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connabeth · 3 years ago

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i’m setting off (but not without my muse)

chapter 1: this is the road to ruin (and we’re starting at the end // percy and annabeth have finished their freshman year of college and make their way back home to new york for the summer with an old friend // percabeth

read on ao3 // please check out @opauc’s lovely art and thank you to @byima for being patient with me! // @pjo-hoo-bigbang

It had been an impromptu decision, as a lot of things in Percy’s life were. He had survived his first year at college in New Rome and he felt like he owed it all to Annabeth. Despite juggling her classes at two different schools, remotely renovating Camp Half Blood, and doing an internship in the city, she had made time to help him study. Of course, she would shrug it off and assure him it was he who had put in the work and made an effort to keep up his grades, but he knew he’d be nowhere without her in more ways than one. Even when she wasn’t tutoring him on weekday nights, snuggled up on his bed in his dorm room with her body drowning in one of his warm sweatshirts and pointedly ignoring his roommate’s snores nearby, she was his source of motivation. If he wanted a future with her, a career, a marriage, a family, a life, he needed to study and find whatever his passion was so he could keep up with her.

But he had helped her, too. She would often find herself working herself to the brink of exhaustion, forgetting to eat, sleep, and interact with other people. Percy was always there to gently nudge her into taking care of herself and maintaining a healthy eating and sleeping schedule. He was also the best way to destress after exams, not that she’d ever admit it.

The transition from high school to college had been strange to say the least, but not necessarily bad . In grade school, his main worry was trying not to get kicked out or die everyday, along with ─at the bare minimum─trying to not fail his classes. But in New Rome, the university was a lot more accommodating for students with learning conditions (as nearly all demigods had at least one), and safety wasn’t an issue he had to actively worry about. He felt a security he hadn’t felt in a long time. It was a mild culture shock, but a pleasant one he thought he definitely deserved after being failed by the American education system time and time again. He was able to actually pay attention in class more and manage decent grades with some help. He was just as surprised as the next person when he found he didn’t hate learning as much as he thought he did, probably because he had some decent─and dare he say, enjoyable ─teachers now. He had also started to care enough to put more effort into his work, the days of plagiarizing papers off the internet long behind him. Well. Most of the time.

Unsurprisingly, he and Annabeth had a legend-like celebrity status, beyond that of the typical hero, given their major role in both wars. A lot of the new people he and Annabeth met either looked up to them, were nervous and intimidated, or sported not-so-subtle crushes on either (and sometimes both) of them. Percy kind of just wished people would treat him like every other normal guy. He was tired of his accomplishments as a hero commanding a kind of deference out of some demigods. Sure, he deserved respect on a basic level but he didn’t want to be worshipped . And the fact that he had briefly been praetor made the situation a little worse.

Although, he would never deny the perks of getting a free brownie or cookie once in a while from the bakery. It helped that one of the girls that worked at the bakery had a major crush on Annabeth. This led to her bringing him a lot of free baked goods which he wholeheartedly accepted. He could deal with someone having a harmless crush on his girlfriend if it meant free junk food for their movie nights. The little green monster in both of them tended to sneak out at times but it was nothing a few placating kisses, some teasing, or a hot quickie in a precarious location couldn’t fix.

It was finally summer break which meant Annabeth was only bogged down by, like, half of her commitments. She had an internship at an architecture firm in New York starting in late June, as she and Percy would be spending their summer back home. And while the Olympus renovations were winding down, the gods were always requesting new things, those fickle beings. Of course, they expected Annabeth to cater to their every whim. She supposed the only upside was the generous salary she earned from designing the palace of the gods. Her mother wanted to provide her with compensation for all the time she invested in Olympus, but the gods didn’t have a great grasp of the value of mortal money so she ended up getting a very handsome paycheck.

Which meant that she could afford to splurge on something worthwhile. It had been a while since they’d gotten to hang with their friend Grover, just the three of them like it used to be all those years ago, so they planned (“planned” was a loose term) a road trip together. Percy had traveled a lot of places, some that he had always wanted to visit, and some he really wished he never had to go to, but he had never gotten to truly enjoy any of them. The chaos and anxiety of quests paired with some kind of deadline hangin over their heads didn’t allow for much relaxation or enjoyment as they traveled across the country on their adventures. A road trip was a nice way to appreciate being in the moment and getting a chance to breathe without thinking about the next god that was going to show up asking for a favor by presenting an unwanted quest like it was some golden opportunity they should’ve been grateful to have been offered. It wasn't like Annabeth to not plan every single moment of their trip from the moment they got in the car. That’s not to say impulsivity wasn’t threaded into her DNA, but she found it satisfying to make vacation plans. However, this summer, the girl was a) exhausted, b) didn’t want to defeat the whole purpose of the trip by ruining the spontaneity, and c) had entered zero-fucks-given mode the second her last final had been submitted.

They had a vague idea of the places they wanted to hit, and Annabeth had made maybe one hotel reservation just to ensure they’d have a room when they visited some popular tourist destination, but that was as far as their planning went. All she wanted was quality time with her two favorite boys, even if it meant getting lost in the desert somewhere in Arizona.

#percabeth #percy jackson #annabeth chase #pjo #hoo #grover underwood #the golden trio #my edits #my fic #pjo hoo big bang 2021

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phykios · 4 years ago

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honesty and promise me part 6 [co-written with @darkmagyk] [read on ao3]

Ah, the age old question: what to get for the guy who has everything and also when you’re trying make up for the fact that you actually missed his birthday entirely while spending as little money as possible?

“Where the hell are you taking me?” Percy asks as they wait their turn to disembark. “I haven’t been to Staten Island in ages.”

Annabeth has never been at all. She knows there’s a handful of Greek revival buildings in the Historic District, but she’s never had a car to get there, or the stomach to get on the ferry. Percy had practically climbed onto the bow, his own personal reenactment of Titanic, arms thrown out to the wind, while Annabeth attempted to keep her breakfast down.

Having spectacularly flamed out last week in Philadelphia, she can’t let Percy’s birthday go without some sort of commemoration. The Staten Island Ferry is just part one. “All in due time,” she says, checking her phone for directions. They still have a bus they need to board, and Annabeth is getting sweaty in her leather jacket. Thank God Percy volunteered to carry the backpack with all their gear; otherwise, when this jacket comes off, it’s going to smell worse than his tights at the end of a long day.

Like a magnet, his gaze is glued to the strips of the bay he can spot through the bus windows, his head resting on his chin, a soft, serene smile lifting his lips. All the tightness, all the stress he’s held in his shoulders the last few times she’s seen him, it melts away at the sharp, salty tang of rust and sea air which suffuses every corner. She doesn’t even mind that he isn’t looking at her.

Hand in hand, finally, they get off the bus, and walk to the overlook. Slinging the backpack off his shoulder, he sets it down at his feet, eyes fixed on the strip of shoreline which can be seen, even all the way over here. “What is that?” he breathes, shielding his eyes against the glint of the sun on the water.

“That,” says Annabeth, “is the Staten Island ship graveyard.”

Still stewing in her guilt over how she missed his birthday--despite the fact that he didn’t even tell her--Annabeth decided to swallow her pride and ask for help. It took an inordinate number of coffee orders and one instance of her actually getting down on her knees and begging, pleading to their long friendship together and swearing that Annabeth would never use this information for evil, but she had finally wheedled the secret out of Thalia: Percy’s greatest love, after the ballet, was sailing. Ship construction, naval battles, maritime history, they were, according to Thalia, the only things which could entice Percy to actually set down the tights and “get some frickin’ sunshine for once in his life.” Annabeth hadn’t believed her, until Thalia had dug up an old photo which had never been posted to his socials--and Annabeth had certainly scoured them for long enough, she would have recognized it had she seen it before--of Percy, on a glittering, jewel-like sea, a rope wrapped around his fist as he leaned over the side of a sailboat, eyes squeezed shut, mouth wide in a graceless, unrestrained joy.

“Back in the eighties, there used to be over four hundred ships down there,” Annabeth says, coming up beside him. “A lot of it’s been scrapped or sold, but there are still maybe a hundred or so boats, including the USS PC-1264, one of the--”

“One of the two predominantly African American crewed Navy ships from World War II,” he interrupts, eyes light. “No way!”

“Yes way,” Annabeth grins, unzipping her jacket. The midday sun beats down on them, the air sticky and heavy, and she needs this thing off, pronto. “And, there’s a ship that was supposedly the command post for the General Slocum disaster.” Not that she really knows what that is.

He whirls around. “The Abram S. Hewitt is there? Holy sh--”

His jaw drops. His eyes bug out.

Part two of his present was the ship graveyard. Part three is the outfit.

Annabeth, one hand on her hip, slings her jacket over her shoulder with the other, the leather hot against her bare skin. She has chosen to forgo a shirt entirely, wearing nothing but her nicest pair of black jeans with the thick suspenders and a shiny, red bra. And yes, she had Thalia touch up her hair, five inches of curls lopped off on one side, undercut sharp and severe.

“I thought we could have a picnic here,” she says, a smile curling her lips without her permission. “Then, if you want, we could do some light trespassing? See the ships up close?”

Percy swallows. He breathes in through his nose, shuddering. “Sure,” he whispers, hoarse. “Sounds good.”

Dropping to the ground like a rock, studiously not checking her out, Percy unpacks their picnic, laying out the blanket, something blue, old, but soft Annabeth had knitted in a fit of pre-finals’ anxiety in college. Annabeth had hinted the night before that he should make them some food, as no one could make a grilled cheese like Percy, and she sure as shit wasn’t going to buy them some prepackaged, tasteless garbage.

Percy’s sandwiches, just like the man himself, are stacked: thick, sourdough slices (which she suspects he made himself), bacon, turkey, apple, tomato, lettuce, avocado, mayo for her but none for him. She’d always been under the impression that dancers needed to watch what they ate, endlessly in pursuit of some unattainable ideal of beauty. Nope. Percy eats everything and anything he can get his hands on, high carb and high protein and high everything else. It makes sense, she guesses, for someone who basically has to bench their own body weight daily. Every inch of him is tailored for power and velocity, to propel him out of the grasp of gravity--rabbit food just isn’t going to cut it here.

Munching down, he maneuvers himself into a number of splits and stretches, unable to give up his routine for a single day. “When I was probably thirteen or fourteen,” he says, halfway through a tirade of reminiscence, “my dad took me and Triton and Kym to Cyprus, for some family bonding time.” He rolls his eyes. “You can probably imagine how well that went. Most of that trip was… well, Cyprus was definitely the best part. We went to Kyrenia Castle, which has this amazing museum that holds one of the oldest known ships in the world. Like, this thing was operational during the lifetime of Alexander the Great, and it sank about a mile away from the harbor.” He takes a heroic bite, chewing with his lips firmly shut.

“Cool.”

He swallows. “Very cool. I love really old ships, but you can imagine how few of those are still left, and not just because we haven’t found them.”

Annabeth feels her neck heating up, despite the shade they sit in. “Well, I hope these ones are old enough for you.”

“Oh, these are incredible--don’t get me wrong! I had no idea there was anything like this so close to home. Who needs Cyprus when you have Staten Island?” He grins, placing his sandwich down, throwing his arms in a stretch.

“I know it isn’t Tokyo or Moscow or anything…” she trails off, self-conscious even as she doesn’t actually ask the question that’s on her mind.

Shamefully, she has found that she still thinks about what Will had said at his apartment over a month ago at this point: Percy Jackson, boy toy of the rich and famous. But if she actually asks, it will make her look like some totally jealous girlfriend or something, like she honestly cares about Percy’s past sexual conquests.

She doesn’t care. She doesn’t.

He’s just led a really interesting life, and she wishes she could relate. That’s all.

“It’s not,” he agrees, bending his back with an audible pop. “It’s better.”

“Really? A little ship graveyard is better than the sites of Tokyo?”

“I didn’t see any sites in Tokyo,” he said. “Mostly just Mittie’s hotel room.”

“Mittie?”

Percy looks at his sandwich, suddenly very interested in the crust.

“She’s someone important, then?”

Silence.

Annabeth laughs to break the tension. “Okay, I'll bite--who’s Mittie? Another model?”

Taking a small bite of sandwich, he chews, methodical and deliberate. He swallows, clearing his throat. “Margherita Savoy.”

The name doesn’t ring a bell. “Who?”

“Princess Margherita Elisabetta of Sardinia.”

Her mouth drops open a little. “A princess?”

Percy shrugs. “Technically. The throne of Sardinia doesn’t exist anymore, obviously, but she’s big into the money and the titles and stuff.”

A princess. A fucking princess. “But she lets you call her Mittie.”

He looks a little constipated. “She didn’t… until she took me to Tokyo.”

“Oh,” she says. Because what else is there to say? She’s certainly no princess.

“She was nice,” Percy says, softly. “You know, eventually. Once we got to know each other.”

Her phone is hot in her pocket, like it’s preemptively searching Google for pictures of Margherita Elisabetta of Sardinia, downloading them all so Annabeth can scribble all over her face like a bad high school movie. “A pretender?” She scoffs, exaggeratedly, her fists tight against the grass. “Talk to me when you get a real princess.”

His ears go red. “Um…”

No way. “No fucking way.”

“Look, Eugenie was just kinda pissed when Triton broke up with her, and so she just thought that we’d have some fun.”

“Oh my god.” She says, looking at him in something like horror. And telling herself at least it wasn’t her distant cousin Madeleine.

“It was only for like a week or two,” Percy protests. “We went to a club in Berlin she knew Triton liked to go to so he would see us and get annoyed.”

“A princess dated you because she was pissed at your brother?”

“Only twice,” he says, casual, like any of this is normal and not absolutely insane. “Eleonore is one of Kym’s friends. And she’s technically, like, an archduchess, not a princess. But I don’t know. A couple of his other girlfriends wanted to get back at him, and I was in Europe and available, so we just…” He trails off. She can hear the ellipsis, hanging hot and heavy over them, each dot dropping like a stone. What is this, fucking Mamma Mia?

“When was the last time this happened?” she asks, not really wanting to hear the answer.

He rubs a hand over his mouth, gaze unfocused as he thinks. “Um… not since the week after Frank left, I think. Mittie wanted to go to Bora Bora but she didn’t want to go alone, you know?”

“No, I meant,” she pushes through as her stomach flutters, tight and uncomfortable, “girls using you to get back at your brother.”

His face falls, just a bit. “Oh. Last year, I guess.”

“Who was she?” And where is she so Annabeth can punt her off a building?

“Calypso Atlas.” He sighs, wistful, with more reverence than he had given any of the princesses, and Annabeth’s stomach flops, different from the flutter. Painful this time. “She actually liked me.”

“Everyone likes you,” she says, faintly. Maybe wearing the leather jacket is giving her heatstroke.

“You know, they really don’t. Not how it counts, anyway.” He picks at a blade of grass, rubbing it between his fingers. “Most of the girls who wanted to use me to get back at Triton only did it because they knew how much he liked to bitch about me--the ‘half-breed bastard.’” He rolls his eyes, huffs a laugh. “And even Kym’s friends didn’t actually like me. Like, yeah, they’d fly me all over with them, but they didn’t want to be seen with me. Mittie and I were on and off for years, and she gets photographed constantly. I’m not in any of them.”

Annabeth thinks she might actually be sick.

But he doesn’t stop. “It wasn’t so bad when they went around saying that I was a dancer with the Paris Opera, because I was, and I was proud of it. But it wasn’t… I don’t know. It wasn’t like with Frank, whose family does have a ton of money, but who only ever dated me because he liked me.” He picks another blade of grass, tearing it between his fingers. “Calypso, though. She was different.” And he smiles, a little.

“How?”

That smile grows wider. “She just called me one day, out of the blue, and very publicly asked me to be her date to Milan Fashion Week after she and Triton broke up and he immediately turned around and got engaged. She was super up front about it, didn’t try to sleep with me or anything, even though I know she was friends with some people and probably heard about my various talents.”

She knows exactly which talents he means. He winks at Annabeth, ironic and self-conscious, and she forces out a little laugh, as though the idea of him going down on someone else is charming.

“But then we actually had a good time together, and a few weeks later, she called me up again, and again, and again, until eventually she introduced me to her father--which was a hell of an experience, let me tell you. The Atlas family puts the Olympianides family to shame as far as dysfunction goes. But it was nice, in its own way; if I’d ever asked Mittie to introduce me to her dad, she’d have laughed in my face.”

“Sounds like you were pretty serious,” Annabeth manages.

“That was the problem.” He looks away, towards the sea. Always towards the sea. “She wanted to leave Paris, travel the world. And she wanted me to go with her.”

“To leave the Paris Opera?”

“To leave ballet entirely. I just…” He holds the silence for a moment, lost in the fog of reminiscence, the mist of possible futures long since dissipated. Sighing, he shakes his head. “I couldn’t do it. So, in March, she went to Dubai, and I started making calls back to New York.”

“You broke up with her this year?”

“She broke up with me,” he clarifies, turning back to her. “It was all very romantic. I always left my comp at the box office for her. She didn’t come to my show, but she showed up at the stage door the day before she was set to leave, telling me that she had an extra ticket with my name on it. I turned her down.” And then he looks her in the eye as he says, “I don’t regret it at all.”

She swallows, her face flushing, tongue numb as she searches desperately for something to say to that. “Atlas, you said her family was? It sounds familiar.”

“Oh, you’re probably thinking of Zoe Atlas,” Percy says, easing off for the moment. “You probably know about her because she and Thalia were archenemies in boarding school. Or maybe girlfriends? I have yet to get a straight answer.” Annabeth’s eyes nearly bug out of her head. Thalia, in boarding school? What? “But I like Zoe. She’s an activist, and absolutely hates her father. Like I said, there’s a lot of dysfunction. And she came to my first show way back when, and she wasn’t even weird when I dated her sister when we ran into each other in Paris. So that was nice.”

“She went to your first show?” What in God’s name is up with these one-percenter families? It’s like they all overlap in one big incestuous slurry. And as the daughter of the Chases and the Pallases, she tries not to think where she might fit into that.

“Thalia brought her. Her first not-date. It was Thalia’s first ballet ever, too. It… it meant a lot.”

“What show was it?”

He smiles, wistful. “The Nutcracker. I was one of the kids at Clara’s party. Most scared I’ve ever been. When I got out backstage after intermission, Thalia was waiting for me with my mom. She punched my shoulder, called me ‘Kelp Head,’ and told me I did great. Then I hugged her,” he says, snickering. “She punched me again.”

Annabeth laughs, huffing through her nose. “Good to see some things never change.”

“That’s our Thalia for you--looking out for everyone, even when it kills her inside.” He glances at her pointedly.

It’s her turn to share.

Annabeth’s mouth is dry, like sandpaper.

She grabs her backpack, pulling out a sketchbook and a pencil. Beside her, Percy sighs, deflating a little.

Annabeth flips open a new page, and starts drawing.

Each sketch delivers a challenge: bringing order to the whole through design, composition, tension, balance, light and harmony. Sometimes, buildings spring to life on the page, fully formed. Sometimes the page stays blank, an empty pencil.

Pencil to paper. Letting whatever wants to come out, come out. “My mom invited me to lunch one day,” she says. Her eyes follow the line of her pencil, ninety degree angles and symmetrical shapes. “I had moved to New York like six months before. Single girl, in the big city, to follow her dreams.” She’d gone to boarding school in New York before that, but it wasn’t the same as picking out her apartment and taking the train to the Manhattan skyscraper her office was held in. Sometimes she’d walk down the street, feeling like she was smack dab in the middle of Sex and the City, which she and Piper use to watch in secret, huddled under the covers in the dorms at Miss Minerva’s. “Unfortunately, my mom didn’t love my dreams.”

“She didn’t approve of anarchist architecture?”

Annabeth’s laugh is hollow. “She thought I should have been charting some new path in business for a woman. But not in a feminist way. In, like, a capitalist way. But architecture was not really negotiable for me. And once that became clear, she had her own expectations about that, too.”

Annabeth has always been a prideful know-it-all. If all her mother had wanted from her was ambition, they probably could have made it work. Annabeth wanted to reshape the skyline, she wanted her name on buildings that would last and impress.

But even Annabeth couldn’t do that in six months.

“She wanted the best schools, the best companies, the best projects.” She sighs. “I was lucky to find a job in New York that wasn’t just carrying coffee.” She had gotten a bigger offer from a more well-known firm where she had interned one summer, but it had been for an assistantship, heavy on the assistant. Her eventual Junior Architect label hadn’t been great, but it had been something, being a rising star at a smaller firm. It seemed like a good fit. “I did not make my mother proud. I… she lived in New York, and I lived with my dad all over.”

Percy frowns. “Your mom didn’t have custody of you?”

“My mom didn’t want custody of me,” she laughs, bitter. God, it feels weird to tell someone else this. Piper and Leo and Luke knew, obviously, but they had witnessed it all firsthand. Telling someone else, out of the blue… Well, Percy had divulged his tragic backstory without complaint. It’s only fair that she does as well. “I mean, my dad didn’t either. But when it became clear my mom wasn’t an option, well, there we were. He stepped up as best he could. That wasn’t always a lot, but when compared to my mother, he seems like a perfectly involved parent.”

“Are you trying to make my parental situation seem more reasonable?”

“Is it working?”

“If you ever meet my dad, we can compare notes.” He shudders at the thought, playfully. “So, what happened with your mom?”

“She made her displeasure known.” Annabeth sighs again, shading a corner. “I mean, she’s always made her displeasure known. I wasn’t getting good enough grades, I wasn’t in the right activities, I wasn’t going to get into the right school, yadda yadda yadda. But for a long time… I don’t know, it at least seemed like she was worried about me.” She thinks of the Eta party, of the man in the brown suit, tutting about Athena Pallas’s druggie daughter, and scowls. “My mother has always had an all or nothing outlook. If I wasn’t the best, I might as well be nothing. But the thing was, this time I thought I was making real progress. And when she invited me to lunch after six months in the same city, I thought she would see that.”

She had not. Because to Athena Pallas, having a daughter who was an architect instead of an executive Vice-President on her way to CEO, having a daughter at a small but growing architecture firm instead of the best one in the country, was like having a daughter who was drunk in a gutter somewhere.

And Annabeth had realized as much that lunch.

All her work was never going to earn her mother’s love.

And suddenly, she wasn’t sure what work had been her’s and what had been her mother’s ambitions.

She’d started crying. In the cafe and right now, on Staten Island, with Percy. “I’m sorry,” she sniffs, wiping her nose on her arm. “Wow, I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.” He reaches over and wraps an arm around her, gently, rubbing her shoulder, and she more or less crumples into his side. “It’s fine. Take your time.”

Her arm, still free, keeps moving. The drawing takes a shape that she can’t quite name yet. A tree, maybe, in a box. A window to another world, possibly. She spills tears on the paper.

“She disowned me.” Her thin line trembles, before righting itself. “I ran out of there. I stumbled into the first tattoo parlor that didn’t smell like piss, and got my owl done.” She brandishes her left arm, the grey shape blurry and faded against her elbow. She had had a stuffed owl as a little girl, her protector against the spiders in the closet. “I cut off my hair, got my eyebrow pierced, found a club, and just… had a rough couple of days. Got really really drunk that night.” Like, too drunk. Crying on the floor of a filthy bathroom drunk. “Thalia found me under the bathroom sink, took me back to her place, helped me kick the hangover the next day, and that was that.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m not,” Annabeth says. And most of the time, she isn’t. She wipes her eyes, smudged makeup getting smudger.

“Your mom sounds like she sucks.”

“She does.”

“What about your dad?”

She sniffs. “What about him?”

“You just haven’t really mentioned him. What’s he like?”

Shrugging, she wipes a tear from her cheek. “He’s a history professor.”

“And?”

“That’s about it.”

“I mean, do you like him?”

She shrugs again. “Sure.” There was a lot to like about Frederick Chase. “I haven’t really spoken to him in a while.”

Mouth in a sympathetic twist, he brushes the curls from her eyes, a gesture so sweet it makes her heart pound. “You should call him,” he says. “I’m sure he misses you.”

Her phone burns in her pocket, heavy with the weight of unread texts. “Maybe.”

“Do you want to change the subject?” he asks.

“Please,” she blurts out, digging the heels of her hands into her eye sockets. “God, please. Let’s go back to your cute backstory. Tell me more about your first ballet. I want to hear all about the time you were in the Nutcracker.”

Percy fishes out a napkin from somewhere, handing it to her. Grateful, she blows her nose into it, wet and disgusting. “I hate to tell you this,” he says, “But I have been in the Nutcracker, like, fifteen times.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously,” he nods, “It's the big moneymaker. Have you ever seen it?”

“It's a holiday classic,” she scoffs, a little wetly. “Of course I’ve seen it.”

He snorts. “Like, for real, or the recorded one they play on Netflix with Macaulay Culkin?”

“I've seen it live! My dad lived in San Francisco when I was in high school. They have a fancy ballet there.” She’d seen it as a little kid in NYC, she thought, too. Maybe when her parents were still married, or her mother was still willing to take her for Christmas.

“Would you be willing to see it again?”

“Like, for real,” she parrots back at him, “or the recorded one they play on Netflix?”

“Ha ha. I mean for real.”

“I mean… maybe if they switched things up a bit.”

“It's a classic!” He protests. “I mean, it isn’t like we do the Balanchine everywhere, every time. But… it's a classic.”

“I’m sure the dancing is fine.” Annabeth says. She remembers going with Luke in Boston and thinking it was nice, but also hoping Luke would kiss her at the end of the night, so she hadn’t really paid attention. “But they get to design a land of magic and sweets and fairies, and every time the costumes and the sets are just, like, pink glitter and white gauze mixed with weird racial stereotypes. There’s no imagination.”

“Well, okay then.” There’s something in his smile, in the turn of his head that she can’t quite identify. “What would you do?” he challenges.

She holds his gaze for a moment, looking into those eyes that almost reflect the color of the sea around them. Her eyes feel a little puffy still, but he doesn’t look away. Then, without breaking away, she flips open a new page in her sketchbook.

“Space,” she says. “It needs space.”

“Outer?”

“Negative. Lots of space for dancers to move around.” Her pencil scratches over the paper, familiar blocky shapes springing to life. Doric fluted columns split the wings, because of course. “It’s Christmas, so we want color: no sterile, snowy landscape. We know it’s all frozen over--we don’t need to see it again. Obligatory Christmas tree here,” she sketches a crude triangle off to one side, approximately along the golden ratio, “and a big fireplace in the center, preferably a functional one.”

“You know there was this dancer in the nineteenth century that died because her costume caught fire, yeah?”

Annabeth tilts her head, capitulating. “Fair point. We’ll raise it up on a pedestal, keep it out of the way.” She draws a little platform beneath it. “But color is key.” Up above, she draws a pediment crowning the proscenium. She scribbles in the empty space, a placeholder. “Everyone knows the story, so you lay it out up here, episodes merging into each other from start to finish.”

Percy peers down at her page, his chin perilously close to resting on her shoulder. She can’t draw like that. “Kind of reminds me of the Parthenon.”

“You’ve been?”

He nods, his hair tickling the side of her face. “Couple of times. I thought you said you wanted color, though. The Parthenon’s all white, isn’t it?”

“Not originally,” she says. “Do they not explain that on the tours?”

“Um…” Sheepish, he looks away. “I, uh, I’m not always great at listening.”

God. It’s so endearing. What the hell. She kisses him on the cheek, enjoying the way he flushes lightly. “Me either.” He is so fucking handsome. “But no, the original Parthenon, all those white statues, they were painted. Ergo, color.”

He blinks, momentarily stunned. “Wouldn’t--uh, wouldn’t that distract from the dancers? People would just be staring at the ceiling.”

“Then… it’s only lit up before and after the show. During the show, you turn the lights down, bring the focus back down onto the stage.” She considered it. Something she’d worked on for a production once, a fashion show Piper had done at Pratt. “Or, you set it up so the colors are mostly lights. Lights that shine through during the snowflake dance and when Clara rides off with the prince. But then you also get the white for the frosted look. But, they’re still too pink, so I don’t think some color variety is bad.”

“So, not to kill your vibe,” Percy says, pulling back a bit, “but I gotta say, I don’t see how this is that different from the billion other Nutcrackers out there.”

She glares, lips pursed. He’s trying so hard not to laugh. Dick. “The set is only half the problem,” she says. “You'd need to redesign the costumes, too.”

“Tell you what. Why don’t you come see my show in December, and then you can tell me all about how you’d fix it.”

“Me and every tourist in New York at Christmas time?”

He nods, like he was expecting it. “Then come to my current one. September isn’t Christmas, so it’ll be a lot less crowded.”

“I don’t know,” she grimaces, sketching a star in the corner of the page. “I don’t really think I’d fit--'' Fit in with those people like the ones from the Eta awards, who thought not being her mother’s lackey was the same as being in rehab.

“Annabeth.” Percy takes her drawing hand, lifting it off the page entirely. The pencil is caught between them, an ineffectual barrier to the sweet, rubbing thumb on the mound of her palm. “I want you to come to my show. I’ll leave you a ticket. No one will care what you look like, I promise.” He stares at her, baby seal eyes in full effect.

Fuck.

“As long as you leave me a ticket,” she says, weakly. “I mean, I wouldn’t be able to afford a good seat.” The lie slips out, easy as anything. She can’t help it.

He smiles, soft and warm and way too inviting. “And in the meantime,” he says, softly, you can come with me tonight.”

“Tonight?”

“I’m going to my parents’ for dinner. It’ll be just my mom, Paul, and my sister. They’d love to meet you.”

“I can’t,” she replies, immediately, almost without thinking. “I’ve got--I’ve got work to do.”

She doesn’t. But boys don’t bring girls like Annabeth home anymore. She isn’t meant to settle down. She’s meant for grimy bars and ship yards. She'll leave it to the princesses to be brought home.

He deflates, just the slightest bit. If she hadn’t had so much up and personal time with his naked chest and the movement of his shoulders, she probably would have missed it. “Maybe next time, then?”

“Yeah,” she agrees, not entirely certain if she means to follow through. “Maybe next time.”

#ballet au #percabeth #pjo #the rivalry ends here #darkmagyk #perseannabeth #byima #uhhh whoever else #my fic #pjo fic #look at them having a real conversation and then immediately blowing it

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