Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition - James Baldwin

Annabeth is woken up in the middle of the night by the shrill call of her phone ringing a foot from her head.  In and of itself, that isn’t all that strange.  Neither is the name plastered across the screen-- Seaweed Brain-- accompanied by a photo of Percy buried in the sand, grinning and giving thumbs up, his head, hands and feet the only parts of him not encompassed.  He is fourteen in the photo, and every time Annabeth sees it she is shocked at how different he looks only 2 years later.  But there is something that feels wrong tonight--technically this morning--something about 02:02 glowing in white on her screen and Percy’s nickname that tells her that something is wrong.  She thinks about it for too long and the ringing stops and she feels like crap for not answering it in time.

She gets up, suddenly completely awake, and scrambles to call him back.  Before she even gets the chance it starts ringing again.  It really is bad then.  If Percy thought she slept through his first call he would take it as a sign not to bother her tonight.  She knows it.  She answers as quickly as her thumb will move to the green icon, and she hopes to hear his voice, some sort of assurance that he is okay.

“Percy?”

“Annabeth,” he breathes her name.  It sounds like he has been running.  There are plenty of things that are not good signs as far as Percy is concerned, a late night/early morning run is one of them.  It means there is something he is trying to get away from.

“What’s going on?”

She hears him breathe for too long before he answers her.  “I need out,” he says, sounding desperate even though his voice is half gone.

“Out?” she repeats.

“Out.” She can imagine him nodding.  “Annie,” she is too worried to even tell him not to call her that.  And then Perseus Jackson of all people says the unimaginable.  “I need out of New York,”

From Annabeth’s mouth that would be one thing.  She lives there, likes the aesthetics of the city so long as she doesn’t look down and is willing to stomach the smell if she has to, likes the public transport and hates the winters and summers.  It is a place she lives, not really a home.  She isn’t so sure what that actually means and that is enough to tell her that she doesn’t have a home like Percy does, that she has never known one.  And that is just the thing.  New York City is Percy’s home.  It is not the apartment he has lived in since he was two-years-old, it is not his bedroom, it is none of the boarding schools he has been ferried between.  It is New York, it is Manhattan.  Things must be bad if he is begging to get out.

“Okay,” she nods even though he can’t see her, “We’ll get out of New York,”

Percy has been the only thing keeping her there since they moved.  She ran away when she was seven and they were living in Virginia and was returned by the police to her father within the week and for a few years after she was practically kept under lock and key.  Until she was twelve she had never left the state, and then she was shipped to New York and she was so out of her depth but she wanted to explore all of it, learn about every building in so much detail it made her head hurt.  It kept her content for long enough to make her father complacent.

And then she met Percy.  Completely by chance, of course.  She was exploring the city, managed to give her stepmother the slip because she was distracted by Bobby and Matthew and really never too concerned with Annabeth and what she did so long as she made it home at the end of the day, and stumbled into a skatepark.  It was very bare bones, almost entirely empty, and because Percy was the only one there the second she showed up he ran to her side and talked her ear off and made her watch him do tricks before trying to convince her to have a go (even now, four years later, she has never once set foot on his skateboard--maybe just because she has seen him totally wipe out on it too many times).  He had been incredibly annoying and she didn’t think she much enjoyed his company, but there was something inexplicable that brought her back at the same time next week.  Somehow that turned into the two of them being basically inseparable within the month.

And now he wants to leave.  Annabeth has lived her whole life in somebody else’s house, a spare piece in somebody else’s family.  They do not want her there and aren’t very good at hiding it: the second he asks she starts packing a bag.  She scribbles a note, doesn't care if she spells half of it wrong, and leaves it on her bedside table.  They need to go into her space if they want to find it; she won’t be delivering it to them but she won’t be hiding it either.  If they care to look they’ll find it.

Don’t look for me.  I left becuase I wanted to.  I’m wiht Percy and we’ll be back if we fell like it

It feels like what they deserve from her.

She has chosen her old hiking backpack, shoved some spare clothes and a towel into it, all the money she has stashed around her room over the years with this very specific day in mind like an eventual inevitability goes into its own pocket so she can’t lose it.  Deodorant and baby wipes and other hygiene things go in too, of course.  She steals her father’s water bladder because it is bigger than any water bottle they own and more convenient even if Percy will be absolutely mercilessly teasing her about it.  If she’s lucky it will cheer him up.  She also steals some cash from him because he has left his bag out on the dining room table and that is honestly his own fault for being careless.  She takes a Swiss army knife from his camping kit too, and then she just stands in the kitchen and looks around.  This is it.  She’s finally leaving.  What else does she need to take with her?

She goes back to her room, packs a sketchpad, a notepad, a book, a scarf and a hat and some waterproof gloves, all of her father’s boot socks just because she wants to be annoying, and all of the hairbands she can find in five minutes.  She changes out of her pyjamas and folds them neatly, putting them on the end of her bed.  The rest of her room is a mess and she only tears it apart more, but there is something about this last action before she leaves, the pointed, thoughtful abandoning of material comfort, that feels symbolic, important.  She puts on sweats, biking shorts and a t-shirt underneath so she can take them off if she gets too hot when it stops being the middle of the night, and her well-worn Timberlands.  She is half convinced that they are so well-fitted to her feet by now that there isn’t a single other person in the world they would really fit.

She raids the pantry before she leaves, both a practical decision and a final fuck you, and then she is gone.  She doesn’t look back.

It is an unspoken rule that if they don’t specify a meeting place they go to the skatepark where they first met.  So Annabeth trudges through Manhattan on foot at 2:30am, burdened with the largest backpack she owns on her back and fastened around her waist, doing her absolute best not to look vulnerable, not to look like a tourist.  It’s quite the feat but she thinks she manages.  She isn’t a street kid in quite the way that Percy is, but she isn’t completely without practice.  They have slept outside under these stars before and she knows these streets like the back of her own hand.  Part of her is almost a little sad to leave them and she almost wants to savour what might just be the last time she ever walks them, but she can’t.  Because Percy sounded desperate and she can’t keep him waiting any longer than she already has.  She takes the subway, hops the turnstiles like Percy taught her to do all those years before, and ignores the smells and the strange men.  Because she acts like she belongs, nobody questions that she doesn’t.

She gets to the skatepark as quickly as she can.  New York is always alight in some way or another, but none of what Annabeth is seeing is natural light.  They still have plenty of time to slip away before even the earliest of risers wake up.  And Percy is right there, his school backpack the only one he owns and full to the point where the fabric is strained, his skateboard, his prized possession, strapped to the back of it.  He is sitting on the hard concrete floor, hunched over with headphones in.  he doesn’t even see that Annabeth is approaching.

She puts a hand on his shoulder and he startles but settles when he sees it is just her and not some especially considerate murderer.  She is horrified when he turns to face her.  The streetlamp here is one that flickers like it was designed that way and even in the dim illumination it provides them she can see his face, how red the left side of it is, the fresh starts of a bruise starting to turn purple.  By the time the sun rises it will be dark.

“Percy,” she says accusatively.  If he wanted to be coddled about this he would have called anyone but Annabeth.  “I thought you said he didn’t do that anymore!”

Percy shrugs and holds out a hand so she pulls him to his feet.  He used to be a lot less heavy but he is six feet tall and he might weigh less than she does.  She doesn’t really get it, because she has seen how he eats like a ravenous animal, but he also never stops moving, like a shark that has to keep going forward to keep breathing, like he will suffocate if he stops.  “In my defence, you chose to believe me,”

“That’s a shitty defence,” he smiles weakly at her and stretches and his shoulders pop so loudly that she flinches at the noise even though she should be used to it by now.  What she has by way of medical supplies is sparse: a box of band-aids, another of larger wound dressings, a single roll of bandage, a half-empty tube of Neosporin, a collection of antibiotics she found left over from courses never completed in the bathroom medicine cabinet, all the Advil her father had specifically for Percy’s painful joints but also for her cramps and the accompanying headaches, and her Ritalin.  “You have your meds, right?”  She never got on with Adderall like he never got on with Ritalin.  She’ll share if she has to but she doesn’t know how their doses differ and she knows from when they were thirteen and Percy’s doctor had tried him on different meds that Ritalin makes him jittery, gives him these tics he hates.

“Sure do,” he pauses.  “What are we supposed to do when we run out?”  That’s a good question.  Annabeth pauses.

“Buy it illegally?” she suggests after a moment.  “Or we try to taper off of what we have?”

Percy levels her with a look.  “Neither of those seem smart,”

She shrugs.  “So we’ll deal with it when we have to,” she looks up at the sky.  There are stars in it but they are few and far between, drowned out by light pollution.  It’s one of the few things she misses about their old house in Virginia.  She used to be able to step out into the back garden during the night and look up and see the sky like ink, the stars like spilled salt across it.  Now she can just about find Sirius A.  “I’m going to show you the stars,” she decides, “And the forest.  I’m gonna show the city boy what the country is like,”

Percy grins at her.  His eye looks sore and she wishes she had an ice pack to offer him but it’s not exactly the sort of thing she could pack.  They could buy something cheap and frozen if he wants it later, but it won’t keep for long.  “Sounds like a plan, Wise Girl,” he looks up with her, at the sky that is the only way he has ever known it: underwhelming.  There is something about cities like this that feels like they are tricking people who don’t know better that this is all the world is.  She has the chance to prove otherwise.

This is his home and not hers, so even though this was his idea she has to be the one to ask.  “Are you ready to go?” he nods and turns around to leave the way she came, to go straight back to the subway station she came from.  They don’t pay and there is nobody who cares enough to see them doing it.  Even though it is almost 3am the subway is far from empty.  They get on a random train and ride it as far as it will take them then get onto the next.  For the time being their first priority is distance.

They get off in Queens and they pick a direction and walk.  There is nobody here who knows them and something about that is freeing.  It makes Annabeth feel small in a way that terrifies her, but they will be away from cities soon and she will be able to become small in a way that is Sublime, is natural, that makes her inferior only to the world itself.  She doesn’t complain about having the heavier bag even though it really is heavy, because she knows it will be way worse on Percy’s body than hers.  They keep walking.

“What about your mom?” she asks.  The sky is a strange sort of blue, neither dark nor light, calm in an odd way, almost featureless.  The sun is probably making its first appearance of the day but she can’t see it.  Percy looks genuinely sad when she says it.  She gets it.  Sally Jackson is probably the one and only reason they haven’t done this way sooner.

“I left her a note,” he says quietly, “I hid it in the fridge, in the egg carton.  Gabe’ll never find it. I’ll call her when I can, on the phone at her work so there’s no chance he’ll answer it,”

“You don’t think she’ll look for you?”

“Hopefully not if I can convince her I’m safe,” he looks down and sighs.  “I want her to get out so badly.  If she doesn’t have me to deal with she might be able to afford to leave,”  Annabeth wants her father to give the Jacksons all the money they have sitting around, but he never would and neither of them would ever accept it.

“Speaking of money,” Percy sends her a look that feels like a thank you.  He has the darkest hair she has ever seen and his eyes are so bright they always make her feel like she is see-through.  She should be used to his face and his harsh angles and how he always seems to look at everything and everyone for just a moment too long, but she has never quite managed it.  “You’ve been dog-walking.  Do you have any money left over from that?”  He smiles sheepishly at her and, against her will, her mouth falls open.  “He took all of it?”  She has never liked saying Gabe’s name.  She thinks it makes him feel too human, prefers him as this kind of abstract, awful thing that isn’t quite real, rather than a man who should know better, should have some degree of empathy for the people he hurts.

“He always has,” Percy dismisses as though that makes anything better.  Annabeth is hardly new to the differences in their situations.  For her it is silence, it is being ignored, it is family outings she is never invited to, it is the scald scar that takes up half of her left forearm because they left for a weekend when she was seven and she had to feed herself somehow and the stove was too high and the pot was too heavy.  For him it is anything but.  It is loud, it is shouting, it is trying to hide how violent it is.  Annabeth doesn’t know how bad it really is, but they are far away now.  If they do this right then none of it ever needs to happen again.

Around them vendors are beginning to open their stores and the sky is becoming a lighter blue and the weight on Annabeth’s back is starting to get to her but she can push through it.  She’ll have to learn to live with it.  They don’t need to spend any of their money right now so, though she looks at a quaint little panadería with longing as they pass by, she only stops to pull them out a cereal bar and a banana each.  She doesn’t have much fruit because it won’t last long getting rattled about in her bag, but what they do have needs to be eaten soon.  She takes the more bruised one for herself and gives Percy the other, taking a sip from the long straw of her water bladder.  Percy rolls his eyes at her.

“I can’t believe you brought that,”

“You’ll be glad I did when you run out of water and I still have most of mine,”

“Yeah, well.  Right now you look ridiculous,”

She cocks an eyebrow.  “I think that’s the least of our worries,”

They find a park and sit on the grass because they quietly agree they need the break and Annabeth takes her first dose of the day.  Percy looks at her.  “You seriously get up this early regularly?” she nods.

“You haven’t slept at all, have you?”

He shakes his head and lets out a well-timed yawn that makes his jaw make a disconcerting popping sound.  She really hates that his body kind of sounds like it is falling apart.  It has only gotten worse since they first met.  “No,”

“I won’t hold it against you if you want to take a nap here,” the grass is a little damp and the breeze is still a little cold, but it is getting steadily warmer so Annabeth takes off her hoodie and folds it into a ball, offering it to Percy as a kind of pillow.  He takes it.

“Thanks,” he says, “Not just for the hoodie,” she knows what he means so she smiles at him.  He doesn’t need to thank her.  She has been waiting for this.  She won’t tell him that, though, because he will only feel bad for making her wait and she doesn’t want that.  Whilst they are out on the streets they probably can’t afford to not be getting along.  It’s probably pretty lucky that their friendship is built off of making fun of each other, prodding at thick skin and learning how far they can go before the other gives.

She watches him splay out on his back in the grass, arm cast over his eyes to block the sun out, until the moment his breathing evens out and she can only assume he is well and truly asleep.  His eye looks even worse now that there is substantial daylight, a sickly sort of colour, swollen half closed even when it should be wide open.  She wants to hurt the man who did this to him, can’t believe her own naivete for believing Percy when he said that all the physical stuff had stopped.  She knows it doesn’t work like that, but she really wanted to believe that he was relatively safe in his own apartment, by his loving mother’s side.  She has a feeling that he only ever took any of the mistreatment so his mom didn’t have to, and then another one, a terrible, evil one, that it probably didn’t really work.

She looks away eventually because she feels a bit strange watching him sleep, but she stays by his side and takes note of the time so she can wake him up in a few hours.  It's 06:03 and there are a few other people who are out and about.  Not many, but enough that she feels a bit self conscious just sitting there even though she isn’t really doing anything wrong.  An old couple passes them by and the woman looks over and smiles at her like she is perhaps a little confused but in no way hostile so Annabeth smiles tightly back.  She doesn’t really know what to do with herself.  She could sleep too, but they’re in the middle of a very public park, just barely under the shade of a lonely tree, and they’re completely screwed if their stuff gets stolen.  It’s not necessarily likely, but she isn’t willing to risk it.  She stretches out her spine and reaches for her bag.  There’s a big office building blocking out a large part of the sky where she is looking and she decides that she is going to draw it.  Her lines come out straight because she has a lot of practice in making sure they do.

She does wonder about what a big decision like this means for her future, but she is smart and she will manage because she has to, and she just really needs to be out of that house.  There is something about the very specific way they are happy without her and absolutely nothing whilst she is there that makes her feel sick to her stomach, makes her head spin.  She feels awful every time she is alone in that house or in her family’s presence and she just can’t keep doing it.  This escape is what she needs and she isn’t about to sabotage it by looking too far back.  She has done this before and this time she has the wisdom and company to be able to do it better.

She wakes Percy up at 9am and looks away as he sits up and stretches, reaching for his bag and pulling his water bottle out of the pocket on the side.  He thanks her when she passes it over and drinks too much of it in one gulp.  It’s metallic, covered in stickers and dented like it has been knocked around a whole lot.  It is Percy’s, so it probably has been.  It's a lot smaller than her water bladder but it probably also keeps his water a lot cooler.  Hers is already pretty warm but she doesn’t think either of them particularly has the luxury of caring about that sort of thing, not in the past and definitely not now.  He takes his meds before they leave and then they just start walking again.

“Which way are we headed?” he asks.

She thinks for a moment.  “Probably south west,” she says, “there’s not much more of the US up North and you don’t have a passport and we’re both minors so I don’t really think Canada is an option.  She doesn’t need it to be.  The US is huge and if they’re lucky nobody will look for them.  They’re troubled children, runaways, and they aren’t planning on staying nearby.  So long as they make good enough ground now, even if somebody does decide to look, they won’t look hard enough to find them.  Annabeth stops in her tracks, has a good idea.

“What do you think about catching an overnight bus?  I have more than enough money, it’ll give us somewhere to sleep, and it will get us pretty far out,”

Percy nods without taking time to consider.  “It doesn’t feel fair that you’ll be paying for both of us though,”

She shrugs.  “Think of it as an IOU if you have to,”

He seems reluctant but he agrees.  “Where can we go?”

Annabeth pulls out her phone.  It remains nearly fully charged because she has it on power saving mode and is trying her very best to conserve the battery because she knows she can’t rely on consistent access to an outlet but she is willing to use it when she needs it. “There’s a station like an hour's walk away,” she says.  She looks at Percy before she decides anything for sure, waiting for his nod before she looks any further.  “If we go buy tickets now we have the rest of the day to kill.  D.C sound good to you?”

“Why not?  How long will it take?”

“Four hours give or take.  It’s not exactly a great night’s sleep but we could do worse,”

“I have a feeling we’re going to be saying that a lot,”

Chapter Text

Annabeth’s phone rings at 10 am.  Frederick Chase declares the screen, the background a default blue, the caller ID photo a default F.  She hits the red button on the left side, rejects the call, then blocks her father’s number.  She blocks her stepmother’s too, and the home phone.  There is a spark of guilt in her guts as her forefinger hovers over Bobby’s name, then Matthew's, because none of it is their fault.  But they will be just fine without her and it has to be done.

Percy calls Sally at noon

Annabeth allows Percy to take the window seat.  The bus is far from full and there are plenty of other window seats, even seats that are completely empty so they could sprawl across the whole thing if they wanted to, but she wants to be there next to him.  It feels much safer that way.  Percy will wake up hurting regardless of how he sleeps so she decides that she can suffer the crick in her neck and take what little of the pain she can away.  She has an ungodly amount of Advil anyway.

He falls asleep about five minutes after they start moving, face pressed against the cold of the glass, posture awkward but clearly not all that uncomfortable.  She smiles at him.  From this side his face is just his face and it is like he has never touched it.  So long as she doesn’t look at the reflection in the glass there is no wound.  The pressure of laying on it must hurt, but the cold must soothe.  He isn’t asleep long before he starts muttering.  She doesn’t understand it but it comforts her nonetheless.  As a general rule, she doesn’t need to worry about Percy when he is making noise, but when he goes quiet she panics.  Even when he sleeps he almost always keeps talking.

They stop at a red light and she looks out of the window, past Percy, careful not to let his black eye interrupt her picture-perfect vision of him exactly how he always should be.  It is dark out but not completely.  The sky is a clean slate, black without stars, moon hidden somewhere in a cloud so dark she can’t see it.  She’d carve her name into it if she had a long enough knife.  Streetlights glint by the side of the road, and every car they pass has its lights on.  The traffic light goes amber then green and she leans into Percy’s shoulder, places her hand between her head and the seam of his jumper because he is bony, and wills herself to sleep.

She dreams in pictures rather than a narrative.  She sees a man who is her father but not her dad and a woman who was supposed to be her mom but simply stepped out and they are dancing together in an empty room to the sound of a piano that Annabeth can’t see.  She doesn’t want to watch them anymore so she sees Percy instead, a person who had no obligation to care for her but decided to anyway.  She likes to think there’s some obligation there now.  She is leaning over his shoulder and fussing over him because he fell off his board mid-jump and rolled so fast she couldn’t see what he landed on and then started talking like he didn’t quite know what he was saying.  He is typing How many concussions is too many? and letting his autocorrect do most of the heavy lifting.  There is a symbol to the left of the search that tells her he has searched this before and the first link once the results load is already purple.  She sees herself next, like she is looking through from the other side of a mirror.  The Annabeth who is not her sighs and slumps forwards, hands on the filthy porcelain of a sink in a gas station bathroom, and her body moves with hers even though she does not want it to.  The other Annabeth meets her eyes then fusses about her hair before shaking her head and flicking her temple, idiot playing silently across her lips.  She pulls out her knife and slowly, laboriously, hacks her long hair off, handful by handful.  The second it is done she regrets it.

She wakes up relieved when it is all still there.  She takes a drink of water and checks the time.  5 am.  They should be there soon.  She lets Percy sleep for ten more minutes before she wakes him up, shakes his shoulder as gently as she can.  He blinks wearily at her.

“You drool in your sleep,” she tells him, like he doesn’t already know.  He quirks his eyebrows and taps the corner of his mouth so she wipes her own where he is indicating.  It comes away damp and she scowls at him and hopes he doesn’t notice the penny-sized damp spot on his shoulder.  He has yet to speak but laughs hoarsely, wordlessly.   She wishes she could record it and play it on loop but it stops almost as soon as it starts.

“I’m glad you’re doing this with me,” he tells her, awake but voice still thick and scratchy with sleep.

“I wouldn’t do it with anyone else,”

The bus stops not long after and its sleeping riders wake up with groans and yawns and a general malaise about them that Annabeth can’t help but share.  This is it.  They are out of New York and everything is different now.  As much as she has been waiting for this, it is all starting to set in: Percy might just be the only person left in her life at all; she doesn’t have a roof or a bed or the little stuffed owl she has had since she was a baby, amongst the only things her mother ever gave her; she doesn’t have a fridge or a stove or and address or a bath; no matter what happens from here on out her life will never be the same again.  She wonders if Percy is thinking the same thing, watches his face as they stay seated whilst most of the people on the bus stand impatiently in the aisle.  His eyebrows are low over his eyes and he is looking at the canvas shows of his sneakers, scuffed thin.  She’d bet every cent she has brought with her that he is thinking about his mom, left alone to Gabe’s mercy yet, if Percy is to be believed, with the best chance she has ever had of escaping it.  She hopes he isn’t regretting this because she knows that she isn’t.

He white-knuckles the top of the seat in front of him as the door at the front pops open with a hydraulic hiss and the line in the aisle starts moving.  Most of these people will have luggage stored under the bus, suitcases containing just a small sub-section of their lives whereas she and Percy have all of theirs in the backpacks stowed overhead.  She feels strange suddenly, like the world is moving and she is lagging just a little behind.  There is no time to dwell on it though, it is time to stand, grab their bags and move along.

Neither of them has ever been to DC before which means there is nothing but new stuff to see here.  Her dad wouldn’t think to look here if he cares to look at all though, for all he knows about her, she could have told him explicitly about planning to be here and he would never have remembered.  They walk aimlessly away from the bus station, picking a direction and wandering in it.  They have no destination planned, nowhere to be just some place to avoid.  They won’t be in DC for long, she’s sure, but she suspects Percy appreciates this initial distance as much as she does.

“You’re making us go to the Smithsonian before we move on, right?” he says after a short space of comfortable silence.  She grins at him because he knows her, because he listens to her and actually remembers the things she tells him.  She doesn’t necessarily have more interest in the museum than anybody else does but if there are things to know she is always going to prefer to know them, she likes learning and the Smithsonian offers free entry.

“You know me so well,” she presses her hand to her chest and smiles saccharinely and he chuckles ever so slightly, wincing at the way the movement forces the bruised skin by his eye to scrunch.  “Do you want ice or something?”

He shakes his head and grits his teeth.  “No,” he insists.  She had suspected he might: he is, after all, the same boy who only let her take him to the hospital for his dislocated shoulder last year when half a day had passed and the problem wasn’t fixing itself.  If he can physically tough something out he is always going to choose to--it makes her think again about how bad it must be with Gabe for him to really be walking out now.  He cracks his knuckles one by one and in the quiet, near empty street it sounds like his own miniature thunderstorm.  “I’ve never seen this much of the morning,”

“That’s because you become nocturnal whenever you’re left to your own will,”

“Yeah well, you get paid more for the night shift,”

She stops for a moment just to blink slowly and intentionally up at him.  “You don’t work a night shift,” she tells him, “and you know that if you did that’s possibly carcinogenic, right?”

“I choose to believe that ‘possibly’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence, Beth,”

“You don’t just get to decide that!  And don’t call me Beth!”

“Sorry Annie,”

“You’re such an asshole,” she is smiling as she says it, shivering as she may be, in the middle of a brand new city with nothing to her name but the clothes she is wearing and the bag on her back and the best friend in the word a girl could ever ask for.  “Let’s do the Smithsonian tomorrow,”

He nods contemplatively as though he is thinking it over.  “Deal,” he says, “my calendar’s free,”

She hits him hard on the arm and he grins, all dimples and crooked teeth and eyes that are as bright as they are tired.  She’d draw him if only she could figure out how to make organic shapes actually look a little more organic. “This is so weird,”

He winces again.  “I know.  I’m sorry for dragging you into it.  If you ever just want to go home, seriously, I won’t stop you from going,”

“I didn’t mean it like that, Percy,” she tries to reassure him.  “I wanted out as much as you did and I really don’t regret this I just-” she shrugs, feeling a little loopy with the stress and the sleep deprivation and the uncertainty sitting sick and heavy in her stomach, “I feel aimless.  I mean, we’re going to the Smithsonian tomorrow but where are we sleeping tonight?  Where are we going next?  How are we making money?  I have a decent amount but it’s nowhere near enough to last us forever.  When can I wash my hair next?” It’s a wash day, though that is amongst the least of her concerns.

“I don’t know,” he admits, still giddy with the thrill of getting out and the guilt and the heaviness of everything he has had to leave in the midst of it all.  “Single day entry to crappy gyms is usually pretty cheap if you want that shower?  Or there might be a Y with showers?”

“Why do I get the feeling you just want to go swimming?”

“Because I always want to go swimming.  Crappy gyms don’t usually have a pool though, and I’ll be fine without the water for a bit.  I’m not a beached whale,”

“There’s a big sea exhibit in the natural history museum,” she says.

“Of course there is,”

“Approximately how much of our time are we going to be spending there?”

“I don’t know if you want that answer, Annabeth,”

She feigns a groan but she likes seeing Percy be interested in things, likes seeing him happy and content.  She isn’t uninterested in the sea but he’s a little bit obsessed with it and every time he tells her all about it she tries her hardest to listen but inevitably gets a little distracted by how excited he is and how much it suits him.  “We can wander a mall or something for most of today,” she suggests.  “It’s not that hot now but I think it’s supposed to heat up later and we can’t really afford to be getting heatstroke.  We don’t have to buy anything,”

“Good call.” They keep wandering for a bit, as though hoping one will magically appear before them.  “Can I have an Advil?” he asks about five minutes later.

“Sure,” she stops to take the bag off her back and digs through the little pocket containing her paltry little makeshift first-aid kit.  She pauses to look up at him as seriously as she can from her place on one knee in the middle of a narrow residential street.  “Do you take this every day?”

He looks shiftily to the side.  “Maybe,” he says, a little too quickly.

Her eyes narrow, grip loose around the rattling bottle.  “Are you supposed to do that?”

“Probably not,” he’s nonchalant enough about it that she throws over the bottle before she has really computed it as a ‘no’.

“Let me guess,” she says flatly, “It’s not our biggest problem right now?”

“Exactly,” he reaches a hand over to tap her on the nose before he pops the cap open and shakes two little pills into his hand.  She makes a face but doesn’t start batting or hitting at him in case he drops them.

“Do you need some water?” She's pretty sure his bottle is empty.

“Yep,” she hands over the straw and he looks at it in disgust for a moment.

“Is this really what it’s come to?  Already?”

“Don’t get your panties in a twist,” she rolls her eyes fondly, “It’s just a water bladder,”

“Blergh,” he sticks out his tongue then pauses to tip the pills into his mouth and take a deep sip of her practically warm water.  “That’s a horrible name for it.  Bladder.  It sounds like you’ve just gutted an animal for it,”

“They used to use inflated pig’s bladders to play mediaeval soccer,” she says.

He shakes his head at her, corners of his mouth pulling to the starts of a smile.  “Of course they did.  Why are we drinking from a mediaeval soccer ball?”

“ It’s plastic!   And it was a good call Perseus , as much as you might want to make fun of it.  You’re out of water and I’m not,”

“Not quite,”

“Yeah,” she nods, “we need to find somewhere to fill our bottles up,”

“ My bottle,” he says back, instead of contributing an idea as to how they’re going to go about it, “ your bladder.”

“Don’t call it my bladder,”

“I thought that was what it was.”

The mall is air conditioned.  It’s only been a day but with the sweatpants and the shorts she has been wearing for a little too long and the hoodie she has been pulling on and off, always tied around either her waist or Percy’s when she isn’t wearing it, and the large, heavy bad on her back that has left her t-shirt damp with sweat, she could swear she has almost forgotten what that felt like.  She sighs in relief and closes her eyes with her arms held out to her sides, deciding in an instant to be completely above whatever random strangers might be thinking about her and filing that away with their ever-growing list of problems too small to care about with everything else they have going on.

She slips into the bathroom to change her underwear and stow her sweats in her bag.  She steps out of the stall to brush her teeth at the sink and re-tie her hair, grimacing at the grease accumulating across her scalp.  She has decided to continue not to care what other people are thinking as a young woman looks at her with a frown as she spits her toothpaste into the sink.  She should really get used to all of this.  She’s homeless now.  It isn’t a nice thought to think.

Percy is waiting for her outside, sitting against the wall.  He’d told her before that standing still is often harder on his hips than walking. She imagines skating also hurts quite a lot but he loves it so he pushes through the pain and she’s never going to tell him that it probably isn’t a good idea because she knows that he must already know.  He has made a decision, one that can only end poorly but that he isn’t ready to end quite yet.  She wonders how many times her dad has read her note, how many times he has tried to call her--the one time he felt obligated to?  More?--and whether or not he has called the police.  Percy won’t tell her much about his call with Sally but Annaebth knows he isn’t willing to tell her where they are but he is willing to tell her every day that he is safe and, until the day when she doesn’t get that call, she will do as he asks and hold off.

There is an artisan coffee shop she can’t afford to go into, a skateshop she catches Percy staring at with a kind of quiet longing as they pass, clothing store after clothing store.  They don’t go into a single one because they don’t have any disposable money and, at least for now, Annabeth is at least a little bit opposed to shoplifting, if only because she’s too scared of getting caught.  She doesn’t think it’s an opinion that Percy shares but she has never really bothered to confirm that with him--still, she knows he only ever has what money he can get away with hiding from Gabe and the meagre allowance his mom can afford to give him in secret, and still he is able to get himself things, is able to eat at least a little bit on the nights and days he spends outside of his apartment, as far away from Gabe as he can get after his pockets have been raided.  She has money right now regardless, so she can worry about stealing when she stops having other options.

It’s still early so they are amongst the only people there.  It’s strange, just her and Percy and tired workers opening up their stores and a couple of early risers.  It feels empty almost, just dead space.  In a way she almost prefers it if only because she looks her worst and she’d rather not have everybody see her (or, frankly, smell her) in that state.  It’s just one item on the ever-growing list of things she needs to get over.  Somehow it doesn’t matter what Percy sees: she has, in moments of weakness, cried to him about every problem she has ever had, and he has done the same in kind; he has seen her after sleepless nights or nights spent outside, either much too cold or much too hot, sweating and shivering, her hair just barely on the right side of matted.  Percy’s bruise looks awful and the stress is already making her skin break out.  It’s probably all downhill from here though, at least for a while.  It makes her laugh to herself for a moment, just at the ridiculousness of it; here she is savouring a purple bruise and a little constellations of pimples brewing under the skin of her forehead.

“What’s funny?” Percy asks her, confused.

“Nothing, nothing,” she waves her hands, “just everything, I suppose,”

“Should I be worried about you, or…?”

“No need.  Never better,” strangely, oddly, she isn’t lying.

The day passes largely uneventfully but just about everything seems monumental because everything is different which means everything is huge.  They pick through the selection of snacks she has in her bag and she watches them windle much faster than she had thought they would between the two of them but doesn’t say anything because she knows the second she does neither she nor Percy will be willing to do much more than nibble at half a granola bar a day.  About midday they walk into a fastfood place and try their best not to drool as they walk up to the cashier and ask her, doing their best to look needy which is admittedly not much of a feat right now, if she’s okay with them just using the water station to fill up their bottles without buying anything.  She is young, maybe early twenties, and she waves them right over, eyes lingering on Percy’s bruised face and the ugly scar on Annabeth’s arm.  “I don’t care,” she says simply, “water’s free anyway and you look like you could use it,”

Annabeth wonders momentarily if that means she looks dehydrated on top of everything else then shuts those thoughts right down.  Bigger problems.  It’s becoming something of a personal mantra.

It would be a boring day, perhaps, if it weren’t for all the newness.  That wasn’t something she really considered before all of this but she’ll live with it if it means that Percy feels safe and she feels like she might actually finally be herself, away from all the crushing nothingness and loneliness of her dad’s house.

“Where are we sleeping?” Percy asks her, the two of them finally leaving the mall as it closes.

She hums for a minute and tries to think.  She has slept outdoors before but the thought of sleeping rough tonight turns her stomach.  They’re in a new city and she doesn’t know where is safe and where isn’t, and if anything happens she doesn’t have a home to run back to, empty of a shell as it may have been, at least it was a place they could go where neither she nor Percy would get hurt.  “We’ll think about it,” she promises, “but I think you mentioned something about a shower earlier and I feel positively grimey,”

Percy nods.  “Let’s find a 24-hour gym,” he says, “we can think about where we’re sleeping after that,”  They’re just putting it off because they don’t really know what to do about it.  There’s no way they don’t both know that already.

The nearest gym that is still open is almost empty and they have to walk down a strange dark road clearly only intended for cars and without a single streetlight in order to enter.  The young man working the front door displays next to no sign that he has seen them, not so much as looking up when he asks them to hand over five dollars each for entry then waving them right through and paying them no more mind.  The room is large and square, one side taken up by weights and the other by cardio.  There are a series of doors on the far wall, each clearly labelled.  They beeline towards them, not so much as thinking about actually exercising.  The only thing they actually spent money on all day was the cheapest shampoo Annabeth could find and she is inappropriately excited to be able to use it.

It feels strange to be breaking away from Percy but she doesn’t really think much of it as she throws a towel his way and then ducks behind the door to the women’s locker room.  There is a bag on a bench, either abandoned or left there by one of the few people in the main room, but there is nobody else in here so Annabeth doesn’t delay in heading to the showers, getting her towel, soap and shampoo out then dropping her bag to the ground outside the door of one of the stalls.  She undresses, drapes her clothes over the top of the door alongside her towel and turns on the shower.  The water pressure is, in a word, underwhelming, in two, absolutely crap, and the water always runs a bit colder than she would like it to and every time she turns the temperature any higher it only increases almost imperceptibly and the pressure gets even spottier, as though the faucet is sputtering and stuttering like a person struggling to get their words out.  She suds up her hair and pretends the water is actually hot enough to wash some of the ache out of her shoulders and when the water begins to trail soap down her face and into her eyes she reaches for a washcloth only to realise she forgot to pack one and she will have to go without.

Her hair tangles despite her best efforts to run her fingers through it and running her towel over it to do away with the worst of the water doesn’t help any and when it starts to dry it feels like all the moisture has been completely sucked out of it.  And still it ranks amongst the most satisfying showers she has ever had.

She doesn’t have much by way of clothes but she has a clean pair of leggings and another sports bra and an old t-shirt that is definitely Percy’s now that she looks at it so she pulls them on and bundles her other clothes into the same old target bag as her used underwear.  They’ll have to find a laundromat at some point.  That gets filed away with everything else on her endless mental list.

She waits outside the locker rooms for Percy for a little while, sitting with her elbows braced on her knees on one of the many unused weight-lifting benches nearby.  He’s told her before how rough washing his hair can be on his shoulders and it’s not like she has anywhere better to be so she doesn’t mind waiting.  It’s actually kind of nice to get the chance to sit and not think for a little while, even if it is taking everything she had not to think too hard about how many people have sweated onto this bench and how few of them actually cleaned it satisfactorily after.

Percy doesn’t take too much longer to reappear, bag slung over one shoulder and damp towel across the back of his neck catching the water dripping from his hair.  In hindsight, that was probably a better idea than just letting the water from her hair drip right down her back and soak into her t-shirt but now she knows for next time.  She waves to him in case he hasn't seen her and he shoots her a smile but does not walk immediately over, standing by the locker room door instead and holding it open for someone else.

Chapter Text

“This is Leo,” Percy tells her and Annabeth looks from him to the boy their age standing behind him wringing his hands.  He’s slight and he’s scrawny and he looks a little bit like a latino elf and she supposes she is as inclined to trust him as she would be any stranger.  Still, he is a stranger.  “He’s been where we are,” percy goes on, “and him and his buddies have an apartment and an inflatable mattress,”

She wants to ask him how safe it is to really trust this stranger but she doesn’t think any of this is particularly safe.  Sleeping out on the street in a strange city she doesn’t know definitely isn’t.  “Your buddies?” she asks Leo instead.

He nods a little too quickly a few too many times and tucks his thumbs into his pockets.  “My friend Jason and his sister, Thalia.  The place is hers.  I ran away from another foster home and Jason noticed I wasn’t at school so he came looking for me, took me in,”

“So now you’re taking strays?”  She’s at least a little reassured by the fact that there is another girl there, that this isn’t some sort of sketchy halfway house filled to the brim with strange men with bad intentions.  This is just two kids and another kid whose head they have put a roof over.  Maybe, finally, their luck is looking like it is taking a turn for the better.

“They won’t mind,” Leo shrugs, “and I’d feel like douche if I didn’t even offer,”
“But this offer is genuine?” She feels a little like it might be too good to be true but he nods again, narrow face earnest.

“It'd be better than sleeping on the streets,” he promises.  “I’d know.” he looks between them.  “Do you have bus fare?  Because I don’t have enough for all of us and the walk would take us a while,”

She nods and tries not to reveal where she is keeping her money in case his master plan is just to steal what little she and Percy have.  “So we’re doing this,”

Leo talks the whole way there and Percy and Annabeth do their best to answer his questions, the vast majority of them banal, some almost incoherent--more an attempt to fill a silence they all know would quickly turn awkward than one to really learn about them.  She sits next to Percy on the bus and Leo hovers next to them instead of sitting on the empty seats behind, one hand clutched on the railing and the other tight around the strap of his bag.  He makes a little bit too much eye contact and she finds herself looking out of the window to avoid it, cracking her fingers in her lap so many times over that they cease to make a noise, and going through the motions regardless.  She tries to read graffiti as they pass it by, spots two posters for missing cats, slotted into plastic envelopes but rendered almost illegible by the weather nonetheless, thinks about the architecture and tries to imagine complex little lives for the people milling around outside in the dark.

She was hardly expecting to be led to the nicest part of town so she isn’t surprised when the bus stops at a bus shelter that looks like it has been half-torn down, plastered with paper and spray paint wherever it isn’t shattered.  “It’s only a couple minute’s walk,” Leo says cheerfully, readjusting his bag over his shoulder.  “It’s kinda crappy, so don’t get your hopes up,”

Percy shrugs and steals the words right out of Annabeth’s mouth.  “A roof’s a roof,” he shakes his head, his hair still damp and hanging limply in front of his eyes.  “Seriously, thank you again,”
Leo half laughs.  “You’ve said that enough times already,”
“I’m pretty sure I haven’t,”

It has always been Annabeth’s opinion of Percy, despite her brief, initial annoyance at him hanging around her like the perfect intersection between a puppy and a fruit fly, that he is easy to get along with.  She understands that this isn’t a commonplace opinion--that, outside of herself, Percy has never made friends easily; that people find him off putting in the same way they find her off putting.  She has a gut feeling people feel that same way about Leo much of the time.

True to Leo’s word, he stops them in front of a door in a wall tucked between small storefronts, all now closed for the night, that Annabeth, through the lens of all of the day’s stress and exhaustion, is almost sure she wouldn’t have noticed.  “Home sweet home,” he says chipperly, as Annabeth squints at what she is almost certain is a death threat carved crudely into the brick beside the door handle.  The wood of the door is chipped and weathered, and when Leo opens it, it squeaks like it is protesting to being used.  He leads them up rickety stairs she is sure haven’t been cleaned in the past year, at least, and then to another door.

“Honey, I’m home,” Leo smiles saccharinely as he calls to his roommates, adding on “and I have company,” like an afterthought.  Anxiety bubbles in Annabeth’s gut and she is forced to ask herself how she hasn’t been feeling it the whole trip over.  He must see it on her face because he looks up at her over his shoulder, waving his hands like he is the one who is scared.  “I told them you were coming,” he waves a flip phone in front of her and Annabeth can’t even remember the last time she saw one of those, “They aren’t just going to throw you out,”

“I might,” says a woman’s voice somewhere behind Leo, teetering impossibly on a line between disinterested and amused, “if they break the rules,”  Annabeth shivers.

Leo rolls his eyes.  “The rules are very simple,” he says, “They boil down to ‘don’t be a douchebag’,”

“And don’t steal my food!” the woman adds, finally appearing behind Leo in the cramped hallway that is much too narrow for them to stand beside each other in.  Her jewellery is amongst the first things Annabeth notices about her--there is a lot of it, in piercings all over her ears and a few in her face, strung around her neck and wrists, heavy rings weighing down just about every finger, and none of it seems to match.  Her dark hair is short and spiky and she looks almost exactly like she is dressed to head out to the sort of cheap gig that Percy likes and Annabeth kind of slightly hates but never complains about being dragged along to.  That is, apart from the almost obnoxiously pink fluffy socks she is wearing over ripped tights.  Strangely they make Annabeth feel a little less on-edge about this whole ordeal which, in turn, makes her worry much more about her own intelligence and how easily fooled she might be.  She could turn back right now, go home to where she is safe if uncomfortable and unwanted, decide this whole thing is a bad idea and undo it without even making anything much worse.  But Percy?  Well, she doubts he can do the same so she stays there in a stranger’s doorway in a brand new city and hopes the pink socks aren’t just distracting her from something horrible and obvious.

“You must be Thalia,” Annabeth tries for a friendly smile and hopes it doesn’t look as much like a grimace as she feels like it does.

“Must I?” she cocks a pierced eyebrow and crosses her arms across her chest before rolling her eyes and grinning, her teeth off-white and sharp and not-quite straight, more than a little like Percy’s.  “Leo didn’t give me your names, so unless you want me to call you Stray One and Two,” she gestures languidly to Annabeth, then Percy, “I’d suggest that you do,”  Annabeth laughs a little as she obliges, not sure if she is delirious or just relieved.

“You have an actual New York accent,” Thalia laughs as Percy introduces himself, “I thought those only existed in, like, gangster movies,”

“Hey!” Annabeth knows what Percy looks like when he’s really upset well enough to know that this isn’t that.  “It’s not that bad,”

“You’re in my house;” Thalia quips as she grabs him by the elbow and promptly pulls him in through the front door, “everything is exactly as I say it is,”

“Is that rule number three?” Annabeth asks in spite of herself.

“You catch on quick,” Thalia grins.

“Where’s Jason?” Leo asks, rising up onto his tiptoes to peer over her shoulder.

“Out getting food,” she looks back at Annabeth and the mousy brown-almost blonde at the roots of her hair catches the weak light cast from a flickering bulb overhead.  “I don’t know what you guys like but I hope you like Panda Express because we don’t have anything else and I’m pretty sure Jason will have managed to get in just before closing,”

“I eat anything,” Percy says.

Annabeth nods along.  “He’s like a human garbage disposal,”

He jabs her in the ribs, hard enough to make a traitorous little giggle spill past her lips but not hard enough to hurt.  She turns and glares at him and he puts on an over-acted facade of innocence.  “Y’know, sometimes I remember I hate you,” she tells him and all he does in response is grin.

“You’re fun,” Thalia decides with a nod, “but the flirting is already getting a little gross,”

Annabeth sputters and Percy chokes.  “We aren’t flirting,” she insists.

“Sure, sure,” Thalia waves a hand and turns to stage-whisper to Leo, “I’m sure they’ll figure it out someday,”

“There’s nothing to figure out!”  Annabeth insists, “we’ve been friends forever, this is just how we talk to each other,”

Thalia’s face is smug as she nods.  “Is it, now?”

The floors of Thalia’s apartment are all hardwood, all multitude of stains, some surely older than Thalia herself, soaked into chips in the lacquer, covered over with mismatched runs that sit at strange angles and don’t quite fit the space they are in, overlapping each other--”to keep the heat in,” Thalia says apologetically the second time Annabeth trips over one’s corner.  There are lots of pictures on the walls but no frames, all tacked or taped up.  There are at least a couple of older-seeming ones with sticky notes or torn segments of scrap paper--a recipe, a newspaper, part of a stained, old mathematics’ worksheet--covering parts of them and Annabeth rejects the urge she has to peek at what is hidden underneath them.  Her living room is small, cut on one side by a kitchenette, the sink overflowing with dishes.  Her couch is old and maybe made of brown leather, though Annabeth can’t quite tell, what with the sheer quantity of blankets thrown on top of it--a lot of them look handmade, knitted or crocheted or quilted with love then just put away in a thrift store, sold to a stranger for cheap.  The TV is small, playing on such a low volume Annabeth can’t make out a single word being spoken, and the wires trail unimpeded across the floor--another tripping hazard.  Annabeth thinks she might love the place.

“Sit down,” Thalia says, gesturing at the couch as she plops herself into a deflated-looking beanbag chair without a hint of elegance about her.  “If Jason isn’t back in half an hour we’ll go looking for him,” she paws blindly at the floor beside her, almost toppling a half-full bottle of beer as she searches for the remote.  “You like football?” she asks as soon as she has it in hand,”

“Sure,” Percy says.

Thalia hums.  “Too bad,” She puts a murder mystery on and sinks in her chair to watch, turning the volume up as loud as it will go.

It isn’t really that loud and the window behind the TV starts to rattle audibly in its frame as soon as the wind picks up a little.  Thalia frowns and turns on the subtitles.

Jason gets home just as the murderer is revealed and Thalia tries to spring to her feet with a cry of “I knew it!” but, because of the nature of her beanbag, she just kind of falls forward on herself, spilling the last of her beer on one of the many rugs.  “Aww, dammit,” she shakes her head and clambers to her feet to throw the empty bottle out and grab a handful of paper towels which she just sort of lamely presses into the new stain.  “This counts as cleaning, right?”  Percy shrugs, Leo nods, and Annabeth keeps her opinion to herself.

Jason turns out to be a boy about their age, with broad shoulders and close-cropped blond hair and a scar over his lip.  He squints at Thalia, his eyes the same bright blue as hers.  “You’re welcome,” he says with a huff, toeing off his boots and making an upwards gesture with the bags full of food he is holding.  “I’m almost twenty minutes late and you didn’t even call me?  Really?”

“Whoops, is it really that late?” Thalia says a little guiltily, looking at her phone and grimacing.  “You can handle yourself, can’t you?”

Jason rolls his eyes.  “Not really the point,” his eyes meet Annabeth’s and he smiles a little.  “You must be our guests.  Sorry, it’s not much,”

Percy shakes his head.  “I promise it’s more than enough,”

“We have hot food and furniture,” Thalia says, “that’s good enough.  Speaking of hot food…” Thalia sat back in her seat after placing the paper towels on the floor so now just kind of gestures for the food, which Jason brings over with a slight amused groan.  “It’s my money,” she says by way of explanation.

“And you share it oh so generously,” Leo agrees and Annabeth gets the feeling he might be the slightest bit scared of Thalia, even in her pink fluffy socks.

“You know it,” Thalia nods, and like a good mother or maybe just a good sister she follows it up with, “now eat.  Before it gets cold,”

They roll out the inflatable mattress sometime after the takeout containers have made their way into the now-full bin in the kitchenette but they don’t sleep right away.  They watch Saw instead, because that’s a fantastic bedtime story, apparently, and it’s shocking to everybody except Percy (who knows every film she has seen since the day they met because they watched them together) that she has never seen it before.  She screws up her nose at the state of the bathroom--”Just wait til you see ours!” Leo chimes and Thalia stretches her legs from the beanbag to the couch to kick him in the shin--and she winces as the serrated edge of the titular saw slices painfully and slowly through flesh and sinew and bone.  And then she is supposed to sleep.  She keeps looking at the television screen with disgust long after it has gone dark and she pretends that she is more annoyed than calmed down by Percy’s not-so-subtle giggling behind her.

“You don’t mind sharing, right?” Thalia asks at the last moment before she leaves the living room to go to bed.  Annabeth nods, Thalia shoots her two thumbs up, and that’s that.

“Let me know if you do anything weird like shout or walk in your sleep,” Leo tells them, then adds as an afterthought “or dance in your sleep.  That would be fun,”

Percy shakes his head and Annabeth levels him with a look.  “He talks in his sleep,” she tells Leo, gesturing over her shoulder with his thumb.

“I do not!” Percy sounds a little indignant but that doesn’t make her any less right.

“You sleep talked last night!  And every other night we have ever slept together!” she pauses for a second, as soon as she realises what she has said, and feels her face getting hot.  She looks at Leo who is grinning at them knowingly even though there is absolutely nothing to know.  “I didn’t mean it like that,” she says.

“Whatever you say,” Leo says dismissively right back.

“You don’t believe me,” Annabeth scowls.

“Noooo,” He responds, insincerity dripping off of his tongue.

“I’m telling the truth!”  She realises Percy has been strangely quiet so turns to face him so quickly she almost gives herself whiplash.  “You know I’m telling the truth!  Why aren’t you helping me?”

He holds up his hands in surrender.  “I didn’t think it would help,”  The one thing wrong with being close friends like this is that Percy absolutely is not scared of her like all good, sensible people should be.  It’s her own fault really, for leaving too many well-meant threats unfulfilled.  She cuffs him on the shoulder anyway, even though it only makes him smile at her more and she hates the way the too-sharp points of his canines poke at the flesh of his lower lip in the same way that she has since she started to love the shapes his face twists into when he’s happy.

“I don’t actually care,” Leo says, cheeky grin still in place.  “Just, you know, remember that I’m in here, too,”

Annabeth searches for something to throw at him, settling on her sweat-soaked jumper.  Leo doesn’t seem overly pleased when it hits him in the face.  “I’m going to bed now,” she tells him, and he only smiles wider, like he has won even though she knows with nothing but absolute certainty that she is right and he is wrong.  Still, he gets up from the sofa to flip the light switch, plunging them into a darkness only broken through by the light on the small screen in the microwave in the kitchenette, then settles back right where he was, throwing them down a seemingly entirely random selection of blankets and couch cushions before turning onto his side so that his back is pressed against that of the couch and his eyes, though closed, are facing out to the rest of the world.

As soon as Percy lies down he mutters something like “ohmygodthisisliterallyheaven,” words and syllables all running together and, headphones in now that he has somewhere to reliably charge his phone, he falls asleep before she’s even had the chance to lie down herself.  He’s right that no inflatable mattress has the right to be this comfortable but it still takes Annabeth a while to fall asleep.

She can hear the wind outside, the way it rattles the window frame and makes her feel ever so slightly concerned that it is going to take the entire building down, as well as the thrum of Percy’s music leaching out quietly from his headphones and into the air.  She can’t tell what it is, but it’s energetic and loud and she’s almost sure she’s heard it before.  They like to exchange music.  Percy's is angry and hers is sad and sometimes they find something in the middle that makes them stare up at the ceiling or the space where stars should be and just let it sit between them without words.  She likes sad music because she can half convince herself that there is something elegant about her misery.  That's not true though, she knows it: she and Percy bonded over their anger issues

They’re hard to see in the dark but if she really focuses she can tell that there is paper coming away from the walls, where it has been stuck over parts of photos.  She thinks about that too, about how Thalia still wanted these pictures on her walls, still wanted to see them every day, just not all of them.  And even then, she didn’t want to cut them up, or couldn’t make herself do it.  Something like that.  Percy is the only person Annabeth keeps a photo of and she knows that there are two pictures in Percy’s wallet: one of her and one of Sally.  There are no pictures of her mother in Frederick Chase’s home, at least not on display, and there are no photos at all in Percy’s apartment, really more Gabe’s than Percy’s or Sally’s.  Percy tells her stories sometimes, about being a little kid who was allowed to take up space and make messes, but he almost never mentions the day it ended, about the gentle words telling him to clean up that turned much too quickly to kicks to the ribs--he told her once it felt a little like being in a prison, and she knew from that moment on that anytime he came to her in the middle of the night it was only because he needed to escape to keep himself sane.

“I’m sorry,” Percy says in his sleep, earnestly and with more clarity than any of his other mumblings.  She can only imagine who he is dreaming about, what he is apologising for, but she hates how genuine he sounds; a world away from her stepmother's "I'm sorry you feel that way”s, from the quiet communications of “this is your fault and you are blaming me,” which she has become used to hearing, the polite refusal of blame.  He sounds genuine and scared and, though Annabeth can’t ask him, she can practically picture his face, looming and horrible and grim.  Gabe is very easy to imagine as a monster, and he has never even spent the night under her bed.

When he fell asleep he had his limbs stretched out like a starfish, occupying most of the mattress, and she didn’t even mind it, but now he turns to face her, curled up in the foetal position with his head tucked against his chest, close to his knees.  He looks small, vulnerable, here on a stranger’s floor.  Maybe she gets it now.  Maybe it’s that Frederick’s home, no matter how much she hates it, isn’t all that unsafe of a place to be, that the stranger asleep on the couch and the two in the bedrooms, no matter how nice they seem, are the realest danger she has faced in a while but for Percy, well… strangers they may be, but they are kind ones, and Gabe’s home has never been a safe place for him.  She doesn’t know the extent of what Gabe does, of what he has done, but she knows enough to know that Percy has always winced an awful lot and she had overlooked it and put it down to the pain he lets her know about, but he is wincing an awful lot less these past couple days, even with all the fear and the newness, and the bright bruise plastered across his face.

He stretches his arm towards her in his sleep and she traces shapes on his outstretched palm--a square, a star, a doric column, then an ionic one, just to be sure she can remember the difference.  His skin is soft where it isn’t scarred and, in his sleep, he does nothing to indicate he has felt it.  She steals one of his headphones and smiles ruefully now that she can actually hear the lyrics--something about hitting your dad with a baseball bat, and finally actually settles in to sleep.  The apartment smells a bit like a thrift store, her hair like cheap strawberry shampoo, and the stain in the rug emanates a subtle beer smell she wouldn’t have recognised were her face not so close to the floor.  She sleeps well in spite of it all.  Maybe because of it.

Chapter Text

For once Annabeth isn’t the first to wake up.  She doesn’t have her trusty old alarm clock anymore, and there is no bus rattling underneath her to jostle her periodically out of her sleep, no sun streaming against her face to lull her into wakefulness.  She is comfortable and she sleeps well, probably dreams but doesn’t remember a single second of it.

She reaches out a hand as she wakes up, tries to find Percy on the other side of the mattress but he isn’t there and the first thing she does is panic as she remembers that they’re in a strange city with strange people and something terrible may have happened to him in the night.  She might be alone now.  She sits up, the bleariness of sleep gone, and her eyes dart around for a moment until the scent of breakfast hits her and she sees Percy in the kitchenette, Jason craned over his shoulder.  Leo is still asleep on the sofa, his limbs dangling over the edge of it and the blankets that were once covering him all tangled and knotted together in a ball by his feet.

She gets up, stretches and approaches the kitchenette, drawn in by the smell of delicious hot food.  All the dirty dishes that were in the sink the night before are gone and there’s a banged-up skillet on the stove, over-easy eggs cooking on one side, their whites all blending together, and maple bacon sizzling on the other.  There are store-bought hash browns in the oven and Jason is saying “so, how do you cook eggs without breaking the yolks?” and Percy is smiling back at him a little incredulously and the last of Annabeth’s fear dissipates.  She laughs a little and Percy looks over his shoulder at her, grinning.

“Good morning!”

“You’re up,” Jason says, “so can you please tell him he doesn’t have to earn his keep here?  Trust me, if you did Leo would’ve been out a long time ago.”  As if on cue, Leo lets out a single well timed snore and falls from the sofa onto the inflatable mattress.

“Isn’t Thalia going to kill us for eating her food?” she says instead.

“Thalia doesn’t buy any food that takes more effort to cook than a frozen pizza,” Jason dismisses, “I bought all of this.”  She nods, somewhat comforted that all of her bad decisions seem to be shaping up miraculously well.  Resolutely, she does not allow herself to spiral just yet, doesn’t give herself permission to dwell on what comes after a museum trip and a night or two more at Thalia’s.  She accepts her makeshift breakfast sandwich when Percy offers it to her, squishes the brioche in her hands hard enough that the crispy edges of the hash brown contained within crunch then split, and the yolk pops.  She lets herself enjoy the way it tastes and the way Percy laughs as the gloriously golden yolk starts to run down her hands before she starts to wish she had picked up her father’s call to find out whether or not someone was looking for them, whether or not they have to keep moving to keep ahead of them.  She looks at the mattress where she slept like a baby as Leo snores himself awake and wishes she could relax again as the worry claws its way up her throat.

She tries to pull answers out of Thalia when she eventually stumbles in, still wearing her pink fluffy socks, only with an oversized t-shirt and a pair of basketball shorts from some middle school team she or--judging by the fit of them--more likely Jason had belonged to once-upon-a-time.  There is mascara smudged beneath her eyes that she clearly didn’t clean off properly and her hair is sticking up every which way and the creases from her pillow are still imprinted all over her face and Annabeth is struck again with an odd sort of appreciation for exactly how human she looks, then again by the way she apparently associates being human with being undone somehow, being proudly a little bit of a mess.  The family of porcelain dolls she has left behind is uncanny and cold and Thalia smears ketchup across her face in an attempt to wipe some of the mascara away and she pouts at Jason as he laughs.

“You can stay as long as you like,” Thalia dismisses her concerns with a hand wave.  “Especially if that one keeps cooking me breakfast and doing my dishes for me.”  Percy looks at Jason with a satisfied smirk and Jason rolls his eyes and Percy looks so at home here Annabeth feels a sudden stab of guilt she is certain is not supposed to be hers to feel.  But he will never feel it and someone has to, someone who is not Sally and is not Percy--someone has to care about them, about the things that happen to them and all the ways they’ve been hurt.  It’s rotten work and Annabeth shoulders it anyway.

She almost wishes Thalia would tell them to get out.  To leave.  Put a deadline on her hospitality.  Annabeth doesn’t know what to do with herself in a place like this, where she is welcome and accommodated for, where she doesn’t have a schedule to stick to, anything in particular she needs to do.  She wishes Thalia would tell her to leave so she wouldn’t have to let herself get too comfortable on that air mattress next to that beer-stained rug, beneath that photo of Thalia and Jason and the magazine clipping conspicuously covering a third person up.  She can’t stay here forever--knows that even if she doesn’t know why--so she shouldn’t want to.  She should do as she always has done and want nothing more than to leave, to never settle, to be fidgeting out of her skin when confronted with the thought of staying.  But Thalia wants them there, and Annabeth wants to be there and she doesn’t know what to do next because surely it cannot be that easy.

It’s a problem she can confront later, shove it to the background and let it grow until it is one of those innumerable worries that are too big for her to hold, that come out in their ugly ways and haunt her dreams despite having been resolved years ago.  For now there is the Smithsonian and hot coffee and the face Percy makes when he doesn’t want her to know that something hurts.  There is Leo insisting Thalia should let him jury rig her broken heating and Thalia arguing back that she doesn’t want to be evicted or watch the building burn down with all of her things inside of it, Jason watching an old documentary about fighter pilots and occasionally telling them to shut up entirely devoid of venom, Leo relenting and begging Thalia to at least allow him to fix the rattling window that lets all the cold air in because there’s no way he could start a fire doing that, and Thalia reminding him that he’s already on the second of his three pyromaniacal strikes with a fondness about her features that seems to imply she doesn’t really mean it.  For now all is well and Annabeth knows she doesn’t need to prove her stepmother right by ruining every good thing that has ever happened to her.

She looks at the sweaty clothes she has with a grimace and Thalia digs through her closet for anything that won’t “offend her preppy sensibilities” without Annabeth even having to ask.

“Percy would be so jealous,” Annabeth remarks, sitting on Thalia’s unmade bed and looking at her collection of creased band tees with a soft smile.  It’s a small room: bed shoved into the corner, the side of it that she doesn’t sleep in cluttered with indie zines and CD cases and a stained shopping bag filled with well-loved makeup; narrow dresser serving as a side table with a CD player, a half-empty glass of water and a pint glass cum vase of long-dead roses perched on top of it; more fraying rugs underfoot; enough posters on the walls that Annabeth can hardly tell that the walls beneath are actually standard landlord off-white; closet with its cracked built-in mirror threatening to block the door.  It’s so far from either of the houses Annabeth has lived in and she revels in it.

“That gives me an idea,” Thalia says, throwing a pair of faded blue jeans and a belt that is only minimally embellished Annabeth’s way, “if you think Percy would be open to it.  I’m in a band--we’re not great but that’s all part of our charm--and we’ve managed to swindle a local club owner into letting us play on Tuesday.  Do you want to come?  I also have a bunch of t-shirts we can’t sell, I can give you guys a couple each.”

Annabeth blinks dumbly at her for a minute.  “We’re both underage,” she says after a moment and Thalia genuinely laughs at that.

“I’m sure not according to your fake IDs.”

“I don’t have one,” she says, doesn’t like that she can’t say for sure whether or not Percy does.

Thalia just shrugs, pulling a box out from under her bed and rifling through a stack of identical t-shirts, placing a few to Annabeth’s left.  “You can have the t-shirts anyway.  And you’ve got a few days to figure out how you’re going to see me break another string on my ancient bass in front of a room full of people.”

“I’ll try.”  Annabeth holds up one of the t-shirts, squints at the jagged lettering until she can make out the words Artemis and the Hunters in the overly stylised font.  “I’d love to see you play.”

“Get back to me when you’ve actually heard us,” Thalia warns, but she seems pleased to hear Annabeth say it anyway.  “I’ve got some socks here, do you need anything else?”

Percy is standing in the Natural History Museum, looking up at a 2000 lbs model of a shark with his mouth just a little agape and Annabeth is standing next to him, looking at the uninjured side of his face with the sort of fondness that makes her stomach ache.  It had been her idea to start here, where he would be the most engaged, because the thing she is most interested in seeing is the giddy way he is smiling around his words as his hands make these sweeping, enthusiastic gestures to either side of him as he talks to her without tearing his pretty eyes away from the display.

He’s explaining why the model might not be particularly accurate to life and how there aren’t many fossils aside from the teeth, and talking about sharks and the way they just won’t go extinct, and he’s pulling out words like ‘cartilaginous’ and ‘megafauna’ that he would make a point of rolling his eyes at her for using, so she makes him tear his eyes away from the display for just long enough to register her slightly superior smirk and shove her playfully away.  He continues anyway, as though uninterrupted, until eventually he stops and she asks him why he calls it Otodus megalodon when the display calls it Carcharocles megalodon just to hear him carry on.  “Same difference, really,” he tells her and she likes the way that he doesn’t remember anything except the things that interest him and he knows everything about her, “there are way too many names for megalodon to keep track of.  Doesn’t help that they reclassified it from Lamnidae to Otodontidae.  They decided that it wasn’t as closely related to the great white as they thought it was--or most of them did, anyway, it’s pretty telling if people are still calling it Carcharodon, like a type of white shark.  It’s actually more closely related to the shortfin mako.”  And he keeps on going because Annabeth keeps prompting him to, following tangents about raptorial sperm whales and how Moby Dick was one of the only books for English class that he actually read, and Leedsichthys that she tries to follow until she gets lost in the sound of his voice and the way it feels like the home she has always wanted and never been able to have.

He finally decides he is ready to leave and, as they do, they pass a boy who might be a year or two younger than they are, explaining to his friend that the ocean is massive and mostly unexplored so they can’t know that anything that ever lived in it is actually extinct and there’s almost definitely at least a couple megalodon still out there.  Percy rolls his eyes with a genuine frustration that is neither the joy nor the anger she is used to seeing from him and she can’t help but laugh at it.  “Can you believe this guy?” he mouths more than whispers, and as Annabeth watches the way his lips move to form those sounds he is not vocalising, she is hit square in the gut with the urge to kiss him.  She stops where she stands and tries to shove it back down with all of the other issues she is saving for later when she can afford to collapse and sob and panic about them and Percy cocks his head at her like a puppy and completely doesn’t help.  “Please don’t tell me you’re one of those people that think megs are still out there.”

She shakes her head a little too vigorously.  “No,” she says, “nope.  Those fish are super, extremely dead.”

He nods back sagely, appeased.  “Exactly.”

They move to the Sant Ocean Hall next, again at Annabeth’s insistence and to Percy’s ill-contained glee, and she’s more than happy to stare up at the model of the right whale with him, to feel a little creeped out by the giant squids but to approach them anyway, to admire the craftsmanship of the Northwest Coast canoe and to tell Percy everything she remembers about the Tlingit people.

“I’d have been so much better at school if you were a teacher,” he tells her and she does her utmost not to dwell on the tense of the sentence, on how easy it is for him to sound like he never plans on going back.  She doesn’t want to go back either but she does want to know what comes next, wants the opportunities a high school diploma then, eventually, a college degree might provide her.  But that is another of those problems that will ruin the moment for no good reason so she just does away with it.

“I do like learning,” she says instead and he nods.

“I noticed.”

They leave the Natural History Museum and head to the American History Museum and all the way Annabeth makes fun of Percy for being a poser and wearing a shirt for a band he has never heard a single song from, not because she believes it, just because she knows it will annoy him.  He insists that it’s different because he knows one of the band members and Annabeth cackles so loudly and so much like a witch that an old woman passing them by looks at her a little aghast and then starts to giggle as she goes, and Percy starts laughing too, doubles over in the middle of the street and makes them stop there for a minute or so, so he can catch his breath.  Even though she’s looking at it, she stops noticing the bruise.  The joy suits him: the laugh that starts raspy and ends up silent, the way his sharp canines prod at the skin of his bottom lip and the gap between his two front teeth, the way only one of his cheeks dimples.  Comparatively, the black eye is nothing.  Like a fingerprint smudge on an aquarium.  Percy is so much bigger than anything Gabe could do to him.  She wants to tell him as much but doesn’t know the right words to use so says nothing and hopes that her expression conveys everything.

Leo puts her and Percy in touch with the Stoll brothers who aren’t twins no matter how much they look like they are, and are quick to tell her that, like they already know what she is thinking.  It disquiets her somewhat, but there is an ease to the way they smile at her and the way that they speak that she decides she is going to find comforting.  They deal in things like fake IDs and other such low-level criminality and she willfully ignores the little chat Percy and Connor have about the ways one can be an effective shoplifter when they need to eat but have no money nor place to go. 

She lets them turn her into Annabelle Clark and Percy into Peter Johnson and she tries not to feel strange about how Clark seems no less like her name than Chase does as Percy explains how strange it is to think of himself as anything other than Jackson when it is his mother’s name.  There’s something about the Stolls, about Thalia and Jason and Leo, that is oddly familiar.  She’s had this feeling all her life that she was somehow intrinsically different from everyone around her that Percy is the only person to ever have successfully bridged and now there are all these other people who she realistically barely knows and yet feels understood by.

She asks them if Thalia's band is any good because they apparently know her well and Travis shrugs and says “They’re fun,” which doesn’t really answer her question.

She finds out for herself soon enough, tries not to let the bouncer see that she’s terrified as she presents him with her brand new fake ID.  Luckily he basically just glances at it, like he’s only really there for plausible deniability, and waves her, Percy, Leo and Jason right through the door.  It’s still early so it is still empty, dimly lit but brighter than she had been expecting it to be.  There is a bar on one side of the long-low room that, aside from the toilets, seems to be all there is to the club, and a small, raised stage against the wall furthest from the door.  It is there where Thalia and a group of four other girls who are dressed in more or less the same fashion that she is are setting up their instruments.

Thalia is sipping on something clear and bubbly in a disposable plastic cup that she puts down to wave at them when they walk in, grinning widely enough that Annabeth can see the flecks of black lipstick on her incisors.  “For courage!” she announces with a flourish as she abandons the straw she had been using and throws the rest of it back.

“I’m sure you don’t need it,” Annabeth says back, trying to be supportive but no longer entirely sold on what she is saying.

Thalia shrugs and plucks discordantly at her bass’ lowest string, other hand nowhere near the fretboard.  “ You might, based on our track record.”

“I don’t drink.”

Thalia nods along.  “I’ll try not to be the thing that drives you to it, then.”

Annabeth heads over to the bar at Thalia’s request, buys a round of nothing but cola that makes the bartender eye her with pleasant amusement as he fills the cups and Annabeth realises there is no world in which she will be able to carry them all at once.  Thankfully, as he always is, Percy is right there to help her as soon as he has noticed her predicament and Annabeth considers, not for the first time, where she would be without him.  If she had let that annoying kid at the skatepark stay that annoying kid at the skatepark and had never gone back.  Her life would be worse--even without a home to go back to she can be sure of that.  Somewhat guiltily she’d like to think that Percy’s would be too, though she doesn’t want to dwell on how when she has for so long been his only avenue of safe escape.

She drinks her cola through a paper straw that quickly goes soggy and she has a conversation with Leo about all the ways that Thalia’s building is awful from every single viewpoint aside from the one Annabeth keeps looking at it through that makes it one of her favourite places in the world.  The topic changes at some point, either naturally or interestingly enough that she doesn’t quite notice it happening, to robotics and engineering and the things that are making the world a better place as well as the ones that are making it worse.  It’s a big conversation, perhaps, to be having with a boy she has only known for a few days, in a bar that smells like spilled alcohol and someone’s sickly-sweet vape, over music that it growing steadily louder as more people, all varying levels of intoxicated, start to file in and strike up chatter of their own all around them.  It’s not the sort of place where she feels comfortable but Leo, like very few people she has ever met in her life, is the sort of person whose company she feels comfortable in.

The music playing over the speakers stops eventually and a willowy girl with silver-green eyes and auburn hair who Annabeth assumes must be Artemis clears her throat into her mic and introduces her band and most of the eyes in the room turn to look at her.  Annabeth is watching Thalia behind Artemis as she adjusts the strap of her bass and Annabeth can clearly follow the shape of a nervous gulp as it passes down the pale column of her throat.

It’s not Annabeth’s sort of music--too shouty, too honest in its anger--but she likes it well enough, even as Artemis’s voice cracks when she tries to pitch it too loud and the guitars fall out of synch with the drums, and there are too many words jammed into a verse so they all become completely jumbled to her ears.  She enjoys the odd safety of having Percy’s shoulder pressed against hers, Leo and Jason on her other side, the two of them shouting along to the choruses even though nobody else is because they’ve no doubt heard these songs many times before.  It doesn’t actually matter whether or not it’s good, she realises as she listens to the final chorus of their third song and realises she actually does know the words well enough from the previous repetitions to join in on the shouting. Whether or not they’re any good--which admittedly they maybe are not--doesn’t really feel like the point.

They wrap up and not everybody applauds or even really acknowledges them, but enough people do and Annabeth makes sure that she is one of the loudest, singing like a bird out of its cage, revelling in the odd freedom she feels in this crowded room.  Thalia grins at her whole little group, sweaty and shining under the lights, lipstick smeared onto her cheek and freckles peeking through the foundation she has begun to sweat off.  It’s frankly shocking how quickly she has become one of Annabeth’s favourite people, but then again it is not, considering quite how few people she actually likes.

At Jason’s prompting, they follow the band as they head out of the back door to load their instruments into a hollowed-out minivan and Thalia procures a six-pack of warm beer from the passenger-side foot well that she passes around to her bandmates.  “So, these are your new strays,” Artemis remarks with a pretty sort of smile and here, beneath the inky black night sky, still without stars, her eyes look remarkably like the moon with their silvery sheen.  Thalia introduces them--as “Annabeth and the one that feeds me,”--to her, then to Zoë, the drummer, then to Phoebe the guitarist, and Bianca on keys.

She pops the bottle cap off of her beer with a keychain that may or may not have been intended for that purpose, then curses as it lands on the already filthy ground and she tries to find it by the light of her phone’s torch even though nobody would notice if she just left it there.  She pockets the cap when she finds it and lets Zoe try to wipe the lipstick from her cheek with only minimal success and hangs around when the rest of the band piles into the minivan that only has two seats left in its gutted interior.  “I’ve got pets,” she shrugs, looking at Annabeth, Percy and Leo with a sort of fondness Annabeth isn’t sure they’ve earned from her, “I can’t leave them alone all night when they’re just settling in.”

So they stay in the alley long after the car is gone, talking and shivering as the sweat they built up while they were inside turns cold against their skin.  It’s nice even though it doesn’t smell great and Thalia asks them what they thought and Annabeth tells her honestly that it was the most fun she’s had in a very long time.

“You don’t mean that,” Thalia tells her authoritatively, but the thing is that she does.  And she insists that she does and Thalia hugs her once she’s reiterated her point enough times that it must have actually gotten across and her arms are thin but they are strong, and just a little bit of her beer spills on the back of Annabeth’s shirt.  She thinks she might love DC in a way she was never able to love New York.

She jinxes it by thinking that, of course. 

“Thalia!” a man’s voice calls from around the corner, like maybe he has heard them speaking.  “Babe.  Long time no see!” and it is like Thalia freezes, her mostly full bottle falling from her fingers and shattering against the sidewalk, splashing beer on the hems of Annabeth’s borrowed jeans.

Chapter Text

Annabeth feels like she is watching it all happen from somewhere outside of herself.  Thalia, who previously seemed thoroughly unshakeable, rattles like a loose-limbed tree in the wind, and she looks small with her hair matted close to her head with sweat.  Jason and Leo have taken cautious steps back, their faces startlingly blank, and Annabeth knows they know something she doesn’t.  And Percy.  Well, Annabeth doesn’t know what’s happening, but she does know Percy, and there’s something like a horrible understanding on his face, a bland wide-eyed comprehension.  And she is just standing there, looking between Thalia, and the empty dark space where the voice came from, and the beer on the floor.

From the darkness through the alley emerges a young man with bright blond hair and sky blue eyes, and a self-assured smile that Annabeth doesn’t know how to interpret, but that makes Thalia recoil.  “I’ve been looking for you,” he says, and the way he holds himself is casual but there’s a non-specific venom about him, like he is turning everything around him toxic.  “Why didn’t you tell me where you were going?” and it’s like the smile melts right off.

“Luke,” Thalia says slowly, like she’s speaking around a mouthful of molasses.  He keeps walking, stepping in too close to her.  Annabeth hates the way he dwarfs her.  “I had to leave.”  Jason makes a face, a visible wince, and Leo takes another step back, like he’s trying to get away.  Like he needs to get away.  And Annabeth thinks she gets it now.  For just a moment, she loses sight of Percy as he ducks down, as though retying his shoelaces, but that doesn’t make any sense.

“You didn’t have to do anything.” There’s no hiding the venom this time.  It’s right there, and it’s bitter and it’s angry and his hands are on Thalia’s shoulders.  It doesn’t seem like he is using much force, but Thalia’s narrow shoulders jump backwards, into the rough brick of the wall, and Annabeth wants her to look angry but she just looks terrified.  And Jason looks terrified and Leo looks terrified.  And Percy still looks blank, empty.

“I did,” Thalia almost says, before she pivots to “I’m sorry.”

Luke cocks his head at her, all saccharine sweet.  “You know,” he says, almost teasing in tone, “that isn’t a good enough answer.”  And his hands are on her again, anything but sweet.  His fingers are tight and pressing on her arms, and his muscles are all tense, and Annabeth knows that nothing good happens next, even if she is watching from half a world away.

Percy isn’t blank anymore.  He’s angry.  And he’s taller than Luke is, and his big hands are usually gentle ones but now Annabeth hopes he is holding Luke’s shoulder hard enough to bruise.

Luke laughs.  “This isn’t your fight,” he says, then turns darkly right back to Thalia who Annabeth is just starting to wish would run away, even if it meant leaving them all behind.  She just looks so scared, so unlike Annabeth’s new favourite person.

Luke doesn’t know Percy.  Doesn’t know that this is his fight, that the way his eyes are narrow and dark and his body language is tight, coiled like a spring.  Doesn’t know his anger issues like Annabeth does, doesn’t know that he’s never really been able to overcome them.

Annabeth doesn’t see the glint of the glass in Percy’s other hand in the dim light, until it is slicing clean and deep into Luke’s cheek.  His hands fly to his face, right off Thalia’s arms, and Percy throws the shard of broken beer bottle to the floor, grabs Thalia like he’s rehearsed it, and drags her away.  Annabeth forces the body she isn’t really in to follow, and trusts that Jason and Leo will do the same of their own accord.

“What was that!” Thalia all but shouts three blocks away from the bar, and her voice shakes like she’s doing all she can not to cry.  She pulls herself away from Percy now, and his hand leaves a dark, bloody mark on her sleeve.

“I-” Percy says, and he stops, drops his head and tucks his hands behind his back.  He’s only a few paces in front of Annabeth and she wants to run to his side but she stays back because this all feels like it has nothing to do with her in a way she doesn’t know how to navigate.  Percy looks ashamed.  She doesn’t know what to do with it.

“I didn’t need your help!”  Annabeth wonders if Thalia really believes it.  “I don’t need you to fight my battles for me.”

Percy breathes deeply and intentionally.  In and out.  “I know,” he says, “I’m sorry.  I just-” inhale, exhale.  He pushes his hair back away from his face and it falls right back into his eyes.  “My brain got fucked up and I made it about me.”

“Oh.” Thalia says, and Annabeth watches her face change again.  It has this strange, instant way of shifting, of becoming something new from one blink to the next.  She’s unpredictable in a way Annabeth likes when the air isn’t so cold it stings her lungs, and she doesn’t have a bad feeling in her stomach that this surprisingly good thing she stumbled upon is all about to come crashing down.  “Of course,” It’s sort of like it slips out of Thalia’s mouth, and she winces even as she says it, but Percy betrays no sign of having so much as noticed.

“I’ve ruined it, haven’t I?” Percy says, and he sounds small and scared, and just like he did the first time he showed up at her house with a bloody nose and tear-streaked cheeks that she knew immediately had nothing to do with him falling off his skateboard.  Thalia doesn’t say no.

Annabeth walks the rest of the way over to them now, presses in close to Percy’s side and lets his hand clasp around her elbow even with the blood running down his fingers.  She had assumed the blood on Thalia’s sleeve was Luke’s, but now she sees that he must have cut his own palm gripping the shard so tightly.  It seems about right he’d manage to get himself hurt again right as his black eye is finally starting to disappear--Annabeth feels guilty for thinking it; she knows it’s not really his fault.  She also knows the alternative is seeing him as a victim.  Over and over and over again.  All the time and every day, in the shapes of mottled bruises and the ragged lines of stitches, and anything but accidents.

“Does it hurt?” she asks, and Percy acts like he didn’t even notice it.  He probably didn’t.  His skin is probably thick with scar tissue by now, built up like armour.  And still he is so very able to be cut.

“This isn’t good,” Thalia frets.

“Is he going to find you?” Annabeth needs to know that Thalia will be safe, even if she and Percy have to leave.

“We’ll have to leave,” Thalia says it mostly to herself but Jason nods a little numbly along, and Leo makes a face like he is too scared to assume she means him to.  Annabeth knows she does.  “I didn’t wanna leave DC.  I don’t think we have much choice.”

“I’m sorry,” Percy says again.

“It’s not about you,” Thalia reassures him, somewhere between an accusation and a joke.  It is what makes the sick feeling in Annabeth’s stomach start to settle.  “I should have left as soon as I got away from him.  But DC’s home, y’know?  And I didn’t want to lose home as well as everything else.”

Percy smiles at her bittersweetly.  “I felt that way about New York.”

“And then you left.”

“And then I left.  And it feels completely different to how I thought it would.”  Annabeth hasn’t heard anything about this.  It makes her throat feel sour.

“What did James Baldwin say in Giovanni’s Room?” she says, not really meaning to, “You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you can never go back.”

“I never read it,” Thalia shrugs.  Meanwhile, Percy looks at her with something she can only describe as terror.  She swallows a lump in her throat.

“We should go,” Jason cuts in.  “He’ll find us eventually.”

“He’ll find us at the apartment eventually, too.” Thalia grumbles.

“He’ll find us here sooner.  We have time to get out of the apartment.”

And so Annabeth and Percy go back to it for the very last time.  It still feels like a home, when she walks through the rickety, horrible door and over the tripping hazards that carpet the floor.  She tries to pretend that is not synonymous with ‘thing she is doomed to lose’.  Thalia rips down her photographs, tears the person with the covered face right off and scrunches every iteration of him into one big ball.  Then she peels the whole thing apart and rips him into shreds instead.

“We have to go,” Annabeth tells herself out loud.

“Where?” Percy asks.

“Anywhere.  The middle of nowhere.”

“Luke will look for you,” Thalia says, deadly serious.  “You shouldn’t have done that.  But you did.  The middle of nowhere sounds like a good idea right now.”  Percy doesn’t say that he isn’t scared of Luke.  Annabeth wishes he would.  She doesn’t like that Percy, who throws himself around and lives in every moment, and is doing this crazy thing with her, is scared of anything.  She likes the things he’s scared of even less.

“You’re leaving too?” Annabeth double checks.  If Luke is so dangerous and Thalia is so scared, she wants nowhere near him.

“As soon as I can find another place as dirt cheap as this one that’s nowhere near it.  I’m thinking West Coast.”

“Florida?” Jason suggests.

“Ew,” Thalia says, “I’m not living in a swamp.”

“What about me?” Leo dares to ask, sounding small.

“You aren’t banned from the Pacific Northwest, are you?” Thalia says, sounding somewhat confused, like it hasn’t even occurred to her to leave Leo behind.

Leo laughs, a little relieved sound bubbling up from the back of his throat.  “Of course not.”

“How about you?” Jason turns to Annabeth.  “Where’s the middle of nowhere?”

“Virginia,” she says.  She’s not even really attached to it, but she had decided on it arbitrarily when they first left New York so she’s sticking to the plan.

“Virginia,” he repeats, “never been.”

“It’s not really worth going to,” she shrugs.

“Then why are you going?” Thalia asks.

“Because it’s not worth going to.”

“I like that,” she says.  “I’m thinking we find some tiny shithole town in Washington and never leave again.”

Annabeth cocks an eyebrow.  “From Washington to Washington?”

“I like what I like.”

“The name Washington?”

“Exactly!”

They get ready to leave early the next morning, when the sun is just barely beginning to rise.  Neither of them slept very well last night.  She was dozing off well enough, but Percy was tossing and turning, and when she blearily asked him why, he said it was because there was a moment where Thalia looked just like his mom and he snapped.  And then she couldn’t sleep either.  Being anything like Percy’s mom should be an honour, should be a good thing, shouldn’t break Annabeth’s heart.  She loves Sally Jackson like everyone who knows Sally Jackson and also has a heart loves Sally Jackson, and it breaks her brain somewhat to think of her as anything other than softly smiling and beautiful.  It makes her think about Sally how she doesn’t want to think about Percy: black eyes, scattered contusions, a victim of someone who is regrettably just as human as she is.  A victim.

She packs all of her things into her bag.  It’s getting quite full now, because she showed up out of nowhere and Thalia gave her everything she could even though Annabeth couldn’t give her anything back.  She’s looking for her Ritalin when she finds Thalia’s socks.  A pair of the fluffy pink ones.  She must have slipped them into Annabeth’s bag when she wasn’t looking.  She peels off the ones she’s wearing--a pair of the nice merino wool ones she stole from her father--and puts them on.  It’s a bit of a squeeze to shove them into her sneakers but she does it anyway.  She finds the Ritalin too, eventually.  Unscrews the cap and looks down into the bottle, rattles it as though that will somehow make the last few pills multiply back into a full bottle.  She grimaces, tips one pill into her hand, and uses Thalia’s sharpest knife to bisect it on the kitchenette counter.  She takes one half with a swig of water, and puts the other half back into the bottle.  She knows it probably isn’t smart, which doesn’t stop her from doing it.

“So you’re leaving,” Thalia says from her bedroom doorway, wearing her ratty pyjamas and another pair of her fuzzy socks.  Her roots are mousier than ever and her hair looks terrible, and she didn’t take her makeup off properly, and, God, Annabeth wants to stay here.  But she can’t.  None of them can.

“The train from Union Station to Charlottesville leaves a little after eight.”

Thalia makes a face.  “That’s too early.  Especially for how far from Union Station we are.”

“Hence why we’re all awake at the asscrack of dawn,” Percy says, which Annabeth thinks is somewhat hyperbolic.

“That’s why you’re awake,” Thalia corrects, “I’m awake to say goodbye.”  She pauses.  “And maybe also thank you.”

“We’re the ones who should thank you,” Annabeth says.

“You already have.  Plenty.  You-” she takes Percy by the shoulders, shakes him, and he lets himself be wobbled, “I am so going to miss having hot breakfasts that aren’t from McDonalds.”

“What McDonalds are you going to that actually serves breakfast hot?”

“It’s lukewarm at best,” Thalia agrees.  She hugs them both, and loads them up with snacks, and makes sure she can’t offer them anymore when she has already given them so much.

“We’ll visit you in Washington one day,” Annabeth says.

“You better.”

“Well, you said you’d never leave,” Percy shrugs with a grin.

“The middle of nowhere has a sort of appeal," Thalia admits.

“There’s a romanticism to everything if you’re looking for it,” Annabeth says, and Thalia smiles at her in a way that says she doesn’t really get it, but appreciates it nonetheless.

“If you say so.  You make me feel like I need to read more books.”

“Everyone needs to read more books.”

“Some of us are dyslexic.”  Thalia holds up her hands as though in surrender.

Annabeth looks around the room, takes stock of the three of them.  “All of us are dyslexic,” she corrects.

“Oh, don’t tell me that,” Thalia complains, “I’d like to keep hold of my excuse.”

“Libraries have audiobooks,” Annabeth says, “you can read without really reading.”

Thalia nods.  “I’ll make sure our shithole town in Washington has a library then.  It’s priority number two, right after a grocery store.”

“You don’t cook,” Percy tells her, and Thalia punches him in a way he doesn’t feel the need to reel back from.  “Maybe a takeout place should also be on that list.”

“You’ve inspired me to give it a go,” Thalia says, and Annabeth can see how flattered he is even if he tries to hide it.

“What else is on your list?” she asks.

“TBD.  I’m sure Leo and Jason will come up with something.”

And then they leave.  And it’s over.  It’s ruined.  Because of another horrible man who isn’t a monster.

The morning air outside is cold, even if Annabeth’s back is hot and sweaty almost immediately where her bag is pressed snugly against her spine.  They have to walk to the bus stop, and get one bus, and then another, and then they have to walk to the station because the bus that goes right there comes exclusively at inconvenient times.  It costs money and takes time, but they need to leave so it is what it is.  And the thing is, she didn’t realise until she left Thalia’s apartment quite how scared she was.  But now she’s in the street, and she’s visible, and the odds of Luke being right behind her are slim but they aren’t zero, and she looks over her shoulder after every other step and she’s terrified.  She isn’t hiding it.  And Percy just seems normal, like Percy, walking with the same old gait, the same old ease.  She decides that is not because he is scared all the time because she doesn’t like the thought that it might be.

The sky is light blue and choked with clouds, and the sun is up by now which means they’re running a little low on time but she thinks they’ll be alright.  There’s a strange little alley between an Eastern European grocers, and an Irish pub, and Annabeth slows and strains her eyes to look down it.  She doesn’t see anything, but she does bundle her hair at the back of her head and pull the hood of her sweatshirt up over her head, just in the hopes that, if it’s necessary, she’ll be a little harder to recognise.

“How do you do this every day?” She asks Percy, because sometimes she really does forget he can’t actually read her mind.

“How do I do what?” He’s picking at the edge of the bandage around his hand as he walks, fraying the edge of it.  Jason put it on for him the night before, and Annabeth redid it this morning, and the hole in his palm is a lot deeper than she had first assumed and it keeps bleeding in earnest, and Percy keeps making an effort not to mention it, as if pretending it isn’t there means it doesn’t need stitches because they can’t afford a trip to the ER.

She shakes her head.  It’s not a question she knows how to ask.  “We’ll be in Charlottesville by 10:30.”

“Are we staying there?”

“I think we should get out of the city, head somewhere smaller, more obscure.  Middle of nowhere, remember?”

“I’m a New Yorker, Charlottesville already feels like the middle of nowhere.”

“Oh, you have so much to learn.”  She pauses for a second.  “Do you think he’ll find us?  Luke, I mean.”

“I don’t want to think that.”

“That’s not really an answer.”

He shrugs.  “I think it is.”

She almost says ‘I love you’, instead she just says nothing at all.  The ensuing silence is weird, not because it’s unusual for her and Percy to just exist comfortably beside each other, but because something in her is desperate to fill it and she vehemently refuses to say a word because nothing will come out her mouth she won’t regret.

The Amtrak is thirty minutes late.  She thinks that’s not that bad for an Amtrak, but Percy, spoiled rotten by a lifetime in a rare American city with functional public transport, is aghast.  Or perhaps mildly perturbed and playing it up for her amusement because he doesn’t want the morning to take the almost inevitable downward turn towards gloom they are both expecting it to.  It’s comfortable at least.

“This is way better than the subway,” she says, mostly because she knows it’ll get a reaction out of him.  “The seats are comfortable and I’m not too scared to sit on them, we’ll be able to see the views out of these nice big windows, and it doesn’t smell like urine or something non-specifically worse than urine.”

“This doesn’t compare to the subway,” Percy rolls his eyes, “It was thirty minutes late, for one!  And what views could there possibly be between DC and Charlottesville?”

“The world is pretty, you know?  Even outside New York.  Even without high rises and impressive architecture.  We left New York, so we’re going to experience what it’s like outside of New York.”  He stares at her as she speaks.

“You are badmouthing architecture?”

“I’m not badmouthing anything,” she clacks her fingernails against each other, restless where she sits, which doesn’t bode well for the next two hours considering she has just left the station, “but there’s no better architect than Mother Nature.”

He laughs at her for saying that.  She had hoped he would.

He eats a granola bar Thalia gave him, she tries to sketch something but keeps losing her focus and making decisions that don’t make any sense.  He looks over at her sketchbook page as she drums the eraser end of her pencil against it, trying to work out how much of it can be salvaged and how much she just needs to do away with.  “That house is going to fall down,” he remarks, which means it’s probably even worse than she thinks.

“I don’t know why I like you.”

"I’d like to say my wit, or my charm, or my winning smile, but I think I just wore you down.”

“You’re still wearing me down,” she says, doesn’t mean it.  She gives up on her terrible sketch and opts to just look instead, out the window at the passing edge of DC, at Percy in her periphery, chewing slowly, wincing as his jaw cracks, asking her for the Advil and taking one pill too many.  “We need to get some butterfly bandages,” she says, “you probably need stitches but, well…”

He nods.  “I usually just get crafty with regular bandaids.”

“That’s not good,” she says.

“Cheaper than stitches or butterfly bandages, though.”

She surprises herself when she says “You could just lift them.”

“Huh,” he says, “I guess I could.  You’ve never stolen anything, have you?”  She shakes her head and he nods along.  “Well, I hope you never have to.”  She makes the decision not to mention how severely their funds are dwindling.  Today has not been cheap.  It’s silly really, how long she spent saving, and how quickly all that money is disappearing.  And that’s with Thalia’s unforeseen aid.

“I need coffee,” she decides.  “I’m gonna go get one.  You need anything?”

“Is it too early for hot chocolate?”

“It will never be too early for hot chocolate ever again,” she decides on the spot.  He makes a face at her.

“I feel like shit,” he admits.

“Me too.”

“I think I ruined everything with Thalia.”

He didn’t.  He surely already knows that so it doesn’t matter whether or not she tells him again.  The land passing outside is verdant and green and it is just starting to rain, droplets falling softly on the window panes.  “I hope you left a scar.”

He makes a face and she leaves in search of hot drinks before she can allow herself to agonise over what precisely it might mean.

The coffee is bad.  She was expecting it to be, and she doesn’t really think coffee tastes nice anyway if she’s wholly honest with herself, but she’s hoping it might help fill in for what she’s missing from her dose today.  It probably won’t, and she’s probably placebo-ing herself into feeling the effects of the half-dose more than she actually should be.  The brain is a powerful thing capable of affecting real change. So she thinks about not being scared--not about being brave, just about being somewhere elevated and incredible, somewhere she is above fear.  When she stops thinking she is still just on a train, still scared that Luke might be hiding in the toilets, that her father might be looking for her, that Percy’s absence has turned Gabe more against Sally.  She wouldn’t tell Percy if he had.  It’s the one thing they try to keep secret, in a futile effort to protect each other.

“Here’s your hot chocolate,” she says, handing the cup over.  Her coffee, sweetened slightly outside of the realm of reason, is already half gone, her tongue thoroughly burned.

“I love you,” he says, like it’s easy, like it’s casual, like it doesn’t mean anything big enough to change things.  Because to him, it doesn’t.  Because they’ve always been the way they are and Annabeth’s stupid feelings want to step in and confuse everything.  She takes another too-big pull of her coffee, and tries to drown them out.

“You better,” she says, instead of the ‘I love you too’ that sits expectantly on her scorched tongue.