head upwards just a bit to look up and find the side of his face. His eyes had remained closed, and his fingers had traced idle patterns against her shoulder.
“Thank you,” he said, and she frowned softly, huffing a breath from her nose.
“What for?” she asked.
A smile bloomed on his face.
“Tolerating me,” he said, and there wasn’t anything else but gratitude in his voice. “All these years.”
She had stared at him then, a little too stunned to speak, and found there wasn't a trace of teasing there, as though he genuinely believed she had done him some tremendous kindness by staying.
She decided it wasn’t worth arguing over how she didn’t “tolerate” him at any moment. For all that was worth, Annabeth had loved him, one way or another, from the very start — he wasn’t a quest to be put behind or a problem to solve; he was the reason why reason made sense, and the solution to the chaos in her mind and, apparently, in the world.
They did have that discussion later. It did earn her kisses and smiles Annabeth wished she could have had painted and hanging on walls just so she didn’t risk forgetting a thing about his face or his touch or his love over her skin.
And standing now in the cabin of the Argo II, she found herself remembering every single one of them.
The problem with six months apart, she thought, was that memory became dangerous when it wasn’t absent like he had been. At first it helped, really; it sustained her sanity and the certainty that Percy wasn’t a made up thing her mind manipulated into her memory when loneliness took over her head.
She remembered a laugh and survived another day, then remembered a smile and survived another week. Utimately, she remembered the feeling of his arms around her and convinced herself that one more month would not kill her even if it felt like it would.
Eventually, memory started becoming cruel, because no recollection was ever as good as the real thing. There wasn’t a dream that ever felt enough or amount of remembering that could replace presence, and now Percy was standing right there.
Close enough to touch, close enough that she could see the concern growing in his expression. close enough that she could hear his breathing over the distant creaking of the ship and close enough that all the fear she had been carrying for months suddenly had somewhere to go.
Which was perhaps the problem. For months she had been forced to carry it alone, and she wasn’t sure when she would be able — if at all — to share with someone she knew would willingly share the burden with her. And now Percy was there, and now Percy could see it.
Annabeth didn't know what to do with that.
“Hey,” he called again when she hadn’t answered for the better part of a minute. Annabeth’s eyes snapped back towards him. “What’s going on, love?” Percy asked once more, and she didn’t know what to do with what was in her chest.
Love, he had called her, and the pet name should not have affected her the way it did. It was the thousanth time she had heard it, perhaps, but Percy never seemed to understand the effect he had on people. Or maybe — unlikely, but he did have the talent to surprise her — he did, and simply chose to weaponize it whenever possible.
The concern in his voice made it worse, the gentleness and care and the way he wasn't pushing her. The way he was waiting, like she had been for months to even hear his voice; as though she was something precious and breakable.
Gods— no. She wouldn’t call for them. They didn’t deserve to be even remembered, at that point; some more than others, she wanted them to rot wherever Kronos had been for however long it’s been since he was chopped into nasty pieces of tyranny. She wouldn’t call for them, not after everything. Not after Hera (or Juno or whatever the fuck her name was), and not after six months of more unanswered prayers.
She wouldn’t risk calling for any of them after searching every corner of the country for a boy who had been stolen because immortals had decided that was acceptable collateral damage, after waking up every morning wondering if Percy was alive, after falling asleep every night wondering if he was scared.
Not after imagining him alone, lost and gone for months.
But, damn, was she tired of feeling those things. The fear and grief and the pretending that she wasn’t angry. She was tired of carrying around an absence so large it had nearly swallowed her whole.
I would love to see an emotional, soft fic with the reunion in mark of Athena. Maybe a little angst involved? Preferably with black Annabeth and blonde Percy if you enjoy writing them that way :)
your wish is my command, darling o'mine!
(just so it's known, i'll only write black Annabeth/blonde Percy. there is no other option for them in my stories).
just a little disclaimer: it's been almost ten years since i read that book, and i still haven't reread it (my mistake, i'm working on fixing that), so there might be a few too many inconsistencies to the book, but i tried the best my memory allowed. hope it doesn't ruin your experience and i really, truly hope you like this story :)
why i went to war (there you are)
read it on Ao3
Absence, ultimately, was familiar to Annabeth.
It wasn’t welcome or wanted, but it was familiar. It had threaded itself through her life so early that sometimes she wondered whether she had learned its language before she learned any other. It had shaped the edges of her childhood, settled into the spaces between words, followed her from place to place like a shadow that never quite detached itself from her feet.
Her father meant absence.
Frederick Chase had been there in the literal sense. He had occupied rooms and driven cars and sat at tables; he had tucked books onto shelves and filled notebooks with equations and diagrams. But there had always been a distance to him that Annabeth had felt long before she possessed the vocabulary to describe it.
A man could stand three feet away and still feel impossibly far; she had learned that young.
Her mother meant absence too. Maybe more than anyone.
Athena existed in stories and signs and expectations. She existed in the impossible standards Annabeth carried on her shoulders and in the intelligence that seemed to separate her from other children before she understood why. She existed in victories, in lessons.. in pressure, in architecture and in strategy — she existed bound to Time like only gods could be.
But not in bedtime stories or visits throughout one’s life. Athena was present in everything and absent from everything at the same time.
Her mother meant absence, for even her birth had only been a passing thought.
New York had meant absence, as well. Not because the city lacked people, obviously — oddly enough, the opposite was what made it truer. Millions of people existed within it, of voices and lives, and yet loneliness had found her anyway.
Loneliness was clever like that; It didn't require empty rooms, but only the feeling of standing inside a crowd and believing nobody would notice if one disappeared.
Camp Half-Blood had meant absence too, and that realization came later. It didn’t happen when she first arrived, when she was seven and frightened and exhausted and clutching what remained of her childhood in bruised hands; back then, camp had felt permanent. It had felt safe, and it had been home.
It took years to understand that even homes could be temporary. Summer always ended, cabins emptied and friends left. Some came back, sure, but others didn't. Demigods disappeared, and demigods died.
The campfire burned every night, and every year there seemed to be another face missing from the circle. Another name spoken softly, and another story ending too soon — people left, because that was what people did.
Thalia, too, had become absence. Even if not by choice — though that would eventually come true, also —, for years she had been a pine tree on a hill, a memory frozen in sacrifice and a promise Annabeth carried so tightly that it hurt.
Then she returned, and then she left again. Not cruelly, but Hunters belonged to the road and the moon and eternity.
Annabeth had found her only to lose her in a different way.
There was Luke, too. And Luke was absence carved into bone. The oldest wound, the one that never healed correctly even now. It had been some (short) time, and wars had ended and were starting to begin again. The world had survived, and he had not, but there were still moments when she thought she saw him. Moments of insanity where she saw a flash of dark hair in a crowd, a familiar laugh carried on the wind or a shape standing where nobody stood.
Then reality returned, and reality always remembered what grief refused to learn.
Luke was absence forever. And forever was a difficult word; Annabeth hated it, because it sounded a lot like a closed door, like something she couldn't outthink or outplan or fight her way around.
Forever meant absence that would never change its mind.
She swallowed, and the deck of the Argo II was quiet beneath her. The sea stretched endlessly beyond the railing, dark water, dark sky and a world painted in shades of blue and silver.
Most of the ship slept, or tried to. The events of the day still felt unreal enough that sleep seemed impossible, so Annabeth drew her knees closer to her chest and stared out toward the horizon.
Her fingers curled around the sleeve of her jacket, and the fabric still smelled faintly of salt.
And Percy.
The scent itself wasn't remarkable. Sea water, salt. Something clean and familiar and distinctly him. If she closed her eyes, she could almost imagine she was standing on the beach at Camp Half-Blood again, Percy beside her, the ocean rolling endlessly beyond them.
Normal and ordinary, and the sort of memory that should never have felt precious, but it did.
Because Percy had always been precious in ways she rarely allowed herself to examine.
Annabeth had spent years convincing herself she was practical, reasonable and smart enough not to build her life around things that could disappear, and somehow Percy Jackson had slipped through every defense she possessed. Not all at once, but slowly and steadily and throughout time, the way roots cracked stone and tides reshaped coastlines.
The way certain stars became part of navigation before anyone realized they were using them, Percy had simply remained.
At first he had been an irritation, she would have to admit — a walking headache with which she had to learn how to be, with far too little luck and way too much confidence in improvisation and the power of recklessness. Then, he was a companion. Then a friend.
Then something so deeply woven into her understanding of the world that separating him from it felt impossible.
When she thought of camp, she thought of Percy. When she thought of quests, she thought of Percy. When she imagined the future — however reluctantly, however vaguely — Percy was there too, and she didn’t consciously placed him there.
He simply belonged, as naturally as the sea belonged to the horizon. As naturally as breathing, as naturally as gravity.
Percy was never related to absence.
Until he was.
Until he was ripped out of her hands and her sight and her knowing. Until he was gone and no one, human or immortal or undead or divine, knew a thing about it.
Even the memory of it hit her bones with such force that Annabeth's chest tightened. Before last year, she had never truly considered the possibility — never as something serious, not as something real, because of course, Percy left sometimes — of him being anywhere near the absence she knew so well.
Sure, quests happened and sometimes things went awry (like someone having to hold the sky or someone being taken to the Underworld or gods know where, or them getting separated), and summers ended and there were days and weeks when they weren't together, but those were temporary things.
Predictable things.
That was the kind of distance that came with an eventual return, because Percy had always come back. There was no reason not to, after all. Always, even when the odds were impossible and when every logical calculation suggested otherwise.
Percy came back, and that was a fact.
Looking back, that had been her mistake. For some illogical, terrible, naive reason, she had begun believing it was a law of nature. Something fixed and permanent, like sunrise and the tides and the stars.
And then a goddess had stolen him, just like that. One day he existed, and the next day he didn't — there wasn’t a warning, an explanation, a note or a trace; there was only emptiness.
And suddenly Percy Jackson had become absence too.
Finding that out had nearly destroyed her, because losing Percy hurt more than losing anyone else — while she had prepared herself for that grief before the Battle of Manhattan, he hadn’t died. He had stayed, again, almost out of spite, and it was a relief so big that she forgot the fear.
It hurt more than losing anyone else, and she had never been brave enough to measure grief that way. It had shattered her because Percy had occupied a place inside her life that nobody else ever had.
Luke had taught her how devastating loss could be, and Thalia had taught her how complicated reunion could become, but Percy had taught her what constancy felt like. What certainty felt like. And when certainty disappeared, the world tilted; nothing stayed where it belonged anymore.
The months after his disappearance had felt wrong in a way she struggled to describe, as though somebody had removed a pillar from a building and expected the structure to continue standing, as if a familiar constellation had vanished from the sky and the ocean itself had forgotten how to reach the shore.
Everything had continued — the sun still rose, camp still functioned and quests still happened. She still woke every morning, after all, but something fundamental had gone missing.
A piece of reality.
A piece of herself.
It was difficult to explain. The grief itself had been familiar, because Annabeth knew grief. She knew fear. She knew loss so intimately that sometimes she wondered whether it recognized her on sight or would have to introduce itself when it inevitably came to shake her hand.
But this had been different. Percy's disappearance had not felt like someone leaving as much as it had felt like someone reaching into the foundations of her life and removing a support beam. Sure, the structure remained standing, but every day afterward had carried the terrible certainty that something was wrong and something essential had been misplaced.
Percy had never belonged among the missing. Percy was supposed to be there.
He was supposed to be standing beside her when she rolled her eyes at somebody's stupid plans, but the world had continued existing while Percy didn't, and people had expected her to keep moving. She was expected to keep talking, eating, sleeping, thinking, as if losing him was merely another tragedy in a life already crowded with them.
They acted careful around them anyway, because they weren’t insane not to, but everyone still expected her to behave as if she had not spent years building parts of herself around his existence and he had not become woven through her life so thoroughly that removing him felt like tearing threads from a tapestry and pretending the picture remained unchanged.
The ship was quiet, at that point in the night.
Most of the crew had retired hours ago, exhaustion finally winning over adrenaline and celebration — of finding their missing camper and finding new allies to the chaos — and relief. The only sounds came from the occasional footsteps overhead, those assigned to watch for threats in the darkness beyond the ship.
The sea murmured below, and wood creaked softly. The world slept, but Annabeth didn’t.
She paced around the small cabin over and over and over again, restless still like she had been for months now.
Back and forth.
Back and forth.
Back and forth.
Back and forth.
The cabin wasn't large enough for the amount of restless energy trapped beneath her skin. She crossed from one wall to the other, turned and walked back. She turned again and walked and turned around and walked more — those months of searching had taught her how to keep moving. How to keep looking and how to function while carrying fear.
Apparently, nobody had informed her body that the search was over.
The moonlight spilled through the porthole, painting silver across the floorboards. The Moon had become her most loyal companion over the past months of sleepless nights and spent staring at ceilings. Months spent imagining impossible scenarios and impossible endings, and spent searching so much that worry became habit, eventually.
Fear became routine, and Annabeth learned how to carry it over all of the layers of nightmares and trauma and loss.
Percy was back. The objective fact existed, and she knew it. She had seen him, touched him and held him, and yet her mind still behaved like a hunted thing. Her brain still expected disaster around every corner and her nerves were still braced for loss.
Night after night she had sat awake beneath the moonlight, thinking, planning and worrying. Praying, occasionally, though she'd never admit it aloud.
Tonight should have been different.
Tonight Percy was alive.
Tonight Percy was there.
If only her heart could believe her senses.
It was suddenly that the door of the cabin opened, silently enough that most people might not have noticed it at all were they in similar turmoil.
“Wise Girl?” the shadows called, and the familiar voice stopped her immediately. Annabeth snapped her head in his direction, watching as Percy — Percy, Percy, Percy — entered the room and stood just a couple of steps away from the closed door. “Hey,” he greeted.
Percy stood there.
Percy.
The sight of him still hit her strangely, as if her brain required a moment to process what her eyes were seeing. Blond hair, blue eyes and faint crease between his brows when he was worried.
Alive.
He stepped inside and shut the door quietly behind him.
“Hey,” he said, turning his head towards her again.
She was more than a little out of breath.
“Hi,” she greeted back, her brain running overtime and overdrive to encapsulate his presence.
Brilliant response, her mind supplied, and nothing else. She stared, because apparently that was all she knew how to do anymore — stare at him and reassure herself that he was still there.
Percy's expression softened at the sight of her — and oh, she could die — and the corners of his mouth twitched upward.
Annabeth swallowed nothing, for her mouth had been a little dry ever since she had seen him in that roman attire, and she scrambled for anything to say.
“I—uh,” she babbled. Excellent. Very eloquent.
Percy arched a curious eyebrow.
“I’m sorry,” Annabeth decided to say. “About the judo flip,” she clarified.
She was. She really was sorry — she knew it hand’t offended Percy in any way, if his smile at the time was any indicator whatsoever, but she wished she had just tackled him to the ground with a hug and stood there. For hours, preferably; forever, ideally.
For half a second after she spoke, though, Percy simply blinked. And, for some reason, then he looked genuinely offended.
“Are you kidding me?”
Annabeth felt herself shrug at his question, lowering her eyes from his for a moment.
“I mean it,” she promised.
Percy blinked again.
“Wise Girl,” he said, a little breathless and a little revolted, but lightweight.
“I launched you into the ground,” she explained, as if it was any good explanation.
It was his turn to shrug, nonchalant.
“You were happy.”
She pressed her lips together, and lowered her head.
“I could've hugged you.”
Percy's grin widened, and something a little wicked flickered inside his eyes.
“I'll take you on top of me anytime."
Annabeth made a strangled sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a groan.
“Percy.”
"What?" he asked, entirely unrepentant and pleased with himself.
Completely pleased, even, like making her cheeks heat up so easily after six months apart was some tremendous personal achievement.
Which, unfortunately, it probably was, and for a moment the tension eased a little, and her shoulders loosened. The moment of her muscles were small, but more than enough for Percy to notice.
That much — and him — hadn’t changed.
His smile faded gently, and his eyes followed her as she resumed pacing, restless and wild and a bit too out of her senses. Annabeth didn't even realize she was doing it until she caught him watching.
Concern had settled across his face now, the type that came from knowing somebody too well.
“Beth?”
She halted at once. The name caught her off guard so completely that she almost stumbled.
Percy noticed that too.
“Beth,” he repeated softly, taking a step closer. “What's going on?”
He didn’t usually call her that. He didn’t usually call her anything other than “Wise Girl” whenever there was a chance someone could be around — on quests or at camp when there was daylight. He called her “Annabeth” when talking about her to other people, and nothing else when there were ears and a soul around.
But Percy was a loving, very much in love, very much cliché man (that wasn’t a complaint whatsoever), and Annabeth was the person he loved the most. Inevitably, and she knew that when they first started dating, he would get around to pet names.
The surprising part was just how much she loved each and all of them.
He called her whatever sweet thing came to mind, whenever it came to mind. Love (she melted every time) and dear, and darling, and sweetheart (she had a soft spot for that one in particular), and ever more stupid things such as “curls” or “owl” or “pretty” just because he liked to say it.
Beth, however, was rare. It was something she didn’t hear often, and he didn’t use it often either. Anything related to her actual name was something they didn’t use — it wasn’t like she didn’t like her name, but it was what everybody else called her. That, and the fact that once, Thalia called her “Beth” for some reason at random, and Annabeth told her not to call her that.
Percy had heard it, and took it as an order, too. Percy, being Percy, had apparently interpreted that as a sacred commandment.
And obeyed it ever since.
That was one of the strange things about him.
People often mistook Percy for careless instead of a reckless person (he could argue with the wall about that; it was clear as day). They saw the jokes, the impulsiveness, the way he threw himself into danger first and worried about consequences later. They saw someone who forgot homework assignments and directions and occasionally his own train of thought.
What they failed to notice was that Percy remembered everything that he considered to hold importance for anyone he knew. He remembered every preference, every fear and every offhand comment she made and forgot five minutes later.
He remembered how she took her coffee even if she changed it every month. He remembered that she hated when people touched her sketchbooks without asking, and how anyone should stay away from her hair (except for him and Grover, because she liked the caresses). He remembered exactly which constellation she had pointed out to him years ago during a quest and which myth she had attached to it.
He remembered things she had never expected anyone to notice, and when Annabeth told someone not to call her Beth, Percy had quietly accepted it as law. Not exactly because he was afraid of upsetting her or because he thought she would be angry, but just because she had said she didn't like it.
And that was enough.
Sometimes she thought love lived in moments like that. Not in grand sacrifices, and definitely not prophecies or in battles, but in those small, almost invisible decisions people made every day to accommodate one another's hearts.
Percy had always been full of those decisions.
Which was why she remembered so clearly the first time he had broken that particular rule.
He first used Beth when they were lying together in his bed, on Cabin Three — in broad daylight, a lazy weekday Chiron had granted them when he looked at the pair and decided they looked a little too much like they had been visiting Hades often and not seen daylight in at least a year. There was not a problem with her being in the Cabin, mostly (Poseidon didn’t care at all, and Percy had asked about his friends being there), and Chiron was a little hesitant to be too harsh on them ever since Luke had killed himself with her dagger right in front of whoever had eyes to see.
And ever since Percy, the Hero of Olympus, hadn’t died, and had not known what to do after he hadn’t died at the blooming age of sixteen.
There was a strange kind of exhaustion that followed survival, and it angered her that nobody talked about it. The stories she heard and learned always ended after the victory when the monster was defeated and the world was saved and all the living heroes celebrated.
Nobody ever mentioned the morning after, or the week after, or the months spent learning how to live inside a future that had almost never happened.
Percy had carried that uncertainty like an extra shadow. He had survived, yes — and thank fuck —, but then he had looked around and realized there was no next instruction.
Annabeth thought that that had frightened him more than most monsters ever had.
They did take advantage of Chiron’s pity as much as they could, because, as it turned out, Annabeth loved being held (by Percy) as much as Percy loved having her (especifically) in his arms.
She didn’t know what they had talked about before, but they had been quiet for a while; she had plastered to his side and had a leg thrown over his own, while his arms held her close and he was very much on the verge of counsciosuness — mostly out of it.
Hearing and feeling his breathing was soothing, after all they had been through. It was calming, and at the time, it had been the only thing to still her mind and heart enough so she could rest.
The cabin had been warm from the summer sun. Life outside continued, and for once, neither of them was required to save it.
It had felt miraculous.
“Beth,” he had called, drowsy with a bone-deep tiredness that was allowed to be present, that day. She hummed in acknowledgement of his calling, and she hadn’t really thought about what she had called her — her name, and everything related to her, was so sweet and so cared for in her voice, that she didn’t even hear anything other than that.
“Hm?” she hummed, tilting her head upwards just a bit to look up and find the side of his face. His eyes had remained closed, and his fingers had traced idle patterns against her shoulder.
“Thank you,” he said, and she frowned softly, huffing a breath from her nose.
“What for?” she asked.
A smile bloomed on his face.
“Tolerating me,” he said, and there wasn’t anything else but gratitude in his voice. “All these years.”
She had stared at him then, a little too stunned to speak, and found there wasn't a trace of teasing there, as though he genuinely believed she had done him some tremendous kindness by staying.
She decided it wasn’t worth arguing over how she didn’t “tolerate” him at any moment. For all that was worth, Annabeth had loved him, one way or another, from the very start — he wasn’t a quest to be put behind or a problem to solve; he was the reason why reason made sense, and the solution to the chaos in her mind and, apparently, in the world.
They did have that discussion later. It did earn her kisses and smiles Annabeth wished she could have had painted and hanging on walls just so she didn’t risk forgetting a thing about his face or his touch or his love over her skin.
And standing now in the cabin of the Argo II, she found herself remembering every single one of them.
The problem with six months apart, she thought, was that memory became dangerous when it wasn’t absent like he had been. At first it helped, really; it sustained her sanity and the certainty that Percy wasn’t a made up thing her mind manipulated into her memory when loneliness took over her head.
She remembered a laugh and survived another day, then remembered a smile and survived another week. Utimately, she remembered the feeling of his arms around her and convinced herself that one more month would not kill her even if it felt like it would.
Eventually, memory started becoming cruel, because no recollection was ever as good as the real thing. There wasn’t a dream that ever felt enough or amount of remembering that could replace presence, and now Percy was standing right there.
Close enough to touch, close enough that she could see the concern growing in his expression. close enough that she could hear his breathing over the distant creaking of the ship and close enough that all the fear she had been carrying for months suddenly had somewhere to go.
Which was perhaps the problem. For months she had been forced to carry it alone, and she wasn’t sure when she would be able — if at all — to share with someone she knew would willingly share the burden with her. And now Percy was there, and now Percy could see it.
Annabeth didn't know what to do with that.
“Hey,” he called again when she hadn’t answered for the better part of a minute. Annabeth’s eyes snapped back towards him. “What’s going on, love?” Percy asked once more, and she didn’t know what to do with what was in her chest.
Love, he had called her, and the pet name should not have affected her the way it did. It was the thousanth time she had heard it, perhaps, but Percy never seemed to understand the effect he had on people. Or maybe — unlikely, but he did have the talent to surprise her — he did, and simply chose to weaponize it whenever possible.
The concern in his voice made it worse, the gentleness and care and the way he wasn't pushing her. The way he was waiting, like she had been for months to even hear his voice; as though she was something precious and breakable.
Gods— no. She wouldn’t call for them. They didn’t deserve to be even remembered, at that point; some more than others, she wanted them to rot wherever Kronos had been for however long it’s been since he was chopped into nasty pieces of tyranny. She wouldn’t call for them, not after everything. Not after Hera (or Juno or whatever the fuck her name was), and not after six months of more unanswered prayers.
She wouldn’t risk calling for any of them after searching every corner of the country for a boy who had been stolen because immortals had decided that was acceptable collateral damage, after waking up every morning wondering if Percy was alive, after falling asleep every night wondering if he was scared.
Not after imagining him alone, lost and gone for months.
But, damn, was she tired of feeling those things. The fear and grief and the pretending that she wasn’t angry. She was tired of carrying around an absence so large it had nearly swallowed her whole.
You write so so beautifully and your fics always make my chest ache in the best way possible!!
oh 🥹you flatter me, really (i'm blushing)
thank you so, so much for reading the things i write. really, for giving them a chance, i am so forever grateful. it means the world to me that what i write is met with such kind sets of eyes.
i hope, if you keep giving me chances, that they are worth your time and chest aches! ❤️
i think i might go a little too canon-divergent with this one, haha! more than I initially intended to (i sort of live for getting-together stories).
"Fiyero didn’t wait until the morning to break up with Galinda.
In fact, cruel as it might have been, he didn’t wait at all — there was no second thought crossing his mind or white feeling of indecisiveness taking over his chest; there was resolution, plain and simple and as certain as the warmth as on his skin.
Where Elphaba had touched him so faintly, so kindly, so warm. Where her magic sent shivers down his spine and he wasn’t sure it was at all related to magic, because he was sure that the spell wasn’t meant to make his heart go rogue inside his ribcage."
hehe. gotta love men pinning.
thank you so much for the ask, darling! ❤️ hope you like the little snippet, haha! loads of love :) ❤️
Don’t apologize for not uploading!! Just know your writing and your fics are absolutely worth waiting for. I would happily wait a month for an update.
Just knowing that you are working on it and haven’t given up on the fic makes me so excited to read the next chapter. Thank you for always giving us your best!!
I am so sorry, love, that I didn't see this before. I thank you so incredibly much for being so, so kind and so, so very sweet. Really. You have no idea just how much this means to me.
I apologize for that because I did (do) have a schedule, and it really makes me feel bad that I can't always keep up with it. I also fear a lot that you lot will give up on me and on the fic, and it would break my heart to shards (i really love you guys and i really love this story).
but, truly, thank you so much for your words. a lot of you call me a poet (it melts me every time and it's an honor), but i wish you all knew that the most beautiful things ever written or spoken are those wrapped in kindness.
you lot are my favorite writers, and i mean it. you make me tear up and smile like a cheshire cat every time.
(i'm a little bit emotional today. had a pretty shitty week and your message did lighten it quite a bit. thank you, thank you, thank you).
Ooh please give more details on general laws of the universe!!
bonus ask is about stunt double :D
General Laws of the Universe is one I am SO excited to upload eventually! it'll likely be multi-chapter, and it's an AU that I am honestly proud of (i'm having too much fun overall thinking and drafting and writing it!)
"An engineer who spent a lifetime studying reliability and safety in order to prevent human error, Edward A. Murphy coined “Murphy’s Law” with an offhand remark. A silly thing, really, after an experiment went wrong — everything that could go wrong will go wrong, apparently.
Annabeth hated the guy.
She hoped he burned in hell."
and the stunt double one is a bit of a mess, lol, but i love it, too! I'm not sure which role they'll have yet (Percy and Annabeth and everyone else) but i'll figure that out as I go.
this little snippet has different roles from the one i posted before because i'm trying things here:
" “Isn’t he so cute?”
Annabeth snorted but didn’t look up. Grover went very still.
“I told Annabeth. Told her they’d look good together.” Juniper's voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. “They have matching sad vibes. Like, emotionally coordinated,” she giggled. “They should kiiiiiss!”
Grover looked at Annabeth in alarm, but Annabeth only shrugged and took a bite of her sandwich, utterly unfazed.
“She’s been saying that since she met him. The doctor kindly said he’d pretend he didn’t hear a thing.”
“What?! Why?” Juniper whined, scandalized. “I’m helping fate!” the woman mumbled. “Helping fate is exhausting.” "
thank you so very much for the ask, darling! all the love ❤️
oh wow now I'm incredibly anxious to upload a fic that I HAVE NOT WRITTEN A WORD OF because I just thought it entirely through in my head and I love it
