WiP meme
Since everyone else is doing it...
When you see this, post an excerpt from as many random works-in-progress as you can find lying around. Who knows? Maybe inspiration will burst forth and do something, um, inspiration-y.
And by "works-in-progress," I mean "fics I will go fiddle with when I'm bored but most likely will never get posted."
The Kane Chronicles
a. Sadie/Anubis fic I started writing after someone prompted me, I think
“Funny, you didn’t whine about legality at all last night when we broke into the mayor’s office last night. Or when you begged Bast to teach you how to hot wire cars a week ago. Or - ”
“That’s different and you know it, Sadie,” Carter interrupted and, she couldn’t be sure because of the dark of the night, but his cheeks had to be flushing with embarrassment. “We need to do that stuff, it’s part of the whole Ancient Egyptian magician job description. Scaling cemetery walls so you can have a midnight rendezvous with your stupid, jackal headed boyfriend? Not so much.”
Sadie didn’t know when Carter had decided to become the overbearing, overprotective older brother. She supposed it had something to do with the fact that she was sixteen now, and boys were looking looking at her in a way Carter didn’t like in the slightest; she couldn’t even flirt with cute gas station attendants or waiters without him showing up in his new three piece suit and trying to intimidate them with a heavy glare. She wished he had better ways of channeling his concern for her, ones that didn’t involve treating her like an infant.
Sadie Kane was a bloody magician and had fought and defeated gods. She didn’t need her idiot brother around to defend her honor if some boy suddenly got a little too handsy.
“A.) He is not my boyfriend, and b.), you know we’re supposed to give an update to Dad and Osiris every couple of months, so this is in the job description,” Sadie snapped back, bracing her hands on the wall. “Now will you stop being an obnoxious git and give me a boost? I can’t quite reach the top.”
Carter grumbled some sort of unsavory comment under his breath, but bent his knees and cupped his hands together. Sadie planted one of her combat boots in the cradle of his hands, and he pushed he upwards until she could reach the ledge and pull herself over.
“You’re getting heavy,” Carter grunted, and he narrowly avoided getting a boot to the face. Sadie glared at him as she swung her legs over to the other side.
The Hunger Games
b. A Finnick/Johanna piece I started writing prior to Mockingjay. I might need to go and re-tool it if I ever want to post it.
She meets him on her Victory Tour at District 4’s celebratory dinner where he sidles up to her, tall and intimidating in his form-fitting suit and his famous good looks. Even though they’re the same age and she’s a victor all the same as him, she feels like she needs to treat him with some kind of reverence and respect. Having those kinds of feelings is a first for her, but Finnick Odain is the youngest living champion of the Hunger Games, and only living legends get a little bit of deference from Johanna Mason.
Her deference lasts right up until he opens that handsome mouth of his.
“You’re the girl with the ax, right? The one who blubbered all over the place?” he drawls, as if he hadn’t paid attention to the Games at all. He looks bored and in-different, as if she wasn't worth his time at all.
Johanna bristles. This snobby son of a bitch had to know who she was; everyone did now. Her first kill had been one of his tributes and she had made it particularly brutal to prove a point to everyone watching, everyone back home who thought she was a goner - he has to know who she is, has to hate her with every last bit of being.
She sees the corner of his mouth twitch up in the beginning of a satisfied smirk, and she refuses to let her temper get a hold of her. Johanna Mason’s no idiot, and she knows he’s baiting her, waiting to see how she’ll react. But two can play at that game, and since they’ve both been crowned as masters of the games, their meeting quickly becomes a matter of who plays them better.
“And you're the pretty boy with the trident, right?” she replies, taking a slow sip of her drink and waiting for his nod. “I hope you've learned how to use that thing by now. It'd be a pity for a … weapon of that size to go to waste.”
Percy Jackson
c. If you can't tell what massive WiP that will probably never be posted this is from...
“So,” he says conversationally as he lines up beside her behind the starting line. His tone is clipped with anger and disappointment. “Are you really going to go to formal with Reilly?”
Annabeth bends her knees, waiting for the coach's start whistle, and glances at him.
“Maybe,” she says after a moment. “What's it to you?”
Before he can respond, the whistle blows and Annabeth's off, racing to the center line to get one of the rubber balls waiting there, Percy right on her heels. She's not nearly as good at dodgeball as she is at Capture the Flag, but she has the best throwing arm of all the girls in her class and she's had more than her fair share of practice dodging painful, flying objects.
After the initial volley is over and all the weaker students have been picked off on both teams, Percy makes the effort to catch a pass in her area, just so he can turn and say to her, “Maybe I was just wondering why you decided to pick him out of all your other candidates. He's an asshole, Annabeth.”
“To you, maybe,” she responds, throwing a ball at one of the girls hiding in the corner on the other side of the gym. “But he's never been anything but nice to me.”
“Because he wants in your pants,” Percy replies forcefully, catching another ball and handing it to her. “Half these guys wouldn't be asking you if they didn't think you'd put out. I mean, it's not like they're really interested in you.”
At that moment, Annabeth wishes she was on the other team so she could throw that ball very hard at Percy's stupid head, just so he can have some idea of how much that comment hurt. Even though she's said similar things to Rachel and her other friends before, the way Percy says it makes it sting worse than anything else.
Instead, she settles for wailing the ball into the stomach of one of the dark haired boys on the other team and shoots Percy a glare, hoping he understands that was meant for him.
“Sorry,” he says as they move toward the back of them gym to get out of range. He doesn't sound remotely apologetic, just hopelessly frustrated and confused. “But I'm just sick of seeing all these guys act like they know you when they didn't even have the slightest clue who you were a week ago - ”
“Well, there's a solution to that,” Annabeth interrupts, ignoring the game and turning her attention fully to Percy. “Instead of whining about it, you could ask me instead.”
Percy blinks, surprised. “Would you say yes?”
Annabeth gives him a critical look, the same one she gives him in Chemistry when he asks her for an answer to a question she's positive he knows already.
“Ask me,” she replies. “And find out.”
d. The AU where Percy's a merboy and Annabeth's going to a Victorian finishing school for girls
The docks at Clarion Ladies Academy were technically off-limits to the students who resided there, supposedly because there were too many dangerous obstacles lurking about and too many chances that the girls could ruin their fine clothes by catching them on rotted pieces of wood. That was what the old matrons teaching at the school wanted them to believe, but any young lady above the age of twelve quickly learned the real reason was that the docks were hard to see from the school's windows, thus making it the perfect location for an evening rendezvous with the stable hands and serving boys.
A romantic rendezvous was not Miss Annabeth Chase's goal as she approached the docks today, for she was only thirteen years old and romance was not yet one of her primary priorities, something her art instructor Ms. Aphrodite thought to be extremely unfortunate. Ms. Aphrodite was forever encouraging her students to be victims of love with all the time she spent rattling off romantic poetry and telling them tall tales about handsome princes riding off into the sunset with their true loves. Annabeth did not bother to point out to her smitten classmates that - no matter how pretty she was - Ms. Aphrodite was an unmarried spinster of eight and twenty, teaching at New England's most remote girls boarding school, and thus did not have realistic expectations of love. It was those sorts of observations that had gotten her in trouble since she had first started at Clarion, and she knew now how to keep her mouth shut less she was sent to bed without dinner.
As it were, her art instructor was the reason she was climbing over piles of coiled rope, sketch paper and pencils tucked under one arm. Ms. Aphrodite had today informed her that she was dreadfully tired of Annabeth turning in drawings of buildings and arches instead of the required watercolors of landscapes or tea trays her contemporaries were so skilled at reproducing at the end of each work.
"Would you expect your husband to let you display this in his household?" Ms. Aphrodite said in front of a full class, dangling Annabeth's sketch of floor plans for a manner house in front of her like it was some kind of muddy article of clothing. "It is not very pleasing to the eye, Miss Chase, and your hard lines and strokes are hardly those of a lady. Why, it looks like you almost tore through the paper!"
Blushing furiously at the criticism and annoyed by her classmate's titters of laughter behind her, Annabeth responded, "He'll hang it in his household if he used those plans to build his household. I think any man would be proud to display his wife's work, especially if it provided him with a handsome new home."
Ms. Aphrodite heaved a melodramatic sigh, the one that indicated that Annabeth had so much to learn about the ways of men and women, and set the drawing down. "Miss Chase, I have been patient with you throughout the year and you have the potential to be quite an accomplished artist, but I will write your father if you do not turn a landscape into me by the end of the week. Is that understood?"
e. Apollo/Rachel fic for pjo_kinkmeme. I SHIP RACHEL/EVERYONE, OKAY.
The metal of the Maserati's hood is still warm when Apollo pressed her up against the car, but that was nothing compared to the heat the sun god himself was putting off. A bead of sweat dripped down the column of Rachel's spine as she stared into his inscrutable blue eyes, wondering what sort of trouble she'd gotten herself into this time.
The man in front of her wasn't the playful, laid back persona Apollo liked to adopt when he was around her. This was the side of him she caught glimpses of in her early morning dreams and hazy fantasies - the intensely fierce, serious immortal with a possessive streak a hundred miles wide.
Who knew flirting with a couple of guys at a club would be enough to bring that side out of him? She hadn't even known he was there until he'd tapped her on the shoulder and asked her to come outside with him, an angry, but otherwise unreadable expression on his face.
“Lord Apollo,” she said, her voice raspy, unsure, “Is something wrong?”
“I'm getting very tired,” Apollo said, keeping his tone deliberate and slow, moving just a bit closer to her, “of young men thinking you're an available woman, my dear.”
Well, at least he wasn't mad at her. But did his annoyance mean that ... ?
Of course not. Apollo wouldn't get jealous of some mortal boys, especially not because they were flirting with her.
“Well, it's not like I can wear a sign that says, 'I'm a virgin Oracle, hands off,' when I go out,” she replied carefully, gauging his reaction. “That'd just be awkward.”
Apollo cracked a small smile, and Rachel relaxed a little bit, planting her hands behind on on the car's hood and leaning back to give herself a bit more room. The god's smile faded as his eyes narrowed and followed her movements, dragging up her body and watching her with a look that grew more desperate and hungry by the second.
Rachel had seen that look before, once or twice when something had almost happened between the two of them, and a satisfied heat flowed through her. So maybe Apollo was a little jealous after all; that was perfectly acceptable to her, especially if he decided to break some his ridiculous, self-imposed rules.
“Yes, it would,” he said, his hands settling on her hips, his thumbs unerringly seeking out at the bare patch of skin between her the waistband of her pants and the edge of her shirt. “But something should be done to stop this from happening again.”
f. My girlsavesboyfic that I never finished on time. After I get through all my post-TLH ideas, I might go back and finish this one. Set right before The Last Olympian.
The Stolls, Will Solace and a few Ares kids had gone out to Boston area a couple of days ago to retrieve a couple of new campers and destroy a small base camp of Kronos’s monsters near the harbor. The mission had gone well, but Will and the others had returned without the Stolls. The brothers had apparently been distracted post-mission by a shipment of luxury goods they wanted to confiscate and sell on the black market (“All for the good of camp, they assured me,” Will said, rolling his eyes) and no one else had wanted to be involved with grand theft, so they’d left without the brothers to their own devices.
Annabeth couldn’t decide who had been the bigger idiots in the situation - probably Will and the Ares kids. You just couldn’t leave people behind during a war, especially to let them get captured by a nest of hideous snake women.
“Lamia,” Annabeth replied grimly, watching as one of them slithered toward the pit, a woven basket clutched under her scaly arms.
The lamia looked like an average women from the waist up - pleasant shaped face, flowing brown hair, ample cleavage (as she had noticed Percy had noted with some interest) - but her lower body was a bright green snake’s tail. Annabeth was sure she’d seen one with a rattle on the end of it go by at some point. She couldn’t see their eyes from this far, but if the stories were true, she didn’t particularly want to see that.
“They’re like Greek vampires ... except they primarily feed on the blood of infants,” she continued, and Percy made a gagging sound in the back of his throat. “You’re lucky you brought me with you. Men are particularly susceptible to lamia, which is probably why those idiots got themselves caught in the first place.”
Percy an arched an eyebrow. “Are you saying that because men are all infants?”
Annabeth resisted the urge to rise to his bait. She was not in the mood to argue with him over little things today.
“I’m saying that because a lamia’s second favorite meal is a stupid guy. You can’t look at them too long or they’ll use their magic to enchant you.”
g. Said post-TLH fic I'm working on now...
He scrambles to pulls his helmet off his head and throws it aside. He hears it clatter on the ground as he reaches for her, cupping her face in his hands, and her gray eyes go wide with recognition a moment later.
"I know you," he says wonderingly, his thumb caressing her cheek lightly. "You're Annabeth."
When you see this, post an excerpt from as many random works-in-progress as you can find lying around. Who knows? Maybe inspiration will burst forth and do something, um, inspiration-y.
And by "works-in-progress," I mean "fics I will go fiddle with when I'm bored but most likely will never get posted."
The Kane Chronicles
a. Sadie/Anubis fic I started writing after someone prompted me, I think
“Funny, you didn’t whine about legality at all last night when we broke into the mayor’s office last night. Or when you begged Bast to teach you how to hot wire cars a week ago. Or - ”
“That’s different and you know it, Sadie,” Carter interrupted and, she couldn’t be sure because of the dark of the night, but his cheeks had to be flushing with embarrassment. “We need to do that stuff, it’s part of the whole Ancient Egyptian magician job description. Scaling cemetery walls so you can have a midnight rendezvous with your stupid, jackal headed boyfriend? Not so much.”
Sadie didn’t know when Carter had decided to become the overbearing, overprotective older brother. She supposed it had something to do with the fact that she was sixteen now, and boys were looking looking at her in a way Carter didn’t like in the slightest; she couldn’t even flirt with cute gas station attendants or waiters without him showing up in his new three piece suit and trying to intimidate them with a heavy glare. She wished he had better ways of channeling his concern for her, ones that didn’t involve treating her like an infant.
Sadie Kane was a bloody magician and had fought and defeated gods. She didn’t need her idiot brother around to defend her honor if some boy suddenly got a little too handsy.
“A.) He is not my boyfriend, and b.), you know we’re supposed to give an update to Dad and Osiris every couple of months, so this is in the job description,” Sadie snapped back, bracing her hands on the wall. “Now will you stop being an obnoxious git and give me a boost? I can’t quite reach the top.”
Carter grumbled some sort of unsavory comment under his breath, but bent his knees and cupped his hands together. Sadie planted one of her combat boots in the cradle of his hands, and he pushed he upwards until she could reach the ledge and pull herself over.
“You’re getting heavy,” Carter grunted, and he narrowly avoided getting a boot to the face. Sadie glared at him as she swung her legs over to the other side.
The Hunger Games
b. A Finnick/Johanna piece I started writing prior to Mockingjay. I might need to go and re-tool it if I ever want to post it.
She meets him on her Victory Tour at District 4’s celebratory dinner where he sidles up to her, tall and intimidating in his form-fitting suit and his famous good looks. Even though they’re the same age and she’s a victor all the same as him, she feels like she needs to treat him with some kind of reverence and respect. Having those kinds of feelings is a first for her, but Finnick Odain is the youngest living champion of the Hunger Games, and only living legends get a little bit of deference from Johanna Mason.
Her deference lasts right up until he opens that handsome mouth of his.
“You’re the girl with the ax, right? The one who blubbered all over the place?” he drawls, as if he hadn’t paid attention to the Games at all. He looks bored and in-different, as if she wasn't worth his time at all.
Johanna bristles. This snobby son of a bitch had to know who she was; everyone did now. Her first kill had been one of his tributes and she had made it particularly brutal to prove a point to everyone watching, everyone back home who thought she was a goner - he has to know who she is, has to hate her with every last bit of being.
She sees the corner of his mouth twitch up in the beginning of a satisfied smirk, and she refuses to let her temper get a hold of her. Johanna Mason’s no idiot, and she knows he’s baiting her, waiting to see how she’ll react. But two can play at that game, and since they’ve both been crowned as masters of the games, their meeting quickly becomes a matter of who plays them better.
“And you're the pretty boy with the trident, right?” she replies, taking a slow sip of her drink and waiting for his nod. “I hope you've learned how to use that thing by now. It'd be a pity for a … weapon of that size to go to waste.”
Percy Jackson
c. If you can't tell what massive WiP that will probably never be posted this is from...
“So,” he says conversationally as he lines up beside her behind the starting line. His tone is clipped with anger and disappointment. “Are you really going to go to formal with Reilly?”
Annabeth bends her knees, waiting for the coach's start whistle, and glances at him.
“Maybe,” she says after a moment. “What's it to you?”
Before he can respond, the whistle blows and Annabeth's off, racing to the center line to get one of the rubber balls waiting there, Percy right on her heels. She's not nearly as good at dodgeball as she is at Capture the Flag, but she has the best throwing arm of all the girls in her class and she's had more than her fair share of practice dodging painful, flying objects.
After the initial volley is over and all the weaker students have been picked off on both teams, Percy makes the effort to catch a pass in her area, just so he can turn and say to her, “Maybe I was just wondering why you decided to pick him out of all your other candidates. He's an asshole, Annabeth.”
“To you, maybe,” she responds, throwing a ball at one of the girls hiding in the corner on the other side of the gym. “But he's never been anything but nice to me.”
“Because he wants in your pants,” Percy replies forcefully, catching another ball and handing it to her. “Half these guys wouldn't be asking you if they didn't think you'd put out. I mean, it's not like they're really interested in you.”
At that moment, Annabeth wishes she was on the other team so she could throw that ball very hard at Percy's stupid head, just so he can have some idea of how much that comment hurt. Even though she's said similar things to Rachel and her other friends before, the way Percy says it makes it sting worse than anything else.
Instead, she settles for wailing the ball into the stomach of one of the dark haired boys on the other team and shoots Percy a glare, hoping he understands that was meant for him.
“Sorry,” he says as they move toward the back of them gym to get out of range. He doesn't sound remotely apologetic, just hopelessly frustrated and confused. “But I'm just sick of seeing all these guys act like they know you when they didn't even have the slightest clue who you were a week ago - ”
“Well, there's a solution to that,” Annabeth interrupts, ignoring the game and turning her attention fully to Percy. “Instead of whining about it, you could ask me instead.”
Percy blinks, surprised. “Would you say yes?”
Annabeth gives him a critical look, the same one she gives him in Chemistry when he asks her for an answer to a question she's positive he knows already.
“Ask me,” she replies. “And find out.”
d. The AU where Percy's a merboy and Annabeth's going to a Victorian finishing school for girls
The docks at Clarion Ladies Academy were technically off-limits to the students who resided there, supposedly because there were too many dangerous obstacles lurking about and too many chances that the girls could ruin their fine clothes by catching them on rotted pieces of wood. That was what the old matrons teaching at the school wanted them to believe, but any young lady above the age of twelve quickly learned the real reason was that the docks were hard to see from the school's windows, thus making it the perfect location for an evening rendezvous with the stable hands and serving boys.
A romantic rendezvous was not Miss Annabeth Chase's goal as she approached the docks today, for she was only thirteen years old and romance was not yet one of her primary priorities, something her art instructor Ms. Aphrodite thought to be extremely unfortunate. Ms. Aphrodite was forever encouraging her students to be victims of love with all the time she spent rattling off romantic poetry and telling them tall tales about handsome princes riding off into the sunset with their true loves. Annabeth did not bother to point out to her smitten classmates that - no matter how pretty she was - Ms. Aphrodite was an unmarried spinster of eight and twenty, teaching at New England's most remote girls boarding school, and thus did not have realistic expectations of love. It was those sorts of observations that had gotten her in trouble since she had first started at Clarion, and she knew now how to keep her mouth shut less she was sent to bed without dinner.
As it were, her art instructor was the reason she was climbing over piles of coiled rope, sketch paper and pencils tucked under one arm. Ms. Aphrodite had today informed her that she was dreadfully tired of Annabeth turning in drawings of buildings and arches instead of the required watercolors of landscapes or tea trays her contemporaries were so skilled at reproducing at the end of each work.
"Would you expect your husband to let you display this in his household?" Ms. Aphrodite said in front of a full class, dangling Annabeth's sketch of floor plans for a manner house in front of her like it was some kind of muddy article of clothing. "It is not very pleasing to the eye, Miss Chase, and your hard lines and strokes are hardly those of a lady. Why, it looks like you almost tore through the paper!"
Blushing furiously at the criticism and annoyed by her classmate's titters of laughter behind her, Annabeth responded, "He'll hang it in his household if he used those plans to build his household. I think any man would be proud to display his wife's work, especially if it provided him with a handsome new home."
Ms. Aphrodite heaved a melodramatic sigh, the one that indicated that Annabeth had so much to learn about the ways of men and women, and set the drawing down. "Miss Chase, I have been patient with you throughout the year and you have the potential to be quite an accomplished artist, but I will write your father if you do not turn a landscape into me by the end of the week. Is that understood?"
e. Apollo/Rachel fic for pjo_kinkmeme. I SHIP RACHEL/EVERYONE, OKAY.
The metal of the Maserati's hood is still warm when Apollo pressed her up against the car, but that was nothing compared to the heat the sun god himself was putting off. A bead of sweat dripped down the column of Rachel's spine as she stared into his inscrutable blue eyes, wondering what sort of trouble she'd gotten herself into this time.
The man in front of her wasn't the playful, laid back persona Apollo liked to adopt when he was around her. This was the side of him she caught glimpses of in her early morning dreams and hazy fantasies - the intensely fierce, serious immortal with a possessive streak a hundred miles wide.
Who knew flirting with a couple of guys at a club would be enough to bring that side out of him? She hadn't even known he was there until he'd tapped her on the shoulder and asked her to come outside with him, an angry, but otherwise unreadable expression on his face.
“Lord Apollo,” she said, her voice raspy, unsure, “Is something wrong?”
“I'm getting very tired,” Apollo said, keeping his tone deliberate and slow, moving just a bit closer to her, “of young men thinking you're an available woman, my dear.”
Well, at least he wasn't mad at her. But did his annoyance mean that ... ?
Of course not. Apollo wouldn't get jealous of some mortal boys, especially not because they were flirting with her.
“Well, it's not like I can wear a sign that says, 'I'm a virgin Oracle, hands off,' when I go out,” she replied carefully, gauging his reaction. “That'd just be awkward.”
Apollo cracked a small smile, and Rachel relaxed a little bit, planting her hands behind on on the car's hood and leaning back to give herself a bit more room. The god's smile faded as his eyes narrowed and followed her movements, dragging up her body and watching her with a look that grew more desperate and hungry by the second.
Rachel had seen that look before, once or twice when something had almost happened between the two of them, and a satisfied heat flowed through her. So maybe Apollo was a little jealous after all; that was perfectly acceptable to her, especially if he decided to break some his ridiculous, self-imposed rules.
“Yes, it would,” he said, his hands settling on her hips, his thumbs unerringly seeking out at the bare patch of skin between her the waistband of her pants and the edge of her shirt. “But something should be done to stop this from happening again.”
f. My girlsavesboyfic that I never finished on time. After I get through all my post-TLH ideas, I might go back and finish this one. Set right before The Last Olympian.
The Stolls, Will Solace and a few Ares kids had gone out to Boston area a couple of days ago to retrieve a couple of new campers and destroy a small base camp of Kronos’s monsters near the harbor. The mission had gone well, but Will and the others had returned without the Stolls. The brothers had apparently been distracted post-mission by a shipment of luxury goods they wanted to confiscate and sell on the black market (“All for the good of camp, they assured me,” Will said, rolling his eyes) and no one else had wanted to be involved with grand theft, so they’d left without the brothers to their own devices.
Annabeth couldn’t decide who had been the bigger idiots in the situation - probably Will and the Ares kids. You just couldn’t leave people behind during a war, especially to let them get captured by a nest of hideous snake women.
“Lamia,” Annabeth replied grimly, watching as one of them slithered toward the pit, a woven basket clutched under her scaly arms.
The lamia looked like an average women from the waist up - pleasant shaped face, flowing brown hair, ample cleavage (as she had noticed Percy had noted with some interest) - but her lower body was a bright green snake’s tail. Annabeth was sure she’d seen one with a rattle on the end of it go by at some point. She couldn’t see their eyes from this far, but if the stories were true, she didn’t particularly want to see that.
“They’re like Greek vampires ... except they primarily feed on the blood of infants,” she continued, and Percy made a gagging sound in the back of his throat. “You’re lucky you brought me with you. Men are particularly susceptible to lamia, which is probably why those idiots got themselves caught in the first place.”
Percy an arched an eyebrow. “Are you saying that because men are all infants?”
Annabeth resisted the urge to rise to his bait. She was not in the mood to argue with him over little things today.
“I’m saying that because a lamia’s second favorite meal is a stupid guy. You can’t look at them too long or they’ll use their magic to enchant you.”
g. Said post-TLH fic I'm working on now...
He scrambles to pulls his helmet off his head and throws it aside. He hears it clatter on the ground as he reaches for her, cupping her face in his hands, and her gray eyes go wide with recognition a moment later.
"I know you," he says wonderingly, his thumb caressing her cheek lightly. "You're Annabeth."