Sally Dies Before Percy, The Way Parents Should Die, The Way Parents *want* To Die. She Dies Before Percy,

Sally dies before Percy, the way parents should die, the way parents *want* to die. She dies before Percy, who now has to figure out how to live in a world without her.

hi @nikkisha16 i know it’s you <3 and because @nerdylizj sent a similar ask, you’re getting it loves <3 please check the AO3 listing for specific warnings, because, uh, yeah, it’s a little sad haha.

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Who Carries the Fire

His father had been present, and Percy wasn’t sure whether he’d expected that or not; he hadn’t spared much of a thought for the god of the sea, had never wondered whether the gods wandered into the funerals of the mortals they’d loved once, or if they watched from marble towers. His father had been present, in a black suit sharp enough to cut, a black undershirt, a black tie, not a spot of color on him until you saw his eyes, and then they hadn’t been green. They’d been black, black like the polar sea, black like the water a thousand feet deep. With his hair combed back and his beard well-groomed he looked startlingly like Zeus, for all that he didn’t share a single physical feature with his brother—it was the way ground beneath him seemed to tense, the way the land lent itself and all its power to him, the way he didn’t play at masking himself as a mortal. The way a pair of eyes could skate over him and know that the world would bend to do his bidding, that the world would leap at the chance. The sea does not like to be restrained, Percy had learned, was just this side of wrong—the sea would happily restrain itself if Poseidon willed it, the sea would happily do as Poseidon bade it, but it was Poseidon himself in all his caprice who would never ask the question. It was not the sea that refused restraint; its god did, and its god hid behind the excuse. Broad-shouldered and tall and as visibly unmovable as the mountains his rage crested, dark brows furrowed over a prominent nose and a regal profile, head held high almost in challenge, and Percy had never in his life felt less like Poseidon’s son.  

His own knees had been unstrung and every inch of him had trembled and he was only there at all because Annabeth was behind him. Even if could have opened his mouth to speak, he couldn’t have formed a single word. Somehow, he was cold to the bone on a bright June morning while the sun blazed down as hot as it could; somehow, he was cold even as he felt the sweat trickle down the back of his neck, cold the way fourth-degree burns incinerated the nerves so instantly as to be painless and numb. His hands wouldn’t stop shaking so he thrust them in his pockets, and then his fingers had fumbled around a well-worn lump of paper, and he’d pulled it out and unfolded it while his hands shook so badly he couldn’t read its faded words. He didn’t need to, to recognize the shape of a ticket, to recognize a souvenir from the last time he’d worn this suit—a souvenir of his senior prom with Annabeth. He didn’t know what had made him stop staring at it, that offensive little piece of paper, and he didn’t remember walking forward, and he didn’t remember speaking, and he didn’t remember listening. The only thing that kept him upright was Annabeth’s hand on the small of his back, even the electric current of her hand on his mortal tether somehow dulled by the oppressive cold, and the slice of Poseidon’s back, standing alone, some distance away. Poseidon and his earth and the sea that he brought with him and all of his unimaginable, earthshaking power, and Percy had never in his life felt less like Poseidon’s son, and he’d never in his life wanted to wrench Poseidon’s trident from his hands and spear him on it more. The anger kept him upright.

 But that had been the funeral, and there would only ever be the one funeral. A few hours of carrying his stabbed heart in his hands while the blood soaked between his fingers and ran down his arms, and then he could put it back, then he could say, my mother is dead and my father speaks to me so rarely I might qualify as an orphan, but I maybe have a stepdad I have no idea how to talk to anymore, and I guess orphans don’t have anyone at all, and of course his heart would fit. There would only ever be the one funeral but no one had told Percy that the one funeral wasn’t the hardest part—the hardest part was every day after that, the hardest part was the life he was expected to live with a solid iron harpoon through his stomach, shattering his spine into two distinct halves. There would only ever be the one funeral. There were a thousand days that followed it and a thousand days ahead of him and if Percy felt like being honest, he didn’t want to see a single one.

 There were several soft clicks, and Percy shifted, glancing at Annabeth, eyes slithering away quickly, unable to look at her for too long. He wasn’t sure where the aversion to looking had come from, in the past week and a half. There was something in her face that was unbearable to him—it could’ve been pity, but Annabeth wasn’t really one for pity, and as pathetic as Percy could be, she’d never pitied him. Maybe it was the dark circles under her eyes and the red, irritated rims, the lasting evidence that he wasn’t the only one who’d lost something. It made him feel guilty in the back of his throat, guilty in the way that made him want to claw out of himself, the kind of guilt that tasted like blood and had a hundred names. The kind of guilt that still felt like Charles Beckendorf grinning at him under the beating sun and Nico di Angelo’s black eyes watering with tears because his sister was never going to see him again. Percy had been slowly reconciling himself to waking up every day with the aftertaste of blood in his mouth, that guilt, had started to think, this isn’t so bad, I can live around this, and now he couldn’t sleep at all.

 “I think the pizza place is still open,” Annabeth said, pulling the keys out of the ignition. The night was too quiet without the rumble of the engine—Paul had passed them his old Prius, the one Blackjack had semi-trampled, when he and Sally had gone to buy a new car. Percy had half a mind to drive it into the middle of nowhere and set it on fire. “Regular?” she asked. “Or—or not.”

 I’m not so fucking sensitive that I can’t eat the same kind of pizza my mom liked, Percy wanted to snap, and he almost did. The only thing that held his tongue was the intimidating effort of speaking. He felt unkind and he tasted blood and thought of guilt, and ruthlessly he tried to shove it to the side. He rolled his shoulders and swung open the car door and stepped out, grateful to be out of the car. Annabeth had offered to come alone. She hadn’t wanted to put Paul through the trouble of picking up the stuff they’d left at the cabin, but she’d said, I can go by myself, if you want, in the tone of voice that meant, I’d be calling Rachel to come stay with you, and it had all sounded so exhausting Percy would rather a miserable car ride and an infinitely more miserable day and a half. The car ride hadn’t been awful. If Percy were honest, he didn’t remember it—the sound of the engine and the roar of cars swirling past them on the highway had turned his head into a pitchy, black-and-white static.

 “Pepperoni it is,” she said, softly, and maybe Percy loved Annabeth as much as he hated her, sometimes. Maybe it wasn’t her that he hated—it was what she knew about him. The things she knew about him, that she collected and stored away in her filing cabinet of a brain, and sometimes, when Percy kissed her, he felt like he was trying to convince her to forget all of that. That if he could love her the way he wanted to, it would be wiped clean, it would stop mattering. Sometimes it felt like he was saying I’m madly in love with you, and I like to think I’m a pretty good kisser, and please forget everything else you know, because sometimes I think I’ll wake up and you’re gone because of it all but in the only way she couldn’t hear him, because he was too much of a coward to risk it. Risk saying that, to her, and the saying being the last thing she could take.

 He was halfway to the steps of the cabin before he remembered that he had a bag in the backseat, too, but when he turned Annabeth already had it over her shoulder. She smiled at him, a watery, half-sure smile, and if he’d thought he’d held the weight of the sky before, it was nothing compared to the weight of that one smile. Let Atlas look at Annabeth and see if he could carry the weight of her.

 “I was thinking,” she said, when they were in the cabin, and she was dropping their bags on the unused kitchen table, and Percy was fumbling for the light, “I downloaded a few movies, on the laptop, before we left. I know there’s no Internet service here, and—okay, I downloaded the worst James Bond movies that exist. I thought it would be fun, maybe.”

 Percy flicked on the light, and flexed his hand a couple times, as if he could talk the muscles and tendons out of their nonstop tremors. “If you didn’t download Octopussy, I will walk into the ocean and not come back,” he said.

 She beamed. “Good thing that was the first one I downloaded.”

 The cabin was cool, which was surprising—usually when they arrived it took a few hours for the air conditioner to cool the place down, as small as it was—but then Percy remembered that they’d never turned the air conditioner off before they’d left, because they were supposed to have come back. They had just been out for a drive, and they were supposed to have come back. He braced his palm on the kitchen counter. It kept him upright. “Which other ones?”

 “Casino Royale,” she said. “Uh. Moonraker, too, I think. Goldfinger, because I like that one.”

 “Goldfinger isn’t a bad Bond movie, shut up,” Percy said. “It’s a great Bond movie. Everyone loves that one.”

 Annabeth shrugged, kicking off her sneakers. Sometimes Percy tried to tell her that she could get cheaper sneakers and they could look cooler, but Annabeth invariably insisted on black-and-white sneakers, upwards of the seventy-dollar range. It was maddening. “We can’t just watch all the shitty Bond movies. There has to be something to look forward to.”

 “Uh, yeah, it’s bad jokes about the fact that people named a movie Octopussy. A movie doesn’t need to be good if it’s named Octopussy.”

 Annabeth wrinkled her nose. “So the appeal is your jokes?”

 Percy crossed his arms. “Yeah, that’s the appeal. I’m funny.”

 Annabeth’s brows crawled to her hairline. She slipped her phone out of her back pocket, tapped the screen a few times, and all the while her eyebrows remained sky-high, like she couldn’t shake the disbelief.

 “I’m funny,” Percy said, again, louder.

 Annabeth pressed the screen with her thumb and then the phone hummed a tone.

 “This is the part where you say I’m funny,” Percy said. “You know, like a supportive girlfriend.”

 “I’m on the phone, I’m sorry, I’ll have to get back to you,” she said, with a sly twist of her mouth, and if Percy hadn’t needed his palm braced flat on the countertop to stay upright he would have crossed the kitchen and kissed the corner of her mouth. She always laughed, when he did that.

 “You’re mean,” he said.

 “Excuse me, I’m mean? Are you twelve?” she said. “You have to have a better insult.”

 Percy shrugged. “You don’t deserve a better insult, you’re mean.”

 “I know you are but what am I,” she said, and Percy was about to lay into her for calling him childish and then immediately saying the most childish comeback that existed, but a clerk picked up the phone, and Annabeth applied her sugar-sweet customer service voice and ordered. He noticed that she ordered the cinnamon twist things, which she knew Percy loved, and as hard as he tried to convince himself she’s your girlfriend and your mom just died, she’s allowed to order you the cinnamon twist things about it, it grated on him, like dragging the backs of his nails on chalkboard.

 Annabeth shut her phone off with a click. “We can do leftover pizza for breakfast, I guess.”

 There were there for the night to pack everything up, everything from a weekend vacation that had been cut off at the neck; both Percy and Paul had forgotten entirely about it, between the hospital and the funeral, and then the renter had left an unbearably gentle, I know things are tough right now but I do have to rent the cabin out again soon, please collect your things when you can. Percy had listened to the voicemail and waited for anger to pound through his blood. He waited for the heat of it, the feeling of breathing in pure smoke, the coil of it in his gut—and however much of that fire was his, or the rage of Achilles handed down through time and the leathery bond of a shared curse, Percy would never know. He’d always been angry, but now when he was angry, he called for blood, the way fighting dogs did. But his rage had failed him. He’d been left cold and aching, standing in his kitchen, listening to a tinny voicemail on repeat until Annabeth had pulled his phone out of his hand. He hadn’t realized he’d been shaking so hard he was about to drop it, until she’d slipped it away and cut the voicemail off and looked at him like she was about to cry.

 And then she’d said, I can go by myself, if you want, with that running undercurrent, the implication that she’d call Rachel and ask her to stay with Percy for the night left unsaid. It hadn’t only exhausted Percy, the idea of trying to handle yet another person with eyes so soft it made him want to carve his own out with a spoon—he’d resented it. His mom was dead. He didn’t need his friends trying to step into that role. He could be alone for a night and be fine.

 There were hands cupping his cheeks. Annabeth was speaking, and Percy blinked, as if he could re-orient his world by looking at her, and, truth be told, he probably could.

 “Hi,” she said. “You zoned out a bit.”

 Percy looped his fingers around her wrists. “I zoned out a bit,” he agreed.

 “Focus on the pizza, it’ll keep you strong,” she said.

 Percy snorted. “Please don’t mock my love of pizza. I am in a very committed relationship with pizza.”

 “I didn’t know my name was pizza,” Annabeth said.

 “Cheeky,” Percy hummed, and he bent down to kiss the corner of her mouth the way he’d wanted to earlier. True to form, she giggled, a sound high and loud like church bells. It was gratifying, too, the way he had to lean down to kiss her, when she’d been taller than him for two years when they were younger. Slow and steady won the race.

 Percy dropped his hands to her waist, and then her hands moved from his cheeks to the nape of his neck, fingers tangling in the back of his hair. “You need a haircut,” she said.

 “Yeah,” Percy said, and his voice sounded like he’d swallowed gravel. His mom used to cut his hair every year when he got back from camp—something of a tradition, his mom sitting him down in the kitchen and pulling out the barber scissors, the shitty old radio they’d had since what felt like the dawn of time crooning a Pink Floyd song. He’d chirp the details at her, while she worked, the stuff that no one but his mother cared about; how many arguments Annabeth had won, Grover getting in a fight and getting stuck in a tree for an hour, the Stolls putting hair dye in Chiron’s tail shampoo. She would interject, sometimes, offer a, you know I love Annabeth, sweetheart, but she’s a real terror when she wants to be, or a, if you really want to mess with Chiron, you should bedazzle his ping pong paddle. And then Percy would have to admit that he rarely saw Chiron play ping pong, because he slept through most of the camp counselor meetings, and his mom would swat his shoulder, would say something about respect, but she’d be laughing. Annabeth didn’t know any of that. Annabeth had no reason to know any of that.

 Annabeth’s hands fingered the collar of his hoodie, and then tugged, gently. After a few years Percy had learned what she wanted, when she did that, and he scrunched down, so Annabeth could rock up on her tip-toes and press a warm, dry kiss to his forehead. She lingered there for a moment, her breath hot on his face, and then she was flat on the ground again, over a head shorter than him. He pulled her closer by her waist, and then laid his head against her hair, breathing in the scent of her new strawberry shampoo—she’d switched from lemon-scented, somewhere in freshman year of college. He kind of missed the lemon, but he’d feel like a freak, saying, hey, girlfriend of mine, love of my life, I pay a lot of attention to how your hair smells, can you please go back to the lemon one because it’s the one you’ve always had and it smells like falling in love with you. Also can you pick up some eggs on the way home, thanks, love you, bye.

 “You’re going to be okay,” she mumbled into his chest, so low he almost didn’t hear it, as distracted as he was, between the lemon shampoo and the strawberry shampoo and the things about Annabeth he loved and lost as she changed around him. Her arms squeezed his chest. “I promise.”

 “Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” Percy said, roughly, and he pulled away. He could’ve stood there breathing in the scent of Annabeth’s shampoo for a lot longer, but he could feel ice in his throat, his blood, and he didn’t want to talk about it. He’d rather eat glass than talk about it, as much as Annabeth had been needling him, as much as Paul and Grover and Rachel—and God, even Thalia, although when Percy had said, if you ask me how I’m doing, I’m going to walk into traffic and wait, Thalia had said, thank sweet fuck up above. It had been a nice phone call, after they’d gotten that out of the way. At least Thalia hadn’t treated him like a pathetic-looking rescued dog, emaciated and teary-eyed.

 Then again, Thalia was the only one who hadn’t visited in person. Percy’s hands still shook where they were braced against the counter. His teeth still rattled. His heart still skipped every few beats, stuttering, like it kept having to restart. Thalia didn’t have to look at any of that.

 “Casino Royale or Octopussy first?” Annabeth asked, and if her voice was tighter than normal, and if Percy couldn’t look at her, neither of them breathed a word of it.

 “Casino Royale,” Percy said. “You have to earn the right to my jokes.”

 “I would do anything and everything other than do that,” Annabeth said, and that sly grin was back, even if it was faded and worn. Percy didn’t kiss the corner of her mouth again, though he wanted to. He couldn’t bear to hear you’re going to be okay, I promise again, not the way it felt like the too-sharp talons of a hellhound, the initial shredding that didn’t hurt until he was on the ground and his head was pounding and he was soaked in his own blood. Didn’t hurt until he remembered that he could die, there, that he hadn’t said goodbye to his mom that morning because he’d been late for school, and it was a gritty New York City alleyway, and he could die. He still remembered what those felt like, sinking into his stomach—the fall semester after they’d sailed the sea of monsters, before Annabeth had been kidnapped, a hellhound had stalked Percy home from school. He’d been slow, and stupid, and the thing had scoured three-inches-deep, two-inches-wide scars into his gut, and hadn’t that had been a miserable Iris message to Thalia and Annabeth at their adjacent boarding school? I was slow, and stupid, please come bring god food before I die in a New York City alleyway surrounded by rats, thanks, had been what he’d tried to say, but it had probably come out slurred, the words like alphabet soup. He’d lived, though, and he’d healed enough that he’d been able to tell his mother he went out with Annabeth and Thalia and forgotten to warn her first. She’d been stern, but relieved, and Percy had held a hand to the still-aching, still-healing gouges when her back was turned, because the pressure took the edge off of the pain. He’d learned that at thirteen. He’d learned that at ten. Maybe his entire life was learning that, over and over and over.

 Annabeth’s fingers were wrapped around his wrist. She tugged on him, made an expectant noise, and it took half a minute for Percy’s brain to connect with his joints, to shuffle forward after her, because he couldn’t help but think that maybe things might have been different, if he’d told his mom about the blood, the hellhound, the alley and its rats. Thalia pouring nectar down his throat, Annabeth frozen beside him, like she hadn’t been the one who’d taught him how brutal the life of a demigod could be in the first place. At the time he’d thought it was justified, because hadn’t his mother spent his entire life hiding her blood from him? Sopping up her bloodied noses with black towels where he couldn’t see? Didn’t he owe her the same kind of protection?

 They were standing by the couch, an old, tattered, floral-patterned thing with awful springs. Percy folded himself up on it, elbowing deep into the cushions, dropping one leg to the ground so Annabeth had a space where she could reasonably fit on top of him. She was holding her laptop, and when—when had she grabbed it? He was tired. He was losing time. Didn’t he owe her the same kind of protection?

 Annabeth settled against him and flicked open the laptop, punching in her password and scrolling through her files. Her background was a group picture, her and Clarisse and Katie and Rachel and Thalia, a kind of girls’ hiking trip they liked to take when their schedules aligned. Usually spring break, since Clarisse came back to Camp Half-Blood for spring break every now and then. Percy’s arms settled around her stomach and he slipped one hand just under her t-shirt so he could rub circles into her side with his thumb, and she shivered, and wriggled until her head notched perfectly under his chin. Strawberry-lemonade hair. He was caught up by the presence of her, the closeness of her, that he didn’t realize Casino Royale had started, that he didn’t realize the doorbell had rung until Annabeth was clambering on top of him and rifling through her wallet for cash. He supposed it was the cabin getting to him, the memories of him and his mother pressing down on him, her tired eyes and her three jobs and the way it had never, ever felt like it was him that she was tired of.

 Annabeth shut the door with a click. “Come eat,” she said.

 He stared at his hands and tried to will them to stop shaking. They failed him, but that was nothing new. “In a bit,” he said.

 Annabeth was silent for a long moment, and there wasn’t the sound of her rifling through the cabinets for the pack of paper plates they’d left behind, the cracking sound of her opening the two-liter she’d got because the water here tasted like shit. Then she said, “You haven’t eaten today. Come eat,” in a hard voice.

 He wanted to say that he had, that she wasn’t his keeper—but the day was a wall of gray and black-and-white static in his head, a day that began and ended at the car ride that seemed to have cleared his mind of everything except for the aching. Percy shifted until his feet were on the floor—he’d forgotten to take off his shoes—and stopped, stilled, trying to think through the process of walking into the kitchen, failing. Failure tasted like blood, and so it tasted like guilt.

 Annabeth’s hand on his knee was warm. “I knew this was not going to work,” she said.

 Percy had a primal moment where he thought Annabeth had meant them, the two of them, the whatever-you-call-this they had. His heart all but stopped and his lungs shuddered to a halt, and he worked his jaw and tried to say, you knew this wasn’t going to work, how long, why didn’t you tell me sooner—

 But then Annabeth said, “I should’ve made you stay home,” and Percy remembered the voicemail, and her hands on his, and the way seeing that expression on her face had skinned him alive.

 “It was the car,” Percy said, in a moment of clarity, because he could at least track the way he’d unfurled. “Fucking car. It—”

 Annabeth squeezed his knee. “I’m sorry,” she said.

 “Why would you be sorry,” he said, mumbling. “Why would you be sorry, if I’d been—why would you be sorry, please don’t be sorry.”

 “If you’d been what?” Annabeth pressed.

 “Awake,” he said, stumbling over the word. “I was asleep. If I had been awake, I would have seen the truck coming before she did.”

 That had been everyone’s question—how had he survived a car accident so bad his mother had died on the way to the hospital, and how had he survived without a scratch? Percy had shrugged and forced out words about being lucky between his teeth, and it had felt like pounding rusty nails into his spine to breathe the word lucky about his mom’s death. It had felt like an insult to her. But he’d always been good at disappointing his mom.

 “So you stopped sleeping,” Annabeth said, pointedly, and Percy fixed his gaze on her hand and the silvery scar that crossed her knuckle. They’d already fought about that, the not sleeping, and it wasn’t something Percy was eager to revisit—it had been the two of them screaming at each other in the kitchen, Percy shouting things designed to hurt that were almost incomprehensible, Annabeth in tears shouting, you’re not normal, Percy! I know that’s what you want, but you’re not, and you can’t go three days without sleeping, the Curse will kill you, you have to—get over yourself!

 “Let’s not,” Percy said.

 “You’re not like the rest of us,” Annabeth said, and even in her softest voice, the words were like a knife to the chest. “You know you’ve been running a fever, right? I can feel it. Because it’s burning through you.”

 Fever, she said, but he’d never felt colder in his life. “I’ll be fine,” he said, and he scrubbed at the side of his neck unconsciously, the side with the twisted scar branded into his skin by Mount Saint Helens, the gnarled hurricane shape that meant he tried to avoid mirrors when he could. The skin there was dry and hot and he hadn’t realized how itchy it was until he touched it.

 Annabeth tugged his arm away. “Stop that,” she said.

 “It’s not fair,” Percy said. “It’s not—it’s not fair. What kind of life is it, if—my mom barely got to live for herself. It’s—”

 Didn’t he owe her the same kind of protection?

 “Soul for a soul,” Percy murmured, and he wrung his hands, thinking. Thinking that he should have thought of it sooner, thinking that he should have remembered his fear that Nico would try to trade Percy’s soul for Bianca’s, the quiet, maybe he has a right to in the back of his mind.

 He didn’t see dark circles beneath Annabeth’s eyes, or the red, irritated rims around them, when he looked at Annabeth’s face. He saw her rage. “So it’s something permanent until it gets hard for you,” she snarled.

 “Annabeth—”

 “It’s something permanent until you decide it’s time to make a sacrifice,” she said. “You’ve got a guilt complex, Percy, and we let it slide. But if you think anyone is going to thank you for making an exchange like that, you have lost your fucking mind. You have more than lost your fucking mind. It is not your fault that people die in accidents. It is not your fault that people die in wars. No one, anywhere, is asking for you to trade your life to fix something you didn’t do.”

 Percy stared at her, unblinking. He couldn’t think of anything around the overwhelming, I desperately want you to forget I said any of that, so he tilted her head up by the chin and kissed her, in the bruising way he did when he didn’t want her to leave, when he didn’t have the words to convince her to stay.

 When she pulled away, she said, finally, “You’re out of your fucking mind,” and cupped his face. “It sucks right now. I know. It’s awful. But it’s going to get better.”

 “You don’t know that,” he whispered.

 “I do,” Annabeth said. “From experience. I met you, and things got better. I can be optimistic enough for the both of us.”

 She stood, then, and settled on the couch beside him, her thigh warm against his. He was usually pretty good at articulating how much he loved her, where he loved her, why he loved her; but that night the emotion rattling around his ribcage was too intense for words, equal parts respect and awe. How a girl who ran away from home at age seven, a girl who had lost almost everyone close to her in one way or another, how a girl who had spent the better half of her life acutely aware of all of the things that wanted to hunt her down and kill her—how that girl managed to hold such hope, Percy would never know. She was the one who carried the fire.

 “I didn’t learn to write in school,” Percy said, his voice almost too loud for the night. “Well, kind of. During lessons, they—my teachers hated me? I could never sit still, I was always interrupting, I was too loud. So during lessons, they’d just kind of, I don’t know. Not help. Kind of embarrassing, sitting there with your hand raised for ten minutes and the teacher doesn’t come to you.”

 Annabeth’s eyes were bright. “And?” she said, when he stopped, because his throat had closed around a shame he’d thought he’d forgotten a long time ago.

 “My mom taught me,” he said. “She would write out letters, and then have me trace them, over and over. Then sentences. She did that when she was exhausted because she worked so much. She carved out time at night to do that. We would sit in the bathroom and she’d be trying to fix her hair and I’d be—tracing letters. Because nobody else would.”

 Annabeth swiped at his face with her thumb. He was crying, now, he supposed, but he hadn’t cried yet, and it hurt, like prodding a blackening bruise.

 “I used to do it at breakfast, too, but I had to stop,” he said. “Because once I got distracted and knocked over a cereal bowl and it spilled on Gabe, and he wasn’t happy about that.”

 Annabeth plucked at his hoodie, peeling off a strand of her own hair that was stuck to it, and she was frowning in the way she always did when she wanted to press further, but refused.

 “He wasn’t happy,” Percy repeated, and then he said, “He grabbed me by the hair, slammed my head into the table. Broke my nose. Had to duck beneath the table and act like I was reaching for a dropped spoon, so she wouldn’t see, and then he told me to get into a fight at school that day, and I did.”

 She gripped his hand like a vise. She didn’t say anything, but she didn’t have to, because every thought she was having was written in her eyes, if he could just look at them for longer than a moment. She picked up his hand and pressed a kiss to his knuckles, instead.

 Percy scrubbed at his eyes. “I don’t know where that came from,” he said.

 “You don’t have to,” she said, and then leaned over and pressed a kiss to his temple. “Sleep it off, okay? Half of this is probably because you’re tired. You mope more when you’re tired.”

 “Pizza’s probably cold,” he said, awkwardly, trying not to think of the things Annabeth knew about him, had memorized about him. It was comforting, sometimes, but now it prickled his skin, the uncomfortable idea that he wasn’t a singular, that so much of him was held by someone else.

 “You like cold pizza. All the more reason to go to sleep,” she said, and with that she shoved him down on the couch, rolled so she was on top of him, like a very bossy, albeit beautiful, blanket.

 “This couch is too small for this,” he said.

 Annabeth pillowed her head into the crook of his neck, and he could smell the strawberry shampoo, and maybe it wasn’t the lemon but he could adjust. “You’re the one making it necessary for me to lie on top of you so you will sleep.”

 “Point taken,” he said, and he absently scrubbed at his face with the sleeve of his hoodie, hooked around his thumb. “I don’t know how you love me enough for this.”

 “This is nothing,” Annabeth said. “I love telling you that I love you. It’s the Octopussy jokes that are hard.”

 “You are so mean,” he said. “I’m baring my soul out to you and you are still so mean. You are a mean bitch, Annabeth Chase.”

 But she wasn’t, not really, because when they’d packed everything up the next day—a process which was entirely more painful than the night preceding it, a process that left Percy dead on his feet and maybe ready to walk into the ocean and just sleep among the sharks for the rest of his life—Blackjack was grazing by the sad little patches of grass surrounding the gravel driveway. He raised his massive head and offered a wordless nicker in greeting, teeth working a mouthful of grass. And Annabeth’s hand was on the small of his back, keeping him upright, carrying the fire.