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He knocks on her door exactly one minute after she’s done with packing. For that one minute, she sits on the floor, facing the made bed. Her rucksack sits on one corner of the bed, near her laptop. She sits on the floor because it feels like the room isn’t hers anymore; she doesn’t know how to sleep in this bed, use this room, wake up tomorrow, and go meet looming death. It’s a habit she picked up from the Campers. The kids who leave for quests would leave their room absolutely spotless, no personal item in sight, no hint of life; no one would have to go through the ordeal of cleaning their room if they didn’t return—everything that they don’t take with them packed away in cardboard. She’d done it once, for Luke, scooping out flesh from the rotting carcass that was his room, putrid remains of the life he’d chosen to leave behind. Whatever was left inside Annabeth didn’t really feel alive, too.
Annabeth gets up, grabbing her bag and laptop with the utmost delicacy, trying not to disturb the air of lifelessness that had settled between the four walls. She doesn’t look back, taking back each bit of Annabeth that she had given to the room. She switches off the lights before opening the door, not wanting him to see, and is welcomed by a warm smile.
“Hey. Let’s go to my room.” He knows her, he knows a part of her would be left behind if she didn’t leave right now, and he knows she doesn’t have much more to leave behind.
“Yeah. I’ll meet you, there. Gonna drop off my rucksack on the table.” His fingers twitch, aching to grab her hand and run off the world, but he simply nods and waits for her to walk away first.
She doesn’t knock before opening his door, maybe it’s because she’s impertinent, or maybe it’s because, in dark shadows, Argo II feels like a graveyard. It used to feel like a jail—imprisoned by the quest her mother issued, imprisoned by the golden blood that ran through her veins. Now, it has turned into a place she itches to hold onto, haunting the others like a ghost, unable to let go.
He’s sitting on the bed, leaning against the headboard, twiddling his thumbs. The frown on his face takes its leave the minute dangling blonde hair announces her arrival.
“Hey.” She steps inside and closes the door. She stays there, leaning against the door as her eyes try to sear every curve of his body, every hard line they can spot, into her soul. She doesn’t care much for brains or bones, those will turn to dust the minute her shroud is buried, but her soul will remember. Her heartbeat doesn’t rise as it usually does around him, her body stills, like clay waiting to be molded. He doesn’t say anything, too, trying to understand what she needs, trying to not beg her to stay. She knows he’s made up his mind when he decides that what she needs is a prayer.
“Come here,” he calls, so softly, like the color of his seagrass eyes, on the day she had met him.
His arms open, as she walks towards the bed, and slowly crawls into his lap. A loud sigh escapes her when his arms encircle her body, and she tucks her face into his neck. They hold on tighter than ever, trying to leave an imprint on the other’s skin. A promise to never forget.
“I’m scared.” A wisp of a muffled voice, but he follows it.
“I know. Fuck, Annabeth, I wish—” he tenses, but he can’t break tonight. His grip turns harder, and his face scrunches in pain words he can’t express.
“No.” She lifts her head from her haven and leans forward to rest her forehead on his. A tiny shake of the head. “No. No wishing, Percy. I’m here.” Her eyes close, waiting for him. She remembers how she waited for five years, and then for eight months. His hands leave her hips to grab her face, thumbs slowly caressing her cheeks. His head leans away, and she thinks he’s going to kiss her, but he just stares. She waits then, too, for him to finish memorizing the twist of her lips, the shade of her eyes, the pink of her cheeks.
She doesn’t know what his eyes see, but the next moment he rushes forward to kiss her, and his lips desperately, devastatingly press against hers. He asks, so she gives. Annabeth rises on her knees to fully press into him, and he cranes his neck. His hands roam the entirety of her body; arms, fingers, back, and thighs. They don’t dare stop to take a breath of air, only inhaling what the other gives; They don’t dare stop, lest they look at what the fates have spun out of them. Annabeth’s hands run through his hair, grasping, and faintly pulling. Percy’s hands run up and down the sides of her torso, his thumbs faintly skim her skin when her shirt rides up. It’s sloppy, it’s careless, it’s revolutionary. They fight together, to beat the ichor out of their veins, insurgents against destinies.
Annabeth’s head spins, and she breaks away. A line of spit connects both of them, and a silly laugh escapes him when his thumb reaches out to wipe her mouth. She settles down again, the heat of their desperation replaced by warmth. Can you yearn for something present right in front of you? She thinks of what he’d told her when she’d driven herself mad, engrossed in thoughts of coins and statues. I miss you more when you’re here.
He doesn’t say anything, but she knows the subtle downturn of his lips, the faint crease in his forehead. Her hand clenches on his shoulder, and he leans back, to let her decide. Her hands reach downward, to the ones he has on her hips, and she pulls them away. Slowly, their fingers entangle, calluses rub against each other. She tries to remember the first time she’d held his hand, how small and innocent it had been then. How, how does she tell him his hands saved her? She looks down at them, grown-up and rough, now; at the small scratches that run on the back of his hand. Her head rises to look at him, but the eyes that stare at their hands look like the water that reflects the shade of a mighty tree. She gets up, avoids his gaze, and turns around in his lap. He accepts her weight, like he always has, and wraps their joined hands around her body. There’s nothing to say now, goodbye’s and be-safe’s left for when the sun shines tomorrow, so they just sit in the company of their pounding hearts.
He inhales deeply, and nudges her face with his nose, breathing her in. Her scent is his favorite color, in moments like these, it beats blue right out of the water. Her head turns, giving way to her bare neck. His lips press as softly as they can, in reverence of her pulse beneath. He nips and soothes gently, he grips and carelessly sweetly. Her eyes close and she thinks of the push and pulls that defined their relationship when they were 15—scared not only of the war and death but of love and vulnerability. Her hand reaches up to scratch the hair at the nape of his neck, and she melts further. He stops, and brings her hand down to press his lips to her strained knuckles. She doesn’t dare look at him, at his heart-squeezing tenderness, at the other hand gripping hers, asking her to not go. She turns her head to face his, and her hands leave his to guide his chin toward her. She requests, so he obliges.
They kiss, for a few seconds, for a few hours. They kiss until the night stops, they kiss until the moon shies away.
“What’s the time?” he whispers, scared to break what they’ve built in the room. It’s theirs and theirs alone, no observers and no interveners.
“I don’t know,” she lies, and chases his swollen lips. Time leaves her drop by drop, slowly bleeding to death on the ground.
She breaks away, her heart in ruins, and takes her shirt off. She gets off his lap, and grips the collar of his ratty t-shirt. He follows her as she lays down on the bed, her knees bracketing his hips. His weight fuses into her skin, as he kisses her collarbone and she tugs his shirt up with an urgency. He gets up to pull it off completely, and kneels at the altar of her body. Her nails dig into his skin when he trails devastating kisses down her stomach, and runs his tongue along her scars. When she goes to undo her bottoms, he comes up, but doesn’t meet her eyes. He knows he won’t survive that storm.
“You sure?” he asks, kissing the scar near her shoulder. His scar. It’s still not faint, even after a year. All of her wounds, that one hurts him the most. He can still picture her on that day; pale, a lifeless grey shrouding her whole body, death baring his teeth to feast. He freezes, slapped into the reality of tomorrow, of the possibility of losing the love of his life.
“You okay?” she pauses, as he rests his forehead on her chest, listening to the old brag of her heart. It sounds like music to him, a nocturne of her existence, his promises.
“I love you, so much.” he mouths, a broken voice that barely reaches her.
She doesn’t say it back, afraid that he’d stop because of the crack in her voice, and pulls him by the nape of his neck.
Her hands run along his face, and he ducks to kiss her eyes. Annabeth’s hands tug his pants down, and push his chest back. They both sit in their underwear, taking each other in as a man dying of thirst gulps down water. He pulls her into him like a wave does, and kisses her shoulder. His hands reach backward to unclasp, and her hands clutch at his hair.
“Are you sure you want to—?” he asks, again, after hands and mouth have traveled the expanse of her bare chest. Annabeth pulls away, takes his hand, and lays down on the bed.
Her tanned skin, adorned by scars almost everywhere, is a stark contrast against the navy sheets. His fingers tangle in her hair, gentle against the rich gold.
“Please.” She says, head turned up, when his hands travel downwards. Please. Don’t let me go alone. Please. Promise me you’ll hold my hand again.
She moans, and he thinks I love you, so much again, face buried into her neck. She pushes his hand away, eyebrows furrowed, a sheen of sweat on her body. He places open-mouthed kisses on her chest, as she wraps herself around him tighter, hands grasping at his back. Percy thinks of the Poseidon Cabin, of late-night rendezvous, the excitement of exploring someone’s bodies, discovering the assortment of noises pure bliss could draw out. This doesn’t feel like that; he slows down, acid twisting his gut. Marks of her nails down his back, imprints of his fingers on her hips, the crack in his heart.
“Percy?” He can’t. He can’t hear her giggle in a certain way, or moan, and wonder if it’s the last time he’ll hear her do that. He’s the son of Poseidon, and she’s slipping away like water.
“I’m just so fucking angry.” he curses into her neck. Her eyes scrunch in pain, struggling to hold back a dam of tears.
A part of her wants him to be angry, the rage is easier to handle than desolation. He can’t crack, not when the others need him more than her, not when the world needs him. She doesn’t have a right to the oceans, but she wishes she dared to call on it, leave the entire earth parched.
She rolls them around, and rests her head on his chest. His hands rub her back, her arms, nails graze her scalp, and she’s so close to losing her name in his touch. Everything feels hazy now, young smoke mingles with the ocean breeze, the boundaries of their bodies blend like watercolors.
“What are you thinking of?” she asks, unable to listen to the numbing drone of her mind. Percy’s fingers play with a stubborn curl, and he reaches down to pull a blanket over them. She settles in further, completely on top of him.
“That time when you listened to the siren’s song, and I had to…” he trails off, not wanting to say that he saved her, because Percy doesn’t really feel like he saved her, if anything, he imagines he only brought more pain into her life, sometimes.
“I used to wonder why I didn’t see you.” Percy doesn’t know where she’s going with this. At the tender age of 13, he didn’t fully realize how excruciating it must have been for her to yearn for those things. His mom and he didn’t have a lot of things, but there was always love in the house. So Percy didn’t really feel like they were missing much, because, most of the time all people really needed was love.
“Used to?” A low chuckle rumbles through him, and goes to her.
“Yeah. All the people that I saw, they had all… abandoned me. You—you were the first one who didn’t. I didn’t see you because you were there, Percy. You had never left.” Her fingers run over a few scars on his arm, cracks in bronze filled with marble.
“I did leave. Before the war, that one year.” Somehow, he doesn’t feel shame in admitting that anymore. Maybe he needed to go through it, or maybe two consecutive wars forced them to grow older beyond their years.
“I know. You were scared, it’s okay.” A part of her, the little girl abandoned by the gods in the sky and the mortals on earth, holds onto the anger she’d felt; for so long, it burned in competition with her feelings for him. The part of her that she cannot separate from him, the part of her lying here, doesn’t care—instead, it feels a bit complacent. She thinks of how much time they wasted, of how much more they could have burned. But then again, she’s not really mad at herself, she’s mad at the game time and the fates are playing. She’s mad at the gold that taints her blood.
“I’m scared now, too. You—”
“Sush…” she rises, takes his face in her hands, and pours every bit of her divinity into a kiss, a divinity that would have been wasted otherwise, if not for this single moment.
He chases her when she breaks away, but she holds him down. Forces him to meet her gaze, to accept the truth that found a home between them.
“You saved me. You’ve always saved me,” she whispers, forehead resting on his.
His hands touch her face, fingers push a few hair strands behind her ears.
“You save me, every day.” His only answer.
Annabeth doesn’t say anything. Fatigue enters his eyes, and she brushes them shut. Her head rests on his chest, listening to the beat of his heart. There is no sense, there is no rhythm, it’s just him, just him, and she’s nowhere.
“I love you, so much,” she mutters, unsure if he’s heard her.
The last thought before they must return the night to time enters her. She thinks of permanency, and eternity. His courage to choose her in the face of mortality, has made her eternal. Of how the Gods are who they are because of prayer, devotion, and reverence. She thinks of how he’s immortalized her, in a life so fleeting, with a love so temporary.