“It sounds a lot like a tragedy,” she commented.
Percy shook his head immediately.
“No. No, Mama, it is not,” he denied, leaning forward with elbows on his knees. “It is the opposite. That is what makes it so difficult."
Sally's eyes shimmered slightly at the anguish she could hear in his voice and in his words and see on his face — Percy did not notice her noticing, too absorbed in the pain that rang repeatedly over his chest. He was too busy staring at the floor.
“It hurts,” he laughed weakly. “Gods, Mama, it hurts.”
read it on Ao3
previous chapter | all chapters | next chapter
chapter 36
the thing with wings
It was not during the ball that she knew.
No, it was not when the violins soared nor when the laughter echoed against the high windows. It was not when gloved hands reached for hers, or when yet another forgettable suitor bowed too low, spoke too loudly, and asked her too little about anything that held any importance whatsoever.
No, Annabeth did not fall in love in the ballroom.
She knew it on the shore.
She knew it in the hush that followed her escape — the moment her slippers sank into sand and did not meet polished marble. She knew it when the silk of her gown caught the salt-heavy breeze and her breath fogged in the night like a secret too delicate to speak aloud, a moment held on air like life hung in time; she knew when the world was silent and whispered in sweet, sweet poems of salt and water and breeze.
She knew it on the shore, for it was where she met Love.
It had taken her hand without a word, emerging like a ghost from between columns that fundamented her being and sights, like It had been waiting for the exact moment she would see It — like It knew.
And perhaps It had. Perhaps It had, for Love was not hurried. It was not hurried, and how much It was misunderstood by so, so many. They spoke of thunderclaps and lightning strikes, of arrows and sudden ruin, of hearts stolen in an instant and lives overturned overnight.
But standing by her window, with light stretching silver across the floorboards and the distant sea breathing beyond the cliffs, Annabeth thought that Love was patient. Patient enough to wait months without complaint, to sit beside her while she debated theories and sketched impossible buildings and argued with professors, to listen while she spoke of history and stone and mathematics.
Patient enough to become friendship first.
And, so, she thought that perhaps Love had been there from the beginning. Not in Percy, necessarily, or even in herself, but beside them. Walking quietly and waiting, and enjoying the sun and the moon and the shadow, the laughter and the ease and the peace.
It had watched her laugh in flower fields, search crowded rooms without understanding why and carry letters and conversations and memories home like precious artifacts. It had seen her sigh and dream and smile in secret, and live and breathe and wander out in the open — It had been, so kindly, there.
And all that time, It had never once demanded recognition. Love simply waited until she was ready to name It.
Annabeth found herself imagining It as something strangely human. Not a god or a force, and not some cruel creature perched upon fate's shoulder. It was just a traveler. A companion. Someone with hands and eyes and a heartbeat, who arrived without invitation and stayed without obligation.
Love sat beside people during long winters. It walked with them through spring, lingered during summers so bright they seemed eternal and when autumn came, It gathered fallen leaves with gentle hands and never complained about the cold.
Love knew no haste, for It had all the time in the world. All the time in the world, for It belonged equally to eternity and mortality. All the time in the world, for It was immortal in a way people never could be.
It did not survive untouched, but It chose to remain — and choice, Annabeth learned more and more, gave meaning to memories more than happenstance could ever do. It chose, over and over, even after loss, even after grief, even after goodbyes that never had a chance to happen.
Love stayed. It lingered in empty chairs and old letters, in pressed flowers between pages and half-forgotten melodies, and favorite books with worn spines. In voices remembered long after they had fallen silent, in mismatched dances to song and night, and in whatever it was that sewed Time into endlessness.
It stayed.
And yet, It was mortal, too. Mortal, because every love was bound to someone. Bound to a laugh, a face, a smile, a pair of blue eyes that reflected sunlight like ocean water. Bound to a hand reaching out across a moonlit shore.
Love was everlasting, and still it willingly tied itself to fragile things. To human things.
It tied Itself to people who could be hurt, people who could leave and people who would die, and somehow that made It no less brave. More, if anything; all, if nothing else.
Annabeth, whenever It crossed her mind, could only think of Percy. Of his smile and the way he looked at the sea as though listening to an old friend, of his laughter and how he remembered things she herself forgot she had mentioned.
Of how he never once asked her to become smaller, never once asked her to be less.
Love, she realized, had not arrived wearing a crown and flattering Itself as the utmost reason for life and death. It had arrived laughing, carrying flowers woven into a bracelet and slowly, with sandy feet and wind-tangled hair.
It had arrived speaking nonsense and kindness in equal measure; It had arrived looking exactly like Percy Jackson.
And perhaps that was why she had failed to recognize it. Love, in stories, was always grand, but the real feeling seemed oddly ordinary.
It sat beside one during conversations, and It remembered one’s favorite color. It celebrated one’s victories as though they were its own, and It listened. It stayed.
The moon hung quietly beyond the glass, and the sea answered with a distant sigh. The fear remained, of course, while she thought about it — Love was still risk, still uncertainty, still hope.
But perhaps hope was not the enemy she had always imagined. Maybe — and whyever would that not be? — hope was simply another traveler. A quieter one, a singing bard that walked beside Love wherever It went.
And perhaps they had both found her together on that shore, dancing barefoot beneath the stars, laughing and alive and decided that it was time to introduce themselves as they were, with given names and stolen blessings.
They rested with kindness, now, at a living room of roses and sea salt she had built in a palace offshore. They rested gentle, permanent, like roots finding soil and the tide returning home, right after she invited them in for tea. They rested and talked and sang like something that had always been traveling toward her and had finally arrived after such long, long travels in tempests and land.
She loved him, and tje truth remained unchanged no matter how many times she examined it.
Love found her on the beach, without theatrics or scenes, without dramatics or written rules that should be followed. It had just her hand taken, and then freedom had blossomed around them — with the sound of the waves and the scent of the sea, the sand on her feet (and none inside her boots) and pointless conversations that meant so much more than the academic things she loved so deeply still.
It had not asked her to dance to rehearsed choreography and sweet music and loud stares.
He simply had.
Their feet left no trace on the dampened sand, though her heart felt heavy enough to sink them. He held her close, but not improperly; his fingers pressed lightly into her waist, his breath fanned softly against her temple. They swayed beneath the moon — not to music, but to the tide. To the unsteady rhythm of wanting and not daring. To the beat of something unspoken between them that pulsed louder than any orchestra ever could.
And now, the ball was long behind her. The house slept and the candles had melted low. Her gown lay across her chair, discarded but not forgotten, with sand still clinging to its hem.
She stood alone by her window, and the moon stared back at her like a knowing friend, silver and ancient, hanging over the black sea like a promise.
Annabeth pressed a hand over her chest, as if that might still the ache blooming there. It was not sharp, and it was not painful. It was soft — terrifyingly soft — like the petals of some rare bloom unfurling at last in moonlight, despite the frost in the air.
She was in love.
Gods above, around, below and in-between — she was in love, and the realization should have arrived like lightning, like thunder, like some grand revelation sung by poets and playwrights and ridiculous romantics who insisted that love announced itself before entering a room.
Instead, it arrived the way dawn did. Inevitable despite the night, and there all along; she had only now turned her face toward the light.
Annabeth stared out at the sea. The tide continued its endless journey beyond the cliffs, silver beneath moonlight. Somewhere out there ships crossed sleeping waters, people were either found or lost, lives were ever the same or never again. Somewhere beyond the horizon, the world continued turning exactly as it had the day before.
It felt to her, though, that everything had changed. It felt, all the same, that nothing had — and was that not the strange thing? Was that not the opposite of every single thought she had known and grown by and into? The world was the same as it had been the day before, the week before, the eras ever since humans were taught a thought.
Nothing had changed, because love had not transformed Percy into someone new. He remained precisely who he had always been, that impossible, infuriating, still absurd and prone to speaking as if kindness cost him nothing and offering pieces of himself were as natural as breathing. He was still the same man who listened to her speak of architecture for hours and somehow always managed to ask the one question she had not considered, and the man who remembered every thought she offered him.
He was still the man who looked at her as though her mind was something miraculous and her existence was enough to send a prayer to gods he never believed in.
No, nothing about Percy had changed.
The change, as outdated and cliché and silly as it was, had happened within Annabeth herself. And, perhaps, that was the reason it felt less like falling and more like discovering. Less like fear, and so much more like uncovering a truth that had always existed beneath layers of stone and flesh and soul.
It was a fact; a simple, undeniable one, at that.
A fact, and a very well fundamented one, for, for months she had gathered evidence without noticing. The way she searched every room for him before speaking to anyone else, even if she knew he was not there — somewhere, deep down, she hoped he did the same —, and the way she measured days by whether she would see him. The way every success felt incomplete until she shared it with him, and how she carried his words home and turned them over in her mind like treasures.
The way his absence had become something she physically felt, as tangible as hunger and as real as gravity that kept them grounded and able to walk side by side whether surrounded by trees or flowers or sand and nothingness. How her skin ached to feel his again even if it had been a scarce event, and how her heart shrunk every time they needed to part.
There was not a reasonable person who could examine the evidence and arrive anywhere else, and Annabeth Chase had spent her entire life respecting facts.
This one was perhaps the most obvious she had ever encountered. She loved Percy Jackson, and it fell to obviousness as much as the stars did to the night sky and fish did to bodies of water. She loved Percy Jackson, and the man and the feeling walked the same pace.
The words should have terrified her, but instead, they settled quietly against her ribs.
And that settling, perhaps, was the hardest thing to get used to. Because it had been easy — it had not broken her ribs despite its side, and it had not asked her to change or accommodate it despite all else; it found a way around her bones, her organs, her being, and it never once hurt any of it to make a home within her skin.
The topic of love had always been uncertain. Hypothetical at best, and nothing within reach; it was a fairy-tale, romantic love, and nothing more.Something written in novels and tucked between pages. Something poets insisted upon and scholars rarely bothered to define. A concept she could examine, dissect, understand in theory without ever believing it belonged anywhere near her own life.
For years, she had imagined herself standing outside of it, and never because she despised the notion, but because love had always seemed to belong to other people.
It belonged to women who waited by windows and pressed flowers between diary pages. To girls who dreamed of wedding veils and danced until dawn and measured their futures by the names they might someday share.
Annabeth had measured her future in different things, and it had been measured for her by other standards. In degrees earned and books written and cities built and foundations strong enough to outlast centuries.
Love had always seemed like an optional chapter in someone else's story. A pleasant possibility, if she stretched too far; a distraction, perhaps, but certainly not something inevitable.
Certainly not something that would arrive quietly enough that she would only realize it had happened after it was already woven through every corner of her life.
Love was vulnerability and uncertainty and risk. It was offering another person the power to hurt one’s heart simply because one trusted they would not.
Love was hope, and hope was the thing with wings.
But then, so was Icarus.
Annabeth let out a soft breath, her fingers curling against the windowsill.
For most of her life, hope had seemed less like a blessing and more like a dangerous architectural flaw. A weakness in the foundation, a misplanned something in the middle of a plan, a beautiful, beautiful something that invited collapse.
She had watched too many people build entire lives upon wishes.
She had watched students abandon certainty for dreams and return heartbroken. She had watched brilliant women surrender ambitions for promises that dissolved like mist. She had watched her own mother dismiss romance with the same measured certainty one might use to dismiss an unstable bridge.
Hope, according to every lesson she had ever learned, was dangerous because it asked for belief before proof; and Annabeth had always preferred proof.
But standing there before her window, she found that fear was not the strongest thing she felt — wonder was. Somehow, impossibly, she had found herself loving a man who made the world gentler. A man who had never once asked her to become smaller, never demanded pieces of her brilliance in exchange for affection and looked at her ambition and intellect and stubbornness and sharp edges and loved speaking to her because of them.
Not despite them, but because of them, and not in some storybook fashion, with declarations and sighs and fateful strings tying wrists together. No — it was quieter than that. Stranger.
She loved him the way the sea loves the shore — not always gently, not always visibly, but eternally. In tides, in rhythms. In the way her world tilts toward him no matter how far she walks.
She loved the way he looked at her, even when no one else saw. The way he pretended not to know her, because he knew how much it would cost her. The way he listened and, oh, the way he laughed. The way he existed beside her, never taking more than she offered, and yet making her wish she could give everything she ever could.
Still, she was afraid. Afraid, terrified that Love might undo all she has built. That It might soften the walls she had spent a lifetime raising. That, to want him, truly, was to betray the girl she was taught to be. But, oh, gods above and little and almighty.
She touched her hand again, where he had held her, and closed her eyes.
God, she was scared.
But, Lord, she was in love. And what a beautiful thing it was to feel.
To love, not in spite of who she was, but because of it. To love him, exactly as he was.
And against so much of her beliefs, the knowledge did not come with a gasp — it arrived as dawn does, all at once and slow.
She was in love.
The words did not leave her lips. They rose inside her like tidewater, and crest and curled through her chest, filling the hollows of her ribs with warmth and weight. And her mind — oh, her mind ran untethered.
She loved him.
She loved him like the sea loves the moon — pulled by some ancient force that does not need naming, that exists whether or not it is seen, whether or not it is known, whether or not it is believed to exist. He is her ocean, her storm, her shore. The shipwreck and the harbor.
She loved him like fire loves oxygen — wild and bright and gasping to burn. She has never known her thoughts to move like this, never known her hands to tremble without cause, unless the cause is him. And it always is, isn’t it? Always.
He was not a man to her, not merely. He was sunlight caught in saltwater. He was laughter echoing through a canyon of silence. He was every book she’s ever loved and every horizon she’s ever longed for.
He was chaos wrapped in kindness, a storm with gentle eyes.
Her heart, which has always beat steady, logical, reasoned, now sang. It sang, and not to be heard by others, no; it was a private symphony that only the soul and time and space could hear. That oh-so-rare kind of music played when something sacred had taken root in the dark.
She pressed her fingertips to her lips as if the feeling might escape, as if saying her thoughts aloud would break its fragile form — and perhaps it would. Perhaps love, when first realized, was like glass. Too beautiful to bear the weight of words. So she did not name it; instead, Annabeth decided that if anything, she would only feel.
He was beauty, she thought, fierce and stunned. He was the first page of a new book, and the one she would smooth your hands over before she dared turn.
He was the final line of a poem she never wanted to end, because the rhymes, more and more, made more sense and it got some much more beautiful by the word, by the feeling, but the hour.
He was the hush that follows music and the look between two people who should not know each other — and do.
He was not safe, and safety was all she had sought her entire life.
But he was true, and he had her heart in his hands for quite a while. And Percy, ever the gentleman and ever the kindest soul, took care of it with his own.
She was in love, and Annabeth had not told a soul.
Even the thought of it burned too brightly, too intimately, as if to share it would be to spill sacred ink across the wrong parchment. And because she was human and only just too real, she could not rid herself of the feeling of terror that washed over her being the more she thought about that.
She feared what that made her. A girl who lingered too long in front of mirrors now, wondering not how smart she seemed (because she knew she was always smart) but how lovely. A girl who memorized the shade of ribbon he once said suited her. A girl who hoped, perhaps in vain or perhaps in beauty; but hoped nonetheless.
And wasn’t that the most dangerous thing of all?
She felt traitorous, sometimes. As if affection was a crack in her armor. As if to want beauty — to want him — was to betray the foundation of who she was. But when she saw him, when he looked at her as if she were the most marvelous discovery in the world, she could not feel ashamed.
She could not be sorry.
She was no less herself for loving him, Annabeth wanted to believe. For all she knew, it made her more, for it is what happened when something was shared; it passed along, and it kept more than one heart beating. More, as if her soul has met a companion of so, so long before, and oh. There you are.
And what a terrifying thought to be so much more than one ever was.
Love, she wanted so to believe, was not weakness. It was the wind that dared to lift an arrow from the bow, and she felt that it was the why behind every leap.
To her utmost horror, it was not something to be studied like an equation, nor something to categorize and store away. It was not something to be reasoned with, for there was no reason whatsoever in handing a soul and a heart in someone else’s palm that not one’s own. It was lightning strike, yes — that struck once, twice, eternally, and carved light into the sky and made the world more beautiful for having burned.
And while Percy, of course, was not the center of anyone’s world but his own (for his life did revolve after him), he was very much the center of that feeling.
He was the flame she did not know she needed warmth from, and a secret joy in her careful, quiet life. And when he held her on the shore — when he led her away and her feet barely touched the sand and she felt like floating —, Annabeth knew.
She would not say it aloud, for knowing a fact was not to know context or entire rules, but she was his in a sense she had never once believed one could belong to another. It was not something owned or owed or conquered.
Instead, it was something chosen.
She had chosen to love him.
And what a radiant, terrifying, extraordinary choice it was.
[…]
The lecture hall had long since emptied, leaving only muffled echoes and the occasional hush of turning pages. Afternoon light poured in through tall arched windows, striping the worn wooden floor with soft gold. Annabeth sat at the edge of the gallery, her book open across her lap, a finger pressed between the pages but unmoving. She wasn’t reading anymore — not really. She was waiting. Or perhaps just holding still.
Below, her mother spoke in low, measured tones with Professor Westgate, the chair of the architecture faculty, a man with a fondness for Athena’s published works and a tendency to ramble. Athena stood with her hands clasped behind her back, chin tilted at a slight angle — all intellect and scrutiny.
Annabeth watched them for a moment before letting her gaze drift back toward the windows. The day had been long, that far, but it had been a good one. Good in the way only university days could be.
The mornings, that were usually filled with classes, were getting a little less busy the more she advanced on her thesis and final project to hand in — according to Professor Chiron, it would not be long until she presented him something that she was satisfied with, more than only him with her work (a small jab at her insistence in perfection that would never be achieved, and one she deserved for a while now).
Afterward she had spent nearly two hours in the archives searching through sketches and municipal records for an (other) article she was drafting. The piece had grown far larger than intended, which was usually how her best work happened. What began as a simple examination of public spaces had somehow become an exploration of memory, architecture, and the ways people carried history inside buildings long after the original inhabitants were gone.
Professor Chiron had called it ambitious. Whatever it was that he meant, Annabeth had taken that as encouragement.
“It sounds a lot like a tragedy,” she commented.
Percy shook his head immediately.
“No. No, Mama, it is not,” he denied, leaning forward with elbows on his knees. “It is the opposite. That is what makes it so difficult."
Sally's eyes shimmered slightly at the anguish she could hear in his voice and in his words and see on his face — Percy did not notice her noticing, too absorbed in the pain that rang repeatedly over his chest. He was too busy staring at the floor.
“It hurts,” he laughed weakly. “Gods, Mama, it hurts.”
read it on Ao3
previous chapter | all chapters | next chapter
chapter 36
the thing with wings
It was not during the ball that she knew.
No, it was not when the violins soared nor when the laughter echoed against the high windows. It was not when gloved hands reached for hers, or when yet another forgettable suitor bowed too low, spoke too loudly, and asked her too little about anything that held any importance whatsoever.
No, Annabeth did not fall in love in the ballroom.
She knew it on the shore.
She knew it in the hush that followed her escape — the moment her slippers sank into sand and did not meet polished marble. She knew it when the silk of her gown caught the salt-heavy breeze and her breath fogged in the night like a secret too delicate to speak aloud, a moment held on air like life hung in time; she knew when the world was silent and whispered in sweet, sweet poems of salt and water and breeze.
She knew it on the shore, for it was where she met Love.
It had taken her hand without a word, emerging like a ghost from between columns that fundamented her being and sights, like It had been waiting for the exact moment she would see It — like It knew.
And perhaps It had. Perhaps It had, for Love was not hurried. It was not hurried, and how much It was misunderstood by so, so many. They spoke of thunderclaps and lightning strikes, of arrows and sudden ruin, of hearts stolen in an instant and lives overturned overnight.
But standing by her window, with light stretching silver across the floorboards and the distant sea breathing beyond the cliffs, Annabeth thought that Love was patient. Patient enough to wait months without complaint, to sit beside her while she debated theories and sketched impossible buildings and argued with professors, to listen while she spoke of history and stone and mathematics.
Patient enough to become friendship first.
And, so, she thought that perhaps Love had been there from the beginning. Not in Percy, necessarily, or even in herself, but beside them. Walking quietly and waiting, and enjoying the sun and the moon and the shadow, the laughter and the ease and the peace.
It had watched her laugh in flower fields, search crowded rooms without understanding why and carry letters and conversations and memories home like precious artifacts. It had seen her sigh and dream and smile in secret, and live and breathe and wander out in the open — It had been, so kindly, there.
And all that time, It had never once demanded recognition. Love simply waited until she was ready to name It.
Annabeth found herself imagining It as something strangely human. Not a god or a force, and not some cruel creature perched upon fate's shoulder. It was just a traveler. A companion. Someone with hands and eyes and a heartbeat, who arrived without invitation and stayed without obligation.
Love sat beside people during long winters. It walked with them through spring, lingered during summers so bright they seemed eternal and when autumn came, It gathered fallen leaves with gentle hands and never complained about the cold.
Love knew no haste, for It had all the time in the world. All the time in the world, for It belonged equally to eternity and mortality. All the time in the world, for It was immortal in a way people never could be.
It did not survive untouched, but It chose to remain — and choice, Annabeth learned more and more, gave meaning to memories more than happenstance could ever do. It chose, over and over, even after loss, even after grief, even after goodbyes that never had a chance to happen.
Love stayed. It lingered in empty chairs and old letters, in pressed flowers between pages and half-forgotten melodies, and favorite books with worn spines. In voices remembered long after they had fallen silent, in mismatched dances to song and night, and in whatever it was that sewed Time into endlessness.
It stayed.
And yet, It was mortal, too. Mortal, because every love was bound to someone. Bound to a laugh, a face, a smile, a pair of blue eyes that reflected sunlight like ocean water. Bound to a hand reaching out across a moonlit shore.
Love was everlasting, and still it willingly tied itself to fragile things. To human things.
It tied Itself to people who could be hurt, people who could leave and people who would die, and somehow that made It no less brave. More, if anything; all, if nothing else.
Annabeth, whenever It crossed her mind, could only think of Percy. Of his smile and the way he looked at the sea as though listening to an old friend, of his laughter and how he remembered things she herself forgot she had mentioned.
Of how he never once asked her to become smaller, never once asked her to be less.
Love, she realized, had not arrived wearing a crown and flattering Itself as the utmost reason for life and death. It had arrived laughing, carrying flowers woven into a bracelet and slowly, with sandy feet and wind-tangled hair.
It had arrived speaking nonsense and kindness in equal measure; It had arrived looking exactly like Percy Jackson.
And perhaps that was why she had failed to recognize it. Love, in stories, was always grand, but the real feeling seemed oddly ordinary.
It sat beside one during conversations, and It remembered one’s favorite color. It celebrated one’s victories as though they were its own, and It listened. It stayed.
The moon hung quietly beyond the glass, and the sea answered with a distant sigh. The fear remained, of course, while she thought about it — Love was still risk, still uncertainty, still hope.
But perhaps hope was not the enemy she had always imagined. Maybe — and whyever would that not be? — hope was simply another traveler. A quieter one, a singing bard that walked beside Love wherever It went.
And perhaps they had both found her together on that shore, dancing barefoot beneath the stars, laughing and alive and decided that it was time to introduce themselves as they were, with given names and stolen blessings.
They rested with kindness, now, at a living room of roses and sea salt she had built in a palace offshore. They rested gentle, permanent, like roots finding soil and the tide returning home, right after she invited them in for tea. They rested and talked and sang like something that had always been traveling toward her and had finally arrived after such long, long travels in tempests and land.
She loved him, and tje truth remained unchanged no matter how many times she examined it.
Love found her on the beach, without theatrics or scenes, without dramatics or written rules that should be followed. It had just her hand taken, and then freedom had blossomed around them — with the sound of the waves and the scent of the sea, the sand on her feet (and none inside her boots) and pointless conversations that meant so much more than the academic things she loved so deeply still.
It had not asked her to dance to rehearsed choreography and sweet music and loud stares.
He simply had.
Their feet left no trace on the dampened sand, though her heart felt heavy enough to sink them. He held her close, but not improperly; his fingers pressed lightly into her waist, his breath fanned softly against her temple. They swayed beneath the moon — not to music, but to the tide. To the unsteady rhythm of wanting and not daring. To the beat of something unspoken between them that pulsed louder than any orchestra ever could.
And now, the ball was long behind her. The house slept and the candles had melted low. Her gown lay across her chair, discarded but not forgotten, with sand still clinging to its hem.
She stood alone by her window, and the moon stared back at her like a knowing friend, silver and ancient, hanging over the black sea like a promise.
Annabeth pressed a hand over her chest, as if that might still the ache blooming there. It was not sharp, and it was not painful. It was soft — terrifyingly soft — like the petals of some rare bloom unfurling at last in moonlight, despite the frost in the air.
She was in love.
Gods above, around, below and in-between — she was in love, and the realization should have arrived like lightning, like thunder, like some grand revelation sung by poets and playwrights and ridiculous romantics who insisted that love announced itself before entering a room.
Instead, it arrived the way dawn did. Inevitable despite the night, and there all along; she had only now turned her face toward the light.
Annabeth stared out at the sea. The tide continued its endless journey beyond the cliffs, silver beneath moonlight. Somewhere out there ships crossed sleeping waters, people were either found or lost, lives were ever the same or never again. Somewhere beyond the horizon, the world continued turning exactly as it had the day before.
It felt to her, though, that everything had changed. It felt, all the same, that nothing had — and was that not the strange thing? Was that not the opposite of every single thought she had known and grown by and into? The world was the same as it had been the day before, the week before, the eras ever since humans were taught a thought.
Nothing had changed, because love had not transformed Percy into someone new. He remained precisely who he had always been, that impossible, infuriating, still absurd and prone to speaking as if kindness cost him nothing and offering pieces of himself were as natural as breathing. He was still the same man who listened to her speak of architecture for hours and somehow always managed to ask the one question she had not considered, and the man who remembered every thought she offered him.
He was still the man who looked at her as though her mind was something miraculous and her existence was enough to send a prayer to gods he never believed in.
No, nothing about Percy had changed.
The change, as outdated and cliché and silly as it was, had happened within Annabeth herself. And, perhaps, that was the reason it felt less like falling and more like discovering. Less like fear, and so much more like uncovering a truth that had always existed beneath layers of stone and flesh and soul.
It was a fact; a simple, undeniable one, at that.
A fact, and a very well fundamented one, for, for months she had gathered evidence without noticing. The way she searched every room for him before speaking to anyone else, even if she knew he was not there — somewhere, deep down, she hoped he did the same —, and the way she measured days by whether she would see him. The way every success felt incomplete until she shared it with him, and how she carried his words home and turned them over in her mind like treasures.
The way his absence had become something she physically felt, as tangible as hunger and as real as gravity that kept them grounded and able to walk side by side whether surrounded by trees or flowers or sand and nothingness. How her skin ached to feel his again even if it had been a scarce event, and how her heart shrunk every time they needed to part.
There was not a reasonable person who could examine the evidence and arrive anywhere else, and Annabeth Chase had spent her entire life respecting facts.
This one was perhaps the most obvious she had ever encountered. She loved Percy Jackson, and it fell to obviousness as much as the stars did to the night sky and fish did to bodies of water. She loved Percy Jackson, and the man and the feeling walked the same pace.
The words should have terrified her, but instead, they settled quietly against her ribs.
And that settling, perhaps, was the hardest thing to get used to. Because it had been easy — it had not broken her ribs despite its side, and it had not asked her to change or accommodate it despite all else; it found a way around her bones, her organs, her being, and it never once hurt any of it to make a home within her skin.
The topic of love had always been uncertain. Hypothetical at best, and nothing within reach; it was a fairy-tale, romantic love, and nothing more.Something written in novels and tucked between pages. Something poets insisted upon and scholars rarely bothered to define. A concept she could examine, dissect, understand in theory without ever believing it belonged anywhere near her own life.
For years, she had imagined herself standing outside of it, and never because she despised the notion, but because love had always seemed to belong to other people.
It belonged to women who waited by windows and pressed flowers between diary pages. To girls who dreamed of wedding veils and danced until dawn and measured their futures by the names they might someday share.
Annabeth had measured her future in different things, and it had been measured for her by other standards. In degrees earned and books written and cities built and foundations strong enough to outlast centuries.
Love had always seemed like an optional chapter in someone else's story. A pleasant possibility, if she stretched too far; a distraction, perhaps, but certainly not something inevitable.
Certainly not something that would arrive quietly enough that she would only realize it had happened after it was already woven through every corner of her life.
Love was vulnerability and uncertainty and risk. It was offering another person the power to hurt one’s heart simply because one trusted they would not.
Love was hope, and hope was the thing with wings.
But then, so was Icarus.
Annabeth let out a soft breath, her fingers curling against the windowsill.
For most of her life, hope had seemed less like a blessing and more like a dangerous architectural flaw. A weakness in the foundation, a misplanned something in the middle of a plan, a beautiful, beautiful something that invited collapse.
She had watched too many people build entire lives upon wishes.
She had watched students abandon certainty for dreams and return heartbroken. She had watched brilliant women surrender ambitions for promises that dissolved like mist. She had watched her own mother dismiss romance with the same measured certainty one might use to dismiss an unstable bridge.
Hope, according to every lesson she had ever learned, was dangerous because it asked for belief before proof; and Annabeth had always preferred proof.
But standing there before her window, she found that fear was not the strongest thing she felt — wonder was. Somehow, impossibly, she had found herself loving a man who made the world gentler. A man who had never once asked her to become smaller, never demanded pieces of her brilliance in exchange for affection and looked at her ambition and intellect and stubbornness and sharp edges and loved speaking to her because of them.
Not despite them, but because of them, and not in some storybook fashion, with declarations and sighs and fateful strings tying wrists together. No — it was quieter than that. Stranger.
She loved him the way the sea loves the shore — not always gently, not always visibly, but eternally. In tides, in rhythms. In the way her world tilts toward him no matter how far she walks.
She loved the way he looked at her, even when no one else saw. The way he pretended not to know her, because he knew how much it would cost her. The way he listened and, oh, the way he laughed. The way he existed beside her, never taking more than she offered, and yet making her wish she could give everything she ever could.
Still, she was afraid. Afraid, terrified that Love might undo all she has built. That It might soften the walls she had spent a lifetime raising. That, to want him, truly, was to betray the girl she was taught to be. But, oh, gods above and little and almighty.
She touched her hand again, where he had held her, and closed her eyes.
God, she was scared.
But, Lord, she was in love. And what a beautiful thing it was to feel.
To love, not in spite of who she was, but because of it. To love him, exactly as he was.
And against so much of her beliefs, the knowledge did not come with a gasp — it arrived as dawn does, all at once and slow.
She was in love.
The words did not leave her lips. They rose inside her like tidewater, and crest and curled through her chest, filling the hollows of her ribs with warmth and weight. And her mind — oh, her mind ran untethered.
She loved him.
She loved him like the sea loves the moon — pulled by some ancient force that does not need naming, that exists whether or not it is seen, whether or not it is known, whether or not it is believed to exist. He is her ocean, her storm, her shore. The shipwreck and the harbor.
She loved him like fire loves oxygen — wild and bright and gasping to burn. She has never known her thoughts to move like this, never known her hands to tremble without cause, unless the cause is him. And it always is, isn’t it? Always.
He was not a man to her, not merely. He was sunlight caught in saltwater. He was laughter echoing through a canyon of silence. He was every book she’s ever loved and every horizon she’s ever longed for.
He was chaos wrapped in kindness, a storm with gentle eyes.
Her heart, which has always beat steady, logical, reasoned, now sang. It sang, and not to be heard by others, no; it was a private symphony that only the soul and time and space could hear. That oh-so-rare kind of music played when something sacred had taken root in the dark.
She pressed her fingertips to her lips as if the feeling might escape, as if saying her thoughts aloud would break its fragile form — and perhaps it would. Perhaps love, when first realized, was like glass. Too beautiful to bear the weight of words. So she did not name it; instead, Annabeth decided that if anything, she would only feel.
He was beauty, she thought, fierce and stunned. He was the first page of a new book, and the one she would smooth your hands over before she dared turn.
He was the final line of a poem she never wanted to end, because the rhymes, more and more, made more sense and it got some much more beautiful by the word, by the feeling, but the hour.
He was the hush that follows music and the look between two people who should not know each other — and do.
He was not safe, and safety was all she had sought her entire life.
But he was true, and he had her heart in his hands for quite a while. And Percy, ever the gentleman and ever the kindest soul, took care of it with his own.
She was in love, and Annabeth had not told a soul.
Even the thought of it burned too brightly, too intimately, as if to share it would be to spill sacred ink across the wrong parchment. And because she was human and only just too real, she could not rid herself of the feeling of terror that washed over her being the more she thought about that.
She feared what that made her. A girl who lingered too long in front of mirrors now, wondering not how smart she seemed (because she knew she was always smart) but how lovely. A girl who memorized the shade of ribbon he once said suited her. A girl who hoped, perhaps in vain or perhaps in beauty; but hoped nonetheless.
And wasn’t that the most dangerous thing of all?
She felt traitorous, sometimes. As if affection was a crack in her armor. As if to want beauty — to want him — was to betray the foundation of who she was. But when she saw him, when he looked at her as if she were the most marvelous discovery in the world, she could not feel ashamed.
She could not be sorry.
She was no less herself for loving him, Annabeth wanted to believe. For all she knew, it made her more, for it is what happened when something was shared; it passed along, and it kept more than one heart beating. More, as if her soul has met a companion of so, so long before, and oh. There you are.
And what a terrifying thought to be so much more than one ever was.
Love, she wanted so to believe, was not weakness. It was the wind that dared to lift an arrow from the bow, and she felt that it was the why behind every leap.
To her utmost horror, it was not something to be studied like an equation, nor something to categorize and store away. It was not something to be reasoned with, for there was no reason whatsoever in handing a soul and a heart in someone else’s palm that not one’s own. It was lightning strike, yes — that struck once, twice, eternally, and carved light into the sky and made the world more beautiful for having burned.
And while Percy, of course, was not the center of anyone’s world but his own (for his life did revolve after him), he was very much the center of that feeling.
He was the flame she did not know she needed warmth from, and a secret joy in her careful, quiet life. And when he held her on the shore — when he led her away and her feet barely touched the sand and she felt like floating —, Annabeth knew.
She would not say it aloud, for knowing a fact was not to know context or entire rules, but she was his in a sense she had never once believed one could belong to another. It was not something owned or owed or conquered.
Instead, it was something chosen.
She had chosen to love him.
And what a radiant, terrifying, extraordinary choice it was.
[…]
The lecture hall had long since emptied, leaving only muffled echoes and the occasional hush of turning pages. Afternoon light poured in through tall arched windows, striping the worn wooden floor with soft gold. Annabeth sat at the edge of the gallery, her book open across her lap, a finger pressed between the pages but unmoving. She wasn’t reading anymore — not really. She was waiting. Or perhaps just holding still.
Below, her mother spoke in low, measured tones with Professor Westgate, the chair of the architecture faculty, a man with a fondness for Athena’s published works and a tendency to ramble. Athena stood with her hands clasped behind her back, chin tilted at a slight angle — all intellect and scrutiny.
Annabeth watched them for a moment before letting her gaze drift back toward the windows. The day had been long, that far, but it had been a good one. Good in the way only university days could be.
The mornings, that were usually filled with classes, were getting a little less busy the more she advanced on her thesis and final project to hand in — according to Professor Chiron, it would not be long until she presented him something that she was satisfied with, more than only him with her work (a small jab at her insistence in perfection that would never be achieved, and one she deserved for a while now).
Afterward she had spent nearly two hours in the archives searching through sketches and municipal records for an (other) article she was drafting. The piece had grown far larger than intended, which was usually how her best work happened. What began as a simple examination of public spaces had somehow become an exploration of memory, architecture, and the ways people carried history inside buildings long after the original inhabitants were gone.
Professor Chiron had called it ambitious. Whatever it was that he meant, Annabeth had taken that as encouragement.
Congrats on the followers, you and your fics deserve all that love and MORE
I would like to request a fic with these prompts, please:
Percabeth: slow dancing, jealousy, out of the blue love confession
You are seriously my favourite ao3 author ever, and I have been here a long time. Thank you so much for doing this! Much love 🩷
HELLO, honey! hope you're well!
I apologize for how long it took me to even start this bingo. really. sorry. I hope you can forgive me (also, it's an AU. sorry if you didn't want that)
here it is! i sincerely hope you like the fic, love - it's shorter than my usual works (thank God, lol) but I do hope it's nice :)
you're one of my favorite people ever, I swear. thank you so very much for being so, so sweet and so, so lovely all the time. much, much love always, dear 🩷
let's play bingo!
dancing on my own
read it on Ao3
The night was not supposed to have her crying on a balcony.
It had begun too beautifully for that.
The premiere had transformed an entire Manhattan block into gold and light. Cameras flashed endlessly outside the theater; names glittered across giant posters; people in gowns and black tuxedos drifted through the lobby beneath chandeliers like something out of one of Sally’s old romance novels. There had been laughter everywhere tonight — loud, genuine laughter that only existed when people who had survived difficult years finally found themselves somewhere safe.
And Sally deserved this.
Annabeth had thought that the moment she had even known about the movie.
That night, Sally Jackson stood near the center of the reception room glowing beneath soft amber lights, one hand wrapped around Paul’s arm while producers and actors and journalists congratulated her on the adaptation. Her smile looked almost disbelieving still, as though some part of her remained the eighteen-year-old girl who used to write at a tiny kitchen table after midnight while the rest of the world slept.
Percy looked impossibly proud of her. That had been Annabeth’s second thought.
He had spent most of the evening orbiting Sally with the kind of affection only Percy could make look effortless — fixing her dress train when it snagged, stealing appetizers off her plate, making her laugh so hard she nearly cried twice already. Blond hair falling into his eyes and his blue suit slightly crooked because he never wore formal clothes correctly, along with smiling with his entire face.
Beautiful. He looked so, so beautiful, and Annabeth hated herself a little for noticing.
Well, maybe not for noticing — because she had noticed since she was twelve years old and dripping wet and furious at him in a canoe at summer camp — but for still reacting to him this way after all these years.
Because she was twenty-four now, and that was too old, probably, to still feel her pulse stumble every time Percy touched the small of her back to guide her through a crowd or touched her arm and her shoulder just because he knew he could. She was too old to still love him with the same terrible completeness she had at sixteen.
She was probably too old into that feeling to still hope.
And yet.
“Annabeth.”
She turned at the sound of Athena’s voice earlier that evening and nearly startled. Her mother stood beside her in deep emerald silk, elegant and composed as always, though age had softened some of the sharpness from her face.
“You look beautiful tonight,” Athena had said. Those were simple words, normal words, and still they had shaken Annabeth more than they should have.
Because there had been a time in her life when she would have traded entire years just to hear them. But things were easier now. Not perfect — Annabeth doubted perfection existed between mothers and daughters who had once failed each other so catastrophically — but easier. They spoke on the phone sometimes. Athena asked about her projects in Rome. Annabeth visited her on holidays. They were building something carefully from wreckage.
And tonight Athena had even smiled when Percy kissed her cheek hello out of the overjoyment of his heart because of his mother’s success. She had even told him he did a good job with the picking of the venue.
It would have been unimaginable once, but it seemed that everything had changed at some point that Annabeth wasn’t sure she knew she had crossed.
Maybe that was part of the problem that made her chest ache, she thought. Maybe that was somehow the reason why she felt her eyes a little too sensitive to feelings and her heart a little too bruised for the loads of nothing that had happened other than happy stuff.
Sally’s book was a success and the movie was an even bigger one even before it was released. Percy’s side hustle as a suft instructor had somehow landed him in an international surf championship — and he was, somehow, one of the favorites to win —, and no one was happier than the man himself. Annabeth’s own career was thriving, and she had been invited to build a whole entire museum in the heart of New York.
There were only joys all around her, and still she felt stuck. Stuck, somehow, and still life was moving. Moving forward, at that, and she suddenly did not know where she stood inside it.
Music drifted through the ballroom now — something slow and orchestral played by the live quartet near the dance floor — while guests swayed beneath hanging lights.
Matt had dragged Bobby into dancing horribly with some producer’s daughters, and Grover was laughing too loudly beside Juniper near the bar. Thalia had stolen champagne from someone important, she figured, when she found Jason more than mortified and trying to explain something to someone expensive-looking, and Percy—
Percy was dancing with Rachel on the dance floor.
Annabeth felt the sight before she understood it, for it came with a sharp thing beneath her ribs.
Rachel’s red dress moved like liquid beneath the lights as Percy spun her gently across the floor, both of them laughing at something she had said. Rachel’s hand rested on his shoulder as she bent over to laugh over some silly thing he surely said, and Percy leaned down slightly to hear her over the music.
It seemed easy, the sight, and even intimate in the accidental way that hurt the most.
And Annabeth hated that she noticed the details.
They had been friends for years — their friend group had the tendency to enlarge instead of shrink like most did — and Rachel was one of their best friends. She was nice and smart and so very funny, and Annabeth truly loved that she was their friend; but something had changed within the last year, and it made something ugly crawl inside her veins.
Annabeth hated that lately she had started noticing the way Rachel looked at Percy.
It wasn’t friendly anymore, and she could see it. It wasn’t obvious, she gathered, since no one said anything yet; but something softer lived there now. Something hopeful that made Annabeth’s stomach twist in knots.
And Percy… God, Annabeth didn’t know what Percy felt because Percy loved people so openly that it was impossible to tell where friendship ended and something else began. She, at least, couldn’t tell — she had never seen Percy in love, and she didn’t know how that would look on his face.
That was the cruelty of loving him, she figured. Everyone received warmth from Percy Jackson, and everyone received tenderness. He held the world gently in both hands without realizing what that did to people.
Without realizing what it had done to her. For years.
Her throat tightened suddenly at the sight of the pair just a few meters away. Her lungs ached and her heart seemed to have been struck by a crowbar; she looked away immediately, horrified by the sudden sting behind her eyes.
This was ridiculous.
Pathetic, honestly.
Twenty-four years old and on the verge of tears because the man she loved was dancing with another girl at a party.
Except Percy was not just some man she had met a few times and loved just for a while. No, no, no; he was so much more than that and there was so little she could use to describe it.
He was not just some love, some flicker of feeling that she could leave behind to meet something greater. He was summer camp at twelve years old and scraped knees and stolen blue candy and sitting beside her through nightmares she never spoke aloud. He was phone calls from California at three in the morning because he missed New York, and answering her calls from Rome because she missed it just as much — because she missed him.
He was every airport goodbye and hello and picking up a random meal before dropping her home — her apartment that was just two blocks away from hers. He was every almost-confession and moment she had looked at him and thought not now. Not yet. Later, maybe.
Except later had somehow become years, and years, and years. And different routines and continents and hours and now life kept happening around them. People were changing and wanting things and moving forward.
Rachel looked at Percy like a woman preparing to leap, and Annabeth suddenly feared she might lose him simply because she had stayed silent too long.
The thought hit hard enough that she could barely breathe. Her dress seemed tight, all of a sudden, and the bodice she chose seemed to be squashing her ribs and the air and her heart that shouldn’t be so dramatic over something that didn’t even make sense.
He was her best friend, and only that. There was nothing to be hurt over or about.
Before anyone could notice the expression cracking apart on her face, Annbabeth tried to take a breath. A deep inhale that should’ve, maybe, helped somehow; but it was useless.
So she turned on her heels, lowering her head so she wouldn’t have to hide so much in case someone greeted her, and slipped quietly through the crowd and out onto one open balcony on the edge of the place.
Cold air struck her immediately. Manhattan glittered below like scattered stars, the city a beautiful thing to make up for the lack of natural light from the sky. The chaos from inside still reached her ears, but a little more limited now that she was a tad far from it all, and she swallowed a knot.
For a moment, Annabeth only stood there, gripping the railing, breathing hard through the ache lodged inside her chest.
Inside the ballroom, muffled music continued behind glass doors. Someone laughed and cameras still flashed somewhere, and the music was still loud and fast and bubbly.
Annabeth breathed in, trying to center herself to reality, and pressed one hand over her mouth as she tried not to spiral further into that terrible feeling inside his chest. It wasn’t fair, she knew; no one was doing nothing wrong. They were all adults with their own feelings and choices, but the first were taking the best of hers and the latter were being thoroughly regretted.
She did not remember what it felt like not to love him. When she thought about it, in retrospect, maybe she never had.
Annabeth had once tried to calculate it. Not like a serious matter — it was a serious feeling but she often tried to disregard it as such so she wouldn’t freak out and have a meltdown —, but something to do in her loneliness and in the feeling of missing home.
It was just one sleepless night in Rome when rain struck against her apartment windows and solitude pressed heavy enough against her ribs that she found herself staring at the ceiling thinking about Percy again.
Congrats on the followers, you and your fics deserve all that love and MORE
I would like to request a fic with these prompts, please:
Percabeth: slow dancing, jealousy, out of the blue love confession
You are seriously my favourite ao3 author ever, and I have been here a long time. Thank you so much for doing this! Much love 🩷
HELLO, honey! hope you're well!
I apologize for how long it took me to even start this bingo. really. sorry. I hope you can forgive me (also, it's an AU. sorry if you didn't want that)
here it is! i sincerely hope you like the fic, love - it's shorter than my usual works (thank God, lol) but I do hope it's nice :)
you're one of my favorite people ever, I swear. thank you so very much for being so, so sweet and so, so lovely all the time. much, much love always, dear 🩷
let's play bingo!
dancing on my own
read it on Ao3
The night was not supposed to have her crying on a balcony.
It had begun too beautifully for that.
The premiere had transformed an entire Manhattan block into gold and light. Cameras flashed endlessly outside the theater; names glittered across giant posters; people in gowns and black tuxedos drifted through the lobby beneath chandeliers like something out of one of Sally’s old romance novels. There had been laughter everywhere tonight — loud, genuine laughter that only existed when people who had survived difficult years finally found themselves somewhere safe.
And Sally deserved this.
Annabeth had thought that the moment she had even known about the movie.
That night, Sally Jackson stood near the center of the reception room glowing beneath soft amber lights, one hand wrapped around Paul’s arm while producers and actors and journalists congratulated her on the adaptation. Her smile looked almost disbelieving still, as though some part of her remained the eighteen-year-old girl who used to write at a tiny kitchen table after midnight while the rest of the world slept.
Percy looked impossibly proud of her. That had been Annabeth’s second thought.
He had spent most of the evening orbiting Sally with the kind of affection only Percy could make look effortless — fixing her dress train when it snagged, stealing appetizers off her plate, making her laugh so hard she nearly cried twice already. Blond hair falling into his eyes and his blue suit slightly crooked because he never wore formal clothes correctly, along with smiling with his entire face.
Beautiful. He looked so, so beautiful, and Annabeth hated herself a little for noticing.
Well, maybe not for noticing — because she had noticed since she was twelve years old and dripping wet and furious at him in a canoe at summer camp — but for still reacting to him this way after all these years.
Because she was twenty-four now, and that was too old, probably, to still feel her pulse stumble every time Percy touched the small of her back to guide her through a crowd or touched her arm and her shoulder just because he knew he could. She was too old to still love him with the same terrible completeness she had at sixteen.
She was probably too old into that feeling to still hope.
And yet.
“Annabeth.”
She turned at the sound of Athena’s voice earlier that evening and nearly startled. Her mother stood beside her in deep emerald silk, elegant and composed as always, though age had softened some of the sharpness from her face.
“You look beautiful tonight,” Athena had said. Those were simple words, normal words, and still they had shaken Annabeth more than they should have.
Because there had been a time in her life when she would have traded entire years just to hear them. But things were easier now. Not perfect — Annabeth doubted perfection existed between mothers and daughters who had once failed each other so catastrophically — but easier. They spoke on the phone sometimes. Athena asked about her projects in Rome. Annabeth visited her on holidays. They were building something carefully from wreckage.
And tonight Athena had even smiled when Percy kissed her cheek hello out of the overjoyment of his heart because of his mother’s success. She had even told him he did a good job with the picking of the venue.
It would have been unimaginable once, but it seemed that everything had changed at some point that Annabeth wasn’t sure she knew she had crossed.
Maybe that was part of the problem that made her chest ache, she thought. Maybe that was somehow the reason why she felt her eyes a little too sensitive to feelings and her heart a little too bruised for the loads of nothing that had happened other than happy stuff.
Sally’s book was a success and the movie was an even bigger one even before it was released. Percy’s side hustle as a suft instructor had somehow landed him in an international surf championship — and he was, somehow, one of the favorites to win —, and no one was happier than the man himself. Annabeth’s own career was thriving, and she had been invited to build a whole entire museum in the heart of New York.
There were only joys all around her, and still she felt stuck. Stuck, somehow, and still life was moving. Moving forward, at that, and she suddenly did not know where she stood inside it.
Music drifted through the ballroom now — something slow and orchestral played by the live quartet near the dance floor — while guests swayed beneath hanging lights.
Matt had dragged Bobby into dancing horribly with some producer’s daughters, and Grover was laughing too loudly beside Juniper near the bar. Thalia had stolen champagne from someone important, she figured, when she found Jason more than mortified and trying to explain something to someone expensive-looking, and Percy—
Percy was dancing with Rachel on the dance floor.
Annabeth felt the sight before she understood it, for it came with a sharp thing beneath her ribs.
Rachel’s red dress moved like liquid beneath the lights as Percy spun her gently across the floor, both of them laughing at something she had said. Rachel’s hand rested on his shoulder as she bent over to laugh over some silly thing he surely said, and Percy leaned down slightly to hear her over the music.
It seemed easy, the sight, and even intimate in the accidental way that hurt the most.
And Annabeth hated that she noticed the details.
They had been friends for years — their friend group had the tendency to enlarge instead of shrink like most did — and Rachel was one of their best friends. She was nice and smart and so very funny, and Annabeth truly loved that she was their friend; but something had changed within the last year, and it made something ugly crawl inside her veins.
Annabeth hated that lately she had started noticing the way Rachel looked at Percy.
It wasn’t friendly anymore, and she could see it. It wasn’t obvious, she gathered, since no one said anything yet; but something softer lived there now. Something hopeful that made Annabeth’s stomach twist in knots.
And Percy… God, Annabeth didn’t know what Percy felt because Percy loved people so openly that it was impossible to tell where friendship ended and something else began. She, at least, couldn’t tell — she had never seen Percy in love, and she didn’t know how that would look on his face.
That was the cruelty of loving him, she figured. Everyone received warmth from Percy Jackson, and everyone received tenderness. He held the world gently in both hands without realizing what that did to people.
Without realizing what it had done to her. For years.
Her throat tightened suddenly at the sight of the pair just a few meters away. Her lungs ached and her heart seemed to have been struck by a crowbar; she looked away immediately, horrified by the sudden sting behind her eyes.
This was ridiculous.
Pathetic, honestly.
Twenty-four years old and on the verge of tears because the man she loved was dancing with another girl at a party.
Except Percy was not just some man she had met a few times and loved just for a while. No, no, no; he was so much more than that and there was so little she could use to describe it.
He was not just some love, some flicker of feeling that she could leave behind to meet something greater. He was summer camp at twelve years old and scraped knees and stolen blue candy and sitting beside her through nightmares she never spoke aloud. He was phone calls from California at three in the morning because he missed New York, and answering her calls from Rome because she missed it just as much — because she missed him.
He was every airport goodbye and hello and picking up a random meal before dropping her home — her apartment that was just two blocks away from hers. He was every almost-confession and moment she had looked at him and thought not now. Not yet. Later, maybe.
Except later had somehow become years, and years, and years. And different routines and continents and hours and now life kept happening around them. People were changing and wanting things and moving forward.
Rachel looked at Percy like a woman preparing to leap, and Annabeth suddenly feared she might lose him simply because she had stayed silent too long.
The thought hit hard enough that she could barely breathe. Her dress seemed tight, all of a sudden, and the bodice she chose seemed to be squashing her ribs and the air and her heart that shouldn’t be so dramatic over something that didn’t even make sense.
He was her best friend, and only that. There was nothing to be hurt over or about.
Before anyone could notice the expression cracking apart on her face, Annbabeth tried to take a breath. A deep inhale that should’ve, maybe, helped somehow; but it was useless.
So she turned on her heels, lowering her head so she wouldn’t have to hide so much in case someone greeted her, and slipped quietly through the crowd and out onto one open balcony on the edge of the place.
Cold air struck her immediately. Manhattan glittered below like scattered stars, the city a beautiful thing to make up for the lack of natural light from the sky. The chaos from inside still reached her ears, but a little more limited now that she was a tad far from it all, and she swallowed a knot.
For a moment, Annabeth only stood there, gripping the railing, breathing hard through the ache lodged inside her chest.
Inside the ballroom, muffled music continued behind glass doors. Someone laughed and cameras still flashed somewhere, and the music was still loud and fast and bubbly.
Annabeth breathed in, trying to center herself to reality, and pressed one hand over her mouth as she tried not to spiral further into that terrible feeling inside his chest. It wasn’t fair, she knew; no one was doing nothing wrong. They were all adults with their own feelings and choices, but the first were taking the best of hers and the latter were being thoroughly regretted.
She did not remember what it felt like not to love him. When she thought about it, in retrospect, maybe she never had.
Annabeth had once tried to calculate it. Not like a serious matter — it was a serious feeling but she often tried to disregard it as such so she wouldn’t freak out and have a meltdown —, but something to do in her loneliness and in the feeling of missing home.
It was just one sleepless night in Rome when rain struck against her apartment windows and solitude pressed heavy enough against her ribs that she found herself staring at the ceiling thinking about Percy again.
Congrats on the followers, you and your fics deserve all that love and MORE
I would like to request a fic with these prompts, please:
Percabeth: slow dancing, jealousy, out of the blue love confession
You are seriously my favourite ao3 author ever, and I have been here a long time. Thank you so much for doing this! Much love 🩷
HELLO, honey! hope you're well!
I apologize for how long it took me to even start this bingo. really. sorry. I hope you can forgive me (also, it's an AU. sorry if you didn't want that)
here it is! i sincerely hope you like the fic, love - it's shorter than my usual works (thank God, lol) but I do hope it's nice :)
you're one of my favorite people ever, I swear. thank you so very much for being so, so sweet and so, so lovely all the time. much, much love always, dear 🩷
let's play bingo!
dancing on my own
read it on Ao3
The night was not supposed to have her crying on a balcony.
It had begun too beautifully for that.
The premiere had transformed an entire Manhattan block into gold and light. Cameras flashed endlessly outside the theater; names glittered across giant posters; people in gowns and black tuxedos drifted through the lobby beneath chandeliers like something out of one of Sally’s old romance novels. There had been laughter everywhere tonight — loud, genuine laughter that only existed when people who had survived difficult years finally found themselves somewhere safe.
And Sally deserved this.
Annabeth had thought that the moment she had even known about the movie.
That night, Sally Jackson stood near the center of the reception room glowing beneath soft amber lights, one hand wrapped around Paul’s arm while producers and actors and journalists congratulated her on the adaptation. Her smile looked almost disbelieving still, as though some part of her remained the eighteen-year-old girl who used to write at a tiny kitchen table after midnight while the rest of the world slept.
Percy looked impossibly proud of her. That had been Annabeth’s second thought.
He had spent most of the evening orbiting Sally with the kind of affection only Percy could make look effortless — fixing her dress train when it snagged, stealing appetizers off her plate, making her laugh so hard she nearly cried twice already. Blond hair falling into his eyes and his blue suit slightly crooked because he never wore formal clothes correctly, along with smiling with his entire face.
Beautiful. He looked so, so beautiful, and Annabeth hated herself a little for noticing.
Well, maybe not for noticing — because she had noticed since she was twelve years old and dripping wet and furious at him in a canoe at summer camp — but for still reacting to him this way after all these years.
Because she was twenty-four now, and that was too old, probably, to still feel her pulse stumble every time Percy touched the small of her back to guide her through a crowd or touched her arm and her shoulder just because he knew he could. She was too old to still love him with the same terrible completeness she had at sixteen.
She was probably too old into that feeling to still hope.
And yet.
“Annabeth.”
She turned at the sound of Athena’s voice earlier that evening and nearly startled. Her mother stood beside her in deep emerald silk, elegant and composed as always, though age had softened some of the sharpness from her face.
“You look beautiful tonight,” Athena had said. Those were simple words, normal words, and still they had shaken Annabeth more than they should have.
Because there had been a time in her life when she would have traded entire years just to hear them. But things were easier now. Not perfect — Annabeth doubted perfection existed between mothers and daughters who had once failed each other so catastrophically — but easier. They spoke on the phone sometimes. Athena asked about her projects in Rome. Annabeth visited her on holidays. They were building something carefully from wreckage.
And tonight Athena had even smiled when Percy kissed her cheek hello out of the overjoyment of his heart because of his mother’s success. She had even told him he did a good job with the picking of the venue.
It would have been unimaginable once, but it seemed that everything had changed at some point that Annabeth wasn’t sure she knew she had crossed.
Maybe that was part of the problem that made her chest ache, she thought. Maybe that was somehow the reason why she felt her eyes a little too sensitive to feelings and her heart a little too bruised for the loads of nothing that had happened other than happy stuff.
Sally’s book was a success and the movie was an even bigger one even before it was released. Percy’s side hustle as a suft instructor had somehow landed him in an international surf championship — and he was, somehow, one of the favorites to win —, and no one was happier than the man himself. Annabeth’s own career was thriving, and she had been invited to build a whole entire museum in the heart of New York.
There were only joys all around her, and still she felt stuck. Stuck, somehow, and still life was moving. Moving forward, at that, and she suddenly did not know where she stood inside it.
Music drifted through the ballroom now — something slow and orchestral played by the live quartet near the dance floor — while guests swayed beneath hanging lights.
Matt had dragged Bobby into dancing horribly with some producer’s daughters, and Grover was laughing too loudly beside Juniper near the bar. Thalia had stolen champagne from someone important, she figured, when she found Jason more than mortified and trying to explain something to someone expensive-looking, and Percy—
Percy was dancing with Rachel on the dance floor.
Annabeth felt the sight before she understood it, for it came with a sharp thing beneath her ribs.
Rachel’s red dress moved like liquid beneath the lights as Percy spun her gently across the floor, both of them laughing at something she had said. Rachel’s hand rested on his shoulder as she bent over to laugh over some silly thing he surely said, and Percy leaned down slightly to hear her over the music.
It seemed easy, the sight, and even intimate in the accidental way that hurt the most.
And Annabeth hated that she noticed the details.
They had been friends for years — their friend group had the tendency to enlarge instead of shrink like most did — and Rachel was one of their best friends. She was nice and smart and so very funny, and Annabeth truly loved that she was their friend; but something had changed within the last year, and it made something ugly crawl inside her veins.
Annabeth hated that lately she had started noticing the way Rachel looked at Percy.
It wasn’t friendly anymore, and she could see it. It wasn’t obvious, she gathered, since no one said anything yet; but something softer lived there now. Something hopeful that made Annabeth’s stomach twist in knots.
And Percy… God, Annabeth didn’t know what Percy felt because Percy loved people so openly that it was impossible to tell where friendship ended and something else began. She, at least, couldn’t tell — she had never seen Percy in love, and she didn’t know how that would look on his face.
That was the cruelty of loving him, she figured. Everyone received warmth from Percy Jackson, and everyone received tenderness. He held the world gently in both hands without realizing what that did to people.
Without realizing what it had done to her. For years.
Her throat tightened suddenly at the sight of the pair just a few meters away. Her lungs ached and her heart seemed to have been struck by a crowbar; she looked away immediately, horrified by the sudden sting behind her eyes.
This was ridiculous.
Pathetic, honestly.
Twenty-four years old and on the verge of tears because the man she loved was dancing with another girl at a party.
Except Percy was not just some man she had met a few times and loved just for a while. No, no, no; he was so much more than that and there was so little she could use to describe it.
He was not just some love, some flicker of feeling that she could leave behind to meet something greater. He was summer camp at twelve years old and scraped knees and stolen blue candy and sitting beside her through nightmares she never spoke aloud. He was phone calls from California at three in the morning because he missed New York, and answering her calls from Rome because she missed it just as much — because she missed him.
He was every airport goodbye and hello and picking up a random meal before dropping her home — her apartment that was just two blocks away from hers. He was every almost-confession and moment she had looked at him and thought not now. Not yet. Later, maybe.
Except later had somehow become years, and years, and years. And different routines and continents and hours and now life kept happening around them. People were changing and wanting things and moving forward.
Rachel looked at Percy like a woman preparing to leap, and Annabeth suddenly feared she might lose him simply because she had stayed silent too long.
The thought hit hard enough that she could barely breathe. Her dress seemed tight, all of a sudden, and the bodice she chose seemed to be squashing her ribs and the air and her heart that shouldn’t be so dramatic over something that didn’t even make sense.
He was her best friend, and only that. There was nothing to be hurt over or about.
Before anyone could notice the expression cracking apart on her face, Annbabeth tried to take a breath. A deep inhale that should’ve, maybe, helped somehow; but it was useless.
So she turned on her heels, lowering her head so she wouldn’t have to hide so much in case someone greeted her, and slipped quietly through the crowd and out onto one open balcony on the edge of the place.
Cold air struck her immediately. Manhattan glittered below like scattered stars, the city a beautiful thing to make up for the lack of natural light from the sky. The chaos from inside still reached her ears, but a little more limited now that she was a tad far from it all, and she swallowed a knot.
For a moment, Annabeth only stood there, gripping the railing, breathing hard through the ache lodged inside her chest.
Inside the ballroom, muffled music continued behind glass doors. Someone laughed and cameras still flashed somewhere, and the music was still loud and fast and bubbly.
Annabeth breathed in, trying to center herself to reality, and pressed one hand over her mouth as she tried not to spiral further into that terrible feeling inside his chest. It wasn’t fair, she knew; no one was doing nothing wrong. They were all adults with their own feelings and choices, but the first were taking the best of hers and the latter were being thoroughly regretted.
She did not remember what it felt like not to love him. When she thought about it, in retrospect, maybe she never had.
Annabeth had once tried to calculate it. Not like a serious matter — it was a serious feeling but she often tried to disregard it as such so she wouldn’t freak out and have a meltdown —, but something to do in her loneliness and in the feeling of missing home.
It was just one sleepless night in Rome when rain struck against her apartment windows and solitude pressed heavy enough against her ribs that she found herself staring at the ceiling thinking about Percy again.
Congrats on the followers, you and your fics deserve all that love and MORE
I would like to request a fic with these prompts, please:
Percabeth: slow dancing, jealousy, out of the blue love confession
You are seriously my favourite ao3 author ever, and I have been here a long time. Thank you so much for doing this! Much love 🩷
HELLO, honey! hope you're well!
I apologize for how long it took me to even start this bingo. really. sorry. I hope you can forgive me (also, it's an AU. sorry if you didn't want that)
here it is! i sincerely hope you like the fic, love - it's shorter than my usual works (thank God, lol) but I do hope it's nice :)
you're one of my favorite people ever, I swear. thank you so very much for being so, so sweet and so, so lovely all the time. much, much love always, dear 🩷
let's play bingo!
dancing on my own
read it on Ao3
The night was not supposed to have her crying on a balcony.
It had begun too beautifully for that.
The premiere had transformed an entire Manhattan block into gold and light. Cameras flashed endlessly outside the theater; names glittered across giant posters; people in gowns and black tuxedos drifted through the lobby beneath chandeliers like something out of one of Sally’s old romance novels. There had been laughter everywhere tonight — loud, genuine laughter that only existed when people who had survived difficult years finally found themselves somewhere safe.
And Sally deserved this.
Annabeth had thought that the moment she had even known about the movie.
That night, Sally Jackson stood near the center of the reception room glowing beneath soft amber lights, one hand wrapped around Paul’s arm while producers and actors and journalists congratulated her on the adaptation. Her smile looked almost disbelieving still, as though some part of her remained the eighteen-year-old girl who used to write at a tiny kitchen table after midnight while the rest of the world slept.
Percy looked impossibly proud of her. That had been Annabeth’s second thought.
He had spent most of the evening orbiting Sally with the kind of affection only Percy could make look effortless — fixing her dress train when it snagged, stealing appetizers off her plate, making her laugh so hard she nearly cried twice already. Blond hair falling into his eyes and his blue suit slightly crooked because he never wore formal clothes correctly, along with smiling with his entire face.
Beautiful. He looked so, so beautiful, and Annabeth hated herself a little for noticing.
Well, maybe not for noticing — because she had noticed since she was twelve years old and dripping wet and furious at him in a canoe at summer camp — but for still reacting to him this way after all these years.
Because she was twenty-four now, and that was too old, probably, to still feel her pulse stumble every time Percy touched the small of her back to guide her through a crowd or touched her arm and her shoulder just because he knew he could. She was too old to still love him with the same terrible completeness she had at sixteen.
She was probably too old into that feeling to still hope.
And yet.
“Annabeth.”
She turned at the sound of Athena’s voice earlier that evening and nearly startled. Her mother stood beside her in deep emerald silk, elegant and composed as always, though age had softened some of the sharpness from her face.
“You look beautiful tonight,” Athena had said. Those were simple words, normal words, and still they had shaken Annabeth more than they should have.
Because there had been a time in her life when she would have traded entire years just to hear them. But things were easier now. Not perfect — Annabeth doubted perfection existed between mothers and daughters who had once failed each other so catastrophically — but easier. They spoke on the phone sometimes. Athena asked about her projects in Rome. Annabeth visited her on holidays. They were building something carefully from wreckage.
And tonight Athena had even smiled when Percy kissed her cheek hello out of the overjoyment of his heart because of his mother’s success. She had even told him he did a good job with the picking of the venue.
It would have been unimaginable once, but it seemed that everything had changed at some point that Annabeth wasn’t sure she knew she had crossed.
Maybe that was part of the problem that made her chest ache, she thought. Maybe that was somehow the reason why she felt her eyes a little too sensitive to feelings and her heart a little too bruised for the loads of nothing that had happened other than happy stuff.
Sally’s book was a success and the movie was an even bigger one even before it was released. Percy’s side hustle as a suft instructor had somehow landed him in an international surf championship — and he was, somehow, one of the favorites to win —, and no one was happier than the man himself. Annabeth’s own career was thriving, and she had been invited to build a whole entire museum in the heart of New York.
There were only joys all around her, and still she felt stuck. Stuck, somehow, and still life was moving. Moving forward, at that, and she suddenly did not know where she stood inside it.
Music drifted through the ballroom now — something slow and orchestral played by the live quartet near the dance floor — while guests swayed beneath hanging lights.
Matt had dragged Bobby into dancing horribly with some producer’s daughters, and Grover was laughing too loudly beside Juniper near the bar. Thalia had stolen champagne from someone important, she figured, when she found Jason more than mortified and trying to explain something to someone expensive-looking, and Percy—
Percy was dancing with Rachel on the dance floor.
Annabeth felt the sight before she understood it, for it came with a sharp thing beneath her ribs.
Rachel’s red dress moved like liquid beneath the lights as Percy spun her gently across the floor, both of them laughing at something she had said. Rachel’s hand rested on his shoulder as she bent over to laugh over some silly thing he surely said, and Percy leaned down slightly to hear her over the music.
It seemed easy, the sight, and even intimate in the accidental way that hurt the most.
And Annabeth hated that she noticed the details.
They had been friends for years — their friend group had the tendency to enlarge instead of shrink like most did — and Rachel was one of their best friends. She was nice and smart and so very funny, and Annabeth truly loved that she was their friend; but something had changed within the last year, and it made something ugly crawl inside her veins.
Annabeth hated that lately she had started noticing the way Rachel looked at Percy.
It wasn’t friendly anymore, and she could see it. It wasn’t obvious, she gathered, since no one said anything yet; but something softer lived there now. Something hopeful that made Annabeth’s stomach twist in knots.
And Percy… God, Annabeth didn’t know what Percy felt because Percy loved people so openly that it was impossible to tell where friendship ended and something else began. She, at least, couldn’t tell — she had never seen Percy in love, and she didn’t know how that would look on his face.
That was the cruelty of loving him, she figured. Everyone received warmth from Percy Jackson, and everyone received tenderness. He held the world gently in both hands without realizing what that did to people.
Without realizing what it had done to her. For years.
Her throat tightened suddenly at the sight of the pair just a few meters away. Her lungs ached and her heart seemed to have been struck by a crowbar; she looked away immediately, horrified by the sudden sting behind her eyes.
This was ridiculous.
Pathetic, honestly.
Twenty-four years old and on the verge of tears because the man she loved was dancing with another girl at a party.
Except Percy was not just some man she had met a few times and loved just for a while. No, no, no; he was so much more than that and there was so little she could use to describe it.
He was not just some love, some flicker of feeling that she could leave behind to meet something greater. He was summer camp at twelve years old and scraped knees and stolen blue candy and sitting beside her through nightmares she never spoke aloud. He was phone calls from California at three in the morning because he missed New York, and answering her calls from Rome because she missed it just as much — because she missed him.
He was every airport goodbye and hello and picking up a random meal before dropping her home — her apartment that was just two blocks away from hers. He was every almost-confession and moment she had looked at him and thought not now. Not yet. Later, maybe.
Except later had somehow become years, and years, and years. And different routines and continents and hours and now life kept happening around them. People were changing and wanting things and moving forward.
Rachel looked at Percy like a woman preparing to leap, and Annabeth suddenly feared she might lose him simply because she had stayed silent too long.
The thought hit hard enough that she could barely breathe. Her dress seemed tight, all of a sudden, and the bodice she chose seemed to be squashing her ribs and the air and her heart that shouldn’t be so dramatic over something that didn’t even make sense.
He was her best friend, and only that. There was nothing to be hurt over or about.
Before anyone could notice the expression cracking apart on her face, Annbabeth tried to take a breath. A deep inhale that should’ve, maybe, helped somehow; but it was useless.
So she turned on her heels, lowering her head so she wouldn’t have to hide so much in case someone greeted her, and slipped quietly through the crowd and out onto one open balcony on the edge of the place.
Cold air struck her immediately. Manhattan glittered below like scattered stars, the city a beautiful thing to make up for the lack of natural light from the sky. The chaos from inside still reached her ears, but a little more limited now that she was a tad far from it all, and she swallowed a knot.
For a moment, Annabeth only stood there, gripping the railing, breathing hard through the ache lodged inside her chest.
Inside the ballroom, muffled music continued behind glass doors. Someone laughed and cameras still flashed somewhere, and the music was still loud and fast and bubbly.
Annabeth breathed in, trying to center herself to reality, and pressed one hand over her mouth as she tried not to spiral further into that terrible feeling inside his chest. It wasn’t fair, she knew; no one was doing nothing wrong. They were all adults with their own feelings and choices, but the first were taking the best of hers and the latter were being thoroughly regretted.
She did not remember what it felt like not to love him. When she thought about it, in retrospect, maybe she never had.
Annabeth had once tried to calculate it. Not like a serious matter — it was a serious feeling but she often tried to disregard it as such so she wouldn’t freak out and have a meltdown —, but something to do in her loneliness and in the feeling of missing home.
It was just one sleepless night in Rome when rain struck against her apartment windows and solitude pressed heavy enough against her ribs that she found herself staring at the ceiling thinking about Percy again.
“You cannot spend an entire ball refusing every gentleman who asks,” he continued. “People shall begin believing you terribly cruel.”
“Then society shall survive a disappointment.”
He grinned at that, entirely too pleased with himself.
“Oh, come now."
Annabeth’s patience snapped thread by thread.
“I—” she tried, when the man stepped even closer.
“I believe she had already promised the next dance to me, gentleman.”
read it on Ao3
previous chapter | all chapters | next chapter
chapter 35
salty melodies
Percy had reached the conclusion, somewhere between pacing across the library for the seventh time and nearly walking directly into a side table, that he was losing his mind a little.
Not entirely. No; he had most of the reins to his life as his thoughts and his mind. It was just enough of a loss to be deeply inconvenient.
The late afternoon stretched gold through the tall windows of the Jackson estate, painting warm streaks over carpets and bookshelves and the untouched tea that had gone cold nearly an hour ago. Outside, London moved quietly beneath gathering evening clouds, carriages rattling faintly through distant streets.
Inside the house, Percy walked.
And walked.
And walked.
He walked as if movement itself might somehow solve the impossible knot tightening more and more behind his ribs every passing hour.
His mind and his heart alike seemed to be turning circles and galloping miles inside his body, and there was not a second of rest in his day. He could not think of nothing else, breathe another fact, use another distraction that would not lead to the fact that the Chase ball was in two nights.
Two nights, and he was still in London.
In two nights, and he was still very much not traveling north with his mother. Which would have been excellent news if it did not also feel like impending doom for his mother could decide to departure any hour, now, and he would miss the event for the sake of being on the road.
And, surely, he had told Annabeth he would not attend because of his travels, but that had been over ten days before, and he still had not departed. He was still there, and it seemed, in his head, that he was waiting for the event to approach more and more so there would not be chance at all of his presence.
It made him nauseous to think of it.
The very thought of her descending that staircase in a gown chosen carefully by her own hands made his heart trip over itself like a fool. He still remembered the masquerade too vividly; purple silk beneath moonlight and amber eyes behind a mask and her hand in his.
And that had been while half her face remained hidden.
What in God’s name was he supposed to do seeing her fully? In candlelight? Without masks or shadows or excuses to hide behind?
The mere fictional image alone rendered him entirely useless.
Which was precisely the problem.
Percy dragged a hand through his curls and exhaled sharply through his nose. Hee wanted to go. Desperately, in ways that were frankly becoming humiliating.
He wanted a dance, perhaps more than one if selfishness was ever rewarded to those of foolish thoughts. He wanted more than stolen moments between strangers and hidden conversations near walls. He wanted to see her laugh in candlelight and steal her away from dreadful men with terrible opinions on embroidery and music and literature.
He wanted a dance.
God, he wanted a dance.
And perhaps worse than that, he wanted to see if she would look for him. The realization nearly made him stop pacing altogether.
Pathetic.
Absolutely pathetic.
Percy groaned quietly and dropped backward into one of the library armchairs, only to sit there for approximately four seconds before standing again immediately. Stillness proved entirely impossible, because, while his wishes were foolish and vain and entirely new to his brain and heart and chest, the other half of the problem remained just as large.
He could not go. Or rather, he should not.
The distinction mattered little when both possibilities tortured him equally.
The Jacksons had spent years carefully existing at the edge of society instead of within its center. Present enough to avoid suspicion, absent enough to preserve peace. Percy liked it that way. Sally liked it that way, too, for it avoided whispers and endless marriage-minded mothers parading daughters before him like decorative porcelain.
And it avoided questions to every one that carried that same name.
But the Chase ball would be crowded. Important, for it was fed with rumours and wonderings as to why such a reserved family would choose to take part in the social Season they had avoided for decades. The event would be filled with exactly the sort of people who remembered faces and names and attendance lists.
There was also the fact that there would not have masks this time. He would have to arrive as Percy Jackson. He would have to use the family name, he would have to be seen entering the Chase estate openly.
And Annabeth—
God.
Annabeth would be connected to that.
Maybe not immediately, but society survived on patterns and glances and assumptions. How long before someone noticed the frequency with which Percy Jackson looked toward Miss Chase? How long — seconds, really — until someone asked why, out of all the families and events, had Mr. Jackson chosen to attend that one?
How long before someone asked questions she would be forced to answer?
And perhaps Percy himself could survive gossip. He did not particularly care if society decided he was strange or secretive or inappropriately fond of wandering coastlines, but Annabet already lived beneath enough expectation to choke on it.
The thought of making things harder for her made his stomach twist, which should have settled the matter entirely.
It should have.
And yet.
Argh.
Percy crossed toward the window and stared out over the darkening gardens instead, jaw tight.
He had told her he would not be there, and now he had not even left London yet.
At first, that part had genuinely been circumstance. Sally truly had delayed the trip north repeatedly due to correspondence and estate matters and endless adjustments in scheduling. Percy himself had expected to leave nearly four days ago.
Then three.
Then yesterday.
And now he was very much still there, trapped in uncertainty and watching Annabeth try not to look disappointed every time he told her, “My mother has not chosen the departure day yet” and “I am not certain when I will be capable of being back.”
It sounded false now, even to him. It sounded like a poorly constructed excuse from a man retreating from his own offer.
Percy pressed the heels of his palms briefly against his eyes.
God.
What if she thought he had lied? Not maliciously perhaps, but conveniently. What if she believed his offer to attend had never been genuine in the first place?
The thought alone made something ache sharply beneath his ribs, because he had meant every word. He would have walked willingly into a ballroom full of the entire ton for her; he still would.
That was the worst part.
Percy leaned heavily against the window frame, staring at the fading light outside.
The truth — the terrible, embarrassing truth of a foolish man — was that he had begun arranging himself around Annabeth without even noticing. His days curved toward where she might be, and his thoughts returned endlessly to her voice and laughter and sharp clever observations. He missed her after mere hours apart in ways that felt deeply unreasonable.
And now he faced the possibility of leaving for weeks, which was never a problem, a bother, or even a thought in his mind before. He was used to leaving for months — years, once — and it was part of his nature to like the lack of permanence.
The mere idea of weeks, now, hollowed something unpleasant inside him. He had spent years sailing oceans and traveling ports and vanishing from places without grief, but the thought of leaving Annabeth behind felt quietly wrong in a way he could not untangle.
It felt a lot like abandoning a lighthouse midway through a storm.
Percy closed his eyes briefly, and immediately imagined her again in her purple gown, under soft candlelight. Her amber eyes lifting toward crowded rooms perhaps searching without meaning to search.
His chest tightened painfully.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” he muttered aloud to absolutely no one. “Who are you, moron of a man?”
The grandfather clock in the hallway ticked onward mercilessly.
Two nights, and Percy still had absolutely no idea what he was going to do.
He remained by the window for perhaps another three minutes before deciding he could not stay inside the library another second without combusting entirely. His thoughts had become unbearable company day after day, for every single path led back to Annabeth and the ball and disappointing her and the possibility of not seeing her for weeks.
Worse, even, that his thoughts would lead to her believing he had not truly wished to. The idea gnawed at him with increasing violence.
Annabeth trusted carefully, and he knew that much already. She trusted almost reluctantly, like someone handing over pieces of themselves only after inspecting the structural integrity of whoever received them.
And Percy— God, Percy wanted to be worthy of that trust so badly it bordered on painful, and it made the current situation feel catastrophic. Because from her perspective, he had offered, then taken it back due to circumstances, then he had remained conveniently in London while still insisting he would not attend.
It sounded ridiculous. Suspicious even, like a man searching desperately for excuses, and he was not that man.
Percy groaned aloud and pushed himself away from the window with enough force to nearly knock over a decorative globe beside the bookshelf.
“Excellent,” he muttered to himself while catching it. “Now I destroy continents too.”
The globe wobbled accusingly, and Percy pointed at it.
“You are not helping.”
The silence that followed proved deeply uncooperative. With a frustrated exhale, he finally crossed the room decisively and headed toward the front entrance.
Fresh air.
That was what he needed.
And Grover.
Yes. His best friend’s calming presence and mocking eyes when he inevitably spotted Percy’s unease, would be a solution to his misery, maybe.
Or, perhaps, he just needed to throw himself directly into the Thames and spare himself the humiliation of spiraling over one person’s opinion of him.
Except it was not just one person, or even a random woman.
It was Annabeth. Which, unfortunately, changed everything.
By the time he stepped through the front doors and into the cool late-afternoon air, his mind had somehow managed to worsen the situation further.
What if Annabeth believed he lied about not being in town because he did not wish to be affiliated with her even in rumours?
“No,” Percy said aloud immediately, horrified by the implication even existing. “Absolutely not.”
A gardener several feet away glanced at him oddly, and he would remember to apologize later. For now, Percy ignored him completely.
The thought made him want to vomit, because he knew that Annabeth already spent enough time feeling unwanted in spaces she should have belonged in. If she ever thought Percy himself hesitated because of her—
No.
Gods, he needed Grover. His brother usually possessed either wisdom or enough absurdity to interrupt Percy’s catastrophic thinking.
The front doors opened onto cool late afternoon air, the gardens stretching gold and green beneath the lowering sun. Gravel crunched beneath his boots as he descended the steps quickly, curls stirring in the breeze.
He made it approximately halfway across the front gardens before stopping abruptly. Percy crossed back through the house quickly, climbing toward the upper western rooms where sunlight always lingered longest in the evenings. Sure enough, the scent of paint and lavender met him before he even reached the open doorway.
The studio sat in the western wing, where the sunlight lingered longest through tall arched windows. Percy slowed slightly as he approached, the familiar scent of oil paint and turpentine drifting softly through the partially open door.
Inside, Sally stood before a large canvas with paint smudged faintly across one sleeve of her dress. Evening light turned everything warm around her; the scattered brushes, the unfinished landscapes leaning against walls, the curls escaping her braid. His mother sat near the tall windows of her studio, sleeves rolled comfortably to her elbows, one foot tucked beneath herself on the chair as she painted. The canvas before her was still only partially formed; ocean colors and storm clouds and gold beginning to emerge beneath careful brushstrokes.
She looked peaceful.
Which Percy envied immensely.
“Mama?” Percy called.
She stopped her movements with the brush she used, and his mother turned around to see him.
“Hey,” she greeted her son immediately, glancing over her shoulder with a smile that appeared effortlessly. Percy, inevitably, smiled back despite himself. “I thought I heard you leaving.”
He shrugged.
“I made it as far as the front gardens,” he admitted, stepping into the room. “I still intend to bother Grover, but I forgot to ask you something.”
Sally set her brush aside carefully.
“Why, of course,” she smiled at him, and turned her body on the stool to face him. “Whatever is it?”
Percy breathed in briefly.
“Whenever are we leaving for our trip north?” Percy asked. “We have already delayed over a week of our plans, Mama.”
One of her brows lifted slowly.
“I did not know you were so eager to deal with negotiators and old thieves, son, I must confess,” Sally jested lightly.
Percy laughed despite the knot tightening again beneath his ribs. He cleared his throat.
“Well, I am very much not,” he admitted. “It is only that I— uh,” he rubbed at the back of his neck awkwardly. “I imagined that, perhaps, had we left already, we could find some manner of being back sooner. Which now shall not happen, of course, considering the—the length of the travel and all we have to uncover in Dad’s businesses.”
Sally’s expression softened immediately. Her eyes glimmered in an odd way that brushed past Percy — he did not notice whatsoever the straightening of his mother’s posture, wild as his thoughts seemed to be and out of order as his breathing was ever since the overthinking started.
His fidgeting seemed to worsen while he waited for the two seconds before his mother spoke, and it did not escape her eyes, either.
“Oh, son,” she sighed. “You had plans for the following days?” she asked, and something in her tone was amused, while something else in her voice sounded genuinely grieving. “Whyever did you not tell me? We could have travelled before, of course.”
“No, I—” Percy cleared his throat quickly. “I do not have plans. Exactly. Or even at all.”
Which was perhaps technically true.
He only had one very particular ballroom repeatedly haunting his thoughts.
“I merely— why have we not gone already, Mama?” he pressed instead. “It is quite unlike you to delay things that shall give us headaches inevitably. Usually, you wish to have it solved as soon as humanly possible.”
Sally looked at him with shapened eyes, then, and Percy immediately regretted entering the studio at all. His mother had always possessed an almost supernatural ability to observe him far too accurately.
She leaned one hip lightly against the edge of her table, arms folding loosely.
“Well,” she said carefully, “I suppose I delayed because you have appeared rather miserable every time I mentioned the journey.”
Percy blinked, his mouth agape.
“I have not.”
She arched an eyebrow.
“You have.”
“Mama,” he seemed to beg.
“Son,” she challenged.
He exhaled sharply through his nose.
“That is not fair. You notice things.”
She smiled.
“It is a terrible flaw of mine,” Sally agreed solemnly.
Percy groaned and dragged both hands down his face.
“I am not miserable about the trip.”
“No?” she asked gently.
“No,” he insisted.
She squinted her eyes, and held his gaze for moments more. Percy seemed ready to explode. He looked a lot like a man carrying far too many thoughts at once and rapidly approaching collapse beneath all of them.
Sally watched him with entirely too much affection for someone clearly enjoying his suffering. Then, mercifully, she relented.
“Alright,” she agreed at last.
Percy narrowed his eyes immediately, suspicious of how easily she surrendered. Then his mother breathed in softly and leaned back against the paint-stained table behind her.
“I do have other reasons, darling. I was only jesting,” she assured him, and sighed a bit heavily before speaking again. “Those businesses up north are some of those that annoyed me most ever since your father and I got together.”
That pulled Percy’s attention away from his spiraling immediately, and his shoulders loosened a fraction. That much, at least, he understood.
“They are related to a fabric factory that your father inherited from your grandfather, as you know,” Sally continued. “And your grandfather’s business had always been—”
“Very filled with enemies,” Percy completed automatically.
Sally huffed some laughed.
“Aye. Well, I was going to use ‘rather difficult’, but it works, too,” she corrected dryly.
That made Percy grin despite himself. Sally shook her head fondly before continuing.
“And while I do realize that we are more than capable of handling it, especially because I have always been the one doing the numbers, it was your father who handled the talking and the dismissing and the firing people.”
Percy winced sympathetically. It sounded exactly like his father; warm and impossible and beloved in private, but terrifyingly competent when business required it.
“Do you think they shall not respect you?” he tried to guess. “Or me?” Percy asked.
His mother shook her head.
“Oh, no,” Sally laughed softly. “I am certain we can deal with them just fine,” she assured him. Then her expression turned dramatically long-suffering. “Mr. Howells and Mr. Wonberg just annoy me to shreds. I am not exactly glad to see them again.”
Percy barked out a laugh immediately.
“Oh, God. Wonberg still lives?”
She shrugged.
“Unfortunately.”
Percy twisted his nose.
“I thought sheer bitterness might have killed him by now.”
“One can only hope,” Sally sighed.
Percy laughed again, the sound finally genuine after hours of restless misery.
Sally smiled at the sight of it, and her eyes narrowed just slightly, fond and knowing.
Percy knew that look. It was the look she wore whenever she already understood something and was merely waiting to see whether or not he would survive long enough to realize it himself.
Which, frankly, felt unlikely.
“I would like to take Juniper with us,” Sally continued, then, not dwelling too much on making him squirm under his eyes. “I would like her to see the factory. And I would like her to meet Mrs. Aracnes, too.”
Percy frowned at once, attention momentarily pulled away from the disaster that was apparently his emotional state.
“Mrs. Aracnes is still alive?” he asked, genuinely startled.
“Why, yes,” Sally laughed. “I still make gowns with her, son. Quite frequently, I must add.”
That startled him even more.
“But she lives days worth of travel from here,” he said.
Sally nodded.
“Aye. And she has my measurements,” she laughed, explaining the obvious while his mind seemed to not even process the obvious anymore. “And she constantly sends dresses through deliverymen to London. I am not her only customer.”
Percy shook his head in disbelief, though a grin tugged helplessly at his mouth. The room felt lighter suddenly, the late sunlight warmer through the tall studio windows, the knot inside his chest loosening just enough for him to breathe around it.
He remembered Mrs. Aracnes vaguely from childhood — sharp-eyed and terrifyingly talented, with measuring tape perpetually hanging around her neck and fingers constantly pricked by pins. She used to call him “little prince” whenever Sally brought him along to fittings, which he had always found deeply offensive.
“She used to threaten me with sewing needles,” he recalled solemnly.
“You used to hide beneath fabric tables and scare customers,” Sally accused.
“I was five.”
Percy grinned despite himself.
Then, because the question had been clawing at him for over a week now, because it had sat behind every conversation and every restless night and every meeting with Annabeth beneath skies that felt painfully temporary, he finally asked:
“Well, Mama?” he said. “When do we leave, then?”
Sally hummed thoughtfully, already reaching again for her paints.
“On Monday?” she suggested. “I believe Juniper is busy until Sunday and she has classes on Saturday morning.”
The Chase ball would happen on Saturday. Percy’s heart fluttered a bit too carelessly inside his chest, hopeful.
And hope, Percy had learned over years of storms and disappearances and oceans that took what they wished, was a dangerous, dangerous thing.
Because suddenly there was time. Enough for candlelight and music and enough for a fancy dress descending staircases his imagination had no business constructing so vividly.
Enough time for a dance. Without masks and without guessing. Without disappearing before midnight swallowed them whole.
His mind betrayed him immediately with the image of her standing beneath ballroom lights, amber eyes catching gold from chandeliers, curls pinned carefully for the evening only for half of them to escape by the second dance because she moved too much when she laughed.
He wanted to see her. He ached to see her, as though the absence of her had become something physical these past weeks. Something lodged stubbornly beneath his ribs.
God.
And now there was suddenly the possibility—
“Percy?” Sally called, and he realized he had not said a word in over a minute. His eyes snapped back towards his mother, and her worried gaze met his. “Does that work? Do you have plans on Monday?”
He swallowed dryly.
“Uh—” He blinked hard. “No,” he shook his head quickly. “No, no, Mama. No plans at all.”
“You cannot spend an entire ball refusing every gentleman who asks,” he continued. “People shall begin believing you terribly cruel.”
“Then society shall survive a disappointment.”
He grinned at that, entirely too pleased with himself.
“Oh, come now."
Annabeth’s patience snapped thread by thread.
“I—” she tried, when the man stepped even closer.
“I believe she had already promised the next dance to me, gentleman.”
read it on Ao3
previous chapter | all chapters | next chapter
chapter 35
salty melodies
Percy had reached the conclusion, somewhere between pacing across the library for the seventh time and nearly walking directly into a side table, that he was losing his mind a little.
Not entirely. No; he had most of the reins to his life as his thoughts and his mind. It was just enough of a loss to be deeply inconvenient.
The late afternoon stretched gold through the tall windows of the Jackson estate, painting warm streaks over carpets and bookshelves and the untouched tea that had gone cold nearly an hour ago. Outside, London moved quietly beneath gathering evening clouds, carriages rattling faintly through distant streets.
Inside the house, Percy walked.
And walked.
And walked.
He walked as if movement itself might somehow solve the impossible knot tightening more and more behind his ribs every passing hour.
His mind and his heart alike seemed to be turning circles and galloping miles inside his body, and there was not a second of rest in his day. He could not think of nothing else, breathe another fact, use another distraction that would not lead to the fact that the Chase ball was in two nights.
Two nights, and he was still in London.
In two nights, and he was still very much not traveling north with his mother. Which would have been excellent news if it did not also feel like impending doom for his mother could decide to departure any hour, now, and he would miss the event for the sake of being on the road.
And, surely, he had told Annabeth he would not attend because of his travels, but that had been over ten days before, and he still had not departed. He was still there, and it seemed, in his head, that he was waiting for the event to approach more and more so there would not be chance at all of his presence.
It made him nauseous to think of it.
The very thought of her descending that staircase in a gown chosen carefully by her own hands made his heart trip over itself like a fool. He still remembered the masquerade too vividly; purple silk beneath moonlight and amber eyes behind a mask and her hand in his.
And that had been while half her face remained hidden.
What in God’s name was he supposed to do seeing her fully? In candlelight? Without masks or shadows or excuses to hide behind?
The mere fictional image alone rendered him entirely useless.
Which was precisely the problem.
Percy dragged a hand through his curls and exhaled sharply through his nose. Hee wanted to go. Desperately, in ways that were frankly becoming humiliating.
He wanted a dance, perhaps more than one if selfishness was ever rewarded to those of foolish thoughts. He wanted more than stolen moments between strangers and hidden conversations near walls. He wanted to see her laugh in candlelight and steal her away from dreadful men with terrible opinions on embroidery and music and literature.
He wanted a dance.
God, he wanted a dance.
And perhaps worse than that, he wanted to see if she would look for him. The realization nearly made him stop pacing altogether.
Pathetic.
Absolutely pathetic.
Percy groaned quietly and dropped backward into one of the library armchairs, only to sit there for approximately four seconds before standing again immediately. Stillness proved entirely impossible, because, while his wishes were foolish and vain and entirely new to his brain and heart and chest, the other half of the problem remained just as large.
He could not go. Or rather, he should not.
The distinction mattered little when both possibilities tortured him equally.
The Jacksons had spent years carefully existing at the edge of society instead of within its center. Present enough to avoid suspicion, absent enough to preserve peace. Percy liked it that way. Sally liked it that way, too, for it avoided whispers and endless marriage-minded mothers parading daughters before him like decorative porcelain.
And it avoided questions to every one that carried that same name.
But the Chase ball would be crowded. Important, for it was fed with rumours and wonderings as to why such a reserved family would choose to take part in the social Season they had avoided for decades. The event would be filled with exactly the sort of people who remembered faces and names and attendance lists.
There was also the fact that there would not have masks this time. He would have to arrive as Percy Jackson. He would have to use the family name, he would have to be seen entering the Chase estate openly.
And Annabeth—
God.
Annabeth would be connected to that.
Maybe not immediately, but society survived on patterns and glances and assumptions. How long before someone noticed the frequency with which Percy Jackson looked toward Miss Chase? How long — seconds, really — until someone asked why, out of all the families and events, had Mr. Jackson chosen to attend that one?
How long before someone asked questions she would be forced to answer?
And perhaps Percy himself could survive gossip. He did not particularly care if society decided he was strange or secretive or inappropriately fond of wandering coastlines, but Annabet already lived beneath enough expectation to choke on it.
The thought of making things harder for her made his stomach twist, which should have settled the matter entirely.
It should have.
And yet.
Argh.
Percy crossed toward the window and stared out over the darkening gardens instead, jaw tight.
He had told her he would not be there, and now he had not even left London yet.
At first, that part had genuinely been circumstance. Sally truly had delayed the trip north repeatedly due to correspondence and estate matters and endless adjustments in scheduling. Percy himself had expected to leave nearly four days ago.
Then three.
Then yesterday.
And now he was very much still there, trapped in uncertainty and watching Annabeth try not to look disappointed every time he told her, “My mother has not chosen the departure day yet” and “I am not certain when I will be capable of being back.”
It sounded false now, even to him. It sounded like a poorly constructed excuse from a man retreating from his own offer.
Percy pressed the heels of his palms briefly against his eyes.
God.
What if she thought he had lied? Not maliciously perhaps, but conveniently. What if she believed his offer to attend had never been genuine in the first place?
The thought alone made something ache sharply beneath his ribs, because he had meant every word. He would have walked willingly into a ballroom full of the entire ton for her; he still would.
That was the worst part.
Percy leaned heavily against the window frame, staring at the fading light outside.
The truth — the terrible, embarrassing truth of a foolish man — was that he had begun arranging himself around Annabeth without even noticing. His days curved toward where she might be, and his thoughts returned endlessly to her voice and laughter and sharp clever observations. He missed her after mere hours apart in ways that felt deeply unreasonable.
And now he faced the possibility of leaving for weeks, which was never a problem, a bother, or even a thought in his mind before. He was used to leaving for months — years, once — and it was part of his nature to like the lack of permanence.
The mere idea of weeks, now, hollowed something unpleasant inside him. He had spent years sailing oceans and traveling ports and vanishing from places without grief, but the thought of leaving Annabeth behind felt quietly wrong in a way he could not untangle.
It felt a lot like abandoning a lighthouse midway through a storm.
Percy closed his eyes briefly, and immediately imagined her again in her purple gown, under soft candlelight. Her amber eyes lifting toward crowded rooms perhaps searching without meaning to search.
His chest tightened painfully.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” he muttered aloud to absolutely no one. “Who are you, moron of a man?”
The grandfather clock in the hallway ticked onward mercilessly.
Two nights, and Percy still had absolutely no idea what he was going to do.
He remained by the window for perhaps another three minutes before deciding he could not stay inside the library another second without combusting entirely. His thoughts had become unbearable company day after day, for every single path led back to Annabeth and the ball and disappointing her and the possibility of not seeing her for weeks.
Worse, even, that his thoughts would lead to her believing he had not truly wished to. The idea gnawed at him with increasing violence.
Annabeth trusted carefully, and he knew that much already. She trusted almost reluctantly, like someone handing over pieces of themselves only after inspecting the structural integrity of whoever received them.
And Percy— God, Percy wanted to be worthy of that trust so badly it bordered on painful, and it made the current situation feel catastrophic. Because from her perspective, he had offered, then taken it back due to circumstances, then he had remained conveniently in London while still insisting he would not attend.
It sounded ridiculous. Suspicious even, like a man searching desperately for excuses, and he was not that man.
Percy groaned aloud and pushed himself away from the window with enough force to nearly knock over a decorative globe beside the bookshelf.
“Excellent,” he muttered to himself while catching it. “Now I destroy continents too.”
The globe wobbled accusingly, and Percy pointed at it.
“You are not helping.”
The silence that followed proved deeply uncooperative. With a frustrated exhale, he finally crossed the room decisively and headed toward the front entrance.
Fresh air.
That was what he needed.
And Grover.
Yes. His best friend’s calming presence and mocking eyes when he inevitably spotted Percy’s unease, would be a solution to his misery, maybe.
Or, perhaps, he just needed to throw himself directly into the Thames and spare himself the humiliation of spiraling over one person’s opinion of him.
Except it was not just one person, or even a random woman.
It was Annabeth. Which, unfortunately, changed everything.
By the time he stepped through the front doors and into the cool late-afternoon air, his mind had somehow managed to worsen the situation further.
What if Annabeth believed he lied about not being in town because he did not wish to be affiliated with her even in rumours?
“No,” Percy said aloud immediately, horrified by the implication even existing. “Absolutely not.”
A gardener several feet away glanced at him oddly, and he would remember to apologize later. For now, Percy ignored him completely.
The thought made him want to vomit, because he knew that Annabeth already spent enough time feeling unwanted in spaces she should have belonged in. If she ever thought Percy himself hesitated because of her—
No.
Gods, he needed Grover. His brother usually possessed either wisdom or enough absurdity to interrupt Percy’s catastrophic thinking.
The front doors opened onto cool late afternoon air, the gardens stretching gold and green beneath the lowering sun. Gravel crunched beneath his boots as he descended the steps quickly, curls stirring in the breeze.
He made it approximately halfway across the front gardens before stopping abruptly. Percy crossed back through the house quickly, climbing toward the upper western rooms where sunlight always lingered longest in the evenings. Sure enough, the scent of paint and lavender met him before he even reached the open doorway.
The studio sat in the western wing, where the sunlight lingered longest through tall arched windows. Percy slowed slightly as he approached, the familiar scent of oil paint and turpentine drifting softly through the partially open door.
Inside, Sally stood before a large canvas with paint smudged faintly across one sleeve of her dress. Evening light turned everything warm around her; the scattered brushes, the unfinished landscapes leaning against walls, the curls escaping her braid. His mother sat near the tall windows of her studio, sleeves rolled comfortably to her elbows, one foot tucked beneath herself on the chair as she painted. The canvas before her was still only partially formed; ocean colors and storm clouds and gold beginning to emerge beneath careful brushstrokes.
She looked peaceful.
Which Percy envied immensely.
“Mama?” Percy called.
She stopped her movements with the brush she used, and his mother turned around to see him.
“Hey,” she greeted her son immediately, glancing over her shoulder with a smile that appeared effortlessly. Percy, inevitably, smiled back despite himself. “I thought I heard you leaving.”
He shrugged.
“I made it as far as the front gardens,” he admitted, stepping into the room. “I still intend to bother Grover, but I forgot to ask you something.”
Sally set her brush aside carefully.
“Why, of course,” she smiled at him, and turned her body on the stool to face him. “Whatever is it?”
Percy breathed in briefly.
“Whenever are we leaving for our trip north?” Percy asked. “We have already delayed over a week of our plans, Mama.”
One of her brows lifted slowly.
“I did not know you were so eager to deal with negotiators and old thieves, son, I must confess,” Sally jested lightly.
Percy laughed despite the knot tightening again beneath his ribs. He cleared his throat.
“Well, I am very much not,” he admitted. “It is only that I— uh,” he rubbed at the back of his neck awkwardly. “I imagined that, perhaps, had we left already, we could find some manner of being back sooner. Which now shall not happen, of course, considering the—the length of the travel and all we have to uncover in Dad’s businesses.”
Sally’s expression softened immediately. Her eyes glimmered in an odd way that brushed past Percy — he did not notice whatsoever the straightening of his mother’s posture, wild as his thoughts seemed to be and out of order as his breathing was ever since the overthinking started.
His fidgeting seemed to worsen while he waited for the two seconds before his mother spoke, and it did not escape her eyes, either.
“Oh, son,” she sighed. “You had plans for the following days?” she asked, and something in her tone was amused, while something else in her voice sounded genuinely grieving. “Whyever did you not tell me? We could have travelled before, of course.”
“No, I—” Percy cleared his throat quickly. “I do not have plans. Exactly. Or even at all.”
Which was perhaps technically true.
He only had one very particular ballroom repeatedly haunting his thoughts.
“I merely— why have we not gone already, Mama?” he pressed instead. “It is quite unlike you to delay things that shall give us headaches inevitably. Usually, you wish to have it solved as soon as humanly possible.”
Sally looked at him with shapened eyes, then, and Percy immediately regretted entering the studio at all. His mother had always possessed an almost supernatural ability to observe him far too accurately.
She leaned one hip lightly against the edge of her table, arms folding loosely.
“Well,” she said carefully, “I suppose I delayed because you have appeared rather miserable every time I mentioned the journey.”
Percy blinked, his mouth agape.
“I have not.”
She arched an eyebrow.
“You have.”
“Mama,” he seemed to beg.
“Son,” she challenged.
He exhaled sharply through his nose.
“That is not fair. You notice things.”
She smiled.
“It is a terrible flaw of mine,” Sally agreed solemnly.
Percy groaned and dragged both hands down his face.
“I am not miserable about the trip.”
“No?” she asked gently.
“No,” he insisted.
She squinted her eyes, and held his gaze for moments more. Percy seemed ready to explode. He looked a lot like a man carrying far too many thoughts at once and rapidly approaching collapse beneath all of them.
Sally watched him with entirely too much affection for someone clearly enjoying his suffering. Then, mercifully, she relented.
“Alright,” she agreed at last.
Percy narrowed his eyes immediately, suspicious of how easily she surrendered. Then his mother breathed in softly and leaned back against the paint-stained table behind her.
“I do have other reasons, darling. I was only jesting,” she assured him, and sighed a bit heavily before speaking again. “Those businesses up north are some of those that annoyed me most ever since your father and I got together.”
That pulled Percy’s attention away from his spiraling immediately, and his shoulders loosened a fraction. That much, at least, he understood.
“They are related to a fabric factory that your father inherited from your grandfather, as you know,” Sally continued. “And your grandfather’s business had always been—”
“Very filled with enemies,” Percy completed automatically.
Sally huffed some laughed.
“Aye. Well, I was going to use ‘rather difficult’, but it works, too,” she corrected dryly.
That made Percy grin despite himself. Sally shook her head fondly before continuing.
“And while I do realize that we are more than capable of handling it, especially because I have always been the one doing the numbers, it was your father who handled the talking and the dismissing and the firing people.”
Percy winced sympathetically. It sounded exactly like his father; warm and impossible and beloved in private, but terrifyingly competent when business required it.
“Do you think they shall not respect you?” he tried to guess. “Or me?” Percy asked.
His mother shook her head.
“Oh, no,” Sally laughed softly. “I am certain we can deal with them just fine,” she assured him. Then her expression turned dramatically long-suffering. “Mr. Howells and Mr. Wonberg just annoy me to shreds. I am not exactly glad to see them again.”
Percy barked out a laugh immediately.
“Oh, God. Wonberg still lives?”
She shrugged.
“Unfortunately.”
Percy twisted his nose.
“I thought sheer bitterness might have killed him by now.”
“One can only hope,” Sally sighed.
Percy laughed again, the sound finally genuine after hours of restless misery.
Sally smiled at the sight of it, and her eyes narrowed just slightly, fond and knowing.
Percy knew that look. It was the look she wore whenever she already understood something and was merely waiting to see whether or not he would survive long enough to realize it himself.
Which, frankly, felt unlikely.
“I would like to take Juniper with us,” Sally continued, then, not dwelling too much on making him squirm under his eyes. “I would like her to see the factory. And I would like her to meet Mrs. Aracnes, too.”
Percy frowned at once, attention momentarily pulled away from the disaster that was apparently his emotional state.
“Mrs. Aracnes is still alive?” he asked, genuinely startled.
“Why, yes,” Sally laughed. “I still make gowns with her, son. Quite frequently, I must add.”
That startled him even more.
“But she lives days worth of travel from here,” he said.
Sally nodded.
“Aye. And she has my measurements,” she laughed, explaining the obvious while his mind seemed to not even process the obvious anymore. “And she constantly sends dresses through deliverymen to London. I am not her only customer.”
Percy shook his head in disbelief, though a grin tugged helplessly at his mouth. The room felt lighter suddenly, the late sunlight warmer through the tall studio windows, the knot inside his chest loosening just enough for him to breathe around it.
He remembered Mrs. Aracnes vaguely from childhood — sharp-eyed and terrifyingly talented, with measuring tape perpetually hanging around her neck and fingers constantly pricked by pins. She used to call him “little prince” whenever Sally brought him along to fittings, which he had always found deeply offensive.
“She used to threaten me with sewing needles,” he recalled solemnly.
“You used to hide beneath fabric tables and scare customers,” Sally accused.
“I was five.”
Percy grinned despite himself.
Then, because the question had been clawing at him for over a week now, because it had sat behind every conversation and every restless night and every meeting with Annabeth beneath skies that felt painfully temporary, he finally asked:
“Well, Mama?” he said. “When do we leave, then?”
Sally hummed thoughtfully, already reaching again for her paints.
“On Monday?” she suggested. “I believe Juniper is busy until Sunday and she has classes on Saturday morning.”
The Chase ball would happen on Saturday. Percy’s heart fluttered a bit too carelessly inside his chest, hopeful.
And hope, Percy had learned over years of storms and disappearances and oceans that took what they wished, was a dangerous, dangerous thing.
Because suddenly there was time. Enough for candlelight and music and enough for a fancy dress descending staircases his imagination had no business constructing so vividly.
Enough time for a dance. Without masks and without guessing. Without disappearing before midnight swallowed them whole.
His mind betrayed him immediately with the image of her standing beneath ballroom lights, amber eyes catching gold from chandeliers, curls pinned carefully for the evening only for half of them to escape by the second dance because she moved too much when she laughed.
He wanted to see her. He ached to see her, as though the absence of her had become something physical these past weeks. Something lodged stubbornly beneath his ribs.
God.
And now there was suddenly the possibility—
“Percy?” Sally called, and he realized he had not said a word in over a minute. His eyes snapped back towards his mother, and her worried gaze met his. “Does that work? Do you have plans on Monday?”
He swallowed dryly.
“Uh—” He blinked hard. “No,” he shook his head quickly. “No, no, Mama. No plans at all.”
“You cannot spend an entire ball refusing every gentleman who asks,” he continued. “People shall begin believing you terribly cruel.”
“Then society shall survive a disappointment.”
He grinned at that, entirely too pleased with himself.
“Oh, come now."
Annabeth’s patience snapped thread by thread.
“I—” she tried, when the man stepped even closer.
“I believe she had already promised the next dance to me, gentleman.”
read it on Ao3
previous chapter | all chapters | next chapter
chapter 35
salty melodies
Percy had reached the conclusion, somewhere between pacing across the library for the seventh time and nearly walking directly into a side table, that he was losing his mind a little.
Not entirely. No; he had most of the reins to his life as his thoughts and his mind. It was just enough of a loss to be deeply inconvenient.
The late afternoon stretched gold through the tall windows of the Jackson estate, painting warm streaks over carpets and bookshelves and the untouched tea that had gone cold nearly an hour ago. Outside, London moved quietly beneath gathering evening clouds, carriages rattling faintly through distant streets.
Inside the house, Percy walked.
And walked.
And walked.
He walked as if movement itself might somehow solve the impossible knot tightening more and more behind his ribs every passing hour.
His mind and his heart alike seemed to be turning circles and galloping miles inside his body, and there was not a second of rest in his day. He could not think of nothing else, breathe another fact, use another distraction that would not lead to the fact that the Chase ball was in two nights.
Two nights, and he was still in London.
In two nights, and he was still very much not traveling north with his mother. Which would have been excellent news if it did not also feel like impending doom for his mother could decide to departure any hour, now, and he would miss the event for the sake of being on the road.
And, surely, he had told Annabeth he would not attend because of his travels, but that had been over ten days before, and he still had not departed. He was still there, and it seemed, in his head, that he was waiting for the event to approach more and more so there would not be chance at all of his presence.
It made him nauseous to think of it.
The very thought of her descending that staircase in a gown chosen carefully by her own hands made his heart trip over itself like a fool. He still remembered the masquerade too vividly; purple silk beneath moonlight and amber eyes behind a mask and her hand in his.
And that had been while half her face remained hidden.
What in God’s name was he supposed to do seeing her fully? In candlelight? Without masks or shadows or excuses to hide behind?
The mere fictional image alone rendered him entirely useless.
Which was precisely the problem.
Percy dragged a hand through his curls and exhaled sharply through his nose. Hee wanted to go. Desperately, in ways that were frankly becoming humiliating.
He wanted a dance, perhaps more than one if selfishness was ever rewarded to those of foolish thoughts. He wanted more than stolen moments between strangers and hidden conversations near walls. He wanted to see her laugh in candlelight and steal her away from dreadful men with terrible opinions on embroidery and music and literature.
He wanted a dance.
God, he wanted a dance.
And perhaps worse than that, he wanted to see if she would look for him. The realization nearly made him stop pacing altogether.
Pathetic.
Absolutely pathetic.
Percy groaned quietly and dropped backward into one of the library armchairs, only to sit there for approximately four seconds before standing again immediately. Stillness proved entirely impossible, because, while his wishes were foolish and vain and entirely new to his brain and heart and chest, the other half of the problem remained just as large.
He could not go. Or rather, he should not.
The distinction mattered little when both possibilities tortured him equally.
The Jacksons had spent years carefully existing at the edge of society instead of within its center. Present enough to avoid suspicion, absent enough to preserve peace. Percy liked it that way. Sally liked it that way, too, for it avoided whispers and endless marriage-minded mothers parading daughters before him like decorative porcelain.
And it avoided questions to every one that carried that same name.
But the Chase ball would be crowded. Important, for it was fed with rumours and wonderings as to why such a reserved family would choose to take part in the social Season they had avoided for decades. The event would be filled with exactly the sort of people who remembered faces and names and attendance lists.
There was also the fact that there would not have masks this time. He would have to arrive as Percy Jackson. He would have to use the family name, he would have to be seen entering the Chase estate openly.
And Annabeth—
God.
Annabeth would be connected to that.
Maybe not immediately, but society survived on patterns and glances and assumptions. How long before someone noticed the frequency with which Percy Jackson looked toward Miss Chase? How long — seconds, really — until someone asked why, out of all the families and events, had Mr. Jackson chosen to attend that one?
How long before someone asked questions she would be forced to answer?
And perhaps Percy himself could survive gossip. He did not particularly care if society decided he was strange or secretive or inappropriately fond of wandering coastlines, but Annabet already lived beneath enough expectation to choke on it.
The thought of making things harder for her made his stomach twist, which should have settled the matter entirely.
It should have.
And yet.
Argh.
Percy crossed toward the window and stared out over the darkening gardens instead, jaw tight.
He had told her he would not be there, and now he had not even left London yet.
At first, that part had genuinely been circumstance. Sally truly had delayed the trip north repeatedly due to correspondence and estate matters and endless adjustments in scheduling. Percy himself had expected to leave nearly four days ago.
Then three.
Then yesterday.
And now he was very much still there, trapped in uncertainty and watching Annabeth try not to look disappointed every time he told her, “My mother has not chosen the departure day yet” and “I am not certain when I will be capable of being back.”
It sounded false now, even to him. It sounded like a poorly constructed excuse from a man retreating from his own offer.
Percy pressed the heels of his palms briefly against his eyes.
God.
What if she thought he had lied? Not maliciously perhaps, but conveniently. What if she believed his offer to attend had never been genuine in the first place?
The thought alone made something ache sharply beneath his ribs, because he had meant every word. He would have walked willingly into a ballroom full of the entire ton for her; he still would.
That was the worst part.
Percy leaned heavily against the window frame, staring at the fading light outside.
The truth — the terrible, embarrassing truth of a foolish man — was that he had begun arranging himself around Annabeth without even noticing. His days curved toward where she might be, and his thoughts returned endlessly to her voice and laughter and sharp clever observations. He missed her after mere hours apart in ways that felt deeply unreasonable.
And now he faced the possibility of leaving for weeks, which was never a problem, a bother, or even a thought in his mind before. He was used to leaving for months — years, once — and it was part of his nature to like the lack of permanence.
The mere idea of weeks, now, hollowed something unpleasant inside him. He had spent years sailing oceans and traveling ports and vanishing from places without grief, but the thought of leaving Annabeth behind felt quietly wrong in a way he could not untangle.
It felt a lot like abandoning a lighthouse midway through a storm.
Percy closed his eyes briefly, and immediately imagined her again in her purple gown, under soft candlelight. Her amber eyes lifting toward crowded rooms perhaps searching without meaning to search.
His chest tightened painfully.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” he muttered aloud to absolutely no one. “Who are you, moron of a man?”
The grandfather clock in the hallway ticked onward mercilessly.
Two nights, and Percy still had absolutely no idea what he was going to do.
He remained by the window for perhaps another three minutes before deciding he could not stay inside the library another second without combusting entirely. His thoughts had become unbearable company day after day, for every single path led back to Annabeth and the ball and disappointing her and the possibility of not seeing her for weeks.
Worse, even, that his thoughts would lead to her believing he had not truly wished to. The idea gnawed at him with increasing violence.
Annabeth trusted carefully, and he knew that much already. She trusted almost reluctantly, like someone handing over pieces of themselves only after inspecting the structural integrity of whoever received them.
And Percy— God, Percy wanted to be worthy of that trust so badly it bordered on painful, and it made the current situation feel catastrophic. Because from her perspective, he had offered, then taken it back due to circumstances, then he had remained conveniently in London while still insisting he would not attend.
It sounded ridiculous. Suspicious even, like a man searching desperately for excuses, and he was not that man.
Percy groaned aloud and pushed himself away from the window with enough force to nearly knock over a decorative globe beside the bookshelf.
“Excellent,” he muttered to himself while catching it. “Now I destroy continents too.”
The globe wobbled accusingly, and Percy pointed at it.
“You are not helping.”
The silence that followed proved deeply uncooperative. With a frustrated exhale, he finally crossed the room decisively and headed toward the front entrance.
Fresh air.
That was what he needed.
And Grover.
Yes. His best friend’s calming presence and mocking eyes when he inevitably spotted Percy’s unease, would be a solution to his misery, maybe.
Or, perhaps, he just needed to throw himself directly into the Thames and spare himself the humiliation of spiraling over one person’s opinion of him.
Except it was not just one person, or even a random woman.
It was Annabeth. Which, unfortunately, changed everything.
By the time he stepped through the front doors and into the cool late-afternoon air, his mind had somehow managed to worsen the situation further.
What if Annabeth believed he lied about not being in town because he did not wish to be affiliated with her even in rumours?
“No,” Percy said aloud immediately, horrified by the implication even existing. “Absolutely not.”
A gardener several feet away glanced at him oddly, and he would remember to apologize later. For now, Percy ignored him completely.
The thought made him want to vomit, because he knew that Annabeth already spent enough time feeling unwanted in spaces she should have belonged in. If she ever thought Percy himself hesitated because of her—
No.
Gods, he needed Grover. His brother usually possessed either wisdom or enough absurdity to interrupt Percy’s catastrophic thinking.
The front doors opened onto cool late afternoon air, the gardens stretching gold and green beneath the lowering sun. Gravel crunched beneath his boots as he descended the steps quickly, curls stirring in the breeze.
He made it approximately halfway across the front gardens before stopping abruptly. Percy crossed back through the house quickly, climbing toward the upper western rooms where sunlight always lingered longest in the evenings. Sure enough, the scent of paint and lavender met him before he even reached the open doorway.
The studio sat in the western wing, where the sunlight lingered longest through tall arched windows. Percy slowed slightly as he approached, the familiar scent of oil paint and turpentine drifting softly through the partially open door.
Inside, Sally stood before a large canvas with paint smudged faintly across one sleeve of her dress. Evening light turned everything warm around her; the scattered brushes, the unfinished landscapes leaning against walls, the curls escaping her braid. His mother sat near the tall windows of her studio, sleeves rolled comfortably to her elbows, one foot tucked beneath herself on the chair as she painted. The canvas before her was still only partially formed; ocean colors and storm clouds and gold beginning to emerge beneath careful brushstrokes.
She looked peaceful.
Which Percy envied immensely.
“Mama?” Percy called.
She stopped her movements with the brush she used, and his mother turned around to see him.
“Hey,” she greeted her son immediately, glancing over her shoulder with a smile that appeared effortlessly. Percy, inevitably, smiled back despite himself. “I thought I heard you leaving.”
He shrugged.
“I made it as far as the front gardens,” he admitted, stepping into the room. “I still intend to bother Grover, but I forgot to ask you something.”
Sally set her brush aside carefully.
“Why, of course,” she smiled at him, and turned her body on the stool to face him. “Whatever is it?”
Percy breathed in briefly.
“Whenever are we leaving for our trip north?” Percy asked. “We have already delayed over a week of our plans, Mama.”
One of her brows lifted slowly.
“I did not know you were so eager to deal with negotiators and old thieves, son, I must confess,” Sally jested lightly.
Percy laughed despite the knot tightening again beneath his ribs. He cleared his throat.
“Well, I am very much not,” he admitted. “It is only that I— uh,” he rubbed at the back of his neck awkwardly. “I imagined that, perhaps, had we left already, we could find some manner of being back sooner. Which now shall not happen, of course, considering the—the length of the travel and all we have to uncover in Dad’s businesses.”
Sally’s expression softened immediately. Her eyes glimmered in an odd way that brushed past Percy — he did not notice whatsoever the straightening of his mother’s posture, wild as his thoughts seemed to be and out of order as his breathing was ever since the overthinking started.
His fidgeting seemed to worsen while he waited for the two seconds before his mother spoke, and it did not escape her eyes, either.
“Oh, son,” she sighed. “You had plans for the following days?” she asked, and something in her tone was amused, while something else in her voice sounded genuinely grieving. “Whyever did you not tell me? We could have travelled before, of course.”
“No, I—” Percy cleared his throat quickly. “I do not have plans. Exactly. Or even at all.”
Which was perhaps technically true.
He only had one very particular ballroom repeatedly haunting his thoughts.
“I merely— why have we not gone already, Mama?” he pressed instead. “It is quite unlike you to delay things that shall give us headaches inevitably. Usually, you wish to have it solved as soon as humanly possible.”
Sally looked at him with shapened eyes, then, and Percy immediately regretted entering the studio at all. His mother had always possessed an almost supernatural ability to observe him far too accurately.
She leaned one hip lightly against the edge of her table, arms folding loosely.
“Well,” she said carefully, “I suppose I delayed because you have appeared rather miserable every time I mentioned the journey.”
Percy blinked, his mouth agape.
“I have not.”
She arched an eyebrow.
“You have.”
“Mama,” he seemed to beg.
“Son,” she challenged.
He exhaled sharply through his nose.
“That is not fair. You notice things.”
She smiled.
“It is a terrible flaw of mine,” Sally agreed solemnly.
Percy groaned and dragged both hands down his face.
“I am not miserable about the trip.”
“No?” she asked gently.
“No,” he insisted.
She squinted her eyes, and held his gaze for moments more. Percy seemed ready to explode. He looked a lot like a man carrying far too many thoughts at once and rapidly approaching collapse beneath all of them.
Sally watched him with entirely too much affection for someone clearly enjoying his suffering. Then, mercifully, she relented.
“Alright,” she agreed at last.
Percy narrowed his eyes immediately, suspicious of how easily she surrendered. Then his mother breathed in softly and leaned back against the paint-stained table behind her.
“I do have other reasons, darling. I was only jesting,” she assured him, and sighed a bit heavily before speaking again. “Those businesses up north are some of those that annoyed me most ever since your father and I got together.”
That pulled Percy’s attention away from his spiraling immediately, and his shoulders loosened a fraction. That much, at least, he understood.
“They are related to a fabric factory that your father inherited from your grandfather, as you know,” Sally continued. “And your grandfather’s business had always been—”
“Very filled with enemies,” Percy completed automatically.
Sally huffed some laughed.
“Aye. Well, I was going to use ‘rather difficult’, but it works, too,” she corrected dryly.
That made Percy grin despite himself. Sally shook her head fondly before continuing.
“And while I do realize that we are more than capable of handling it, especially because I have always been the one doing the numbers, it was your father who handled the talking and the dismissing and the firing people.”
Percy winced sympathetically. It sounded exactly like his father; warm and impossible and beloved in private, but terrifyingly competent when business required it.
“Do you think they shall not respect you?” he tried to guess. “Or me?” Percy asked.
His mother shook her head.
“Oh, no,” Sally laughed softly. “I am certain we can deal with them just fine,” she assured him. Then her expression turned dramatically long-suffering. “Mr. Howells and Mr. Wonberg just annoy me to shreds. I am not exactly glad to see them again.”
Percy barked out a laugh immediately.
“Oh, God. Wonberg still lives?”
She shrugged.
“Unfortunately.”
Percy twisted his nose.
“I thought sheer bitterness might have killed him by now.”
“One can only hope,” Sally sighed.
Percy laughed again, the sound finally genuine after hours of restless misery.
Sally smiled at the sight of it, and her eyes narrowed just slightly, fond and knowing.
Percy knew that look. It was the look she wore whenever she already understood something and was merely waiting to see whether or not he would survive long enough to realize it himself.
Which, frankly, felt unlikely.
“I would like to take Juniper with us,” Sally continued, then, not dwelling too much on making him squirm under his eyes. “I would like her to see the factory. And I would like her to meet Mrs. Aracnes, too.”
Percy frowned at once, attention momentarily pulled away from the disaster that was apparently his emotional state.
“Mrs. Aracnes is still alive?” he asked, genuinely startled.
“Why, yes,” Sally laughed. “I still make gowns with her, son. Quite frequently, I must add.”
That startled him even more.
“But she lives days worth of travel from here,” he said.
Sally nodded.
“Aye. And she has my measurements,” she laughed, explaining the obvious while his mind seemed to not even process the obvious anymore. “And she constantly sends dresses through deliverymen to London. I am not her only customer.”
Percy shook his head in disbelief, though a grin tugged helplessly at his mouth. The room felt lighter suddenly, the late sunlight warmer through the tall studio windows, the knot inside his chest loosening just enough for him to breathe around it.
He remembered Mrs. Aracnes vaguely from childhood — sharp-eyed and terrifyingly talented, with measuring tape perpetually hanging around her neck and fingers constantly pricked by pins. She used to call him “little prince” whenever Sally brought him along to fittings, which he had always found deeply offensive.
“She used to threaten me with sewing needles,” he recalled solemnly.
“You used to hide beneath fabric tables and scare customers,” Sally accused.
“I was five.”
Percy grinned despite himself.
Then, because the question had been clawing at him for over a week now, because it had sat behind every conversation and every restless night and every meeting with Annabeth beneath skies that felt painfully temporary, he finally asked:
“Well, Mama?” he said. “When do we leave, then?”
Sally hummed thoughtfully, already reaching again for her paints.
“On Monday?” she suggested. “I believe Juniper is busy until Sunday and she has classes on Saturday morning.”
The Chase ball would happen on Saturday. Percy’s heart fluttered a bit too carelessly inside his chest, hopeful.
And hope, Percy had learned over years of storms and disappearances and oceans that took what they wished, was a dangerous, dangerous thing.
Because suddenly there was time. Enough for candlelight and music and enough for a fancy dress descending staircases his imagination had no business constructing so vividly.
Enough time for a dance. Without masks and without guessing. Without disappearing before midnight swallowed them whole.
His mind betrayed him immediately with the image of her standing beneath ballroom lights, amber eyes catching gold from chandeliers, curls pinned carefully for the evening only for half of them to escape by the second dance because she moved too much when she laughed.
He wanted to see her. He ached to see her, as though the absence of her had become something physical these past weeks. Something lodged stubbornly beneath his ribs.
God.
And now there was suddenly the possibility—
“Percy?” Sally called, and he realized he had not said a word in over a minute. His eyes snapped back towards his mother, and her worried gaze met his. “Does that work? Do you have plans on Monday?”
He swallowed dryly.
“Uh—” He blinked hard. “No,” he shook his head quickly. “No, no, Mama. No plans at all.”
Ridiculous.
Annabeth pressed her lips together and turned away sharply from a gown the color of deep amber honey.
She was not here for that.
She was not some dreamy-minded debutante choosing silks in hopes of catching admiration beneath candlelight. She did not care for appearances, and never had. She cared for structures and scholarship and measurements and history and work that mattered.
She cared for plans and precision.
Not blue eyes.
read it on Ao3
previous chapter | all chapters | next chapter
chapter 34
warp beams of moonlit fabric
Her parents did not force her to arrange the ball, at least.
If Annabeth were sincere about the matter, she did believe they would do such — it was very much like her mother to make her stand before consequences until she learned to reshape herself around them properly — but the outcome of their plans was another entirely. They did not make her arrange the ball, no; instead, they arranged it themselves.
And somehow that proved worse.
Somehow, and Annabeth knew, too, that it was a calculated move to make it so. Because the ball became a living thing inside the house. It became a statement, a correction and a consequence of a mistake polished into crystal and candlelight.
It followed Annabeth through hallways and breakfasts and late evenings when she descended quietly for tea only to find invitation drafts abandoned atop tables like reminders left deliberately within her sight. Gold ink and cream paper and the Chase crest pressed into wax for the sake of making her know that it would happen regardless of her thoughts and feelings and amusements.
It became impossible to breathe — more so than usual, she would have to concede — in her own house without hearing mention of guest lists or musicians or floral arrangements or which noble families might attend now that the Chases had finally decided to participate in the Season properly.
And ‘proper’ was a word her parents quite had gotten a liking towards ever since the event was declared inside the estate. Her father spoke of it with controlled calm, but there was always something beneath it pointed carefully toward her without ever needing to become explicit. Comments dropped into conversation like knives wrapped in velvet, about how it was a shame that public appearances required such extensive preparation when one does not naturally enjoy society, said by Frederick when he left their library after scribbling lists and things for much shorter than usual.
Her mother joined, too, with more subtle annoyances directed towards her daughter, with mentions of how it was a fortunate thing that people are willing to overlook peculiar habits in favor of reputation or an observation at breakfast that the family ought to capitalize on the novelty of their participation before the Season concluded entirely.
They were never directly cruel or loud, like they had never been, for Annabeth believed that that would have been easier. Cruelty shouted openly could at least be resisted. But that, that constant, measured pressure, felt like drowning slowly beneath perfectly civilized and stilled waters.
Athena rarely spoke of the ball emotionally at all, much like she did with everything, and it somehow made it sharper. She discussed logistics instead, the placement of orchestras and the necessity of lighting in the ballroom that had never once been used for such things as propriety and leisure. She discussed whether scholars ought to be invited alongside aristocrats to better reflect the Chase family’s “particular intellectual inclinations.”
As though Annabeth herself were an issue in architecture needing elegant integration into society.
And perhaps the worst part was that neither of them ever framed the event as punishment directly, because they would never do that; they simply spoke around it until the shape became undeniable.
The entire ordeal existed because Annabeth had failed to fulfill expectations correctly, because supposed loopholes were not the same thing as obedience and one masquerade attended anonymously was not sufficient proof that their daughter understood her role within society.
So now there would be a ball, and every arrangement surrounding it carried the faint implication of just how much effort was required because of her.
Annabeth endured it quietly, as she always had, for that was the thing about the Chase household. There were no screaming matches or shattered glass or even explosive tempers burning themselves out in minutes. Everything was controlled and precise, and even disappointment arrived elegantly there. It echoed through rooms in the form of prolonged discussions and thoughtful critiques and consequences announced with enough composure to make resistance feel childish by comparison.
Annabeth had learned that very young.
She remembered being eight years old and forgetting a book beneath a tree during a family gathering. It had rained later that afternoon, the pages ruined beyond repair.
Her father had not yelled. Instead, at dinner, he calmly explained before relatives how carelessness reflected a lack of discipline. How intelligent children ought to value the objects connected to their education. The entire table had listened quietly while Annabeth sat very still with burning cheeks and trembling hands hidden beneath linen.
The book itself had mattered far less than the humiliation.
She remembered being eleven and interrupting one of Athena’s colleagues during conversation because she had been excited — so excited — about an architectural theory she had just understood after days trying to rationalize it. Later, her mother had explained privately that brilliance without restraint quickly became unpleasant in women.
Measured disappointment settled inside Annabeth’s bones far deeper than rage ever could have. Because rage passed, but words turned into memory burnt into someone’s brain and history and skin. They lingered.
And silence lingered most of all.
There were days in her childhood where silence filled the Chase household so completely it became its own form of punishment. It was hostile, as much as it tried not to be — there were doors closed softly and already scarce conversations were shortened and praise was withheld so thoroughly that Annabeth learned to survive on scraps of acknowledgment like someone rationing food through winter.
As a child, she had thought so many times that, if she just became perfect enough, perhaps that feeling would stop. So she tried to. Gods, she tried so hard to be the closest thing to perfection a human being could ever be.
Annabeth became careful with her words, with posture and with grades, with appearances, with emotional reactions, with the exact acceptable amount of enthusiasm to display in public settings. She learned which opinions invited approval and which inspired lectures, how to apologize before conflict fully formed and how to swallow hurt before it became visible.
She learned how to fold loneliness inward so neatly that no one noticed its weight.
Mistakes became terrifying things, even if they never were catastrophic, because they echoed. Because consequences in the Chase household stretched endlessly through reminders and subtle observations and the quiet implication that disappointment ought to be remembered properly so improvement could occur.
And Annabeth learned to reduce her errors to near nothing, because it minimized the ache. Because if she could become flawless enough, perhaps she could finally exist inside her own home without feeling perpetually examined.
It never truly worked, and the loneliness remained anyway.
That was maybe the cruelest part, that she had spent years reshaping herself into someone difficult to criticize only to discover that solitude still waited for her at the end of every achievement.
Annabeth breathed in, and tried not to allow the silence to be louder than her thoughts or the breeze that came from open windows.
Out of everything surrounding the event, the invitations became a living thing inside the house. They were still paper and wax and ink and careful calligraphy pressed onto cream-colored parchment beneath Frederick Chase’s sharp gaze, sure; that much could not be changed. But to Annabeth, they seemed to breathe and move through corridors and beneath doors and across dinner tables like ghosts summoned deliberately to haunt her.
Her parents did not ask for her opinion on flowers or music or lighting, because this was not truly a celebration. It was a statement. A correction. A polished and elegant response to what they perceived as defiance.
And Annabeth knew it. Worse — she knew they knew that she knew.
That was always how punishments worked within the house. It was never loud enough to be called cruelty or direct enough to leave bruises one could point to. Instead, everything unfolded with precision and civility and immaculate posture.
It would almost have been easier had they screamed.
But Frederick never screamed. Athena rarely raised her voice at all. If anything, the two of them were a good match simply because they excelled at subtleties and comments spoken into rooms as though Annabeth were invisible while simultaneously ensuring she heard every syllable.
They never said you embarrassed us, but the implication lingered in the air instead, elegant and cold as winter silver. And because no accusation was spoken plainly, Annabeth was never granted the dignity of defending herself.
Ridiculous.
Annabeth pressed her lips together and turned away sharply from a gown the color of deep amber honey.
She was not here for that.
She was not some dreamy-minded debutante choosing silks in hopes of catching admiration beneath candlelight. She did not care for appearances, and never had. She cared for structures and scholarship and measurements and history and work that mattered.
She cared for plans and precision.
Not blue eyes.
read it on Ao3
previous chapter | all chapters | next chapter
chapter 34
warp beams of moonlit fabric
Her parents did not force her to arrange the ball, at least.
If Annabeth were sincere about the matter, she did believe they would do such — it was very much like her mother to make her stand before consequences until she learned to reshape herself around them properly — but the outcome of their plans was another entirely. They did not make her arrange the ball, no; instead, they arranged it themselves.
And somehow that proved worse.
Somehow, and Annabeth knew, too, that it was a calculated move to make it so. Because the ball became a living thing inside the house. It became a statement, a correction and a consequence of a mistake polished into crystal and candlelight.
It followed Annabeth through hallways and breakfasts and late evenings when she descended quietly for tea only to find invitation drafts abandoned atop tables like reminders left deliberately within her sight. Gold ink and cream paper and the Chase crest pressed into wax for the sake of making her know that it would happen regardless of her thoughts and feelings and amusements.
It became impossible to breathe — more so than usual, she would have to concede — in her own house without hearing mention of guest lists or musicians or floral arrangements or which noble families might attend now that the Chases had finally decided to participate in the Season properly.
And ‘proper’ was a word her parents quite had gotten a liking towards ever since the event was declared inside the estate. Her father spoke of it with controlled calm, but there was always something beneath it pointed carefully toward her without ever needing to become explicit. Comments dropped into conversation like knives wrapped in velvet, about how it was a shame that public appearances required such extensive preparation when one does not naturally enjoy society, said by Frederick when he left their library after scribbling lists and things for much shorter than usual.
Her mother joined, too, with more subtle annoyances directed towards her daughter, with mentions of how it was a fortunate thing that people are willing to overlook peculiar habits in favor of reputation or an observation at breakfast that the family ought to capitalize on the novelty of their participation before the Season concluded entirely.
They were never directly cruel or loud, like they had never been, for Annabeth believed that that would have been easier. Cruelty shouted openly could at least be resisted. But that, that constant, measured pressure, felt like drowning slowly beneath perfectly civilized and stilled waters.
Athena rarely spoke of the ball emotionally at all, much like she did with everything, and it somehow made it sharper. She discussed logistics instead, the placement of orchestras and the necessity of lighting in the ballroom that had never once been used for such things as propriety and leisure. She discussed whether scholars ought to be invited alongside aristocrats to better reflect the Chase family’s “particular intellectual inclinations.”
As though Annabeth herself were an issue in architecture needing elegant integration into society.
And perhaps the worst part was that neither of them ever framed the event as punishment directly, because they would never do that; they simply spoke around it until the shape became undeniable.
The entire ordeal existed because Annabeth had failed to fulfill expectations correctly, because supposed loopholes were not the same thing as obedience and one masquerade attended anonymously was not sufficient proof that their daughter understood her role within society.
So now there would be a ball, and every arrangement surrounding it carried the faint implication of just how much effort was required because of her.
Annabeth endured it quietly, as she always had, for that was the thing about the Chase household. There were no screaming matches or shattered glass or even explosive tempers burning themselves out in minutes. Everything was controlled and precise, and even disappointment arrived elegantly there. It echoed through rooms in the form of prolonged discussions and thoughtful critiques and consequences announced with enough composure to make resistance feel childish by comparison.
Annabeth had learned that very young.
She remembered being eight years old and forgetting a book beneath a tree during a family gathering. It had rained later that afternoon, the pages ruined beyond repair.
Her father had not yelled. Instead, at dinner, he calmly explained before relatives how carelessness reflected a lack of discipline. How intelligent children ought to value the objects connected to their education. The entire table had listened quietly while Annabeth sat very still with burning cheeks and trembling hands hidden beneath linen.
The book itself had mattered far less than the humiliation.
She remembered being eleven and interrupting one of Athena’s colleagues during conversation because she had been excited — so excited — about an architectural theory she had just understood after days trying to rationalize it. Later, her mother had explained privately that brilliance without restraint quickly became unpleasant in women.
Measured disappointment settled inside Annabeth’s bones far deeper than rage ever could have. Because rage passed, but words turned into memory burnt into someone’s brain and history and skin. They lingered.
And silence lingered most of all.
There were days in her childhood where silence filled the Chase household so completely it became its own form of punishment. It was hostile, as much as it tried not to be — there were doors closed softly and already scarce conversations were shortened and praise was withheld so thoroughly that Annabeth learned to survive on scraps of acknowledgment like someone rationing food through winter.
As a child, she had thought so many times that, if she just became perfect enough, perhaps that feeling would stop. So she tried to. Gods, she tried so hard to be the closest thing to perfection a human being could ever be.
Annabeth became careful with her words, with posture and with grades, with appearances, with emotional reactions, with the exact acceptable amount of enthusiasm to display in public settings. She learned which opinions invited approval and which inspired lectures, how to apologize before conflict fully formed and how to swallow hurt before it became visible.
She learned how to fold loneliness inward so neatly that no one noticed its weight.
Mistakes became terrifying things, even if they never were catastrophic, because they echoed. Because consequences in the Chase household stretched endlessly through reminders and subtle observations and the quiet implication that disappointment ought to be remembered properly so improvement could occur.
And Annabeth learned to reduce her errors to near nothing, because it minimized the ache. Because if she could become flawless enough, perhaps she could finally exist inside her own home without feeling perpetually examined.
It never truly worked, and the loneliness remained anyway.
That was maybe the cruelest part, that she had spent years reshaping herself into someone difficult to criticize only to discover that solitude still waited for her at the end of every achievement.
Annabeth breathed in, and tried not to allow the silence to be louder than her thoughts or the breeze that came from open windows.
Out of everything surrounding the event, the invitations became a living thing inside the house. They were still paper and wax and ink and careful calligraphy pressed onto cream-colored parchment beneath Frederick Chase’s sharp gaze, sure; that much could not be changed. But to Annabeth, they seemed to breathe and move through corridors and beneath doors and across dinner tables like ghosts summoned deliberately to haunt her.
Her parents did not ask for her opinion on flowers or music or lighting, because this was not truly a celebration. It was a statement. A correction. A polished and elegant response to what they perceived as defiance.
And Annabeth knew it. Worse — she knew they knew that she knew.
That was always how punishments worked within the house. It was never loud enough to be called cruelty or direct enough to leave bruises one could point to. Instead, everything unfolded with precision and civility and immaculate posture.
It would almost have been easier had they screamed.
But Frederick never screamed. Athena rarely raised her voice at all. If anything, the two of them were a good match simply because they excelled at subtleties and comments spoken into rooms as though Annabeth were invisible while simultaneously ensuring she heard every syllable.
They never said you embarrassed us, but the implication lingered in the air instead, elegant and cold as winter silver. And because no accusation was spoken plainly, Annabeth was never granted the dignity of defending herself.
“I held my side of the arrangement, Father,” she said, voice tightening despite her efforts. “You requested that I attend a function of the Season. I did.”
“And I cannot verify it.”
Annabeth stared.
For one absurd second she thought she had misunderstood him.
“You cannot—”
“How am I to know you truly attended?” Frederick interrupted sharply. “Masks covered every face in attendance.”
read it on Ao3
previous chapter | all chapters | next chapter
chapter 33
loopholes and renewed demands
The morning began quietly enough that Annabeth almost trusted it.
Sunlight spilled pale and golden across the breakfast room, slipping through tall windows and catching against the silverware laid with rigid precision atop the long table. Outside, the gardens breathed softly under the early warmth of the day; roses shifted lazily in the breeze, and somewhere farther away she could hear the distant rhythm of hooves against stone from the street beyond the gates.
Annabeth sat alone at the table, one leg crossed beneath the other, a cup of tea cooling untouched near her hand while her eyes skimmed absentmindedly over the same paragraph of notes for the third time.
There would be a seminar the following morning, and it had been a while since she had last felt so anxious for anything related to academia. It was a little short notice, aye; Professor Chiron had spoken almost casually when he informed her of it two days prior, though his eyes had gleamed with enough satisfaction that she immediately understood the weight of the invitation.
She had reason to be worried. To be nervous. When Professor Chiron had told her, Annabeth had barely believed her ears; a visiting professor from overseas had requested attendance after reading one of her published articles.
Not her father’s or her mother’s, and surely not a recommendation written under the Chase name, but her work.
The thought should have made her proud. Perhaps it did, somewhere beneath the anxiety curling tightly around her ribs. She had spent the better part of the previous evening revising arguments she already knew by heart, rearranging citations, imagining questions that might be asked and answers that might fail her.
She had not told her parents, as she often did not, and the decision had not even felt conscious. It simply… Annabeth had no reason whatsoever to believe that it was something worth telling them. Especially considering that the subject was something she was fairly confident in, and there was no need whatsoever for her to risk their pointing and judment on the words and topics she had chosen to present..
Because there was always judgment, sometimes subtle enough to pass for concern and, oftentimes, sharp enough to split her open entirely. And Annabeth had long ago learned that there were victories best kept quietly folded inside oneself, hidden carefully where no one could reach in and reshape them into something smaller.
It was easier that way, safer.
There had been a time, years ago now, when she had tried to share things with enthusiasm before caution learned how to live inside her bones. She remembered being fifteen and speaking too quickly over dinner about a paper she had written — something about ancient structures and civic identity and the emotional implications of public spaces — only for her father to ask whether she had considered choosing topics “more accessible” if she wished to be understood by wider circles.
She remembered her mother asking whether her professors genuinely praised her work or merely praised her effort, as though brilliance in Annabeth was always something still under suspicion that required verification before it could properly exist.
After that, she had slowly learned silence, enough that her achievements became private things, carried quietly back to her room and celebrated only in the sanctuary of locked doors and candlelight. Enough that excitement itself began to feel embarrassing before it could fully bloom.
And perhaps that was why the invitation to speak at the seminar now rested folded carefully beneath her notebook on her desk instead of openly displayed on the breakfast table. It mattered to her, too much, perhaps.
Professor Chiron himself had approached her after lecture with that calm warmth of his, explaining that a visiting academic from overseas had read one of her articles and wished to attend her presentation specifically.
Her article. Her.
The realization still made her stomach twist in knots, when she was first invited, because what if he attended and found her disappointing? What if she spoke too quickly? What if her arguments sounded childish aloud? What if she forgot everything midway through speaking?
Worse, even, what if she succeeded?
Annabeth stared absently down into her tea. That possibility frightened her too, in ways she could barely untangle, for success meant visibility, and visibility meant expectation. Expectation meant scrutiny, and scrutiny, in the Chase household, had never once felt gentle.
And still, beneath all the anxiety and anticipation and careful restraint, there was something warmer too. A small, stubborn ember of pride she refused to extinguish completely, because she had worked for this in long nights bent over books until candlelight blurred across pages, in margins crowded with notes and arguments revised again and again until every sentence said precisely what she meant it to say.
Her work mattered, perhaps, even if she rarely allowed herself to say that aloud.
The sound of footsteps interrupted her thoughts, heavy and measured and very much familiar. Annabeth looked up just as her father entered the room.
Frederick Chase carried tension the way noblemen carried titles: permanently, naturally, woven into posture and expression alike. His jaw was tight already, eyes distant with whatever thoughts had occupied him before entering the room.
Athena followed behind him, and that alone made something uneasy stir inside Annabeth’s stomach.
Her mother was rarely silent when entering a room. Even in restraint there was usually some acknowledgment — a glance, a nod, the faintest movement that signaled awareness and that she was watching, observing and surely cataloguing every single detail of every since thing around them, but not now.
Now Athena looked coldly composed, her mouth a thin line, her attention fixed somewhere far beyond the breakfast table itself.
Annabeth immediately understood two things. First: this conversation had begun before they entered the room, and second: her mother was not there to intervene, but to witness.
A strange heaviness settled over the room as Frederick took his seat at the head of the table without greeting his daughter, and Athena sat beside him.
Annabeth slowly lowered her papers.
“Good morning,” she offered carefully.
Her father barely glanced at her.
“The Season approaches its end,” he said instead. There was no greeting or acknowledgement, obviously, and Annabeth felt her spine straighten instinctively.
There was room for arguing, she knew, because there were at least another handful of weeks before the nonsense was entirely over and became only stories and tales and judgement, but Annabeth was not exactly sure of where it was that she stood in that statement.
“I am aware,” she replied cautiously.
Frederick folded his napkin once. Precisely.
“And yet you have not attended a single proper event like we have agreed before.”
The words landed harder than they should have, and Annabeth blinked once.
“I attended the masquerade, Father, as I have informed you,” she answered evenly. “Which was an event of the Season. In fact, the largest one held thus far.”
Her father laughed in hues of cold. Annabeth felt heat crawl unpleasantly beneath her skin.
“A masquerade,” Frederick repeated. “An event where no one can identify anyone with certainty.”
Her fingers tightened faintly around the edge of the tablecloth.
“It was still an event of the Season.”
Frederick’s face seemed to harden even more in apparently boiling anger.
“It was a loophole, Annabeth.”
The word struck like a slap. She stared at him.
“I beg your pardon?”
Frederick finally looked directly at her then, expression sharp with irritation already half-formed before the conversation even began.
“You heard me perfectly well. A masked ballroom does not fulfill the purpose of your agreement.”
She frowned, her lips twisting in irritation and disbelief.
“I fulfilled exactly what was asked of me.”
“No,” he replied immediately. “You attended the single event where identities could be hidden. You found the one technicality that allowed you to claim obedience without truly participating.”
Something cold and wounded opened quietly beneath her ribs.
“I held my side of the arrangement, Father,” she said, voice tightening despite her efforts. “You requested that I attend a function of the Season. I did.”
“And I cannot verify it.”
Annabeth stared.
For one absurd second she thought she had misunderstood him.
“You cannot—”
“How am I to know you truly attended?” Frederick interrupted sharply. “Masks covered every face in attendance.”
Shock gave way to something hotter.
“You think I lied?”
“I think that you manipulated the agreement to suit yourself,” her father said coolly.
The room seemed suddenly too small, and Annabeth looked instinctively toward her mother.
Athena’s eyes were skeptical towards her daughter, and her posture remained perfectly composed, gaze resting calmly upon Annabeth’s face before she finally spoke.
“I did not expect you to resort to technicalities, Annabeth.”
The complete amusement in her voice hurt infinitely more than anger would have. Annabeth felt it physically, like something tightening around her throat.
“It was not a technicality,” she said carefully, though her pulse had begun to pound painfully behind her eyes. “The agreement was that I were to attend an event of the Season before the Season had run its course. The masquerade was an event. I attended. Thalia herself invited me—”
“How smart, uh? And vain,” her father interrupted her. “Very well. You claim you have attended one, and now you shall attend another.”
Annabeth frowned, physically flinching back in her seat.
“What?”
Frederick’s eyes were stone on her face.
“I cannot be assured that you have attended and kept your word or our deal, Annabeth, and so I have to take precautions so that little brain of yours does not keep drawing circles around us,” he continued with anger. “If you refuse to properly participate in the Season and keep your word, then we shall host a ball ourselves.”
The words landed with horrifying clarity, and Annabeth froze. His words echoed around her brain as if an empty ballroom was greeted with yelling, and it made little sense, the thing her father spoke. Suddenly, her head spun and there was too much happening — people filling the halls, watching and measuring and judging and playing parts on stages they had not been invited to fill.
Her safe spaces, scarce as they already were, swallowed whole beneath noise and expectation and scrutiny. And it came from inside her house, no less.
“No,” she said immediately.
Frederick’s gaze hardened.
“No?”
“I upheld my agreement,” Annabeth repeated, trying desperately to keep her voice steady. “You do not get to change the terms after the fact simply because you dislike how I fulfilled them.”
He huffed some laughter, cold and low.
“It is happening, Annabeth.”
“No.”
The word escaped sharper this time.
Athena finally looked at her fully.
“This is merely the consequence of your own actions.”
Annabeth stared at her mother as though she had physically struck her.
“Mother—”
“You chose evasion instead of honesty, and decided that you would attempt to fool us,” Athena said. “Bad choices have consequences, too, Annabeth.”
That hurt worst of all, she figured, because Annabeth had never been dishonest. Not once in her life, even when it might have been safer not to bet on truth.
Her throat tightened painfully.
“I was honest.”
Frederick scoffed softly.
“You were clever.”
“And since when is that a crime in this household?” she shot back before she could stop herself.
Athena’s expression shifted almost imperceptibly.
Frederick leaned back slowly in his chair.
“This attitude is precisely why you continue to misunderstand your situation.”
Annabeth’s hands trembled beneath the table.
“My situation, Father?”
He nodded minutely.
“You are not a child anymore, Annabeth.”
“No,” she replied tightly. “I gathered that much from the constant negotiations surrounding my existence.”
Athena tilted her head back a bit, and her eyes seemed to be even sharper, even grayer than before.
“Annabeth,” she warned quietly.
“No,” Annabeth repeated, breath shaking now despite her efforts. “No, I would truly like to understand. You ask for attendance, I attend. You ask for appearances, I appear. You ask for compliance and somehow even when I obey it is still wrong.”
“Because obedience is not obedience if it is a lie,” Frederick snapped.
The words cracked through the room while Annabeth stared at him. Something inside her — something thin and stretched and exhausted from years of carefulness — trembled dangerously.
The agreement had never truly been about attendance, much like she knew the deal had never been, either; it all had always been about surrender. About becoming someone easier to display, easier to explain, easier to fit into the shape her father believed acceptable.
Her chest hurt.
“I have never lied to you,” she said quietly, and she knew they already knew that much. Neither her parents answered immediately, and somehow that silence diminished her more than accusations could have.
Annabeth swallowed hard.
“I have never embarrassed this family,” she continued, voice quieter now, more wounded than angry. “I study. I publish. I attend every academic obligation you ask of me. I have done everything properly.”
Frederick’s jaw tightened.
“And still you resist every attempt to prepare you for reality.”
“What reality?” she asked, hurt finally slipping visibly into her voice. “The one where my worth depends upon being seen at the correct ballroom often enough, Father? One that I have never been presented to before, and you somehow wish to make it my fault that I do not belong?”
The word echoed strangely in her head — all of them did, really; honesty and reality and all the others her father had chosen to use. It felt as though she had not spent her entire life trying to make herself understandable to them, trying to make herself good enough in ways that mattered to them. Quiet enough, brilliant enough, obedient enough, useful enough.
It felt as though honesty had not always been the only thing she truly owned.
Annabeth swallowed hard.
“I was sincere,” she said carefully, because if she spoke too quickly now her voice might break. “I told you I attended the masquerade because I did attend it.”
Frederick’s jaw tightened.
“You knew perfectly well what was expected of you.”
She nodded.
“Yes, Father, and I fulfilled it.”
“No,” he replied sharply. “You circumvented it.”
The words struck harder this time, the ones he kept choosing. Circumvented, manipulated, technicality, and each accusation peeled something rawer beneath her skin.
Athena remained quiet beside him, composed and distant in that terrible way Annabeth had known since childhood — the kind of silence that did not soothe and only evaluated.
Annabeth felt suddenly young in the worst possible sense. She felt not young in innocence, but in helplessness.
She felt like standing too straight in too-small shoes while trying desperately not to spill tea at gatherings she had been forced to attend before she even understood what embarrassment meant. She felt like learning early that raised voices meant danger even when no one touched her, and like learning that disappointment could hollow a room faster than anger ever could.
Being a child had never been safe there.
Her breath shortened.
“I kept my word,” she insisted, quieter now, because her throat was tightening painfully. “I have never once lied to either of you.”
Annabeth heard her own breathing afterward, uneven and embarrassingly shallow, and hated it immediately. She hated how small it made her sound. How young.
Frederick’s face did not soften. Athena’s gaze lowered briefly toward the untouched tea someone had somewhen placed before her, as though the porcelain itself required more consideration than her daughter’s trembling voice.
And something inside Annabeth snapped quietly into clarity.
“You know, do you not, Father?” she said softly.
Frederick’s gaze was simply indifferent when he looked at her.
“Whatever is it you speak of?”
Annabeth laughed once under her breath, disbelieving and wounded all at once.
“You know I am telling the truth.”
“Annabeth—” Athena began, again as a warning.
“No,” Annabeth interrupted, sharper this time. “No, because that is what makes this absurd.” Her hands shook harder now. She clasped them together tightly in front of her stomach so neither parent would notice, or perhaps so she herself would not. “You gave me terms. You said I could choose an event to attend. I did.”
Frederick’s jaw tightened immediately.
“You chose the one circumstance—”
“Because it still fulfilled the agreement!” she burst out.
“I held my side of the arrangement, Father,” she said, voice tightening despite her efforts. “You requested that I attend a function of the Season. I did.”
“And I cannot verify it.”
Annabeth stared.
For one absurd second she thought she had misunderstood him.
“You cannot—”
“How am I to know you truly attended?” Frederick interrupted sharply. “Masks covered every face in attendance.”
read it on Ao3
previous chapter | all chapters | next chapter
chapter 33
loopholes and renewed demands
The morning began quietly enough that Annabeth almost trusted it.
Sunlight spilled pale and golden across the breakfast room, slipping through tall windows and catching against the silverware laid with rigid precision atop the long table. Outside, the gardens breathed softly under the early warmth of the day; roses shifted lazily in the breeze, and somewhere farther away she could hear the distant rhythm of hooves against stone from the street beyond the gates.
Annabeth sat alone at the table, one leg crossed beneath the other, a cup of tea cooling untouched near her hand while her eyes skimmed absentmindedly over the same paragraph of notes for the third time.
There would be a seminar the following morning, and it had been a while since she had last felt so anxious for anything related to academia. It was a little short notice, aye; Professor Chiron had spoken almost casually when he informed her of it two days prior, though his eyes had gleamed with enough satisfaction that she immediately understood the weight of the invitation.
She had reason to be worried. To be nervous. When Professor Chiron had told her, Annabeth had barely believed her ears; a visiting professor from overseas had requested attendance after reading one of her published articles.
Not her father’s or her mother’s, and surely not a recommendation written under the Chase name, but her work.
The thought should have made her proud. Perhaps it did, somewhere beneath the anxiety curling tightly around her ribs. She had spent the better part of the previous evening revising arguments she already knew by heart, rearranging citations, imagining questions that might be asked and answers that might fail her.
She had not told her parents, as she often did not, and the decision had not even felt conscious. It simply… Annabeth had no reason whatsoever to believe that it was something worth telling them. Especially considering that the subject was something she was fairly confident in, and there was no need whatsoever for her to risk their pointing and judment on the words and topics she had chosen to present..
Because there was always judgment, sometimes subtle enough to pass for concern and, oftentimes, sharp enough to split her open entirely. And Annabeth had long ago learned that there were victories best kept quietly folded inside oneself, hidden carefully where no one could reach in and reshape them into something smaller.
It was easier that way, safer.
There had been a time, years ago now, when she had tried to share things with enthusiasm before caution learned how to live inside her bones. She remembered being fifteen and speaking too quickly over dinner about a paper she had written — something about ancient structures and civic identity and the emotional implications of public spaces — only for her father to ask whether she had considered choosing topics “more accessible” if she wished to be understood by wider circles.
She remembered her mother asking whether her professors genuinely praised her work or merely praised her effort, as though brilliance in Annabeth was always something still under suspicion that required verification before it could properly exist.
After that, she had slowly learned silence, enough that her achievements became private things, carried quietly back to her room and celebrated only in the sanctuary of locked doors and candlelight. Enough that excitement itself began to feel embarrassing before it could fully bloom.
And perhaps that was why the invitation to speak at the seminar now rested folded carefully beneath her notebook on her desk instead of openly displayed on the breakfast table. It mattered to her, too much, perhaps.
Professor Chiron himself had approached her after lecture with that calm warmth of his, explaining that a visiting academic from overseas had read one of her articles and wished to attend her presentation specifically.
Her article. Her.
The realization still made her stomach twist in knots, when she was first invited, because what if he attended and found her disappointing? What if she spoke too quickly? What if her arguments sounded childish aloud? What if she forgot everything midway through speaking?
Worse, even, what if she succeeded?
Annabeth stared absently down into her tea. That possibility frightened her too, in ways she could barely untangle, for success meant visibility, and visibility meant expectation. Expectation meant scrutiny, and scrutiny, in the Chase household, had never once felt gentle.
And still, beneath all the anxiety and anticipation and careful restraint, there was something warmer too. A small, stubborn ember of pride she refused to extinguish completely, because she had worked for this in long nights bent over books until candlelight blurred across pages, in margins crowded with notes and arguments revised again and again until every sentence said precisely what she meant it to say.
Her work mattered, perhaps, even if she rarely allowed herself to say that aloud.
The sound of footsteps interrupted her thoughts, heavy and measured and very much familiar. Annabeth looked up just as her father entered the room.
Frederick Chase carried tension the way noblemen carried titles: permanently, naturally, woven into posture and expression alike. His jaw was tight already, eyes distant with whatever thoughts had occupied him before entering the room.
Athena followed behind him, and that alone made something uneasy stir inside Annabeth’s stomach.
Her mother was rarely silent when entering a room. Even in restraint there was usually some acknowledgment — a glance, a nod, the faintest movement that signaled awareness and that she was watching, observing and surely cataloguing every single detail of every since thing around them, but not now.
Now Athena looked coldly composed, her mouth a thin line, her attention fixed somewhere far beyond the breakfast table itself.
Annabeth immediately understood two things. First: this conversation had begun before they entered the room, and second: her mother was not there to intervene, but to witness.
A strange heaviness settled over the room as Frederick took his seat at the head of the table without greeting his daughter, and Athena sat beside him.
Annabeth slowly lowered her papers.
“Good morning,” she offered carefully.
Her father barely glanced at her.
“The Season approaches its end,” he said instead. There was no greeting or acknowledgement, obviously, and Annabeth felt her spine straighten instinctively.
There was room for arguing, she knew, because there were at least another handful of weeks before the nonsense was entirely over and became only stories and tales and judgement, but Annabeth was not exactly sure of where it was that she stood in that statement.
“I am aware,” she replied cautiously.
Frederick folded his napkin once. Precisely.
“And yet you have not attended a single proper event like we have agreed before.”
The words landed harder than they should have, and Annabeth blinked once.
“I attended the masquerade, Father, as I have informed you,” she answered evenly. “Which was an event of the Season. In fact, the largest one held thus far.”
Her father laughed in hues of cold. Annabeth felt heat crawl unpleasantly beneath her skin.
“A masquerade,” Frederick repeated. “An event where no one can identify anyone with certainty.”
Her fingers tightened faintly around the edge of the tablecloth.
“It was still an event of the Season.”
Frederick’s face seemed to harden even more in apparently boiling anger.
“It was a loophole, Annabeth.”
The word struck like a slap. She stared at him.
“I beg your pardon?”
Frederick finally looked directly at her then, expression sharp with irritation already half-formed before the conversation even began.
“You heard me perfectly well. A masked ballroom does not fulfill the purpose of your agreement.”
She frowned, her lips twisting in irritation and disbelief.
“I fulfilled exactly what was asked of me.”
“No,” he replied immediately. “You attended the single event where identities could be hidden. You found the one technicality that allowed you to claim obedience without truly participating.”
Something cold and wounded opened quietly beneath her ribs.
“I held my side of the arrangement, Father,” she said, voice tightening despite her efforts. “You requested that I attend a function of the Season. I did.”
“And I cannot verify it.”
Annabeth stared.
For one absurd second she thought she had misunderstood him.
“You cannot—”
“How am I to know you truly attended?” Frederick interrupted sharply. “Masks covered every face in attendance.”
Shock gave way to something hotter.
“You think I lied?”
“I think that you manipulated the agreement to suit yourself,” her father said coolly.
The room seemed suddenly too small, and Annabeth looked instinctively toward her mother.
Athena’s eyes were skeptical towards her daughter, and her posture remained perfectly composed, gaze resting calmly upon Annabeth’s face before she finally spoke.
“I did not expect you to resort to technicalities, Annabeth.”
The complete amusement in her voice hurt infinitely more than anger would have. Annabeth felt it physically, like something tightening around her throat.
“It was not a technicality,” she said carefully, though her pulse had begun to pound painfully behind her eyes. “The agreement was that I were to attend an event of the Season before the Season had run its course. The masquerade was an event. I attended. Thalia herself invited me—”
“How smart, uh? And vain,” her father interrupted her. “Very well. You claim you have attended one, and now you shall attend another.”
Annabeth frowned, physically flinching back in her seat.
“What?”
Frederick’s eyes were stone on her face.
“I cannot be assured that you have attended and kept your word or our deal, Annabeth, and so I have to take precautions so that little brain of yours does not keep drawing circles around us,” he continued with anger. “If you refuse to properly participate in the Season and keep your word, then we shall host a ball ourselves.”
The words landed with horrifying clarity, and Annabeth froze. His words echoed around her brain as if an empty ballroom was greeted with yelling, and it made little sense, the thing her father spoke. Suddenly, her head spun and there was too much happening — people filling the halls, watching and measuring and judging and playing parts on stages they had not been invited to fill.
Her safe spaces, scarce as they already were, swallowed whole beneath noise and expectation and scrutiny. And it came from inside her house, no less.
“No,” she said immediately.
Frederick’s gaze hardened.
“No?”
“I upheld my agreement,” Annabeth repeated, trying desperately to keep her voice steady. “You do not get to change the terms after the fact simply because you dislike how I fulfilled them.”
He huffed some laughter, cold and low.
“It is happening, Annabeth.”
“No.”
The word escaped sharper this time.
Athena finally looked at her fully.
“This is merely the consequence of your own actions.”
Annabeth stared at her mother as though she had physically struck her.
“Mother—”
“You chose evasion instead of honesty, and decided that you would attempt to fool us,” Athena said. “Bad choices have consequences, too, Annabeth.”
That hurt worst of all, she figured, because Annabeth had never been dishonest. Not once in her life, even when it might have been safer not to bet on truth.
Her throat tightened painfully.
“I was honest.”
Frederick scoffed softly.
“You were clever.”
“And since when is that a crime in this household?” she shot back before she could stop herself.
Athena’s expression shifted almost imperceptibly.
Frederick leaned back slowly in his chair.
“This attitude is precisely why you continue to misunderstand your situation.”
Annabeth’s hands trembled beneath the table.
“My situation, Father?”
He nodded minutely.
“You are not a child anymore, Annabeth.”
“No,” she replied tightly. “I gathered that much from the constant negotiations surrounding my existence.”
Athena tilted her head back a bit, and her eyes seemed to be even sharper, even grayer than before.
“Annabeth,” she warned quietly.
“No,” Annabeth repeated, breath shaking now despite her efforts. “No, I would truly like to understand. You ask for attendance, I attend. You ask for appearances, I appear. You ask for compliance and somehow even when I obey it is still wrong.”
“Because obedience is not obedience if it is a lie,” Frederick snapped.
The words cracked through the room while Annabeth stared at him. Something inside her — something thin and stretched and exhausted from years of carefulness — trembled dangerously.
The agreement had never truly been about attendance, much like she knew the deal had never been, either; it all had always been about surrender. About becoming someone easier to display, easier to explain, easier to fit into the shape her father believed acceptable.
Her chest hurt.
“I have never lied to you,” she said quietly, and she knew they already knew that much. Neither her parents answered immediately, and somehow that silence diminished her more than accusations could have.
Annabeth swallowed hard.
“I have never embarrassed this family,” she continued, voice quieter now, more wounded than angry. “I study. I publish. I attend every academic obligation you ask of me. I have done everything properly.”
Frederick’s jaw tightened.
“And still you resist every attempt to prepare you for reality.”
“What reality?” she asked, hurt finally slipping visibly into her voice. “The one where my worth depends upon being seen at the correct ballroom often enough, Father? One that I have never been presented to before, and you somehow wish to make it my fault that I do not belong?”
The word echoed strangely in her head — all of them did, really; honesty and reality and all the others her father had chosen to use. It felt as though she had not spent her entire life trying to make herself understandable to them, trying to make herself good enough in ways that mattered to them. Quiet enough, brilliant enough, obedient enough, useful enough.
It felt as though honesty had not always been the only thing she truly owned.
Annabeth swallowed hard.
“I was sincere,” she said carefully, because if she spoke too quickly now her voice might break. “I told you I attended the masquerade because I did attend it.”
Frederick’s jaw tightened.
“You knew perfectly well what was expected of you.”
She nodded.
“Yes, Father, and I fulfilled it.”
“No,” he replied sharply. “You circumvented it.”
The words struck harder this time, the ones he kept choosing. Circumvented, manipulated, technicality, and each accusation peeled something rawer beneath her skin.
Athena remained quiet beside him, composed and distant in that terrible way Annabeth had known since childhood — the kind of silence that did not soothe and only evaluated.
Annabeth felt suddenly young in the worst possible sense. She felt not young in innocence, but in helplessness.
She felt like standing too straight in too-small shoes while trying desperately not to spill tea at gatherings she had been forced to attend before she even understood what embarrassment meant. She felt like learning early that raised voices meant danger even when no one touched her, and like learning that disappointment could hollow a room faster than anger ever could.
Being a child had never been safe there.
Her breath shortened.
“I kept my word,” she insisted, quieter now, because her throat was tightening painfully. “I have never once lied to either of you.”
Annabeth heard her own breathing afterward, uneven and embarrassingly shallow, and hated it immediately. She hated how small it made her sound. How young.
Frederick’s face did not soften. Athena’s gaze lowered briefly toward the untouched tea someone had somewhen placed before her, as though the porcelain itself required more consideration than her daughter’s trembling voice.
And something inside Annabeth snapped quietly into clarity.
“You know, do you not, Father?” she said softly.
Frederick’s gaze was simply indifferent when he looked at her.
“Whatever is it you speak of?”
Annabeth laughed once under her breath, disbelieving and wounded all at once.
“You know I am telling the truth.”
“Annabeth—” Athena began, again as a warning.
“No,” Annabeth interrupted, sharper this time. “No, because that is what makes this absurd.” Her hands shook harder now. She clasped them together tightly in front of her stomach so neither parent would notice, or perhaps so she herself would not. “You gave me terms. You said I could choose an event to attend. I did.”
Frederick’s jaw tightened immediately.
“You chose the one circumstance—”
“Because it still fulfilled the agreement!” she burst out.
“I held my side of the arrangement, Father,” she said, voice tightening despite her efforts. “You requested that I attend a function of the Season. I did.”
“And I cannot verify it.”
Annabeth stared.
For one absurd second she thought she had misunderstood him.
“You cannot—”
“How am I to know you truly attended?” Frederick interrupted sharply. “Masks covered every face in attendance.”
read it on Ao3
previous chapter | all chapters | next chapter
chapter 33
loopholes and renewed demands
The morning began quietly enough that Annabeth almost trusted it.
Sunlight spilled pale and golden across the breakfast room, slipping through tall windows and catching against the silverware laid with rigid precision atop the long table. Outside, the gardens breathed softly under the early warmth of the day; roses shifted lazily in the breeze, and somewhere farther away she could hear the distant rhythm of hooves against stone from the street beyond the gates.
Annabeth sat alone at the table, one leg crossed beneath the other, a cup of tea cooling untouched near her hand while her eyes skimmed absentmindedly over the same paragraph of notes for the third time.
There would be a seminar the following morning, and it had been a while since she had last felt so anxious for anything related to academia. It was a little short notice, aye; Professor Chiron had spoken almost casually when he informed her of it two days prior, though his eyes had gleamed with enough satisfaction that she immediately understood the weight of the invitation.
She had reason to be worried. To be nervous. When Professor Chiron had told her, Annabeth had barely believed her ears; a visiting professor from overseas had requested attendance after reading one of her published articles.
Not her father’s or her mother’s, and surely not a recommendation written under the Chase name, but her work.
The thought should have made her proud. Perhaps it did, somewhere beneath the anxiety curling tightly around her ribs. She had spent the better part of the previous evening revising arguments she already knew by heart, rearranging citations, imagining questions that might be asked and answers that might fail her.
She had not told her parents, as she often did not, and the decision had not even felt conscious. It simply… Annabeth had no reason whatsoever to believe that it was something worth telling them. Especially considering that the subject was something she was fairly confident in, and there was no need whatsoever for her to risk their pointing and judment on the words and topics she had chosen to present..
Because there was always judgment, sometimes subtle enough to pass for concern and, oftentimes, sharp enough to split her open entirely. And Annabeth had long ago learned that there were victories best kept quietly folded inside oneself, hidden carefully where no one could reach in and reshape them into something smaller.
It was easier that way, safer.
There had been a time, years ago now, when she had tried to share things with enthusiasm before caution learned how to live inside her bones. She remembered being fifteen and speaking too quickly over dinner about a paper she had written — something about ancient structures and civic identity and the emotional implications of public spaces — only for her father to ask whether she had considered choosing topics “more accessible” if she wished to be understood by wider circles.
She remembered her mother asking whether her professors genuinely praised her work or merely praised her effort, as though brilliance in Annabeth was always something still under suspicion that required verification before it could properly exist.
After that, she had slowly learned silence, enough that her achievements became private things, carried quietly back to her room and celebrated only in the sanctuary of locked doors and candlelight. Enough that excitement itself began to feel embarrassing before it could fully bloom.
And perhaps that was why the invitation to speak at the seminar now rested folded carefully beneath her notebook on her desk instead of openly displayed on the breakfast table. It mattered to her, too much, perhaps.
Professor Chiron himself had approached her after lecture with that calm warmth of his, explaining that a visiting academic from overseas had read one of her articles and wished to attend her presentation specifically.
Her article. Her.
The realization still made her stomach twist in knots, when she was first invited, because what if he attended and found her disappointing? What if she spoke too quickly? What if her arguments sounded childish aloud? What if she forgot everything midway through speaking?
Worse, even, what if she succeeded?
Annabeth stared absently down into her tea. That possibility frightened her too, in ways she could barely untangle, for success meant visibility, and visibility meant expectation. Expectation meant scrutiny, and scrutiny, in the Chase household, had never once felt gentle.
And still, beneath all the anxiety and anticipation and careful restraint, there was something warmer too. A small, stubborn ember of pride she refused to extinguish completely, because she had worked for this in long nights bent over books until candlelight blurred across pages, in margins crowded with notes and arguments revised again and again until every sentence said precisely what she meant it to say.
Her work mattered, perhaps, even if she rarely allowed herself to say that aloud.
The sound of footsteps interrupted her thoughts, heavy and measured and very much familiar. Annabeth looked up just as her father entered the room.
Frederick Chase carried tension the way noblemen carried titles: permanently, naturally, woven into posture and expression alike. His jaw was tight already, eyes distant with whatever thoughts had occupied him before entering the room.
Athena followed behind him, and that alone made something uneasy stir inside Annabeth’s stomach.
Her mother was rarely silent when entering a room. Even in restraint there was usually some acknowledgment — a glance, a nod, the faintest movement that signaled awareness and that she was watching, observing and surely cataloguing every single detail of every since thing around them, but not now.
Now Athena looked coldly composed, her mouth a thin line, her attention fixed somewhere far beyond the breakfast table itself.
Annabeth immediately understood two things. First: this conversation had begun before they entered the room, and second: her mother was not there to intervene, but to witness.
A strange heaviness settled over the room as Frederick took his seat at the head of the table without greeting his daughter, and Athena sat beside him.
Annabeth slowly lowered her papers.
“Good morning,” she offered carefully.
Her father barely glanced at her.
“The Season approaches its end,” he said instead. There was no greeting or acknowledgement, obviously, and Annabeth felt her spine straighten instinctively.
There was room for arguing, she knew, because there were at least another handful of weeks before the nonsense was entirely over and became only stories and tales and judgement, but Annabeth was not exactly sure of where it was that she stood in that statement.
“I am aware,” she replied cautiously.
Frederick folded his napkin once. Precisely.
“And yet you have not attended a single proper event like we have agreed before.”
The words landed harder than they should have, and Annabeth blinked once.
“I attended the masquerade, Father, as I have informed you,” she answered evenly. “Which was an event of the Season. In fact, the largest one held thus far.”
Her father laughed in hues of cold. Annabeth felt heat crawl unpleasantly beneath her skin.
“A masquerade,” Frederick repeated. “An event where no one can identify anyone with certainty.”
Her fingers tightened faintly around the edge of the tablecloth.
“It was still an event of the Season.”
Frederick’s face seemed to harden even more in apparently boiling anger.
“It was a loophole, Annabeth.”
The word struck like a slap. She stared at him.
“I beg your pardon?”
Frederick finally looked directly at her then, expression sharp with irritation already half-formed before the conversation even began.
“You heard me perfectly well. A masked ballroom does not fulfill the purpose of your agreement.”
She frowned, her lips twisting in irritation and disbelief.
“I fulfilled exactly what was asked of me.”
“No,” he replied immediately. “You attended the single event where identities could be hidden. You found the one technicality that allowed you to claim obedience without truly participating.”
Something cold and wounded opened quietly beneath her ribs.
“I held my side of the arrangement, Father,” she said, voice tightening despite her efforts. “You requested that I attend a function of the Season. I did.”
“And I cannot verify it.”
Annabeth stared.
For one absurd second she thought she had misunderstood him.
“You cannot—”
“How am I to know you truly attended?” Frederick interrupted sharply. “Masks covered every face in attendance.”
Shock gave way to something hotter.
“You think I lied?”
“I think that you manipulated the agreement to suit yourself,” her father said coolly.
The room seemed suddenly too small, and Annabeth looked instinctively toward her mother.
Athena’s eyes were skeptical towards her daughter, and her posture remained perfectly composed, gaze resting calmly upon Annabeth’s face before she finally spoke.
“I did not expect you to resort to technicalities, Annabeth.”
The complete amusement in her voice hurt infinitely more than anger would have. Annabeth felt it physically, like something tightening around her throat.
“It was not a technicality,” she said carefully, though her pulse had begun to pound painfully behind her eyes. “The agreement was that I were to attend an event of the Season before the Season had run its course. The masquerade was an event. I attended. Thalia herself invited me—”
“How smart, uh? And vain,” her father interrupted her. “Very well. You claim you have attended one, and now you shall attend another.”
Annabeth frowned, physically flinching back in her seat.
“What?”
Frederick’s eyes were stone on her face.
“I cannot be assured that you have attended and kept your word or our deal, Annabeth, and so I have to take precautions so that little brain of yours does not keep drawing circles around us,” he continued with anger. “If you refuse to properly participate in the Season and keep your word, then we shall host a ball ourselves.”
The words landed with horrifying clarity, and Annabeth froze. His words echoed around her brain as if an empty ballroom was greeted with yelling, and it made little sense, the thing her father spoke. Suddenly, her head spun and there was too much happening — people filling the halls, watching and measuring and judging and playing parts on stages they had not been invited to fill.
Her safe spaces, scarce as they already were, swallowed whole beneath noise and expectation and scrutiny. And it came from inside her house, no less.
“No,” she said immediately.
Frederick’s gaze hardened.
“No?”
“I upheld my agreement,” Annabeth repeated, trying desperately to keep her voice steady. “You do not get to change the terms after the fact simply because you dislike how I fulfilled them.”
He huffed some laughter, cold and low.
“It is happening, Annabeth.”
“No.”
The word escaped sharper this time.
Athena finally looked at her fully.
“This is merely the consequence of your own actions.”
Annabeth stared at her mother as though she had physically struck her.
“Mother—”
“You chose evasion instead of honesty, and decided that you would attempt to fool us,” Athena said. “Bad choices have consequences, too, Annabeth.”
That hurt worst of all, she figured, because Annabeth had never been dishonest. Not once in her life, even when it might have been safer not to bet on truth.
Her throat tightened painfully.
“I was honest.”
Frederick scoffed softly.
“You were clever.”
“And since when is that a crime in this household?” she shot back before she could stop herself.
Athena’s expression shifted almost imperceptibly.
Frederick leaned back slowly in his chair.
“This attitude is precisely why you continue to misunderstand your situation.”
Annabeth’s hands trembled beneath the table.
“My situation, Father?”
He nodded minutely.
“You are not a child anymore, Annabeth.”
“No,” she replied tightly. “I gathered that much from the constant negotiations surrounding my existence.”
Athena tilted her head back a bit, and her eyes seemed to be even sharper, even grayer than before.
“Annabeth,” she warned quietly.
“No,” Annabeth repeated, breath shaking now despite her efforts. “No, I would truly like to understand. You ask for attendance, I attend. You ask for appearances, I appear. You ask for compliance and somehow even when I obey it is still wrong.”
“Because obedience is not obedience if it is a lie,” Frederick snapped.
The words cracked through the room while Annabeth stared at him. Something inside her — something thin and stretched and exhausted from years of carefulness — trembled dangerously.
The agreement had never truly been about attendance, much like she knew the deal had never been, either; it all had always been about surrender. About becoming someone easier to display, easier to explain, easier to fit into the shape her father believed acceptable.
Her chest hurt.
“I have never lied to you,” she said quietly, and she knew they already knew that much. Neither her parents answered immediately, and somehow that silence diminished her more than accusations could have.
Annabeth swallowed hard.
“I have never embarrassed this family,” she continued, voice quieter now, more wounded than angry. “I study. I publish. I attend every academic obligation you ask of me. I have done everything properly.”
Frederick’s jaw tightened.
“And still you resist every attempt to prepare you for reality.”
“What reality?” she asked, hurt finally slipping visibly into her voice. “The one where my worth depends upon being seen at the correct ballroom often enough, Father? One that I have never been presented to before, and you somehow wish to make it my fault that I do not belong?”
The word echoed strangely in her head — all of them did, really; honesty and reality and all the others her father had chosen to use. It felt as though she had not spent her entire life trying to make herself understandable to them, trying to make herself good enough in ways that mattered to them. Quiet enough, brilliant enough, obedient enough, useful enough.
It felt as though honesty had not always been the only thing she truly owned.
Annabeth swallowed hard.
“I was sincere,” she said carefully, because if she spoke too quickly now her voice might break. “I told you I attended the masquerade because I did attend it.”
Frederick’s jaw tightened.
“You knew perfectly well what was expected of you.”
She nodded.
“Yes, Father, and I fulfilled it.”
“No,” he replied sharply. “You circumvented it.”
The words struck harder this time, the ones he kept choosing. Circumvented, manipulated, technicality, and each accusation peeled something rawer beneath her skin.
Athena remained quiet beside him, composed and distant in that terrible way Annabeth had known since childhood — the kind of silence that did not soothe and only evaluated.
Annabeth felt suddenly young in the worst possible sense. She felt not young in innocence, but in helplessness.
She felt like standing too straight in too-small shoes while trying desperately not to spill tea at gatherings she had been forced to attend before she even understood what embarrassment meant. She felt like learning early that raised voices meant danger even when no one touched her, and like learning that disappointment could hollow a room faster than anger ever could.
Being a child had never been safe there.
Her breath shortened.
“I kept my word,” she insisted, quieter now, because her throat was tightening painfully. “I have never once lied to either of you.”
Annabeth heard her own breathing afterward, uneven and embarrassingly shallow, and hated it immediately. She hated how small it made her sound. How young.
Frederick’s face did not soften. Athena’s gaze lowered briefly toward the untouched tea someone had somewhen placed before her, as though the porcelain itself required more consideration than her daughter’s trembling voice.
And something inside Annabeth snapped quietly into clarity.
“You know, do you not, Father?” she said softly.
Frederick’s gaze was simply indifferent when he looked at her.
“Whatever is it you speak of?”
Annabeth laughed once under her breath, disbelieving and wounded all at once.
“You know I am telling the truth.”
“Annabeth—” Athena began, again as a warning.
“No,” Annabeth interrupted, sharper this time. “No, because that is what makes this absurd.” Her hands shook harder now. She clasped them together tightly in front of her stomach so neither parent would notice, or perhaps so she herself would not. “You gave me terms. You said I could choose an event to attend. I did.”
Frederick’s jaw tightened immediately.
“You chose the one circumstance—”
“Because it still fulfilled the agreement!” she burst out.
"You may rest," Annabeth said. "You are under my roof, after all."
He arched an eyebrow, challenging.
"And your spell."
She smirked.
"That too."
Or,
In the depths of a forest long forgotten and deemed enchanted, a witch hides from sight, from life and from time itself. Annabeth aids creatures in need and, on a fated afternoon, she invited inside her cottage a campire; a long-dead creature with just an echo of life and a cry for help on his lips.
It is quite alright. Simply another creature to be nursed, to be helped, to be sent away; just another day from which she would move on.
But old hearts and old times might just recognize each other, and curiosity is forever the reason why the world evolves.
Two lifeless creatures, in the end, perhaps shall learn what becomes of lives eternal.
read it on Ao3
would that i
The forest had been quiet for days.
It was the kind of stillness that made the air hum with its own secret rhythm, and the kind that would bother any mind a tad more restless that found itself stuck among the trees. Annabeth felt it before she saw it, the hush that sank into the roots, the slow ache in the wind. The animals spoke less when storms were coming, and she had learned to listen to what silence meant.
She lived where the paths forgot themselves, in a cottage that might have grown out of the earth rather than been built upon it. Moss ran up the stones like green veins, and the thatched roof bloomed with wildflowers no one had planted. Inside, the air always smelled faintly of rosemary, smoke, and rain—a scent the world had come to associate with her, the witch of the woods.
She wasn’t cruel, though they said she could be if bothered enough, if challenged to wickedness. The stories told in nearby villages were uncertain things, old things from centuries before: that the witch of oak-colored skin and scars serpentining her limbs healed lost creatures, brewed storms, spoke with ghosts, the dead and animals alike.
All were true in their own meticulous, particular way, and none were a truth in whole. She had lived too long to bother correcting anyone, or explaining anything.
Annabeth’s hands were steady, her voice low, her eyes older than they appeared. Her obsidian hair glowed softly in candlelight, like twilight caught in motion. Her skin was darker than pine, softer than night, with dark grey markings curled over her wrists and collarbone—living traces of the power in her blood, old as the forest itself, as the ground beneath her feet and the air that came to her lungs.
She didn’t hide them anymore, like once or twice she had tried to. Long ago, she had believed that if she looked more human, she might be allowed to love, to live like one. If her skin was not marked, if her eyes were not as sharp, if the power did not make her a commotion.
But time had made her heart cautious. Centuries passed as easily as seasons; she tended the injured, buried the lost, and kept her garden blooming year after year. The world changed beyond the trees, but within her woods, the rhythm stayed the same. The forest never aged—and neither did she.
Sometimes, when Annabeth sat before the fire, the heat painting shadows over her skin, she wondered if stillness was a gift or a curse. She had loved once, long ago—loved fiercely, as mortals do, all flame and briefness. She had watched that flame die, and afterward built her heart a fortress of stone. Love had been too costly, too fleeting, and it was better to live in gentleness than to burn again.
That night, however, something broke the forest’s stillness.
The storm began without warning—not rain but wind, carrying a scent she hadn’t smelled in centuries. Metallic, cold, alive and dead at once. Lightning cracked across the horizon, and the trees bent as if bowing to some unseen force.
Annabeth stood at the window, a candle flickering. The storm wasn’t natural; she could feel the wrongness in its rhythm, in its screams and in its loudness and mere existence. It wasn’t born of clouds or wind, but of anguish.
And then came the knock.
Three soft, faltering raps against her door, like the echo of a dying heartbeat.
Her first thought was that some poor traveler had lost their way. The forest had claimed many, and it would be not novelty to deal with a mortal that would rather whither in the forest floor than to accept her help—she could not blame them; accepting a strange woman’s ailing in the deep forest, in the middle of the night was quite a recipe to disaster.
Annabeth would always offer help, regardless. Because there was a chance it could be accepted. If not, she also knew how to make burials for at least Time to witness.
She pulled her shawl around her shoulders, the deep grey fabric shimmering faintly where it caught the candlelight, and opened the door.
The world outside was silvered in rain. The wind, restless, pushed through the doorway, scattering leaves and petals across her floor. And there, half-collapsed on her threshold, laid a man.
He was soaked through, his yellow hair plastered to his brow and face, his clothes torn and blackened as if burned. His skin was pale to the point of translucence, and his blood—what little stained the earth—shimmered faintly, silver like moonlight in water.
Her breath caught.
She knew what he was before his lips moved.
And what a novelty, to meet a vampire in those lands.
A relic of the old wars, of the age when kings ruled the night. She had thought them gone, turned to dust when their master fell, centuries that felt like ages ago. But this one still breathed, barely—and even in ruin, he looked beautiful in that terrible, ancient way.
“Please,” he rasped, lifting his head. His voice was the sound of gravel under rain. “Don’t… let me hurt anyone.”
He shouldn’t have been able to speak. He shouldn’t have been asking for anything, because vampires were predators, not penitents. But when Annabeth studied his figure, eyes trained to find fear, evil and time, the witch saw no hunger in his night-blue eyes; there was only exhaustion, and the faint shimmer of tears the rain hadn’t made.
For a heartbeat, Annabeth hesitated. She could have ended him there with a flick of her wrist and avoided lots of headaches and annoying spell-casting. Her power would answer her call, and the forest would swallow him without a trace. It would be safer. Simpler.
And yet, something ancient stirred in her chest, something that had slept for far too long.
He was a creature out of time, just like her. Broken, lingering, unwanted by the world that had moved on. She couldn’t bring herself to turn him away.
“If you mean to kill me,” she said quietly, brown eyes fixated on his, “you should have done it before I opened the door.”
He blinked, as if surprised she wasn’t afraid.
“I do not want to,” he whispered. “Not anymore.”
She studied him for a long moment—the tremor in his hands, the faint pulse of pain beneath his stillness. The storm howled around them, the forest holding its breath.
“Then come inside,” she said at last.
And when he crossed the threshold, something shifted in the air as though the forest exhaled in relief, as though fate itself had been waiting for this moment.
The witch led him to the fire. He moved with the careful grace of someone used to chains, his every gesture carefully chosen, his eyes lowered, even if his bones seemed to be made of stone. When she knelt beside him to map his wounds, the scent of blood—cold and ancient—mixed with rosemary and smoke.
His skin was like marble, unyielding yet fragile. The man was weaker, weaker by the second; she could see the odd life that kept him existent slipped his consciousness more and more. The cuts didn’t close on their own; the power that sustained him had waned.
When she touched his wrist, she felt no human heartbeat. But under her palm, the faintest warmth answered.
“You are not supposed to exist,” she murmured, fascinated. Even if she knew of the existence of vampires, those lands were never mentioned to have any; it was odd, and a tad worrisome, that one knocked on her door.
But curiosity was a grace she yielded with ease from the beginning of time.
“Neither are you,” the creature said, and there was something almost like a smile in his voice.
Annabeth looked at him then, and forced her eyes to truly see. The sharp planes of his face, the haunted blue-gray of his eyes, the centuries of solitude behind them. She thought of her own reflection, untouched by time, her heart locked away behind walls she’d built stone by stone.
The firelight flickered between them.
“Rest, foreigner,” she said softly. “The forest will keep you safe tonight.”
The vampire, despite the wishes not to, gave up on keeping his eyes open.
For the first time in centuries, he believed someone else.
[...]
When dawn came, the forest held its breath.
The storm had passed in the night, leaving a hush that felt almost sacred. Mist coiled low along the earth, soft as wool, and light slipped through the treetops in pale threads that shimmered like spun glass. The world, for once, seemed new.
Inside the cottage, Annabeth’s candles had long burned down to stubs. The fire was only embers now, their glow pulsing faintly against the floorboards. The air smelled of rain, blood, and the faint bitterness of herbs—aconite and mugwort, mostly, for safety’s sake.
The vampire laid on the couch near the hearth, motionless but not dead. The spell she’d cast still thrummed faintly around him, invisible threads holding him in deep, dreamless stillness. He looked peaceful there, too peaceful for what he was: his skin pale as riverstone, his light hair drying in loose curls across his brow, his lips parted just slightly as if caught mid-breath.
Annabeth sat at the small wooden table near the window, grinding a few last petals into paste. The mortar and pestle moved slowly in her hands, rhythm steady, patient. Her magic, old and instinctive, had already sealed the worst of his wounds, but he was still weak.
More than weak, she realized without much challenge.
He was starved.
Even in sleep, the signs were there, and the witch could not stop noticing each of them. The faint tremor in his jaw, the hollowness beneath his eyes, the slight tightening of his fingers when she passed too near. His body wasn’t decaying—vampires, after all, never did—but there was a kind of deep, quiet suffering in it, like a violin string pulled taut and waiting to snap.
She had seen his kind before, in the wars that came before peace, when legends first began and myths started to spread. Vampires were an old tale. Most people thought vampires were dead things that walked, cursed by wickedness, doomed to thirst forever. But Annabeth knew better—because of course she did.
They were not corpses wearing human faces. They were still alive, just differently so. Their hearts still beat, though slow and shallow, like a whisper of what life had once been. Their bodies didn’t crave blood for cruelty or conquest; it was something older, simpler—biological, even.
Fresh blood was warm.
It carried the spark of living, the hum of a thousand cells in motion. When they drank, it wasn't death that thrilled them—it was life. It reminded their hearts what it felt like to beat properly. For a brief, terrible moment, the bloodsucking creatures remembered what being alive felt like.
And then it faded.
It faded, and so they hunted again. Not because they wanted to (though Annabeth knew there were bad, evil people in all shapes, sizes, colors, races and lifelines), but because they needed to remember what they had lost. It was so much more about memory than it was about violence, than it was about blood.
Annabeth’s gaze softened as she watched him. It had been centuries since she had last met or seen one of his kind, as for most were gone now, or hiding in darkness and in much colder lands than those. She had heard rumors and stories of the old, cruel vampire king’s fall—a tyrant who ruled through hunger and fear, his followers bound to him like shadows.
If the creature before her had survived that, he must have seen things she could scarcely imagine.
She stood and moved to him quietly. The spell shimmered faintly where it touched her fingertips—an invisible circle of power, a soft manifestation of light. She murmured a few words in the old tongue, and the binding eased enough for her to work.
Her touch hovered above his chest first, then drifted to his face. He was cold, but not lifeless—there was the faintest warmth beneath his skin, the trace of something struggling to stay.
She did not think anything ordinarily living would be capable of telling.
“You have done this to yourself,” she whispered, voice almost fond, almost sorrowful. “Starving on purpose, are you not?”
The spell did not let him answer or awaken, for she needed him still to access the situation and think about her next steps, but Annabeth thought she saw the faintest twitch at the corner of his mouth, as though the truth had flickered through even in sleep.
It was not unusual, throughout time, that some of his kind would try to stop feeding altogether, believing hunger made them monsters or that their nature could be completely changed by sheer will alone. But starvation did not make vampires kind; it made them hollow. Those who gave up on feeding themselves faded slowly from the world until they were nothing but ghosts.
“Foolish,” Annabeth murmured, though her tone was soft, not cruel; there was reprimand in it regardless. “So afraid of the beast that you would rather let yourself vanish.”
Her hand hesitated before touching his cheek. She could feel the weight of centuries in him—sorrow layered over sorrow until it became its own kind of silence. She recogized it, so familiar it was. It stirred something strange in her chest, odd and searching and curious.
The spell hummed in reply, as though seeing her movements.
When he began to stir, it happened gradually, hours later after the spell had been cast—a faint flutter under her wards, the sense of awareness pressing against the barrier she had cast. She didn’t dispel it yet; she wouldn’t. Despite being wary, Annabeth wanted him lucid enough to understand where he was.
By the time the creature opened his eyes, the sun had lifted fully into the morning sky, spilling gold light through the windows. The storm, raging as it had been, did not leave a thing other than the sharp smell of grass in the air and a chill in the trees.
He blinked slowly, as though the brightness pained him. For a moment, he didn’t move at all.
His voice was quiet, quiet when he spoke.
“Am I alive?”
His voice was rough, disoriented.
Annabeth, still standing near the hearth, stirred the potion in her hands.
“I cannot answer that better than you would.”
His gaze flickered toward her.
“Witch,” the vampire said, and it was not an attempt at offense; he did not know her name and, therefore, he had chosen her title to speak directly to the woman. His face contorted in a frown. “You spelled me.”
It was the obvious that he spoke, and Annabeth nodded anyway.
"You may rest," Annabeth said. "You are under my roof, after all."
He arched an eyebrow, challenging.
"And your spell."
She smirked.
"That too."
Or,
In the depths of a forest long forgotten and deemed enchanted, a witch hides from sight, from life and from time itself. Annabeth aids creatures in need and, on a fated afternoon, she invited inside her cottage a campire; a long-dead creature with just an echo of life and a cry for help on his lips.
It is quite alright. Simply another creature to be nursed, to be helped, to be sent away; just another day from which she would move on.
But old hearts and old times might just recognize each other, and curiosity is forever the reason why the world evolves.
Two lifeless creatures, in the end, perhaps shall learn what becomes of lives eternal.
read it on Ao3
would that i
The forest had been quiet for days.
It was the kind of stillness that made the air hum with its own secret rhythm, and the kind that would bother any mind a tad more restless that found itself stuck among the trees. Annabeth felt it before she saw it, the hush that sank into the roots, the slow ache in the wind. The animals spoke less when storms were coming, and she had learned to listen to what silence meant.
She lived where the paths forgot themselves, in a cottage that might have grown out of the earth rather than been built upon it. Moss ran up the stones like green veins, and the thatched roof bloomed with wildflowers no one had planted. Inside, the air always smelled faintly of rosemary, smoke, and rain—a scent the world had come to associate with her, the witch of the woods.
She wasn’t cruel, though they said she could be if bothered enough, if challenged to wickedness. The stories told in nearby villages were uncertain things, old things from centuries before: that the witch of oak-colored skin and scars serpentining her limbs healed lost creatures, brewed storms, spoke with ghosts, the dead and animals alike.
All were true in their own meticulous, particular way, and none were a truth in whole. She had lived too long to bother correcting anyone, or explaining anything.
Annabeth’s hands were steady, her voice low, her eyes older than they appeared. Her obsidian hair glowed softly in candlelight, like twilight caught in motion. Her skin was darker than pine, softer than night, with dark grey markings curled over her wrists and collarbone—living traces of the power in her blood, old as the forest itself, as the ground beneath her feet and the air that came to her lungs.
She didn’t hide them anymore, like once or twice she had tried to. Long ago, she had believed that if she looked more human, she might be allowed to love, to live like one. If her skin was not marked, if her eyes were not as sharp, if the power did not make her a commotion.
But time had made her heart cautious. Centuries passed as easily as seasons; she tended the injured, buried the lost, and kept her garden blooming year after year. The world changed beyond the trees, but within her woods, the rhythm stayed the same. The forest never aged—and neither did she.
Sometimes, when Annabeth sat before the fire, the heat painting shadows over her skin, she wondered if stillness was a gift or a curse. She had loved once, long ago—loved fiercely, as mortals do, all flame and briefness. She had watched that flame die, and afterward built her heart a fortress of stone. Love had been too costly, too fleeting, and it was better to live in gentleness than to burn again.
That night, however, something broke the forest’s stillness.
The storm began without warning—not rain but wind, carrying a scent she hadn’t smelled in centuries. Metallic, cold, alive and dead at once. Lightning cracked across the horizon, and the trees bent as if bowing to some unseen force.
Annabeth stood at the window, a candle flickering. The storm wasn’t natural; she could feel the wrongness in its rhythm, in its screams and in its loudness and mere existence. It wasn’t born of clouds or wind, but of anguish.
And then came the knock.
Three soft, faltering raps against her door, like the echo of a dying heartbeat.
Her first thought was that some poor traveler had lost their way. The forest had claimed many, and it would be not novelty to deal with a mortal that would rather whither in the forest floor than to accept her help—she could not blame them; accepting a strange woman’s ailing in the deep forest, in the middle of the night was quite a recipe to disaster.
Annabeth would always offer help, regardless. Because there was a chance it could be accepted. If not, she also knew how to make burials for at least Time to witness.
She pulled her shawl around her shoulders, the deep grey fabric shimmering faintly where it caught the candlelight, and opened the door.
The world outside was silvered in rain. The wind, restless, pushed through the doorway, scattering leaves and petals across her floor. And there, half-collapsed on her threshold, laid a man.
He was soaked through, his yellow hair plastered to his brow and face, his clothes torn and blackened as if burned. His skin was pale to the point of translucence, and his blood—what little stained the earth—shimmered faintly, silver like moonlight in water.
Her breath caught.
She knew what he was before his lips moved.
And what a novelty, to meet a vampire in those lands.
A relic of the old wars, of the age when kings ruled the night. She had thought them gone, turned to dust when their master fell, centuries that felt like ages ago. But this one still breathed, barely—and even in ruin, he looked beautiful in that terrible, ancient way.
“Please,” he rasped, lifting his head. His voice was the sound of gravel under rain. “Don’t… let me hurt anyone.”
He shouldn’t have been able to speak. He shouldn’t have been asking for anything, because vampires were predators, not penitents. But when Annabeth studied his figure, eyes trained to find fear, evil and time, the witch saw no hunger in his night-blue eyes; there was only exhaustion, and the faint shimmer of tears the rain hadn’t made.
For a heartbeat, Annabeth hesitated. She could have ended him there with a flick of her wrist and avoided lots of headaches and annoying spell-casting. Her power would answer her call, and the forest would swallow him without a trace. It would be safer. Simpler.
And yet, something ancient stirred in her chest, something that had slept for far too long.
He was a creature out of time, just like her. Broken, lingering, unwanted by the world that had moved on. She couldn’t bring herself to turn him away.
“If you mean to kill me,” she said quietly, brown eyes fixated on his, “you should have done it before I opened the door.”
He blinked, as if surprised she wasn’t afraid.
“I do not want to,” he whispered. “Not anymore.”
She studied him for a long moment—the tremor in his hands, the faint pulse of pain beneath his stillness. The storm howled around them, the forest holding its breath.
“Then come inside,” she said at last.
And when he crossed the threshold, something shifted in the air as though the forest exhaled in relief, as though fate itself had been waiting for this moment.
The witch led him to the fire. He moved with the careful grace of someone used to chains, his every gesture carefully chosen, his eyes lowered, even if his bones seemed to be made of stone. When she knelt beside him to map his wounds, the scent of blood—cold and ancient—mixed with rosemary and smoke.
His skin was like marble, unyielding yet fragile. The man was weaker, weaker by the second; she could see the odd life that kept him existent slipped his consciousness more and more. The cuts didn’t close on their own; the power that sustained him had waned.
When she touched his wrist, she felt no human heartbeat. But under her palm, the faintest warmth answered.
“You are not supposed to exist,” she murmured, fascinated. Even if she knew of the existence of vampires, those lands were never mentioned to have any; it was odd, and a tad worrisome, that one knocked on her door.
But curiosity was a grace she yielded with ease from the beginning of time.
“Neither are you,” the creature said, and there was something almost like a smile in his voice.
Annabeth looked at him then, and forced her eyes to truly see. The sharp planes of his face, the haunted blue-gray of his eyes, the centuries of solitude behind them. She thought of her own reflection, untouched by time, her heart locked away behind walls she’d built stone by stone.
The firelight flickered between them.
“Rest, foreigner,” she said softly. “The forest will keep you safe tonight.”
The vampire, despite the wishes not to, gave up on keeping his eyes open.
For the first time in centuries, he believed someone else.
[...]
When dawn came, the forest held its breath.
The storm had passed in the night, leaving a hush that felt almost sacred. Mist coiled low along the earth, soft as wool, and light slipped through the treetops in pale threads that shimmered like spun glass. The world, for once, seemed new.
Inside the cottage, Annabeth’s candles had long burned down to stubs. The fire was only embers now, their glow pulsing faintly against the floorboards. The air smelled of rain, blood, and the faint bitterness of herbs—aconite and mugwort, mostly, for safety’s sake.
The vampire laid on the couch near the hearth, motionless but not dead. The spell she’d cast still thrummed faintly around him, invisible threads holding him in deep, dreamless stillness. He looked peaceful there, too peaceful for what he was: his skin pale as riverstone, his light hair drying in loose curls across his brow, his lips parted just slightly as if caught mid-breath.
Annabeth sat at the small wooden table near the window, grinding a few last petals into paste. The mortar and pestle moved slowly in her hands, rhythm steady, patient. Her magic, old and instinctive, had already sealed the worst of his wounds, but he was still weak.
More than weak, she realized without much challenge.
He was starved.
Even in sleep, the signs were there, and the witch could not stop noticing each of them. The faint tremor in his jaw, the hollowness beneath his eyes, the slight tightening of his fingers when she passed too near. His body wasn’t decaying—vampires, after all, never did—but there was a kind of deep, quiet suffering in it, like a violin string pulled taut and waiting to snap.
She had seen his kind before, in the wars that came before peace, when legends first began and myths started to spread. Vampires were an old tale. Most people thought vampires were dead things that walked, cursed by wickedness, doomed to thirst forever. But Annabeth knew better—because of course she did.
They were not corpses wearing human faces. They were still alive, just differently so. Their hearts still beat, though slow and shallow, like a whisper of what life had once been. Their bodies didn’t crave blood for cruelty or conquest; it was something older, simpler—biological, even.
Fresh blood was warm.
It carried the spark of living, the hum of a thousand cells in motion. When they drank, it wasn't death that thrilled them—it was life. It reminded their hearts what it felt like to beat properly. For a brief, terrible moment, the bloodsucking creatures remembered what being alive felt like.
And then it faded.
It faded, and so they hunted again. Not because they wanted to (though Annabeth knew there were bad, evil people in all shapes, sizes, colors, races and lifelines), but because they needed to remember what they had lost. It was so much more about memory than it was about violence, than it was about blood.
Annabeth’s gaze softened as she watched him. It had been centuries since she had last met or seen one of his kind, as for most were gone now, or hiding in darkness and in much colder lands than those. She had heard rumors and stories of the old, cruel vampire king’s fall—a tyrant who ruled through hunger and fear, his followers bound to him like shadows.
If the creature before her had survived that, he must have seen things she could scarcely imagine.
She stood and moved to him quietly. The spell shimmered faintly where it touched her fingertips—an invisible circle of power, a soft manifestation of light. She murmured a few words in the old tongue, and the binding eased enough for her to work.
Her touch hovered above his chest first, then drifted to his face. He was cold, but not lifeless—there was the faintest warmth beneath his skin, the trace of something struggling to stay.
She did not think anything ordinarily living would be capable of telling.
“You have done this to yourself,” she whispered, voice almost fond, almost sorrowful. “Starving on purpose, are you not?”
The spell did not let him answer or awaken, for she needed him still to access the situation and think about her next steps, but Annabeth thought she saw the faintest twitch at the corner of his mouth, as though the truth had flickered through even in sleep.
It was not unusual, throughout time, that some of his kind would try to stop feeding altogether, believing hunger made them monsters or that their nature could be completely changed by sheer will alone. But starvation did not make vampires kind; it made them hollow. Those who gave up on feeding themselves faded slowly from the world until they were nothing but ghosts.
“Foolish,” Annabeth murmured, though her tone was soft, not cruel; there was reprimand in it regardless. “So afraid of the beast that you would rather let yourself vanish.”
Her hand hesitated before touching his cheek. She could feel the weight of centuries in him—sorrow layered over sorrow until it became its own kind of silence. She recogized it, so familiar it was. It stirred something strange in her chest, odd and searching and curious.
The spell hummed in reply, as though seeing her movements.
When he began to stir, it happened gradually, hours later after the spell had been cast—a faint flutter under her wards, the sense of awareness pressing against the barrier she had cast. She didn’t dispel it yet; she wouldn’t. Despite being wary, Annabeth wanted him lucid enough to understand where he was.
By the time the creature opened his eyes, the sun had lifted fully into the morning sky, spilling gold light through the windows. The storm, raging as it had been, did not leave a thing other than the sharp smell of grass in the air and a chill in the trees.
He blinked slowly, as though the brightness pained him. For a moment, he didn’t move at all.
His voice was quiet, quiet when he spoke.
“Am I alive?”
His voice was rough, disoriented.
Annabeth, still standing near the hearth, stirred the potion in her hands.
“I cannot answer that better than you would.”
His gaze flickered toward her.
“Witch,” the vampire said, and it was not an attempt at offense; he did not know her name and, therefore, he had chosen her title to speak directly to the woman. His face contorted in a frown. “You spelled me.”
It was the obvious that he spoke, and Annabeth nodded anyway.
“I did."
read the rest on Ao3
as long as you're mine @justapoet - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
