Fic: Thousands Hungry in an Hourglass, PJO
Title: Thousands Hungry in an Hourglass
Fandom: Percy Jackson and the Olympians
Characters/Pairings: Percy/Nico/Annabeth
Summary: Live long enough, and you see it all.
Word Count: 3,700
Notes: A pinch-hit timestamp to Remove Tag Before Washing and its sequel. Set in the same verse, but reading neither is necessary to understand this. Written all in one sitting, so all errors are probably unchecked :DD
Now available @ AO3.
Birthdays are kind of important to them.
You can understand why.
-
To this day, Nico's favorite birthday is still his sixteenth.
It's the birthday that would have decided the fate of the world, if it had been his prophecy after all, if destiny had stepped out for coffee at the wrong time and Hades, for once, got what he wanted. Nico is still stupidly grateful that the Great Prophecy hadn't been about him; the world can't trust him, it really can't. There's too much of the gods in Nico -- he's not human enough to save the world and do it right.
It's not to say his other birthdays haven't been fun, or memorable (although there was that one birthday he woke up in a jail cell the morning after with a puppy crooked under one arm and a sunflower tucked into his pants -- nobody's explained that one to him yet.) It's just -- his sixteenth birthday still stays in his memory, too awash in soft, lazy, golden light to think back to very often, less it lose its shine. It's one of those memories you only pull out in the more dire of circumstances; when you think you're about to die, when you're waiting for Chiron to send an Iris message your way (they made it home okay, Nico,) or in the earliest days of March when the sky over Long Island stays grey for week-long stretches and you think you can't stand another day of monotony. It's the kind of memory you tuck between your palms like a lightning bug and let it ease the strain on your lungs.
Percy and Annabeth had waylaid him while he was walking to school that morning. Do you have a test today? they wanted to know.
Yeah, I do, he'd gone, instantly on guard. Them asking if he had anything important going on was usually a prelude to him almost dying in one way or another. And he really did have a test -- American History, the kind where there are only ten multiple guess questions and then a five-paragraph essay, and hell if Nico hadn't stayed up the night before reading and rereading every damn paragraph his textbook had to say on the Watergate scandal.
Skip it! They said cheerfully, and took him back to their apartment.
Nico loved that little place. He really did. Percy and Annabeth moved in half-way through their freshman year at NYU -- Percy because he felt increasingly like a bum and a third wheel living with his mom and Paul, and Annabeth because her roommate more or less hated her guts (Nico kind of had a hand in that one. He'd tried to apologize for the thing with the pig, he really had.) It was a small, shitty place in the way that all Manhattan apartments got books written about them by fledgling, self-discovering authors for being so shitty. It was just one of those things: live in an apartment in one of the boroughs, and hell, you could probably take on Cerberus on one of his bad days: three-headed dogs have nothing on the size of the cockroaches Percy and Annabeth share shower space with.
They took him home and dumped him on their bed and didn't let him up again, except once to make them sandwiches, and even that didn't count because Percy followed him in and bent him over the flimsy kitchen table and sucked a bruise into the wing of his neck that later turned into a fairly accurate purple-and-green topographical map of California.
It doesn't seem like much, when you write it down like that; just one day filled with nothing but sex, sheets rucking up underneath their heels and pillows dragged around and left askew wherever convenient and lots of elbows and knees in every possible soft, fleshy part, muttered ow, fuckers and warm mouths kissing it better.
But it's the best birthday Nico's ever had, and if anyone can't understand why, then they've never had Percy Jackson's hair curled in between their fingers, his mouth flush and swollen and limned with a halo of red like he's been sucking on a red popsicle, and the smile on his face when he turns his head, presses a kiss to the meaty part of their thumbs, nothing in his eyes but a smile, brighter than the sun off the surf. They've never had Annabeth's weight settled fully on their hips, her spine arched in that primal, visceral way that could inspire soliloquies from a Nethanderal, or have her collapse against him, huffing, holy -- what, fucking -- gods, I love you. Nico di Angelo, I fucking love you and if you ask me later, I will deny it. Shut up, stop laughing!
Nico had a girlfriend at the time, because someone had to try to date other people, just to see what it was like, and it wasn't going to be either Percy or Annabeth: she was a mortal girl who couldn't see through the Mist but had been raised in a polytheistic family and had no reason not to believe him about the son of Hades, Greek gods are real dun dun DUN thing, and only had the best kind of sarcastic commentary waiting whenever he came back from the latest Olympian disaster. He liked her a lot; liked her husky blush and how white her smile was and liked her arm against his during school assemblies. He learned, later, that she'd been waiting for him to show up all day, her birthday present to him tucked in his locker, where it sat for a week before he'd found it.
He never did speak to that girl again. How could he? Any words he had to say to people who weren't Percy or Annabeth were useless, worth less than a penny in a department store.
On Nico's sixteenth birthday, the world had already been saved, which was great, because he didn't have a thought left to spare beyond his hands on Annabeth's hips, in Percy's hair, his mouth around their names like it was the only two words he knew of a foreign language and they had to stand for everything, and the feeling, filling him up with love and love and love, like being shot through with prism light, like white static on the last television channel, like putting his ear to a shell and hearing the roar of the ocean.
-
Annabeth's favorite birthday is her twenty-fourth.
She's sure of this, because her twenty-third is the worst one she's ever had; it falls right in the middle of a Quest they shouldn't even be on. They're too old to get involved in Camp Quests anymore, except Percy dreamt about Nico's little sister in danger, and nobody stopped for a who, what, when, where, or why or even bothered changing out of their pajamas before they were headed cross-country, springing into and falling into and occasionally semi-on-purpose triggering trap after trap until they got to the last week in April, coming full-circle back to New York, and Annabeth takes Rachel Elisabeth Dare by the feet and Percy cradles her head, half-blinded by smoke and tears, and they lift her onto the pyre, wrapped in a sheet.
There's no celebration that year, because even when things settle down, nobody's in the mood to care that Annabeth's one year older. She ignores it for four months running, continues to write 22 down on surveys and on documents, because she shouldn't be twenty-three, not when Rachel never will be, not when breathing still hurts like always standing next to someone who's smoking, grief choking and burning in her chest, the first thing she feels when she wakes up.
She gets fired from her part-time job at a real estate agency and only lasts three weeks repairing washing machines at the local laundromat before she permanently relocates some creepy Russian customer's front teeth and gives her notice. She comes home and things only get worse: she picks fights as soon as she comes through the door, says the nastiest things she can think of like there's no filter between her mouth and the brain that usually wouldn't even think these things.
"You're really not the best person to be around right now, Annabeth," Nico tells her when she snaps at him for taking over the kitchen table, his textbooks open and diagrams of the human muscular system spread out over her usual spot, so she has to eat standing up at the counter. He's got one of those medical-school-or-not defining final exams at one, she knows, and she doesn't care.
She tosses her spoon into the sink. "That's rich, coming from you," she goes, turning on the tap. "Didn't Bianca spend her last week alive just falling all over herself to get away from you?" And knows without turning around the look that will be all over Nico's face; shocked airless and his eyes dark like a sodium bulb just gone out, like the sky without stars, without oxygen, without warmth, a look like shipwrecks and small children abandoned on subway platforms.
She listens to him carefully gather up his textbooks and study notes, and the soft pop of displaced air as he disappears. She grips the countertop until her knuckles lock up and hates herself.
She knows she's doing it, she can feel herself doing it, and she hates it, but she can't control herself. And it's stupid that she's doing this because of Rachel, who she didn't even like most days, or, like, ever.
But Rachel ... Oracle or not, Rachel's just a fucking mortal. She's supposed to live long enough to give the old crone a run for her money, spouting off prophecies, taking no bullshit, and handing out Quests long after Annabeth and Percy and Nico and all their contemporaries have been burned down to ash and shards of bone. Rachel wasn't supposed to be there; Annabeth wasn't supposed to have to stand there on her birthday and watch Percy cry so hard he couldn't see straight, trying to fit her red hair and bits of her skull back together. Half-bloods die young and bloody so that mortals can live. Not the other way around.
So Annabeth swallows against the sour nut of frustration and grief and guilt in her throat and lashes out at Percy and Nico, wanting to sink her nails into their well-loved faces and rip them away, change them into people she doesn't recognize and therefore can't care about, because if she becomes this when Rachel fucking Dare dies, then what's going to happen when it's Percy she has to cover in a shroud, when it's smoke coming off Nico's pyre? What's going to happen to her then?
She can't even fathom it -- it's like trying to contemplate the edge of space, or the size of an atom -- and it scares the shit out of her.
The worst thing that could happen to Annabeth wouldn't happen to her. It would happen to one of them.
It's August before she cracks under the weight of it, finds herself standing at the wharf with Percy in front of her, sea salt stiff in the fabric of his hoodie and the familiar scent of fish and brine sharp in her nose and he has that unshaven look he gets when he's been out at sea for awhile and his eyes are more blue than green and unreadable in a way she hates, but she chose this man when she was eleven years old and hasn't backed from that decision yet. She fists a hand in the print of his sweatshirt and hangs on and says through teeth bared like the bars of a cage, "Don't you die. Don't you ever die, okay, I won't allowed it I won't I won't --"
And then she's crying, great racking sobs and everything unspools inside of her, like a ribbon she's been winding up suddenly springing loose, unraveling in every direction.
Annabeth's twenty-fourth birthday falls on a Friday, and the thing about having April 15 for a birthday is that no matter what day of the week it is or where everybody is supposed to be, usually they're all at home, doing their taxes. On the couch, she's got one leg tucked under her and the other in Percy's lap, a can of Coke Cherry balanced on her thigh, leaving a ring of condensation in the fabric of her capris. She rubs at a spot of skin over her eyebrow, contemplates asking Percy if bailing their dumbass necrophiliac boyfriend out of jail counts as a charitable contribution and if their swords, mace, ax, and crossbow are something they need to declare.
Clarisse is sitting across from them, playing with the coaster on the coffee table and taking refuge from her husband -- "one mistake," she huffs. "And he chases me out of the house! I'm fucking dyslexic, dude, I'm gonna make mistakes. But now he doesn't trust me with numbers. I fucking saved Manhattan and he thinks I can't handle a little calculator work. Hmph, assface mortals."
She keeps going. Percy runs his fingers idly up and down Annabeth's shin bone. She twitches a little when he reaches her knee, and he goes in an undertone, "yeah, I noticed you missed your kneecap while shaving, like I care," and she makes a face at him.
Nico comes in from the kitchen in the middle of Clarisse telling them how she met Terrence Freemason ("we went to elementary school together. He transferred into my grade when we were twelve. Nasty, ugly, scrawny kid, so I shoved his head down a toilet." "Yup," Percy comments dryly. "That sounds about right.") He has a slice of red velvet cake on a plate.
"A present," he goes, as soon as he knows that he (or, rather, the cake) has the whole room's attention. "For the only person currently doing any hard work." And hands the plate and fork to Annabeth, who beams at him.
"Who'd you steal this from?"
"Mikolos," Nico replies instantly. "He was busy ogling Vanna White's second boob job, so I snuck in and out."
"Good," Annabeth says archly. "The man owes me the key to Eris's locker in Grand Central Station. Keep stealing his shit."
"Will do," Nico smiles that strange, lopsided smile he gets when he feels justified by his existence on earth; when he's done something for herself or Percy and considers their happiness as fair reward. He leans over the back of the couch for a kiss, catching crumbs from the corners of her mouth.
Clarisse makes a noise in the back of her throat. "It's like I got dropped into the middle of a USA drama series. Where the hell did that plot twist come from?"
"I got one for you too," Nico insists cheerfully, coming around the edge of the couch with his arms extended.
She leaps to her feet immediately, backing away with one finger pointed in Nico's direction. "Oh, hell no," she goes. "You stay the hell away from me, you creepy-ass child. Don't think I've forgotten that thing with Annabeth's poor roommate and the pig."
"I said I was sorry!" Nico's voice climbs an octave in his indignation. "Am I never gonna live that down? Come on, what are a couple zombies between friends?"
Annabeth curls around her plate of cake, laughing so hard she can feel it cramp up in her shoulders. She has Percy's hand on her leg, Nico standing over her making kissy faces at Clarisse, and she blinks the tears out of her eyes, suddenly, blindingly, breathlessly grateful in a way she's never been before that they're here, they're here with her where she can put her hands on them and keep them and love them until death do them part.
On Annabeth's twenty-fourth birthday, she decides how she's going to spend the rest of her life.
It's the best day ever.
-
His seventh birthday, maybe. That was before Gabe, before strange things started happening to him whenever he went outside. Sally took him to Chucky Cheese and let him eat two whole slices of pepperoni pizza and let him climb backwards up the slide even though you're never supposed to climb backwards up a slide, everybody knows that. He fell asleep with his head pillowed on his mother's thigh on the cab ride home, and woke up on her comforter the next morning, Sally curled around him the way he'd seen mother dogs do in pet shop windows even though he was way too big for this kind of stuff. He scooted up so he could put his head on the pillow next to hers, and loved her with the all-consuming, supernova love any child has for his mother.
His fourteenth, Nico's hellfire eyes flicking restlessly towards the fire escape, before he turned and bared his teeth and said, yeah, okay, cake sounds good.
And if he doesn't say his sixteenth, Annabeth will find a way to chop off his fingers in his sleep. If he doesn't think about the whole issue and significance of his sixteenth birthday, yeah, it's almost a nice memory, and if he closes his eyes, sense memory can still conjure the smell of lakewater and Annabeth's soap, the two cleanest scents he can think of.
His twenty-first, which was absolutely not as alcohol-soaked as he thought it would be. "Everybody gets wasted on their twenty-first," Rachel said dismissively, one finger on his lips and the other guiding him down a steep set of steps. His boots scrape clumsily against tarmac, and he waits until he can feel her tug at the knot in his blindfold. "But how many people can take a private jet to Tahiti and get there same-day?" She flourished, grinning as Percy's eyes bug out, pupils shrinking in the sudden light. "I may have blackmailed Zeus into helping a little bit," she added, answering his unasked question, tropical sun catching in the gold in her eyes. "Now come on, I'm going to put you in a coconut bra and you're not even going to be drunk when I do it."
His twenty-sixth, slipping a ring onto Annabeth's finger and watching her throat bob in shock. She mumbles something about how, classic Percy style, he's managing to do it wrong: people are supposed to give him gifts, not the other way around, and Nico leans over his shoulder and says, astonished, "You listened to me. You actually listened to me. Nobody ever listens to me. Are you feeling okay?" and Percy yelled, "Oh my gods, will you be my wife or not?" and Annabeth swallowed hard again and went, "Fuck. YES." And Nico, predictably, ruined the moment by going, "oh, thank gods, that saves me the trouble of having to marry one of you," and slept crooked on the couch for four days.
His thirty-fourth, coming home to find plastic tarp spilling out of the spare room. He leaned against the doorjamb and blinked at Annabeth, who had a paint roller in hand and Nico on his knees in front of her, still in his scrubs with his mouth open low on her stomach where her shirt's ridden up. "What's going on?" he asked, feeling a little airless at the look in their eyes. "Have we figured out what we're doing with this room?" Annabeth carded her fingers through Nico's hair and Nico smiled wide enough his molars showed and he said, "It's gonna be a nursery."
His fortieth (actually, it's a couple weeks out, but important things can't always keep happening on your birthday, not even when you're Percy Jackson,) and Nico's little sister is standing in front of him on deck, saying, please, with her fingers tangled together with Thomas Blofis's, and Percy remembers rescuing her from monsters when she was just eight years old, remembers changing Tommy's fucking diapers, and Pauline says, please, we might not -- and he thinks, what the hell, we're Greek, this is not the most incestuous thing we've ever done, and he goes, Fine! Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today in the vain hopes that we're not going to die miserably. Something, something something OKAY, by the power invested in me as captain of this ship, I pronounce you husband and wife, for as long as you can avoid being eaten by sea monsters.
His sixty-fifth, a granddaughter with blonde pigtails climbing onto the arm of his chair to kiss his cheek.
His eighty-first. They put exactly that many candles on his cake and the resulting fire gutted the kitchen. It was absolutely hilarious, don't try to tell him otherwise.
The point is.
The point is, you can't ask Percy to pick a favorite, any more than you can ask a beetle what it thinks about the stars. As cliche as it sounds, even to him, every day is his new favorite, birthday or not, good day or bad. Even those days when it all goes horribly; he wakes up later than he means to and someone yells at him at work about something that will be inconsequential by next week, and something blows up on the subway and gets monster guts all over his clean shirt, again, even those days are fucking wonderful, because the sky is still where it should be and fucking gorgeous New York City hasn't sunk beneath the waves and there are mortals everywhere doing silly mortal things, and he almost lost this.
After all, you know Percy. He never does anything half-assed, and if he's been given a happily ever after, well, then he's going to live happily ever after, and it's going to be the best damn happily ever after you ever saw.
Thank you very much.
("Dude, remember that time we tried to get you to jump from the Brooklyn bridge on your birthday?" Nico goes, mouthing absently at the knobbly bones in Percy's shoulder until he flips over onto his back, pulling him close enough to kiss. "And you did it, you fucker, and me and Annabeth, mm --"
"You and dear Annabeth over here had to spent the night in police lock-up trying to convince them we hadn't actually killed you, and it would have been really helpful if you'd actually, like, shown up," Annabeth picks up the narrative from their other side, tone too mellow to really pull off her annoyance. "Except you decided it would be fun to chase hippocampi instead, and left us there until the next day."
"This wasn't the jail visit where I had a sunflower down my pants, was it?" Nico murmured.
"No, that came later."
"Oh yeah," Percy smiles fondly in the general direction of the ceiling. "Best day ever.")
-fin
Fandom: Percy Jackson and the Olympians
Characters/Pairings: Percy/Nico/Annabeth
Summary: Live long enough, and you see it all.
Word Count: 3,700
Notes: A pinch-hit timestamp to Remove Tag Before Washing and its sequel. Set in the same verse, but reading neither is necessary to understand this. Written all in one sitting, so all errors are probably unchecked :DD
Now available @ AO3.
Birthdays are kind of important to them.
You can understand why.
-
To this day, Nico's favorite birthday is still his sixteenth.
It's the birthday that would have decided the fate of the world, if it had been his prophecy after all, if destiny had stepped out for coffee at the wrong time and Hades, for once, got what he wanted. Nico is still stupidly grateful that the Great Prophecy hadn't been about him; the world can't trust him, it really can't. There's too much of the gods in Nico -- he's not human enough to save the world and do it right.
It's not to say his other birthdays haven't been fun, or memorable (although there was that one birthday he woke up in a jail cell the morning after with a puppy crooked under one arm and a sunflower tucked into his pants -- nobody's explained that one to him yet.) It's just -- his sixteenth birthday still stays in his memory, too awash in soft, lazy, golden light to think back to very often, less it lose its shine. It's one of those memories you only pull out in the more dire of circumstances; when you think you're about to die, when you're waiting for Chiron to send an Iris message your way (they made it home okay, Nico,) or in the earliest days of March when the sky over Long Island stays grey for week-long stretches and you think you can't stand another day of monotony. It's the kind of memory you tuck between your palms like a lightning bug and let it ease the strain on your lungs.
Percy and Annabeth had waylaid him while he was walking to school that morning. Do you have a test today? they wanted to know.
Yeah, I do, he'd gone, instantly on guard. Them asking if he had anything important going on was usually a prelude to him almost dying in one way or another. And he really did have a test -- American History, the kind where there are only ten multiple guess questions and then a five-paragraph essay, and hell if Nico hadn't stayed up the night before reading and rereading every damn paragraph his textbook had to say on the Watergate scandal.
Skip it! They said cheerfully, and took him back to their apartment.
Nico loved that little place. He really did. Percy and Annabeth moved in half-way through their freshman year at NYU -- Percy because he felt increasingly like a bum and a third wheel living with his mom and Paul, and Annabeth because her roommate more or less hated her guts (Nico kind of had a hand in that one. He'd tried to apologize for the thing with the pig, he really had.) It was a small, shitty place in the way that all Manhattan apartments got books written about them by fledgling, self-discovering authors for being so shitty. It was just one of those things: live in an apartment in one of the boroughs, and hell, you could probably take on Cerberus on one of his bad days: three-headed dogs have nothing on the size of the cockroaches Percy and Annabeth share shower space with.
They took him home and dumped him on their bed and didn't let him up again, except once to make them sandwiches, and even that didn't count because Percy followed him in and bent him over the flimsy kitchen table and sucked a bruise into the wing of his neck that later turned into a fairly accurate purple-and-green topographical map of California.
It doesn't seem like much, when you write it down like that; just one day filled with nothing but sex, sheets rucking up underneath their heels and pillows dragged around and left askew wherever convenient and lots of elbows and knees in every possible soft, fleshy part, muttered ow, fuckers and warm mouths kissing it better.
But it's the best birthday Nico's ever had, and if anyone can't understand why, then they've never had Percy Jackson's hair curled in between their fingers, his mouth flush and swollen and limned with a halo of red like he's been sucking on a red popsicle, and the smile on his face when he turns his head, presses a kiss to the meaty part of their thumbs, nothing in his eyes but a smile, brighter than the sun off the surf. They've never had Annabeth's weight settled fully on their hips, her spine arched in that primal, visceral way that could inspire soliloquies from a Nethanderal, or have her collapse against him, huffing, holy -- what, fucking -- gods, I love you. Nico di Angelo, I fucking love you and if you ask me later, I will deny it. Shut up, stop laughing!
Nico had a girlfriend at the time, because someone had to try to date other people, just to see what it was like, and it wasn't going to be either Percy or Annabeth: she was a mortal girl who couldn't see through the Mist but had been raised in a polytheistic family and had no reason not to believe him about the son of Hades, Greek gods are real dun dun DUN thing, and only had the best kind of sarcastic commentary waiting whenever he came back from the latest Olympian disaster. He liked her a lot; liked her husky blush and how white her smile was and liked her arm against his during school assemblies. He learned, later, that she'd been waiting for him to show up all day, her birthday present to him tucked in his locker, where it sat for a week before he'd found it.
He never did speak to that girl again. How could he? Any words he had to say to people who weren't Percy or Annabeth were useless, worth less than a penny in a department store.
On Nico's sixteenth birthday, the world had already been saved, which was great, because he didn't have a thought left to spare beyond his hands on Annabeth's hips, in Percy's hair, his mouth around their names like it was the only two words he knew of a foreign language and they had to stand for everything, and the feeling, filling him up with love and love and love, like being shot through with prism light, like white static on the last television channel, like putting his ear to a shell and hearing the roar of the ocean.
-
Annabeth's favorite birthday is her twenty-fourth.
She's sure of this, because her twenty-third is the worst one she's ever had; it falls right in the middle of a Quest they shouldn't even be on. They're too old to get involved in Camp Quests anymore, except Percy dreamt about Nico's little sister in danger, and nobody stopped for a who, what, when, where, or why or even bothered changing out of their pajamas before they were headed cross-country, springing into and falling into and occasionally semi-on-purpose triggering trap after trap until they got to the last week in April, coming full-circle back to New York, and Annabeth takes Rachel Elisabeth Dare by the feet and Percy cradles her head, half-blinded by smoke and tears, and they lift her onto the pyre, wrapped in a sheet.
There's no celebration that year, because even when things settle down, nobody's in the mood to care that Annabeth's one year older. She ignores it for four months running, continues to write 22 down on surveys and on documents, because she shouldn't be twenty-three, not when Rachel never will be, not when breathing still hurts like always standing next to someone who's smoking, grief choking and burning in her chest, the first thing she feels when she wakes up.
She gets fired from her part-time job at a real estate agency and only lasts three weeks repairing washing machines at the local laundromat before she permanently relocates some creepy Russian customer's front teeth and gives her notice. She comes home and things only get worse: she picks fights as soon as she comes through the door, says the nastiest things she can think of like there's no filter between her mouth and the brain that usually wouldn't even think these things.
"You're really not the best person to be around right now, Annabeth," Nico tells her when she snaps at him for taking over the kitchen table, his textbooks open and diagrams of the human muscular system spread out over her usual spot, so she has to eat standing up at the counter. He's got one of those medical-school-or-not defining final exams at one, she knows, and she doesn't care.
She tosses her spoon into the sink. "That's rich, coming from you," she goes, turning on the tap. "Didn't Bianca spend her last week alive just falling all over herself to get away from you?" And knows without turning around the look that will be all over Nico's face; shocked airless and his eyes dark like a sodium bulb just gone out, like the sky without stars, without oxygen, without warmth, a look like shipwrecks and small children abandoned on subway platforms.
She listens to him carefully gather up his textbooks and study notes, and the soft pop of displaced air as he disappears. She grips the countertop until her knuckles lock up and hates herself.
She knows she's doing it, she can feel herself doing it, and she hates it, but she can't control herself. And it's stupid that she's doing this because of Rachel, who she didn't even like most days, or, like, ever.
But Rachel ... Oracle or not, Rachel's just a fucking mortal. She's supposed to live long enough to give the old crone a run for her money, spouting off prophecies, taking no bullshit, and handing out Quests long after Annabeth and Percy and Nico and all their contemporaries have been burned down to ash and shards of bone. Rachel wasn't supposed to be there; Annabeth wasn't supposed to have to stand there on her birthday and watch Percy cry so hard he couldn't see straight, trying to fit her red hair and bits of her skull back together. Half-bloods die young and bloody so that mortals can live. Not the other way around.
So Annabeth swallows against the sour nut of frustration and grief and guilt in her throat and lashes out at Percy and Nico, wanting to sink her nails into their well-loved faces and rip them away, change them into people she doesn't recognize and therefore can't care about, because if she becomes this when Rachel fucking Dare dies, then what's going to happen when it's Percy she has to cover in a shroud, when it's smoke coming off Nico's pyre? What's going to happen to her then?
She can't even fathom it -- it's like trying to contemplate the edge of space, or the size of an atom -- and it scares the shit out of her.
The worst thing that could happen to Annabeth wouldn't happen to her. It would happen to one of them.
It's August before she cracks under the weight of it, finds herself standing at the wharf with Percy in front of her, sea salt stiff in the fabric of his hoodie and the familiar scent of fish and brine sharp in her nose and he has that unshaven look he gets when he's been out at sea for awhile and his eyes are more blue than green and unreadable in a way she hates, but she chose this man when she was eleven years old and hasn't backed from that decision yet. She fists a hand in the print of his sweatshirt and hangs on and says through teeth bared like the bars of a cage, "Don't you die. Don't you ever die, okay, I won't allowed it I won't I won't --"
And then she's crying, great racking sobs and everything unspools inside of her, like a ribbon she's been winding up suddenly springing loose, unraveling in every direction.
Annabeth's twenty-fourth birthday falls on a Friday, and the thing about having April 15 for a birthday is that no matter what day of the week it is or where everybody is supposed to be, usually they're all at home, doing their taxes. On the couch, she's got one leg tucked under her and the other in Percy's lap, a can of Coke Cherry balanced on her thigh, leaving a ring of condensation in the fabric of her capris. She rubs at a spot of skin over her eyebrow, contemplates asking Percy if bailing their dumbass necrophiliac boyfriend out of jail counts as a charitable contribution and if their swords, mace, ax, and crossbow are something they need to declare.
Clarisse is sitting across from them, playing with the coaster on the coffee table and taking refuge from her husband -- "one mistake," she huffs. "And he chases me out of the house! I'm fucking dyslexic, dude, I'm gonna make mistakes. But now he doesn't trust me with numbers. I fucking saved Manhattan and he thinks I can't handle a little calculator work. Hmph, assface mortals."
She keeps going. Percy runs his fingers idly up and down Annabeth's shin bone. She twitches a little when he reaches her knee, and he goes in an undertone, "yeah, I noticed you missed your kneecap while shaving, like I care," and she makes a face at him.
Nico comes in from the kitchen in the middle of Clarisse telling them how she met Terrence Freemason ("we went to elementary school together. He transferred into my grade when we were twelve. Nasty, ugly, scrawny kid, so I shoved his head down a toilet." "Yup," Percy comments dryly. "That sounds about right.") He has a slice of red velvet cake on a plate.
"A present," he goes, as soon as he knows that he (or, rather, the cake) has the whole room's attention. "For the only person currently doing any hard work." And hands the plate and fork to Annabeth, who beams at him.
"Who'd you steal this from?"
"Mikolos," Nico replies instantly. "He was busy ogling Vanna White's second boob job, so I snuck in and out."
"Good," Annabeth says archly. "The man owes me the key to Eris's locker in Grand Central Station. Keep stealing his shit."
"Will do," Nico smiles that strange, lopsided smile he gets when he feels justified by his existence on earth; when he's done something for herself or Percy and considers their happiness as fair reward. He leans over the back of the couch for a kiss, catching crumbs from the corners of her mouth.
Clarisse makes a noise in the back of her throat. "It's like I got dropped into the middle of a USA drama series. Where the hell did that plot twist come from?"
"I got one for you too," Nico insists cheerfully, coming around the edge of the couch with his arms extended.
She leaps to her feet immediately, backing away with one finger pointed in Nico's direction. "Oh, hell no," she goes. "You stay the hell away from me, you creepy-ass child. Don't think I've forgotten that thing with Annabeth's poor roommate and the pig."
"I said I was sorry!" Nico's voice climbs an octave in his indignation. "Am I never gonna live that down? Come on, what are a couple zombies between friends?"
Annabeth curls around her plate of cake, laughing so hard she can feel it cramp up in her shoulders. She has Percy's hand on her leg, Nico standing over her making kissy faces at Clarisse, and she blinks the tears out of her eyes, suddenly, blindingly, breathlessly grateful in a way she's never been before that they're here, they're here with her where she can put her hands on them and keep them and love them until death do them part.
On Annabeth's twenty-fourth birthday, she decides how she's going to spend the rest of her life.
It's the best day ever.
-
His seventh birthday, maybe. That was before Gabe, before strange things started happening to him whenever he went outside. Sally took him to Chucky Cheese and let him eat two whole slices of pepperoni pizza and let him climb backwards up the slide even though you're never supposed to climb backwards up a slide, everybody knows that. He fell asleep with his head pillowed on his mother's thigh on the cab ride home, and woke up on her comforter the next morning, Sally curled around him the way he'd seen mother dogs do in pet shop windows even though he was way too big for this kind of stuff. He scooted up so he could put his head on the pillow next to hers, and loved her with the all-consuming, supernova love any child has for his mother.
His fourteenth, Nico's hellfire eyes flicking restlessly towards the fire escape, before he turned and bared his teeth and said, yeah, okay, cake sounds good.
And if he doesn't say his sixteenth, Annabeth will find a way to chop off his fingers in his sleep. If he doesn't think about the whole issue and significance of his sixteenth birthday, yeah, it's almost a nice memory, and if he closes his eyes, sense memory can still conjure the smell of lakewater and Annabeth's soap, the two cleanest scents he can think of.
His twenty-first, which was absolutely not as alcohol-soaked as he thought it would be. "Everybody gets wasted on their twenty-first," Rachel said dismissively, one finger on his lips and the other guiding him down a steep set of steps. His boots scrape clumsily against tarmac, and he waits until he can feel her tug at the knot in his blindfold. "But how many people can take a private jet to Tahiti and get there same-day?" She flourished, grinning as Percy's eyes bug out, pupils shrinking in the sudden light. "I may have blackmailed Zeus into helping a little bit," she added, answering his unasked question, tropical sun catching in the gold in her eyes. "Now come on, I'm going to put you in a coconut bra and you're not even going to be drunk when I do it."
His twenty-sixth, slipping a ring onto Annabeth's finger and watching her throat bob in shock. She mumbles something about how, classic Percy style, he's managing to do it wrong: people are supposed to give him gifts, not the other way around, and Nico leans over his shoulder and says, astonished, "You listened to me. You actually listened to me. Nobody ever listens to me. Are you feeling okay?" and Percy yelled, "Oh my gods, will you be my wife or not?" and Annabeth swallowed hard again and went, "Fuck. YES." And Nico, predictably, ruined the moment by going, "oh, thank gods, that saves me the trouble of having to marry one of you," and slept crooked on the couch for four days.
His thirty-fourth, coming home to find plastic tarp spilling out of the spare room. He leaned against the doorjamb and blinked at Annabeth, who had a paint roller in hand and Nico on his knees in front of her, still in his scrubs with his mouth open low on her stomach where her shirt's ridden up. "What's going on?" he asked, feeling a little airless at the look in their eyes. "Have we figured out what we're doing with this room?" Annabeth carded her fingers through Nico's hair and Nico smiled wide enough his molars showed and he said, "It's gonna be a nursery."
His fortieth (actually, it's a couple weeks out, but important things can't always keep happening on your birthday, not even when you're Percy Jackson,) and Nico's little sister is standing in front of him on deck, saying, please, with her fingers tangled together with Thomas Blofis's, and Percy remembers rescuing her from monsters when she was just eight years old, remembers changing Tommy's fucking diapers, and Pauline says, please, we might not -- and he thinks, what the hell, we're Greek, this is not the most incestuous thing we've ever done, and he goes, Fine! Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today in the vain hopes that we're not going to die miserably. Something, something something OKAY, by the power invested in me as captain of this ship, I pronounce you husband and wife, for as long as you can avoid being eaten by sea monsters.
His sixty-fifth, a granddaughter with blonde pigtails climbing onto the arm of his chair to kiss his cheek.
His eighty-first. They put exactly that many candles on his cake and the resulting fire gutted the kitchen. It was absolutely hilarious, don't try to tell him otherwise.
The point is.
The point is, you can't ask Percy to pick a favorite, any more than you can ask a beetle what it thinks about the stars. As cliche as it sounds, even to him, every day is his new favorite, birthday or not, good day or bad. Even those days when it all goes horribly; he wakes up later than he means to and someone yells at him at work about something that will be inconsequential by next week, and something blows up on the subway and gets monster guts all over his clean shirt, again, even those days are fucking wonderful, because the sky is still where it should be and fucking gorgeous New York City hasn't sunk beneath the waves and there are mortals everywhere doing silly mortal things, and he almost lost this.
After all, you know Percy. He never does anything half-assed, and if he's been given a happily ever after, well, then he's going to live happily ever after, and it's going to be the best damn happily ever after you ever saw.
Thank you very much.
("Dude, remember that time we tried to get you to jump from the Brooklyn bridge on your birthday?" Nico goes, mouthing absently at the knobbly bones in Percy's shoulder until he flips over onto his back, pulling him close enough to kiss. "And you did it, you fucker, and me and Annabeth, mm --"
"You and dear Annabeth over here had to spent the night in police lock-up trying to convince them we hadn't actually killed you, and it would have been really helpful if you'd actually, like, shown up," Annabeth picks up the narrative from their other side, tone too mellow to really pull off her annoyance. "Except you decided it would be fun to chase hippocampi instead, and left us there until the next day."
"This wasn't the jail visit where I had a sunflower down my pants, was it?" Nico murmured.
"No, that came later."
"Oh yeah," Percy smiles fondly in the general direction of the ceiling. "Best day ever.")
-fin