Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Annabeth is usually pretty good at planning, well, everything, but her decision to wear sneakers rather than snow boots feels like a serious oversight. The trudge up Half-Blood Hill is long, slow, and unsettling. Snow keeps seeping into the soles of her shoes, and the icy water—partnered with the frigid air and the ominous sense of deja vu—strikes her with a fit of shivers.

This cold, this setting—it all adds up. It’s far too much like she is reliving a bad memory. 

She remembers the camp in winter, a white slush around her shoes. She remembers climbing this exact path to see Percy standing beside Thalia’s tree, his grin broad and mischievous. “We’re going to get into so much trouble together,” his smile seemed to say, as if the words were scrawled along the curve of his lips. 

She remembers kissing those lips goodnight. 

And then she remembers waking to find him nowhere at all. Gone. Missing. Stolen. 

The last time Annabeth visited the camp in winter, Hera, the cow—sorry, she means ‘queen’ — of Olympus, kidnapped Percy from his bed without so much as an explanation. Needless to say that Annabeth was rather displeased by this sudden relocation of her boyfriend. And she only grew more displeased as his three-day disappearance stretched into an eight-month marathon of stress and loneliness. 

Percy has since returned, a constant in her life yet again. But his presence doesn’t stop Annabeth from feeling a certain uneasiness. Seeing snow on this ground… it casts a bad omen. 

As Annabeth approaches the crest of the hill, she finds the space beside Thalia’s tree empty, utterly unoccupied by a certain green-eyed son of Poseidon. Sort of disappointing, she supposes, but not unexpected. Her plane took off long after its scheduled departure time, and Percy, having settled into camp three days ago, probably can’t afford to wait for her arrival. Especially not with all the studying he has to do for his upcoming midterms.

After a near-infinite airport delay, a six-hour flight, and a terrible-smelling taxi ride, Annabeth has finally returned from San Francisco. She agreed to celebrate Christmas with her family in California this year, but only on the condition that she'd spend the rest of her break at her usual winter vacation spot. The chaotic but ever-lovable Camp Half-Blood.

Her dad wasn't too happy with this agreement. But if Annabeth was to suffer Christmas in too-sunny San Francisco, she should at least be allowed to enjoy New Year's in good ol' wintry New York—even if she's not exactly heading to Times Square to watch the ball drop. 

Annabeth likes to plan, likes to prioritize, and right now Camp Half-Blood is Annabeth's top priority. New Rome University—the college that Annabeth and Percy will be attending next fall—isn't far from her Dad's place. Soon he'll have nothing to complain about. But her friends at camp, the friends Annabeth has kept and relied on for most of her life...they won't be able to say the same. They won't be able to say anything except goodbye. 

As she passes through the camp boundaries, a wall of warm air soaks through her jacket, chasing away the goosebumps beneath her clothes. The ground below her feet becomes grassy and dry, devoid of the snow and mud that dominates the rest of New York in winter. 

None of this surprises Annabeth. Magic has always controlled the camp's weather and temperature throughout the year, no matter how the rest of the world storms and freezes. In all her years here but one, Camp Half-Blood has never suffered a true winter—it has only breezed through cool springs and warm summers. 

She recalls that, in the past, the camp would crowd only in summer, with just a few lonesome demigods like Annabeth lingering during the winter. But with so many new claimings, the Christmas attendance has increased dramatically. The camp feels full and alive. She can see campers playing volleyball, canoes floating in the lake, and sword-fighters practicing in the arena. She spots friends—Nico D'Angelo, Will Solace, Butch Walker, Nyssa Barrera—and waves to them. She smiles at the buildings she has known since she was seven, and nods appreciatively at the new additions prompted by the recent wars. The camp has truly become a disorienting mix of the familiar and the unfamiliar. 

Still, certain components of the camp are missing. Many of her closest friends—Grover, Thalia, Hazel, Frank, Piper, Leo, Jason—are traveling. Or staying at Camp Jupiter. Or visiting family. Or… worse. 

There have been so many wars. So many lost demigods. So many monsters and enemies, all determined to keep Annabeth from any semblance of a normal life.  

Her socks feel distinctly soggy as Annabeth approaches the cluster of cabins. She mutters under her breath, cursing the socks, the half-melted snow, the sneakers on her feet, and the heavy backpack chafing against her shoulders. She can’t wait to take off her shoes and her backpack and just—

There’s a roar. A monstrous, gurgling one. Annabeth whips around to see the bathhouse shaking as if stricken by an earthquake. She takes a panicked step forward, unsure what she's even trying to fight. Is this a monster attack? A volcanic eruption? There are people inside, she thinks. Voices yelling and cursing at the chaos—

And then, with a mighty geyser of very unclean-looking water, two figures are spat from the building, deposited as gently as one might chuck trash in a New York City alleyway. 

Left tangling the grass are lengthy limbs, drenched clothes, and water-matted brown hair. Familiarity allows Annabeth to identify the owners of these battered parts: Travis and Connor Stoll, sons of Hermes and infamous camp pranksters. Seeing them like this—soaked to the bone and spluttering like a pair of very ill-tempered, drowned rats—almost makes Annabeth's socks feel dry by comparison. 

Before she can ask what happened, a familiar silhouette ducks out from behind the bathhouse. It’s Percy, she realizes—tall and unkempt as he marches forward. Not toward Annabeth, though. No. She's invisible to him as he seeks his target, his unwavering eyes latched to Stolls' collapsed bodies. 

Annabeth watches Percy, expecting him to offer a hand to the Stolls, or at least offer them a little toilet-water-evaporating magic. But he doesn't. His face is hard. His fists are clenched. And when his body arches over the brothers, he demands, "Well? Had enough yet? Ready to give it back?”

Half-drowned the way they are, the brothers can't immediately respond. Connor seems to be trying to articulate something, but Travis doesn't even bother. He's still too busy regurgitating the camp’s plumbing. His award-winning response to Percy ends up being something like “Uck-goo!” and it's still several minutes before they muster anything more intelligible than that. 

“We told you, Jackson,” rasps Connor, at last. "You’ll get it back if we decide to give it back.” 

Travis retches—horrifically—and then adds: “That’s a big if, too!”

There's some more retching from the both of them. Lots of gagging followed by gasping and coughing and a menagerie of other unpleasant sounds, plus the explanatory, "Goddamn...exploding toilets…” 

Panting, Connor says, “You know, if you weren't being so unreasonable about this whole thing, we might consider—”

“Me, unreasonable?” Percy jabs an accusing finger at Connor, who attempts to wave it out of his face. “You’re the ones who stole—”

“Uh, duh. That’s what we do. Sons of Hermes.” 

“Yeah, well, you've pissed off a Son of Poseidon. So if you ever want to safely use a toilet again, I’d suggest—”

Annabeth has never heard Percy sound quite like this. Normally, where the Stolls are concerned, all disagreements fall into the category of ‘fun and games’. But even with the word ‘toilet’ somewhere in his threat, Percy hardly sounds like he’s playing a game. He sounds just as angry as he claims to be. Maybe even panicked too, unless she's imagining things. There's a strain in his voice that Annabeth has only ever heard during life-or-death situations. 

“Hey!” Annabeth calls, waving her arms. “Everything okay, Seaweed Brain?” 

Percy flings himself away from the Stolls with such violence, it look like he's avoiding a flaring campfire. His head snaps up to meet her gaze—and Annabeth is made uneasy by his near-terrified expression. 

“Uh, hey, Annabeth!” he greets, voice pitched high. A hand jerks upward to rub at the back of his neck. “You’re early!”

Gods, he should really know better by now. Lying—to her? He must be out of his mind. Besides, she’s not even early. She’s late. Very late. So if he’s going to lie, he could at least bother to check a watch. 

Annabeth strides forward, intending to join Percy and the Stolls on the flooded green. And, oh, they are going to regret making her walk through all this mud. Her shoes were soaked as it is, and now this toilet water only makes it worse—

It's not long before she's stationed herself between the three boys, arms crossed and eyes investigating the scene. She glances at Percy. Then at the Stolls. Then at Percy again. Whatever happened between them, it’s not particularly obvious to her. Clearly, some exploding toilets were involved—their conversation (and the smell) tells her that much.

Percy mentioned a theft. Not exactly uncharacteristic behavior from the Stolls, and it's pretty customary for campers to seek revenge when the Stolls swipe their belongings. So was Percy using the toilets to get back at the Stolls? 

But what did the Stolls take to prompt Percy, the least vengeful person she knows, to seek revenge? And why would he try to hide it from her? 

She supposes that she can speculate all day. But if she wants real answers, she’ll have to do a little interrogating. 

“Percy,” says Annabeth. Polite, at first, though there's an edge of warning to it. “Is something wrong?”

“No!” he assures her, with denial far too quick for her liking, and eyes wide in the universal expression of shit, I’ve been caught. “No. Everything’s fine. Perfect, even. What makes you think that something’s wrong?” 

Wordlessly, Annabeth gestures to the drenched Stolls, still kneeling in the nearby grass, and then to Percy’s face. 

“Oh, them?” Percy gives an exaggerated flap of his hand. “That’s nothing. We’re just, uh. Playing pranks on each other.”

Annabeth raises a skeptical eyebrow. “You said that they stole something.”

“Well… yeah. But it’s no big deal. They steal from everybody, right?”

She shoots another glare at the nearby brothers, who pointedly avoid her gaze. They instead occupy themselves with wringing their clothes, whistling all the while. It's a forced attempt to look innocent, she's sure. One that only cements Annabeth's suspicions. 

“They do,” Annabeth agrees. “But I’m asking what they stole from you. You seemed… I don’t know. Pretty upset about it, I guess.”

At that, his cheeks redden, and the forced smile slips from his features even more. There’s something else there, beneath the surface, something that is more than simply 'angry' or ‘nervous.’ Something that worries Annabeth more than she'd care to admit. 

“It’s fine,” Percy mutters. "Everything's fine."

His voice, so quiet and unsure, nearly conjures another fit of shivers. Surely, something must be wrong if he is acting like this? 

Annabeth reaches for his hand, hoping that he’ll see the gesture as an invitation to explain. He takes it readily. The hand, she means—but not the invitation. His fingers intertwine with hers, but Annabeth can only watch as his lips settle into a thin, unyielding line. 

They've never been a quiet couple. Ever since they first met six years ago, Percy and Annabeth's jaws have rattled with arguments and jokes and the oddly frequent mid-battle declaration. But these moments right now… she doesn't know what to do with them. Since when do they have nothing to say to one another? 

She swallows a relieved sigh when he finally—finally—shatters the silence. 

“Want me to help you unpack?” He points over her shoulder. “That backpack looks heavy.” 

Right. The backpack. Miraculously, Annabeth nearly forgot about it, and it’s only now that she again notices its weight on her shoulders. 

Still, she doesn’t like the fact that he’s changing the subject. She doesn’t like the fact that this problem, whatever it is, has him pivoting. It makes her worry that she is missing something… well… pivotal. 

“But what about—” 

He lets out a noise of annoyance, and this time, the smile he shoots her is half-genuine. “We’ll talk about it later, okay? Like I said, it's nothing you have to worry about.”

She doesn't have time to argue before he slides the backpack from Annabeth's shoulders onto his own. “But—”

He tugs at her hand, pulling her toward the Athena cabin. They move quickly. His grip and pace are not exactly forceful but… insistent. Percy is insistent that she move along, move on from whatever she just saw or heard.

“C’mon,” he urges. “The faster you unpack, the faster you can help me study for Calc. My brain’s been melting without you.”

Of course, Annabeth will not give up so easily. He should know that by now.

As they go, she sends the Stolls another glower over her shoulder, the kind that plainly declares, We will have words. Because if Percy won’t tell her what’s going on, they will. 

Over the course of the next few days, the Stolls undergo a transformation. Annabeth watches as these brothers, once confident pranksters, devolve into skittish paranoids who cower at the sight of a dewdrop.

Not that anyone can really blame them. They’ve been given more than a few reasons to feel a little aquaphobic. 

It seems that Percy has compelled all water to wage war against the Stolls. If Travis or Connor near any source of it—the canoe lake, the Long Island Sound, the bathrooms, the creek in the woods, or even a mere jug of water—they immediately find themselves under aquatic attack. Soaked. Splashed. Washed away. This prank war with Percy... it makes even the most brutal of water balloon fights look tame. 

The rest of the camp finds it hilarious, of course. Connor and Travis are not infamous among their ranks for nothing. Many campers have fallen victim to their pranks in the past, so she supposes that plenty of people are happy to see Percy return the favor. 

Annabeth, on the other hand, is a lot less pleased. Percy has been even less focused than usual, always preoccupied with planning his next water attack on the Stolls. And no matter what Percy and Annabeth are doing together—leading camp activities, sparring, tutoring sessions, and even, oh yeah, making out— he never hesitates to drop everything to send a flood Travis and Connor’s way. 

So Annabeth is frustrated. Justifiably so. Especially because she still doesn’t know what they’re fighting about. 

It’s not like she hasn’t tried to find out. She’s pestered Percy constantly about it, but he’s brushed her off every time she's tried, always claiming to have a sword-fighting class to teach or a study guide to finish. And the Stolls aren't much help either. She only manages to corner them once without Percy around, and even then, even with the full power of Annabeth's withering glare trained upon them, they still refuse to squeal. 

“It’s nothing!” Travis insists. “We didn’t even steal something valuable. He’s going crazy over nothing.”

“I don't believe you,” says Annabeth, her voice sharp with accusation. “Because Percy's mad. Really mad. And he won’t tell me why.”

Connor scoffs. “And somehow your communication issues are our problem?” 

The urge to smack Connor is so overwhelming, it's a miracle that Annabeth manages to restrain herself. Sure, her relationship with Percy isn't perfect, but she would never say it's uncommunicative. There’s not a single person on the planet that she trusts more than Percy Jackson, and she is certain that he returns her trust in equal amount. Between their many quests and their shared knowledge of his Achilles spot and their little trip through Tartarus, it’s impossible for her to believe otherwise. 

But… he won’t tell her what the Stolls took. It doesn’t make sense.

“What—" Annabeth's teeth grind so hard over the word, she probably loses enamel “—did you idiots steal?”

“What does it matter?” mutters Travis. “It's not like he’s getting it back.” 

“What's that supposed to mean?” 

The Stolls don't answer. Instead, in a move of uncharacteristic brilliance, Connor points to her foot and screeches, “Is that a spider?”

That, of course, makes Annabeth glance downwards. And her distraction grants the boys just enough time to bolt into their cabin and shut the door tight. 

“They’re driving me nuts!” Annabeth complains amid sword strikes. “What thing could be so important… so secret… that Percy can’t tell me about it?” 

“Less talking, more fighting!”

This complaint comes from Clarisse LaRue, daughter of Ares—a combatant who easily dodges Annabeth’s blade and counters with a spear swipe of her own. 

Annabeth takes a step back and hefts her shield to block the attack. “I wasn’t talking to you, Clarisse.”

Currently, Annabeth stands in the arena. She leads a sparring match between the Athena and Ares cabins. It’s normally Percy’s job to oversee swordfighting, seeing as it’s his specialty and he doesn’t really have a cabin to manage. But Percy is absent at the moment—a fact that might have once caused her panic, given his history of mysterious disappearances. But more recent events suggest that he’s probably still somewhere at camp, arranging another terrible prank for the Stolls.  

Malcolm, the person to whom Annabeth is actually trying to talk, fights beside her. His smirk flashes in her periphery. 

Malcolm is her next-oldest half-brother, and as another child of Athena, he’s usually her next best source for calm, logical wisdom. The kind of wisdom that's been made elusive to Annabeth by this unending, illogical, prank war bullshit. 

“You haven’t heard anything about it, have you?” she asks Malcolm, suspicious of that knowing smirk. “Anything about what was stolen?” 

“Focus, Annabeth!” Clarisse hisses, then lunges forward. Annabeth barely manages to keep Clarisse’s spearpoint from skewering her torso, though the sharpened tip still draws a scratch across her shoulder. 

She hardly reacts to the injury. After being battered by a Cyclops, crushed under the weight of the sky, stabbed by Ethan Nakamura, and dropped into the literal hellhole known as Tartarus, it seems that Annabeth has developed an impressive threshold for pain. 

But she has not, apparently, developed a whole lot of patience. 

“Malcolm!” she calls. 

He shrugs and—in the same smooth motion—uses the butt of his sword to smack the helmet off an Ares camper. “I’ve heard some gossip. Nothing definite. But some of the theories are actually pretty well-considered, in my opinion.”

Clarisse is mid-charge when Annabeth raises her hands in the ‘time out’ gesture and yells, “Athena cabin, yield!” 

Her words have the desired effect: the combat around her immediately ceases. But the Ares campers, especially Clarisse, glower at her, their bloodlust unsated. To them, a moment without a fight is a moment wasted. 

“Quick water break!” Annabeth provides by way of explanation. 

There’s some irritated grumbling, but the combat formations disperse, the campers retreating to rest and rehydrate. Even Clarisse saunters off for a brief respite—albeit while muttering curses. 

Annabeth, meanwhile, whirls on Malcolm and demands information. Whatever he has heard, she wants to know. 

“This came from an Aphrodite camper,” explains Malcolm. “So it’s a bit fantastical—but it’s honestly the only explanation that makes sense to me.”

“Okay, hit me with it.”

“You and Percy… you’ve been through a lot together, right? Wars and Tartarus and everything?”

Annabeth blinks. “Yeah, of course.”

“You’ve said the L-word to each other?” 

Despite herself, Annabeth blushes. “Yeah.”

“And when you go to school in New Rome, you’ll be living together?”

Her blush deepens and she nods. 

“You’re both eighteen. And something’s been stolen from him, but he won’t tell you what it is—at least not yet.”

Annabeth makes a frustrated noise. “What does this have to do with anything?” 

Malcolm looks at her like she just asked whether a cheese danish contains cheese. 

“Don’t you get it, Annabeth?" he asks. "The thing that the Stolls took… did you ever consider that it might be a ring?”

Something in Annabeth’s chest plummets right down to her toes. Her sword suddenly feels slippery in her grasp, and she struggles to maintain hold of it. 

A... ring? 

No. No way. Percy wouldn't. Not now, anyway. Of course, she’d hoped, maybe someday, but now ? They haven’t even graduated high school yet—

“That’s a load of Minotaur dung.” 

Annabeth turns to see Clarisse materialized to her right, teeth half-gnawing on the spout of a water bottle. She must have been eavesdropping on them despite her earlier (perhaps feigned) disinterest in the conversation. When their gazes meet, Annabeth suspects that Clarisse can see the panic in her eyes.

“Not that Jackson doesn’t worship you and all,” continues Clarisse, her body slouched against her spear shaft. “But he always follows your lead. So unless you’ve been dropping some explicit hints that you want him to pop the question, I’d say you two still have a long way to go.” 

Annabeth relaxes, recognizing that Clarisse has a point. When they decided to move to New Rome, it wasn’t like Percy just packed his belongings and said, “Wanna come?” They talked about it pretty thoroughly before even partially committing to the idea. She doubts that Percy would consider proposing without first asking, “Hey, Annabeth! You ready for marriage?” at least once. 

But then again, it’s not like Percy to keep things from her. So what does she really know? Who’s to say it isn’t a ring?

Certainly not Malcolm, who seems to resent Clarisse’s dismissal of his theory.

“Well?” he says. “What else could it be?”

“C’mon. The Stolls don’t always steal for value—sometimes they steal for laughs.”

“Meaning?”

Clarisse shoots Annabeth a look of mock-pity. “My guess? They probably took all of Percy’s clean underwear. It wouldn’t be the first time, either. Not that he—or anyone with half a brain—would tell their girlfriend that. ” 

Annabeth doesn’t even have time to process that disgusting prospect. Not when she is suddenly distracted by something else. A noise. A commotion. An overture of pounding hoofbeats, indignant horse whinnies, and desperate male screams. 

“OUT OF THE WAY!” Travis and Connor bellow as they bolt across the arena, sprinting directly from entrance to exit—tripping over themselves and each other to escape whatever pursues them.

And judging by all those approaching hoofbeats, there's definitely more than one whatever in pursuit. Behind the Stolls are at least a dozen frenzied pegasi, their elongated teeth snapping at the Stolls' heels. The Ares and Athena cabins can only watch, awed, as the procession of terrified Stolls and wrathful winged horses storm out of sight, stampeding toward the strawberry fields with clouds of dirt in their wake. 

The arena is still frozen and stunned when Percy jogs into view. He says nothing about the recent stampede, shows no indication that anything is amiss. He simply lopes up to Annabeth with the air of someone returning from a relaxing walk.

“Hey,” he greets, as if a horde of winged horses didn’t just nearly trample the Stoll brothers before their very eyes. He leans down and drops a kiss upon the crown of Annabeth’s head. “How’s sparring going?”

Annabeth points to his forehead, having noticed a piece of gold something lodged in his dark hair. His eyes cross comically as he tries to see what she’s pointing to. When he finally locates it—the thing that has fallen into his hair—he flicks at the offending piece of gold, and it floats gently to the hoof-beaten ground. 

It’s a stalk of hay, Annabeth realizes. From the stables. 

Because who else would send a stampede of pegasi after the Stolls but Percy Jackson, son of Poseidon? 

That night, at the campfire, Percy wraps an arm around Annabeth’s shoulders. He sings the campfire songs in the way he has since he was twelve, sarcastic and loud and off-key, like he knows the lyrics are dumb—but that, to him, is what makes them so fun.

In moments like this, Annabeth feels like they’re both still twelve, about to embark on their first quest together. And by thinking about how young they were… how young they both still are… she can’t help remembering what Malcolm said—about the hypothetical ring, about the fact that Percy might be planning to propose. 

Truthfully, she is comfortable with the idea of marrying him. Marrying him someday, she means. They’ve been through so much together that calling him a ‘boyfriend’ hardly feels sufficient anymore. Annabeth struggles to imagine herself with anyone but Percy. 

But Annabeth doesn’t want to rush anything. Not because she doubts the durability or stability of their relationship, but because ‘rushing’ feels like waiting for a shoe to drop and squeezing their lives into the time before it hits the floor. Demigods are always told to rush. To count their days. To expect to die before reaching anything close to an old age or a complete life. 

Annabeth doesn’t want to live like that with Percy. Not after everything that they’ve been through. The monsters, the Titans, the Giants, the pit of Tartarus, and the Earth herself all tried but couldn’t manage to kill them. That has to mean something. Hopefully, it means that they’ve finally earned a long, slow, happy life. That they deserve the luxury of taking their time. 

“Percy?” 

He hums a question in response. His stare connects with hers, green eyes on grey, and his attention strikes her like one of Thalia’s lightning bolts. Suddenly, there are a billion things she wants to say to him, too many things, and she doesn’t know where to begin but… she needs him to understand one thing in particular. 

“I like… stages,” blurts Annabeth, not-at-all-coherently. 

This declaration earns her the blankest of stares—thus confirming the fear that she sounds like an idiot.

“Stages,” Percy repeats slowly. “Um. You mean like… for concerts?” 

“Life stages,” she clarifies. “High school. Graduation. College. Career. Marriage. Whatever comes after. I like to plan. I like to keep moving forward. I just…” She sighs. “I just don’t want everything to happen all at once, okay?”

The flames flicker across his confused features. As she studies him, moment after moment evaporating with the rising smoke, she prays to every god she can think of. She prays that he'll understand—that he'll accept what she's saying. That he'll realize that they're not ready for this yet, for a ring and all it might entail. Even if someday she hopes—

But there's no such luck, in the end. That becomes clear when Percy's face closes off into something guarded and...guilty? Why on earth would he look so guilty? 

“Right,” Percy mutters, affixing his gaze to the fire. “Graduation. Moving forward. No problem.”

“So apparently we’ve slipped into a parallel universe."

It's not uncommon for theoretical topics to be thrown around the Athena table. The Fermi Paradox. The Moonshine Theory. The Simulation Hypothesis. They've argued over plenty of them in the past, but Annabeth thinks this might be their first attempt to discuss multiverse theory.

But she doesn't trust Malcolm to lead the discussion. Especially when he sounds like he's teasing rather than philosophizing. 

Grinning, Malcolm continues, “The evidence couldn't be more obvious. You see, Annabeth Chase is here, staring off into space.” He points a thumb over his shoulder. “While Percy Jackson is over there, reading a book at the dinner table.” 

Annabeth doesn’t need to follow Malcolm’s thumb to know what he's talking about. She was already looking in that direction.

Percy is sitting at the Poseidon table by himself, squinting furiously at what appears to be a beaten-up library book. A forkful of grilled chicken hovers beside his half-open mouth, forgotten in favor of the yellowing pages and tiny letters. 

Just watching him gives Annabeth a migraine. His features are scrunched up in focus, and his fingers tap erratically along the spine and cover of the book.

Tonelessly, Annabeth replies, "Hilarious."

Malcolm's grin is obnoxiously wide. "I pride myself on my observational skills."

"Well, I wasn't just 'staring off into space,' okay? I was thinking." 

“About what?” Malcolm waggles his eyebrows. “Wedding plans?” 

Annabeth kicks him from under the table. 

“About what was stolen,” she says, unapologetic as Malcolm whines and clutches his shin. “I’m losing my mind here. I can’t think of a single thing that would make him act like this.”

She develops a list in her mind. A list of all his most important possessions—the items that are most personally significant to him. 

“The minotaur horn is still in his cabin,” she recalls, ticking a mental checkmark. “His sword is in his pocket, as always. His camp necklace is around his neck. I’m running out of ideas.”

“Okay, but…” Malcolm squints at Percy like he suspects him of being body-snatched. “What’s with the sudden preference for Charles Dickens?”

“I wouldn’t exactly call it a preference. It’s just another consequence of Hera screwing up his life.”

One of her other siblings laughs. “Hera made him read Great Expectations? Talk about a curse.” 

“Not quite,” Annabeth says. “The Mist convinced his school that his disappearance was just a semester-long exchange program. But he still has a lot of coursework to catch up on if he wants to go to college in the fall. He’s doing homework, not reading for enjoyment.”

Malcolm's stare turns pitying. “Jeez. I can’t believe he missed a whole semester. And right before his junior year, no less.”

He shakes his head like it’s the worst catastrophe imaginable. And to many of her half-siblings, it would be a catastrophe. Children of Athena are known to greatly value their grades. Wisdom is supposed to be their specialty, after all, so even with dyslexia and ADHD, most of the Athena cabin—including Annabeth—have always kept straight A’s. 

Percy, on the other hand, hasn’t found the same success. School has always been a disciplinary and academic struggle for him, and that semester was not one he could afford to skip. Even a child of Athena would have difficulty catching up on that much schoolwork. But Percy refused to be held back a grade, determined to graduate in the same year as Annabeth. 

“He’ll get through it,” Annabeth insists, pouring all belief into the words. “I’ve been tutoring him. And he can be pretty smart when he puts his mind to something.” 

A part of her still worries, though. Percy lost a lot more than time during his abduction, not that Hera ever even considered—

Annabeth senses what’s happening before anyone else does. She sees Percy lift his focus from the book, his pained grimace swapped for a smirk. She sees his eyes travel to the Hermes table. And then she sees Travis and Connor raise their glasses to their mouths, intending to take a drink. 

Percy jerks his head ever so slightly—

—and the contents of the glasses erupt all over the Stolls.

It's the kind of magic that only a son of Poseidon can cast. The liquid blasts the Stolls with such force, you'd think someone had reversed the gravity. It's a grenade; a volcano within a drinking glass. An explosion that leaves the Stolls coughing and sneezing Coca-Cola. 

Annabeth might be the first person to notice this, but she is not by any means the last. The whole dining pavilion howls with laughter at the sight of the now-soaked Stolls, and their nearest siblings shuffle several seats away, fearful of being caught in the prank war crossfire. 

The Stolls, meanwhile, are left frozen, too enraged to do anything but stand and let the soda drip, drip, drip in the aftermath. 

Until they focus their attention on the cause of their little accident: Percy Jackson. Percy, who acts like nothing of remote interest has occurred, having already returned to his book and his meal. 

“That’s it!” Travis yells.

The brothers slam their glasses down on the tabletop, then storm right up to Percy—positioning themselves so that they tower over his seated figure. 

“We’ve had enough!” proclaim the brothers, in unison.

Slowly, very slowly, Percy places a napkin between the pages of Great Expectations. It's only after doing this that he acknowledges the Stolls at all, regarding them with a raised eyebrow. 

When he is calm, Percy’s eyes reflect that, mimicking the color and beauty of a placid sea. But his eyes look nothing like that right now. Right now, they’re as cold and uninviting as a storm-ridden ocean. The remorseless kind of ocean that rears up and sinks ships and smashes coastlines into pieces. 

Connor clenches his fists. “We haven’t showered in days! We can’t do half the activities at camp! And now, because of you, we can’t even take a goddamn drink at dinner—”

Percy raises a hand to stop them. “Because of me? Uh, no. I’ve made myself clear. Give back what you stole, and everything goes back to normal.”

Annabeth rises to her feet, sensing that she might need to intervene if this little confrontation descends into a real fight. The Stolls seem reckless enough to throw a punch. And Percy has never been afraid to throw one right back. 

The Stolls exchange a glance. “That won’t be possible.” 

Percy takes a long and leisurely sip from his own glass of blue soda. With a satisfied sigh and a voice saturated with mock pity, he remarks, “Well. That's just too bad, isn't it?"

Connor gulps. “Seriously, man. You need to stop.”

“And I will," assures Percy. "But only when you give back what you stole.”

There is a pause. A hesitation that swallows up the room. No one else in the pavilion speaks for fear of derailing the drama. 

“We can’t,” the Stolls tell him, together. 

“Why?”

“We just can’t!”

“Why? Because of your stupid ‘no-return policy?'” 

“No!”

“Then what? Why can’t you make things easier for everyone and just return it?” 

“Because we don’t have it anymore!” shouts Travis in desperation, arms waving above his head. “We don’t have it, okay? There’s nothing to give back!”

Annabeth is still several feet away, but this confession makes her stop in her tracks. Not simply because the words are surprising. Not simply because Connor shoots Travis a look of betrayal for revealing this secret.

She stops because of Percy’s reaction. All blood drains from his face. His jaw hangs open. And he's so frozen and stiff, Annabeth might mistake him for one of Medusa's soon-to-be smashed sculptures. 

“You… what?” he says, breath skittering over the words. 

Connor crosses his arms, all pretenses abandoned. “We lost it, okay? We didn’t want to tell you, because clearly it meant more to you than we originally thought. But we’re really—”

“You… lost it?” Percy repeats.  

It's only a few more steps before Annabeth is close enough to touch Percy, but he doesn't react to the hand she lays on his shoulder. He's too blindsided by this, whatever this is.

“I don’t understand,” Annabeth says. “What’s the big deal? What was stolen?”

It’s the question everyone has been wondering. The eyes of every demigod burn into the Stolls, demanding answers. 

Helplessly, Travis explains, “Look, it was just a joke, okay? Some camper got injured in a swordfight, and Percy said he had extra ambrosia in his bunk—”

“—so we went to grab it while Percy brought the kid to Chiron,” continues Connor.

“And when we went into the Poseidon cabin, we found the Ambrosia right where Percy said it was—”

“—but there was this ugly thing on the bed—”

“—a doll, like a baby doll, the kind some little girl would have—”

Connor opens his mouth, prepared to say more, but Annabeth holds up a finger before he can. Surely, she must have misheard them.

 “I’m sorry,” she interrupts. “But did you just say there was a baby doll on Percy’s bed?”

She shoots her boyfriend a questioning look, but he says nothing. He only continues to gape at the Stolls like they've committed murder before his eyes. 

“Yeah!” Travis says. “And of course it’s, like, weird for Percy Jackson, slayer of giants and titans and whatever, to have a baby doll—”

“—so we’re like, man, we could totally give him a hard time about this, you know, as pranking sons of Hermes do—”

“—give it back to him in some spectacularly humiliating way, maybe—”

“—so we, you know, stole it. From his cabin.”

“And of course, when he realized it was gone, he knew we’d stolen it because, seriously, who else would have—”

“And we meant to give it back in a few days, honestly—”

“But we lost it, and now we have no idea where it is—”

“But he was really mad at us for taking it, and we didn’t want to make him any angrier by telling him we’d lost his precious baby doll or whatever, so we just kept pretending we still had it.”

“Until now,” Travis amends. 

“Until now,” Connor agrees. 

“And we’re talking,” reiterates Annabeth because, for all her wisdom, nothing is making any damn sense, “about a baby doll ? A baby doll owned by my boyfriend, Percy Jackson. Is that what you’re telling me right now?”

“Yes, Annabeth,” scoffs Connor. “We are talking about Percy’s baby doll.”

“Because apparently, your boyfriend has a weird attachment to some… some…” Travis flails a hand. “...children’s toy!”

Over the last few days, Annabeth has spent a great deal of time imagining what was stolen, what could cause Percy and the Stolls so much antagonism and strife. She imagined valuables and prized possessions and even—thanks to Malcolm—something as ridiculous as an engagement ring. 

But never, not once, had she considered the possibility of a baby doll.

Because who in Hades would?

The whole pavilion falls silent, struggling to make sense of Travis and Connor's claims. The prank war, the fight, and the revelation of the baby doll—it’s a lot to process. And then—

“That wasn’t just some children’s toy!” 

And Annabeth can feel it. She can feel Percy's rage bursting forth with his words—a pressure that whips through the pavilion like the briny wind of a sea storm. It's something primal, she thinks. Something desperate. So when Percy rises to his feet, climbing and cresting like a tidal wave, Annabeth doesn't blame the Stolls for shrinking toward the floor. If she didn't know Percy so well, she would do the same. 

“That doll,” Percy grits out, “is worth fifty percent of my Home Economics grade!”

Annabeth blinks. Those words—Home Economics—have doused her with fresh confusion. Until now, she wasn't aware of any kind of Home Economics assignment. Until now, she hadn’t even known that Percy was taking Home Economics. She thought she knew his whole schedule. She thought she knew all about his classes, his assignments, his grades. But why wouldn’t he tell her about this? Why, out of everything, has he kept this one class secret from her?

“If I don’t hand in that baby—undamaged—on January 15th, do you know what will happen?”  

Twenty whole seconds pass before either brother answers Percy's latest question. The silence is excruciating.

“I’m guessing…you’ll fail the class?” Travis squeaks.

Percy doesn’t congratulate him on what must be the correct answer. Instead, he takes a menacing step toward the Stolls, one that makes them both flinch.

“And do you know what will happen,” Percy asks,  “if I fail Home Economics?” 

“You’ll…” Connor gulps, nearly cowering. “...have to take it again?”

Panic swells in Percy's voice. “If I fail Home Economics, my GPA will drop so low, I won’t graduate. I won’t go to college. I won’t—” 

He cuts himself off with a frustrated choking sound. 

It is then that Percy notices the immense attention trained upon him—the dozens of nervous stares and halted breaths from his fellow campers. He looks thoroughly humiliated as he meets every gaze, but it’s not until he turns to face Annabeth that his cheeks burn bright red with shame. 

Oh. Oh. 

Above all, Percy didn’t want Annabeth to know about this. He didn’t want her to know that, after everything, after all the tutoring sessions and study guides and SAT practice… his GPA is still shaky enough that one really bad grade, even in a class as ridiculous as Home Economics, could send it toppling down. 

He’s been working harder in school than ever before, and still, it’s not enough. A bad GPA still means no graduation. And no graduation means no scholarship. And no scholarship means no New Rome University. 

Above all, he thinks he’s letting her down. Ruining her plans. Jeopardizing their future. Letting their hard work go to waste. 

“Percy...” she murmurs, reaching out for him. 

He opens his mouth just barely, and she can sense some sort of apology stuck in his throat, something struggling to escape and explain all this chaos—

But it never manages to shake free. Percy just turns and sprints out of the dining pavilion, leaving Annabeth with a dangling outstretched hand and nothing to hold on to. 

In the wake of his exit, yet another silence envelops the pavilion. The campers are too shocked to speak. Never before have they seen Percy Jackson, their leader, so easy-going and friendly and brave, so utterly devastated. 

“Way to ruin his life, idiots!” Katie Gardner yells, the first to offer commentary on the Stolls' immense screw-up. “Hasn’t he been through enough?” 

The world seems to slow as she hurls a piece of grilled chicken across the pavilion. The meat finds its mark as it slams, not-at-all gently, against Connor Stoll’s face. It finds impact with a wet smack before bouncing gracelessly to the floor. 

“Ow!” he exclaims, rubbing his cheek. 

Katie has never particularly liked the Stolls, so her outrage isn’t exactly a surprise to Annabeth. What does surprise her, however, is the fact that Katie is not alone in this reaction. Soon enough, something similar to a food fight breaks out amidst the campers. It is only similar to a food fight because there aren’t exactly opposing sides. Rather, it’s the entire camp pelting the Stolls with food and insults, determined to make them pay for what they’ve done to Percy. 

It’s touching, actually. Between his roles in Titan and Giant Wars, she supposes that the other campers have come to look up to him. Perhaps they've even grown invested in his life. Invested enough to want to see something good happen to him. 

Annabeth is tempted to join in on their collective wrath, thinking that, considering recent events, her mashed potatoes would look excellent in Travis’s hair.

But… there are more pressing matters. 

She needs to find Percy.

Chapter Text

As a knowledge-loving daughter of Athena, Annabeth knows a lot of things. Obscure things, even. She knows that the medical term for brain freeze is sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia. She knows that more than 10 million bricks comprise the Empire State Building. 

And she knows Percy Jackson. She might, in fact, know him better than most of the things stored in her brain.

So it doesn’t take her too long to find him. That’s not to say he doesn’t try to hide from her, because he does. She checks his usual haunts—the Poseidon Cabin, the lake, the beach, the sword fighting arena—only to find them all empty. Not a trace of him to be found. 

That's fine, Annabeth thinks. No need to panic. Just because he's not in any of his favorite places doesn't mean he's done anything extreme, like left camp. She doubts he would do that—especially after Hera and all the terror she's caused them. Eight months of being missing; eight months of fruitless searching by his family and friends. Percy is upset, surely, but he’d never go missing again. Not really. Not on purpose. He must still be here, at camp. 

So it’s just a matter of where at camp. And if he’s hiding, he’s hiding from Annabeth in particular.

If his reaction in the dining pavilion told Annabeth anything, it's that she's a major factor in this. He knows how much Annabeth likes to plan, how much effort she's devoted to constructing their future together after graduation. He's probably terrified of how this baby doll situation will affect their... well... everything. 

Avoiding the issue (and her) won’t help either of them, though. They still have a future, Annabeth is convinced. She just needs to convince him of that fact as well. 

The first step is finding him. So she thinks about it, about him, about what she would do if she were Percy Jackson, trying to hide from Annabeth Chase. 

She would go somewhere that he never does. Somewhere he would be unlikely to be discovered at night, even by accident. Somewhere that Annabeth avoids just as much. 

In the end, only one place really comes to mind.

Annabeth finds Percy on the archery range, his silhouette illuminated by the light of a crescent moon. 

Much to Chiron’s disappointment, it’s the one camp activity that she and Percy have always hated. Close range weapons have always been their preference, and they’ve never had the talent or interest to learn archery properly. The archery range is the last place Annabeth would expect to find Percy. So, naturally, it is the first place he went. 

Percy doesn’t notice her arrival at first. His back is turned to her, and her steps are soundless in the soft grass. 

As she gets closer, she notices that he is holding one of the camp’s bows, an arrow already nocked in its bowstring. It’s a sight that—understandably—makes her a bit uneasy. With the distant targets so obscured by the night, it’s probably not safe for anyone, not even an Apollo camper, to be firing off arrows at this hour. And Percy has never been a good shot. Not even in the daylight. 

Percy draws his arm back and releases the arrow. It flies through the air in the way that a drunk person might walk down the stairs—wobbling all the way down. A loud and graceless thunk informs Annabeth that the arrow has landed, having lodged itself in a remote tuft of grass. It’s nowhere near any conceivable target. So unless he was aiming for the weeds, she would say that he missed his mark. In fact, it seems like a lot of recent arrows have missed their marks. The ground is utterly littered with them, the wooden shafts and colorful feathers sticking in the grass like tiny flags. The distant bullseyes, meanwhile, remain untouched, each arrow having fallen short of its target. 

Percy doesn't realize his quiver is empty as he reaches for another arrow. When his fingers grasp at nothing, he turns, probably intending to grab more ammunition from the stock of equipment, but freezes as he spots Annabeth standing behind him. 

Over the years, Annabeth has developed an impressive talent for reading Percy Jackson. Reading his appearance, his emotions, his mannerisms. Which means that nothing—not even the silvery wash of the moonlight or the dark of the surrounding night—can hide his reddened eyes from her notice. 

Surprise hits her more forcefully than it probably should. Because, really, it’s not like she hasn’t seen Percy cry before. She has seen him shed tears over the burning shrouds of fallen friends. She has seen his eyes stream with poison and agony and hopelessness in the depths of Tartarus. She has even seen Percy near-weeping during the birth of his half-sister. And if they’re watching a movie where a dog dies? Forget it. He turns into a human waterfall. 

But throughout all the years she has known him, she doesn’t think she has ever seen him cry in shame before. 

Percy raises his hand to his face, scrubbing a palm across his eyes to hide the evidence. The attempt is clumsy and, despite the effort, totally unsuccessful. 

“Hey,” he says simply. The bow lowers to his side, drooping with the rest of his posture. He is hunched and miserable-looking, desolate in a way that Annabeth hasn't seen since Tartarus, and Annabeth heart sinks in her chest at the very sight of him. 

Annabeth steps forward to disentangle his fingers from the bow. Carefully, she drops it into the grass, then weighs his now-empty hand in hers. His fingers are ice cold. The air within camp borders never drops below freezing, but that doesn't mean that the night is warm. It's nearly the new year and the camp is about as cold as it ever gets. Resisting the urge to shiver, she brings both of his hands between hers and squeezes them tight, forcing warmth into them. 

“You probably thought it’d take me longer to find you.” 

At this, a small smile twitches across his mouth. But it's fragile. Very fragile. She worries that the mere gravity of her gaze could buckle it. 

“Not really," he admits. "I just wanted to some time to cool off. You know, before we talked.”

She studies his face. Moonlight catches the tear streaks on his cheeks—glinting like mercury—and she doesn't know what to do. 

“Are you okay?” Annabeth asks. She knows it’s probably the stupidest question in the world, because he’s clearly not, but she also knows that it needs to be asked anyway. 

With a shrug, he says, “Sort of.”

His tone is equal parts sarcastic and sincere. Contradictory. Ambiguous. Annabeth doesn’t like ambiguous answers. She thinks they violate the point of answering at all. 

“What do you mean, ‘sort of’ ?” 

“Well… I’m alive." He stares determinedly at their hands, still clasped together between their bodies. "And the people I care about are alive. So I shouldn't ask for more. I can't ask for more, and I was dumb to think I could—"

“Listen,” she says, “I doubt that stupid baby doll is really going to change anything. I know it probably seems like a big deal now, but it won’t affect your GPA that much, especially with how well you’ve been doing in your other classes—”

“I got a D on my last English essay,” he blurts, interrupting her.

For a few moments, Annabeth simply blinks at him, trying to parse those frantic words. Sure, it’s news to her. Bad news. But not so bad that he should say it like he’s admitting to murder. More than anything, though, she just doesn't understand how it's possible that he failed. Not after how attentive he's been, how hard he's worked. It just doesn't make sense—

“What?” Annabeth exclaims. “That makes no sense! I helped you edit that essay and it came out great. Maybe you should talk to your teacher—”

“No, that was a different essay. There was another one last week, one I forgot about, and I had to finish it in an hour and it was garbage—” He cuts himself off again, taking a deep breath. “I’m not good at this kind of thing. School. Remembering assignments.”

“You’re fine at it.” 

“No, I’m not.” He rubs again at his eyes, as if forcing them to cooperate. “I’m not smart, okay? Never have been. You know that. We both know that.” 

“That is absolutely not true,” Annabeth insists. “You are very smart, Percy. Even if a classroom doesn’t make you feel that way.”

“Maybe I’m smart when it comes to stabbing monsters,” he concedes. “But not in anything else.”

“Percy...” 

“Annabeth.” Percy’s red-rimmed eyes shine in the moonlight. “I can’t even pass Home Economics.”

After a pause, she says, “I didn’t even know you were taking Home Economics.”

A part of her wants to chastise him for withholding that information. But then another part of her remembers a moment three years ago, in the Athena cabin, shortly after she had heard her first prophecy. The first prophecy that was really issued to her, Annabeth Chase, and not to anyone else. 

It was hardly an optimistic prediction. The Oracle had warned that she would lose a love to a fate worse than death. Ultimately, that love was Luke Castellan, but when Annabeth had first heard the words, her mind immediately jumped to Percy. It was probably the first time she had acknowledged her feelings toward him, if only to herself. 

Certainly, she couldn’t have told him then. Not with a prophecy that promised he would die because she loved him. And not with the long-standing prophecy that Percy would die upon his 16th birthday, regardless of how Annabeth felt about him.

She remembers standing across from Percy, enclosed within the walls of the Athena cabin, the knowledge of what she might lose on her ill-fated quest—namely, him—like a suffocating pressure on the back of her mind. She knew that she couldn’t go on the quest without him, but if she told him…

No, she couldn’t. She couldn’t tell him. He had lived through enough dire prophecies and was still due to suffer the worst one of all. 

The last thing she wanted, at that moment, was to tell the truth. All she wanted was to step into his arms, to let him reassure her in that optimistic way he always does. Because this was a boy who had faced war gods and titans and monsters with a ‘ no problem’ attitude. Surely, he of all people could not have been wrong about their chances of survival. 

Percy’s position now is nowhere near as deadly, but it's not without its similarities. Years ago, she concealed the words of a prophecy to spare him some amount of fear and dread. And until recently, he had concealed his grades to spare her the uncertainty of their future together. 

Slowly, she slides her hand out of his grasp and wraps him in a tight embrace. A coil of nervousness in her chest—one that she didn’t even notice until now—seems to release when he leans into her, face pressing into her shoulder. 

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she murmurs into his t-shirt, despite already knowing the answer. 

Percy doesn’t reply for many moments. When he finally does, his voice is muffled, trapped somewhere between his mouth and the seam of her shirt. “I asked you to go to New Rome University with me. You could’ve gone anywhere. Harvard. Yale. Wherever you wanted.”

“I wouldn’t have agreed to go to New Rome University if I didn’t want to.”

“Maybe. But you were making all these sacrifices for me, giving up other opportunities, tutoring me, and I didn’t want you to know that I was letting you down. That nothing was working, that I still can’t pass English, and now Home Ec…”

He trails off. 

“That’s the Stolls’ fault,” Annabeth reminds him. 

“It’s supposed to be the easiest class in the world,” Percy says. “A GPA booster. That’s why I took it. If you show up to class and keep that stupid baby doll in one piece, you get an A. But I couldn’t even do that.”

“The Stolls—”

“Yeah, but how were they supposed to know that my GPA was riding on a plastic baby doll?” She feels rather than sees his head shake. “If I don’t graduate, it’s my fault, not theirs.”

She pulls away, but only so that she can shoot Percy a partly incredulous, partly annoyed look. No matter what he says, Annabeth is still convinced that the Stolls are to blame for their current situation. Percy has tried his absolute best to pass his classes—Annabeth has seen that firsthand. But it’s not like anyone forced the Stolls to steal the doll from his cabin. 

Percy is being far too forgiving. Too forgiving, it seems, of everyone except himself. 

“You’re going to graduate,” she promises. “And even if you don’t, it won’t matter. Not really.”

He chuckles not at all humorously. “But it will.”

“Percy Jackson, if you think for even one second that a diploma will make any sort of difference in the way I feel about you—”

“Okay,” he says seriously. “Let’s pretend my becoming a high school dropout won't matter to you in any way. But maybe—”

“Maybe what ? I’m telling you, Seaweed Brain. There is no maybe.”

“Fine. It doesn’t matter to you. But...” He sighs. “Well, have you thought that maybe, just maybe, it matters a lot to me? Maybe it matters more to me than anybody else.”

Cold air replaces the warm arms around her shoulders. Annabeth discovers that Percy has moved a few feet away, his features thrown out of relief by distance and darkness. The ones that she can still make out are drawn, like the world has never burdened him more than it is burdening him right now. Which probably isn't a good sign. Percy has literally held the weight of the world before. Could this graduation situation really be worse than that?

“I’ve pretty much spent most of my life feeling like a screw-up,” he confesses, bitterly, almost like it's a big joke, but Annabeth can tell that it’s not. “I can fight as many monsters and titans and giants as I’d like, but most people won’t know. They’ll only know that I’ve been expelled from seven schools.” 

Annabeth realizes this. She realizes that the mortal world will never understand all that they’ve been through, all that they’ve lost, in the short span of eighteen years.

“Graduating,” Percy says, “was supposed to prove I wasn’t that kind of kid. That I could do okay in school instead of getting kicked out.” 

There's a wistfulness in his voice, in his eyes, that Annabeth has rarely heard or seen. She's caught traces of it when he's talked about moving to New Rome. Or about sharing a place together, just the two them. But there's also something different about it—something desperate, rather than just hopeful. Like this is the one thing Percy needs more than anything else. Something that he'd give just about anything to have. 

His eyes squeeze shut again, like he's still willing himself not to cry. 

“It’s stupid, I know, but I can’t stand how it’s going to affect everyone else. My mom will act okay, she always does, but I know she wanted to take pictures of me in my cap and gown—she hasn’t stopped talking about it since senior year started. And I’m sure Paul is going to hate explaining to the other teachers why his stepson couldn’t walk with the other students.” 

There’s an intense sort of pause before he continues. “And then, of course, there’s you.”

“Me?” Annabeth gestures to herself in confusion. “What about me?” 

Percy's eyes are open again but they won't meet Annabeth's. 

“Well, every time we meet a mortal, you’re going to have to explain why you, a smart and successful young lady, are dating a guy who couldn’t even graduate high school.” 

She crosses her arms. “And you think I care about that?”

“Not at all. That’s the opposite of what I’m saying. I’m saying I care, even if you don’t. I care about being seen as a screw-up for the rest of my life. Okay?” 

For the second time that night, Annabeth thinks about it, about him, about what she would do if she were in Percy Jackson’s shoes. If she was the one who was, by some ridiculous circumstance, unable to graduate high school. She wouldn’t doubt for a second that Percy still loved her. He wouldn’t care at all if she graduated or not—it’s just that he always assumed that she would. 

But Annabeth would care, even if he didn’t. She would be furious with herself. Humiliated. How could she continue to consider herself a daughter of Athena? How could she be wise if she couldn’t accomplish something as typical and simple as graduating high school? 

Pride is her fatal flaw, after all. And that sort of failure… it would decimate her pride. 

But Percy is supposed to be different from Annabeth. Percy has always been the humble one, not the proud one. And it’s only now that she realizes that pride and humility might not be mutually exclusive. Maybe Percy has always wanted to be proud. Maybe it’s just that, all along, Percy has struggled to see himself as someone to be proud of.

Graduation was supposed to be his chance to be proud of himself. To see others be proud of him. And the Stolls had ruined that. 

The coil in her chest has returned, but this time, it seems more like a corkscrew than a coil, embedded deep but twisting deeper still. She finds herself searching desperately for something to say to him, something that might assure him of a bright side, but nothing seems sufficient. 

She is speechless. Speechless for too long, long enough to make him misinterpret her silence, afraid that he has said something to upset her. Percy is quick to try to rectify the situation, even if there is nothing to fix. It is Annabeth who is failing him now. 

“I love you,” he insists. “And I know I sound stupid and selfish, and we’ll be fine even if I don’t graduate, but—”

“It’s not selfish.”

These are the first words Annabeth has managed in a while, and she only manages them because they are unquestionably true. She even resists rolling her eyes. Truly, only Percy would believe that he is selfish for wanting to feel a little proud of himself. Most of the world will never know what he has done, what he has sacrificed. Battling the god of war. Sailing the Sea of Monsters. Holding the weight of the world. Navigating the Labyrinth. Winning a war. Being abducted. Dragging himself through Tartarus. Winning yet another war. These are silent, secret deeds that mean nothing to the rest of the world, but have scarred Percy beyond endurance. No other demigod in history — not even Hercules — can boast that sort of track record. Not one. 

Certainly, that should mean something to him. But it doesn’t. Annabeth knows that Percy would easily trade every ounce of glory for any of the trivialities that mortal kids take for granted. The ability to read and focus. The privilege of walking through New York without being attacked by monsters. The assurance that he will not be expelled from his current school. And the promise of a future, of a graduation and a college and a career. 

So she can tell him all she wants that his other accomplishments, the ones that saved the world, are the ones that really matter. But that won’t change what matters more to Percy.

“I promise you,” Annabeth tells him, holding him perhaps a little too tightly. “Everything will be okay. I’ll make sure of it.”

He hums like he’s not quite convinced, but doesn’t express his doubt out loud. Instead, he drops a kiss on her lips, brief but heartbreakingly gentle, and says, “Okay, Wise Girl. I trust you.”

Despite the promise, their joint worry still lingers in the air. Annabeth wants desperately to push it out of their space, if only for a moment. Their time here at camp is limited. Or at least it was, back when New Rome University seemed like a certainty. 

No. No. It has never stopped being a certainty, and Annabeth is still determined to make their remaining days at camp as amazing as possible. And sure, maybe these past few hours have been less than amazing. A lot less. But she thinks that, with a little work, the night might still be salvageable. 

“I meant to tell you this earlier, but…” Annabeth's eyes flit between the arrows strewn all over the grass. “You’re a terrible shot.” 

He laughs, a full and genuine laugh, and the night seems to lighten by a few shades. 

“So?” he teases. “I’m still better than you. 

“No way. I’d hit at least one target.”

“Oh really?” Percy jerks his head toward the bow still resting the nearby ground. “Prove it.”

She shoves him out of her hold, directing him toward the shed that houses the archery equipment. “Fine! Go find some more arrows and I will, Seaweed Brain.” 

“Fine. But I bet you won’t hit a single target.”

“Oh, I’ll take that bet.”

He smirks, positioning himself at the ready to sprint for another quiver. “Stakes?” 

Her grey eyes flash mischievously. “Strip archery.”

“Strip archery?” Percy chokes down another laugh, but it’s not at all dismissive of the idea. “Pretty sure that’s not a thing.”

She shrugs. “We both shoot. Whenever one of us hits a bullseye, the other person has to take off a piece of clothing.” 

His eyes follow her as she—quite slowly—reaches down to retrieve the fallen bow. “Well?” she says, raising her eyebrows expectantly. “Are we on?” 

“Yeah,” he says, tripping over his feet in his haste to reach the shed. “We’re so on.”

In the end, the stakes of their strip poker game are exciting only in concept, as neither of them manages to hit a proper bullseye. One of Annabeth’s arrows actually strikes a target but doesn’t pierce its surface, so they argue for a while about whether the shot is strip-worthy (Annabeth says yes, Percy says no). 

Ultimately, Percy compromises by partially taking his shirt off, half of the garment hanging normally around his torso, the rest bunched around his neck like a scarf. 

But beyond that, they remain fully clothed as they frantically fire off arrows, failing to demonstrate even a modicum of archery skill. 

After they gather up their many arrows and correct the unfortunate mess that is Percy’s shirt, they intertwine their hands and walk back toward the cabins. It's not a long walk, unfortunately—however much they might enjoy each other's company. Before long they're standing just outside the Poseidon Cabin, the moon at its peak above them. 

Percy gives an enormous yawn. It carries into his words as he garbles, "I think I'm gonna turn in."

She could probably get away with sneaking into his cabin if either of them wanted to. But she has a feeling he's too exhausted for that. Even a child of the eldest gods would be left exhausted by the kind of emotional turmoil Percy experienced tonight.

“Okay.” She kisses between his eyebrows—a spot that's often creased with worry. “See you in the morning?” 

His smile is almost apologetic. “I promise.”

Objectively, it’s silly that he actually has to promise her such a thing. A simple ‘goodnight’ would suffice for most people. And on the night Hera abducted him, Percy and Annabeth had, in fact, simply said goodnight, just like every other couple in the world. So these days, it’s a bit of a superstition of theirs—avoiding that word, ‘goodnight.’ Maybe they’re crazy. Maybe the word really is cursed. Either way, it seems safer to just exchange promises about the morning. 

Annabeth still can’t imagine how he sleeps in the bed where he was kidnapped. It’s something that she marvels at and, more than once, something that she has even asked him about. 

“Hera already took eight months of my life,” was his bitter reply. “She’s not getting my dad’s cabin too.” 

Now, Annabeth watches as Percy slips into the cabin, the shut door manifesting a barrier between them. No matter how tired he is, she doubts he'll sleep soundly. He never really has, and this GPA situation surely isn't helping things. Annabeth can't simply soothe away this very real nightmare. She'll need a plan—a real plan. Something to revive his soon-to-be sunk grades. 

She now finds herself alone, unsure of what time it is, unsure if the Athena campers have started to question her absence. Somehow, she doubts her location is much of a mystery to anyone. Not after everyone saw her chasing after Percy. 

And then, as if to prove that point, a gruff voice behind Annabeth asks, “So? Are we gonna rough up the Stolls or not?” 

She turns to see Clarisse and Malcolm standing behind her. They're grinning, the both of them, and those grins are filled with pure mischief.  

Annabeth answers but keeps her voice low, wary that they're still close to Percy’s bunk. “What? You mean you didn’t bludgeon them to death with grilled chicken?” 

Malcolms sighs with exaggerated self-pity. “We tried our best, but sadly, they escaped.”

“Tragic,” Annabeth remarks, only half-feigning disappointment. “Well, where are they? Hermes Cabin?” 

“That’s where they tried to go,” Clarisse explains, “but their siblings kicked them out. After that, they dragged themselves to my cabin for sanctuary. They figured Ares kids wouldn’t give a damn about Percy's situation.”

Annabeth blinks at Clarisse, and for the first time she considers Clarisse's presence—and what it means. “That’s actually pretty smart of them. I mean, you’re the last person I’d expect to want to help Percy.”

Clarisse scowls. “What? You think I want to see Jackson moping around camp for the rest of his life?”

“Well, your dad hates Percy, doesn’t he?”

“Well, technically, so does our mom,” is Malcolm's snarky interjection—spoken beneath his breath. “But that doesn’t exactly stop you from sticking your tongue in his mouth.” 

Annabeth glares at him, but Clarisse brushes off the comment as if it never happened. 

“So what if Ares holds a grudge? I don’t fight my dad’s battles, not unless the whole world hangs in the balance."

Annabeth isn't prepared when Clarisse shoves her. It's forceful enough to send Annabeth stumbling...though she thinks there might be something affectionate in it. A shove of respect, if such a thing exists.

“Besides," Clarisse continues, near-grumbling. "Whenever the world hangs in the balance, you and Percy usually end up leading the battle. If Ares campers understand anything...it's looking after your fellow soldiers.”

Annabeth smiles. She wants so desperately to give Clarisse a hug, but she knows better than to try. The attempt will likely earn Annabeth little more than a black eye.

Besides, the smile already seems to be embarrassing enough for Clarisse. 

"Shut up," Clarisse grumbles, even though Annabeth hasn't spoken a word. "All I'm saying is that Stolls are still in my cabin, and they don’t know that you know. The faster we get there, the faster we can make them pay.”

It’s an enticing prospect, wreaking endless revenge against the Stolls. Perhaps she will dunk them in the toilets, or throw them into the woods to be chased by monsters. Annabeth might even convince a Hecate camper to conjure a terrifying illusion for them, or perhaps enlist an Aphrodite camper to apply some of the permanent makeup that the Stolls suffered so many years ago. 

But ultimately, Annabeth knows that vengeance against the Stolls won’t help Percy. It will satisfy her, surely, but it won’t change Percy’s situation.

No. What Annabeth needs… is to find that baby doll. If Percy turns it in, his GPA is saved. If he fails to do so, his GPA tanks, and he can kiss his cap and gown goodbye.

 The Stolls—the thieves that they are—claim that they lost the doll shortly after stealing it, and Percy has accepted that. But Annabeth won’t let it go. She won’t. She’ll be damned if she lets some stupid children’s toy — or the Stolls — ruin her future with Percy. 

Annabeth is going to find that baby doll. And Travis and Connor are going to help her — whether they want to or not.

“W-Where’s her knife? I don’t see it!” 

Travis presses his back against the far wall of the cabin, his eyes round with fear. The Ares campers surround him on all sides, watching but offering no aid. Annabeth is here by Clarisse's invitation, after all, and they're not about side with the Stolls over their cabin's leader. Besides, even the Ares campers know not to interrupt Annabeth when she's on a revenge-fueled warpath. 

Annabeth rolls her eyes. “I don’t use a knife anymore, idiot.”

“What?” Connor joins his brother in cowering against the wall. “Since when?”

“Since I fought my way through the depths of Tartarus."

Annabeth recalls this fact so flippantly, it sounds like she's discussing a mere trip to the grocery store. And then, for dramatic effect, she allows her voice to drop into a menacing growl. “You see..." she begins as she takes a single, menacing step.  "I don’t need a knife to make monsters suffer.”

That does the trick. Both brothers raise their hands in the classic gesture of surrender. “Oh, come on!” Connor yells. “We’re not monsters! We made one small mistake!”

“One small mistake?” Annabeth grabs Connor’s shirt collar and yanks him forward. “You ruined my boyfriend’s future!” 

“N-not on purpose!” Connor shrieks, protecting his face with his hands. His voice rises to an inhuman pitch. 

 “So what you’re telling me is that you were careless instead of cruel?” She raises a fist. “That doesn’t make you any less responsible in my eyes.” 

“Look, look! We didn’t do anything careless to lose it—”

“The baby doll is gone, isn’t it? That’s what you said. If you lost something so completely, then you must have been careless—”

“We didn’t lose it, so much,” Travis admits. “It was taken from us.” 

“Sons of Hermes, stolen from?” Malcolm stands beside Clarisse at the door, blocking the exit in case the Stolls try to escape. He sounds intrigued by this development. Intrigued, and a bit amused. “Now that is ironic.”

Annabeth feels hope bubble in her veins. If the Stolls simply lost the doll, she'd probably find herself on a fruitless search, retracing their steps over and over with little chance of finding so much as a clue. But if someone took the doll, a real person with motives and favorite places and predictable behaviors, then there’s a real target to chase after. And a real possibility of getting the doll back. 

“Who?” Annabeth demands. “Who stole it?”

“It’s not a who,” Travis tells her miserably. “It’s a what.”

Annabeth’s hopes evaporate. That is never a good thing to hear. Especially when you're a demigod.

“We have to tell Percy. With his help, we can sneak in, grab the doll—”

“Absolutely not,” Annabeth says, crossing her arms. Her glare on Malcolm is absolutely forbidding, like he just requested her permission to dump several gallons of oil into the nearest river. “We will, under no circumstances, tell Percy.”

“Uh, Annabeth,” Clarisse says. “You and Jackson are pretty much the questing team. If anyone can do this, it’s you two—” 

“If Percy learns the location of the doll, he’ll never let any of his friends help him retrieve it. He’d go alone, risk his neck, probably get himself killed.” Annabeth shakes her head fiercely. “He won’t let anyone endanger themselves over something like this. He’s too stupidly selfless.” 

Annabeth can, in fact, imagine his reaction perfectly. She’d tell him the truth, and make him promise to wait for her, so that they could steal the doll back together. But Percy wouldn’t wait. And he certainly wouldn’t let her risk her life over his grades. He’d sneak out in the dead of night and try to rescue it on his own, the sweet and dumb jerk that he is. 

“So what? We leave it there?” Clarisse stares at her disbelievingly. “I thought you said you wanted to help him.” 

“I said we don’t tell Percy." She holds up a single finger. “But that doesn’t mean we don’t rescue the doll. We do it — just us — and he never has to know. We can say we found it in the woods. As far as he knows, it’s just missing. So it’s not beyond the realm of possibility.”

Gods, Annabeth thinks. If only the doll were ‘just missing.’ 

When the Stolls revealed the doll’s fate, the information was hardly comforting for Annabeth to hear. The knowledge that something had the doll only made their situation all the more hopeless—especially when she learned the identity of the doll's captors. 

“Our dad gave us this celestial bronze chest a couple years ago, as a gift,” Connor said. “It’s magic, so only we can open it.”

Annabeth squinted at them. “That’s a pretty fancy gift. I didn’t know Hermes did that sort of thing for his kids.”

Annabeth doesn't have the kindest opinion of the God of Messengers. She's convinced that if it weren't for Hermes's negligence, Luke Castellan wouldn't have died. He wouldn't have joined Kronos, he wouldn't have betrayed the camp, and he wouldn't have even thought about attacking Olympus. It was Hermes's refusal to care that drove Luke to that extreme. So she never really considered the possibility that Hermes might care about some of his children. Though why he chose the Stolls, of all children, to bless, Annabeth can't begin to fathom—

Travis shrugs. “What? Luke might’ve gone batshit, but that doesn’t mean that all of Hermes’s kids hate their dad. He can be pretty cool.” 

“Anyway, the chest is where we store our loot. We hide it in the forest, buried, to… uh…” Connor eyed Annabeth like he expected her to smack him, “keep the contents safe.”

Oh, yes. To keep the contents safe from the people they actually belong to, Annabeth was sure.  

“So that’s where you put the doll?” she assumed.

“Yeah. We didn’t plan to keep it there long, we just wanted to stop Percy from taking it back—”

“I don’t care how long you planned on keeping it,” Annabeth interrupted. “I just want to know what happened to it.”

“It’s the stupid ants!” Connor yelled. “They saw the bronze chest, got attracted to how shiny it was, and dragged it off. It’s probably in their hive right now.”

Travis groaned and dropped his head in his hands. “All those drachmas… gone… ten thousand dollars in cash...”

“And don’t forget our collection of cell phones from the Titan War—”

As the Stolls continued to bemoan their lost spoils, Annabeth's stomach churned with anxiety.  

The Myrmekes. The giant, monstrous, nearly indestructible ants which inhabit an enormous hive in the camp forest… now had her boyfriend’s Home Economics assignment. The assignment that he needed to graduate. 

Annabeth encountered them before, with Percy. So she knows how dangerous they are. Last time, a huge bronze dragon (eventually named Festus) had barely managed to keep the primal creatures at bay. This time, however, she would have no such backup. 

But. But. If the doll is in that chest, and the chest is truly magicked to keep anyone but the Stolls from opening it…

The doll is still intact. The doll is still intact, and there’s still hope for Percy. 

If, by some miracle, Annabeth manages to sneak into a hive of bloodthirsty, acid-spitting ants and steal it back from them. The heist sounds impossible even in Annabeth's imagination. There's no way that she'll be able to pull it off. Not by herself, anyway. And not even with Clarisse and Malcolm by her side.

“If we’re going to get the doll back,” she says, “we’re going to need some professional thieves.”

Malcolm hums, smirking. He must understand her meaning. 

“I think you’re right," he says. "We can’t drag a whole chest of stolen contraband out of the hive. We’re going to need someone to open it for us.”

Three pairs of eyes glance through the door of the Ares Cabin. Inside, the Stolls still sit against the wall. Their gazes have been following Annabeth's every shift and fidget, watching like they still expect her to whip out a knife and toss it at their foreheads. They don't seem too enthused to see Annabeth staring back all of a sudden. 

Clarisse scowls. “I think it’s the least they could do.”

“Oh yeah,” Annabeth agrees. “So? What do you guys say? Are we gonna steal this baby from the Myrmekes?”

Malcolm’s gray eyes gleam in the same way that Annabeth’s often do. Scheming. Determined. “Sounds like a plan to me.”

Chapter Text

It’s almost eerie, Annabeth thinks — how utterly synchronous Travis and Connor are, even though they’re not actually twins. She watches as the two brothers shuffle their feet and hunch their shoulders, perfectly assuming the same exact posture without so much as looking at each other.

But then again… Annabeth supposes that the body language of shame and regret is fairly universal. If that’s what they’re actually feeling—if they’re not just pretending, for her sake, she means. 

“Look, Percy,” Travis says, voice low and pleading, “we wanted to say…” 

“That is,” Connor continues, interrupting his brother, “we wanted to tell you—”

And then, in yet another synchronous motion, the two brothers throw a somewhat furtive glance at the table where Annabeth and her siblings sit eating breakfast. The Stolls’ look upon her with petulance, obviously unhappy with the task set before them. “ Do we have to?” their expressions seem to ask. 

Glaring furiously, Annabeth drags her butter knife in a threatening line across her own neck. Her message is clear:apologize, or you’re both dead meat. 

And then, after a shared intake of breath and a coinciding bracing of their shoulders, the Stoll brothers finally say the words that Annabeth has demanded to hear. 

“We’re sorry, Percy!” they blurt, in unison. 

Percy doesn’t immediately acknowledge the apology. Instead, he allows the moments to pass in silence, one after the other. Annabeth can measure the time by the circles that Percy rubs across his eyes. 

The Stolls glance yet again at Annabeth, wordlessly demanding, What now?  

This time, she can’t provide an answer. Even she doesn’t know what to expect of Percy at the moment. The graduation issue has, after all, upset him in ways Annabeth has never seen before. And if it’s hard to predict a tempestuous ocean, it’s probably even harder to predict an upset Percy Jackson. 

She can hypothesize, perhaps. Speculate. Enumerate behaviors she has come to expect from him given past circumstances, past apologies. Anger. Forgiveness. Humor. They’re all possible—perhaps even probable—reactions from him. 

But truthfully? She just doesn’t know. 

And Annabeth hates not knowing. 

Ultimately, when Percy finally does react, the answer is revealed to be: none of the above . There’s nothing. No anger. No forgiveness. Not even a shred of humor. Percy’s shoulders just sag toward the floor, and Annabeth feels her heart sink with him. 

Resignation. Somehow, out of every possible reaction, that is the one he chose. After everything, Percy Jackson is simply... resigned. 

“Thanks, I guess,” he mutters to the Stolls, the words halfway smothered by a terse exhale. 

Travis and Connor, meanwhile, exchange confused glances, probably unsure that they heard him correctly. It’s likely not every day that someone expresses gratitude for their monumental screw-ups. 

“Thanks ?” they repeat in bewilderment. “Why are you thanking us?”

Percy’s voice is as flat as a heart monitor on a corpse. “What were you expecting me to do?”

Connor scratches at his own chin, intrigued by the question. “Dunno,” he says. “Maybe tell us that it’s okay?” 

“Or say that you forgive us,” Travis adds with a shrug so flippant that Annabeth resists the urge to throw her fork at him and make it stick.

More silence. Something in Percy’s face twitches erratically. 

“Yeah, well,” Percy says. “I don’t forgive you.”

Another strained pause. And then—

“Oh,” the Stolls squeak, and their body language quickly transitions from regret to fight or flight.

“And it’s not okay,” Percy continues. “So I appreciate the apology and all, but…” Another exhale. “What you did really sucked. And I’m not going to lie by saying that everything’s fine. Cause it’s not.” 

With that, Percy pushes his largely uneaten breakfast away from himself, gathers a sickeningly large Calculus textbook into his arms, and ambles out of the dining pavilion. Annabeth tries to shoot him an encouraging smile as he leaves, but he either doesn’t see it or is too miserable to acknowledge it. 

Then he’s gone… and Annabeth’s hesitant smile melts into a knife-sharp frown.

As the thoroughly chastised Stolls shuffle back to the Hermes table, Malcolm imitates a sound effect from one of those old cartoons — like an anvil taking a long fall from the sky and crashing into the ground. 

“That,” he says, “was absolutely brutal.”

“They’re lucky he didn’t do worse,” Annabeth mutters. 

Percy would have been justified in punching them, or letting a rogue wave wash them out to sea. But it’s his fatal flaw—caring about his friends too much. And the Stolls are just that. His friends. Sure, the prank war was fun while it lasted, but everyone knows that Percy would never truly hurt someone he cares about. He’d let himself get killed before he did. 

But that doesn’t mean someone shouldn’t make the Stolls pay a price for what they’ve done. 

“I can’t believe you made them apologize.”

“Are you kidding? The apology is the easiest part. What they’ve got coming…” Her expression darkens as she stabs at her pancakes. “It’s a lot worse.” 

Really, Annabeth shouldn’t be worried about her plan to rescue the baby doll. She survived Tartarus, for Zeus’s sake. The Myrmekes aren’t even in the same class of dangerous.  

And yet, the situation feels uniquely daunting. At least in Tartarus she could count on Percy to support her against a horde of monsters. This time, it’ll just be her, the Stolls, Malcolm, and Clarisse against an entire army of gargantuan ants. And that’s still more support than she should even hope for.

But it’s still not the same as Percy watching her back. 

Maybe she should tell him. Maybe it really would be better to have his help—

No. She’s going to do this for him. It’s the least she can do for the boy who followed her into Tartarus—the boy she’s determined to spend her future with. 

“Speaking of what’s coming...” Malcolm lowers his voice to a murmur. “A few other campers have expressed interest in helping us.”

Annabeth squints at him. “I didn’t realize we were advertising our little plan.”

“We haven’t been. Some people just figured you were planning something.”

“How?”

Malcolms eyes flash tauntingly. “You’re Annabeth Chase. You’ve always got a plan when disaster strikes.” 

Annabeth hums, not quite convinced. 

“Plus,” Malcolm elaborates, “wise as you are, you’re a bit predictable. And you’re especially predictable when it comes to Percy Jackson.”

Annabeth’s cheeks burn. “Right, well, if they want to contribute, tell them to meet us in the amphitheatre at noon. I suppose we’ll need all the help we can get.”

“Also,” Malcolm continues, “how exactly do you plan to keep Percy from finding out? All he’d have to do is walk into the amphitheatre at the right time, and boom, the secret’s out!” 

“Don’t worry,” Annabeth assures him. “I’ve got that covered.”

“How?”

“I told Percy the truth.”

“What? About the plan?”

“No. About his grades.” Annabeth sighs. “I did a little math. Turns out, Percy can still graduate—but only if he gets perfect 100s on every assignment for the rest of the year.” 

Malcolm shakes his head. “But that’s literally impossible. Some teachers just don’t give perfect scores.” 

“Deep down, he knows that. But—”

“—He also thinks it’s his only hope?” Malcolm finishes for her. 

Annabeth nods solemnly. 

“He plans to study from now until the end of break. Chances are, he’ll stay in his cabin until dinner tonight and go back to study right after.”

“But what if he goes to you for homework help?”

She waves a dismissive hand. “I told him I woke up with a migraine. He said he wouldn’t bother me until I felt better.”

“That’s pretty considerate of him.”

“Fatal flaw,” Annabeth reminds Malcolm miserably, unable to think about anything but the fact that Percy really, truly, absolutely doesn’t deserve to be in a position like this. You’d think the most loyal guy in the world would deserve a little loyalty in return. 

But instead, he got the Stolls and a whole lot of extra homework.

“This,” Annabeth says disbelievingly, “is a few other campers?”

She expected perhaps one or two other demigods to get involved. The crew of the Argo II isn’t here, after all. Grover is off being a Lord of the Wild. Thalia is Zeus-knows-where with the Hunters of Artemis. So, at the most, she expected help from maybe Nico, or Will, or Butch, or a few of the Aphrodite campers who, like their mom, are weirdly obsessed with Annabeth's relationship with Percy. 

Instead, Annabeth finds herself standing before the entire winter population of Camp Half-Blood. Hundreds of expectant eyes and armor-clad bodies, all of whom chose, of their own free will, to contribute to Annabeth’s ridiculous plan to rescue a children’s toy from a hive of vicious insect-monsters. 

“When I was asked about the plan, it was only a few,” Malcolm says defensively. “But I guess it’s hard to keep a good plan under wraps.”

Annabeth shakes her head like she can’t quite process what she’s seeing. “This is everyone. This is literally everyone at camp for the holidays. If Percy finds out—”

“As we all know, Percy Jackson is the most oblivious person on the planet. He won’t notice anything that’s not explicitly explained to him.”

The words come from Nico, who evidently overheard Annabeth’s concerns. 

“Trust me,” Nico adds. “No one here plans to tell him anything. And if no one tells him, he’ll never know.”

There are some chuckles from the crowd of campers, but for the most part, people just nod in agreement. 

“This plan—it’s dangerous,” Annabeth says. “I can’t ask all of you to risk your lives for—”

“Actually, you can,” a different camper—a child of Nemesis—interrupts. “Fair is fair. You and Percy always get the worst, most dangerous missions and never get anything in return.” 

“Except for a lot of mental and physical scarring,” Clarisse interjects.

“Well, yeah, except for that,” the Nemesis camper agrees. “But really, we all owe you. You and Percy both.” 

A mushroom cloud of gratitude fills Annabeth’s chest as she looks out of these familiar faces, these campers who have fought by her side time and time again. Campers who are still ready and willing to fight with her— for her —one last time. 

“Hey, uh, as touching as this is,” Travis calls out, absolutely ruining the moment, “is anyone else a little miffed that we’re all going to be eaten by giant ants?”

Annabeth isn’t at all worried about the possibility of dying in the terrifying, snapping jaws of the Myrmekes. But just in case—she makes a point of seeing Percy right before she puts her plan into action. 

She finds him cross-legged on the floor of the Poseidon cabin, surrounded by what appears to be the aftermath of a homework hurricane. Nearly everywhere she looks there are scattered books or crumpled pieces of paper or snapped pencils. 

Percy appears no less chaotic. His hair sticks up in all directions like he has been pulling at it, and his eyes are wild as they snap up to meet hers. She hasn’t seen him look this disheveled since Tartarus. 

“Annabeth!” he exclaims, but it’s not quite a greeting. He calls her name like it’s the answer to a flashcard—and he’s anxious to move to the next one in the pile. 

“Hey,” she says, stepping further into the cabin. She approaches him, carefully navigating between the dozens of books strewn around her feet. Papers blow across the floor as the door slides shut behind her. “How are you?” 

Percy focuses so intently on the textbook in front of him that his eyes cross. “My brain… is melting...”

Once she’s within a suitable distance, Annabeth outstretches her hand, and he takes it immediately. His grip is used to steady herself as she plops down beside him on the floor. It’s one of the only clutter-free spots remaining in the room. 

She nestles close to him, comfortably tucking her chin over his shoulder. Her eyes skim the textbook that’s been giving him so much trouble. Calculus, evidently. 

“And you?” Percy asks, nudging her slightly. 

“What about me?”

“Your migraine. Is it any better?”

“Oh. Right.” Annabeth blinks, trying to salvage her own lie. “It’s… uh… pretty awful still, actually. I’m hoping that sleep will make it go away.”

“That’s probably a good idea,” Percy says, nodding. He cranes his neck so that she can see his crooked smile. “Mind if I borrow your big brain while you’re asleep?”

Annabeth snorts and pats down some of the more bedraggled strands of his hair. “No need. Your brain’s smart enough on its own.”

 He chuckles. “If that’s what you think… your headache must be worse than I thought. Have you tried taking Advil or something?”

“Who needs Advil when there’s nectar and ambrosia?”

“Well, did you take nectar or ambrosia?”

“C’mon. It’s silly to take nectar or ambrosia for something as minor as a headache.”

Percy shoots her an exasperated look. “You’re impossible.” 

She kisses him on the cheek. “Is that something you’re just noticing now?” 

“Well, if you want to sleep, feel free to crash on my bed. I’ll be down here—I promise I’ll be quiet.”

“No, it’s okay. I should be fine in my cabin.”

For some reason, his eyebrows knit together in confusion. “Are you… sure?”

“Yeah, positive”

“But...” He scratches his head. “Well, I’d think that it’d be sort of... I don’t know... loud in there tonight? There could be parties—” 

Annabeth waves off his concerns. “I’ll just tell everyone to keep it down.”

For a moment, Percy doesn’t respond. He just squints at her with an unreadable expression. 

“Right,” he says, at last. “Well, if you’re sure.” 

With that, he returns to his textbook. Or at least tries to return to his textbook. Annabeth notices that Percy’s eyes aren’t actually moving across the page—evidence that he’s having trouble focusing, perhaps?

To avoid distracting him further, Annabeth disentangles herself from Percy and rises to her feet. She does, after all, have some vicious ants to steal from, so she better start making the preparations. 

Annabeth walks over to the door and pulls it open.

“I love you, Percy,” she tells him, just in case she won’t get another chance. Each word seems to carry a piece of her with it. 

He looks up at her, and she is surprised to see that he still looks confused. Annabeth considers asking him why—about what’s bothering him—but his reply stops her. 

“Love you too, Annabeth.”

His expression may be uncertain, but his words are anything but.

Chapter Text

Annabeth’s plan isn’t to defeat the ants. It’s to distract them. 

A head-on assault against them would be suicide. They’re monsters, first of all—huge, vicious, acid-spitting, nightmare-fuel monsters. And more than that, their numbers probably drastically exceed the camp’s. 

Statistically, that’s just how ants are. Scientists have estimated that there are more than a million ants for every human on Earth. Myrmekes are a bit rarer than regular ants, of course, but demigods are also a bit rarer than regular humans. So she figures that the ratio still somewhat applies. 

The bottom line: don’t expect Annabeth to wipe out the ants. Because it’s probably impossible. 

But then again, the likelihood of retrieving the baby doll from the ants’ lair is probably similarly slim. And still, she intends to try.

The location of the Myrmeke’s lair is well-known throughout the camp— mostly because everyone has been warned to avoid it so many times. And for good reason. The Myrmekes mostly collect shiny objects, like metal and gems and glass, but they’ve been known to drag unsuspecting demigods into their lair to devour.

Annabeth and the rest of the campers have crowded around their infamous anthill, crouching quietly at its perimeter. To someone unfamiliar with the area, this spot would appear to be an innocent clearing in the middle of the woods. That mound over there, capped with a hole? Just a hill. Definitely not of the anthill variety. 

Or so Annabeth wishes. 

A large group followed Annabeth here, but she can no longer see everyone. Much of the campers’ armor has been obscured, black paint coated over celestial bronze. They easily blend into the shadows of the trees and the dark blanket of the night; a discreet group of warriors preparing for an ambush.

Though stealth isn’t everyone’s goal. A few sets of armor and weapons gleam in the moonlight. Pegasi circle overhead. And the chariots...

Annabeth turns to the Stolls, who sit quivering beside her. 

“I’m about to give the order,” she whispers, voice hard and determined. “Can I count on you two to not be stupid?” 

Travis's voice is an indignant hiss. “What you call stupid, we call staying alive!”

“This is crazy,” Connor complains under his breath. “It’s just a doll—”

“And it wasn’t yours to take—or lose— in the first place,” is Annabeth's stern reply. “So you’re going to help me get it back, or I’ll paint you gold and sic the ants on you myself.” 

At that, the Stolls go silent. Annabeth takes that as confirmation that they’re ready. She glances at Malcolm, Clarisse, and Nico beside her, and they nod to express their agreement. 

She takes a deep breath. This is it, she supposes. It’s finally time to rob these ants, or die trying. 

Annabeth raises her dragonbone sword into the air, catching moonlight on its irregular surface. 

Bodies begin to shift between the trees. Evidently, her signal has been seen. 

And that’s when the noise begins. 

Demigods clad in gleaming bronze armor pour out of the woods, their glimmering weapons hefted above them. Together, they begin to bang those weapons against their metal shields, filling the woods with a harsh clanging that seems to reverberate inside Annabeth’s skull. 

The sound is horrible, yes. But that’s the point. They want to disturb the ants—lure them out of their nest. And noise like this is pretty hard to ignore. 

And ignore them, the ants definitely do not. The ground beneath their feet begins to rumble with stampeding feet. There are other sounds too. Chittering of some sort. Hissing. Skittering.

And then, at the top of the anthill, a single pair of agitated antenna poke out of the anthill. It's a deceptively calm sight, at first. Those antenna jerk up and down in a mesmerizing, repetitive motion, almost like a cobra rising from a basket. 

But then the rest of the ant emerges from the hole. Salivating, snapping jaws. Beady eyes. Armored hide. Hairy, skittering legs. All of it, belonging to an insect the size of a refrigerator. All of it, probably designed to kill of demigods stupid enough to lurk close to its lair. 

She can’t exactly blame them either. If someone stood outside her house banging a sword against a shield, she’d also be pretty pissed. 

(Though she wouldn’t spit acid at them. Well, at least not in the literal sense.)

The first Myrmeke is just that—the first. One of many to follow. A line of ants pour out of the anthill after it, each as large and terrifying as the last. 

And then, after a seemingly endless stream of ants, the ground stops quivering and the clearing seems to freeze in place. Facing each other now are two motionless armies. On one side, the demigods in their armor. On the other side, hundreds upon hundreds of vicious ants, drool oozing from their mandibles as they stare hungrily at the bronze shields and the chariots. 

Annabeth knows that at least a few ants must have stayed inside the anthill, protecting it. But this visible gathering of the Myremekes’ numbers is still overwhelmingly large. Fear for her fellow campers—and for herself—seizes Annabeth by the spine. 

But several seconds, no one and nothing moves. The armies merely regard each other, staring and considering. 

And then the ants strike. 

It’s just one ant, at first. One ant surging forward to attack. But ants are hive-minded creatures, after all, and the rest of the ants seem to follow on command. Their bodies cascade down the hill like a cresting tsunami. 

Annabeth holds her breath, praying that her plan works. The plan. The plan that unfolds as the shield-carrying demigods hop into chariots and start rolling away. But there's no guarantee of success—not yet, anyway. What if the ants choose to not give chase? What if they instead notice the demigods dressed in black and attack?

But no—the ants have sped right past the black-clad demigods flanking the hill. They pursue that retreating bronze and gold armor, just as planned, scuttling past Annabeth like the world’s most nightmarish stampede.

It takes mere moments for the clearing to empty of bronze-clad demigods and ants. Annabeth can only hope that the chariots are fast enough to outrun the ants for the next fifteen minutes. In that time, the campers in bronze are supposed to strip off their armor, piece by piece, until the ants have nothing left to chase. 

Annabeth is no ant expert, but she knows that ants can’t see very clearly—especially in the dark. Without the gleam of the bronze armor, she suspects the ants won't be able to keep chasing the chariots. And if any persistent ants somehow continue the pursuit, Annabeth has planned for the pegasi to swoop down and rescue any endangered campers.

It’s by no means a foolproof plan. But given its performance so far, it should allow Annabeth and a few others enough time to infiltrate the hive. 

“Come on!” Annabeth hisses, and she raises the dragonbone sword once more. Several campers from the woods position themselves outside the entrance to anthill. Others form a perimeter to block the ants from a premature return to the hive. 

Annabeth, Nico, Clarisse, Malcolm, and the Stolls, on the other hand, have a job that’s a bit more involved. Namely, actually descending into the anthill.

“You keep track of Connor, I’ll handle Travis,” Annabeth tells Clarisse as she yanks Travis to his feet. She secures her hand around his wrist, and Clarisse does the same to Connor. 

And then they’re all running toward that anthill. 

Annabeth has done a lot of running in her life. Running away from monsters, running toward monsters, playing keep-away with magical objects, and more. She’s fairly accustomed to running with danger bearing down upon her. 

But this time, she’d be lying if she said she didn’t feel strangely exposed. She keeps searching for Percy in her periphery. In nearly all the times she has confronted danger since she was twelve, Percy was there. Percy was watching her back. 

But he’s not here. And without him, it feels like she’s missing a crucial piece of armor. 

As she approaches the hill, she hands off some ropes to nearby campers to be secured to trees at the edge of the clearing. The ropes are long, and as soon as they’re tied and taut, Annabeth tosses the other ends into the hole at the top of the anthill. 

She inhales, exhales, looks around. There are still no ants in sight. Just the vague silhouettes of black-clothed campers and the stony faces of the demigods that she has chosen for her team. 

Oh, and there’s Travis and Connor, both of whom seem thoroughly frightened and inconvenienced by the current situation. But she elects to ignore them.

“We ready?” Annabeth asks Clarisse, Malcolm, and Nico. The words are strained—her chest is still heaving from the sprint to their current position. Out of all of them, she’s closest to the hole, her toes nearly kissing the empty air. 

They nod. Annabeth’s hands tighten around the rope. 

And then, bit by bit, she lowers herself into the darkness.

Annabeth hasn’t been underground in a long time. 

Since Tartarus, she hasn’t considered what it would be like to… well… toss herself into a gaping hole and attempt to traverse an underground hellscape again. She’s not the same girl who semi-confidently navigated the Labyrinth with her friends all those years ago. She wishes she were. But she’s just not. 

She realizes now that she should have considered this—this shadow of Tartarus that seems to hang over her—before she allowed herself to reach the bottom of the hole to the Myrmekes’ lair. 

But here she is, frozen within a wall of darkness, wading through a waking nightmare. She’s utterly overwhelmed by it—the memories of the monsters, the poisonous air, the unending hopelessness. How did she ever escape that torment? Did she ever escape, or has she just thrown herself back into the maw of that primordial monster? 

It smells terrible down here, like rotting flesh, and her lungs feel like they’re burning with every breath. She can’t see, but she can hear the chittering of monstrous things somewhere in the distance. And when she searches the air for something to hold onto, there’s nothing—no one. 

Her heart feels like it’s trying to bore a hole through her chest, it’s beating so fast, and she can’t seem to get enough air, she can’t even see, and she’s all alone down here—

The blinding beam of a flashlight tears a gasp from Annabeth’s throat. In her panic, she finds herself toppling into the dirt, landing hard on her tailbone. 

“Annabeth!” several voices exclaim at once. 

She sees four confused faces standing over her… and one face that seems not-at-all confused. Nico’s.

His brows are knitted together, but his expression is understanding as he kneels beside her. 

“Are you alright?” he asks. 

She is. She has to be. She just feels a bit crazy, is all. Desperately, Annabeth attempts to bite it all down. She imagines herself shoving her memories into a metal box, dropping it into the ocean, and watching it sink into the empty depths. It helps, she thinks. Helps enough for her to make sense of her situation and start breathing normally again. 

“I’m… I’m okay,” she assures him. “I just… I forgot where I was, for a second.”

It’s a stupid sounding excuse, she knows, and it only seems to worsen the confusion among them. Only Nico nods. His expression darkens a bit, as if she confirmed his worst fear, but he isn’t at all surprised.

And why would he be surprised? Nico suffered through Tartarus just as Annabeth did—he’s probably the only other person besides Percy who could hope to understand what Annabeth is feeling right now. In fact, she suspects the only reason he isn’t also freaking out is that the underground is his father’s domain. He’s probably spent a lot more time reconquering his fear of spaces like these. Annabeth will just need to learn to do the same.

Nico extends a hand and pulls Annabeth to her feet. She steadies herself, rubbing at her sore backside. 

“Can you not do that again?” hisses Connor. “We’re already gonna get killed down here without you freaking out on us!” 

Annabeth’s glare is venomous in the near-darkness. “Like you’re one to talk.”

Clarisse throws her flashlight beam around the cavern. “Where to now? Anyone have a map of this place?”

“Last time we were here, we discovered that the ants fill their nurseries with treasure,” Annabeth recalls. “That’s probably where the Stolls’ magic chest will be. In one of the nurseries.”

“So where are the nurseries?” 

Annabeth shrugs. “All over. We’ll have to check as many as we can and hope we see it.” She turns to Travis. “How heavy was this chest of yours?”

“Well,” Travis says, rubbing his chin. “It contains everything we’ve stolen since our first year at camp. And it magically expands to hold as much as we need it too.”

“Alright, so… roughly the weight of a tractor-trailer,” Annabeth guesses only half-jokingly. She’s well-aware of the Stolls’ seemingly endless history of thefts. If they’ve accumulated that much loot over time… chances are, that chest is heavier than any person can lift. 

Of course, ants are extremely strong, so a group of them would have very little problem carrying a chest into their colony, no matter how heavy. But there might still be some physical evidence, especially if they took it within the last two weeks or so...

Annabeth pulls out her own flashlight and shines it on the floor. The legs of the ants have beaten deep grooves into the ground, but beneath it all… thick lines in the dirt. As if something extremely heavy was dragged through the soil. 

“Let’s hope that the ants haven’t stolen any other heavy, magic chests,” Annabeth mutters, gesturing for the group to follow her lead—as well as the lines in the ground. “This way. Stay quiet, and be on the lookout.”

Together, they dash through the corridors. The journey is mostly uneventful, with very few encounters with the remaining ants in the colony. Nico's ability to conceal them in darkness keeps them unseen—and the ants unsuspecting. 

Finally, Annabeth spots a turn in the chest’s tracks up ahead—a turn into a side room, no less. This must be their destination. 

She slows down, gesturing for her companions to do the same, and positions herself against the wall.

Quickly and discreetly, Annabeth pokes her head the corner, shines her flashlight into the room—

—and resists the urge to scream.

It’s a nursery, all right. A nursery full of treasure and ant larvae, just like Annabeth expected. But that’s hardly the main attraction.

At the center of a mountain of gold, celestial bronze, and other treasures sits the largest ant Annabeth has ever seen. At the size of a yacht, it towers over everything else in the room, its shell gleaming ebony in the faint light of Annabeth’s flashlight. From its mouth protrude mandibles as long as Annabeth is tall. One bite from those could probably snap her into pieces. 

This can only be the Queen Myrmeke, in all her regal size and monstrosity. 

Thankfully, the ant doesn’t seem to respond to Annabeth’s flashlight beam. It instead seems to be curled around itself—a position as close to lying down as Annabeth can imagine for an ant. Sleeping, perhaps? 

Annabeth hopes that’s the case as she continues scouring the room with her flashlight. The beam glints off of swords and coins and precious gems, but she doesn’t see—

There! Only a few feet below the queen is the chest, poised somewhat precariously on a battered shield and the muffler of an old car. It’s celestial bronze, just as the Stolls described, and about the length of a person. 

Or one of the Queen’s enormous mandibles.  

Annabeth turns back to her friends and whispers. “I see the chest. But the Queen Myrmeke… I think she’s also in there. And she’s huge.”

“So what do we do?” Clarisse whispers back. 

“I think the Queen’s sleeping. But I don’t know how long that’ll last, so we’d better move fast.”

Travis glances into the room, takes one look at the enormous queen, and releases an uneasy exhale. “Welp, good luck, Annabeth. It was nice knowing you.”

She punches him in the arm. “You’re coming with me, idiot. I’ll need you there to open the chest.”

Travis’s eyes grow to the size of two shields. “What?”

“C’mon, we both know there’s no way we’d be able to drag the whole chest out of there. We need to open it up, grab the baby, and get out of here.”

Travis looks outraged. “And what about the rest of our loot?”

Annabeth simply glares at him. She literally could not care less about all the stolen contraband in that stupid chest. If the chest hadn’t existed in the first place, they wouldn’t be in this mess. 

“The ants can have it. I don’t care.”

“Well, why me?” Travis further demands. “Why not Connor?”

“Hey!” Connor shoves his brother toward the nursery. “You go, I don’t wanna go!”

“You’re both going,” Annabeth says. “Fair’s fair. Consider it the last piece of your apology.”

“But—” they both protest.

Even in a whisper, Annabeth’s voice is heavy with finality. “You both go, or we leave you down here. End of discussion.”

“Uh, Annabeth?” Malcolm says. “Are you sure you want only those two watching your backs? I mean… are you sure don’t want anyone else to go with you?”

“Someone who won’t leave you for dead?” Clarisse adds. 

Annabeth inhales deeply, considering their words.

If she’s being totally honest, she wishes—desperately wishes—that Percy was here to watch her back. That’s what she’s been wishing for all night, in fact. If the Queen wakes and attacks, the Stolls will probably ditch her in favor of the nearest escape route. But Percy… Percy would stand his ground and fight by her side. He’d be crazy to do so, but he’d do it. 

But then she imagines where he is right now. Curled in bed asleep, probably having a nightmare about exams or Tartarus or something just as stressful. She imagines how relieved he’ll be if she gives him that baby doll tomorrow morning—how happy he’ll be when he graduates, his mom snapping endless photos of him in his cap and gown. She thinks of taking him to graduation parties and being a normal, college-aged couple in New Rome—

“No,” Annabeth tells Malcolm. “The fewer people in that room, the better. You two stand guard by the door—make sure that no other ants enter the room.”

Malcolm, Clarisse, and Nico all nod solemnly. With nothing else to say, Annabeth returns her attention to the nursery. She scrutinizes the sleeping queen, gulps heavily, and gestures for the Stolls to follow her into the room.

Annabeth hasn’t exactly been happy with the Stolls lately, but she will give them this—they are stealthy. She probably makes more noise than they do as she tries to climb that mountain of jewels, and she suspects that they’re pocketing a lot of the treasure without her notice. 

Well. Sons of Hermes have their talents, she supposes. 

Still, whenever a coin jangles or a piece of metal creaks, Annabeth glances fearfully at the queen. She watches for any sign of her waking— the barest twitch of an antenna, or an uneven breath—but so far she hasn’t stirred. Annabeth hopes desperately that she’s the world’s heaviest sleeper in addition to being the world's heaviest ant. 

It takes several minutes of climbing before they reach the chest. They kneel before it, carefully lowering themselves onto the mounds of weapons and gold.

“So how does this thing work?” Annabeth whispers. “Is there are a key or…?”

Connor shakes his head. “We just have to—”

He lays a hand on the surface of the chest and it begins to radiate a golden light—brighter than Celestial Bronze’s typical glow. A few moments pass and then, with a soft click, the top of the chest rolls open.

Annabeth jaw drops at the contents. She figured the Stolls stole a lot over the years, but she never imagined the quantity or variety of the loot. Cell phones, petty cash, diamonds, Rolexes, platinum credit cards, luxury car keys… the list goes on and on. It’s like another mini Myrmeke nursery in a box.

And then, at the center of the chest sits the most out-of-place object of all—an extremely creepy-looking baby doll with gaping blue eyes, its awkwardly-proportioned body clad in a poorly-sewn onesie. It certainly doesn’t look as valuable as the Rolexes and the Benjamin Franklins shoved into this chest, and yet… it’s the only thing she has any urge to take. 

Who knew this stupid, ugly children’s toy could cause so much trouble? 

“There’s your baby doll,” Travis says before shooting a nervous look at the still-sleeping Myrmeke Queen. “Now can we get out of here?”

Annabeth won’t argue—she doesn't want to press her luck any further with the queen. She outstretches her arm into the chest, her hand wrapping around the doll’s torso.

“Hold on, don’t touch it yet!” Connor gasps. “The doll, it’s motion-activated—”

But it’s too late. Annabeth has already lifted the doll from the chest and slung it under her arm. 

And that’s when the doll starts crying. 

It’s hyper-realistic, that crying. As loud as a real baby if not louder. How could Annabeth not foresee this—that a baby doll for Home Economics would need to be carried like a real baby, or else they’d face the wrath of motion-activated, pre-recorded, baby tantrums? 

The noise is unbearable. And unfortunately, Annabeth isn’t the only one to think so.

With a horrible chittering, hissing, and cracking of insect joints, the Queen rises to her feet. She rises and rises, a hulking mass of armored statue come to life.

The Queen follows the sound that woke her, her compound eyes immediately fixating on the screeching doll held in Annabeth’s arms. Her mandibles snap furiously at the sight of it, and the sound that results from the motion is like a glacier cracking apart.

“Run!” Annabeth screams, grabbing the closest Stoll by the arm and hoping that the other is following close behind as she vaults off the side of the treasure pile. The baby doll is still clutched in the crook of her elbow, screaming its head off, but Annabeth doesn’t have the time to figure out how to disable it. 

“Let’s go, let’s go!” she yells, sprinting out of the room as fast as she can possibly manage. This time, the yells are meant for Clarisse, Nico, and Malcolm. She wants them to get a head start—to not wait for her. If she and the Stolls get killed for their shared mistakes, so be it. But she won’t let anyone else get hurt.

When Annabeth and the Stolls reach the exit, they see the silhouettes of their friends already racing to the entrance to the colony. 

Maybe it’s just the sound of the baby, Annabeth hopes. Maybe the Queen will just go back to sleep and they’ll leave this place according to plan—

And then, with an ear-splitting screech, the Queen barrels straight through the wall of the nursery, shattering through the mud and the bedrock like she’s cutting through a ribbon. Its inhuman eyes remain fixated on the crying baby doll as it begins to pursue them, heaving forward with the gait of a lumbering dinosaur.  

Annabeth curses. “She’s really mad about us interrupting her nap!” 

The Queen spits acid and narrowly misses, leaving a hissing pile of goop on the wall beside Annabeth. She doesn’t stop to gape at it. She doesn't even want to think about it. 

They run and run, the earth trembling under the Queen’s powerful legs. For a long time, there’s nothing but this—this long catacomb, this endless chase, and the baby doll’s ceaseless howl. But finally, up ahead, Annabeth sees the final exit.

Only a little further...

“Get ready to pull us up!” she screams at the top of her lungs, hoping the demigods on the surface can hear her. “We’ve got company! Monster-sized company!”

Clarisse, Malcolm and Nico all grab hold of a single rope. The Stolls are fast by virtue of their father’s abilities, so it’s not long before they’ve also caught up. Only Annabeth is trailing dangerously behind. 

And then, another terrible noise—the sound of people banging on their shields, the same as before. But this time, Annabeth knows it carries a different meaning. She ordered for that signal to be given only if the other Myrmekes turned around and headed back to the anthill. As hive workers, they must have sensed their queen’s distress. 

But there’s no time to think about that now. Better to face the worker Myrmekes than their enormous, furious Queen. 

The Queen is snapping at Annabeth’s heels when she finally secures a hand around that rope. She closes her eyes—she can feel the Queen preparing to spit acid at her, and she can’t believe that she’s dying here, now, before she even graduates high school, and over a stupid baby doll no less—

But then she’s shooting upward on the rope, and Annabeth can barely hold on, it moves so fast. The acid narrowly misses her, passing so close that its mere proximity stings Annabeth’s skin.

She hits the ground. Or maybe the ground hits her. She can’t tell—she just knows that she’s sprawled in the grass with hands rubbed raw and knees coated in torn-up grass.

She wishes she could catch her breath. Collect her composure. But there’s no time—there never is. There’s rumbling below—the Queen trying to climb her way out— so she grabs Nico by the shoulders. His powers over the underground may be the only thing that can save them. 

“Nico!” she calls. Her voice is so shrill from all the yelling. “You have to collapse the tunnels!”

Nico doesn’t argue or question her. He simply closes his eyes and concentrates. 

What results is a display of massive power. The ground beneath them rumbles excessively—more than it ever did for the Queen’s heavy steps—and there’s an unearthly shrieking amid the crumbling rock. Annabeth can’t see what’s happening beyond the hole to the anthill, but she sees rocks begin to fill the opening, balancing on one another like an invisible hand is stacking them there. 

Soon enough, there’s no hole at all—just a wall of normal stones, heaped upon each other like the treasure in the nurseries. 

Nico collapses from exhaustion, and Annabeth rushes unsteadily to his side. After using his powers that extensively, he probably needs nectar and ambrosia. A lot of it. But Annabeth doesn’t have any available at the moment. 

No. All Annabeth has this stupid baby doll, still crying its stupid, obnoxious cry, drowning out all other sounds. Even the Queen's roar. If she's still roaring, that is. It's likely that Nico killer her. Not that it really makes a difference. Annabethcan still hear the banging of the shields. The other ants… they’re coming her way, and Annabeth is downright exhausted. 

“We all need to get out of here,” one of the other campers—a sentry posted outside the anthill—says. “The Myrmekes sense their Queen is in trouble. They’ve turned around, and they’re—”

The trees at the edge of the clearing rustle so loudly that Annabeth jumps. She pulls out her dragonbone sword, knowing what is to come. Clarisse, Malcolm, the Stolls, and the rest of the demigods do the same with their weapons. Even Nico tries to stand and assume a defensive stance, but Annabeth doesn’t let him. She takes that role instead, standing over him protectively. 

The trees break apart like curtains pulling open at the start of a play. From the gaping wounds in the treeline pour Myrmekes, screeching and chattering angrily at the sight of their very-obviously decimated anthill. There are hundreds of the huge ants here now—hurtling toward Annabeth and the remaining demigods like an army of bulldozers. 

“Where are the pegasi?” Annabeth asks one of the other sentries, wondering if there’s any hope of a rescue.

“They’re on their way, but they had to take some campers who were part of the distraction to the infirmary—”

Annabeth curses and turns back to the ants. So… she narrowly escaped the Queen, only to be killed her angry workers. It feels a bit unfair after all the effort, all the planning—all her good intentions. She glares angrily at the stupid baby doll and curses the American education system and the Stolls with every fiber of her being. 

Suddenly, there’s more rumbling beneath Annabeth’s feet. Maybe the Queen is waking up and coming to get her. Maybe it’s just the storming footsteps of those ants. There’s no time for Annabeth to find out. She just wishes, again, for the thing she keeps wishing for, as a Myrmeke grows close enough for her to see the spit on its mandibles. She’s ready to fight this thing, and it’s ready to fight her—

But before her sword even makes contact, a wall of water blows Annabeth straight off her feet.

A few moments before, Annabeth was standing in a grassy clearing, completely dry save the sweat from all the sprinting. But now it feels like she’s been knocked off a surfboard by a rogue wave. 

How this much water ended up in an empty field, Annabeth doesn’t know for sure. But she does, at the very least, have a fairly probable hypothesis. The wave that knocked her off her feet—it’s surprisingly gentle. Too gentle. 

Annabeth is rising for air when she spots a shadow hovering over the surface of the water. 

“Are you out of your freaking mind?” asks a very familiar—and very annoyed—voice. 

Blackjack’s wings beat ripples through the water. On the pegasus’s back is Percy, staring down at Annabeth with the most furious glare she has ever seen. 

Well, the most furious glare he’s ever directed at her, at least. 

Annabeth coughs, spitting out as much of the foul-tasting water as she can. She outstretches a hand for him to grab. “Mind helping me out of the water?”

Evidently, that’s the wrong thing to ask. Annabeth can feel the water churning in response to Percy’s anger. 

“Not until you tell me what’s going on,” Percy says. He shakes his head disbelievingly. “I mean, did the entire camp simply forget to tell me about this midnight duel against the Myrmekes, or am I missing something?”

“As a matter of fact, you are missing something, Seaweed Brain.” She lifts the baby doll high above the water for him to see. 

Somehow, even after severe waterlogging, the baby continues to cry at the top of its artificial lungs. It doesn’t look half-bad either—a little soggy and dirty, perhaps, but otherwise okay. 

For a second, Percy simply sits there, staring at the baby. She watches somewhat fascinated as the anger in his face slowly morphs into an expression of utter disbelief, horror, and outrage.

“Annabeth,” he grits out, over-enunciating each syllable of her name. “Please,” he says. “Please, tell me that you didn’t—”

Annabeth shakes her head. “But I did.” She raises the baby even higher. “Now do you want it or not?”

For good measure, she tosses the doll in his direction. He catches it on reflex, and at his touch the doll immediately becomes dry—impossibly dry. Son-of-Poseidon-magic kind of dry. Annabeth wishes for the same treatment, but he doesn’t so much as lend her a hand. 

Instead, the water in the field begins to drain. It’s like someone unplugged a bathtub. The water recedes like something alive, crawling to some unknown spot behind the treeline. Within its depths, Annabeth can see the outlines of hundreds of twitching Myremekes being carried away, the victims of a massive flood. A flood that Percy single-handedly caused. 

Soon enough, Annabeth is lying in the still-damp grass, definitely soaked but not actually swimming in water. She looks around to see the other demigods in similar states—all sopping wet and distinctly disoriented, but otherwise unharmed. Many of them—including Nico, Clarisse, and Malcolm—are already stumbling to their feet. Though the Stolls choose to remain sprawled next to the anthill, sputtering complaints and curses. 

Her eyes scan the clearing for a quick headcount. Everyone seems to be accounted for. And of course, there’s someone extra—Percy. 

Blackjack lands, his hooves digging into the wet mud as Percy tries to dismount. When Percy’s feet hit solid ground, his knees buckle—evidence of the same sort of exhaustion Nico experienced only minutes before. He must have used too much of his power. 

Annabeth surges forward and just manages to keep him from toppling onto the ground.

“Jeez. Where did you even pull all that water from?” Annabeth asks, struggling to hold Percy upright with both hands. 

His voice shakes when he answers. “The creek,” he tells her. “It was the closest water source. But it’s freshwater. The Naiads are probably gonna murder me–”

She gapes at him. “You managed to pull that much water from the creek ?” 

Percy straightens, shaking off Annabeth’s grip. His eyes are practically glowing green as they bore into hers. “Enough, Annabeth. I don’t want to talk about the creek. I want to talk about whatever the hell just happened here.”

Annabeth hesitates, then shrugs. “It was just a rescue mission.”

“A rescue mission?” Percy repeats. He swings the baby doll forward and points at it accusingly. “A rescue mission… for this?”

The other demigods have started to gather around them. They can probably sense the argument brewing here, and as loyal as Annabeth’s fellow campers are, she knows that pretty much everyone wants to watch this relationship drama unravel. 

She sighs and rolls her eyes. “You know, you could thank me. I just saved your grades.”

His eyes are wild with incredulity. “You really think I care about my grades so much that I’d want you to risk your life for them?” he demands. “Or worse, risk our friends’ lives too?”

“I had a plan!”

“The Myrmekes almost killed us the last time we fought them! They almost killed you just now!”

“But they didn’t.”

“They would have if I hadn’t made it time. And I almost didn’t—because you decided to keep this from me!”

“We would’ve been fine,” Annabeth tells him calmly. “And how did you find out anyway? Did someone snitch?” She glances around to locate a culprit, but everyone avoids her gaze.

“Rest easy, no one told me anything,” Percy says, waving off her suspicions. “I, unlike you, just actually know what day it is.”

Annabeth blinks, confused. “What does that have to do with anything?

“Do you know the date, Annabeth?”

She wracks her brain. Frankly, Annabeth hasn’t been keeping track of time very well since she got here. She’s been too preoccupied with Percy’s prank war with the Stolls and rescuing the baby doll and worries about college and marriage and gods know what else—

“It’s New Year’s Eve,” Percy says. “Or at least, it was New Year’s Eve, up until a half-hour ago.”

Annabeth curses and mentally counts the days that have passed since she arrived at camp. She’s horrified to realize that he’s right—it should be New Year’s by now. How could she have forgotten? How could she have been that oblivious to that major flaw in her plan?”

Percy shakes his head at her. “A holiday famous for late-night partying, and the entire camp is empty and dead silent. I may be oblivious, but I’m not that oblivious. I thought everyone had been kidnapped or something.”

Frantically, Annabeth turns to Malcolm and shoots him a questioning glance. He should have warned her. Surely he knew—

“Don’t look at me!” he says. “You said that Percy would stay in his cabin doing homework all night, so I thought it wouldn’t matter—”

“Well, sorry to throw a wrench in your big plans, but it was New Year’s.” Percy crosses his arms. “Don't know if you remember, but there’s a certain tradition about kissing someone at the stroke of midnight. I was trying to be festive, but I guess Annabeth was hoping for a kiss from a Myrmeke instead—”

She glares at him. “I was trying to help you!”

“By keeping things from me? Do you know how awful I would’ve felt if you—if any of you—got hurt trying to fix my stupid GPA?” 

“Probably about as guilty as the rest of us felt when you bathed in the River Styx to fight off Kronos,” Annabeth counters. “Or when you were kidnapped so that we could forge an alliance with the Romans. Or when you jumped into Tartarus after me—”

“That’s not fair,” Percy says. “We went through Tartarus together. You’ve taken a knife for me. Friends have died fighting for me—”

Ever the debater, Annabeth is more than ready to continue this argument. She has a counterpoint, and a counterpoint to his likely counterpoint. Truly, she could go on all night—

But Clarisse doesn’t give them a chance. She steps between them, extending her arms as if to push them apart. “Hades, we get it. You’re both very selfless. So enough with the drama and get over yourselves!”

A moment of stunned silence passes. Silence from Annabeth, because she expected to continue the debate. Silence from the campers, because they expected more drama. And silence from Percy, who is stunned to see Clarisse here at all.

It takes him a second, but he finally composes himself. 

“This isn’t a joke, Clarisse,” he says. “People could’ve gotten hurt—”

“So what if there was danger involved?” Clarisse demands, poking Percy hard in the chest. “We’re half-bloods. It’s part of the job description. Always has been. Always will be.”

“But why would you—of all people—risk your neck for my Home Economics grade?” He looks around at the other campers. “Why would any of you?”

Clarisse is the first to answer. And when she does, she speaks for everyone.

“Because you’ve done enough for this camp, Jackson,” Clarisse reminds him. “It’s about time we return the favor.”

It’s strange to hear Clarisse admit such a thing so openly. These days, she usually at least tries to feign antagonism toward Percy, or some degree of annoyance or dislike. But right now Clarisse actually sounds like she respects him.  

Many campers nod in agreement; others offer noises of approval and support. But one thing is clear—everyone seems to share Clarisse’s opinion on the matter. 

“But it’s just a stupid grade,” Percy protests. “In the end, it doesn’t mean anything. It’s not worth dying over.”

“No, it probably isn’t,” Clarisse agrees, shrugging. “But if that stupid grade gets you that much closer to what you want in life, then you’d best believe we’d help you get it. That’s what a family does.”

Percy simply gapes at her. Annabeth gapes at her too. Clarisse’s offer to help retrieve the baby doll was one thing. Hearing Clarisse refer to Percy as ‘family’ is another thing entirely. Annabeth would never, ever expect those words to escape the deepest parts of Clarisse’s subconscious, let alone her mouth. And yet she just said them in front of dozens of campers.

“Besides,” Clarisse continues, “if Percy Jackson, Olympus’s greatest hero, can’t earn a ‘happily ever after,’ then what chance do the rest of us have?”

She grabs Percy’s shirt and yanks him toward Annabeth. “Now go hug your girlfriend, you big idiot. She worked hard to get that baby doll back for you.” 

Percy’s still a bit unsteady on his feet, so the force of Clarisse’s tug causes him to fall over—rather than embrace—Annabeth. She wraps her arms around him and just manages to keep them from both toppling into the mud. 

Percy sighs shakily, all choked up again—but this time, it’s for an entirely different reason. He wraps his arms around her in turn, her wet clothes immediately drying as she smiles into his shoulder. 

“I told you to trust me, didn’t I?” she reminds him. “Well, I hate to say ‘I told you so,’ but…”

“You love saying ‘I told you so,’” Percy points out. He tries to stifle a sniffle, but doesn’t quite manage it. 

“Are you crying?” Annabeth whispers in disbelief. 

“Shut up. Clarisse just called me family—I have every right to be emotional.”

“Oh, Clarisse gets all the credit, does she?”

“Oh no, this was definitely your crazy plan, Wise Girl. And I am both terrified and grateful that you pulled it off. So thank y—” 

An sound cuts him off. A thunderous breaking of stone from somewhere beneath their feet. 

Annabeth and Percy immediately break apart, gazes snapping toward the anthill—the source of the noise. 

The anthill bursts open, giving way to the queen’s enormous mandibles. It’s as if someone set off dynamite—dirt and rocks spray everywhere, creating a haze of particles in the air. But no haze can disguise the Queen’s struggle to free herself from the blocked entrance to the anthill. Her body shakes, and with it, so does the entire clearing. With another explosion of stone, she finally frees herself, her legs scrabbling to drag her immense body into the moonlight. 

Campers scream and seek their weapons. Annabeth and Percy instinctually assume defensive positions, ready to protect the campers, when they notice that two half-bloods are already far too close to the Queen.

The Stolls are still sitting in the grass by the anthill, dripping wet and frozen in fear. 

“Travis! Connor! Run!” Annabeth yells, screaming herself raw. 

The brothers follow her advice, but the movement draws the Queen’s attention. Snapping and hissing, she bounds toward them, eyes focused like lasers upon her prey.

“We need a distraction so that we can get the Stolls away from her. With bronze, maybe—” Annabeth says, half-muttering to herself as she struggles to formulate a plan. 

After hearing this, Percy doesn’t wait. He immediately jumps into action—or rather, jumps onto Blackjack. The pegasus whizzes into the air and when she looks behind for Percy, he’s already gone. As he speeds off, she can hear the baby doll continue to cry, agitated by the sudden motion. 

The Queen towers over the Stolls, practically vibrating with rage and prepared to strike. One move from her could crush them. 

“Hey, ugly!” Percy calls as he brings Blackjack to a spot above the Stolls, just outside of the Queen’s reach. Annabeth watches as he draws Riptide and tips it slightly, allowing the moonlight to glint enticingly off metal. ”Why eat demigod when you can have some tasty Celestial Bronze instead?” 

The Queen grants him her full attention, her eyes full of hunger and hatred. Evidently hoping that she’ll follow it, Percy tosses the sword to the side—it will, after all, return to him within a few moments. 

But the Queen doesn’t move so much as an inch away from the Stolls. Instead, she sends a stream of noxious acid toward Percy. Blackjack only just manages to swerve and lift them to safety. With both demigod and pegasus so clearly out of range, the Queen can only continue to glare at Percy with immense hatred, acid dripping from her mandibles. 

Wait. She’s not staring at Percy. She’s staring at the baby doll. That stupid, crying, screaming baby doll. She wants to vaporize that obnoxious thing more than Percy, more than the Stolls, and more than the Celestial Bronze. And who could blame her? That sound is truly unbearable. 

Annabeth sees Percy glance between the Queen and the doll, seemingly coming to the same conclusion. 

“No, Percy!” Annabeth shouts.  “Don’t you dare!”

She launches forward to stop him, but Clarisse and a few others manage to hold her back. She screams for them to let her go, to let her stop this. She can’t let it happen, not after everything–

“Eat plastic, bug face!” Percy yells as he throws the doll across the clearing, sending its wailing body far from the campers and the Stolls. The Queen roars and follows it, practically tripping over herself in her quest to destroy it. The Stolls, meanwhile, duck and narrowly avoid her stumbling legs, finally making a break for the group of campers on the opposite end of the clearing. They scream as they go, but the Queen pays them no mind—she has her true prey in sight, sprawled on the ground like the broken toy that it is. 

Her jaws snap ferociously as she approaches the doll’s landing place. She leans down, entirely focused on this one insignificant baby doll. Acid sprays from her mouth—

And that’s when Percy sweeps down on Blackjack, pulling up alongside the Queen’s face. He pulls his sword from his pocket—Riptide, rematerialized—and then, with a single fluid motion, Percy drives the blade directly into the Queen’s eye. 

Myrmekes are heavily armored, but even the most armored monsters have weak points. The eye is certainly one of the Queen’s. She screeches pitifully as her inner body disintegrates into golden dust, leaving only a gleaming exoskeleton behind. 

A gleaming exoskeleton… and an acid-fried baby doll.

“No, no, no!” Annabeth shrieks, finally breaking free of the other campers’ grip. She sprints to the spot where the baby landed, but Percy and Blackjack beat her to it. By the time she arrives, they’re already standing mournfully over the fizzing corpse of molten plastic. It’s still crying, somehow, but now its voice sounds distorted and demonic as the acid devours its internal speakers.

Annabeth falls to her knees. Her fingers hover helplessly over the unsalvageable toy. “You killed it. After everything, you just killed it—”

“What was I supposed to do?” Percy demands. “Just let the Queen eat the Stolls?”

Annabeth neither agrees or disagrees. 

Percy rolls his eyes. “Annabeth. It’s just a doll.”

“No!” she says, rising to her feet. Her voice sounds shrill to her own ears. “It’s not just a doll, Percy. You deserve to get good grades. You deserve to graduate like everybody else. This isn’t fair—”

Percy laughs and places a hand on her shoulder. 

“‘Fair’ would be a nice change of pace,” he admits. “But honestly? I’d rather get expelled from every school on the face of the planet than see any of my friends get hurt.” 

Annabeth wrinkles her nose. “Even the Stolls?”

Percy nods. “Even the Stolls.”

Annabeth sighs. This ridiculous, selfless boy. Constantly sabotaging his own life to help the people he cares about. It’s annoying. It’s unbelievable. But it’s also why she loves him. 

“But...what will you do?” Annabeth asks, voice strained by uncertainty. 

Percy shifts his weight. “Dunno. Retake the class, I guess? Let myself get held back a year.”

“But then I’ll be in California, and you’ll be...” 

The reality drops on her like a falling piano. Annabeth will attend college in New Rome—she’s already committed to that. But Percy will suffer through another year of high school in New York. 

Because of this one baby doll, they’ll spend a whole year separated by an entire continent. 

Percy only smiles sadly. “Long-distance could be worse. At least I’ll have my memories this time.”

“But your mom—”

“She’ll understand. She always does.”

Annabeth can’t even think about it. She won’t. She wants to scream. She wants to smash a wall. A little unfairness is one thing, but this? This is a cosmic joke. No, a cosmic cruelty. There must be something she can do, some plan she can make to fix this—

“Uh...Percy?”

Annabeth and Percy turn to see the very brothers they were just discussing—as well as the rest of the camp—approaching. The Stolls are first to reach them. They appear haggard and shocked, their eyes fixated on Percy as if he just sprouted wings and antlers. 

“You… you saved us,” says Travis disbelievingly. 

“Yep,” Percy replies, refusing to meet their eyes. Instead, he devotes his entire focus to flicking monster dust from his sword. 

Connor appears no less stunned than his brother. “You saved us,” he repeats.  “Both of us. Even after everything we did—”

Percy, finally satisfied with Riptide’s cleanliness, returns the blade to pen form and slips it into his pocket. “Uh-huh.”

“Even though you won’t graduate—”

Percy nods. “Unfortunately.”

“B-but,” Connor stammers. “Why would you do that?”

He shrugs. “I mean, I wasn't gonna let you get eaten by ants just because you lost my Home Economics project. I was mad, yeah, but I wasn’t that mad.”

The brothers’ eyes fly to the doll on the ground, which continues to smoke and melt as the acid eats away at the plastic. “Percy, man,” Travis begins, “we’re really sorry. We never meant for this to happen—”

“And this time, we’re not saying that just because Annabeth forced us to,” Connor adds. 

Annabeth scowls. “Oh, I so knew you two were being insincere—”

Percy raises a hand to interrupt her. He finally looks the Stolls in the eye. “I forgive you both,” he tells them, much to Annabeth’s surprise. She's resolved to never speak to them again. But she's not Percy. Percy’s grudges, she knows, never last for long. After fighting so many enemies, he always tries his best to forgive his friends. 

“And,” Percy continues, “I hope you’ve learned a valuable lesson about why stealing is wrong—”

A moment passes in which Travis and Connor only exchange skeptical looks. And then, abruptly, both boys begin laughing. Laughing endlessly—hysterically. But neither Percy or Annabeth understand the joke. 

“Jeez, don’t push it, Percy,” Travis says, still near-cackling. “We’re sorry, sure, but we’re not looking to change careers.”

Connor wipes tears of humor from his eyes. “Yeah, who are you trying to be, anyway? The hall monitor?” 

Percy sighs deeply and turns back to Annabeth. “Well, I tried. They’re incurable.”

The rest of the camp finally joins them. Malcolm is first to rush forward and examine the damage: the now-liquified baby doll, somehow still wailing from the puddle of goo in the grass.

“So that’s it, huh?” Malcolm says. “The doll’s gone. Everything we did—the plan, defeating the Myrmekes—it was all for nothing? Percy won’t graduate?” 

The crowd erupts into disappointed murmurs. Annabeth looks to Percy, and it’s clear that he doesn’t know what to say. She supposes he could lie—pretend that he’ll get perfect scores on every remaining assignment, but it’s so unlikely. And it feels particularly wrong to lie to people who were so determined to fight for his success. 

Percy opens his mouth to provide an answer—probably some sort of weak assurance that everything will be alright. One that even Annabeth won’t believe.

But he doesn’t get the chance. He is interrupted by—of all things—a slow, appreciative round of applause. 

All heads turn to see a man in jogger’s clothes and wings attached to his shoes. He smiles gleefully at the sight of them all, as if he’s giving a standing ovation at a Broadway show. 

“Well, I wouldn’t say it was for nothing ,” says Hermes, tucking his hands into his pockets. “A good heist is never for nothing.”

“What are you doing here?” Annabeth demands. 

These days, Annabeth has a long list of least favorite Olympians, but Hermes is still among her top five least-liked. She’s never forgiven him for neglecting Luke so completely that he felt compelled to betray the camp. 

“I’m the god of thieves,” Hermes explains. “The patron of all heists—including this one.” He claps his hands together. “And what an entertaining heist it was! The best I’ve seen in many centuries, let me tell you—”

“We weren’t looking to entertain,” Annabeth snarls. 

“Of course not,” Hermes says. “You were looking to steal. As all successful thieves hope to do!” 

Annabeth shakes her head fiercely. “I’m not a thief.”

Hermes only raises a skeptical eyebrow. “But aren’t you, Annabeth? You spent the last day conspiring to steal a heavily-guarded item from the depths of the Myrmeke colony. That sure sounds like thievery to me.” 

“The Myrmekes didn’t even want the doll,” Annabeth protests. “They took it by accident, thanks to your sons.”

She gestures to Travis and Connor, intending to shame them in front of their father. But, much to Annabeth’s disappointment, Hermes’s smile only widens. 

“Ah, yes! My sons!” Hermes exclaims, marching over to Travis and Connor so that he can pat both boys on the back. “Quite the feat, stealing from a son of Poseidon! And Percy Jackson, no less! Legendary, simply legendary!”

“Hey!” Percy says indignantly, taking a step forward. “Can you not encourage your kids to steal from me?”

Hermes winks at him. “Sorry, Percy. But you have to admit—without their ingenuity, this fantastic heist never could have happened!”

“Uh... duh!” Annabeth’s voice is raw and furious. “That’s exactly why we’re mad at them! Percy won’t graduate because of them!”

Hermes flaps a hand. “Oh, nonsense. The doll’s fine.”

Annabeth is about to release a scathing insult about Hermes’s obliviousness when she realizes that the doll has, in fact, stopped crying. 

All eyes return to the puddle of goo, only to discover that there isn’t a puddle of goo to be found. Instead, a perfectly intact baby doll sits in the grass, silent and peaceful, looking as though it’s just been unboxed from its toy store packaging. 

A dumbstruck Percy Jackson lifts the doll off the ground, carefully examining it for defects. Again and again, he turns it over, but fails to find so much as a grass stain.

“It’s… it’s perfect,” he stammers, eyes locked on Annabeth’s in a mutual expression of disbelief. “Good as new.”

Annabeth’s head swivels back to Hermes. Her eyes are so wide, they feel as though they’re popping off her face. “But… how did you… why would you—?”

Hermes shrugs. “I do, on occasion, bestow a blessing on heists that I find particularly entertaining.” He smirks. “Or noble.”

At that, the campers erupt into cheers. The doll is saved. Percy can still graduate. They can still go to college together. Somehow—miraculously, magically—everything is going to be okay. 

Annabeth knows she should thank Hermes, but no words feel adequate. Every expression of thankfulness she comes up with feels insincere, especially after she spent so many years mistrusting him. 

“I don’t know what to say,” Annabeth admits finally, forced to half-yell over the celebration of her fellow half-bloods. 

“A daughter of Athena, speechless?” Hermes says with mock astonishment. “I’ll consider that the highest of praises.”

And then, with another wink, Hermes disappears.

Chapter Text

“Thomas Halliday. Katie Huang. Amelia Ibarra.” 

“Paul,” Sally Jackson hisses, nudging her husband with her shoulder. 

The principal continues to list names. A procession of students takes the stage, one after the other, ascending the steps to retrieve their diploma before returning to the bleachers. 

“Joan Irwin. Allison Isaacs. Gregory Ivanovich. ”

It’s all so procedural and stereotypical and yet… the excitement in the crowd where Annabeth sits is astonishingly palpable. Objectively, it’s quite silly—that they all make such a big deal out of a piece of paper and a roll call. But it nonetheless feels like an accomplishment—like it’s special . Perhaps more special for some than for others. 

“Paul, seriously! Where’s the camera? We need to get this on camera!”

“Hold on, Sally, I can’t hold Estelle and take pictures at the same time—” 

“Don’t worry, I’ve got it,” Annabeth says, waving her phone camera for Percy’s mother to see. “I wouldn’t miss this kind of photo-op for the world.”

Besides, she promised she would live-stream it for them. Sure, cell-phone use is largely banned for half-bloods, but most of her friends were perfectly comfortable letting a couple monsters attack them for this. Percy’s school only gave out three family member tickets, after all, and it simply wasn’t fair to the hundreds of campers that wanted to wish him well. 

“Terry Ives. Benjamin Jackman.

She presses record. Any second now.

“Perseus Jackson.”

Annabeth releases her loudest wolf-whistle as Percy climbs the steps. Even from a distance, his smile is one of the widest she’s ever seen. He grabs his diploma, shakes the principals hand, shakes it again for good measure, and then practically skips his way off the stage. Annabeth lifts a thumbs up high into the air, high enough for him to see, and he sticks his tongue out at her. 

Sally explodes into sobs and incoherent babblings. 

“Did you see—look at him—by gods, my baby’s graduating—” 

Annabeth empties her purse of tissues to accommodate Sally’s endless tear-flow. (Alright, she might have needed a couple for herself, she won’t lie). 

“A wonderful ceremony, isn’t it?”

Annabeth turns to see that the seat to her right is now occupied by none other than Poseidon, god of the ocean, also filming the remaining moments of the graduation on a cell phone. She’s only seen him a couple of times before, but she’d recognize those green eyes anywhere. Percy’s green eyes. 

“Uh… definitely,” Annabeth says, not exactly sure how to make small talk with a god—even after all these years. She wonders if Sally has noticed Poseidon’s arrival, but seriously doubts that she can see anything beyond the profuse tears. 

“Mind sending me your videos too?” Poseidon asks. “I missed him walking to the stands.”

“I, uh.” Annabeth bites her lip. “I don’t think I have your cell number.”

“It’s a shell number, actually.”

“What?”

“It’s a shell phone, not a cell phone.” 

Of course it is. Annabeth resists the urge to roll her eyes. She has no idea what the difference is, and doesn’t really want to know—but this is a god she’s talking to, and Percy’s father, so she tries to remain polite. 

“I’ll just post them on my social media,” Annabeth offers, hoping that’ll be enough. “You can find them that way.”

“Oh, that works too! Many thanks.”

Annabeth clears her throat. “No problem.”

“No, really,” Poseidon says, fixing a serious gaze on Annabeth’s gray eyes. “Thank you, Annabeth. For all the help you’ve given him. For all you’ve been able to accomplish together. You’re certainly something special.”

And once again, Annabeth finds herself speechless in the presence of a god. She doesn’t know what to say. Should she thank Poseidon for saying something like that?

But apparently, she won’t be given the time to properly respond. By the time she blinks, Poseidon has disappeared. 

The graduates throw their decorated caps into the air. As it’s tossed, Annabeth gets a glimpse at Percy’s: bright blue with a trident (not at all unexpected) and is that… a baby doll? 

Funny. Very funny. She wonders what he told his classmates about that. 

The graduates pour into the crowd of family and friends. Percy sprints to meet them, tackling both Annabeth and his mother in a crushing hug. Annabeth has never seen him so ecstatic. 

“Look, look!” he says, unraveling the diploma for all of them to see. “Can you believe it? Between the monsters and the expulsions…” He laughs. “I never thought I’d live to see the day.” 

Sally hugs him again, still struggling to wipe tears from her eyes. “I always knew you could do it, Percy.” 

“So did I,” Annabeth adds. She, too, is struggling to keep her tears at bay. “I am so proud of you, Seaweed Brain.” 

Percy gives her a mocking eye roll. “Oh come on, Wise Girl, don’t get emotional on me now.”

She swipes at her eyes. “My boyfriend is graduating! Of course I’m emotional.” 

“Honestly, this is gonna be nothing compared to your graduation. Mark my words, when you give your valedictorian speech, I’ll be crying like a—”

She kisses him, hands clasped around his cheeks. 

Kisses him, at least, until she realizes she’s crushing his diploma. 

She curses and releases him. “Sorry, sorry!” she apologizes, leaning down to see if she caused any serious damage.

“It’s okay,” Percy says, laughing once again. “It’s just a piece of paper.”