Rubix Cubes

jersey if i may humbly request a fic in which annabeth is tenderly patching up percy on the bathroom counter... it's about the Hands... and standing entirely too close. go as ham as ur little h/c writer heart desires. maybe a dash of knuckle kisses if ur feeling benevolent

so, as you know, emma, because i liveblogged writing this to you, you got something a lot more intense than what you had asked for. because it ran away from me! this is intense. this is a lot. this is maybe one of the only times i’ll write a fic that references HOO existing, and you know, if i’m going to do that, i’m going to talk about things that frustrated me in that series. specifically the sad ones. everyone here has seen emma request “go as ham as ur little h/c writer heart desires” and no one is allowed to yell at me, you all have to yell at emma for asking this of me. TWs include graphic depiction of violence, and frank discussion of suicidal tendencies. yes i said fuck the way rick did that if he’s going to put that in his book series and do it badly i’m gonna be mad about it

Rubix Cubes

AO3

It’d taken Chiron paying a visit to the city, and some forged records, and liberal application of the Mist, but Annabeth and Percy had been able to slide right into their junior year of high school. It was harder than Annabeth had expected it to be, which was more than a little humbling, but if she wanted to attend the college of her dreams, she had to have the most spotless high school record she could, because her early education was fabricated almost entirely by the Mist, and she’d flip-flopped between high schools, on account of being a part-time world-saver. Anyone on an admissions board with half a clearsighted eye could’ve seen that she was lying through her teeth. Percy mostly just hadn’t wanted to be in high school longer than he had to, and joked a lot that skipping a year of school was a good way to get paid back, for the not-infrequent world-saving.

She’d thought she was prepared to adjust to the jump between years, she’d thought she’d patched the holes of her missing sophomore year fairly well on her own, but junior year was still the hardest she’d ever had to work for anything academically; and if she was struggling beneath the weight of her study schedule, she knew it had to be worse for Percy. At least she enjoyed it on some level—Percy hated it through-and-through, every inch of the process frustrated him. He wasn’t talking to her about it, the way he had sometimes before, over long Iris Messages, through emails. She used to like helping him through schoolwork, because there was an honest kind of joy in helping him figure out that he was not nearly as dumb as he thought he was, he was just designed to learn differently. But his jaw tightened now whenever she asked about it, and he was moody enough these days that she didn’t really feel like prodding him about it more, not when it’d just lead to a stilted, heavy silence. Not when it’d put him in a bad mood for days at a time. Not when it’d lead to sitting beside him and feeling like he might as well have been halfway across the world, not a tangible memory in his head, for how approachable he felt. He’d always been pessimistic, but she used to be able to talk him out of it, when she tried.

 She was curled around her trigonometry workbook when Percy let himself in—through the window, the one she always left unlocked for him, so he could sneak in after scaling the fire escape. There was a certain privacy to her dorm that they didn’t have at Sally’s, even though they were at Sally’s often enough.

 “Hi,” she said, tapping the end of her pen against the page. The word problem in front of her scrambled itself into trains of nonsensical letters. “I’m suffering.”

 Percy grunted. The noise made her turn and look at him, and he was leaned against the wall by the open window, head craned backwards and his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallowed. She gave herself a moment to trace the lean line of it with her eyes, the slice of shadow that dipped into his collarbone. He was in layers, against the bitter cold front New York City stood against, a jean jacket buttoned up over a hoodie—hastily, too, because the buttons were pulled through the wrong holes. She could see just that slice of shadow, and the sweat beading on his throat.

 “Did you run here?” she asked. Sometimes he did. She usually made him lay on the floor until he was mostly dried off, when he did, because she liked her bed not smelling like a sweaty, gross mess.

 He tilted his head forward, blinked at her. “It’s fucking cold,” he said, by way of explanation. His words were raspy. Slowly he settled on the floor in front of her bed, back pressed against the frame, the back of his head bumping into her knee. She leaned forward and ruffled his hair, and her fingers met thick, sweat-soaked curls.

 “You didn’t have to run here,” she said, the corner of her mouth quirking upwards. Excited, much, she wanted to say, but it was a bit too early to decide if he was in the mood for teasing.

 “I—” he said, and it was clear to her that there were words that were supposed to follow that he wasn’t offering, but he tacked on a miserable little, “did. Sorry.”

“How was your day?” she asked. She resigned herself to working one-handed, and knotted her fingers lazily in Percy’s hair, and he leaned into the touch with a soft, throaty noise.

 “Fine,” he said. “How’s… how—the, uh. The—uh.”

 Annabeth snickered. She shifted her knee and then pushed aside her workbook, cupping Percy’s cheeks and tipping his head back. His face was hot to the touch, and when his eyes flicked up at her, they were folded at the corners in an almost nervous way. His bruised eye was still swollen, but better than it had been yesterday, or the day before. She pressed a kiss to his forehead, and it was burning, too, but it was probably from the run. Excited, much. She tapped his cheekbone, beneath his bruised eye. “How’s this healing.”

 “Fine,” he said, thickly. “I… I love you.”

 Annabeth grinned. “I love you, too,” she said. “But that’s not a good diversion tactic, sorry to say. Did you see him today?”

 “Him,” Percy said.

 “Braxton,” she said. “The guy you knocked out.”

 Friday had been awful, because Percy had called her at five in the evening with a mumble, saying, remember that guy I told you about, the one I told to fuck off and stop bothering people, y’know. Stop, stop, I didn’t start it, I swear, I really didn’t. I just reacted. Strongly. I reacted strongly. He’s—unconscious. A little bit? I’m sorry, ‘Beth.

 Percy shrugged, and winced, his lip curling. “Fuck him,” he said, quietly, eyes drifting shut. “How’s—how’s the… can’t remember.”

 Annabeth frowned, and then moved to the corner of the bed, and patted the rumpled comforter. “Take a nap,” she said. She was starting to think that, despite the fact that Percy no longer had the Curse of Achilles, it had scrambled his sleeping patterns permanently; he slept more now than he had then, seemed to somehow need it more than he had, then.

 “M’good,” Percy mumbled, his head dropping back down to his chest. “M’good here.”

 She left it at that, would rather give Percy space to work through whatever mood it was that he was in, before she tried prying it out of him. He’d been off ever since Braxton. He’d lied about it to his mom, which Annabeth thought was maybe the first time he’d lied to his mom directly, instead of just offering lie after lie of omission. It wasn’t Annabeth’s place to question what Percy decided to keep from his mother, but she couldn’t figure out the reasoning behind this one—she couldn’t figure out why he’d find it so important to lie about something he did in self-defense. Something that Braxton himself was too embarrassed to press charges for. Annabeth refocused herself on her trigonometry workbook, sometimes stretching across the bed to pull out notes she’d made of online videos she’d devoured about Algebra II, the math course she’d missed in favor of saving the world. It didn’t take long for the nearly-winter night to fall, and Annabeth shuffled to stand up and turn on a lamp, because the word problems crawled even further across the page in the nearly-winter dark.

 She moved around Percy, who was slumped over, eyes shut and lashes dusting his cheeks, and pulled the cord of her bedside lamp. There was a thud behind her as the light flooded the room, and Annabeth turned—Percy had startled, bumping his shoulder against the wooden slat of the bedframe, was staring at her with wide, shocked eyes. His hair was curled against his forehead, soaked through with sweat, and she almost said you’re sick, let me call Sally, because he shouldn’t still be sweating. Then she spotted the wide, black-red patch over his stomach.

 Her world tunneled to a single point; the black-red, the way it glistened in the yellow light, its position over a fragile stomach, protected by no curse. “You’re bleeding,” she said, softly, though she’d intended to scream it. She worked through possibilities in an instant, but he hadn’t moved since he’d gotten here, and if he’d been attacked she would have seen it, and that meant his heart had been pumping blood out of his body this entire time. Annabeth’s cheeks flushed with rage or fear or both.

 Percy didn’t answer. He cut his eyes away, breathing hard, and Annabeth’s mouth tasted like cotton and her pulse roared in her ears. She crashed to her knees beside him, sliding her arms beneath his and hiking him upwards, staggering beneath his weight. Carrying Percy had been easier, when he’d been smaller than her, when they’d been the same size, and right now she missed those days more than anything in the world. If the gods had asked after her heart’s deepest desire, in that second, she would have asked to be twelve years old with Percy forever, just the two of them wading through the shallows of the lake catching frogs so Percy could try and find one he could talk to. Now he was taller and folded over her shoulders because he couldn’t stand up on his own, and summer was months away, and her heart was in her throat and beating there, because he’d been lying on the floor of her dorm and bleeding out while she did her fucking trigonometry homework.

 “Why didn’t you fucking say something,” tripped out of her mouth, hurried and rushed, filled with every ounce of her confusion, and she pushed him at the bathroom counter. He flopped on it more than he balanced on it, his back hitting the tiled backsplash and listing dangerously to the side, and he hooked a hand—his right hand, with the knuckles that were still swollen and bruised from the last time he’d been in a fight—into the ridge of the sink’s basin and held on to keep himself upright.

 It was sad, the way her hands were sure, the way even as her mind scrambled for purchase between the domesticity of five minutes ago and the bloodstains coloring her hands now, her hands knew what to do. She popped his jacket open, sending aluminum buttons knocking into the walls, one bouncing off the door, and she didn’t bother trying to have Percy take it off all the way. He was barely upright, and it would be a waste of time. The blue hoodie beneath the jacket had started pooling blood, the material too soaked to retain any more of it, and she ground her teeth and then bolted out of the room, rifling in her desk drawer for her scissors. She used them to cut her flashcards. Today they’d cut her boyfriend’s hoodie open, so she could clean a wound that would otherwise kill him.

 When she returned Percy had managed to pull himself up a little straighter, and his eyes were following her, utterly blank and half-lidded. The only tell that anything on him hurt at all was the severe way his brows were drawn together.

 “If you live,” she said, savagely, fumbling with the stitched collar of Percy’s hoodie, “I’m going to fucking kill you. And then I’m going to bring you back. And then I’m going to let your mom fucking kill you.”

 Percy grunted, and Annabeth’s heart pounded with rage and confusion and then rage because of the confusion. She couldn’t think about if she’d looked up later, if Percy had bled out just ten feet from her supply of nectar and ambrosia, just ten feet from running water, less than that from her. When she’d sliced through the collar, the thickest part of the hoodie, she took both sides in her hands and ripped it open. She didn’t have time to cut something cleanly.

 He hadn’t been wearing a shirt beneath the hoodie, the way she’d assumed, and with the force she’d used to rip the fabric in half, she’d torn it out of where it’d dried into the wound on his stomach. It poured fresh blood. Annabeth slapped a hand over his mouth to muffle his scream with her palm, the echo of it loud in the closed space, and the she pulled him forward and whispered, “Shh, baby, shh, you have to be quiet, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” over and over into his matted curls until the scream tapered off into hiccupping sobs against her hand. Her unoccupied hand curled into his hair, and Annabeth had to swallow against the tears crawling up her throat. Her fault. That sound was her fault.

 “I’m sorry,” she said, turning her face to press a lopsided kiss to his clammy temple. “I’m sorry, baby, I’m so sorry.”

 His chest bucked here and there, as he tried to muffle his own reaction, and somehow it made Annabeth’s heart twist even harder than before. She hadn’t known it was possible, to hurt worse than she did when she heard Percy scream in pain. She propped him back against the backsplash and pulled back the halves of fabric in order to peer at the wound—ragged, somewhat circular. He’d been impaled by something. Her stomach turned. It took every ounce of her not to throw up into the sink beside them.

 “I’m going to fucking kill you,” she said, her voice thready. “I don’t—you were sitting there, you were just sitting there, what the fuck is wrong with you—”

 She yanked open the door of the cabinet beneath the sink, leaving bloody smears in her wake, pulled out her first aid kid, flicked open the lid and pulled out the canteen of nectar. It was a risk, to pump someone full of the food of the gods before properly cleaning a wound—medical care for demigods was above her paygrade, even on the best of days, because there were a lot of catches and ugly surprises wrapped within it. Human bodies, even half-human bodies, weren’t designed to treat healing like a race to the finish, and the larger the wound and the closer to death the demigod, the more complicated it became. But he’d be dead in ten minutes if she didn’t give the ichor in him something to hang on to. She had to prize it, that ichor, because it was the only reason he was alive at all.

 She patted his cheek, peppering smudges of blood on his brown skin. “Look at me, look at me,” she said. “Eyes on me, baby.”

 His eyes flickered open, fixed her with a half-present kind of stare. She pressed the canteen to his lips and tilted his head back, pouring the canteen into his mouth, praying that he wouldn’t choke on it. Nectar had to be swallowed, to be effective, because the world of the gods was bound by its laws.

 Percy spluttered for a moment and then swallowed, and she’d only planned on giving him half the canteen at first, but between her panic and the shallow breaths rocketing in her lungs and the way his blood burned her, she tipped all of it into his mouth. It might’ve been a mistake. It might have saved his life. She wouldn’t know until his pulse evened out—if it ever did.

 She pumped hand sanitizer on her hands and rubbed it in, and then she prodded the wound, searching for anything that might be lodged inside; Percy hissed, and then swore, but this time the sound made her heart lift because he if he was aware enough to swear instead of scream, it was an improvement. If he was in pain, then at least he was still alive. She peeled out fluff leftover from the fabric, and then pulled out a stout, short but hard-and-sharp sliver of yellow-ivory bone.

 “Boar,” Percy gasped. “Calydonian boar. Got—got me outside of the school.”

 “It better be dead,” she said. Calydonian boar, she thought. The leaves were scorched by its breath and lightning came from its mouth, and its tusks were the size of an Indian elephant’s.

 “Headless,” Percy answered, and his grin was crooked, and even with Annabeth’s bloody handprints on his face, he was the most beautiful person she had ever seen. Beautiful, and she was angrier at him than she ever had been in her entire life.

 She didn’t grin back. She looked away and then said, “We have to irrigate it. Bathtub, now.”

 She slid an arm under his shoulders and helped him off the counter, one hand pressed flat against his sternum. She could feel the vibration in his chest, through her fingers, of every hiss and groan, but more importantly she could feel the butterfly-beat of his heart. She focused on it, let her world tunnel to that single point. Annabeth hobbled them both to the bathtub and flicked the water on, and pulled them both beneath the spray, backing herself against the far wall and spreading her legs so Percy could lay between them, the ragged wound on his stomach directly beneath the cold spray. This was the part that made her nervous, the part that was uncharted territory—for every other demigod, it was at least mostly reliable, to chug as much nectar as you could and then race against time to clean and irrigate a wound as best you could, before it healed on you. The nectar would keep you alive as long as you could make sure your flesh didn’t zipper shut with an arrowhead, or a talon, or anything lodged inside of it. But the water required for irrigation healed Percy, too—if he healed with shards of anything inside of him, the wound had to be reopened, and picked clean, and re-closed. The rate at which he healed always seemed different, too, something she couldn’t pin down, something she couldn’t rely on. It was guesswork, wondering whether the water would heal him fast enough, wondering whether it would heal him all the way. But he couldn’t die in water. She held onto that, and held it close to her.

 His head fell against her stomach. His knees were folded up, because her bathtub wasn’t overly large, or even a decent size, and it was maybe the most uncomfortable cuddling they’d ever had, but her grip on him was vice-like. Blood streamed into the basin in long, curling snatches of rose pink water. It would have been pretty, if it wasn’t the life she was tied to that was spiraling down the drain. If that hadn’t been close enough to her own blood that it felt like her heart was hammering against her sternum to compensate.

 “I don’t understand,” she murmured, after several long minutes. “I don’t—I don’t fucking understand.”

 “Can this wait,” he said, softly.

 “Can this wait,” she repeated. “Is that what you were thinking, bleeding out on my fucking—”

 “I don’t—want to fight,” he said. “I don’t… you know it’s not working. You can see it.”

 Annabeth’s eyes snapped to the hole in his stomach. It wasn’t any more closed than it had been before, the way she’d assumed it would—closed somewhat more than it had been, thanks to the nectar, but it was still losing too much blood, it was still far too wide for the water to have done anything. She couldn’t think about it. It was irrigated and that was enough for her, that was enough until he was stable in the way that meant she could breathe for three seconds, and he maybe wouldn’t die on her while she wasn’t looking, while she was breathing. “Why isn’t it,” she said, hating the way her voice shook. “Why isn’t it—stay here.”

 She pulled herself out of the bathtub. Percy made a cut-off noise in his throat, as she jostled him, and she swallowed hard. She snatched the bag of ambrosia squares from the medical kit and thrust it at him, and said, “All of it, eat it, now.”

 Percy took the bag gingerly. “It’s—it might torch me,” he said.

 “Do it and stay in the water,” she snapped. “It—you—you can’t die, in the water, just stay there.”

 It wasn’t enough. The more powerful the demigod, the higher the threshold for the food of the gods, and Percy was about as powerful as they came. There was every rational reason to believe he could take it, but he sounded hysterical to her own ears. She couldn’t imagine how she sounded to Percy, but, well, she wasn’t the one who had spent the night passively bleeding out on her floor without thinking to mention it. If she was hysterical, it was his fucking fault.

 Percy looked like he wanted to say something. You can see it, maybe, that the water wasn’t as kind to him anymore, and she got the sense from his heavy, resigned expression that he knew a lot more than what he was telling her. She was tired of Percy, and his incessant, unfathomable, inscrutable need to hide exactly the things she needed to know—she was tired of getting calls where he said I might have a concussion because things had escalated between him and someone else at his school enough that after-hours fights had broken out about it. She was tired of Percy tightening his jaw when she asked him how his day was, she was tired of never being able to predict which days he’d be mild and which days he’d jump down her throat for every little thing; she was tired of knowing things were tense between him and Sally and never knowing why, she was tired of the way she knew he was struggling in school and he wouldn’t ask her for help, and she was even fucking tired of how much he slept. Sometimes she wondered if Hera hadn’t taken more than just his memories, if Hera hadn’t ran her hands along the things that had made Percy himself, and snapped them cleanly in half.

 She fixed him with the harshest glare she could offer, and Percy looked away, and finished off the ambrosia without looking at her again. The hole in his stomach had closed more, the skin and muscle forcing its way together, enough so that she could possibly pack it with antibiotic ointment and gauze and hopefully it wouldn’t scar as nasty. Her stitches weren’t the best—her hands weren’t the steadiest. It wasn’t a deep tissue procedure, now, at least. It looked—okay, surprisingly enough, but now her hands were shaking and she couldn’t force them to stop.

 Annabeth pointed to the counter. Her whole arm trembled, and he could see it, and it burned. “Do, do you need—I have to—”

 She rose anyway, scrambling to help Percy up, and then help him slide back on her bloodstained white tile counter. She’d be scrubbing the blood out of it for a good while. She didn’t talk, while she swept ointment over what was left of the wound, and tried to push the following hitch in Percy’s breath out of her mind. Annabeth was still thinking about his scream, from earlier. She might hear it for the rest of her life. After it was slathered in ointment, she packed it with bandages, and then let her trembling fingers find Percy’s pulse. His skin was feverish where he’d had so much nectar and ambrosia, and his pulse fluttered, but it was strong enough for someone who had almost died on her bathroom counter. Strong enough that he’d see tomorrow.

 Annabeth’s head fell against his chest, and she forced her breathing to slow, until it matched Percy’s pulse, until it got slower. Percy’s other hand rose and cradled her neck, overly warm.

 “Sweetheart,” he said, softly.

 “Why would you do that,” she said. “I don’t—why, why, why the fuck would you do that.”

 Percy hummed, and bent to press a kiss to her shoulder, and then she knew he wasn’t going to answer. He was going to sit there and hold her and pretend like he hadn’t almost died, and she could see it, the way the future spread out in front of her; she’d let him curl up in her bed and she’d curl beside him and they’d sleep, and then he’d realize he needed to get home, race for his own apartment the way he always did. She’d ask him how his day had been tomorrow, and he’d say fine, and she’d ask him how his school was going, and he’d stop answering, and they’d do it day after day after day. She had been holding out for the hour that Percy was honest with her. She’d expected Percy would talk to her, when he could, when he wanted to, about whatever it was that bothered him, and now she knew that day was never going to come. That his plan, the entirety of it, was to bleed out on the floor of her dorm and never once mention it. That he was content to do that for the rest of his life. That his life was going to be a lot shorter, if he got his way.

 Annabeth pulled away from him and swiped furiously at her eyes. “You don’t get to do this to me,” she said, roughly. “No, fuck you, you don’t. Why didn’t you say anything? You were here for at least half an hour. You could have died, because you didn’t say anything, and I want to know why.”

 Percy ducked his head. “I’m stupid, I guess.”

 “That’s not true, either,” she snapped. “You’re impulsive and you can be reckless. That’s not stupid and that’s not this.”

 He took stock of her, eyes scanning over her, and she must’ve looked like hell, sopping wet and flushed and bloodsoaked and crying. Percy flicked his hand, and the sink beside him rattled to life. He held his hand beneath the water, and the bruises clouding his knuckles didn’t fade a single shade. “It stopped working,” he said. “The healing. I think he knows, my dad. I think he knows… maybe that’s why I don’t, uh, like the water, anymore. Because he knows what I did to Akhlys. Because I don’t deserve it anymore.” The water cut off. Percy’s hand was still dry, but he shook it like it was wet. “He’s right, though. I abused it. I shouldn’t get the benefits of it, after—after that. It’s like… you know what they do to dogs, when they start hurting people. They put ‘em down.”

 “Euthanasia,” Annabeth said, and her words weren’t words, not really, just the ghost of them. They put ‘em down, she thought. The nerves in her heart were beyond aching. She just felt cold, now. It surprised her, almost, how angry she was, how much she wanted to scream, you’re not a fucking dog, you’re the love of my life, you mean the world to me, are you blind? but she’d had enough of screaming.

 Percy wouldn’t look at her. “After Mount Saint Helens I wondered if I should stay dead, to you guys, at least. I’d set one of the most dangerous monsters the gods had ever faced loose. I displaced half a million people, I don’t know how many people I injured. It’s—it’s fucked up, that I don’t even know, that I don’t even know their names. But I can’t… I can’t do that to you. I know I scared you. You don’t deserve that. I don’t deserve you.”

 She searched his face, looking for the tell, waiting for him to be kidding—it had to be a joke, but his gaze on his hands was earnest and hard and sharp. He believed in his words the way he believed that his father was punishing him, the same way he believed that the sun rose in the morning and fell at dusk, the same way he believed in any objective truth. She could read it on every inch of him, how much he believed it, because if he had been lying to her it wouldn’t have looked like he’d just pulled barbed wire through his throat to say it.

 She was silent for so long that he looked up at her, and it was his eyes widening that told her she was crying. She swiped at her eyes, scrubbed her face with the inside of her t-shirt, and then looked at him again, the way he was slumped forward. The careful way he watched her, calculated her every movement, she knew it, she recognized it. He was expecting something to hurt, expecting it from somewhere, from the only other person in the room.

 “I have some of your clothes in a drawer,” she said, evenly. A little proud, maybe, of how steady her voice ended up being. “Change. And then sit on the bed.”

 Percy blinked, once, twice, and then realized she wasn’t fucking around, and slipped off of the counter slowly. He picked his way to her dresser, rooting around for his clothes. He changed and she kept him in the corner of her eye, riding the line between giving him space and making sure he didn’t take off because he felt like it. He perched lightly on the edge of the bed, when he did sit down, now in joggers and a sweatshirt, looking like he was going to dive for the window at any second. Annabeth took a moment to breathe, let the world shift around her, to let her mind sift through her recent memories of Percy, illuminating them, or darkening them. She held her knowledge in her hands and tossed it back and forth, and she ached to solve it the way she could solve a puzzle, a Rubix cube, but that wasn’t how Percy worked, and that wasn’t how anyone worked. When she was steadier than she’d been before she pulled out some of her own clothes, changed in the bathroom, and then padded out and sat in front of Percy, legs crossed beneath her.

 “In Mount Saint Helens, you were fourteen and about to die, and you did what you had to do to escape. That’s not—a moral failing. That’s not bad. That’s just what happened,” she said. Her voice shuddered but it didn’t matter. “You don’t know their names because you shouldn’t have to. You didn’t do anything but survive. I was scared, sure, when I watched you… with Akhlys. But it was Tartarus, baby. I was scared of everything. The only person punishing you is you. The water stopped healing you because you stopped wanting it to.”

 He was looking off to the side, muscles in his jaw working.

 “The thing you actually did,” she said, “was scare the living hell out of me just now. We’re never doing that again. Ever. I know you don’t believe me, or what I’m saying, but that part, that part we’re agreeing on. I don’t deserve that. You don’t deserve that, either.”

 “Okay,” he said, finally.

 She reached out and squeezed his knee. A little support, before she said what she said next; “It’s also never happening again because we’re going to talk to your mom.”

 Percy jerked. “No,” he said, immediately.

 “I wasn’t asking,” Annabeth said.

 “No,” Percy said, his shoulders tensing. “She’ll worry.”

 “And you need that,” Annabeth said. “You need that. You need people to do that. I’m not asking, Percy. Do you want her to hear it from me, or you?”

 “I don’t—” Percy cut himself off. He ran a hand through his hair, and then said, “I scared you,” like it wasn’t something that had occurred to him properly before. Guilt was carved into him. But she couldn’t make him feel better, about something he’d actually done.

 “You did,” she said. I’m going to have nightmares about you dying three feet away from me for maybe the rest of my life, she thought.

 “I’m sorry.”

 “If you’re sorry, then—stay alive,” she said. Her voice broke on the last syllable. “Just, don’t—”

 Leave me, were those last words, the ones that she couldn’t say, because she’d tapped out of whatever reserves she’d had. Whatever had kept her functional had run out. Percy eased himself off of the bed and onto the floor next to her, and pulled her against him, and then she wrapped her arms around his neck and held on with everything she had. He murmured a long litany of I’m sorry, I’m sorry, baby, and she let it ground her, because if he was sorry, even if he was guilty, even if he felt awful, he was alive. She cried until her ribs ached with it, and then she sucked air into her lungs and pushed Percy into her bed, because he’d have to sleep off the fever from the ambrosia and nectar, let it burn through him. She scrubbed her bathroom until it all but sparkled, and tossed the ruined and bloodstained clothes into her trashcan and buried them beneath paper so no one would see them, scrubbed the blood out from underneath her nails. Her hands knew what to do. Her hands carried her forward. Calling Sally was harder, but it was a four minute conversation, just Sally saying, I’ve been so worried, I’ve been calling you both nonstop, is everything alright, and Annabeth’s responding, it’s not, but we’re okay, we’re at my dorm, you might want to pick us up. I’m sorry.

 She forgot to wipe the blood off of Percy’s face, and it was the first thing Sally saw. Sally always looked Percy over first, and had the sharpest eyes for even the slightest of limps, even the tiniest of winces; the reason that he could hide his blood even from Annabeth. An inherited family trait, those lies of omission. But watching the way Percy leaned into his mom and she let him, and the way she licked her thumb to rub it the blood off and crooned at him and he let her, and the way she took care of him and he let her—that it might not have been much of a mistake at all. The blood on Percy’s face wasn’t going to be the thing that broke his mom’s heart, that night, anyway.