Chapter Text
The video game collection is an artifact of its time, and it’s for this reason alone she thinks Chris Rodriguez wins yet another round.
Annabeth doesn’t play. She might, had she not stumbled into the basement when they’d already been four games deep and a childhood with Cabin 11 had possibly taught her better self-preservation than the streets could ever dream to. Connor’s hands are tight around the controller, overgrown brown hair pulled back in a pink band, and it’s too fucking late to get in the middle of him and his brothers and the scoreboard. Profanities practically dig hollows into his clenched jaw and there’s a Hello Kitty bead attached to his hair tie, and she thinks he looks ridiculous. Chris laughs and Connor kicks the back of his bean bag. Which. Until he actually accomplishes it had looked like an impossible feat to Annabeth, because Chris had sat himself in the corner and she thought at most he might be within a toe’s reach, if that toe stretched. But Connor, full of surprises and height—apparently—slams his full foot against the green fuzz of the beanbag and it’s remarkable how he’s the same boy in an eighteen year old’s body.
She bends over to reach the leg of the loveseat, where she had placed her cup. The sweet tea hits her tongue in a sickly rush and she wishes Percy were here. Nevermind that he is, technically, here. One rope ladder and three doors away and taking soap to sugar. What’s left of the sweet tea sloshes inside her Solo cup, but they’d left the Big House kitchen floor a sticky puddle in their group effort to create it. Unfortunately the closest, the pitcher had fallen into her boyfriend’s lap and Annabeth figured it wouldn’t look too respectable on her part if she ducked into the shower with him.
(Especially not when he had dismissed himself and pointedly did not go to his cabin. And then Annabeth had to explain they broke his pipes).
Just then, he emerges from the hole in the ceiling, one strong leg at a time. Though a bother, the rope ladder is a step up from the way they used to do things. In which you’d simply have to jump and hope the trampoline beneath doesn’t snap.
Sound effects spew from the TV and the boys make varying expressive noises, and she hears Silena’s voice perfectly in her head, young and indignant. It’s stupid, she had said, clutching her broken nail. She remembers Luke, fleeting concern on his face after she had cried out on the trampoline. Remembers her own voice, even younger and leagues more stubborn. It’s a hideout. They’re not supposed to be easy to get into.
But Beckendorf and Luke had done away with the trampoline the next morning despite the protests of the younger kids, and she found herself being okay with it. If only because the trampoline was more fun to bounce on outside, anyway.
Halfway into view now, a ladder rung catches on his shirt, pulling it up. His shorts hang a little crooked, a little low and for a second she can admire the dark skin, flush from the shower, taught between his hips before his feet hit the floor and he readjusts his clothing.
Smile is too mild of a word for what she thinks her face must be doing.
“Hey,” he says, blanketing everyone in the room, but he tosses his head to the side and crinkles form in the corner of his eyes and she challenges Aphrodite to dream up a more kissable boy.
Legs pulled up against her body, he places his warm palms on her knees and she watches curious droplets of water, wilfully not dried, trace down his throat. “Is anyone else allowed to sit on your couch?”
She spares a glance back at the boys slumped on their bean bags, seemingly engrossed in their game if you ignore the smirks tugging on their lips.
“In exchange for what?” she manages to say right before he leans in.
The kiss doesn’t last long at all with their audience, even if they are pretending to not care save for a stray giggle. Salt balances out the aftertaste of too-sweet tea and he studies her face for a second after she’s pulled away. “Ready to go?”
Travis pipes up then. “What the fuck. You just got here.”
They got here about ten hours ago, actually. But there's this thing with time and indeterminable behavior that applies only in mythological places and basements, she thinks. Case in point, this round of the game feels much shorter than all the others, even though the timer in the corner of the screen says otherwise. Chris still claims the lead, highest kill count with three more lives to spare. Connor swears he’s making a comeback, while it seems like Travis has mostly accepted his place as last if the way he’s traded his controller for his phone says anything. Annabeth makes out text bubbles and three green hearts next to a contact name and wonders if it’d be a good idea to stop by Cabin 4 to say bye to Katie. Last she’d seen her, she’d been doing her best to solve a sibling dispute and Demeter kids fight dirty .
“Try dealing with—” he flicks her nose, “this one at six in the morning.”
Connor snorts and she knows what he would’ve said just then, had the TV not cut, had the scoreboard he’d worked so brutishly to get on top of not dissolved into static. He curses in ancient Greek, English, and then some amalgamation of the two, which perhaps is more impressive than fluency in either.
(He would've said that he has. He’d spent a childhood of has. )
Travis reaches over him to knock fists with Chris, grins shiteating and laughter loud. She thinks Clarisse would love to see this; Annabeth would love to see Clarisse. If all goes well, she will tomorrow. Grover, too. Though she’s trying to not get her hopes up because coordinating any sort of meet up—outside of camp especially—is like trying to wrangle a swarm of bees. Still, her hopes are up. She’s graduating. She doesn’t want to think about Grover not making it, the same way she doesn’t want to think about how Luke had absolutely demolished Chris at every game in their shoebox for years until he’d learned. Definitely, she does not think about who will have to fix the TV, with Beckedendorf gone.
Percy raises the edge of the red cup to his lips, then promptly spits the drink back out. “How were you drinking that?”
“You’re disgusting. And dramatic.”
And just to prove he’s not, he kisses her again and pays the sweet tea no mind. She curls her fingers into the short hairs at his nape, gives them one little tug before wrapping her hands around his arms and pushing herself onto her feet.
The goodbyes are routine. She’ll hug Chris and Travis, but Connor will insist to kiss cheeks, once on each side—likely the most greek thing about him. It’s what the older generation of counselors used to do, and when Luke had set out for his quest he’d done it naturally, charming and heroic and seemingly shed of the years spent on the streets. He’d saved her his last farewell and knelt, held her face in his hands and pecked the tip of her nose. They had both been startled. It was weird, a point in time when she’d grown disproportionately to him, but he had become used to bending down just enough to meet her forehead. Yet Annabeth was ten and tall, and muscle memory had failed them.
Not Chris, she thinks. It had served him well tonight, vintage gaming console be damned.
Outside, past Thalia’s tree and down the hill, they walk quietly to the car. Percy holds her hand tight. Technically, the borders outside camp are the worst place for a demigod to be. Invulnerable, he doesn’t have much else to worry about besides her and whether he can stay awake behind the wheel.
“I can drive,” she offers.
“Assuming you can also afford our bail?”
She bumps the side of his body with hers. “What, it’s not like there are other cars all the way out here. We can switch later.”
He turns his head. Quiet, eyes narrowed before they soften with amusement. She reaches into the pocket of his jacket, key ring slinging around her index finger.
“Unless you’re scared?”
“You’re graduating in twelve hours,” he reminds her, but leaves it at that because Percy won’t ever mention that they might crash and die, even if he is thinking it.
She ignores him, pulling open the driver’s side door and slipping into the seat. Clearly not convinced yet, he stands by the door, waiting. For her own amusement, she starts the car. It rumbles to life under and around her, a satisfying tiny thrill. And then she kicks her feet up and crawls over the gear shift, landing ungracefully in the passenger seat. The window is cool against the back of her head while Percy is all warmth when he takes her place, each bout of laughter lighting him awake. She’d left her legs stretched out over the center console, her feet now in his lap. He squeezes an ankle, otherwise unbothered.
“Seatbelt,” is all he says, and they leave Camp Half Blood behind.
.
Please cheer for me, I don’t have friends here. She’d asked and Clarisse delivered.
They all did. But when she’d crossed the stage and accepted her diploma, it was mostly Clarisse’s voice that she’d heard, deep battle growl neatly repackaged into something sweeter, though just as fierce. Grover came and so did the rest of their friends and between them and the Jacksons, Annabeth can almost forget that her father couldn’t make the trip.
Or Thalia, but she can’t fault her for that. She tries to not dwell. They go to lunch afterwards and she sits with the peonies Percy got in her lap as their friends trickle out of the restaurant. Grover says he’s arranged to have the day off from his duties and, later, back at the apartment Annabeth thinks she’s over it. She’s done with high school and so is her boyfriend and they have the summer to themselves. Sally will take the pictures she took today to the store to get them printed and they’ll be slotted next to Percy’s grad photos in the album, a chapter completed.
Diagonally cut stems carefully crowded into one of Sally’s vases, she sets the flowers in the corner of Percy’s room. Which, she supposes, is their room until September.
“Are you going to, you know,” Grover says, hooves catching on the wheels of the luggage she’d left flat on the floor. “Unpack?”
She drops her graduation gown to the floor and plucks up a shirt they’d left on the bed. Percy’s probably. Expertly, she slips it on top of her dress and shimmies out of it from the bottom, flopping down on the unmade bed, comfortable and free . “I’d only need to pack again.”
Percy stalls awkwardly in the center of the room. “Annabeth, you have to unpack.”
“You don’t even have the space.”
He sits at the foot of the bed and she takes the opportunity to nudge him with her big toe. Miraculously, he gets the message and runs his thumbs down the center of both feet. She has one pair of heels, and they’re saved for the occasions that would call for them and nothing else. And she guesses maybe she could’ve gotten away with wearing flats, but she’d convinced herself to wear them one last time. Then she’d get cuter, college heels.
“Like half of the shit here can go in the trash. We have space.”
Grover bleats.
“The figurative trash,” he clarifies. “We’ll donate, I’m not a monster. And then we can unpack.”
If you asked, Annabeth would say she’s being perfectly reasonable. How different is a suitcase from a drawer? An eyesore, maybe, but it’s more convenient anyway. She doesn’t want to insert herself into his childhood room and adjust it to fit her, but she feels Percy’s anxiety in his fingers and finds it in her to nod.
“Sure,” she says softly.
It’s not that much anyway. Between moving from camp to Virginia to New York to California, and back to New York again, she’d never gotten the opportunity to pack heavy. It’s easier this way and she’s known it since seven, with nothing but her cartoon dinosaur backpack and even that had been taken from her.
“Leaving your stuff out like this is, like, paradise for bugs too.” Grover sits on the blue rug, flipping through yearbook pages. “If you needed more convincing.”
She shoots Percy a wary glance. “There aren’t roaches here.”
“If you want to believe that.”
The mattress bounces beneath her knees when she launches herself off, nearly tripping over her discarded gown and grad dress in a race to the suitcase. Zipped and safe from whatever bug, she rolls it to the side of the dresser.
When she looks back Percy got the dress’s straps between his thumbs, and she thinks he means to go put it someplace more appropriate—the closet rack to air out, the hamper, maybe—but his eyes move over the garment in soft appreciation, a shallow tide rolling over starfish and seashells. The way it came, it wasn’t really anything remarkable. It’s white, because Silena had drilled that into her head when it had been her turn to graduate. She’d needed the perfect white dress now because, in her words, who knew if she’d ever get to see one later. Clarisse had smacked her arm, but just months out from the war they all knew it was true, even if Silena had seemed the least likely to go. There was nothing for Annabeth to say because weddings meant something to Silena. In the Big House, lying awake in a pillow fort where the coffee table should’ve been, she’d had her wedding planned out right then. No doves, the longest train money would allow, a veil woven by her best friend. She’d realized then that love for her was like architecture for Annabeth, and there would be nothing to console losing that.
Her dress had become a sketchbook of sorts. In the final stretch of the semester when the assignments piled while motivation stooped to new lows, for some reason she’d found herself reaching for her sewing kit, gifted by an older sibling. She’d embroidered a piece of coral first. Peach colored and flimsy and abstract if you want to put it nicely. Unlike her history homework, it was a welcome challenge and the dress hanging in the corner of her dorm was looking awfully plain anyway.
By June, she’d littered it in little mindless designs in off-white thread that can barely be made out from afar. Percy holds the fabric to his face, and the grin on it tells her he sees. Gentle in his grasp, he uses the pads of his fingers to trace. Seashells and swords and tridents, and maybe traitorous things for a daughter of Athena to put her craft skills towards.
“I don’t think that’s washing machine safe,” she says, mouth dry.
Percy’s cheeks are dusted pink and sweet. “I’ll use my hands.”
She stands in front of him sitting criss-cross in the mess of the duvet, and she seizes the rarity of this vertical difference by leaving a chaste kiss on his forehead. His lips melt into something fighting really hard to not be a smile and Annabeth tells herself she should do that more often.
Over his shoulder, Grover is still occupied by the yearbook. He’s landed on the page of senior class photos, Percy leading an impressive list of last name J’s.
He groans and falls face first into the pillows, her dress still clutched to his stomach. “Fucking close that.”
Grover stretches his neck to face him. “You look dapper.”
“Handsome, even,” she says.
“You both sound like my mom.”
Annabeth does not dignify that with a response. It’s a good picture. They didn’t have the time to take senior photos, much to Sally’s disappointment. At least, that had been his excuse. She thinks he’s just camera shy. Clearly, he didn’t even need a senior photo because, in her opinion, his default navy background headshot clears every other boy in that book by a mile. It isn’t even really that he’d tried—she’d run her fingers through his hair and told him to wear her favorite sweater on the day of, but there’d been enough time between then and when he’d sat in front of the camera to appear slightly disheveled again. And, well. She’d be a liar if she said that isn’t how she prefers him anyway. Like now, spread over the length of the bed, his nice shirt wrinkled and hair mussed. Percy might be right— handsome is the word Sally would use. But she doesn't think Grover would appreciate her use of hot.
She kneels and inspects the stack of past yearbooks next to Grover. There aren’t many, which she supposes is due to being expelled before the end-of-year distribution of the books. She shuffles out the bottom-most one: Yancy Academy, six years ago. “Oh my gods.”
Percy sits up abruptly, mortified, but does nothing else, surprisingly. Grover watches her navigate through the pages, expression fond, and Annabeth thinks he’s the only person who could possibly feel nostalgic for middle school.
Their photos are as she expects. Grover looks about the same as he did when he’d left camp just the month before and Percy looks more or less like the boy on the hill, with his minotaur horn and nothing else. Her heart squeezes at the sight of him and it hits her, for maybe the twelfth time, that he graduated, despite it all.
“They don’t know what’s coming,” he says as he stares at his own picture.
“Still don’t.”
“Please don’t bring up college right now, Annabeth, we literally just finished the high school thing. Can you give it, like, a month?”
Grover whistles lowly. “Half-bloods have it rough.”
“Yeah, thanks.”
“Monsters, school, college, monsters…”
Annabeth adds, “War.”
“War,” he agrees.
Quietly, he laughs if only for a second or two, but it’s beautiful and she’s going to miss him when he leaves. She’ll miss him and she’ll hate herself because is it so hard to just not think about it right now?
Like the timing couldn’t be worse, her dad chooses to text her back then. She’d sent him a photo from today, a shot of her with her diploma and her eyes a little squinted from the sun, but a wide smile regardless. Beautiful , he says. So proud of you.
And that’s that.
The thing is, she’s nearly nineteen. She’s past feeling sorry for herself over her father, but she can’t pretend she didn’t notice being the only student at graduation without family in attendance.
She really wishes Thalia had been there, but she’s grateful Grover came.
Percy’s eyes flicker between her and the screen. He gathers her curls into his hands, moving them softly out of her face. “Let’s go to the DMV.”
“What?” She and Grover speak in unison.
He shrugs. “Uh, yesterday you wanted to drive. You’ll need a permit to learn.”
She considers it. “I’d need to put on pants.”
Grover slides her phone from grasp and types something in fast, blissfully untouched from the clutches of dyslexia. “Closes in an hour.”
Percy slumps, like he knew exactly what she’d been thinking of when making the suggestion in the first place and for some reason believed it to be the solution. She doesn’t think she gets it, but she goes along. “We can go tomorrow. I probably should study anyway.”
Grover sputters. “I love you Annabeth, but, c’mon, I didn’t take time off to watch you study.”
She looks up. Her boyfriend is sporting one dimple. “Besides, you don’t even need to.”
No, she doesn’t. But it’s weird to just walk in and take a test without some sort of preparation. Annabeth comes up with a plan. “Where are the Fast and Furious DVDs?”
.
Grover leaves shortly after midnight and thirteen hours later she and Percy walk out of the DMV with a learner’s permit and a familiar weight in her chest.
.
Percy gets this summer job washing cars. Business picked up slowly after the two of them plastered up his flyer all around the neighborhood and then some. June flows into July at the height of what the weatherman hasn’t officially called a heatwave, but if you ask Annabeth she should not be scalded by metal poles through masking tape and paper.
In his room, they keep the blinds closed and the sun more-or-less out. Work hours don’t come with such luxury, where there’s nothing to save Percy from the region-wide fever and what kind of girlfriend would she be if she didn’t offer moral support?
It’s not a particularly hard job for a son of Poseidon. Manipulating the water is as easy as the twitch of a finger. It’s the sun that turns his skin a deeper shade of itself while pink blooms on his cheekbones. His hair isn’t quite long enough to pull back and she suspects his mom would never let it get there anyway. They’d stolen a solid palm-full of Paul’s hair gel to make it work, but his waves sprung out crunchy and free no less than an hour later. So his hair falls in front of his eyes as he works and—okay. Maybe “moral support” isn’t really fitting when she’s here mostly for her own benefit.
“I do have a solution,” she says. Her flip flops are loud on the wet pavement and the flask between her fingers is blissfully cold. “To our laundry problem.”
His hands twist the sponge, soapy and glistening. “Yeah? What’s that?”
“Well the loads are always full because of your car washing clothes, so if you were to, well. You know.”
“Not wear a shirt?”
“You said it.”
He shakes his head at the ground and grins, and she thinks it must hurt because his cheeks are starting to look just a bit sunburned. “Right, first of all—”
“Don’t first of all me.”
Percy releases the sponge into a bucket and there’s a split second when he faces her where he’s forgotten to will his shirt dry. Annabeth tells herself she is not a girl who goes back on her word, not even at the sight of soaked fabric clinging to her boyfriend’s abs.
“First of all,” he says, but his eyes keep flickering, begrudgingly embarrassed, to the car’s wheels and it’s a little hard to take him seriously when he looks so cute. “One pair of clothing is not why our laundry load is fucking preposterous.”
She crosses her arms. “It’s part of it.”
“A two percent part.”
“Percent, preposterous?”
“You wear your clothes and mine. You refuse to wear anything twice without washing because it’s gross outside and that’s fine, but you’ll take a hoodie to wear inside, leave it on the floor when we go out and then insist it’s dirty now even though we vacuum the floors and it’s clean .”
“You want me to stop wearing your clothes, I’ll stop wearing your clothes,” she responds flippantly.
The sidewalk dries in the trail of his footsteps. He stands in front of her and untangles her arms. “When did I say that. When the fuck did I actually say that.”
“It was implied.”
The corner of his lip tugs in a way barely visible to anyone who might be a little further away but Annabeth can feel his breath on her face and sees right through the bullshit.
“That’s not even all of it,” he continues, trying very hard to feign seriousness. “We change the sheets, like, every two days.”
She blinks. “That’s not my fault.”
Percy squints as if to figure her out. His eyes remind her of the creek running through Camp Half Blood’s forest. Pure turquoise. “You’re a monster.”
“You’re easily seduced.”
“So you admit it’s your fault.”
“Have you considered working on your resolve?”
“Who wins then?”
She unscrews the cap of the flask and pours a little of the nectar onto the pad of her index finger, warm now. He drops his forehead onto hers, heat radiating where they meet. Gently, she pats the nectar into the uncomfortably dry, pink layer on his cheeks. He hisses at the contact, but sure enough the skin becomes soft under her touch, though still blushed.
Quietly, she says, “You should wear a hat, baby.”
“And no shirt?” he teases. His nose digs against the side of hers.
She nods solemnly. “I’ll stop wearing your clothes. In exchange.”
He tilts his head up to the sky, exasperated. “ Who wins?”
With a hand on his chest, she pushes him back towards the car. He doesn’t have much left to do, so she calls his client, a middle aged woman who lives just a couple blocks down, to let her know she can come back soon. In the meantime, she retreats to the beach chair she’d set up earlier and pretty much scorches her thighs on the plastic beams. She curls herself up on the canvas portion, a book spread over her knees and if her eyes keep wandering up, she thinks it’s fine. Multitasking is one of her greatest strengths, she believes.
A little later Mrs. Meyer arrives to a spotless Mazda, only thirty minutes later than she’d left it here. She gushes her thanks, grinning wide with teeth, gums, and all. Appreciative, sure, but if Annabeth had to guess she’d say it doesn’t really have to do with the car. Percy smiles politely as she tells him something about how he could charge more for how efficient he is. Again, she doesn’t think that’s entirely what she means.
She drives off and Percy stands one job and a generous tip richer.
.
They don’t take Mrs. Meyer’s advice. For one, it’d require printing a new flier and then replacing each one they’ve already posted, which have already been seen by too many people and they can’t increase the price right in their faces. Besides, it’s really a neighborhood operation, anyway, because who else would rather leave their car with two eighteen year olds than just drive it through some scrubby blue things.
This is how their Manhattan afternoons pass. Annabeth makes it through two books and works up a tan that's noticeably uneven since she can never read in one position too long. She had originally been very committed to exclusively wearing her clothing, which was optimal for tanning, and Percy kept up his side of the deal of foregoing a shirt. But then she started to notice the fans. The same cars driving by three, four times in the span of an hour. Girls taking walks down their street, in packs.
She wears his clothes again and Percy puts on a shirt.
The heat only lets up when it’s time to go back inside, ducking inside the shower (sometimes together—depends on who’s home). Evenings are always a toss up. Her driving practice is a bit limited for the time being as Paul had recently sold the Prius for a good sum of money. Annabeth had never thought there’d be a niche audience of car buyers interested in the novelty of pegasus hoof prints, but she’s immensely grateful if it means they get a new car.
It also means they have to take the train to get to the Stoll’s place later. The inside of which is unfathomably nice. Their mom isn’t home, but they say she rarely is anyway, although neither of them seem very upset about it. Growing up, the two really only spoke of her in awe, though she assumes her absence is part of the reason why they stayed year-round at camp, despite living relatively close. She wonders what it might’ve been like, adjusting to Cabin 11 from a place like this.
Percy tugs her into the kitchen. They’ve got a speaker set up on the center of the island, and she can barely hear Connor who’s standing just across the counter, smirking for whatever reason. She leans back into his chest and he puts an arm around her stomach.
He leans down to her ear. “Connor’s letting you practice with his car.”
She looks up suspiciously. “What do we have to do for him?”
“Clean it.”
Oh. That’s not nearly as bad as she’d been expecting, but maybe they’re all too old to be expecting that kind of mischief from him.
Katie is perched on another kitchen stool, watching as her boyfriend fumbles with a jar of pizza sauce. “You got a new sibling,” she tells her.
Annabeth frowns. “What?”
“His name’s Henry and he’s kinda tiny. Like nine, I think. Really cute.” She notices her expression and adds, “Yesterday. He got here last night, I’m sure that’s why Malcolm hasn’t told you.”
“Oh,” she says. “Yeah, probably.”
She doesn’t mention that last night was likely a full 24 hours ago and he had more than enough time. Besides, she doesn’t want to be upset at Malcolm. It’s the middle of summer and he’s busy no doubt.
Percy rubs his thumb over her skin, under the worn fabric of an old shirt of his. “We can visit tomorrow.”
Connor nods enthusiastically, his hands clutched around a rolling pin. “Please. And we can have one of their creek gatherings, like old times.”
She grimaces and feels Percy do the same behind her. Had they reached the point of referring to their high school years as old times? Surely not. She only graduated a month ago. Still, she loves a gathering, even if being together often feels like being stabbed between the ribs. This can’t possibly be unique to her—she thinks they’re all just very adept at hiding it. As is the nature of growing up knowing your life will be short and painful.
Connor changes the music to something classical and she can physically see the change in attitude as he spins the dough in the air, fully confident and focused, and she’s almost as proud of him for doing it successfully as she is of herself for remembering the first time he had attempted to learn. In the harpies’ kitchen, with Luke and her and not Travis because the two of them were grounded from each other for the day. Her fingers were sticky with wet dough and she didn’t care for trying as much as she loved giggling at the two of them for failing. Luke had figured it out first and took to teaching Connor, but she guessed that he’d done it by sheer luck because his pointers were contradictory and futile.
They put Percy on cheese-grating duty, naturally, since his fingers are as good as steel. Dough stretched, sauce and cheese spread, Connor unveils a brand new jar of olives and allows her to do the honors.
.
“You’re sure we’re in reverse?”
“Yes, baby, see how the R is lit up?”
“Ok.”
“Ok.”
The car sits still.
“The roads will practically be empty this late. You’re just getting in your head.”
“My head is usually right.”
“Yeah, like when you landed a helicopter and operated a crane.”
Fair point, she thinks.
He says, “If you can pull all that off you can back a car out of a garage.”
Because the Stolls just had to be part of the rare subset of people on this island who have an actual garage. Annabeth turns her head to look behind, giving into her muscle memory.
She pulls the car out of the garage in a slow steady movement and turns the steering wheel until they face the street.
Percy leans over, smiling too wide to kiss her cheek the way he must’ve intended, but she blushes all the same.
“What do you even need me to teach you?”
It’s way past midnight and probably too dark for any other new driver, but Annabeth finds herself to be appreciative because the surrounding streets are desolate and no one will be around if she kisses him right here.
His face is warm in her hands, and when her teeth catch his bottom lip, pink rushes back to them just like confidence does to her. She bows her head and giggles against his neck. “We’ll find out.”
.
The truth is that she learned to drive in Argus’s car.
For Camp Half-Blood, summer ended early. After their population whittled down to the few year-rounders, it didn’t really matter if the days were still long or if the temperature never dipped below 75 degrees. It would take her time to find her footing at August’s end, to wake up to a slightly quieter cabin and not feel dread. Her friends made it okay and Annabeth was always excellent at keeping herself otherwise busy. By the time she turned 12, she thought she’d pretty much mastered the adjusting.
And then Grover left.
A prospect in Manhattan, he’d said. A demigod so powerful he had to later take Chiron with him.
September wears a heat that doesn’t fit and Annabeth has never known stir crazy like this before. She trains with Clarrise and they take turns knocking the other down, lacking any remorse. She sits with Beckendorf as he crafts new weapons, and he once joked that he’d better carve her a sword if she really is serious about going on a quest soon. She is serious. But she’ll never get a quest if Chiron isn’t even here to appoint her one, and if—no—when she does, her knife will suffice just fine.
Annabeth trains and reads and trains, and watches. Luke, sweaty in the sword fighting arena, kneeling in the strawberry fields dirty with Earth. Disappearing alone into the woods and retreating back to Cabin 11 with shimmering dust on his blade and jittery fingers. He’d ignored her, sitting criss-cross in front of a game of mancala with Travis, headed straight for the showers. Five minutes later a milky sheen would build on her eyes from the steam and he’d come out fresh and beautiful and she couldn't figure when he stopped trying to conserve the hot water for his campers. Wearing basketball shorts and a faded green towel over his shoulders, he bent over and pressed his lips against the side of her head and she noticed that boiling the cigarette smoke off his body doesn’t do much to lessen how it lingers on his breath. She had told herself she’s too old to wince at something like smoke. And then she looked down at the mancala.
They don’t talk often. He squeezes her shoulder in passing and catches her gaze from the edge of the dining pavilion. Sometimes, she’ll wordlessly sit next to him to roast marshmallows and he’ll add another to his stick to pass off to her. And during those times she may even, at rarer times, lean into him. He doesn't tense. She’s pretty sure it’s not her imagination either when his fingers dance on the wood bench, like he’s unsure what to do with them.
It’s a sunday when he seeks her out. Which means pretty much nothing given that each day is the same, but it’s a sunday and Annabeth lets her cabin sleep in while situating herself in the Big House with berries and a history book.
“Hey.” He sounds tired.
Strawberry between her front teeth, she waves at him.
He’s just woken up, it seems. Puffy face and swollen lips and a rasp in his voice when he speaks. “Good book?”
The fruit can’t be chewed fast enough. “Yeah, it’s—I’m rereading.”
Luke watches the floorboards as he comes closer. She doesn’t recognize the shirt he wears. It’s dark green, adorned with wrinkles and she figures it must be what he sleeps in, which feels strange to think about. She’d never been allowed to keep watch those days on the run, but sometimes the morning was such that Annabeth would be the first awake, well rested while he laid beside her and Thalia sat slouched to her side. They let him sleep while she did her hair, running her fingers soothingly over her scalp and untangling the curls. The forests were always so alive in the morning, she remembers. Birds singing and creatures of the non-mythological kind taking soft steps and the river humming in the distance.
She must’ve seen it before, but she can’t remember what Luke would look like asleep. It wouldn’t mean much anyway, because the boy she met years ago isn’t the one sitting in front of her now.
“I can ask Chiron to get you new books,” he offers, studying her face.
Annabeth shrugs. “I think Sasha is bringing some when she visits.”
“Oh,” is all he says and Annabeth’s always had a sneaking suspicion that he dislikes her older siblings. And maybe that’s partly why she said it.
Silence lapses between them. The fireplace crackles though it’s still too hot outside to have it on and she turns to the next page of her book without even finishing the one before, just to give her hands something to do.
“You could still ask him,” she says softly. “I don’t think she’ll bring many.”
“Have you tried IM’ing him?”
She shakes her head. “He said not to. In case there’s people around.” Which she gets, she really does, but would it kill him to flip a drachma and be the one to call her?
“You’re upset with him,” Luke notes, tone cautious but pleasant somehow.
Unable to stop herself, she says, “I’m supposed to go on a quest. And he just told me that and left .”
He stiffens and she doesn’t exactly have to read his face to know what he’s thinking. “What? What did he tell you?”
Too late now, she reasons. “He has this prophecy. I’m meant to wait until someone special gets here for my quest.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“I know.”
“No, not the waiting part. The prophecy.” Then, he mumbles frustratedly, mostly to himself probably. “I can’t believe he even told you that.”
Annabeth wiggles herself into straight posture, eyebrows tight. “You don’t get it.”
Steps sound from down the hall. Mr. D enters the space belly first and rubs at his eyes. He spares them an annoyed glance and Luke sends him an identical one back. Then he nods towards the door and grabs her book, his finger marking her page. Annabeth holds her bowl of strawberries in both hands and follows him out of the house, forgetting to put her sandals back on where she’d left them by the doormat. The grass is damp underfoot. Warmth kisses her skin shyly and she knows she’ll have to say goodbye to summer sooner than she’d like.
He reaches for a strawberry, but she swiftly twists her body.
They walk aimlessly. He feels abnormally tall standing so close to her, and she can’t pinpoint exactly when that happened. His free hand brushes her arm and Annabeth has known him for much too long to be noticing something as simple as that.
“What don’t I get, Annabeth?” he asks as if he doesn’t expect a good answer.
At the pavilion, she can make out her siblings stacking their dishes at the end of the table. Five plates total, two for Malcolm who likes his eggs runny but can’t stand when the yolk breaches the fruit. She smiles at them, and they look confusedly back at the sight of the two of them walking together, skipping breakfast together, when they can barely hold a five minute conversation these days.
Annabeth looks up at him. The once angry scar that cuts his cheek has fully healed now, but she doesn’t think she could ever forget what he’d looked like bloodied, holding her hand. Or maybe she’d been the one holding his hand. Looking back, he could’ve been completely ignorant to her even being there, sitting back against the wall with his head down and eyes narrowed. In the lightless infirmary, he could’ve been asleep. But she watched him, lied curled at his side, fingers brushing over his erratic pulse and knew he wasn’t. She thinks if you tore at the white tissue of his scar now, he’d look just like he did then.
“I need this quest.”
He takes a deep breath. “You only just turned twelve.”
“But I’ve waited so long, you know that,” she insists. “I wasn’t allowed to train with everyone else for like two years, and Chiron would keep saying I just had to wait. And now I’m trained, and I’m still waiting.”
“Good.”
She stares at him. “You being like this doesn’t change anything. I’m going.” Quieter, she says, “I just don’t know when.”
Luke gets himself to laugh then, though it lands brittle. “Because you’re so fond of listening to me anyway.”
“Grew out of that.”
They stop near the canoe lake. Luke plops himself down a green patch of grass and pulls a dandelion from the soil, slipping it into the page his finger had kept safe. He claps together the hard covers. Briefly, he traces the ancient Greek with a fingernail, contemplative, before turning back to her.
“It won’t be your quest,” he says.
Annabeth remains on her feet, shifting her weight. “I know that.”
“And you don’t care?” He’s smirking.
“I haven’t gotten to leave like you. I don’t just mean your quest. You sneak out whenever—and don’t even deny it, I know you do.” She rolls her shoulder back and musters her conviction. “I want to go outside.”
He throws his head back, face-to-face with the sun, and it’s not lost on her that the light is dull enough now that he can do that at all. “Fuck that. I can take you outside.”
“Can is different from will.”
Luke nods. “Will, then.”
She kicks his thigh with her barefoot, brushing dirt against tan skin. “That’s not nice.”
“I’m serious. Chiron isn’t here. Your siblings aren’t going to rat you out.” His smile is soft and young. “And it’d be fun.”
Annabeth frowns. “Where would we go? How would we get there?”
“You’ll see.”
“I’m supposed to trust that?”
He chuckles. “Annabeth, it’s me .”
She’s still skeptical, but she sits down on the grass by him, an awkward distance away. Luke grabs her arm and tugs her in closer, hands calloused and rough.
“Tonight?” she asks hopefully.
“Tonight.”
He turns his head, spotting a miscellaneous group of Cabin 11 kids leaving breakfast, dispersing in their own directions. His jaw sets, and she has the feeling their conversation is over. But she finds herself sitting with a more overwhelming feeling, one she hasn’t known for a long time—that she doesn’t want him to go.
She picks out a strawberry, pretty and ripe, and holds it out for him. It’s an offering that he takes.
.
The promised creek gathering happens sometime after dinner and Annabeth is drunk before the food settles in her stomach.
Percy holds her hair back as she throws up deeper into the woods, out of earshot from their friends. Her eyes sting and her throat feels raw and she can't even get herself to face him, sober and composed, when she’s done. He tips his water bottle into her mouth so she can rinse and she’s simultaneously grateful and humiliated that he’d been so prepared.
“The dryads are gonna be so upset…” she mutters miserably.
He chuckles and wraps his arms around her. His lips are like velvet against her forehead and Annabeth tucks her face in against his neck.
“You wanna go back?”
She nods dazedly. “Give me a second.”
“You drink too fast,” he says, fingers spread wide over her back, massaging up and down.
“Drank,” she corrects. “I’m not usually like this.”
His laugh is throaty and muffled behind closed lips. Annabeth doesn’t drink often enough for there to be any sort of usually, but she figures as the days build up at one point there will be. She’s about as certain that Percy will always be willing to hold her hair as she is sure that he’ll be there at all, and she doesn’t want that to become routine.
But for now. She’s eighteen and drunk and his arms are warm. And she says she loves him, but she must’ve slurred it because he laughs again, and in her head she thinks she loves that too.
He guides her back to the creek and their friends are mostly lying on blankets sprawled on the grass. Clarisse, Malcolm, and Connor are playing a game knocking down the liquor bottles and Annabeth cheers for her brother while it isn’t even his turn because that’s what family is for. Katie is hunched over in the creek, the hem of her pretty dress soaked and muddy, though she evidently doesn’t care. In her gentle, cupped hands sits a baby frog while Travis, laying beside the water, pets it with one finger and Katie doesn’t notice this but he’s really only looking at her.
She holds it up for the two of them to see, smiling sweetly, before setting the little creature free.
“Find more?” she asks, as if Annabeth would ever say no to a question like that.
.
Frog hunting in the creek is not much different now as to when she was a kid. The water is shallow, but the rocks below would be unforgiving on any skin that touches them. And Annabeth is only now a little less drunk than when she’d vomited into a patch of moss, so Percy trails behind her. Hands to himself, not keeping her steady, still ready just in case. He says it’s “a fucking miracle” she hasn’t so much as tripped. She thinks it’s the knowledge that he’s there that keeps her upright.
It’s late. Past curfew by who knows how long and she doesn’t know what the others are doing. The woods are hushed and peaceful, and they’re likely asleep, either in their cabins or where they left them. Katie and Travis had disappeared about four frogs ago. Though mildly disappointed, Annabeth is no cockblock.
Besides, she has Percy.
Percy, whose jeans are dry even under the water. He’d sacrificed his shirt to her when the moonlit chill began to set. It’s a faded shade of blue, having lived a whole life before he plucked it up at the thrift store for a bargain price. It isn’t much, but her shoulders are cozy and cotton-kissed, and it’s fair because the water will warm him, anyway. His hands are dirty from holding the pretty rocks and pebbles she’s been passing to him, and she thinks this is the only scenario in which a pair of jeans having so many pockets makes sense. A black curl hangs in front of his eyes and the scars on his face, neck, chest swirl like the little whirlpool he makes in the water around her. She giggles at the rush against her calves, reaching back and gripping his arms.
His nose nudges against her cheek and his mouth is warm on her jaw. Melting back against him isn’t nearly close enough, and the two layers on her upper body are beginning to feel like a punishment. He rests one hand low on her abdomen, spread from her belly button to the buckle on her shorts while the other travels up, a finger digging below the strap of her top. Relentless, he sucks and bites a southward trail on her neck, but even in her foggy-brained state Annabeth knows he’s only a horrible tease. He has her here, a wanting mess and she’ll have to wait until she can think straight for him to get anywhere as close as she wants. How she’s ever supposed to do that if he keeps this up, she doesn’t fucking know. She wants to crawl into him, wants him inside her. It goes against her very principles to try to even tug away, but she drops her chin towards her chest, fending him off her neck. He complies, though not without an amused, fond smile that makes her blush, as if he’s never seen her like this before. The water has calmed and it’s the same color as his eyes in the moonlight, and he’s standing there with rocks in his pockets that he could’ve very well just tossed back where they came from.
She has Percy—who else can say that?
They retreat upstream. She’s dizzy and her eyelids are heavy and she’ll never be able to drive them back to Manhattan the way they planned like this. At their little spot, some of their friends have left. Malcolm had returned to Cabin 6, dutiful counselor until it’ll be his turn to take off as well. She waves a hand over Clarisse’s eyes to test if she’s really asleep, which, yes. She is. Chris has his head on her abdomen, awake, but barely. He waves sluggishly, and Percy mutters something into her ear about how a monster could have a midnight snack so easily right now.
Connor lays unnaturally close to the water, the hair that frames his face soaked like he’s been dunking himself every now and then. “Got one,” he mumbles.
“Alone?” Percy asks.
“Yeah, you horny fucks.”
They do their best to redirect the lot of them back to their cabins, though Travis and Katie will have to take care of themselves. She wishes Clarisse a good night and earns a drunken grunt in return. She’s aware enough to let the undeniable truth sit heavy with her; this will never be what it would’ve been had Silena and Beckendorf been here. And every time she thinks of the umbrella of “her friends” her brain has to manually go back and pick them out with bloody fingers, but it’ll never be able to rid the traces which she knows they all must be silently mindful of.
“Percy,” she whispers, clutching his hand and an empty bottle as they duck into Cabin 3.
He takes the bottle from her, setting it down on the floor along with all the rocks she’d collected. With more reasonable vision, many of them aren’t nearly as remarkable as she had initially found them to be.
“Hm?” He sits her down on the bed, brushing the hair out of her face before digging through their bags. Presumably, for something to sleep in.
“Do you want to go home?”
“I want us both to sleep. Now, preferably.”
“But the deal…” she says, even as he lifts her arms and frees her from the day’s clothing.
“You can drive us back tomorrow,” he assures. “I’m wherever you are.”
Annabeth has always taken the side of the bed that pushes up next to the wall. The windowsill is lined with dust and she does her best to not look at it too long, in case one of the specs begins to move. Last time, they’d made themselves scarce before inspection day. She wonders if Percy could even be held accountable for the cabin’s condition, technically no longer a camper.
They wouldn’t be the first older teenagers to visit Camp, on the cusp of adulthood. She’d grown up with her older siblings coming in and out, and now she supposes she’ll be that sister for kids like her new half-brother. A friendly face who brings back brand-name sodas and facilitates dinner conversations, breaking the ice for them before taking off.
She squirms out of her denim shorts, swimming in the sea salt scented sheets, declaring herself comfortable in his large shirt and it does dawn on her that she's spent an inordinate portion of this summer in his wardrobe. There are worse ways to live.
The pipes, as it would turn out, are still not functional. This works out in Annabeth’s favor, tired and comfy and perfectly content being gross for one night. She tells him as much and Percy wraps her in the weight of his arm, not putting up much of an honest fight, though he does snark something about how she’ll regret it in the morning, hungover.
(Unsurprisingly, she does).
.
The front porch lights flicker when her soles hit the wooden panels. For an unsure second, she wobbles, unable to find her balance in these sneakers. Double-edged in the sense that they’re the coolest pair she owns, only at the price of too much unfilled space in front of her toes. Silena said it’s fine—she’s a growing girl and these are a long term investment.
Other than the shoes, she’s almost wearing the same clothes as earlier. Denim shorts that may not have been the wisest choice since the air has taken on a chill, a tank top she’s had for years but miraculously hasn’t outgrown, and a brown zip-up jacket left mostly unzipped. It’s not that cold. She’d tucked a shimmery clip onto a stubborn front curl, because she can’t be bothered to brush hair out of her eyes in the event of a monster encounter.
She had figured he would meet her here, but Luke is busy, she knows. Even at nighttime. Watchful of the harpies in the distance, she bee-lines for Cabin 11.
Their front steps whine under her weight, scratchy and unforgiving on the underside of her legs when she sits down, staring out at the cabins. Each has their lights off, but surely they’re not unanimously asleep. Something like a growl gets tossed in the wind, quiet, likely from deep in the woods. Or outside the boundary. She’s almost certain the turning in her stomach is excitement.
“Look at you.”
Annabeth whips her head around. The door creaks as he closes it slowly. He doesn’t look tired, she notices, eyes wide awake and focused just on her.
Her grin, at the sight of him, is hard to fight. “You kept your word.”
She doesn’t reach out her hand, but he bends down and picks it up anyway, pulling her to her feet with ease.
“Yeah, well.” He looks around as he guides her back down to the grass, holding onto her still. “There are conditions.”
She surprises herself when she doesn’t protest. How could she, even, when he’s leading her up and over Half Blood Hill, and it’s not exactly in the context she’d hoped for, but any venture outside is better than none. The branches of Thalia’s pine are longer facing the road, reaching out to them through the night and she notices that Luke doesn’t glance back even once.
Past the invisible barrier, nothing feels different. Except, maybe, that Luke is holding her hand tighter. And if she’s limp in his fingers, he doesn’t seem to mind because it’s not that the two of them are holding hands in the intertwined way, with mutual intention. She feels a little bit like a kid being dragged across the street at the walk sign. But more than that, she feels his skin and something fluttering inside her.
Argus’s SUV is due for a wash, in her opinion. In the dark, it’s nearly impossible to tell that the car is meant to be white under the grime like someone had driven it through a dust storm, and as far as Annabeth knows, there aren’t any of the sort in New York.
He drops her hand to open the passenger side door, mindless of the dust caked on his palm. She shuffles herself into the leather seat, old newspaper rustling under her sneakers, and she knows that Luke has unique privileges, but getting the keys to the camp vehicle seems far-fetched, even for him. Annabeth wants to ask, and she suspects he can tell. She suspects he leans over her and clicks her seatbelt into place, brushing his lips across the top of her head for this exact reason, before he shuts the door, loud and isolated in the late hour.
She realizes she’s never actually been in here before. When she’d (regrettably) left, her dad had driven all the way up from Virginia and she sat in the back seat, not because she was too young or too short to be up front, but that’s where she had put herself and he didn’t offer otherwise. At the time, it had felt right to her. Annabeth taps her fingers on the dashboard. Twelve years old and sitting shotgun for the very first time.
Luke gets behind the wheel. He starts the car and you would think it’s his. There are handprints made of dust on the steering wheel.
“There’s only one. Condition, I mean,” he says.
She sighs. “On with it.”
“You don’t leave the car at any point tonight.” The front panel lights are blue and the color sinks into the sharpness of his cheeks, electrifying his eyes as they pin her down. “No matter what.”
“But what if—”
“Annabeth,” he pleads, desperate. He pulls the car onto the unmaintained road and Annabeth feels very silly holding onto the sides of her seat to stay still.
The headlights don’t do much to illuminate down the road. If there were a monster up there, neither of them would be able to see. She has her knife and her cap, obviously. And she has Luke. She couldn’t imagine a threat that could best her if she tried.
“I thought you were taking me somewhere,” she accuses.
“I’m taking you on a drive. Outside.” His gaze flutters between her and the road. Mostly her. “That’s all I can give you.”
The road gives to smoother asphalt and Annabeth crosses her arms in front of her body. Her ponytail is uncomfortable against the headrest, but for some reason she can’t get herself to take it out. Instead, she turns her head and stares out the window. This is the opposite direction her father had taken her, and Annabeth wonders where the fields will end, if ever.
“If I wanted to go on a drive, Argus would take me,” she says, not even sure if it would hold true.
He laughs, low and mirthless. “Should I turn the car around?”
She watches his reflection in her window, and even through the shifting shadows it’s clear how tired he is. If he had nothing better to do than this, he should be asleep. But he’s with her and while this isn’t nearly what she’d meant by outside she guesses there are worse ways to spend the night than with Luke, in a car, showing her the tantalizingly close parts of Long Island. He doesn’t deserve her acting like a brat.
Annabeth leans forward and turns on the radio. She rotates the dial and runs through static until landing on a station that is somewhat coherent. She can’t tell if it’s a popular song, if anyone else her age would know it.
“No,” she whispers. And this time when she settles back against the headrest she turns onto her left temple, facing him as he drives.
Luke doesn’t respond. He drops a hand from the wheel, lazy as the road ahead forges straight on. She’s seen him fight, with his sword, with his hands. And she’s seen him work, building more bunks for his campers and pulling weeds out from the perimeter of his cabin. How much effort he has to use at camp; how little energy it takes him to leave.
“How did you learn?” She asks, picking at the threadbare lines in the leather.
He shrugs. “It’s not hard. Taught myself, mostly.”
That, she can imagine. “But when’d you start?”
“Picked up a little when I was your age,” he says. She tries to imagine a homeless pre-teen Luke in a car chase like the movies, which isn’t all that difficult to do. “But if you mean this— two years ago, I think.”
“You don’t have a license.”
Luke chuckles, the insinuation that he’d even need one is ridiculous. “Of course not.” It’s no secret he isn’t fond of flaunting his inherited traits, but she doesn’t miss that this is a Hermes thing no other camper would ever try to do.
The music fades in and out the further they drive through the boring terrain, until it too dissolves into static. He turns it off and looks over at her for so long she nearly tells him to keep his eyes on the road.
“If you were my age,” she starts, and based on his expression she thinks he knows where this is going. “That makes me old enough too.”
“You’re not driving this car right now, Annabeth.”
“But why not?”
Her ponytail hits the headrest hard when the SUV comes to an abrupt stop. She hits his arm, but Luke doesn’t even seem to register it. In one rapid, smooth motion he hauls the car into a clean one-eighty turn and they surge forward the way they came much faster than they had left.
She doesn’t hit him this time, instead grabbing onto his upper arm, inclining herself over the gear shift, pleading. “No, wait. Luke. I don’t want to go back.”
For a long moment, he doesn’t say anything and she almost thinks he’s doing it to spite her. “We’re not,” he says, voice raw, and she knows he didn’t. His jaw is set hard, but his face is irritatingly blank. There had never been a point in time where she could discern, with certainty, what’s going on in that head of his. But she thinks if it would have ever been possible, she’s getting further away from it with every passing day. “Fucking hard to please,” he grumbles, not upset in any true way, she thinks.
Maybe getting ahead of herself, Annabeth breathes a shallow laugh. “Not really.”
He gives her a look, blue eyes dimmed.
“No girl wants to leave her farm to see more farmland. You can’t blame me.”
In truth, the sights on this side don’t have much to offer either, but at least she knows they’re finite.
The time reads half past 10, just about her usual bedtime, but Annabeth refuses to fall asleep, even if the most she can do is watch Luke work his jaw, drum his fingers on the wheel. Hard to please, easily bored. Neither necessarily true, but how would she describe the past couple years if not bored? At least she’s waiting for something. She doesn’t know what it would feel like to be Luke, to have already had something happen, to live for nothing.
A boredom similar to hers, if she had to guess.