Chapter Text
Percy rolls out his neck, shaking out his arms as he hears each satisfying pop with every turn of his head. His shoulders rotate back next, just before he stretches his arms first to the ceiling, then bends at the waist to touch his toes. Holds for a count of ten, tries to focus on 10 things to count.
Coach’s footsteps as he paces along the side of the long pool. One.
The wet, dirty white tile beneath his own feet. Two.
The echo of his teammates’ deep, heaving breaths as they stretch, then give up before they reach ten. Three.
The impossible stillness of the water, not a single ripple on the surface of the pool. Four.
The harsh glare of the fluorescents nearly blinding him, exacerbating his oncoming migraine until it’s no longer oncoming and just is. Five.
The throb of his forehead. Six.
Another breath of his own. Seven.
A cold hand on his back, adjusting his form. Eight.
His speedo pinching him around the hips. Nine.
The shrill shriek of Coach’s whistle. Ten.
He stands and reaches for the ceiling once more, twists at the waist from side to side, clocks the fact that every swimmer on his team is moving in synch, as one. His speedo pinches at his hips again, and he tries to ignore it, to focus on the cool down, the recovery his spent muscles need, but—fuck, it is so annoying.
“Did I shrink these in the wash?” he says aloud, glaring down at the offending material as he stills.
Beside him, his team captain snorts as he stretches out his triceps.
“Went a little too hard into that home cooking this summer, I’d say,” Beckendorf comments, and Percy cannot withhold his grin as he turns to face his friend.
He has all the makings of a captain, the broad shoulders set back confidently, the stoic expression that gives way to an easy smile. Even just his stance screams leader—feet planted firmly, shoulder-width apart, back straight as an arrow. Percy shakes his head, grinning as he meets his friend’s dark eyes, the deep brown skin around them crinkling with his smile.
“You don’t know the power of Sally Jackson’s freshly fried falafel,” Percy says matter-of-factly.
“Nah, but I know the power of her son’s homemade hummus—you owe me a tub, by the way. Told you you’d beat your personal best.”
Percy rolls his eyes and turns his back to Beckendorf, reaching his hands behind him. Beckendorf grabs onto his right arm and pulls it back as far as Percy can handle while he plants his palm flat between Percy’s shoulder blades, holds it there as Percy winces.
“That was a fluke,” he hisses, and Beckendorf pulls his arm back further just to punish him.
“You’ve been at it all summer. I saw you. Not a fluke.” He releases Percy’s arm only to grab the other and repeat the process. “Give yourself some credit.”
Percy sighs and rolls out his right shoulder while Beckendorf nearly dislocates his left.
“Fine,” he concedes. “I’m incredible. Happy?”
Beckendorf releases Percy’s arm and whacks him in the back of the head, and Percy spins around in time to tackle his friend around the waist, his shoulder shoved into Beckendorf’s chest. They wrestle around until Coach blows his whistle so vehemently Percy’s eardrums nearly burst.
The throb in his forehead spreads to his temples.
“Hey, dipshits!” their coach shouts. “You get injured, it’s the end of your season. Fuck off and hit the showers!”
Percy and Beckendorf separate, Beckendorf grinning widely as he salutes their coach, who glares at them.
Coach Hedge is about 5 feet tall, balding, and covered neck-to-toe in body hair. Percy might be more amused if the guy didn’t contain the rage of a thousand men inside his small frame, and if he didn’t happen to hold the ability to end Percy’s undergraduate career in the palm of his sweaty hand. The older man nearly growls at the pair of them, and so they follow his advice and tail the rest of their team to the showers before he bites at their ankles or forces them to stay for an extra hour of conditioning.
“You know, for someone who doesn’t want to be here, you work awfully hard,” Beckendorf comments as they head into the locker room.
Percy sucks in one of his cheeks and shakes his head, pulling off his swim cap and running a hand through his dark curls to soothe his aching scalp. It does little to alleviate the throbbing behind his eyes, but it brings relief nonetheless.
“I’m a man of contradictions,” he says, and Beckendorf sends him a sideways glance as he heads towards his locker.
“I don’t think you are,” he tells him. “I think it’s just the one. Think maybe you’re just a man of your word.”
Percy sighs heavily through his nose and opens his locker, staring at the photo taped to the inside door—his mother’s laughing face beside his own, amber-brown skin to match his, tightly curled hair just as unruly, mouth spread in that same cheek-splitting smile. He’s 12 in the picture, and he’s just won his first gold medal, and neither of them knows that he’s about to lose it to a poker game they didn’t sign up for, along with his school laptop and his mother’s most recent paycheck.
His chest tightens, right beneath the well of his collarbones, and he shakes his head again, trying to set his focus on something productive. Trying not to let the feeling spread up to his throat.
It’s about next steps, he tells himself. Just the one in front of you. Only that.
He takes a breath deep enough to loosen up the knot he let get a little too close to his heart, and suddenly he realizes that he has no idea what time it is, and he needs to decide if he’s going to wash his hair now or save it for later so that he won’t be late to his first class of the day. He’s checking his phone for the time, entirely engrossed in his decision-making process, entirely determined not to face the reality of his captain’s earlier words, when he hears the locker next to him slam shut.
Standing beside him, on the other side of his open door, that flimsy little piece of metal the only thing separating them, is the slimiest, most spoiled piece of shit Percy has ever known. His pale skin is nearly translucent in the light of the locker room, and he sneers at Percy as if he’s not half a foot shorter and 40 pounds skinnier than him.
“Jackson,” Octavian greets, and Percy pays him no attention as he shoves his phone back into his locker and grabs his towel. He heads towards the showers, determined not to be goaded. “Great run at practice. Shame mommy wasn’t here to watch you beat your personal best.”
Percy stops in his tracks, freezing as he flexes his free hand, and clenches his teeth tightly. He has a decision to make here, needs to remember to pick his battles. But goddamn, it would feel so good to just turn around and—
“Jackson! Hurry up, I’m buying breakfast,” Beckendorf calls out from the far corner of the room, and Percy’s train of thought is interrupted.
He looks over at Beckendorf to find the older boy holding his gaze firmly, shaking his head so minutely Percy wouldn’t be able to tell he was moving it if he didn’t know his captain so well. Percy swallows and nods stiffly, trying to conjure the little voice in his head that reminds him it’s 6:30 a.m. on a Monday, and that he cannot get into it this early in the year with someone as fucking irrelevant as that little prick Octavian.
Pick your battles, hayati. Some people aren’t worth it.
Percy nods again, less to his older friend and more to himself, and heads in towards the showers. Today is not the day he gets kicked off the swim team, he decides. Today is not the day.
~ ~ ~
Annabeth’s lost track of time. Again.
She’s been hunched over her sketchpad since she woke up this morning, graphite shavings and pencil marks all over her white comforter, staining the outside of her hand. She’d had a dream—a skyline, dazzling, sprawling, infinite. Each building its own unique style, no two designs the same. New York and Algiers and Athens and Istanbul and Paris and Rio and Sydney and Luanda and Rome and Shanghai all combined into one. Better than anything that has ever existed. Better than anything that could ever exist after it.
So she’s been busy. Engrossed. Tunnel-visioned by her deranged unconscious mind. It was all she could do, to get the idea down on paper before she could forget it. What kind of architect would she be if she let something like that slip through her fingers?
Her alarm goes off for the third time, and her hand starts to cramp, so she holds the pad out in front of her, trying to see the full picture. Trying to see how it all ties together, what she could do to make it a coherent whole and not just a mess of separate buildings that don’t belong together. She stares until she’s cross-eyed, and then she stares some more, and—she’s really going to be late if she doesn’t get up now.
She heaves out a sigh as she drops the sketchpad onto her bed and shuts the alarm on her phone off, finally left in complete silence save for the muffled sounds of the small city outside. Harsh wind shakes her window in its frame, so she pads her way over and cracks it open the tiniest bit, just to listen, to feel the breeze against her skin.
She presses her forehead to the cool glass and watches the tree directly outside her window rustle in the wind, watches as parents cross the street with their kids, as workers wait for busses in the grey-tinted light, as cyclists turn tight corners to avoid being hit. Countless lives, very few of which she will ever know at all, even fewer she will know intimately.
She lets out a puff of breath and writes her initials in the fog with her pinky and watches it fade until only the outline of the letters is left, permanent streaks leaving their marks on cold glass.
Her fourth alarm—which she was an absolute genius to set—goes off, and she remembers her 8 a.m. class, remembers the ridiculous commitment she made to Reyna the day before. But really, she thinks, who would ever want to grab coffee at seven in the morning when they already have an early start ahead of them? The woman is a masochist at best and a sadist at worst. Annabeth is never doing this again.
(She will, probably.)
Somehow she makes it out of her apartment and to the small coffee shop right off campus, finds Reyna sitting in a seat near the front window. Annabeth notices that there are two iced coffees on the table, and she tries to argue about paying Reyna back before her friend quite literally threatens her life.
“Alright,” Annabeth concedes, holding her palms in the air. “I’ll get the next one.”
Reyna smirks, satisfied, and leans back in her seat, her long, sleek black braid falling over her shoulder with an effortless grace that Annabeth’s frizzy curls could never manage.
“You look a little cute for a run,” Annabeth comments, eyeing Reyna’s workout gear, the very subtle makeup highlighting her deep brown eyes. “Would you happen to be meeting anyone in particular today?”
Reyna’s bronze skin tints red, and Annabeth grins widely as she bites down on her straw.
“Shut the fuck up about that,” Reyna says through grit teeth, but Annabeth only smiles wider.
“When are you gonna grow a pair and ask her out?”
“We don’t even know if she’s into girls.”
“She literally told you that she’s butch.”
“Well, we don’t know if she’s into me, then.”
“You are literally the hottest person I’ve ever seen with my own two eyes.”
“I will get up and leave right now.”
“Do it. And give her a kiss for me, will you?”
Reyna flips off Annabeth with both hands, and Annabeth laughs from her belly until her phone vibrates in her pocket and she pulls it out to see who might be sending her a message so early in the morning. Her stomach drops when she sees the name, the five little words in the notification bubble beneath it.
Nothing good has ever come out of a conversation with Frederick Chase, and Annabeth doesn’t have time to be distracted worrying about all the ways their talk could go wrong right now.
She is so deeply lost in thought, her eyebrows stitched together so tightly her forehead starts to ache, that it takes Reyna quite literally kicking her shin under the table to get her attention.
“What’s the matter?” Reyna asks, her face etched in worry. “You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”
Annabeth shakes her head, tucking her phone back into her pocket, determined to ignore the message. For now.
“Nothing,” she lies. “It’s fine.”
Reyna eyes Annabeth warily, but eventually nods reluctantly and leans back into her seat. Annabeth does her best to focus on the conversation at hand, but suddenly the near-empty cafe is too loud and the lights are too bright and the smells are too overwhelming.
“I’m gonna get a croissant,” Annabeth says, standing abruptly. Her voice a touch too high. “You want one?”
If the look on Reyna’s face is anything to go by, Annabeth must’ve just interrupted her speaking. She’ll buy her friend a pastry, make up for it in butter and carbs, the way they always do.
“No, I’ve got to head out, actually,” Reyna says, then stands. She shoulders her bag. “So do you, I think. I’ll text you, okay? And we’ll see each other at Piper’s thing next Friday.”
Annabeth nods and Reyna squeezes her arm supportively before she starts to walk off. She pauses, and Annabeth stares at her friend’s back as she seems to contemplate what to do next. Reyna turns on her heel to face Annabeth, her face open and earnest, but somehow entirely stern, too.
“You know I’m here for you if you need anything,” she says, and her tone leaves no room for argument. “You don’t have to tell me, we don’t have to talk. But I am here. Always.”
Annabeth swallows down the lump of gratitude clogging up her throat and nods.
“I know,” she says, and Reyna nods once, obviously dissatisfied, but unwilling to cross any boundaries. “Thanks.” Annabeth pauses and debates her next words. “Give my regards to Gym Girl, would you?”
Reyna cracks a reluctant smile and calls Annabeth a rather colorful insult before she finally leaves the cafe, and Annabeth is left standing alone, the smell of fresh coffee and baked goods filling her nose.
She stares at the pastry case, runs her finger along the smooth edge of her phone, runs those familiar words over in her head.
Call later? Need to talk.
Nothing good has ever come out of a conversation with her father, Annabeth knows. Nothing good will come from this.
She bites down on the inside of her lip, breathing deeply through her nose, and she makes her decision.
Two croissants it is. Maybe three, just in case. Never know when you’ll need them most.
~ ~ ~
Percy considers himself to be, overall, a fairly patient person. It usually takes quite a lot to set him off, and he is almost never goaded into anything unless it involves someone he loves. His anger, then, is reserved for others; rarely ever does his blood boil for himself.
His hate for Annabeth Chase, however, is wholly, entirely selfish.
He didn’t always hate her. In fact, when the semester had just begun and he first caught sight of her sitting at the front of his neuropsych class, all long legs and golden princess curls and eyes the color of a stormy sky, he’d been a little bit enamored with her. Found that every time she raised her hand in class his ears would perk up, that he would be inclined to listen. Found it endearing, even, the way she tilted her head as she spoke to their professor, the way she introduced herself with her full name each time she was called on, as if anyone could forget her. He’d fallen into the trap of it all, the novelty.
Fell into how stunning she was, in all honesty.
But it had taken about three classes for him to go from adoring to mildly annoyed, and one more to go from mildly annoyed to outright pissy. She interrupted their professor no less than four times each class, once every 20 minutes. She would derail lesson plans and talk too much about shit he didn’t need to memorize and just generally disrupt the flow of the lecture. And Percy, with his ADHD and dyslexia combo, found that flow was the only thing he could rely on. Flow made the world go round, flow kept his notes in check, flow got him the grades he needed to keep his swim scholarship.
Annabeth Chase spat in the face of the flow, and their professor, charmed as he was by her know-it-all tendencies, let her do it gladly. So Percy was forced to make time he didn’t have between swim and work and his other classes to go to office hours, but even then, Annabeth Chase was there. Raising her hand. Taking up all of their professor’s time. Making Percy’s life about 10,000 times harder than it had to be.
Even all of that could have been forgiven—Percy wasn’t exactly a petty person, although he did find her behavior incredibly inconsiderate. What really got to him was how entitled she acted, as if she was the only person in the world and no one else’s education mattered. She had the air of someone who’d grown up with money, someone spoiled who’d never been told no, and it rubbed him entirely the wrong way. He’d spent his entire life in different schools with people just like her, and he wanted absolutely nothing to do with her.
She’d proven to him exactly how right he was about her one day early in the semester, when he’d been running late for office hours. He was about to rush into his professor’s office when he heard his name being spoken in a low tone, and he stopped short just outside after he caught sight of that familiar mane of golden curls through the crack of the open door.
“Who’s Percy Jackson?” Annabeth had asked, and their professor, Dr. Psilas, had taken a short breath.
“Tall, dark-haired kid, has a crazy New York accent,” he explained, and Percy had frowned.
His accent was barely noticeable. Or so he’d thought.
“Wait, you mean the one who raises his hand just to ask you to repeat definitions you gave five seconds before?” Annabeth had said.
Percy’s face burned with embarrassment, something coiling tight and sour in his stomach. He’d spent years overcoming his aversion to asking questions in class for fear of sounding stupid. For fear that maybe he would reveal the truth of the matter: that he did not belong in school, that he never had and never would.
He’d never hated her more than he did in that moment.
“Annabeth,” Dr. Psilas chastised, and Percy saw her shoulders slump. “I really think you could both benefit if you tutored him.”
Annabeth inhaled a sharp breath. “With all due respect, Dr. P, I really don’t have the time in my schedule that someone like him obviously needs.”
Someone like him. Someone like him. Someone like him.
He’d run the words over and over again in his mind, heard the condescension in her tone. He could not drown it out, no matter how hard he tried. He could not unsink his stomach, untie the knot binding his ribs, unheat the metal rod burning him in a reckless path, from the top of his head to the soles of his feet.
Percy hadn’t gone to office hours that day, nor the following week. Shame and rage and a feeling of inadequacy borne long before he ever met her weighed him down until he could turn it all outwards, into something more productive, something that hurt less: outright loathing.
Percy Jackson loathes Annabeth Chase. And there is nothing in the world that will ever change that.
When he takes his seat in class this morning and finds her usual front-row spot vacant, there are no words to describe how relieved he is that she seems to be absent. When class begins and she is still missing, he becomes downright giddy . He smiles through taking notes, nearly laughs to himself as he finally manages to keep up with a lecture for the first time in weeks. It’s incredible. Fantastic. Everything he ever could’ve dreamed of.
And then, after 15 minutes of pure, unadulterated bliss, she bursts into the lecture hall and ruins it all. Lecture disrupted, professor shocked into silence, Percy’s entire mood upended in one fell swoop.
She ambles in and swings her backpack and makes more noise than Percy ever thought possible, entirely unapologetic. Fucking nuisance. Bane of his existence.
Percy lets out a sigh that feels like it may have formed deep within the marrow of his bones, resigned to the fact that his notes will soon stop making sense.
An hour later he sighs again as Dr. Psilas dismisses class. Shuts his notebook and starts trying to do the mental math of when he might be able to drop into office hours or email his professor.
Swim practice tomorrow night, work from four to nine in the morning.
He zips up his backpack and stands.
Class later today. Plus his noon class tomorrow, and the one directly after it.
Casts a glance over his shoulder, where the ass-kisser herself is—of fucking course—engaged in what must be a scintillating conversation with Professor Pushover.
There’s that quiz in Adolescent Development due two days from now, 11:59 p.m. on Wednesday, but he’s working the closing shift that night and has swim that morning, so he’s going to need to find time to get it done between today and tomorrow.
“Shit, shit, shit, shit,” Percy breathes to himself as he makes his way up the aisle to head to his apartment. “Shit.”
Shit is exactly how he feels by the time he arrives at his door, exhausted and sick with stress and furious at himself for forgetting his workload. He quite literally throws his backpack onto the ground and turns around, banging his forehead against the door with a loud groan.
“Rough day?”
Percy jumps in surprise, his heart kicking into overdrive as he turns around to face the owner of the voice.
Clarisse is sitting on his couch with her socked feet propped up on his coffee table, grinning like a fiend.
“What the fuck?” he breathes out, hand over his chest. “Nearly shat myself.”
Clarisse’s smile only grows wider, the freckles across her broad nose stretching with her plump cheeks.
“How the fuck did you get in here?” he asks her as he takes the three steps needed to reach his living room and collapses into the only armchair he owns.
“Got that spare key, remember?”
Percy raises one skeptical eyebrow.
“I don’t remember making you a spare,” he says.
She sighs, rolling her head back on his couch to stare up at his water-stained ceiling. Her sandy brown hair has started to grow back out on top, and it flops back and clings to the wall from the static electricity.
“Yeah, that’s ’cause I made it myself,” she tells him, then lifts her head to look pointedly at him. The corner of his mouth twitches at the sight of the hairs sticking straight up in the air. “You owe me a dollar twenty-nine, by the way.”
He gapes at her, amusement forgotten.
“For what?”
“Key I made. Service ain’t free, you know.”
He stares at her, incredulous, and she blinks at him impassively, her pale brown eyes inscrutable.
“Get out of my house!” he finally yells, throwing his arms up in the air.
She scoffs. “You’re in a mood today,” she says, crossing her massive arms over her chest. “Why don’t you make me some lunch and maybe then you’ll calm down.”
Percy opens his mouth to object, but the only sound that comes out of him is a monstrous rumbling of his stomach. He flattens his lips together and Clarisse raises one triumphant brow at him.
“Oh, fuck off,” he mutters and stands to move toward the kitchen. “Noodles or rice?”
“Bread,” she says, and he doesn’t let her see his grin.
Homemade pizza feels like just the thing to take his mind off all the shit weighing him down today. He knows for a fact that Clarisse must’ve rifled through his fridge and seen the resting dough he’d made the night before to quell his nerves while writing his research paper. He takes the Tupperware out, now, sets it on the counter to bring it back to room temperature. Searches through his pantry, grabs a large pot and a cutting board and his favorite mincing knife. More garlic than can fit in his hand, and then some more—still not enough.
Homemade pizza, Percy knows, requires homemade sauce. None of that jarred shit. None of the artificial nonsense that tastes like watered-down ketchup. Homemade. His mom’s recipe: crushed tomatoes, tomato paste, onion, garlic, fresh basil, salt, pepper, sugar to cut the acidity, more fresh basil, and then at the very end: even more fresh basil. Simple. Easy. Easier to fuck up than to get right, because of its simplicity. Concentration is key.
“Lemme stab something,” Clarisse says from directly behind him, and his eye twitches, his knife hand faltering.
“Nothing for you to stab, tragically,” Percy tells her, resuming his mincing, then pauses. “Actually, I lost my can opener last week, so maybe you can do the tomatoes somehow—”
“Aw, fuck yeah, pass them here.”
Percy grins and does as she says, then passes her a large knife. He briefly wonders, as she jabs at the aluminum can, if this was the best idea—surely giving the woman who seems to live for blood and gore a knife to open a can and expose sharp metal can only end in disaster—but he busies himself with heating up the olive oil, mincing the garlic and dicing the onion.
Clarisse gets the can open in record time, zero injuries incurred, and soon the tiny apartment fills with the smell of sautéed garlic and onion, hot olive oil, freshly cut basil.
Percy and his best friend stand shoulder-to-shoulder over the pot as he waits to add in the tomatoes and take a deep breath in through their noses, eyes closed, then breathe out blissful sighs.
“Heaven,” Percy whispers, his mind utterly devoid of any thoughts that are not the things he loves. Rude butch next to him, food right in front of him.
“Heaven,” Clarisse agrees.
They eat together, hunched over the baking sheet on top of the stove because they can’t wait any longer, burn the insides of their mouths and the tips of their reddened fingers, sauce and cheese and crust. Fucking crust. Phenomenal, if he may say so himself. Maybe his best yet.
“So,” Clarisse says, wiping her hands as they wait for their second pizza to finish baking in the oven, “wanna talk about it or what?”
Percy shakes his head.
“I’m good,” he tells her, and she knits her eyebrows, her eyes searching his face in concern.
“I’m good,” he repeats, and he finds that he means it.
Nothing in the world beats fresh basil, he thinks. Maybe fresh basil picked together, washed by one and dried by another, cut, breathed in, treasured. Green-tinted fingernails and green-stained cutting boards and green specks stuck in crooked teeth. Greener the better, he thinks.
Clarisse chews on a leftover leaf and passes him the one beside it, and they stand and wait and breathe.
Greener the better.
~ ~ ~
Annabeth knows that she is not the world’s most patient person. In fact, she’s aware that she probably errs on the side of being a bit too im patient, on occasion. Or most of the time. Maybe always.
But she doesn’t think it’s her fault, not really. She just can’t be bothered to wait around for things to happen when she can be the one acting and making the changes herself. It makes her antsy and restless, and those are two things that she cannot bear to be.
Also, people can be fucking exhausting, sometimes. She doesn’t really think it’s fair that she’s expected to just endure being irritated in the name of being polite. Who has the energy for that bullshit?
She most certainly doesn’t, and she knows it, and she’s long since accepted it. In fact, she’s grateful for it—it was her impatience that brought Annabeth and her best friend together in the first place.
They were 14 and brand new to a boarding school out in the middle of nowhere, tucked away in the mountains, as far from their families as possible. Annabeth had loathed her roommate, who was loud and inconsiderate and always left her dirty socks at the foot of her bed, which meant that Annabeth spent as much time as possible outside of her dorm, with her most frequent haunt being the library.
It was there that she met Piper McLean, who was sitting at Annabeth’s favorite study table—directly against the library’s large window, with a view out over the mountains and the massive lake that was just inside the school’s property. Piper had been sitting with her head in her hands, her elbows on either side of a textbook, her silky black hair sticking out through her fingers.
Annabeth was torn between asking the girl if she could sit at the large table or just finding somewhere else to go when Piper let out an inhuman groan and her head fell from her hands down onto the textbook with a loud smack.
“Uuuuuuggggghhhh,” she’d moaned, and Annabeth’s eyes had widened.
She was about to ask if the other girl was okay when her groaning started up again, this time for longer. And then Annabeth became annoyed.
“Are you ever gonna shut up?” she snapped, and the girl’s groan cut off instantly.
She didn’t even bother picking her head up, just rolled it to the side to look at Annabeth.
“Depends on who’s asking,” Piper had said, her coffee-brown eyes tired, but somehow still tight around the edges. “And if she’s being an asshole about it.”
Annabeth had bristled at that.
“You’re in a library,” she’d said. “Have some consideration.”
“Do you see anyone else in here?”
Annabeth’s eye had twitched. She knew nobody else was in here, which was why she came here in the first place, but that didn’t discount her own presence.
“Yeah, me, asshat,” Annabeth had snapped.
Piper’s dark eyebrows had lifted to her forehead, then, and she sat up straight.
“You’re spunky,” she’d said, crossing her arms over her chest, and Annabeth had frowned.
“I’m not spunky. I’m annoyed.”
“Well, I’m stubborn and stupid. Have a seat, asshole.”
Piper had kicked out the chair across from her and Annabeth had taken it reluctantly, unsure why she was listening to the person who just called her an asshole not once, but twice.
“Why do you think you’re stupid?” Annabeth had asked, shrugging off her backpack, and Piper had grimaced and nodded to the book before her.
“I can’t even solve a simple inequality.”
Annabeth’s ears perked up, then.
“I’m great at inequalities,” she’d said.
She hadn’t meant to sound boastful or proud, but the look on Piper’s face told her that maybe she had.
Oops.
“Well, if you’re so great at them, why don’t you do me a favor and help me pass this ugly class?” Piper offered. “Either that or you can kill me.”
Annabeth felt the beginnings of a smile start to form on her lips.
“Can’t do murder, sadly,” she’d said. “If I get expelled, I’ll have to live with my actual family.”
Piper had grimaced and rested her cheek against her fist.
“You’d rather live here than at home?” she asked, and Annabeth shrugged.
“Mountains are pretty.”
“And that’s your only opposition to murder? Not being near the mountains?”
Annabeth had grinned a bit.
“They’re really, really pretty.”
Piper had snorted and sat up fully, then pursed her lips.
“I’m Piper.”
“Annabeth.”
“Well, Annabeth, I hate to break it to you, but I think you might be stuck with me for the rest of your life.”
Annabeth had pursed her lips to fight back her smile and shrugged.
“Least we’ll both be really good at inequalities by the time we die.”
Piper had thrown her head back and laughed out loud, Annabeth had finally allowed herself a genuine smile, and the rest was history.
“Do we think I could pull off a septum piercing?” Piper asks in the now.
Annabeth looks up at her from her place on Piper’s living room floor and finds her best friend tilting her head in consideration.
“Absolutely,” Annabeth says without pause. “You’d look so fucking hot.”
“Great, appointment booked.”
Annabeth grins down at the tablet in her lap, erases a shoddy sketch to replace it with another. She’s been at it for the better part of two hours, the sketching, the second-guessing, the erasing. At this rate, she’ll never finish her design project.
“Thought you were hard at work writing that research paper,” Annabeth remarks, deciding to try a sharper style.
“I was, and then I thought ‘I’d look super hot with a septum piercing’ and so I looked up trustworthy piercers, and then I asked your opinion just to get validation that I’d look hot, and then I booked the appointment.”
“You definitely booked the appointment pre-validation.”
“Yeah, I booked it immediately after I found the place, obviously.”
Annabeth grins widely and throws her extra pen at Piper’s head. Her best friend ducks out of the way, hiding behind her laptop and falling back onto the mountain of pillows surrounding her on the couch.
“Oh no, now I’m too comfy to do any work,” Piper whines. “How tragic.”
Annabeth grins and shakes her head, biting her lip as she focuses on a rough corner of her sketch. Why can’t she just get this right today?
“Something’s bothering you,” Piper says suddenly, and Annabeth knits her eyebrows as she glares down at her design.
“No.”
“Yes. You’re quiet, and you have that face on.”
“I’m concentrating.”
“You’re doing the opposite of concentrating. You’re trying too hard to concentrate, because you can’t concentrate, because something’s bothering you.”
Annabeth sighs heavily and gives in, looking up at Piper.
“I don’t think the opposite of concentrating is trying to concentrate,” she says, and Piper sends her an unimpressed look.
“Now you’re avoiding,” she points out, and Annabeth groans and leans back against the recliner behind her.
“My dad texted me today,” she admits quietly.
Piper’s breath catches in her throat before she can collect herself.
“What’s that asshole want?”
Annabeth shrugs. “I don’t know. He asked if I could call him. Said we need to talk.”
“That’s ominous.”
“Yeah.”
They’re silent for a few beats, letting reality sink in. Annabeth has been doing her best to put the text from her father this morning out of her mind, but Piper, as usual, is right—it’s getting to her, and it’s distracting her, and if she doesn’t just call him to find out what he wants, it’ll completely ruin her productivity for the day. Maybe even the week, depending on how long she can manage to drag it out.
Her fingers itch for her phone, but she finds it has nothing to do with answering her father and everything to do with reaching out to someone else she left back home. The string of messages he’d left unanswered.
Luke always used to know what to do, when her father acted like this. Always knew what to say, how to get her out of her ruts. She hasn’t heard from him in over a month, though, and she’s worried sick about him, and she misses him. She needs him.
“What are you gonna do?” Piper asks quietly, breaking Annabeth out of her reverie, and she lifts her head to look at her friend.
“I don’t know,” she mutters, biting the inside of her lip. “Change my number or something.”
Piper sits up in rapt attention.
“You wanna join my family plan? Dad won’t give a shit,” she says.
Annabeth smiles slightly and shakes her head, and Piper pouts, her shoulders dropping in defeat.
“Well, then, come here, idiot,” she mutters, opening her arms.
Annabeth doesn’t bother trying to resist it—she climbs up onto the massive couch and buries herself in Piper’s embrace, holding onto her best friend as tightly as she can. Piper squeezes her until she feels all the loose bits clanging around between her ribs start to mesh together, and Annabeth lets out the breath she felt like she’d been holding in all day.
“Fredrick ruins everything,” she mumbles into Piper’s neck, and Piper nods against her head.
“He does,” Piper agrees. “Let’s mail him a pile of dog shit.”
Annabeth laughs aloud but Piper pulls back from her a bit, looking at her with an earnest expression.
“I’m so serious,” she says, and Annabeth is terrified of how sincere her best friend is being.
“I think that might be more of a punishment to the USPS than anyone else.”
Piper frowns. “Damn it, you’re right. Postal workers deserve better.”
Annabeth nods solemnly. “They really do.”
Piper and Annabeth both sigh, Piper in disappointment and Annabeth in exhaustion, and Annabeth curls up into Piper’s lap, resting her head on her best friend’s belly.
“So we can’t mail him dog shit,” Piper begins, twisting one of Annabeth’s curls around her finger, “and you won’t let me put you on my family plan. Should I hire a hit—”
“Shut up,” Annabeth laughs, burrowing herself further into Piper’s lap.
Piper lets out an indignant huff before she finally gives up and falls back against the pillows.
“Then there’s only one thing left to do,” she says eventually. “Time to break out those croissants you promised me earlier and stuff our faces, babe.”
Annabeth immediately sits up to grab the bag from her backpack.
“I may have accidentally bought half a dozen,” she admits as she presents the large paper bag to her best friend.
Piper just grins as Annabeth hands her the first croissant and takes the second for herself.
“Here’s to puffy pastry,” Piper says, holding her croissant out.
Annabeth knocks her own against Piper’s in a cheers, and they take their first bite together, savoring the taste of butter, the perfectly browned flakes of the pastry. Piper’s eyes nearly roll to the back of her head in bliss, and Annabeth smiles so widely that the food nearly falls out of her mouth.
“Ooh, you know what this would go well with?” Piper begins through her mouthful of food. “My friend just sent me the most delicious pesto—”
“Oh, hell yeah,” Annabeth agrees, already climbing up off the couch and leading the way to Piper’s kitchen.
She and Piper end up finishing the half dozen seated on top of Piper’s kitchen island, the jar of pesto nestled between them, crumbs covering every inch of their clothes. The world beyond may be waiting for them, reality lurking to steal whatever semblance of peace Annabeth has managed to find across the country from her family, but nestled within the four walls of her best friend's home, laughter bubbling up in her throat, Annabeth can feel only gratitude for the simplicity of a meal shared with the person she loves more than anyone in the world.