Percy Jackson: Bona Fide
Title: Bona Fide
Rating: K
Characters: Annabeth (with appearances from Luke, Chiron, and the rest of Camp Half-Blood)
Summary: "The girl, that's Annabeth Chase. She's just a camper, but she's been here longer than just about anybody." These are the lessons Annabeth learns at Camp Half-Blood on her way to being a hero.
A/N: Pre-series gen fic, what? Thanks goes to green_climber for recently putting all kinds of interesting thoughts about Annabeth and her character in my head.
Not a play list by any means, but the title is stolen from The Clark's song Bona Fide, and I spent way too long listening to this song on repeat while I was writing this, so you get a widget to enjoy while you read:
***
I. How to sink
“I won’t,” Annabeth insists stubbornly, setting her jaw and glaring at Chiron out of the corner of her eye. “I won’t do it. It doesn’t like me.”
“Annabeth, I have told you this,” Luke interjects, exasperated. It is a mark of exactly how frustrated they are with her, that they’ve called Luke down to try and coax her into the lake for swim lessons. “It’s just water. It can’t not like you.”
“Actually,” Chiron corrects gently, “it’s not uncommon for children of Athena to fear the water. Her rivalry with the sea god should not be underestimated.”
“See?” Annabeth hisses at Luke. This had been a sore subject for them on the run; Annabeth wouldn’t go into the water alone, even to bathe, but Thalia was terrified she’d be struck by lightning and electrocute the girl, and Luke was a boy.
“However,” Chiron continues determinedly, “the Lord of the Sea is a bit too busy to go around harassing young daughters of Athena who need to learn how to swim. And surely certain children of Athena are much too brave to allow themselves to be frightened of a task as trivial as a swim lesson.”
She frowns at Chiron. “I’m not scared,” she insists quietly. This is a truth. There are plenty of things that Annabeth is frightened of; being forced to go back home is one, spiders is another. She’s not afraid of water. She prefers to simply think of it as a fact of her life: water doesn’t like her. Avoid it if at all possible. Nothing personal. “It just doesn’t make sense. I’m not going to swim, ever, so I don’t need to learn.”
“It can’t hurt,” Luke asserted. “Remember when we had to cross rivers to run away?”
“I cannot imagine,” Chiron responds, “What your mother would say about one of her children refusing to learn something new. That is a quality that Athena values above all else.”
Annabeth straightens a little taller at the mention of her mother. Luke is silent, watching Chiron almost suspiciously.
“She’s always been adamant that the gaining knowledge leads to wisdom and expects her children to act accordingly.”
She rocks her weight on the dock, looking down into the water. The lake water looks still and calm to Annabeth; maybe she could handle this…
“Do you know who else was scared of the water?” Chiron asks innocently. “A son of Athena named George Washington. And what does everyone remember him for?”
“Lots,” Luke protests.
“Crossing the Delaware river,” Chiron finishes triumphantly. “And look at what he accomplished.”
Annabeth doesn’t get it, but the words awaken an impulsive need inside of her, an urge to stand up next to her famous siblings, a pride in being counted among their number. Almost involuntarily, her knees bend and she jumps into the water with a crash. She doesn’t think, only leaps.
As soon as she jumps she knows she made a mistake; water doesn’t like her. The water drags her down. Her kicks do nothing as the bottoms of her bare feet touch slick grass and nearly sink into the mud. In the midst of panic her mouth opens and water invades - she can’t breathe and she can’t kick, and it still feels like the water is pulling her down, down and away from the sun and air.
All she can register is the sound of her heart pounding in her ears - she has no clue anyone has jumped in next to her until she feels arms around her waist, pulling her up towards the surface.
When they break, Annabeth flails and gags and coughs as she fights for air. Luke is the one holding her, and she can feel his arms trembling as he pulls her back towards the dock.
Chiron doesn’t even have the grace to look surprised. “That also happened to George Washington,” he informs a shaking and gasping Annabeth. “We’ll try again tomorrow.”
***
II. How to swim
“There isn’t anything I can say,” Grover mumbles, looking everywhere but into Annabeth’s eyes. “Nothing. I failed as a Keeper. And I’m sorry for it.”
Annabeth isn’t sure why Grover is apologizing now, almost two months after their disastrous arrival at camp, but she isn’t happy to hear it. She doesn’t want to think about their journey to camp, she doesn’t want to remember being lost in the maze of New York City, or that cyclops talking in her father’s voice, or the heat of a hellhound’s breath against her skin as she tries desperately to outrun the beast.
She wants to keep the memories of that horror trip shoved deep down in her brain, where she doesn’t have to think about the rain beating on her face or Furies screeching above her as they swoop or Luke’s shouting or Grover’s terrified bleats or or Thalia…
When she thinks about Thalia she feels the same way she does during the swim lessons that Chiron insists she continue; like there is an iron band around her chest. Her grief is a dark and powerful ocean inside of her, and she is helpless but to try and paddle in order to keep her head above the water.
It is incomprehensible to Annabeth that she had finally found a family that wanted her and cared about her only to have it torn apart so easily and so quickly. She still has Luke - she’s still so grateful for Luke - and on some days Luke is the only reason she can still breathe. On other days it somehow feels like he is the one dragging her under, and she is struggling to pull him up herself.
She doesn’t care if Camp Half-Blood is safe, and she has her own bed, and she’s learning how to be a better fighter; she wants things to go back to normal, with their safe houses and Luke stealing food and Thalia teaching Annabeth how to spar and Annabeth sometimes making cautious suggestions during fights with monsters that work out brilliantly and make Luke and Thalia sing her praises around a camp fire later that night.
“She was my family,” Annabeth blurts out to Grover, who openly winces. “Thalia - and Luke. My dad didn’t want me. My stepmother hated me, was afraid of me. Luke and Thalia were never scared of me or hated me.”
“I’m sorry,” Grover moans miserably, and even though Annabeth is young she can hear the sorrow in his voice, and she knows this is not an apology that he is being forced to give; this is not a half-hearted gesture - this is a real, true request for forgiveness. He’s sorry. It wasn’t supposed to happen that way. “You don’t have to forgive me. I don’t think you can forgive me. But I want you to know how sorry I am.”
Annabeth stares at him for a long minute. She doesn’t have to forgive him. Forgiving him would mean being okay with the fact that Thalia is a tree. Forgiving him would mean that when someone asks her about Thalia she won’t parrot Luke’s go-to response of, “It was all okay until Grover showed up,” anymore.
She wants more than anything in the universe to stay mad at Grover and blame him for the fact that Thalia is gone.
But she knows how bad Grover feels. And she knows how much trouble he got into because of Thalia’s fate. And more than anything, she knows that Thalia was the one who insisted that Grover bring Annabeth and Luke along in the first place, when the satyr had wanted to take Thalia to safety alone and come back for the others.
“Okay,” she finally says quietly. “I’ll forgive you.”
She’s surprised by how much easier it is to breathe.
***
III. She is not that special
She is shocked by the number of kids at camp - there is no privacy, even with four empty cabins. She stays in the Hermes cabin for a grand total of two weeks before the owl symbol of Athena appears above her head. It is not a comfortable experience.
And not only because of the physical crowding either - it’s because so many of the stories are the same: broken families, single parents, trouble in school, trouble with everything, tears, frustration. Too many of them have grown up the same way, even the few kids - like Annabeth - who have been claimed and can swear allegiance to an immortal parent.
Some gods are better than others - Athena always claims her own, if they can make it to camp. Hephaestus will give his children commissions, and the materials to craft them with on occasion. Apollo has been known to inspire his children randomly and with little warning.
Other gods just don’t even try to pretend - as nice as Hermes is to welcome the unclaimed and the children of minor gods, Annabeth can’t help thinking that his children deserve a place of their own. Not long after her and Luke’s arrival, the counselor of the Hermes cabin, a girl named Tracey, tells a story of a pair of twins, daughters of Demeter. The goddess had claimed one and refused the other.
All of Annabeth’s life, it has always seemed like her against the world. And when she’d found Thalia and Luke, she had felt like they were the only two people on the planet who could understand her, the only two people who made it worth her time to fight the world. Here there was a whole host of people who felt the exact same way sitting at camp the entire time, except for one noticeable difference:
“Do you stay all year?” Annabeth asks Tracey one day, as she gathers her items to move into the cabin number six. Some kids have been talking about winter solstice celebrations.
“Hm?” Tracey asks, looking around the cabin, as if mentally calculating the space Annabeth’s departure will free up. “Nah. Only kids who they really want to train up stay. Or the ones who don’t have homes to go back to. My mom works for a community college, so I can take classes for cheap.”
“But - but the monsters!” Annabeth insists. The idea of Tracey leaving has put a flash of fear in her stomach; she likes Tracey. And she can’t imagine being able to live in a home without worrying about being attacked all the time.
Tracey shrugs. “I haven’t really gotten into trouble since middle school,” she muses. “I’ve learned how to keep my head down. And usually I can fight off what does sniff me out.”
She laughs at Annabeth’s shocked expression. “You’ll learn too. You just gotta figure out how to stay off their radar, and then you don’t have to hide here all the time.”
That’s the biggest difference to Annabeth. The kids at Camp Half-Blood don’t care if the world is out to get them. They just fight off what they can, and try to blend in the rest of the time. They’ve all accepted that they are just one in a number, and this is how it goes for them. Annabeth finds herself wondering if she should accept it too.
***
IV. Or maybe she is
“You were only four?!” Her half-sister Sandra gasps.
Annabeth nods. “A hellhound,” she explained. “My dad scared it off. He thought it was after our Doberman.”
In one gesture, her siblings look at one another, and then they’re off:
“I didn’t get attacked until I was twelve, and it definitely wasn’t a hellhound - ”
“I was thirteen, and it was just a little harpy - ”
“I was ten, but I’d skipped a grade. I’d just started middle school when my Keeper found me.”
That’s what it keeps going back to. Middle school. Not only is Annabeth the youngest child of Athena by several years, she’s the youngest child in camp, period, and her siblings find her absolutely fascinating.
“Athena always has a plan for her kids,” her cabin leader, Carter, had informed her proudly when she moved into the cabin and claimed a bunk. When they talk like this, Annabeth finds herself wondering if she’s anything more than a puzzle to her siblings.
She doesn’t know why the monsters started sniffing her out that young, and she doesn’t know why she wasn’t discovered by a Keeper sooner. She has no idea why it is that a simple child of Athena should be so interesting, except that it isn’t limited to just her siblings.
It seems like all of camp whispers about her and Luke wherever they go, because they’re the kids that came in with Thalia. They’re the ones who travelled with the daughter of Zeus, and they’re the ones that Thalia sacrificed herself for. The fact that they knew Thalia alone has everyone interested in them. Most just whisper, but a brave few have the nerve to ask her and Luke about Thalia. Luke likes to complain that they don’t even deserve to know Thalia’s name; Annabeth can barely talk about her for more than five minutes without her throat closing up. Even if she’s not angry about Thalia’s fate anymore, she still misses the dark-haired girl the same way Annabeth imagines she’d miss a limb; that was how fast she’d come to love and depend on Thalia.
Even the adults have taken an interest in her; Chiron has sat her down and asked gentle questions about her upbringing several times now. Not once have her answers seemed to satisfy his curiosity, and Annabeth has noticed that he looks at her the same way that her siblings do, as if she is a riddle that he needs to solve.
Despite the fact that she is the youngest and has captured the attention of many at camp, she gets no special treatment. They push her just as hard in training as anyone else, and never hesitate to make her spar with partners who are bigger than her. Chiron adds an intense study schedule on top of her training, to bring her education up to speed.
Annabeth doesn’t complain. There is something amusing about the fact that their refusal to treat her as anything special is exactly what makes her special, and in the end, Annabeth chooses to take pride in that fact.
***
V. Knowledge is actually worth pursuing
Tracey had told her once that only reasons kids stay at Camp Half-Blood over winter is if they need extra training or if they have nowhere else to go. Annabeth is not sure which category she falls under, and it is with more than a little apprehension that she approaches her education at Camp Half-Blood.
It’s different in the fall and winter, when most everyone goes home or to some equivalent. In the summer it’s group lessons, cabin challenges - sometimes it’s fun, sometimes it’s informal, and there’s always a sense of barely controlled chaos as kids mingle and bounce off of one another.
In the winter there’s a sense of importance about the camp; these are the kids that are serious, these are the kids who aren’t safe in the real world for one reason or another. Drills are a little harder to run when the sword hilt is freezing in your hand, and sometimes, just for fun, the rock climbing wall spouts water that solidifies into ice immediately over the hand holds; the few that remain like to complain that the lava would be a welcome source of heat in the midst of the New York winter.
There are other practical lessons as well; first-aid takes on a new importance in the winter, with the addition of frost-bite and influenza throwing wrenches into their battle strategies. Annabeth loses count of the number of times she spars until she literally can’t feel the sword in her hands, and finds a new thrill in attempting to end fights as quickly as possible, defeating her opponents before the weather defeats them for her.
Chiron is more serious about their study schedules in the winter, and constructs a strict syllabus composed mostly of Greek lessons supplemented by math and history. Annabeth approaches these lessons with dread, remembering far too many months of tears and confusion and that frustrated feeling that she’s thisclose to understanding what’s going on and having it just out of her grasp.
It is with some surprise that Annabeth finds that once she gets a grasp of what’s going on - which is much easier, when the lessons are in a language that spells itself correctly in front of her eyes - she actually really loves learning. Her first winter at camp she studies the words and actions of famous warriors, trying to figure out how to incorporate their moves into her own battle strategies; her second winter - having discovered a surprising proficiency for math that makes even Luke’s eyes cross - is spent mostly trying to figure out the physics and geometry behind those moves, trying to recreate the actions of those Greek warriors at their most base level.
It’s this interest in ancient wars that leads her to it: the tenth book of De architectura, detailing the building and use of war machines. She’s too young to truly grasp the importance of this book and its words, but for the first time in her life, her frustration at not immediately understanding is overruled by an overwhelming thirst to understand.
She spends her entire third winter at Camp Half-Blood deconstructing the ten-book treatise, and finally understands how her father feels when he talks about old airplanes and studies diagrams explaining how they fly; the only one who will listen to her natter on is Chiron - even Luke begs off when she gets going in a mixture of Greek and English - and he gently encourages her interest, pointing her in the direction of other works on architecture by Antistates, Terentius Varro, and Metagenes.
She devours whatever she can get her hands on, and can’t help but be thrilled by the idea that she can reach back through history, take the teachings of her brethren, and create something worth remembering herself.
***
VI. Actually, sometimes she's better off not knowing
She had spent months begging for a quest of her own, once it was announced that Luke would finally be granted his. Chiron had put her off each and every time, but Annabeth was relentless, because to her, it was all about logic: she had been at camp for as long as Luke had, and she’d developed the same skills he had too. For every extra bit of talent Luke had with a sword, she made up with her dagger or archery.
Chiron had refused, and refused. Eventually he’d let slip that he’d already asked the Oracle about her, and had been told that she had to wait for a special partner and Annabeth had seized upon the idea of a prophecy like a wolf upon its prey.
It’s Mr. D who finally steps in on her behalf, tired of Annabeth interrupting his pinochle games with talk of quests and prophecies and chosen ones. “Let her see,” he tells Chiron in a dismissive tone one night as he bids.
Chiron frowns, but Annabeth crows in glee. “Yes, yes! Let me see!” she exclaims.
Mr. D swings his gaze onto Annabeth, who stops her dance of celebration immediately, her blood running cold. His eyes are deadly serious. “It’ll serve you right,” he informs her in a dour tone. “You think you can bear the words of the Oracle? Smarter and stronger demigods than you have gone mad upon hearing her prophecies. Go read it, girl, but I won’t help you if it drives you insane.”
In hindsight, she maybe should have taken the god’s words more seriously, but she’s still flush with her victory over her teacher, too ecstatic at being allowed to read the prophecy at all to consider the warning.
She doesn’t sleep for three days after reading that scrap of paper hanging around the mummy’s neck. Her half-siblings are concerned, and Carter threatens more than once to send her to the infirmary, but Annabeth resists, and refuses to tell them exactly what it is that she saw.
Instead she suffers alone, and thinks somewhere in the haze of terror that fills up her mind late at night that she’s grateful for Thalia’s fate: a couple of Furies, a man-eating Cyclops and the rage of Hades seems like a much easier sentence than whatever it is that this prophecy kid is going to have to face. She’s glad it won’t be Thalia.
When she can finally sleep again she has nightmares - not uncommon for demigods, but these are terrifying even by Annabeth’s standards. The scariest part is that she has no control in the dreams, that she’s only helpless to watch as the prophecy unfolds.
She sees the cursed blade in her dreams, dripping poison and blood, hears somebody screaming in pain and torment. Sometimes it’s Thalia, sometimes it’s another face and body, some nameless unknown child of the Big Three. Sometimes that child looks like the most heroic person she knows - Luke, but she knows it can’t be Luke, who’s been claimed by Hermes and has never looked scared like the person in her dreams, not once in all the years she’s known him.
In the end, Annabeth hopes against hope that she’ll never cross paths with this cursed blade, wishes with every cell in her body that she only meets this prophecy kid in her dreams.
***
VII. You really can't go home again
Christmas is the breaking point. The school year had already been a disaster up until then; she’d gotten into fights, her grades had risen, then fallen, then plummeted, her mortal half-brothers were afraid of her, she didn’t get along with kids in her class at school, and then she’d gotten into more fights.
Annabeth wants more than anything for it to be different this time. Ever since that letter had arrived at camp, marked up with extra postage to account for the weight of her father’s class ring, she’d thought that maybe this was really it - maybe things had changed, her stepmother had come around, her father had finally stood up for her.
The sinking feeling had started with the first monster she faced, early in the school year, walking home from school. Upon arriving home disheveled but victorious, Annabeth couldn’t help the shot of annoyance that had gone through her at the fearful look on her stepmother’s face. The stupid beast hadn’t even gotten close to the house, and Annabeth had been armed. Didn’t her dumb stepmother understand that she could handle these things now?
The problem is that Christmas brings back too many bad memories; it had been the Christmas celebration when she was seven that had finally pushed her over the edge and made her run away in the first place - it wasn’t like she’d wanted her brother’s Christmas presents to be destroyed, wanted all of her parents good wedding china to be broken and strewn about. And still she’d gotten all of the blame for ruining Christmas - her father hadn’t spoken a single word in her defense. Not one.
Despite what he’d written in the letter, his claim that he loved her, he still never spoke a word in her defense. Her brothers skirted around her, staring at her with a cautious, wide-eyed gaze that made Annabeth wonder exactly what they’d been told about her. Her teachers, concerned, sent home all of her tests to be signed, and while he wasn’t angry about her struggles with school, her father was awfully perplexed. Wasn’t Annabeth supposed to be smart? The guilt burned in her chest every day as she tried fruitlessly to force herself to pay attention and focus on her work.
The fight that had finally broken everything beyond repair had started with an innocent sounding question about her school schedule, and the Christmas holiday. All it had taken was one simple question - her stepmother asking if she’d be spending every day of her vacation here at the house, where anything could find her? - and that was it, Annabeth was done.
They don’t want her anymore now than they had when she was seven; now, as she watches the tips of her father’s ears turn red while she stares at him, hoping for him to interject, she wonders what he was thinking, sending that letter.
On Christmas Eve when her family goes to mass Annabeth sends the Iris Message to Chiron and asks him to take her back to camp. He does so without a single question, and Annabeth doesn’t bother leaving a note as she leaves her family to celebrate the holiday that they clearly want without her.
***
VIII. Except for when you can
She’s glad the cabin is empty when she gets back to camp; more than anything Annabeth just wants to be alone right now. Luke - the only one who’d warned her against going back to her dad - comes around several times to see her, tries to corner her after training and sparring, but Annabeth avoids him. She doesn’t think she can bear to hear him say “I told you so” right now. She’s embarrassed that he was right.
Camp is cold and empty this time of year, something Annabeth is used to by now. She’s actually grateful for it, because then she doesn’t have to feel everybody’s burning eyes on her, silently judging her for her inability to live peacefully with her family. Other campers can, why can’t she? She’d wanted to have that family this time, wanted to have that home that missed her during the summers and welcomed her back each fall.
The only one who absolutely refuses to leave her alone is Chiron, who insists she come up to the Big House in the evenings for hot tea and card games with Mr. D. She thinks Chiron must have said something to Mr. D about her, because he refrains from making snarky comments about Annabeth; mostly, he just pretends she’s not there except to complain that she’s too slow with her bids, or thinking too long about her moves.
Chiron doesn’t ask her any questions about home or her parents, for which she’s grateful. She doesn’t want to talk about them, even though they weigh more heavily on her mind than the prophecy and its meaning.
One evening as they’re wrapping up their games before lights out, Chiron quietly remarks to Annabeth that he’s received a message from Carter several days before.
“Oh?” she asks, wondering why Chiron is bringing up her half-brother. “Is he doing okay? Does he need help with something?” As much as she doesn’t want anything to happen to Carter, she’s half-hoping Chiron is sending her to him, a little mini-quest to help another child of Athena who can’t seem to cope in the real world.
It’s not nearly anything as exciting as that, and it’s with equal parts relief and disappointment that Chiron assures her that Carter is fine, and enjoying his semester at school. “He did remark though that he will need to take classes this summer in order to graduate on time. He won’t be coming back to camp this year.”
Annabeth blinks as she processes this information. Carter’s been in charge every year that she’s been at camp; it’s almost unthinkable to her, that he won’t be drawing up maps for capture the flag or letting the Ares cabin goad him into sword fights.
When she doesn’t respond Chiron continues. “Cabin Six will need a new counselor when Athena’s children return to camp this summer.”
She barely has time to process what he’s hinting at before he says it outright: “The job is yours, if you want it.”
It’s not until later, after she’s excitably accepted the offer, that she realizes what this means: extra chores, sitting in at cabin meetings, making strategic alliances during war games and training. She is the one who has to comfort the new kids who don’t understand what a demigod is and cry at night when they have bad dreams. She is the one who is going to have to enforce the rules in the cabin, a frequently unpopular position, even for a cabin as well behaved as Number Six.
She is the one who will represent her mother at Camp Half-Blood. Annabeth feels a fierce pride well up inside of her at this thought. Gazing at the owl perched above the doorway, Annabeth smiles confidently. She can do this - and she can do a good job of it. She is not her father’s daughter; she’s a daughter of Athena.
Opening the door, she heads immediately for the desk that she’s claimed and pulls out a notebook. She only has a few months to plan.
End
***
A/N:
"My dad scared it off. He thought it was after our Doberman." - Yes, that's a call back to Badge of Life
De architectura - ten books on architecture written by the Roman architect Vitruvius as a guide for building projects. The work is one of the most important sources of modern knowledge of Roman building methods as well as the planning and design of structures. The aforementioned book 10 is dedicated to the building and use of machines, including war machines such as siege engines.
Antistates, Terentius Varro, and Metagenes - Book VII of De architectura starts off with a list of references, basically. Antistates is given as an expert on architecture, Terentius Varro a writer whose works include "Nine Books of Discipline", of which a book is dedicated to architecture, and Metagenes is one of the names given as the designer of the Temple of Artemis, one of the former seven wonders of the world.
Rating: K
Characters: Annabeth (with appearances from Luke, Chiron, and the rest of Camp Half-Blood)
Summary: "The girl, that's Annabeth Chase. She's just a camper, but she's been here longer than just about anybody." These are the lessons Annabeth learns at Camp Half-Blood on her way to being a hero.
A/N: Pre-series gen fic, what? Thanks goes to green_climber for recently putting all kinds of interesting thoughts about Annabeth and her character in my head.
Not a play list by any means, but the title is stolen from The Clark's song Bona Fide, and I spent way too long listening to this song on repeat while I was writing this, so you get a widget to enjoy while you read:
***
I. How to sink
“I won’t,” Annabeth insists stubbornly, setting her jaw and glaring at Chiron out of the corner of her eye. “I won’t do it. It doesn’t like me.”
“Annabeth, I have told you this,” Luke interjects, exasperated. It is a mark of exactly how frustrated they are with her, that they’ve called Luke down to try and coax her into the lake for swim lessons. “It’s just water. It can’t not like you.”
“Actually,” Chiron corrects gently, “it’s not uncommon for children of Athena to fear the water. Her rivalry with the sea god should not be underestimated.”
“See?” Annabeth hisses at Luke. This had been a sore subject for them on the run; Annabeth wouldn’t go into the water alone, even to bathe, but Thalia was terrified she’d be struck by lightning and electrocute the girl, and Luke was a boy.
“However,” Chiron continues determinedly, “the Lord of the Sea is a bit too busy to go around harassing young daughters of Athena who need to learn how to swim. And surely certain children of Athena are much too brave to allow themselves to be frightened of a task as trivial as a swim lesson.”
She frowns at Chiron. “I’m not scared,” she insists quietly. This is a truth. There are plenty of things that Annabeth is frightened of; being forced to go back home is one, spiders is another. She’s not afraid of water. She prefers to simply think of it as a fact of her life: water doesn’t like her. Avoid it if at all possible. Nothing personal. “It just doesn’t make sense. I’m not going to swim, ever, so I don’t need to learn.”
“It can’t hurt,” Luke asserted. “Remember when we had to cross rivers to run away?”
“I cannot imagine,” Chiron responds, “What your mother would say about one of her children refusing to learn something new. That is a quality that Athena values above all else.”
Annabeth straightens a little taller at the mention of her mother. Luke is silent, watching Chiron almost suspiciously.
“She’s always been adamant that the gaining knowledge leads to wisdom and expects her children to act accordingly.”
She rocks her weight on the dock, looking down into the water. The lake water looks still and calm to Annabeth; maybe she could handle this…
“Do you know who else was scared of the water?” Chiron asks innocently. “A son of Athena named George Washington. And what does everyone remember him for?”
“Lots,” Luke protests.
“Crossing the Delaware river,” Chiron finishes triumphantly. “And look at what he accomplished.”
Annabeth doesn’t get it, but the words awaken an impulsive need inside of her, an urge to stand up next to her famous siblings, a pride in being counted among their number. Almost involuntarily, her knees bend and she jumps into the water with a crash. She doesn’t think, only leaps.
As soon as she jumps she knows she made a mistake; water doesn’t like her. The water drags her down. Her kicks do nothing as the bottoms of her bare feet touch slick grass and nearly sink into the mud. In the midst of panic her mouth opens and water invades - she can’t breathe and she can’t kick, and it still feels like the water is pulling her down, down and away from the sun and air.
All she can register is the sound of her heart pounding in her ears - she has no clue anyone has jumped in next to her until she feels arms around her waist, pulling her up towards the surface.
When they break, Annabeth flails and gags and coughs as she fights for air. Luke is the one holding her, and she can feel his arms trembling as he pulls her back towards the dock.
Chiron doesn’t even have the grace to look surprised. “That also happened to George Washington,” he informs a shaking and gasping Annabeth. “We’ll try again tomorrow.”
***
II. How to swim
“There isn’t anything I can say,” Grover mumbles, looking everywhere but into Annabeth’s eyes. “Nothing. I failed as a Keeper. And I’m sorry for it.”
Annabeth isn’t sure why Grover is apologizing now, almost two months after their disastrous arrival at camp, but she isn’t happy to hear it. She doesn’t want to think about their journey to camp, she doesn’t want to remember being lost in the maze of New York City, or that cyclops talking in her father’s voice, or the heat of a hellhound’s breath against her skin as she tries desperately to outrun the beast.
She wants to keep the memories of that horror trip shoved deep down in her brain, where she doesn’t have to think about the rain beating on her face or Furies screeching above her as they swoop or Luke’s shouting or Grover’s terrified bleats or or Thalia…
When she thinks about Thalia she feels the same way she does during the swim lessons that Chiron insists she continue; like there is an iron band around her chest. Her grief is a dark and powerful ocean inside of her, and she is helpless but to try and paddle in order to keep her head above the water.
It is incomprehensible to Annabeth that she had finally found a family that wanted her and cared about her only to have it torn apart so easily and so quickly. She still has Luke - she’s still so grateful for Luke - and on some days Luke is the only reason she can still breathe. On other days it somehow feels like he is the one dragging her under, and she is struggling to pull him up herself.
She doesn’t care if Camp Half-Blood is safe, and she has her own bed, and she’s learning how to be a better fighter; she wants things to go back to normal, with their safe houses and Luke stealing food and Thalia teaching Annabeth how to spar and Annabeth sometimes making cautious suggestions during fights with monsters that work out brilliantly and make Luke and Thalia sing her praises around a camp fire later that night.
“She was my family,” Annabeth blurts out to Grover, who openly winces. “Thalia - and Luke. My dad didn’t want me. My stepmother hated me, was afraid of me. Luke and Thalia were never scared of me or hated me.”
“I’m sorry,” Grover moans miserably, and even though Annabeth is young she can hear the sorrow in his voice, and she knows this is not an apology that he is being forced to give; this is not a half-hearted gesture - this is a real, true request for forgiveness. He’s sorry. It wasn’t supposed to happen that way. “You don’t have to forgive me. I don’t think you can forgive me. But I want you to know how sorry I am.”
Annabeth stares at him for a long minute. She doesn’t have to forgive him. Forgiving him would mean being okay with the fact that Thalia is a tree. Forgiving him would mean that when someone asks her about Thalia she won’t parrot Luke’s go-to response of, “It was all okay until Grover showed up,” anymore.
She wants more than anything in the universe to stay mad at Grover and blame him for the fact that Thalia is gone.
But she knows how bad Grover feels. And she knows how much trouble he got into because of Thalia’s fate. And more than anything, she knows that Thalia was the one who insisted that Grover bring Annabeth and Luke along in the first place, when the satyr had wanted to take Thalia to safety alone and come back for the others.
“Okay,” she finally says quietly. “I’ll forgive you.”
She’s surprised by how much easier it is to breathe.
***
III. She is not that special
She is shocked by the number of kids at camp - there is no privacy, even with four empty cabins. She stays in the Hermes cabin for a grand total of two weeks before the owl symbol of Athena appears above her head. It is not a comfortable experience.
And not only because of the physical crowding either - it’s because so many of the stories are the same: broken families, single parents, trouble in school, trouble with everything, tears, frustration. Too many of them have grown up the same way, even the few kids - like Annabeth - who have been claimed and can swear allegiance to an immortal parent.
Some gods are better than others - Athena always claims her own, if they can make it to camp. Hephaestus will give his children commissions, and the materials to craft them with on occasion. Apollo has been known to inspire his children randomly and with little warning.
Other gods just don’t even try to pretend - as nice as Hermes is to welcome the unclaimed and the children of minor gods, Annabeth can’t help thinking that his children deserve a place of their own. Not long after her and Luke’s arrival, the counselor of the Hermes cabin, a girl named Tracey, tells a story of a pair of twins, daughters of Demeter. The goddess had claimed one and refused the other.
All of Annabeth’s life, it has always seemed like her against the world. And when she’d found Thalia and Luke, she had felt like they were the only two people on the planet who could understand her, the only two people who made it worth her time to fight the world. Here there was a whole host of people who felt the exact same way sitting at camp the entire time, except for one noticeable difference:
“Do you stay all year?” Annabeth asks Tracey one day, as she gathers her items to move into the cabin number six. Some kids have been talking about winter solstice celebrations.
“Hm?” Tracey asks, looking around the cabin, as if mentally calculating the space Annabeth’s departure will free up. “Nah. Only kids who they really want to train up stay. Or the ones who don’t have homes to go back to. My mom works for a community college, so I can take classes for cheap.”
“But - but the monsters!” Annabeth insists. The idea of Tracey leaving has put a flash of fear in her stomach; she likes Tracey. And she can’t imagine being able to live in a home without worrying about being attacked all the time.
Tracey shrugs. “I haven’t really gotten into trouble since middle school,” she muses. “I’ve learned how to keep my head down. And usually I can fight off what does sniff me out.”
She laughs at Annabeth’s shocked expression. “You’ll learn too. You just gotta figure out how to stay off their radar, and then you don’t have to hide here all the time.”
That’s the biggest difference to Annabeth. The kids at Camp Half-Blood don’t care if the world is out to get them. They just fight off what they can, and try to blend in the rest of the time. They’ve all accepted that they are just one in a number, and this is how it goes for them. Annabeth finds herself wondering if she should accept it too.
***
IV. Or maybe she is
“You were only four?!” Her half-sister Sandra gasps.
Annabeth nods. “A hellhound,” she explained. “My dad scared it off. He thought it was after our Doberman.”
In one gesture, her siblings look at one another, and then they’re off:
“I didn’t get attacked until I was twelve, and it definitely wasn’t a hellhound - ”
“I was thirteen, and it was just a little harpy - ”
“I was ten, but I’d skipped a grade. I’d just started middle school when my Keeper found me.”
That’s what it keeps going back to. Middle school. Not only is Annabeth the youngest child of Athena by several years, she’s the youngest child in camp, period, and her siblings find her absolutely fascinating.
“Athena always has a plan for her kids,” her cabin leader, Carter, had informed her proudly when she moved into the cabin and claimed a bunk. When they talk like this, Annabeth finds herself wondering if she’s anything more than a puzzle to her siblings.
She doesn’t know why the monsters started sniffing her out that young, and she doesn’t know why she wasn’t discovered by a Keeper sooner. She has no idea why it is that a simple child of Athena should be so interesting, except that it isn’t limited to just her siblings.
It seems like all of camp whispers about her and Luke wherever they go, because they’re the kids that came in with Thalia. They’re the ones who travelled with the daughter of Zeus, and they’re the ones that Thalia sacrificed herself for. The fact that they knew Thalia alone has everyone interested in them. Most just whisper, but a brave few have the nerve to ask her and Luke about Thalia. Luke likes to complain that they don’t even deserve to know Thalia’s name; Annabeth can barely talk about her for more than five minutes without her throat closing up. Even if she’s not angry about Thalia’s fate anymore, she still misses the dark-haired girl the same way Annabeth imagines she’d miss a limb; that was how fast she’d come to love and depend on Thalia.
Even the adults have taken an interest in her; Chiron has sat her down and asked gentle questions about her upbringing several times now. Not once have her answers seemed to satisfy his curiosity, and Annabeth has noticed that he looks at her the same way that her siblings do, as if she is a riddle that he needs to solve.
Despite the fact that she is the youngest and has captured the attention of many at camp, she gets no special treatment. They push her just as hard in training as anyone else, and never hesitate to make her spar with partners who are bigger than her. Chiron adds an intense study schedule on top of her training, to bring her education up to speed.
Annabeth doesn’t complain. There is something amusing about the fact that their refusal to treat her as anything special is exactly what makes her special, and in the end, Annabeth chooses to take pride in that fact.
***
V. Knowledge is actually worth pursuing
Tracey had told her once that only reasons kids stay at Camp Half-Blood over winter is if they need extra training or if they have nowhere else to go. Annabeth is not sure which category she falls under, and it is with more than a little apprehension that she approaches her education at Camp Half-Blood.
It’s different in the fall and winter, when most everyone goes home or to some equivalent. In the summer it’s group lessons, cabin challenges - sometimes it’s fun, sometimes it’s informal, and there’s always a sense of barely controlled chaos as kids mingle and bounce off of one another.
In the winter there’s a sense of importance about the camp; these are the kids that are serious, these are the kids who aren’t safe in the real world for one reason or another. Drills are a little harder to run when the sword hilt is freezing in your hand, and sometimes, just for fun, the rock climbing wall spouts water that solidifies into ice immediately over the hand holds; the few that remain like to complain that the lava would be a welcome source of heat in the midst of the New York winter.
There are other practical lessons as well; first-aid takes on a new importance in the winter, with the addition of frost-bite and influenza throwing wrenches into their battle strategies. Annabeth loses count of the number of times she spars until she literally can’t feel the sword in her hands, and finds a new thrill in attempting to end fights as quickly as possible, defeating her opponents before the weather defeats them for her.
Chiron is more serious about their study schedules in the winter, and constructs a strict syllabus composed mostly of Greek lessons supplemented by math and history. Annabeth approaches these lessons with dread, remembering far too many months of tears and confusion and that frustrated feeling that she’s thisclose to understanding what’s going on and having it just out of her grasp.
It is with some surprise that Annabeth finds that once she gets a grasp of what’s going on - which is much easier, when the lessons are in a language that spells itself correctly in front of her eyes - she actually really loves learning. Her first winter at camp she studies the words and actions of famous warriors, trying to figure out how to incorporate their moves into her own battle strategies; her second winter - having discovered a surprising proficiency for math that makes even Luke’s eyes cross - is spent mostly trying to figure out the physics and geometry behind those moves, trying to recreate the actions of those Greek warriors at their most base level.
It’s this interest in ancient wars that leads her to it: the tenth book of De architectura, detailing the building and use of war machines. She’s too young to truly grasp the importance of this book and its words, but for the first time in her life, her frustration at not immediately understanding is overruled by an overwhelming thirst to understand.
She spends her entire third winter at Camp Half-Blood deconstructing the ten-book treatise, and finally understands how her father feels when he talks about old airplanes and studies diagrams explaining how they fly; the only one who will listen to her natter on is Chiron - even Luke begs off when she gets going in a mixture of Greek and English - and he gently encourages her interest, pointing her in the direction of other works on architecture by Antistates, Terentius Varro, and Metagenes.
She devours whatever she can get her hands on, and can’t help but be thrilled by the idea that she can reach back through history, take the teachings of her brethren, and create something worth remembering herself.
***
VI. Actually, sometimes she's better off not knowing
She had spent months begging for a quest of her own, once it was announced that Luke would finally be granted his. Chiron had put her off each and every time, but Annabeth was relentless, because to her, it was all about logic: she had been at camp for as long as Luke had, and she’d developed the same skills he had too. For every extra bit of talent Luke had with a sword, she made up with her dagger or archery.
Chiron had refused, and refused. Eventually he’d let slip that he’d already asked the Oracle about her, and had been told that she had to wait for a special partner and Annabeth had seized upon the idea of a prophecy like a wolf upon its prey.
It’s Mr. D who finally steps in on her behalf, tired of Annabeth interrupting his pinochle games with talk of quests and prophecies and chosen ones. “Let her see,” he tells Chiron in a dismissive tone one night as he bids.
Chiron frowns, but Annabeth crows in glee. “Yes, yes! Let me see!” she exclaims.
Mr. D swings his gaze onto Annabeth, who stops her dance of celebration immediately, her blood running cold. His eyes are deadly serious. “It’ll serve you right,” he informs her in a dour tone. “You think you can bear the words of the Oracle? Smarter and stronger demigods than you have gone mad upon hearing her prophecies. Go read it, girl, but I won’t help you if it drives you insane.”
In hindsight, she maybe should have taken the god’s words more seriously, but she’s still flush with her victory over her teacher, too ecstatic at being allowed to read the prophecy at all to consider the warning.
She doesn’t sleep for three days after reading that scrap of paper hanging around the mummy’s neck. Her half-siblings are concerned, and Carter threatens more than once to send her to the infirmary, but Annabeth resists, and refuses to tell them exactly what it is that she saw.
Instead she suffers alone, and thinks somewhere in the haze of terror that fills up her mind late at night that she’s grateful for Thalia’s fate: a couple of Furies, a man-eating Cyclops and the rage of Hades seems like a much easier sentence than whatever it is that this prophecy kid is going to have to face. She’s glad it won’t be Thalia.
When she can finally sleep again she has nightmares - not uncommon for demigods, but these are terrifying even by Annabeth’s standards. The scariest part is that she has no control in the dreams, that she’s only helpless to watch as the prophecy unfolds.
She sees the cursed blade in her dreams, dripping poison and blood, hears somebody screaming in pain and torment. Sometimes it’s Thalia, sometimes it’s another face and body, some nameless unknown child of the Big Three. Sometimes that child looks like the most heroic person she knows - Luke, but she knows it can’t be Luke, who’s been claimed by Hermes and has never looked scared like the person in her dreams, not once in all the years she’s known him.
In the end, Annabeth hopes against hope that she’ll never cross paths with this cursed blade, wishes with every cell in her body that she only meets this prophecy kid in her dreams.
***
VII. You really can't go home again
Christmas is the breaking point. The school year had already been a disaster up until then; she’d gotten into fights, her grades had risen, then fallen, then plummeted, her mortal half-brothers were afraid of her, she didn’t get along with kids in her class at school, and then she’d gotten into more fights.
Annabeth wants more than anything for it to be different this time. Ever since that letter had arrived at camp, marked up with extra postage to account for the weight of her father’s class ring, she’d thought that maybe this was really it - maybe things had changed, her stepmother had come around, her father had finally stood up for her.
The sinking feeling had started with the first monster she faced, early in the school year, walking home from school. Upon arriving home disheveled but victorious, Annabeth couldn’t help the shot of annoyance that had gone through her at the fearful look on her stepmother’s face. The stupid beast hadn’t even gotten close to the house, and Annabeth had been armed. Didn’t her dumb stepmother understand that she could handle these things now?
The problem is that Christmas brings back too many bad memories; it had been the Christmas celebration when she was seven that had finally pushed her over the edge and made her run away in the first place - it wasn’t like she’d wanted her brother’s Christmas presents to be destroyed, wanted all of her parents good wedding china to be broken and strewn about. And still she’d gotten all of the blame for ruining Christmas - her father hadn’t spoken a single word in her defense. Not one.
Despite what he’d written in the letter, his claim that he loved her, he still never spoke a word in her defense. Her brothers skirted around her, staring at her with a cautious, wide-eyed gaze that made Annabeth wonder exactly what they’d been told about her. Her teachers, concerned, sent home all of her tests to be signed, and while he wasn’t angry about her struggles with school, her father was awfully perplexed. Wasn’t Annabeth supposed to be smart? The guilt burned in her chest every day as she tried fruitlessly to force herself to pay attention and focus on her work.
The fight that had finally broken everything beyond repair had started with an innocent sounding question about her school schedule, and the Christmas holiday. All it had taken was one simple question - her stepmother asking if she’d be spending every day of her vacation here at the house, where anything could find her? - and that was it, Annabeth was done.
They don’t want her anymore now than they had when she was seven; now, as she watches the tips of her father’s ears turn red while she stares at him, hoping for him to interject, she wonders what he was thinking, sending that letter.
On Christmas Eve when her family goes to mass Annabeth sends the Iris Message to Chiron and asks him to take her back to camp. He does so without a single question, and Annabeth doesn’t bother leaving a note as she leaves her family to celebrate the holiday that they clearly want without her.
***
VIII. Except for when you can
She’s glad the cabin is empty when she gets back to camp; more than anything Annabeth just wants to be alone right now. Luke - the only one who’d warned her against going back to her dad - comes around several times to see her, tries to corner her after training and sparring, but Annabeth avoids him. She doesn’t think she can bear to hear him say “I told you so” right now. She’s embarrassed that he was right.
Camp is cold and empty this time of year, something Annabeth is used to by now. She’s actually grateful for it, because then she doesn’t have to feel everybody’s burning eyes on her, silently judging her for her inability to live peacefully with her family. Other campers can, why can’t she? She’d wanted to have that family this time, wanted to have that home that missed her during the summers and welcomed her back each fall.
The only one who absolutely refuses to leave her alone is Chiron, who insists she come up to the Big House in the evenings for hot tea and card games with Mr. D. She thinks Chiron must have said something to Mr. D about her, because he refrains from making snarky comments about Annabeth; mostly, he just pretends she’s not there except to complain that she’s too slow with her bids, or thinking too long about her moves.
Chiron doesn’t ask her any questions about home or her parents, for which she’s grateful. She doesn’t want to talk about them, even though they weigh more heavily on her mind than the prophecy and its meaning.
One evening as they’re wrapping up their games before lights out, Chiron quietly remarks to Annabeth that he’s received a message from Carter several days before.
“Oh?” she asks, wondering why Chiron is bringing up her half-brother. “Is he doing okay? Does he need help with something?” As much as she doesn’t want anything to happen to Carter, she’s half-hoping Chiron is sending her to him, a little mini-quest to help another child of Athena who can’t seem to cope in the real world.
It’s not nearly anything as exciting as that, and it’s with equal parts relief and disappointment that Chiron assures her that Carter is fine, and enjoying his semester at school. “He did remark though that he will need to take classes this summer in order to graduate on time. He won’t be coming back to camp this year.”
Annabeth blinks as she processes this information. Carter’s been in charge every year that she’s been at camp; it’s almost unthinkable to her, that he won’t be drawing up maps for capture the flag or letting the Ares cabin goad him into sword fights.
When she doesn’t respond Chiron continues. “Cabin Six will need a new counselor when Athena’s children return to camp this summer.”
She barely has time to process what he’s hinting at before he says it outright: “The job is yours, if you want it.”
It’s not until later, after she’s excitably accepted the offer, that she realizes what this means: extra chores, sitting in at cabin meetings, making strategic alliances during war games and training. She is the one who has to comfort the new kids who don’t understand what a demigod is and cry at night when they have bad dreams. She is the one who is going to have to enforce the rules in the cabin, a frequently unpopular position, even for a cabin as well behaved as Number Six.
She is the one who will represent her mother at Camp Half-Blood. Annabeth feels a fierce pride well up inside of her at this thought. Gazing at the owl perched above the doorway, Annabeth smiles confidently. She can do this - and she can do a good job of it. She is not her father’s daughter; she’s a daughter of Athena.
Opening the door, she heads immediately for the desk that she’s claimed and pulls out a notebook. She only has a few months to plan.
End
***
A/N:
"My dad scared it off. He thought it was after our Doberman." - Yes, that's a call back to Badge of Life
De architectura - ten books on architecture written by the Roman architect Vitruvius as a guide for building projects. The work is one of the most important sources of modern knowledge of Roman building methods as well as the planning and design of structures. The aforementioned book 10 is dedicated to the building and use of machines, including war machines such as siege engines.
Antistates, Terentius Varro, and Metagenes - Book VII of De architectura starts off with a list of references, basically. Antistates is given as an expert on architecture, Terentius Varro a writer whose works include "Nine Books of Discipline", of which a book is dedicated to architecture, and Metagenes is one of the names given as the designer of the Temple of Artemis, one of the former seven wonders of the world.