Fic: It's a No Regret Life (part two), Percy Jackson
Title: It's a No Regret Life [Part Two]
Fandom: Percy Jackson and the Olympians
Characters/Pairings: Annabeth/Percy/Nico, and all subsequent combinations thereof
Word Count: 13,500
Continued from.
Sometime in early August, Annabeth spends a week at Camp-Half Blood at Chiron's request. She doesn't mind; Malcolm turns eighteen on the 4th, so they throw him a party true Athena cabin style, the way she hasn't done since she was their age. Her week is almost up before their pillows stop being booby-trapped to not let their owners sleep on them until they answer 15 trivia questions.
Wherever she goes, the younger campers pester her with questions about her designs for Mt. Olympus, even the ones that were unclaimed at the time of the battle in Manhattan or too young to remember it. It's gratifying in some respects, and absolutely terrifying in others. Every day, she wonders if maybe it's too much responsibility for one half-blood to handle.
When she goes back to the apartment in the city on Thursday, she knows something is wrong the instant she opens the door. The door's unlocked, and the lights are on, but there's nobody home.
All her senses tingling, Annabeth gingerly sets her stuff down in the entryway and investigates further. The TV is on, running low volume on the programming channel. A book is open on the beanbag chair; the one she'd told Percy to read for his upcoming fall class, upside down with three pages bent crooked, like it'd been placed down in a hurry. In the kitchenette, there are still dishes in the sink, and in the rice cooker, a meal is forgotten, congealing in the bowl. She doesn't need to check the bedrooms. The whole thing screams of two boys who left in a great hurry and haven't been back in awhile.
She grabs the emergency pack from the cabinet above the sink, checks it to make sure she has everything -- a dagger, bottle of nectar and ambrosia in a baggie, forty dollars, and a few golden drachmas -- and she's out the door before she even has time to think.
-
Fifteen minutes later, she's three blocks down and it just then occurs to her that she has no idea where Percy and Nico could be, or even where she should start looking. She hadn't even bothered to grab the car keys.
It's enough to make her feel like she's going to shatter, like a wrong vibration is going to shake her apart like raindrops out of a screen door, and she stops at the curb to wait for a walk signal, breathing hard. Panic has full and well set in, because too many things can go wrong when you've been gone for a week and come home to discover that your roommates, two half-blood sons of the Big Three with big black marks on their names in the monster world, have disappeared without a trace.
If she was near a pool of water, she could try to make a spray, see if an Iris-message would go through to either one of them, but she's in the middle of New York City in August -- there's no standing water to be had anywhere nearby. Gods, those boys are stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Couldn't they have left a note? Did they think she wouldn't worry, that she wouldn't immediately assume the worst?
The walk signal flicks to green, but Annabeth doesn't even notice.
She is just getting to the stage of panic where her imagination is weighing more on her mind than her common sense, when a voice says disgustedly from behind her, "Staring into space isn't going to be helping anyone, you know."
Annabeth spins around, and blinks in surprise. Looking at her disapprovingly from the trunk of a tree in front of someone's flat is ...
"Juniper," she says blankly. "Hi."
There are two bright lime patches of color high on Juniper's cheeks. "You never came to visit me this week," she sniffs, and Annabeth realizes that the tree nymph really is upset by this fact.
She will never understand girls.
"I'm really sorry about that, Juniper. I've got plenty of free time next week -- I promise I'll come around, and we can hang out. Drink green tea and talk about what Grover's doing these days, whatever, but right now, I've got something on my mind --"
"Because," Juniper cuts in over her, sounding as testy as a nature spirit can. "If you'd come by my tree instead of making me come all the way out here to this barren, fake suburb, I would have been able to tell you that Nico di Angelo is in trouble and I know where he is."
That cuts right through the faint buzz of hysteria in Annabeth's mind, blurring it right into silence like muting a channel of static on a television. It might be that she's entirely too conditioned by this point, because the very first thing she does is send a quick but fervent prayer of thanks to the gods for looking out for her.
"Where?" she goes, not even caring that only one of the boys is accounted for. Because she knows, somewhere where she's never consciously admitted it to herself for one reason or another, that wherever Nico is, Percy is usually nearby, because perhaps the only person who watches Percy's back as closely as she does is Nico di Angelo.
"Central Park," says Juniper, her temper fading in the light of Annabeth's obvious emotional state. "He's been there for three days now, and hasn't left. Normally that wouldn't bother the tree spirits there, except he's a son of Hades and smells like death. Besides, being nature spirits, we're all rather fond of Persephone, and I don't have to tell you what Persephone thinks of Nico. They want him out."
"Is he all right?" she asks, because yeah, he might be the son of Hades, but he could also smell like death because he is dead -- she wouldn't count on tree nymphs to check for something like a pulse.
"As far as we can tell. But you should probably go check for yourself -- it doesn't take a child of Athena to figure out that there's something wrong."
Annabeth spins on her heel and sprints across the street, just as the walking signal begins to flash the don't walk sign. "Thank you, Juniper!" she yells over her shoulder, knows without looking that Juniper is rolling her eyes. "I owe you!"
The subway is four blocks away, a route familiar to her from two summers of staying here with Percy. It's past rush hour when she gets there, thankfully, pushing her way through the turnstiles with more impatience than it necessitates. She reviews the information Juniper gave her as she stands on the platform, unconsciously sizing up the people waiting with her to determine if any of them might be monsters. There isn't a lot she knows, other than Nico's in Central Park and he's been there for three days.
What's so important that he wouldn't leave that spot, not even to go home or to send her an Iris message or anything? And where's Percy, that the tree nymphs didn't have a word to say about him? Most of them know exactly who he is -- Grover's made sure of that. So why Nico and not him?
These questions loop around in her head most of the trip into the heart of Manhattan. She's not a daughter of Athena because she likes to back down from difficult questions, and now that she has something to work with, she can face this more calmly.
When she gets to the Central Park stop, it's already full-on dark, which she supposed should make her nervous, if she wasn't a half-blood who faced monsters and Titan revolutions like they were pop quizzes. It's a big park, and dark, but it doesn't take long to find Nico -- a tree nymph helpfully materializes out of the gloom before she starts to wonder. Juniper must have sent word on ahead that she was coming. The nymph has a gnarled twist to her face, the telltale toughness of someone who's grown up in New York City.
She leads her to Nico, sitting on a bench beside the path, looking strange and forlorn with his jacket pulled up around his ears and his uncombed hair sticking everywhere, like a bird with ruffled feathers. The nymph disappears before Annabeth can thank her, so she plants herself in front of Nico, fighting the inexplicable urge to punch him. It's different from all the times she's wanted to punch him over the summer -- this anger is born directly from relief, instead of annoyance at his immaturity. He's all right, he's not dead, although he could use a bath and some food.
But more importantly.
"What happened to Percy?" she demands, in the best "Nico di Angelo don't you even think of screwing with me" voice that she had. His attention catches on her suddenly like a camera lens, sharp and focused. Good. She doesn't have to worry about his brains being addled.
"He vanished four days ago," he rasps in a raw voice like he'd gone and shouted himself hoarse. His eyes dart away from her. "He's not dead and he's not in the Underworld -- I would sense it if he was. But he's in some immortal place, I can feel that much. I don't know what happened. I just came home and he was gone."
Like her, then -- and the first thing he'd done was set out immediately to find him, without turning off the lights or even leaving a note. Of course.
"So why are you bumming in Central Park?"
"This is the last place he was before he got shunted out of the mortal world." When her look grows skeptical, he flashes, "It's a proximity thing, I think. Like, I've been able to tell when you're on Mt. Olympus or in Camp Half-Blood. It's just in my head, some feeling that tells me you're not in the mortal realm. I can feel it stronger with Percy since I've been living with him longer. I've spent the last three days trying to find where he might have gone. It's like the trail goes cold right around here."
He delivers this in his abused voice, his tone almost matter-of-fact, but when he stops talking, a tremor goes through him, and Annabeth realizes he isn't holding himself together as well as she thought.
"I'm so sorry, Annabeth," he tells their feet, sinking further into his bomber jacket like a turtle withdrawing into its shell. "I can't find him. I don't know what's happened and I don't know where he could be. I'm so, so sorry --" his voice cracks.
Alarmed, she drops onto the bench next to him, because she's grown up with enough brothers to know that if a seventeen-year-old will cry in front of you, then something is really, really wrong. "Hey," she goes. "Don't beat yourself up. You can't watch him every minute of every day. He'd find a way to get into trouble regardless of how closely you were watching him," her tone is wry. "Besides, it's not your job. He's not your boyfriend."
He cuts his eyes at her, and Annabeth feels a sudden jolt catch her, like missing a step on a flight of stairs. She recognizes the look in his eyes, suddenly; it's the same look he's had all summer, that strange distant wistful look, and she's dismissed it again and again, assuming it was just part of the unfathomable Nico enigma, but it's not. It's the most familiar look she knows; she wears it every time she looks at Percy.
She's just never seen it on anyone else before. She's never bothered to look for it.
"Oh," she goes, the softest gasp, as if she'd pricked her finger on a tack. "Oh, gods, I'm an idiot."
"No, Annabeth, no," Nico says quickly. "No, it's not like --" and he trails off, helplessly, because there's no denying the truth. "I didn't mean to," he finishes, almost miserably.
For the first time, she takes a step back and takes a second look at the entire summer. Horror dips deep into her stomach -- what if Nico's problem wasn't that he had the people skills of roadkill? What if Percy's continual awkwardness wasn't due to the fact they had an interloper at all times? What did they have, before Annabeth came in, thinking she knew exactly how the chips fell?
We've been so stupid, she thinks, reaching out and placing a hand on Nico's shoulder, maneuvering him back so that he was caught between the arm of the bench and the back. His pale face betrays surprise, and then it shifts, becoming the same exact understanding that hit her moments before, as she tucks one leg around him to straddle his hips, using the other to keep her balance. We can't just let one person have so much control over our hearts. We aren't made for it, not when there's the chance they won't be there tomorrow.
She kisses him, logically, feeling him startle under her hands. His lips are thinner, harder than Percy's, but she only has a moment to acknowledge this before he's kissing her back with the kind of predetermination that has her thinking he might have already figured this out.
And the thing is. The thing is, it's almost familiar, kissing Nico. It's not something she's ever done before, but it feels like it should be.
His hands move up the accordion of her spine, up to tangle in her hair, and when she kisses him for the second time, he tugs on it hard enough to make her wince, moving her head to align their mouths better. She pushes his jacket off his shoulders, and he leans up into her so it slides off of him, puddling on the ground. They keep on kissing, mouths moving inside and outside and around the other's, fast and hard like they're worried their thoughts will catch up to them if they don't, and Annabeth finds her shirt has been pushed up around her ribs before she's even aware Nico's moved his hands.
Yes. Yes, there's that feeling again: Nico's heart, pounding in her chest, beating for the exact same reason.
This reason has a name.
She steadily forgets everything else, even the numbness spreading down her leg where it's pinned between the slats of the bench and Nico's body, up until an amused voice behind them says, "By the side of the road? Really? Man, it must be great to be young."
They sit up quickly, their heads spinning with the vertigo of it all, but are too tangled in each other to do more than kind of awkwardly incline their upper bodies in his direction and say, "Lord Apollo."
Standing there as jovially as if he goes for midnight strolls in Central Park all the time, the sun god's grin is roguish at best, or just downright lascivious, his teeth as bright as starlight. "Don't mind me interrupting. I just figured, hey, I owe the pretty lady a favor, what's the least I could do?" He looks at them, and Annabeth is sure it's no mistake that she can't tell which one of them he's looking at when he says, "I know where your boyfriend is."
-
He's in Eris's cellar, which is creepy, eerie, and downright disgusting in places, second only to Grover's underwear drawer.
"Things get lost in there," Apollo explained to them when he gave them directions, and the spare key -- neither of them bother to ask why he has it, though it is a lot more useful than breaking in, which is what they'd been planning but probably wouldn't earn them any brownie points on Olympus. "Eris is the goddess of discord; she's a busy woman, but even I can admit she kind of needs to think about having a garage sale or something. Whoever got him probably put him there in the hope that he'd quietly collect dust for a couple centuries before anyone missed him."
"Where are we going?"
"When she's not on Olympus, or in the Underworld, Eris keeps a place in Washington D.C. I'd give you a ride, but..." he shrugs, and points skyward, where the constellations twinkle at them from in between the clouds. "Kind of the wrong time of day for that."
"We'll be fine," Annabeth bows, feels Nico belatedly follow her example; he still wasn't used to showing the proper respect to the gods. "Thank you very much for your help, Lord Apollo."
"Anything for a pretty face," he winks, and disappears with a pop like a light bulb exploding.
She waits for the spots to stop dancing across her vision before she says, "Let's go." Only when she turns around, Nico isn't there -- he's already half-way down the path, walking briskly with his shoulders set, winding deeper into Central Park. In the wrong direction, she might add, and leaving his jacket where they'd let it fall.
"Hey!" she goes, giving chase with a burst of annoyance, her pack banging against the small of her back. She snatches up the jacket. "Nico, come on! We have to hurry if we have a prayer of catching a Greyhound to D.C. -- it's almost a full day away and he's already been missing for, what, four? And we have to stop by camp, pick up some weapons in case Eris has bodyguards or whatever, so we have no time for whatever --"
"Percy never told you what, exactly, shadow-traveling is, did he?" Nico cuts her off.
"What?"
He grabs her arm and unceremoniously yanks her off the path. They immediately disappear into the gloom, slipping under the dozen interlocking branches of trees. A dryad peeps out at them curiously as he drags her around in front of him so she's standing directly in the shadow cast by the trunk of an oak. For one silly, ADHD moment, she thinks he's going to pin her up against it, because the intense focus in his eyes is the same, but the idea is gone as quickly as it comes.
"Trust me," goes Nico, with a little more of his characteristic smirk. "Shadow-travel is a lot faster than a Greyhound."
Her brows furrow. "Okay, sure, but I'm not a daughter of Hades. Can I do it too?"
He shrugs. "With boundaries," he allows, and before she can stop him, he snatches her again, this time by the hips, pulling her flush against him, and ah, she thinks, those kind of boundaries. As in, none at all. Figures.
Her cheeks are flaming red, though, she knows, because the way he's looking at her now is very deliberate, and she can write off kissing him on the bench with a dozen different excuses, but to keep her there, every line of her body molded into his and his eyes very close, that was bordering on something she couldn't take back.
"Do you love me?" she blurts out, and okay, now is really not the time for this, because she is nothing if not practical and focused on a job, even if she does have to do everything the hard way. Way to go, Annabeth, let's have another completely off-topic question. "Or are you just in love with Percy?" Yeah, Annabeth, something like that. That was good.
The corners of his mouth turn white, and without a word he puts his lips to hers, and Annabeth's okay with this, she thinks, letting her neck go pliant into the kiss, because she's not sure if she's ready for any other answer.
And then, suddenly, they're slipping sideways. It's like being squeezed through a nylon stocking, and Annabeth automatically holds her breath, opening her eyes very, very wide.
When they stop, she loses her balance and pitches herself unceremoniously into the grass, which she's sure makes her look really drunk. She scrambles back to her feet. Nico, of course, doesn't even look ruffled. Then again, she allows, he's been doing this since he was ten years old. He sticks his hands in his pockets and frowns. She turns around.
And stares.
"The Capitol?" she hisses incredulously. "The Capitol? Eris's place is underneath the Capitol building?"
"Oh, is that what that is?" Nico blinks, and she resists the urge to smack the back of his head. "I was wondering."
She stares up at it. She took a trip here once with her architecture class in her first semester of college, but that was simply for a field trip and she'd almost gotten scissored in half by a hydra anyway. "And we're going to break into one of the most important buildings in the entire country and find a locked door that'll lead to Eris's cellar?"
"Looks that way."
"Okay, just checking." She pulls her cap out of her back pocket, expression grim. "Well, let's go hope we don't cause a national incident."
Nico grins. "My favorite kind."
-
She grabs his arm and yanks him so hard that from the outside, he must seriously look like a puppet that's been pulled off its own strings. He staggers once, and she shuts the door as fast as she can behind him, one hand over his mouth. However, she's not fast enough to slide her other hand in between the door before it shuts to muffle it, so she does the first thing that pops into her head.
"Zeus's sandals!" she gasps, and the distant boom of thunder covers the sound of the door closing.
Outside, the night guards go running right on past, shouting on ahead, just like they do in the movies, and Annabeth offers a silent prayer of thanks to the Lord of the Sky's footwear.
"Can you take that damn thing off?" Nico hisses when she removes her hand from his mouth, glaring pointedly at some point below her right ear. "I feel like an idiot being pulled around by something I can't see."
"Shut up," she snaps back, even as she slides her ponytail out of her baseball cap. "Have a little faith in me. I think we're here."
That jars him, and he blinks, looking around. Even in the pitch of dead night, they can make out the outline of a glossy executive desk with an enormous desktop computer, and a potted plant sitting in the corner.
"Um," he feels the need to point out, as she rises out of her crouch and goes to inspect the bookshelf. She catches the titles of the books there in swatches of moonbeams falling through the blinds, but none of them really fall together in her dyslexic mind. "This looks like any other office in this building."
"Yeah, but did you look at the gold leaf on the door? It say, 'General Secretary, High Division.'" When he continues to look blank, she sighs. "There's no such thing."
"Really? Sounds legit to me."
"Well, what do you know, you haven't even passed tenth -- hey!" her fingers catch on the spine of one of the books, knocks on it once, and she smiles triumphantly. When she gives it a quick yank, there's the faint, unmistakable click of a hidden lock being sprung. Nico's eyebrows meet his hairline in disbelief, but he's at her side in a heartbeat.
The bookcase rolls back with a long, mournful sound like a woman wailing. The hairs on Annabeth's neck stand on end, and together, they peer down a flight of medieval-looking stone steps, which spiral away into darkness. Very Camelot, she thinks, because really, it wasn't like the gods could have anything sensible like a normal flight of stairs.
"I don't suppose you happen to have anything useful in that pocket of yours, like matches?" she goes, uselessly, as he's already stepping around her, pulling a flashlight out of his void pocket. She almost expects the batteries to be dead, because wouldn't that be ironic, but when he flicks it on, the beam falls sure and steady, catching on whole colonies of cobwebs that look older than the Constitution and probably had their own system of taxation and plumbing by now. "Or that works," she amends, and when he reaches with one hand behind him, she doesn't even think twice about slipping her fingers in between his, following him as he leads the way down the stairs.
It doesn't take long to reach bottom. By then, the air already has that heavy, syrupy feel of an immortal realm, and it's enough to convince them they're in the right place. When they reach the last step, Nico lets the light go wild as he slips his hand along the wall, and when she opens her mouth to ask him what he's looking for, he finds it and flips the light switch.
Her jaw drops, and beside her, she hears Nico draw in a sharp breath through his nose.
Cluttered isn't even a good word to use to describe it. Eris's basement lair would chase 'cluttered' down by the water fountain and beat it senseless and steal its lunch money. It is beyond cluttered. There are stacks of boxes in every direction, a multitude of trunks piled carelessly on top of one another and crowned with various nicknacks. It's like what the attic at the Big House would be if it got illusions of grandeur and a Size-Up mushroom from Super Mario.
But the crowning glory are the taxidermy mummies. In between boxes and on top of trunks and around the various nicknacks are hosts of marble-eyed people, staring glassily in their direction. They look so real that for a moment, Annabeth feels the familiar jolt in her limbs that signals fight or flight, before her brain catches up and tells her that no, they're like deer heads, kept as trophies on the wall. They're people who've been stuffed.
Then she looks even closer, and realizes that she even recognizes some of the faces.
"Oh my gods," she says, her voice falling flat and lost in the dust. "Is that Elvis?"
"Who?" goes Nico.
"Never mind." She pulls him forward a little bit. "What are they doing down here?"
They peer closely and questioningly at Martin Luther King Jr., who looks beyond them with one hand raised like he's hailing a taxi. "I think," Nico says slowly. "They're the people who've changed the course of history. Eris is the goddess of discord, right? Every big change starts with a little discord. She must keep the mementos down here."
"Well, that's creepy," Annabeth decides with a shiver. "So as long as they're not monsters or automatons or something. Come on. Percy's got to be in here somewhere."
She starts forward, but he gives her hand a sudden sharp tug, stopping her. She twists her head around to snap at him for wasting their time, but the expression on his face stops her. "Annabeth. When ... what are things going to be like after we find him? Will you ... what are you going to do?"
His mouth fumbles with the words, but she knows immediately what he's trying to say. Before she can think about it, she lifts herself up onto her tiptoes to kiss him quickly, with faint wonder at how it's already starting to feel comforting. "I won't interfere," she says out loud, and thinks it might be worth it to see the sudden smile that brightens his face. She's in love with Percy, Nico's in love with Percy, and he might just be a little in love with her too. Annabeth's dealt with worse things in her life. "It's going to be the three of us. It's just one of those things."
They move further in. There's no rhyme or reason to how the mess works; she finds a waxy replica of Nero gazing solemnly at Susan B. Anthony, standing just around the corner. She glances over her shoulder to make sure they haven't lost sight of the exit sign, glowing red above the door they came in. Fortunately, it doesn't seem inclined to shift location the way it did in the Labyrinth.
Suddenly, Nico shakes off her hand and slides in between the life-sized taxidermy dummies of two Al-Qaeda terrorists. On the other side, half-hidden behind a stack of boxes that have "operation valkyrie" stamped on them in characters that takes her dyslexic mind a long moment to translate, is Percy, curled into a ball and unconscious.
She has a canister of nectar from her pack in her hand before she's even maneuvered around the dummies, but Nico thinks of something even better.
He pulls a bottle of water out of his void pocket, unscrewing the cap in a quick twist as he kneels down beside Percy, whose skin is roughly the same color as the cement floor. She catches the faint whiff of salt water and sea brine before he splashes the whole thing at Percy's face.
He gasps awake, an almost bluish flush of color coming to his grey face as water runs in rivulets down his chin. His eyes flicker between them in quick appraisal, and the relief she sees there makes her throat go tight. Then, because he's an idiot -- Annabeth knows this already, she's sure, but it still strikes her at the oddest of moments -- he rasps, "Hey, guys. What are you doing here?"
Nico makes a thin, disgusted noise in the back of his throat. He rocks forward and half-drags Percy to an upright position so they can get a better look at him. He appears fine, of course, except for the fact he looks like he just crawled out of the grave. It's easy to forget, sometimes, that no blade will ever cut his skin, no claw will ever reach him, no monster can sink their teeth into him and shake him like a ragdoll, but he can still be injured. She's glad that time moves slower in immortal places, because she'd hate to see what he'd look like after four days in a dark, dank basement.
"What did you do?" she demands, and it comes out short and rough. Nico gives her a sympathetic look out of the corner of his eyes when she cringes, because try as she might, the caring girlfriend will just never come naturally.
Percy frowns hard, like she'd asked him what were the top three architectural styles used in the Montemartre district of Paris and expected a correct answer (because it should be obvious. European architecture is one of the first things you pick up.) "Someone picked a fight with me. A son of Ares, I think, looking to get Dad's approval. Or maybe I picked a fight with him. I don't remember."
Nico and Annabeth exchange a very meaningful look. Would you like to strangle him? it says. Or should I do the honors?
"I take it back," she grumbles, as they haul Percy to his feet. "Your head isn't full of help. If it was, I would still be holding out on the hope it would show some sort of intelligent life. You have none, obviously."
-
They don't relax until they are on the Greyhound -- Nico didn't want to risk shadow-traveling all the way back to New York with both of them; he'd felt enough strain getting them both past security on the way back out, he said.
There are two other people on the bus with them, a middle-aged couple who are drowsing against each other's shoulders, but as the bus rumbles up the ramp onto the freeway out of the metro area and they show no sign of getting up or transforming into something hideous, Annabeth and Nico decide they're just mortals and settle Percy down into one of the seats, giving him a square of ambrosia to tide him over until they can get home.
He's still pale, and his breathing is shallow. Annabeth wants nothing more than to brush the hair out of his eyes, kiss his temple, or do anything to make him feel better, but there's someone who's been waiting a lot longer for the chance.
Percy's eyes flutter open when Nico's long fingers touch the side of his face. "Nico, what ..." he tries for, but doesn't get any farther before Nico leans in, slanting his mouth against Percy's and stealing the words right off his lips.
He goes still all over, one hand coming up to press against Nico's shoulder, his eyes flicking sideways around Nico's head to find Annabeth watching them. She knows a first kiss when she sees it, knows that Nico has done nothing, said nothing, to intrude on what everybody had already considered to be a foregone conclusion. She knows that Percy is going to push him away and say the first thing that comes to his mind, because he never stops to think. He doesn't want to ruin a good thing, and he doesn't understand that right now, he's the only person who could.
She slides in quickly beside him, and Nico pulls back only far enough to give her room to kiss the side of Percy's face; his temple, the corner of his eye, his cheek. "It's okay," she murmurs in response to the question in his furrowed brows. Nico's hand slips around her to hold her hip, leaning in so far his skinny chest is flush against both of theirs. Percy's eyes are still confused, but when Annabeth moves her head, he doesn't object, opening his mouth to her kiss.
Nico's hands tighten briefly around both of them, holding on as tight as possible so the pressure of both of them would keep his heart from splintering. "We're here," he says. "We're here. Both of us."
Annabeth turns to kiss him for that, and marvels at the fact that even though it's her tongue against the rough of Nico's, she can still taste Percy, the salt and the sweat of him. Watching them, so close to him it makes him cross-eyed, Percy makes a choked noise in the back of his throat.
"Are you okay?" she asks him softly, and she and Nico reach up together to touch his face, smoothing his hair back from either side.
His eyes move from one to the other, and then, slowly, wonderingly, he reaches up with both hands to cup their faces. Nico's fingers slip into hers when he does this, his grip tight with joy. She squeezes back, because what she feels is probably similar.
"Yeah," Percy says, leaning forward so that their foreheads all touch. "Yeah, I will be."
-
On the bus, Annabeth sleeps.
Janus isn't laughing at her this time, but silent, waiting expectantly, both faces looking eerily into either direction. There are still two doors behind him, but she can put names to them now.
"If you're waiting for me to make a choice," she tells him, maybe a little smugly, "then you'll be waiting for a very long time."
-
fin
Fandom: Percy Jackson and the Olympians
Characters/Pairings: Annabeth/Percy/Nico, and all subsequent combinations thereof
Word Count: 13,500
Continued from.
Sometime in early August, Annabeth spends a week at Camp-Half Blood at Chiron's request. She doesn't mind; Malcolm turns eighteen on the 4th, so they throw him a party true Athena cabin style, the way she hasn't done since she was their age. Her week is almost up before their pillows stop being booby-trapped to not let their owners sleep on them until they answer 15 trivia questions.
Wherever she goes, the younger campers pester her with questions about her designs for Mt. Olympus, even the ones that were unclaimed at the time of the battle in Manhattan or too young to remember it. It's gratifying in some respects, and absolutely terrifying in others. Every day, she wonders if maybe it's too much responsibility for one half-blood to handle.
When she goes back to the apartment in the city on Thursday, she knows something is wrong the instant she opens the door. The door's unlocked, and the lights are on, but there's nobody home.
All her senses tingling, Annabeth gingerly sets her stuff down in the entryway and investigates further. The TV is on, running low volume on the programming channel. A book is open on the beanbag chair; the one she'd told Percy to read for his upcoming fall class, upside down with three pages bent crooked, like it'd been placed down in a hurry. In the kitchenette, there are still dishes in the sink, and in the rice cooker, a meal is forgotten, congealing in the bowl. She doesn't need to check the bedrooms. The whole thing screams of two boys who left in a great hurry and haven't been back in awhile.
She grabs the emergency pack from the cabinet above the sink, checks it to make sure she has everything -- a dagger, bottle of nectar and ambrosia in a baggie, forty dollars, and a few golden drachmas -- and she's out the door before she even has time to think.
-
Fifteen minutes later, she's three blocks down and it just then occurs to her that she has no idea where Percy and Nico could be, or even where she should start looking. She hadn't even bothered to grab the car keys.
It's enough to make her feel like she's going to shatter, like a wrong vibration is going to shake her apart like raindrops out of a screen door, and she stops at the curb to wait for a walk signal, breathing hard. Panic has full and well set in, because too many things can go wrong when you've been gone for a week and come home to discover that your roommates, two half-blood sons of the Big Three with big black marks on their names in the monster world, have disappeared without a trace.
If she was near a pool of water, she could try to make a spray, see if an Iris-message would go through to either one of them, but she's in the middle of New York City in August -- there's no standing water to be had anywhere nearby. Gods, those boys are stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Couldn't they have left a note? Did they think she wouldn't worry, that she wouldn't immediately assume the worst?
The walk signal flicks to green, but Annabeth doesn't even notice.
She is just getting to the stage of panic where her imagination is weighing more on her mind than her common sense, when a voice says disgustedly from behind her, "Staring into space isn't going to be helping anyone, you know."
Annabeth spins around, and blinks in surprise. Looking at her disapprovingly from the trunk of a tree in front of someone's flat is ...
"Juniper," she says blankly. "Hi."
There are two bright lime patches of color high on Juniper's cheeks. "You never came to visit me this week," she sniffs, and Annabeth realizes that the tree nymph really is upset by this fact.
She will never understand girls.
"I'm really sorry about that, Juniper. I've got plenty of free time next week -- I promise I'll come around, and we can hang out. Drink green tea and talk about what Grover's doing these days, whatever, but right now, I've got something on my mind --"
"Because," Juniper cuts in over her, sounding as testy as a nature spirit can. "If you'd come by my tree instead of making me come all the way out here to this barren, fake suburb, I would have been able to tell you that Nico di Angelo is in trouble and I know where he is."
That cuts right through the faint buzz of hysteria in Annabeth's mind, blurring it right into silence like muting a channel of static on a television. It might be that she's entirely too conditioned by this point, because the very first thing she does is send a quick but fervent prayer of thanks to the gods for looking out for her.
"Where?" she goes, not even caring that only one of the boys is accounted for. Because she knows, somewhere where she's never consciously admitted it to herself for one reason or another, that wherever Nico is, Percy is usually nearby, because perhaps the only person who watches Percy's back as closely as she does is Nico di Angelo.
"Central Park," says Juniper, her temper fading in the light of Annabeth's obvious emotional state. "He's been there for three days now, and hasn't left. Normally that wouldn't bother the tree spirits there, except he's a son of Hades and smells like death. Besides, being nature spirits, we're all rather fond of Persephone, and I don't have to tell you what Persephone thinks of Nico. They want him out."
"Is he all right?" she asks, because yeah, he might be the son of Hades, but he could also smell like death because he is dead -- she wouldn't count on tree nymphs to check for something like a pulse.
"As far as we can tell. But you should probably go check for yourself -- it doesn't take a child of Athena to figure out that there's something wrong."
Annabeth spins on her heel and sprints across the street, just as the walking signal begins to flash the don't walk sign. "Thank you, Juniper!" she yells over her shoulder, knows without looking that Juniper is rolling her eyes. "I owe you!"
The subway is four blocks away, a route familiar to her from two summers of staying here with Percy. It's past rush hour when she gets there, thankfully, pushing her way through the turnstiles with more impatience than it necessitates. She reviews the information Juniper gave her as she stands on the platform, unconsciously sizing up the people waiting with her to determine if any of them might be monsters. There isn't a lot she knows, other than Nico's in Central Park and he's been there for three days.
What's so important that he wouldn't leave that spot, not even to go home or to send her an Iris message or anything? And where's Percy, that the tree nymphs didn't have a word to say about him? Most of them know exactly who he is -- Grover's made sure of that. So why Nico and not him?
These questions loop around in her head most of the trip into the heart of Manhattan. She's not a daughter of Athena because she likes to back down from difficult questions, and now that she has something to work with, she can face this more calmly.
When she gets to the Central Park stop, it's already full-on dark, which she supposed should make her nervous, if she wasn't a half-blood who faced monsters and Titan revolutions like they were pop quizzes. It's a big park, and dark, but it doesn't take long to find Nico -- a tree nymph helpfully materializes out of the gloom before she starts to wonder. Juniper must have sent word on ahead that she was coming. The nymph has a gnarled twist to her face, the telltale toughness of someone who's grown up in New York City.
She leads her to Nico, sitting on a bench beside the path, looking strange and forlorn with his jacket pulled up around his ears and his uncombed hair sticking everywhere, like a bird with ruffled feathers. The nymph disappears before Annabeth can thank her, so she plants herself in front of Nico, fighting the inexplicable urge to punch him. It's different from all the times she's wanted to punch him over the summer -- this anger is born directly from relief, instead of annoyance at his immaturity. He's all right, he's not dead, although he could use a bath and some food.
But more importantly.
"What happened to Percy?" she demands, in the best "Nico di Angelo don't you even think of screwing with me" voice that she had. His attention catches on her suddenly like a camera lens, sharp and focused. Good. She doesn't have to worry about his brains being addled.
"He vanished four days ago," he rasps in a raw voice like he'd gone and shouted himself hoarse. His eyes dart away from her. "He's not dead and he's not in the Underworld -- I would sense it if he was. But he's in some immortal place, I can feel that much. I don't know what happened. I just came home and he was gone."
Like her, then -- and the first thing he'd done was set out immediately to find him, without turning off the lights or even leaving a note. Of course.
"So why are you bumming in Central Park?"
"This is the last place he was before he got shunted out of the mortal world." When her look grows skeptical, he flashes, "It's a proximity thing, I think. Like, I've been able to tell when you're on Mt. Olympus or in Camp Half-Blood. It's just in my head, some feeling that tells me you're not in the mortal realm. I can feel it stronger with Percy since I've been living with him longer. I've spent the last three days trying to find where he might have gone. It's like the trail goes cold right around here."
He delivers this in his abused voice, his tone almost matter-of-fact, but when he stops talking, a tremor goes through him, and Annabeth realizes he isn't holding himself together as well as she thought.
"I'm so sorry, Annabeth," he tells their feet, sinking further into his bomber jacket like a turtle withdrawing into its shell. "I can't find him. I don't know what's happened and I don't know where he could be. I'm so, so sorry --" his voice cracks.
Alarmed, she drops onto the bench next to him, because she's grown up with enough brothers to know that if a seventeen-year-old will cry in front of you, then something is really, really wrong. "Hey," she goes. "Don't beat yourself up. You can't watch him every minute of every day. He'd find a way to get into trouble regardless of how closely you were watching him," her tone is wry. "Besides, it's not your job. He's not your boyfriend."
He cuts his eyes at her, and Annabeth feels a sudden jolt catch her, like missing a step on a flight of stairs. She recognizes the look in his eyes, suddenly; it's the same look he's had all summer, that strange distant wistful look, and she's dismissed it again and again, assuming it was just part of the unfathomable Nico enigma, but it's not. It's the most familiar look she knows; she wears it every time she looks at Percy.
She's just never seen it on anyone else before. She's never bothered to look for it.
"Oh," she goes, the softest gasp, as if she'd pricked her finger on a tack. "Oh, gods, I'm an idiot."
"No, Annabeth, no," Nico says quickly. "No, it's not like --" and he trails off, helplessly, because there's no denying the truth. "I didn't mean to," he finishes, almost miserably.
For the first time, she takes a step back and takes a second look at the entire summer. Horror dips deep into her stomach -- what if Nico's problem wasn't that he had the people skills of roadkill? What if Percy's continual awkwardness wasn't due to the fact they had an interloper at all times? What did they have, before Annabeth came in, thinking she knew exactly how the chips fell?
We've been so stupid, she thinks, reaching out and placing a hand on Nico's shoulder, maneuvering him back so that he was caught between the arm of the bench and the back. His pale face betrays surprise, and then it shifts, becoming the same exact understanding that hit her moments before, as she tucks one leg around him to straddle his hips, using the other to keep her balance. We can't just let one person have so much control over our hearts. We aren't made for it, not when there's the chance they won't be there tomorrow.
She kisses him, logically, feeling him startle under her hands. His lips are thinner, harder than Percy's, but she only has a moment to acknowledge this before he's kissing her back with the kind of predetermination that has her thinking he might have already figured this out.
And the thing is. The thing is, it's almost familiar, kissing Nico. It's not something she's ever done before, but it feels like it should be.
His hands move up the accordion of her spine, up to tangle in her hair, and when she kisses him for the second time, he tugs on it hard enough to make her wince, moving her head to align their mouths better. She pushes his jacket off his shoulders, and he leans up into her so it slides off of him, puddling on the ground. They keep on kissing, mouths moving inside and outside and around the other's, fast and hard like they're worried their thoughts will catch up to them if they don't, and Annabeth finds her shirt has been pushed up around her ribs before she's even aware Nico's moved his hands.
Yes. Yes, there's that feeling again: Nico's heart, pounding in her chest, beating for the exact same reason.
This reason has a name.
She steadily forgets everything else, even the numbness spreading down her leg where it's pinned between the slats of the bench and Nico's body, up until an amused voice behind them says, "By the side of the road? Really? Man, it must be great to be young."
They sit up quickly, their heads spinning with the vertigo of it all, but are too tangled in each other to do more than kind of awkwardly incline their upper bodies in his direction and say, "Lord Apollo."
Standing there as jovially as if he goes for midnight strolls in Central Park all the time, the sun god's grin is roguish at best, or just downright lascivious, his teeth as bright as starlight. "Don't mind me interrupting. I just figured, hey, I owe the pretty lady a favor, what's the least I could do?" He looks at them, and Annabeth is sure it's no mistake that she can't tell which one of them he's looking at when he says, "I know where your boyfriend is."
-
He's in Eris's cellar, which is creepy, eerie, and downright disgusting in places, second only to Grover's underwear drawer.
"Things get lost in there," Apollo explained to them when he gave them directions, and the spare key -- neither of them bother to ask why he has it, though it is a lot more useful than breaking in, which is what they'd been planning but probably wouldn't earn them any brownie points on Olympus. "Eris is the goddess of discord; she's a busy woman, but even I can admit she kind of needs to think about having a garage sale or something. Whoever got him probably put him there in the hope that he'd quietly collect dust for a couple centuries before anyone missed him."
"Where are we going?"
"When she's not on Olympus, or in the Underworld, Eris keeps a place in Washington D.C. I'd give you a ride, but..." he shrugs, and points skyward, where the constellations twinkle at them from in between the clouds. "Kind of the wrong time of day for that."
"We'll be fine," Annabeth bows, feels Nico belatedly follow her example; he still wasn't used to showing the proper respect to the gods. "Thank you very much for your help, Lord Apollo."
"Anything for a pretty face," he winks, and disappears with a pop like a light bulb exploding.
She waits for the spots to stop dancing across her vision before she says, "Let's go." Only when she turns around, Nico isn't there -- he's already half-way down the path, walking briskly with his shoulders set, winding deeper into Central Park. In the wrong direction, she might add, and leaving his jacket where they'd let it fall.
"Hey!" she goes, giving chase with a burst of annoyance, her pack banging against the small of her back. She snatches up the jacket. "Nico, come on! We have to hurry if we have a prayer of catching a Greyhound to D.C. -- it's almost a full day away and he's already been missing for, what, four? And we have to stop by camp, pick up some weapons in case Eris has bodyguards or whatever, so we have no time for whatever --"
"Percy never told you what, exactly, shadow-traveling is, did he?" Nico cuts her off.
"What?"
He grabs her arm and unceremoniously yanks her off the path. They immediately disappear into the gloom, slipping under the dozen interlocking branches of trees. A dryad peeps out at them curiously as he drags her around in front of him so she's standing directly in the shadow cast by the trunk of an oak. For one silly, ADHD moment, she thinks he's going to pin her up against it, because the intense focus in his eyes is the same, but the idea is gone as quickly as it comes.
"Trust me," goes Nico, with a little more of his characteristic smirk. "Shadow-travel is a lot faster than a Greyhound."
Her brows furrow. "Okay, sure, but I'm not a daughter of Hades. Can I do it too?"
He shrugs. "With boundaries," he allows, and before she can stop him, he snatches her again, this time by the hips, pulling her flush against him, and ah, she thinks, those kind of boundaries. As in, none at all. Figures.
Her cheeks are flaming red, though, she knows, because the way he's looking at her now is very deliberate, and she can write off kissing him on the bench with a dozen different excuses, but to keep her there, every line of her body molded into his and his eyes very close, that was bordering on something she couldn't take back.
"Do you love me?" she blurts out, and okay, now is really not the time for this, because she is nothing if not practical and focused on a job, even if she does have to do everything the hard way. Way to go, Annabeth, let's have another completely off-topic question. "Or are you just in love with Percy?" Yeah, Annabeth, something like that. That was good.
The corners of his mouth turn white, and without a word he puts his lips to hers, and Annabeth's okay with this, she thinks, letting her neck go pliant into the kiss, because she's not sure if she's ready for any other answer.
And then, suddenly, they're slipping sideways. It's like being squeezed through a nylon stocking, and Annabeth automatically holds her breath, opening her eyes very, very wide.
When they stop, she loses her balance and pitches herself unceremoniously into the grass, which she's sure makes her look really drunk. She scrambles back to her feet. Nico, of course, doesn't even look ruffled. Then again, she allows, he's been doing this since he was ten years old. He sticks his hands in his pockets and frowns. She turns around.
And stares.
"The Capitol?" she hisses incredulously. "The Capitol? Eris's place is underneath the Capitol building?"
"Oh, is that what that is?" Nico blinks, and she resists the urge to smack the back of his head. "I was wondering."
She stares up at it. She took a trip here once with her architecture class in her first semester of college, but that was simply for a field trip and she'd almost gotten scissored in half by a hydra anyway. "And we're going to break into one of the most important buildings in the entire country and find a locked door that'll lead to Eris's cellar?"
"Looks that way."
"Okay, just checking." She pulls her cap out of her back pocket, expression grim. "Well, let's go hope we don't cause a national incident."
Nico grins. "My favorite kind."
-
She grabs his arm and yanks him so hard that from the outside, he must seriously look like a puppet that's been pulled off its own strings. He staggers once, and she shuts the door as fast as she can behind him, one hand over his mouth. However, she's not fast enough to slide her other hand in between the door before it shuts to muffle it, so she does the first thing that pops into her head.
"Zeus's sandals!" she gasps, and the distant boom of thunder covers the sound of the door closing.
Outside, the night guards go running right on past, shouting on ahead, just like they do in the movies, and Annabeth offers a silent prayer of thanks to the Lord of the Sky's footwear.
"Can you take that damn thing off?" Nico hisses when she removes her hand from his mouth, glaring pointedly at some point below her right ear. "I feel like an idiot being pulled around by something I can't see."
"Shut up," she snaps back, even as she slides her ponytail out of her baseball cap. "Have a little faith in me. I think we're here."
That jars him, and he blinks, looking around. Even in the pitch of dead night, they can make out the outline of a glossy executive desk with an enormous desktop computer, and a potted plant sitting in the corner.
"Um," he feels the need to point out, as she rises out of her crouch and goes to inspect the bookshelf. She catches the titles of the books there in swatches of moonbeams falling through the blinds, but none of them really fall together in her dyslexic mind. "This looks like any other office in this building."
"Yeah, but did you look at the gold leaf on the door? It say, 'General Secretary, High Division.'" When he continues to look blank, she sighs. "There's no such thing."
"Really? Sounds legit to me."
"Well, what do you know, you haven't even passed tenth -- hey!" her fingers catch on the spine of one of the books, knocks on it once, and she smiles triumphantly. When she gives it a quick yank, there's the faint, unmistakable click of a hidden lock being sprung. Nico's eyebrows meet his hairline in disbelief, but he's at her side in a heartbeat.
The bookcase rolls back with a long, mournful sound like a woman wailing. The hairs on Annabeth's neck stand on end, and together, they peer down a flight of medieval-looking stone steps, which spiral away into darkness. Very Camelot, she thinks, because really, it wasn't like the gods could have anything sensible like a normal flight of stairs.
"I don't suppose you happen to have anything useful in that pocket of yours, like matches?" she goes, uselessly, as he's already stepping around her, pulling a flashlight out of his void pocket. She almost expects the batteries to be dead, because wouldn't that be ironic, but when he flicks it on, the beam falls sure and steady, catching on whole colonies of cobwebs that look older than the Constitution and probably had their own system of taxation and plumbing by now. "Or that works," she amends, and when he reaches with one hand behind him, she doesn't even think twice about slipping her fingers in between his, following him as he leads the way down the stairs.
It doesn't take long to reach bottom. By then, the air already has that heavy, syrupy feel of an immortal realm, and it's enough to convince them they're in the right place. When they reach the last step, Nico lets the light go wild as he slips his hand along the wall, and when she opens her mouth to ask him what he's looking for, he finds it and flips the light switch.
Her jaw drops, and beside her, she hears Nico draw in a sharp breath through his nose.
Cluttered isn't even a good word to use to describe it. Eris's basement lair would chase 'cluttered' down by the water fountain and beat it senseless and steal its lunch money. It is beyond cluttered. There are stacks of boxes in every direction, a multitude of trunks piled carelessly on top of one another and crowned with various nicknacks. It's like what the attic at the Big House would be if it got illusions of grandeur and a Size-Up mushroom from Super Mario.
But the crowning glory are the taxidermy mummies. In between boxes and on top of trunks and around the various nicknacks are hosts of marble-eyed people, staring glassily in their direction. They look so real that for a moment, Annabeth feels the familiar jolt in her limbs that signals fight or flight, before her brain catches up and tells her that no, they're like deer heads, kept as trophies on the wall. They're people who've been stuffed.
Then she looks even closer, and realizes that she even recognizes some of the faces.
"Oh my gods," she says, her voice falling flat and lost in the dust. "Is that Elvis?"
"Who?" goes Nico.
"Never mind." She pulls him forward a little bit. "What are they doing down here?"
They peer closely and questioningly at Martin Luther King Jr., who looks beyond them with one hand raised like he's hailing a taxi. "I think," Nico says slowly. "They're the people who've changed the course of history. Eris is the goddess of discord, right? Every big change starts with a little discord. She must keep the mementos down here."
"Well, that's creepy," Annabeth decides with a shiver. "So as long as they're not monsters or automatons or something. Come on. Percy's got to be in here somewhere."
She starts forward, but he gives her hand a sudden sharp tug, stopping her. She twists her head around to snap at him for wasting their time, but the expression on his face stops her. "Annabeth. When ... what are things going to be like after we find him? Will you ... what are you going to do?"
His mouth fumbles with the words, but she knows immediately what he's trying to say. Before she can think about it, she lifts herself up onto her tiptoes to kiss him quickly, with faint wonder at how it's already starting to feel comforting. "I won't interfere," she says out loud, and thinks it might be worth it to see the sudden smile that brightens his face. She's in love with Percy, Nico's in love with Percy, and he might just be a little in love with her too. Annabeth's dealt with worse things in her life. "It's going to be the three of us. It's just one of those things."
They move further in. There's no rhyme or reason to how the mess works; she finds a waxy replica of Nero gazing solemnly at Susan B. Anthony, standing just around the corner. She glances over her shoulder to make sure they haven't lost sight of the exit sign, glowing red above the door they came in. Fortunately, it doesn't seem inclined to shift location the way it did in the Labyrinth.
Suddenly, Nico shakes off her hand and slides in between the life-sized taxidermy dummies of two Al-Qaeda terrorists. On the other side, half-hidden behind a stack of boxes that have "operation valkyrie" stamped on them in characters that takes her dyslexic mind a long moment to translate, is Percy, curled into a ball and unconscious.
She has a canister of nectar from her pack in her hand before she's even maneuvered around the dummies, but Nico thinks of something even better.
He pulls a bottle of water out of his void pocket, unscrewing the cap in a quick twist as he kneels down beside Percy, whose skin is roughly the same color as the cement floor. She catches the faint whiff of salt water and sea brine before he splashes the whole thing at Percy's face.
He gasps awake, an almost bluish flush of color coming to his grey face as water runs in rivulets down his chin. His eyes flicker between them in quick appraisal, and the relief she sees there makes her throat go tight. Then, because he's an idiot -- Annabeth knows this already, she's sure, but it still strikes her at the oddest of moments -- he rasps, "Hey, guys. What are you doing here?"
Nico makes a thin, disgusted noise in the back of his throat. He rocks forward and half-drags Percy to an upright position so they can get a better look at him. He appears fine, of course, except for the fact he looks like he just crawled out of the grave. It's easy to forget, sometimes, that no blade will ever cut his skin, no claw will ever reach him, no monster can sink their teeth into him and shake him like a ragdoll, but he can still be injured. She's glad that time moves slower in immortal places, because she'd hate to see what he'd look like after four days in a dark, dank basement.
"What did you do?" she demands, and it comes out short and rough. Nico gives her a sympathetic look out of the corner of his eyes when she cringes, because try as she might, the caring girlfriend will just never come naturally.
Percy frowns hard, like she'd asked him what were the top three architectural styles used in the Montemartre district of Paris and expected a correct answer (because it should be obvious. European architecture is one of the first things you pick up.) "Someone picked a fight with me. A son of Ares, I think, looking to get Dad's approval. Or maybe I picked a fight with him. I don't remember."
Nico and Annabeth exchange a very meaningful look. Would you like to strangle him? it says. Or should I do the honors?
"I take it back," she grumbles, as they haul Percy to his feet. "Your head isn't full of help. If it was, I would still be holding out on the hope it would show some sort of intelligent life. You have none, obviously."
-
They don't relax until they are on the Greyhound -- Nico didn't want to risk shadow-traveling all the way back to New York with both of them; he'd felt enough strain getting them both past security on the way back out, he said.
There are two other people on the bus with them, a middle-aged couple who are drowsing against each other's shoulders, but as the bus rumbles up the ramp onto the freeway out of the metro area and they show no sign of getting up or transforming into something hideous, Annabeth and Nico decide they're just mortals and settle Percy down into one of the seats, giving him a square of ambrosia to tide him over until they can get home.
He's still pale, and his breathing is shallow. Annabeth wants nothing more than to brush the hair out of his eyes, kiss his temple, or do anything to make him feel better, but there's someone who's been waiting a lot longer for the chance.
Percy's eyes flutter open when Nico's long fingers touch the side of his face. "Nico, what ..." he tries for, but doesn't get any farther before Nico leans in, slanting his mouth against Percy's and stealing the words right off his lips.
He goes still all over, one hand coming up to press against Nico's shoulder, his eyes flicking sideways around Nico's head to find Annabeth watching them. She knows a first kiss when she sees it, knows that Nico has done nothing, said nothing, to intrude on what everybody had already considered to be a foregone conclusion. She knows that Percy is going to push him away and say the first thing that comes to his mind, because he never stops to think. He doesn't want to ruin a good thing, and he doesn't understand that right now, he's the only person who could.
She slides in quickly beside him, and Nico pulls back only far enough to give her room to kiss the side of Percy's face; his temple, the corner of his eye, his cheek. "It's okay," she murmurs in response to the question in his furrowed brows. Nico's hand slips around her to hold her hip, leaning in so far his skinny chest is flush against both of theirs. Percy's eyes are still confused, but when Annabeth moves her head, he doesn't object, opening his mouth to her kiss.
Nico's hands tighten briefly around both of them, holding on as tight as possible so the pressure of both of them would keep his heart from splintering. "We're here," he says. "We're here. Both of us."
Annabeth turns to kiss him for that, and marvels at the fact that even though it's her tongue against the rough of Nico's, she can still taste Percy, the salt and the sweat of him. Watching them, so close to him it makes him cross-eyed, Percy makes a choked noise in the back of his throat.
"Are you okay?" she asks him softly, and she and Nico reach up together to touch his face, smoothing his hair back from either side.
His eyes move from one to the other, and then, slowly, wonderingly, he reaches up with both hands to cup their faces. Nico's fingers slip into hers when he does this, his grip tight with joy. She squeezes back, because what she feels is probably similar.
"Yeah," Percy says, leaning forward so that their foreheads all touch. "Yeah, I will be."
-
On the bus, Annabeth sleeps.
Janus isn't laughing at her this time, but silent, waiting expectantly, both faces looking eerily into either direction. There are still two doors behind him, but she can put names to them now.
"If you're waiting for me to make a choice," she tells him, maybe a little smugly, "then you'll be waiting for a very long time."
-
fin