Chapter Text
The tapping at her window was steady enough to wake her from a dream. Light pings resounding from her window, and why on Earth at this time of night. She burrowed deeper into her blankets.
It was a few seconds before the confused victim-complex of the recently dreaming wore off enough for her to know it was Percy. She breathed in, heavily. It was never not Percy.
Creaking of the window as she opened it. The cool air of outdoors rushing in, causing her unconsciously to cross her arms. It was cold for a night in Summer.
He grinned dumbly when he saw her, poised in the posture of someone about to throw another rock at her window. Contrapasto of David. Beat-up orange t-shirt graduated from camp counselor uniform to pajamas. He dropped the rock in his hand. “Annabeth.”
Jesus Christ, she thought. She said, “Jesus Christ.”
He smiled again. He loved it when she cursed like that. He thought it was sweet, a symptom of her southern childhood, an endearing anachronism in the world they lived in. She never corrected him, but that wasn’t why she said it. When her dad had remarried, her ambiguously Christian stepmother’s insistence on a pious tongue had had the opposite effect intended, and now it felt like the dirtiest word she could use. The boy outside her window had no idea, but when she said: Jesus Christ, she meant: Fuck you Percy Jackson.
He walked up to her window, leaning on the chapped white sill. She continued to stare at him. Messy haired, rumpled shirt. Black eye from the latest scrape. 22 years old. So beautiful.
“I have a door,” She said stupidly, “you could have knocked.”
Pushed his face into her arm on the sill, so they were touching through the open hole of the window. His head came up to her chest like this. “Felt too official.”
This was all scripted. He said that every time he visited her in the middle of the night. Feeling his face on her arm, feeling her own breathing, feeling the breathing of the outside coming inside. She stepped back so he could hoist himself in.
“What’s this?” Hand on her desk, shuffling through papers. Room was quiet, just her bed in the corner. Benefits of making it to adulthood. She had her own cabin now, just like he always had. Anyone over 18. Not many.
“Buildings,” she said, “drawings I made.”
“Oh, I know,” smiling, tilting his head, “I know what your drawings look like. I meant what buildings. Like, what are they for?”
And this was why she loved him. World outside imploding; world inside safe and curious and warm. She sat on her quilt, hands fisting the fabric, and talked for a minute about herself, her work, her visions for public libraries, and he didn’t laugh, even though libraries were trivial when they were losing the war, would lose the war. Percy was leaned on his hand at her desk, flipping through drawings. A pain so sharp it was physical. A prospective pain, retro-acting. The Prophecy, the war. Shall reach 23 against all odds. Birthday coming up. Sick to her stomach.
And then he laughed at something she said, and it was funny, so she laughed too, a real laugh. He looked so beautiful at her desk like that, and clearly sad, too; why else come here if not to be loved into gladness. She said, mouth forming slowly around the words: “c’mere.” And he did come here, and put his head on her lap, black eye face-down so that he almost looked healthy and well.
“Did you know I once met the actual Muffin Man?”
He looked up at her, black eye surfacing in accusatory glare. “You did not.”
“I did. After I ran away from home. Kid you not, actual Muffin Man. Thalia and Luke never believed me.”
He laughed. “I don’t believe you. Did you meet Santa Claus too?”
She stood up abruptly, and he rolled off of her onto the floor, laughing. “I’m serious! It was two weeks after I left home; I was thirteen; I was in this rural town in West Virginia, and I met this muffin seller. Get this: Drury Lane and everything. He would give me the muffins that didn’t sell. Best deal ever.”
Percy was crawling back up onto the bed, into her lap again. “Ok, ok,” he was saying, “Muffin seller on Drury Lane. I get it. But that does not mean you met the actual Muffin Man, from the actual kids song. This was just, like, a guy, Annabeth.”
She looked at him enigmatically. “Guys are never just guys.” His eyes were crinkling at her from down in her lap, half open, and she’d never regretted a single night like this, and she wouldn’t regret one, ever, even after. “How many guys have we run into that turn out to be not just guys?”
Seemed to ponder this for a minute, though maybe just falling asleep. Looked exhausted, face used up, body used up, everything for the war. Some of it saved for her. Best friends; impossible to live without him. In love with him. Would always be in love with him.
Six months ago, the first time he had knocked on her door like this: Hey, how did you sleep? The comedy of that, asked at two in the morning. The answer being not at all, I cannot. I lay awake. She said something like well I was sleeping fine before you threw rocks at me, invited him in, let him lay in her bed and talk about his mom, about the baby, how he loved her already. Did not ask why are you here, but wanted to. Mock-tucked him in, pretended to be his fussing wife. Go to sleep, Percy. Planned to give him her bed, to work all night at her desk, to have a night studded with work and with looking up to find him sleeping. Instead, he had leaned up to her so slowly, had messed up her careful work with the blankets to curve upwards and kiss her on the lips. The feeling of shock and dread it elicited in her unspeakable, but the love, also, unable to be spoken of. And they didn’t.
Eyes opening now, from her lap. “Annabeth.”
Just her name. The reason she kept letting him in at one, two, three in the morning, just to hear it said like that.
“Yeah?”
“I’m pretending you’re my wife.”
“Yeah?”
Closed his eyes again, as if imagining it fully. “Yes.”
“Are you making me make you dinner?” She tapped his head, like she could tip its contents out into her palm. Wished powerfully that she could do this.
Shutting his eyes with more force, grinning, swatting her hand away, saying, “Are you joking? You are a terrible cook. I’m making you dinner.”
“Yeah? What’re we having? What're you making me?”
He thought about this, eyelids moving faintly, not noticing her noticing his eyelids. “Chocolate,” he said, “And wine.”
Placing her own hands delicately on her hips, now, looking down at him, trying not to smile, “You’re making me chocolate for dinner.”
And he said “Yes”, sitting up, placing his hands overtop of her hands, all four of their hands on her hips now, and the room was growing very small and dizzy with warmth, like it always did when he touched her. T-shirt more wrinkled than before. Quilt nested around them, faint headache starting. Looking at one another and not moving.
“Annabeth,” he said, “Do you want to go to sleep now or do you want to stay awake with me?” Slight edge in his voice; son of a god; impossible always to forget that fact, but especially when he tried so hard, like this, to be human. It was every bit of his earnestness rising in him at once. It was overwhelming.
Half-smile, still both kneeling on the quilt, facing on another; her hands tightened on her own hips. Tried a joke. “Can I pick both?”
“Yeah,” He said, “Sure, go to sleep.” Pushed her down on the pillows, playfully, but he was already kissing her. Straight line up her shoulders, up her neck. Jesus Christ.
“Jesus Christ.”
A smile against her throat. Kissed her jaw, her cheek, all innocence. “Are you sleeping yet?”
“No.” Eyes shut tight.
“Why not?”
Hands on his shoulders. “Because you are assaulting me.” Window still open, blowing cool air. Feeling breathed on.
He was breathing on her. “Hm.” Didn’t say anything else; too busy.
Her brain, her body, both heavy. She felt them slowing down. Her favorite part. She had been joking, before, about choosing both, but it was a kind of both, this feeling; both awake and asleep. He often made her into halves.
When this had first begun, she had been surprised not only by her own detachment, but by her extreme involvement also. Her own objectivity versus her own love. Often she felt she was suddenly split into two people; seeing him there in front of her, loving him, touching his face, at the same moment she felt preemptively the immense and unsolvable problem of his eventual absence. The fullness and the emptiness; the love and the grief all at once. Able to smile still, to make a small noise when he touched her. To make it again.
He was murmuring to her then, calling her his wife, calling her beautiful. Saying they were going to win, the two of them, that they would be safe. Things he often liked to say to her.
His strong body on her strong body. Meeting in the early morning tomorrow, a war meeting. Probably both gone from camp this next week, fighting something unfathomable. Last real night in a bed. Not even sleeping. These thoughts slowly leaving her, like water out of a sieve.
Remembering, suddenly, in perfect clarity, his face when he asked about her drawings: the lightness, the curiosity there. Who to be curious about me in a month when he is dead.
Surprised by the shocking cold of this. Almost unable to look at him, but then the whole thing was over and she was shaking, the strength of the thought dulled suddenly by the strength of him inside her. Both done then. Both cooling on top of the quilt, syncing with the air from the window, breathing in little gusts. Her, thinking absently that she could not do it, that she would not allow her life to turn into the life she knew it would without him. Making the decision to save him, to dedicate her life to winning this war and saving his life. Him, smiling into her hair, thinking about wedding rings.