Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

If the monsters don’t end up killing him, Percy’s pretty sure that Annabeth Chase will.

He’d already be ten feet under, if looks could kill. Probably even before he ever got the prophecy from the oracle. 

It’s not like he doesn’t know that he’s testing Annabeth's patience. 

She’s made that very clear- every time she’s given him an annoyed look, or given a huff of disapproval whenever he’s even opened his mouth. He could breathe, and she’d probably find something to criticize. 

To be honest, Percy’s starting to believe that the only thing Annabeth likes about him is the fact that he’s the reason she was able to leave camp. 

Not that she’s ever really thanked him for letting her go on this quest. He can’t exactly blame her- chances are that they’ll both die some time soon, most likely by one of the gods’ hands. 

But still, a little appreciation would have been nice. 

He doubts he’s gonna get that anytime soon, though. The look Annabeth’s giving him now would make Zeus himself shrivel up in fear.

“We’re lost.” She snaps, and it takes everything in Percy to not grimace.

“No, we’re not.” He breaks eye contact and scans the trees surrounding them, trying not to feel his heart sink as he realizes that the long shadows cast by said trees seem to merge together as the sky grows darker. He squints at a tree a few feet away, hope stirring in his chest at the familiarity of it.

“See? We’ve seen that tree before.” He points at it, giving Annabeth what he hopes is a triumphant look. 

Any sense of accomplishment gets diminished as she rolls her eyes. 

“Because we’ve passed it before, Seaweed Brain.” She continues quickly before he can protest. “We’ve been walking in circles.”

Right. Percy’s seen enough cartoons to know that that would have been bound to happen at this point. He feels his own mood darken, and Annabeth’s next few words don’t make it grow any lighter.

“This is ridiculous. We shouldn’t have left Medusa’s at all. Not at this time of night, anyway. At the very least, I shouldn’t have let you lead.” She’s already stormed ahead of him, but he’s not about to chase after her. He’s been doing that this whole time, and it’s starting to get more than just a little bit on his nerves.

“So then why did you?” He says, his voice taking an edge. He almost regrets opening his mouth as soon as she whips around to glare at him once more. 

“Because I thought you knew where you were going!”

With the eerie lighting, alongside the cuts and bruises that line her face and the singed and muddy t-shirt that she’s wearing, she looks like she’s an escapee character from a slasher movie, or a person from one of those survival shows. Which is pretty accurate to what they’ve been through.

That is to say that she looks pretty unhinged, and if Percy’s feet weren’t killing him, and if he couldn’t feel the weariness really sinking into his bones, he might have just kept his mouth shut. He’s already argued with her enough as it is.

But he can already hear his voice as he replies. “How should I have known where we’re going?”

Annabeth’s look turns incredulous. “You’re from New York.”

“Yeah, and this is some random forest in New Jersey. It’s a completely different thing.”

Annabeth glares at him for so long that he almost thinks that she’s zoned out. When she speaks again, the words are a hiss. “You- ugh. So then it’s my fault?”

Percy opens his mouth to agree, but he can’t actually lie and say that that’s the case. 

“No.” He admits, albeit relucntantly. “But it’s not my fault that you’re here, either.”

Annabeth scowls at him. “Then maybe I should have let you get lost by yourself, then.”
“Oh, trust me,” his mouth says before he can even process the words he’s saying, “we’d all be better off.”

Her expression changes so fast, he almost doesn’t see it. Then she’s back to her usual scowling self, and he can’t even really put together exactly what he just saw. 

He does somewhat register, though, the guilt that suddenly pops up out of the blue. 

There’s no way that she really got hurt by what he said. In the short time he’s known her, he’s seen her brush away insults from people higher ranked than her with no problem. She doesn’t get affected that easily by words. 

And, as much as he doesn’t like to acknowledge it, he’s probably said some worse things to her. 

But Percy can still feel the same irritating feeling of guilt growing.

She’d started it, but he can't fight the urge to take the words back.

She drives him crazy, but deep down he knows that he is glad that she’s with him. She’s smart. They wouldn't have made it this far if she wasn't, even though he knows that he’d be stroking her ego if he admitted that outloud. 

And what really annoys him, what spikes the guilt with frustration, is that, for a second, when they’d been fighting Medusa with Grover, almost an hour ago, he’d thought… he’d thought… 

He doesn’t know what he thought, but clearly she hadn’t thought the same. 

He gives a sigh, staring glumly as the woods grow darker and darker. He doesn’t even remember when they’d started walking again, and if she’d even replied.

He can just barely see her silhouette off in the distance, and even the bright orange of her shirt starts to blend in with the rest of the darkness. She has to be a good twenty feet away, and if she goes any faster, he’ll probably lose her.

He picks up his pace.

So much for not chasing after her.

Admittedly, she’d probably be less mad at him if Grover had been here. She’d been almost decent when all of them had been together, although she’s always seemed to have a soft spot for Grover. 

Percy had sworn up and down that the satyr had been right next to him, and he knows that Annabeth had seen him with Grover too. That didn’t stop her from yelling at him when the satyr inexpeipicably went missing. 

Percy’s sure that if they hadn’t agreed on returning to Medusa’s if this exact thing happened, Annabeth would have found the nearest cliff and thrown him off of it. 

He’s still sort of convinced that she’s looking for said cliff right now, since they’ve both lost sight of Medusa’s emporium altogether. 

Maybe it’s Grover’s absence that’s making Percy now feel even more guilt that he usually does. 

At least if Grover were here, he’d have someone sort of agreeing him, although Grover would probably also tell him that he should take it easy on Annabeth. 

As if that isn’t challenging. 

Annabeth gives a loud groan in frustration, finally pulling Percy out of his thoughts. 

He feels his own frown tugging at his lips as he stares at the clearing infront of them. He can feel himself taking a few steps back, preparing to turn around. If he were that type of person, he would have pointed out that Annabeth’s leadership had probably made them more lost than his had, but he doesn’t need to feel even more guilty, and the adrenaline that had given him the energy to argue with her in the first place has been zapped from him.

So he stands there quietly, waiting for Annabeth to come back towards him, which she does. She’s not throwing a hissy fit, but it’s as close to it as Percy’s ever seen coming from her. Her chin’s still held up high, and she seems to be daring him to say anything. When she realizes that he’s not, she averts her gaze with the same stubbornness, and her footsteps pick up speed as she begins to make her way past him. 

Involuntarily, Percy takes a step to the side to let her through.

Sunlight.

Percy stands there for a moment, blinking as his eyes adjust to the brightness of the trees and sky. 

A friendly breeze toys with his hair, blowing it into his eyes and soothing his injuries. 

It’s only when he hears the birds start chirping up above him that he realizes how quiet the forest had been up until this point.

The air around him is also softer. It’s like how it had been back at camp, but even more calm somehow. Maybe it has to do with him just being by himself but-

He’s by himself.

He stiffens, heart beginning to hammer in his chest as he spins on his heel, desperately searching for any sort of familiarity.

Annabeth’s gonna murder me.

Still, he calls out her name, hoping, despite himself, that somehow she got roped into this too.

“Annabeth?” He shouts out once more, pulling Riptide out of his pocket and uncapping the ballpoint pen.

Within seconds, he has his sword at the ready, scanning the area around him in search of monsters, all the while desperately trying to remember if anyone had ever told him about a monster that could do anything like this.

But he doesn’t even know what “this” is, so he wouldn’t know what monster could do this even if someone had told him about them.  

As the seconds pass, no monster begins attacking him. That doesn’t make him feel any better. He’d thought that Auntie Em had been trustworthy, and look how that had turned out. 

He takes a deep breath, then takes a tentative step forwards.

If the birds aren’t terrified, that should be a good sign though, right?

Something in him tells him that that also means nothing, but he wills himself not to think about that right now. 

You just killed Medusa. You’ll be fine.

“Annabeth?” He calls one last time before deciding, screw it, if Grover’s lost he could probably be here too. The guy had just disappeared out of nowhere. Who’s to say that he hadn’t stumbled into this same weird alternate universe?

If that’s what it is. It’s either that or…

“Grover?” He calls, taking another step forwards, then another.

He still can’t hear anything other than the birds and the beating of his own heart, and something in his gut tells him that he won’t, but he still waits for a response, mouth dry.

He waits about a minute, fidgeting with his sword (which is probably a great way to accidentally stab himself, but that’s fine), before beginning to take another step.

As he does, he hears the flurry of wings as a bird about the size of his hand suddenly decides that this is the perfect time to do a dive bomb straight at him. 

Percy can’t say that he’s proud of himself as he quickly scrambles back. 

It’s only when the bird’s talons almost claw his eyes out, that he ducks out of the way, crashing into someone as he does so. The bird soars off past him before Percy can even register the fact that the loud curse he hears is Annabeth’s.

“Percy!” She yells, grabbing his arm in annoyance. Green eyes meet grey, and Percy’s never been happier to see her. 

Whatever sort of positive emotion he’s feeling now quickly disaprears, however, as he takes in the fact that shadows once again hide most of them and their surroundings. As he glances up, he can see that the sky’s still the same deep orange as it had been a minute ago.

He drops his head down to meet Annabeth’s gaze again. She’s still scowling at him, like  he hadn't just vanished right in-front of her.

Uneasiness, slow and certain, begins to grow in Percy’s chest. “You saw that, right?”
She gives an exasperated sigh. “Saw what, Seaweed Brain? You acting dumber than usual?”

He shoots her what he hopes is a nasty look, even though his heart is still getting louder and louder by the second. “Me just reappearing out nowhere.”

She squints at him, folding her arms as she does so. “You never disapeared to begin with.”

He shakes his head, anger pricking the words that he says next. “I did. You weren’t looking, but Annabeth, I swear I went somewhere for about a minute.” He sticks out that the hand with Riptide. 

He can hear the desperation in his voice too, and he knows that that’s gonna come back to bite him later, but right now, he doesn’t even care. 

Maybe that’s what the monster’s true ability is. To make him think he’s going insane. 

For a long (kinda terrifying moment) Annabeth looks like she doesn’t believe him. She opens her mouth to give a retort, when she seems to fixate on Riptide. Her frown lessens slightly as she promptly shuts her mouth.

Percy follows her gaze to where it lands, at the tip of the sword. Or where it should be, anyway. 

He feels his eyes go round, and he pulls Riptide back to him, watching as half of the sword reappears once again. 

Silence settles in between them as the whole forest holds it’s breath. 

Then slowly, tentatively, Annabeth takes a step forwards, past Percy. 

She hesitates, and some part of Percy reconginzes that this is the most unsure he’s ever seen her act. 

Wordlessly, she holds out her hand towards empty air, still holding back somewhat, like the air itself is a giant monster that would bite her entire arm off. 

Percy moves to stand next to her side, watching as her fingertips vanish. 

At Annabeth’s yelp, he swiftly looks back at her, just enough to notice that the blood's drained from her face. Which, fair enough. He can’t say that he wouldn’t have reacted the same way right away if he hadn’t been so caught off guard. 

But as quickly as she’d lost her composure, Annabeth regains it, fixing Percy with an angry look of her own, like he’d been the one to make her hand disappear or something. Before he can ask her why, she sticks her entire hand into the weird portal thing. 

Swirls it around a little, as if she’s trying to feel her way around. 

Then she looks back at Percy, her eyes sharpening further. “Where exactly did you go?”

Percy begins to shrug, then stops. “Dunno. It kind of looked like the woods near camp.” He doesn’t mean to say the words outloud, but Annabeth keeps seeming to drag them out bit by bit. 

Although he can’t even be sure if he was near camp. He’d kinda had been being chased by an angry minotaur the one and only time he’d been in the woods outside of it, so he hadn’t had the chance to look around. 

When he explains that part to Annabeth, her perfect posture seems to lessen a bit, although Percy can’t tell if she’s upset or glad that they haven’t just hiked all the way back to a weirdly sunny version of camp. 

He can’t tell either, to be perfectly honest. He probably wouldn’t hear the end of it if they had arrived back at camp after getting lost, and his mother wouldn’t be any closer to being saved. But, he guesses that they’d be having a break from the- 

Annabeth Chase is holding my hand. 

Technically, she’s not really just holding his hand. 

She’s sorta squeezing the life out of it actually. 

And it’s probably just the lack of circulation in his hand that’s making him think this, but holding her hand isn’t as bad as he’d thought it would be. 

It’s still sorta cold, but he would have sorta expected for it to be that way. It just sorta suits her personality. 

But there’s still something almost human about it.

Key word being almost.

He’s suddenly very aware of how hot and sweaty his own hand probably is.

Great.

Surprisingly enough, Annabeth herself doesn’t seem to be too concerned about the fact that she’s holding hands with him. Instead, she squints infront of her, chews on her lip a little, then turns like she’s about to tell him to do something, then pauses, before rolling her eyes. 

“Don’t make this weird, Seaweed Brain.” 

Percy can feel his face heating up, and he shoots her a look back. “I won’t. What’s the plan?” 

He tells himself not to look at their hands. 

Annabeth pauses once more, before continuing on. “Stay here. I’ll be back in a few seconds.”

He doesn’t even get the chance to ask her what she means (because of course he doesn’t), before Annabeth completely disapears.

Well, almost. 

Her disembodied hand still hangs onto Percy’s, and he can’t tell if that’s the scarier part of this. 

Still, he stands stock still, partly because he’s still getting over the fact that they’re holding hands, partly because the adrenaline that he’s felt since leaving the weird wooded place seems to be disappearing fast, and he doesn’t think he could take another step. 

That is, until Annabeth lets go of his hand about three seconds later, and he’s left staring at air once again.

As he stares, he tells himself that there could be a completely innocent reason why she let go of his hand. 

But then why had she held onto his hand in the first place? He’d have thought that it was so she would have some sort of anchor when she went into the other woods, but then she wouldn’t have let go of his hand of her own will.

But the longer Percy waits for her to come back, the longer it takes for him to come up with any other plausible explanation.

What he does know is that Annabeth would probably be pretty angry if he did follow her in. The words “stay here” give quite a good indication of that. 

But it has to have been around twenty seconds since she let go of his hand at this point, and too many things have not worked out the way he wanted them to today to make him feel at ease with this turn of events. 

Extending Riptide infront of him, he takes one more uncertain step, watching as half of the sword disappears.

He takes a deep breath. 

Besides, he tells himself as he takes another, bigger step, Annabeth was always gonna get mad at me anyway.

*****

The sunlight doesn’t get any less harsh the second time.

Percy doesn’t even get a chance to notice before a knife’s pointed straight at him.

Dagger. He thinks instantaneously. That’s a dagger.

That’s probably the only reason why he has enough control in order to not accidentally stab Annabeth.

He breathes out a curse, before moving to the side of the dagger’s point. From the look that Annabeth’s giving him, he’s not a hundred percent sure if he’s actually still safe. 

“Don’t point that thing at me, Annabeth.”

She doesn’t lower it, and instead narrows her eyes at him.

 “What are you doing here?” She hisses, like she herself isn’t the reason. Like she hadn’t just gone missing for a good minute. 

Percy hears his own teeth grinding.

“What was I supposed to do?” He snaps back, and Annabeth opens her mouth to respond before seeming to realize that he has a decent point, at the very least. She lowers her dagger slowly, then huffs out a sigh. 

“I was going to come back.”
“Sure you were.”

Her eyes widen, and Percy prepares himself to get fully yelled at. It doesn’t matter, because she’ll probably find some way to blame for something, because of course she will. He’s starting to see a pattern, and he’s really starting to hate it.

“You-” Annabeth begins, but whatever she starts to say next gets drowned out by a bark.

Percy must be more sleep deprived than he originally thought, because for a second he convinces himself that the bark is coming from Annabeth herself. 

But as he sees her pale and spin around apprehensively, he can hear his own breathing halt. 

He hears the dog bark again, and he fumbles with Riptide as it starts sliding out of his hand. 

Birds swarm past them, shrieking, disappearing into the other woods, and Percy would do something similar if he was sure that the dog wouldn’t chase both him and Annabeth down. 

Living in Manhattan, he’s used to hearing dogs bark at all hours of the day. It’s part of the reason why he’s never been scared of them. It’s conditioned him to never to be caught off guard by any dog barking at him. 

But the bark’s louder, so loud that it would probably give the sound of nearby thunder a run for it’s money.

He can’t tell if the ground’s trembiling under his feet because how shaky his legs are, or because of something else.

He could have probably coninvced himself that this was just some random, harmless dog. Maybe. 

But then he hears the creaking of trees, and a hot, smelly, gust of air pushes against him so hard that he grows teary eyed, and he knows that he’s not wrong.

The trees creek once more, and suddenly he’s engulfed in shadow. 

Without looking up, he knows what he’ll see. 

Hellhound.

Chapter Text

The way Annabeth sees things, there are two options. 

Either A), she attacks the hellhound instantly, and she risks making the monster angry enough to hurt her and Percy, or B), she stands there and does nothing and the monster will still probably swallow them both whole.

Both of those options are stupid. Annabeth concludes definetively. 

She would have most likely made a move right now, if it hadn’t been for the fact that the hellhound stands only a few feet away from Percy. With each pant it gives, Annabeth can smell what is no doubt people it’s killed in its breath, and she almost pities Percy for taking the brunt of the situation.

In fact, the only reason why she’s not feeling guilty for putting Percy into this situation is that she hadn’t forced him to be in any situation in the first place.

She’d told him to stay behind, plain and simple. 

She hadn’t thought that he would have been dumb enough to follow her in, especially since he’d been clearly scared when he’d left the woods the first time. 

Although, she thinks grimly, you can’t be too surprised. 

When had Percy ever listened to her? 

He and the monster seem completely transfixed on each other, which doesn’t shock her. Although she wouldn’t have expected Hades to resort to sending two hellhounds in a short space of time.  

Percy still fidgets with the hilt of his sword as he points it at the dog, which Annabeth would have reprimanded him about if she’d wanted an instant death by hellhound. 

Besides, she admits to herself that it would be hypocritical of her. 

She forces her hand not to tremble as she points her dagger at the hellhound.

Calm down. You’ve trained for this.

The thought does little to ease her, but she can already feel her mind switching back to protocol. Within seconds, she’s searching the monster for any sort of weak spot, which is harder than she’d like.

The hellhound’s fur seems to soak up any sort of light, and with it, at first, any hope of a weak spot. It’s only when the dog turns it’s head to look at her, it’s eyes seeming to burn as it does, that she sees her opportunity.

She doubts that they could take the hellhound down by just cutting at the throat. It’s too high up, and it’s not that easy to kill a hellhound. An attack like that would just send the monster into a frenzy, and she’s not stupid enough to think that she could easily outrun something the size of a semitruck. 

She sneaks a glance at Percy again, who’s right foot has diseapred entirely from having stepped back. 

The…. She’ll really have to come up with a name for the place they came from, won’t she? 

Fine. 

The other woods could have been a safe haven at some point, but the barrier between the two places let her walk straight through without any problems. 

What’s to say that that won’t happen with the hound?

And who’s to say that the hound hasn’t been there before?

Combined with the shadows…

She curses internally. 

She’ll never admit it, but she had almost smiled when Percy had sent off Medusa’s head to the gods. It was stupid, and entirely something that he would do, but it had most likely taken some nerve, which she can respect.

But she doesn’t feel like smiling now.

Her grip around her dagger is so tight that her hand’s starting to hurt. The hellhound still stares at her, wagging its tail in anticipation.

She takes another deep breath, finally gathering her wits. She hurls the dagger as hard and as fast as she can.

Her hand falls in disbelief as she stares at the pieces of fuzz flickering up into the air.

The monster looks back at the dagger when it lands with a thump, its tail a blur now, and Annabeth hates herself for ever agreeing to leave Medusa’s.

She’s not sure what possess her to look back at Percy. Perhaps there’s an idea that she hasn’t fully been convinced off yet that she wants to mouth to him, or perhaps she wants to glare at him, wants to warn him not to make fun of her. 

Her eyes stare at the open air.

Part of her brain tells her that he’s ran off without her, back into the other woods, but the bigger, more logical part of her (although she hates it for being logical), tells her to look back at the hellhound.

Percy flies towards the monster like a deranged Superman. He wears the same expression Annabeth had seen on his face hours ago, when he’d fought Medusa, and even before that, back on the bus. 

He’s clearly winging it- his legs aren’t as tucked as they should be if he wanted to jump that high, and he has worse aim than she’ll ever have. But when he launches his sword straight at the dog’s ear, there’s no doubt in Annabeth’s mind that he’d meant to aim it there. 

Of course. Itd be too distracted to-

But then the awful moment comes, the turn of the head that happens so fast that Annabeth doesn’t fully process it until she’s yelling out “No!” and sprinting after her own dagger once again, hoping that it’ll be some sort of distraction.

It’s not.

She knows this before she hears the terrible snap canine teeth, before she even reaches her dagger.

Her hands fumble for the hilt, and over her pounding heart, all she can think is that this can’t be happening.

It can’t happen again.

She can’t lose…

It’s the oof that brings her back to reason.

Throughout today, she’s heard various types of screaming. Medusa’s raspy one that barely constitutes a yell. Grover’s, one that’s the closest that she’s ever heard to pure fear.

And her own, obnoxiously high pitched one. 

Percy, to his credit, seems to keep his screams to a minimum, and the shouting to a reasonable volume. 

But no matter how easily he can usually keep himself in check, she’s sure that he would have screamed by now.

So it makes sense, but doesn’t make her feel any better when her eyes land on Percy once again just in time to see him dangling by the shirt from the creature’s jaw.

She’s honestly surprised it hasn’t ripped. Even more surprising is the relief, more than she would have thought there would be, that surges through her as she watches Percy, only a little hesitant, kick at the monster. His feet disappear into the general fur of its chest. His movements reap no benefits, and the creature stands as causally as if it were a normal dog, its tail still wagging.

Come to think of it, Percy’s a lot closer to any weak spot than Annabeth is. 

The monster makes no aknowaldgment of her as she slowly raises her hand as high as she can dare. Drool begins to drip from its maw as it pants.

Whether he notices her as he recoils from the dog’s breath, or he’d seen her from the start, it’s uncertain, but Percy tilts his head slightly towards her either way. His gaze never leaves the hellhound.

Annabeth swings her hand down to an open palm, mouth dry. Then, slowly, achingly slowly, she reaches to her eye.

She waits for Percy to follow her plan, her heart in her throat. 

But then he shakes his head so slightly that she could have missed it, the meaning bigger than the movement. Annabeth’s gaze drops down to the ground, right to where Riptide lays in tall grass.

She wants to kick herself.

She doesn’t know how she missed its decent. She’s letting herself get flustered. She takes a deep breath, and then-

There is no then.

Because the dog turns to face her, its eyes almost as black as its fur. 

The sudden swivle of its head jolts a word out of Percy. A simple, hoarse, nonsensical “Run.”

Annabeth’s grip around her dagger can grow no tighter, even as her hands shake. 

The dog lunges, and it’s only the logic that it can’t kill her with someone already dangling from its mouth that keeps her from throwing the dagger again. 

The light hitting the hound’s eyes now makes them look more brown, and she swallows, taking aim. The ground still trembles from the dog’s paws hitting it, and she can feel the billowing breath and wind from the wagging tail even from several meters away. Part of her registers that Percy’s feet can almost touch the ground now. 

It’s as if the hellhound’s…

Annabeth throws the dagger.

It whizzes past the dog’s face, and she doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. It’s as if Hades and Athena both wanted to make her a laughing stock.

And so has Hermes, because the hellhound gives her a playful look ( get a grip, Annabeth), seems to take Percy’s advice, and runs.

Annabeth’s feet move without her thinking, and she flies after the hellhound, her dagger heavy in her hand from when she’d apparently miraculously grabbed it. 

She wills her shoes not to make her trip, and there’s a curse under her breath, a prayer on the next. She vaults over roots and twigs, and she can feel her hair untucking itself from her already dying ponytail.

The hellhound itself has bounding too far out of her eyesight, although she can hear the snaps of branches, and the heavy panting of the monster. Every so often she can hear Percy’s yelps, but he still doesn’t sound to be in too much pain, and so she presses forwards, her lungs and legs burning.

Then the noise dies down and she runs faster, her prayers adapting themselves to her thoughts. They’re so loud that it almost drowns out the realization that Percy was right.

Because, if she could afford it, Annabeth feels as though she could find a new short cut easily, can almost imagine where that would be in these woods. As if they were back at camp.

But she’s never known camp to be this quiet, unless it were early morning, and her mind refuses to process that.

When her feet hit grass and dirt, however, it’s almost as if she’s been in the clearing before.

Which is ridiculous. All clearings look the same. Grover would never speak to her again if she said that out loud.

Her feet stop suddenly, and she can feel a pit in her chest that makes her branish the dagger and slowly turn around in the clearing.

  The grass tickles her ankles as the wind billows in her ear, but underneath it, she thinks she hears the tell-tale panting of the hellhound.

“Ew.”

Annabeth tenses, and she doesn’t let herself breathe.

Percy’s voice now is a sharp contrast from what it was before. It’s crashed back down to it’s normal volume, and the “ew” is drawn out, which isn’t what she would think it would have been if he’d been getting mauled.

She moves swiftly towards his voice and back into the woods, if only because it’s still less dangerous than standing out in the open. 

And the light works to her advantage in this case. At least, more than it would have 

in the other woods. She can see the monster several yards away, although her legs won’t take her any further than that.

She’s about to yell at herself for stopping, when the dog turns to glance at her, Percy very noticbally gone from its jaws.

“What-” She begins, when Percy himself pops up from where he must have been on the ground. His eyes are round, his hair’s desheveled, and his chest is heaving so hard that Annabeth would have thought that he’d run here too, if she didn’t know better.

But, other than being soaking wet for some reason, as if he weren’t the son of Poseidon, he looks remarkably fine.

In a step, the hellhound is right infront of Annabeth. Quicker still, she finds herself being lifted about an inch off the ground as something warm and heavy presses against her.

And suddenly she’s soaking from head to foot, and she bears the unmistakable odor of dog chow.

Instinctively, she turns her head to the side and retches. She can feel each curl of her hair slicked back.

 When she comes back to her senses, she can hear a familiar burst of laughter, although it’s much more subdued than usual.

She turns back to glare at Percy, keeping her arms away from her slobber covered shirt. That had been the plan anyway, but one look at Percy’s bangs, which now stick up from what was no doubt to smooth them over, and her lips can’t help but twitch.

Biting the inside of her mouth, she recomposes herself, turning to the hellhound in order to bring the seriousness up. 

It isn’t helping matters, thumping it’s paws on the ground again, almost grinning. No amount of cold looks seems to damage its mood. 

Which, Annabeth admits to herself, could almost be cute, if it hadn’t been trying to kill us.

Although, judging by Percy’s poorly hidden grin which she catches a glimpse of from the corner of her eye, it’s looking less and less likely.

“It wasn’t seeing what we tasted like, right?” Percy asks, apparently coming to the same conclusion.

“No.” She responds, watching as the hellhound turns its back to her and thumps the ground next to Percy instead. He watches it, although Annabeth notices that he’s not breathing as shallowly anymore, which is more than could be said for her. She forces herself to take a deep, steadying breath.

“But hellhounds don’t necessarily eat people unless Hades lets them. Its probably been sent to bring you to him.”

“So why stop here?” It’s clearly a rhetorical question, and for the brief moment they lock eyes, Annabeth knows that he’s thinking what she’s thinking. He drinks in a breath of his own, then opens his mouth to say something.

“Mrs. O’ Leary!” 

His jaw snaps shut, and Annabeth glances past his shoulder and into the rest of the 

woods. She begins to frown.

The hellhound stands from where it had been giving a play-bow, it’s floppy ears perking up gently. Its tail sweeps the ground.

“Mrs. O’ Leary!” Comes the voice again. It’s a cheerful, tinkiling voice, one that sounds more human than most of the monsters that Annabeth’s come across. Still, she reaches out and grabs Percy’s arm, tugging him towards her. He turns his head from where he’d been looking too, shooting her a betrayed look.

She shakes her head, shooting him her own look and mouthing “Not Hades.”

He frowns back at her, turning his head to look out the woods one last time before begrudgingly beginning to follow Annabeth. 

They manage to run four steps before the hellhound barks.

The bark last time had been far enough away that it had only been as loud as distant thunder.

This time it’s as loud as a bomb.

Everything in Annabeth screams at her to hunker down and cover her ears, but she persists, grabbing Percy by the arm again and tugging him along just in case. 

They race through the clearing and into the forest floor again, Annabeth’s breathing loud in her ears. It only continues to speed up as she realizes, with some sinking realization, that the hellhound had lead her on twist and turns that she had been too busy trying to get Percy back to fully notice.

She’d run east initially, but she’s sure that they’d ended up in a different direction 

altogether. 

All she can hope for is that for once things will go her way, and they’ll be able to lose whoever knows a hellhound. Percy had clearly only been gone for a few seconds when he’d come here, and she doubts that he wouldn’t have followed her sooner if she’d been gone longer than a few minutes. So, logically, if they get away from whoever had called the hound, they should still not lose that much time, if they hurry and find their way back to the other woods as soon as possible.

As she runs, Annabeth finds it strange that she can suddenly think again. When she’d chased after Percy, it had been-

The hellhound bursts from the woods to the right of them, skidding to a stop right infront of her.

She yelps, cringes, then branishes her dagger at it again. 

“Annabeth?” The voice comes from what at first seems like the lump of fur, but as her eyes travel upwards, they meet someone else’s wide ones. It’s then that she notices the boy sitting ontop of the dog, arms around it’s neck like he’d been clinging on for dear life.

Her tongue tripping over itself, Annabeth manages “Do I know you?” Which she would have thought would have brought a response such as:

“Of course, I am so-and-so”. But the boy just blinks at her and gives an “uh”.

“Who are you?” Percy demands, and she almost can’t hear him trying to regain his breath. The boy turns to him, and for some odd reason he looks even more confused, a light frown forming. 

He pushes himself off from the hellhound, his hands up in slight surrender, although not as high as Annabeth would like them to be. “You don’t… you don’t remember?”

“Remember what?” Annabeth and Percy chorus. Annabeth grimaces, then precouppies herself with giving the newcomer a once over.

He doesn’t look to be much older than them, barely shorter than Annabeth. In the June heat, she would have thought that the aviator’s jacket would have made him sweat, but he isn’t bothered by it in the slightest. His silver ring catches the sunlight and redirects it towards her feet. 

She would have said that he wouldn’t look nearly as intimidating without the hellhound behind him, but there’s something about him that’s almost unnatural. Something that makes her uneasy, and something that makes Percy lift his recovered sword a little higher to where he’s aiming it at the boy’s chest. 

The boy doesn’t flinch, instead shifting like he’s about to explain.

“Oh my gosh.” Another voice- the one from earlier, calls, and Annabeth whirls on her heel to meet another pair of eyes. They’re green, bright and sparkiling, as if they’re start from the woods themselves. 

The girl infront of them also doesn’t look to take notice of their weapons. If she does, she’s smiling despite them. Her eyes flick back to Annabeth and Percy, her grin only growing as Annabeth’s discomfort does. 

“You guys were so tiny!” The girl holds up a hand to her knee to demonstrate, but Annabeth can’t feel indignant just yet, because one word slams into her like a hellhound.

Were.

A new feeling, not unlike the feeling of trying to calm down after running, settles in her.

“What do you mean, were?” She demands, and finally the girl’s smile starts to fade. Before she can respond, the boy speaks, his voice low and ominous.

“You think it’s 2005.”

They all turn to face him again. He’s stepped further back into the hellhound, and the frown’s only grown. 

“What other year would it be?” Percy asks, his own voice becoming husky. 

The strangers exchange looks. As they do, the boy buries his hands into his pockets and the girl tugs at a strand of curly red hair.

Then the girl, her smile only continuing to waver, straightens up. She takes them all in, then speaks in unconvinced certainty. 

“I think we should go back to camp.”

Chapter Text

Percy can’t even try to imagine what the rest of the campers are thinking as they watch him and Annabeth trudge into camp. He’s half surprised that they haven’t come at them with sticks yet.

He hears a quick chuckle from behind them, and he slouches down further, forcing himself not to turn around. 

He sneaks a glance at Annabeth, hoping that she’ll look back, but her head’s again in it’s usual position, and her mouth is drawn into a line. Her hair’s tangled from Medusa and chasing after him and the hellhound, no doubt, and the dog drool probably didn’t help matters. But combined with her expression, she’s kinda rocking it in a weird way.

Screw people stabbing them, the look that she’d given the red-haired girl had made Percy almost worry that Annabeth was going to kill her. It didn’t help matters that she kept gripping her dagger so hard her knuckles turned white. 

“No.” She’d said, and it had been clear from the tone of her voice that she had meant that to be final. And Percy had thought that she would have sooner fought toe to toe with Hades than back down. 

The fact that they’re back at camp has proven otherwise.

And it’s the same old camp, he’s sure of it. He recognizes some of the Hermes kids. Some of the Hephaestus ones, too. As he passes them, they follow the rest of the crowd in their staring, although a few do give him small smiles. 

Some of the cabins look like they’ve gotten renovations. He counts at least three new windchimes by the Apollo cabin, and although he’s made it a habit to avoid the Athena kids’ cabin, he thinks he sees a new welcome mat outfront where he had not seen it before. 

But other than that, it’s the same old camp.

A pit begins to worm its way into Percy’s stomach, one that gnaws at him and distracts him from Annabeth just long enough that his shoulders drop a little more.

Maybe it’s for the best that he hasn’t dared to talk to Annabeth.

He may be the reason she’s on this quest, but without her he doesn’t think he would have gotten this far.

And now they’re back to square one. Either that or, (what looks way more likely) they’re in some crazy alternate universe. And his mom is still stuck in Hell.

Still stuck alone when he’d promised her and the stars that he’d bring her back. When he’d been stuck here at camp before the quest, he’d felt trapped. Powerless. 

Now it feels a thousand times worse. 

He takes in a breath and holds it. Technically, as a son of a sea-god, he can hold it forever, and right now that’s the only thing that’s keeping him from hitting something. 

The red-haired girl and the boy who looks perpetually like he’s gotten the worst news in the world walk a few feet ahead of them, murmuring amongst themselves. Red is talking more than he is, and Percy hears a few snatches of their conversation. He catches his name a few times, followed by Annabeth’s, and it’s not just once that they look back at the both of them. Mrs. O’ Leary switches from walking next to them to walking next to Percy every few seconds. Even now, as she walks at a relatively slow pace, the ground seems to bounce as she moves.

If he’d been tired before, Percy’s barely walking now. Back at Yancy, the few times people other than Grover invited him to their dorms, they’d spent a lot of time playing games where they killed zombies. He never knew why Grover would never want anything to do with electronics until the minotaur. Even now the idea of playing those sorts of games for fun makes him feel queasy, but he can definitely sympathize with the zombies. It’s like he’s half dead himself, and he’s pretty sure the only reason why he’s not full blown panicking right now is because he’s too tired to really comprehend anything. 

Let alone make a run for it.

If these people really are demons or something, they’re going about capturing them in a really weird way, though. 

The first thing that makes sense since they’ve walked into camp is when Red calls out abruptly: “Chiron!”
His heart skips a beat, and he turns and watches as she waves out to what seems like the general void of the forest, before a silhouette appears.

“Guess who!” Red yells over, stepping aside. Suddenly, Percy feels extremely unguarded, even when the silhouette turns into a man (or part of a man, anwyway), and who looks to be Chiron strides out in the open. 

If this is Chiron, the centaur is the last guy who would openly judge him. Still, Percy’s feet sink as far at the ground will let them, and his shoulders ride up to his ears.

If there’s any benefit to the situation, it’s the fact that this might be the first time he’s ever seen Chiron surprised. At least, other than when Poseidon claimed him. He has halted a few feet away from them completely, and he stands stiff, a small frown pulling at his lips.

“I see.” His eyes are on Annabeth, but of course they have to now move to him. His frown lessens, and as he moves back to take in both of them, his eyes soften too. 

“I have to admit, I was not expecting to see this, of all things.” 

It hasn’t even been a full two days since Percy’s last seen Chiron, but it’s like he hasn’t heard his voice in forever. And if someone is trying to impersonate him, whoever this is doing a pretty good job at doing so, because Percy’s chest aches.

“When I was seven,” Annabeth says, her voice sharp, “who did I give my teddy bear to?” 

She doesn’t so much as flinch as everyone turns to her, but she doesn’t sound like she’s been breathing much, either. 

“There was a young boy, I believe. Oscar, son of Apollo. He arrived at camp a few days after you did, and you gave him your bear.” Chiron’s own voice is slow, a smile forming. And Percy thinks he sees Annabeth smile, too, or maybe she’s just breathing again. Either way, he’s still trying to picture a tiny Annabeth Chase clutching a bear. He would have sooner thought that she had hurled the bear at someone who had made her angry, but then again, he’s only known her for a few weeks.

“Luke bought that bear for me.” 

Percy freezes.

Oh, gods. Luke.

So this is camp, which means at any second Luke could see that Percy is very much not wearing his winged shoes. They’re off with Grover somewhere, and Percy feels like a jerk

He glances around briefly, like if he even thinks of the guy he’ll just appear out of nowhere. But all he sees is Red and Jacket. Red’s got a funny glint in her eyes, like Annabeth had just made someone up, and Jacket’s looking like he’s trying not to scowl.

To be fair, he’s been looking like he’s trying not to scowl the entire time, and Red could just not like Luke. Although, it’s Luke. There isn’t much not to like.

“Oscar’s still a seasonal camper.” Chiron says. He clears his throat. “Now, I think there’s a matter that we have to discuss.” He raises an eyebrow at Percy, and the boy would have rather had a sit down with Zeus, honestly.

But he nods, swallowing, even as his mouth remains dry. Chiron’s smile grows.

“Very well. Let us walk to The Big House.”

*****

Percy waits for Annabeth to blame him for everything, his own counter-argument ready at the tip of his tongue.

Granted, he doesn’t necessarily know what it’ll be. Probably something about how she’s the whole reason why he went back into these woods in the first place, but even that sounds like a bad excuse. The more he thinks about it, the more he realizes that there was no reason for him to panic as much as he did, and the fact that it was over Annabeth really messed him up.

He guesses he was trying to be the bigger person. Annabeth, at the end of the day, is twelve like him, and even she couldn’t take Hades if he decided to appear. But she’s been fighting for longer, and the truth, the fact that he just wanted to make sure he was okay, doesn't feel like the right words to say right now. 

So he just sits and waits for Annabeth to explain everything, and then for her to inevitably point the finger at him and say (in a very Annabeth-y way), that it’s “his fault, your honor”.

And she does tell Chiron (who’s back in his wheelchair) everything. About Medusa, about how they’d split up, about how they’d gotten lost and found themselves here. How Mrs. O’Leary (she’s blatantly refusing to call her by her name) had practically dragged them here.

But she doesn’t say what she’s said to him to his face. That he’s ruined everything. And he doesn’t know why.

“And so you are from two-thousand five.” Chiron says once she’s finished. Annabeth nods, and Percy has to give her credit- she doesn’t even pretend to be scared of the implications of that. He can’t tell if she’s trying not to think about it, or if she has and she’s just working through everything in her head.

He’s jealous in both situations. 

He’s watched too many sci-fi movies to not notice the fact that Chiron keeps stressing the two-thousand-five part. Jacket had brought it up, too. 

“What year is it supposed to be?” Annabeth asks, pulling her chair forwards.

And Percy thinks that for once they’re about to get a straight answer. The feeling lasts for a brief, wild moment, but he doesn’t want to scream into a pillow any less when Chiron hesitates.

“It’s dangerous to know what's to come.” He settles.

“You let me see The Oracle.” Percy points out. The Oracle’s word’s tug at his subconscious as soon as he speaks, and his throat tightens. 

And you shall fail to save what matters most in the end. 

For a bit, when they’d killed Medusa, he’d tricked himself into thinking they were on the right track. It had seemed like it, at least, up until he’d mailed Medusa’s head to Olympus. Even after that, he’d revealed in the fact that he’d had power for the first time in his life. 

Bile rises up in him.

Gods, he’d been so stupid. He’s already on thin ice with all of them, and he’d sent the head anyway. Of course they’d get angry.

Maybe he’s ruined his chances before he ever really got started. Medusa could have even been the friend who betrayed him. 

Except, no.

His fingers curl around his knees and he clenches them. 

He hasn’t returned anything that’s been stolen. No matter how angry the gods are at him, Zeus at the very least would want his lightning bolt back. Sending him here doesn’t do anything productive for either of them.

So the prophecy’s still on. He has to believe that it’s still on, and that what matters most is some material object, not his own mother.

He has to.

For better or worse, Chiron speaks again, shaking his head. “That was different. We do not know if this is the future you are destined to follow, and even if it is, we cannot have you rely on it. If I tell you what has come to pass and you do not like it, you may try to change your future and it could lead to intended or unintended consequences.”

When it comes to reading people, in terms of Chiron, Percy’s absolute garbage at it. The centaur’s face is as unreadable as ever, apart from a small spark of sympathy in his expression that Percy really has to search for. 

She’s not gone.

She can’t be.

“Well, then we need to get back to our time now.” Annabeth states, standing. “It’s good to see that you’re okay, Chiron, but me and Percy being gone won’t help us-”
“Or Grover.” Percy interrupts, the grip on his knees loosening. He exchanges a look with Annabeth, forcing thoughts of the prophecy from his mind altogether and falling back on his theory that seems so long ago. “He could be in these woods, too.” He turns to Chiron.

“You haven’t seen him, right?”

Chiron’s expression grows somber as he shakes his head. “Have you tried your- ah. Hasn’t happened yet.” He pauses. “I’ll send out some campers to look for him. In the meantime, do you remember exactly where the portal was?”

“West.” Annabeth says this with full confidence, but it quickly slips away. She gives a curt sigh.

“Can’t we get the hell-hound to retrace its scent?”

“We could.” Chiron agrees, but there’s something off to his tone. 

“There’s a “but”, isn’t there?” Percy’s not even sure why he’s asking, but Chiron nods.

“Mrs. O’Leary has, for the most part, been roaming around these woods for the past few days. For whatever reason she’d rather spend time with her owner or with his friends outside.”
Percy’s pretty sure he means Jacket, which raises all sorts of questions. Mainly, if he even would ever want to get to know someone who had a pet hell-hound, and what future he thinks of this, if he even stuck around.

“Today in particular, she spent a lot of time in the woods. The young lady and gentlemen who brought you here were taking her out on her fourth walk this morning.”
“So she would get confused.” Percy responds.

“Exactly.”

Percy lets out a breath as Annabeth chews on her lip. “Well, we’ll need to get out there anyway to retrace our steps.”

Chiron agrees. “Of course. I’ll tell one of her handlers to let her out just in case your idea could work. I believe we have an old dummy she’s been gnawing on lately. We could use that as a base for her scent.” He adjusts himself in his chair, then continues. “As I said, I’ll send out campers to search for Grover, and I’ll inform them to keep an eye out for the other woods as well. Although,” his voice rides over Annabeth’s, “I should suggest that you two try to conserve your energy as much as possible.”

Next to Percy, Annabeth stiffens, already protesting. He can hear himself beginning to do so as well, his tongue tripping over itself as he does, but when Chiron raises a hand, suddenly he can’t talk anymore. 

Annabeth falls silent, too, although Percy doesn’t envy Chiron for taking the brunt of her glare.

“I understand your concerns.” The centaur says evenly. “And I know that asking you to stay here will no doubt instill suspicion in you. However . You’ve already been sent obstacles in terms of the furies and Medusa. While the camp grounds keep you primarily safe from monsters, you both should know by now that there are exceptions. You both have just stepped into camp from a portal yourselves. Who knows what may have followed you- or is lying await for you. Mrs. O’Leary might have scared off a potential intruder for now, or perhaps there is none at all. Regardless, I cannot deem it wise to go back into the woods without it being cleared.”

Percy can’t really imagine anything bad being in these woods. It looks like even the hellhounds are nicer here.

Then again, he’d thought the woods were semi-safe in the past, too.

He shivers. “But you’ll send out other campers.”

“They’ll be in groups of their own.” Chiron turns to him once more. “And they are a lot more practiced in dealing with any sorts of creatures, even if they are not as powerful as you. I would send you two out with a group myself, but if the situation becomes compromised, you run the risk of not completing your own tasks. And, even without the threat of monsters after you, I can only assume from your bedraggled appearances that neither of you have gotten much sleep.”
As soon as he says those words, Percy feels his legs fail him and he leans back into the chair. “Not much.” He admits. 

Even before the quest, it was never much.

“Then I advise you both to stay here. At least for an hour.” 

Percy really needs to stop chorusing with Annabeth, but “an hour?!” tears its way out of his throat anyway. 

Chiron interlocks his fingers together, his eyes darting back to Annabeth. “You stated that not much time at all had passed in the past, correct?”

She stares at him dubiously. “Well, yes, but-”

“If we find the portal before an hour is up, I shall send you on your way immediately.” Chiron treasures her. “In the meanwhile, you should regain your strength. But if time passes slower in your past, I do not see why you should exhaust yourselves now further than you have.”

Annabeth doesn’t have much to say to that, but honestly, neither does Percy. Even as Chiron speaks, he has to admit that it does sound nice, not running for his life. And he has a valid point.

But if he says any of this, Annabeth will immediately argue back with him, and despite getting lost, he trusts her a lot more to be right than himself.

She screws up her nose slightly, squinting. “Swear that you’ll send us back to the portal as soon as it’s found. Swear it on the River Styx.”

For the first time since they’ve come into the Big House, Chiron smiles. “I swear it on the River Styx.”

Annabeth’s silent for a second, then her chair squeaks a little as she falls back into it. “Fine.” 

She says it so softly that Percy thinks for a second that he’s misheard her. It would make more sense than for her to actually agree to it, but when he glances at her, her jaw is set. 

“Percy could use the rest.” Which would sound all nice and sweet and everything if it wasn’t coming from Annabeth. The “Hey!” steals its way out of his mouth before he has time to stop it, and she rolls her eyes.

“You’ve been stumbling around for the past ten minutes.” She says, and his face heats. 

“Yeah, well-”

A chuckle cuts him off, and they both turn to stare at Chiron. And yeah, to be fair,, Percy’s always gotten the sense that he knows things that they don’t. That being said, maybe it’s the fact that they’re literally time-travelers, but the feeling is more intense than ever.

“I’d forgotten how easily you two would get into fights.”

Before Percy can ask what that’s even supposed to mean, Chiron addresses Annabeth. “It seems that you may need some rest as well. Consider it.” He stands from his wheelchair, and Percy doesn’t know if he’ll ever get used to seeing his whole centaur form. 

“I shall round the campers. The Big House should be satisfactory for your stay for now. I should ask you to try to keep contact with other campers to a minimum.” 

If it wasn’t for Annabeth’s safe question, Percy’s sure he would be booking it. But Chiron doesn’t even particularly sound steadfast in those words. He’s gotta be thinking that they’ll try to leave, and he doesn’t blame him. But he could honestly go to sleep right here, too.

Annabeth doesn’t even wait two seconds after Chiron leaves before getting up from her chair. Percy grimaces at the squeaking of it, then watches as she yanks her hair tie from her hair. She tries to run her fingers through it once, but they snag on it and her eyebrows furrow. Percy doesn’t know that he’s staring until they make eye contact, and she scowls at him.

“Let’s go.” She says, beginning to pull her hair into a ponytail again. Percy remains glued to his chair.

“Let’s go where?” 

He truly is getting all sorts of looks from Annabeth today.

“I’m not just going to sit here.” 

He’d figured, but his own frown grows. “Chiron said-”

“I have ears, Percy.” She rolls her eyes. Evidently unhappy with how her pony-tail has formed, she starts over.  “But at the very least, we can get back the supplies we lost on the bus, if not some information on exactly what sort of being could send us to the future.”

“Chiron doesn’t even know that.”

“How do you know?” Her eyes burn into him, and he shifts. 

“He would have said something, right? I mean, you didn’t even ask him.” He hadn’t either. He’d figured that this just had been a freak accident, but given this quest’s track record and the fact that Annabeth replies with such conviction, he’s starting to doubt it.
“He knows.” Her hands drop to her sides. “At the very least, he has some idea. He has to. But if I asked him the question directly, he would have never given me a to-the-point answer, especially because he thinks that we could be in danger.”

“I don’t know.” Is the only thing that Percy can say, because Annabeth does have a point. This whole day they’ve been caught off guard over and over again, and it would be nice to know what they’re dealing with for a change.

But still.

“Do you think you know what’s going on?” He asks, and he doesn’t miss the slight hesitation from Annabeth.

“Maybe. But it’s far-fetched, and there would need to be a lot of things that needed to happen in order for this theory to work.” She shakes her head. “It’s stupid, and I’m not even going to bother telling it to you. Not before I have any sort of proof.”

And Percy knows she means it, so he shrugs. “If you say so.”

She huffs, like she was expecting more of a fight, before switching topics. “If you’re not going to help me try to figure this out, the least you could do is get more supplies.” 

“I thought you said I was stumbling around all over the place and that I needed rest.” 

“I never said you needed rest, Percy. But fine,” she waves a hand at him. “Go ahead and be completely useless.”

“Hey,” he stands abruptly, “I just killed a bunch of monsters, didn’t I?”

She scoffs. “Please. You wouldn’t have lasted a day without my (and Grover’s) help.”

“Uh, I’m pretty sure I saved your life at least once, too.”

“Oh, at least once.” She nods exaggeratedly, and before Percy can think up something else to say, she heaves a dramatic sigh, like he’s the problem. 

“This is getting us nowhere. Fine, you might have helped out a few times, but you wouldn’t be helping now if you just sat around. Get us supplies, and if you run into anyone, see if any of them have any idea of what sent us here.”

Percy blinks, still trying to process Annabeth’s admission. 

“What?” But Annabeth doesn’t reiterate, and so he tries to play it off. As if those words aren’t on repeat in his head. He doesn’t get why her words should even matter, anyway.

“I mean, why aren’t you asking those people? They know you more than me.”

“Because-” For the first time, Annabeth seems a bit put out. “Because you’re more- ugh!” She stares up at the ceiling. Percy feels a slow grin forming as realization settles in him.

“Because people like me more?”

“No!” Annabeth’s attention snaps to him as she turns red, and he finally laughs. She crosses her arms, but Percy finally gets the chance to speak before she does.

“Okay, good, because trust me- people like you way more than they like me.” He doesn’t think he’s anyone’s favorite camper, and gods, if he runs into Clarisse, he’ll be six feet under before the hour’s up. He doesn’t think he has the best relationship with anybody at camp other than Beckendorf and Grover, and maybe Luke. But Luke acts the same with every single person, so Percy can’t even be sure if the guy even considers him a friend. If he’s lucky, most people just ignore him. If he’s not, the Ares cabin is chasing after him, or actively freaked out around him. 

At least people respect Annabeth.

For a blink-or-you’ll-miss-it moment, a funny look settles on her face. Then she’s back to business.

“We can safely assume this time period is at least a few months in the future. On the way here I saw one of my half-brother’s who must have shot up at least a foot since I last saw him. So, if you didn’t screw up this quest, you should be viewed at least somewhat favorably. Especially since you’re a child of The Big Three.”

“Yeah, I guess.” Percy bounces on his toes twice before settling back down. He sighs. “I’ll get the supplies, and if II see anyone on the way there, I’ll ask.”

He almost thinks he sees Annabeth smile. It can’t be. It has to be a trick of the light.

“Good.” She says. “Stay close to water, just in case. I would go with you, but it’ll be more time efficient if I have more time to try and collect clues. Let’s meet up in-” she begins to look at her watch, before realizing that her wrist is bare. This time, she sighs.

“Twenty minutes. I’ll try to sneak out any books to your cabin, so let's meet up there.”

Her mind is set, and maybe it’s the idea of having a set plan for once, but Percy feels the tiredness seep away a little as they make their way to the front door.

“You’ve never watched a sci-fi horror, have you?” He holds it open for her.
“Of course not.” She says, moving past him. Her feet thump against the stairs as she descends from the patio. “I have a life, Seaweed Brain.” 

It’s unnervingly easy for her to ditch him.

“Twenty minutes.” She calls over her shoulder. If it weren’t for the double takes people exhibit as she moves into the crowd, she would have blended into it perfectly.

Eyes, what seem like hundreds, turn to Percy. The muttering is louder now. A few giggles, too. 

“Right.” He says under his breath, shoving away the urge to run after Annabeth. He tugs at the wrinkles of his shirt. “Okay. You’ve got this.”

Chapter Text

The first solid answer that Annabeth gets is a “no”.

She blinks rapidly as she stiffens. “What do you mean, no?” 

The boy blocking her way to the library folds his arms and gives a grin. “I mean, Chiron said you can’t go in here. He gave very specific orders.” He speaks slowly, and gods, it’s just great that people still don’t respect her.

“What-” Annabeth catches herself, then draws in a breath. She shifts her stance, placing all her weight on one leg. “Which cabin do you belong to?”

She’s fully expecting him to say he’s in the Hermes one, and not only because unclaimed kids don’t listen to Chiron other than to exclusively make her angry. Hermes’ kids do the same, and with the smile on his face, she wouldn’t be surprised if he is related to the Stoll brothers.

“Yours.”

She struggles to keep herself from deflating. “Mine?”

“Yup.” He pops the “p”. “Proud child of Athena!” 

The worst part is that she doesn’t even think he’s lying. His back is stiff, his eyes not moving from hers. She gives a sharp sigh, about to say “I knew that” before she remembers that there is no way she could have known. She remembers every single one of her cabinmates, and he’s not one of them.

“Well, I still need to-”
“No can do.” 

He’s making Percy seem downright bearable. 

Speaking of Percy, Annabeth’s only thankful that he’s not here. With all of his sudden paranoia, he would have attempted to march right back to The Big House, no doubt.

Which is why she has to do everything.

“Fine.” She turns on her heel. Ignoring the laughter from her alleged half-brother, she speaks to the massive crowd behind her, who are staring right back at her as if she’s two, not twelve. She wouldn’t be surprised if some of them start cooing at her.

Pushing away the disarmenet she feels (she likes attention, but not this much, and not for a reason like this) she musters up the voice she uses when she’s issuing orders to her cabin. 

“Don’t you have something better to do?” Her words get snatched away by the wind, and she sounds even younger than twelve. She murmurs a curse, but the crowd seems to be ebbing away a little. Still not enough, though. Her hands twitch for her invisbility cap before she remembers, too late, that it’s still with Percy.

The few stragglers follow her as she stomps back down to the regular path, and she forces herself to stare infront of her cooly. Maybe she’d like to be known for her abilities, but she’d never want a hoard.

They won’t help her. If they had been planned on doing so, they would have done it already. Besides, the safe-question with Chiron was barely proof that he was trust worthy. None of them have said anything of the kind.

Maybe…. She shakes her head, her ponytail still feeling heavy on her head. She scowls. She should have asked Percy to get them some extra clothes, too. She doesn’t smell rank yet, but she can scent something wafting off of her. Given that she has who knows long left with two teenage boys, shirts should have been essentials.

But, regardless of what year it is, she has to focus on the present. Someone will help her, she’s sure of it. He’ll get the books she needs from the library, and then she’ll go from there. 

With each passerby that joins her walk, another one leaves. They’re in perpetual limbo. But she thinks she recognizes some of them now. People she actually remembers from her cabin, or other ones that she’s seen sitting around the campfire.

Again, they won’t help her, but she knows someone who will.

There’s a step next to the Hermes cabin that always squeaks louder than the rest. She would have thought that someone from the Hephaestus cabin would have finally fixed it, but when she stomps up the steps, putting more force than what’s probably necessary, that step sags underneath her.

She ignores it, yanking open the cabin door before she can remember that visiting this cabin without warning is always a bad idea.

Thankfully, everyone’s fully clothed, although now she can feel what seems like thousands of eyes on her.

There’s probably more people here than there are outside, but she holds out hope that it’s worth it.

Until she doesn’t catch a familiar smile or a cheerful greeting, and her stomach twists.

Luke not being here doesn’t mean anything. Most times, it takes hours for them to even run into each other. And it’s perfectly logical that he’s not there.

The remnants of an old conversation echoes in her mind.

“ I can’t wait to get out of here, ‘Beth.”

  She focuses on keeping her frown.

Figures. The one person I actually want to see, and he’s not even here.

A heavy hand settles on her shoulder, and when Annabeth spins around, her foot collides directly with Travis Stoll’s shin.

He yelps, his curses a mixture of Ancient Greek and English, barely heard over the laughter that sounds around them.

Desperately hoping that her face isn’t as red as it feels, Annabeth folds her arms.

“Jeez, Annabeth!” Travis says. He’s still crouched over, like she’s kicked him somewhere else entirely, but when he finally meets her gaze, there’s the old familiar twinkle in his eye that she remembers. “Did you have to kick me so hard?” 

She scoffs. “It’s your own fault for sneaking up on me.” Which gains her a round of laughter that she doesn’t quite mind this time.

“Yeah, but I was just trying to say hi…” His voice trails off, and he straightens up. “Anyway, awww…. Baby Annabeth!” 

It’s somewhat of a miracle that he doesn’t try to pinch her cheeks. She takes a step back anyway, her frown returning.

“And yet you’re the one who still hasn’t grown up.” A few cheers sound through the crowd, and Annabeth allows a smile. 

Travis scoffs, folding his arms, although his grin never leaves his face. “I’ve grown up plenty.” Then, before she argue back again, his hands fall to his hips.

“Whatcha looking for, babybeth?”

She gives a sharp sigh, pinching the bridge of her nose. “I’m not a-” 

But Travis’s smile has only grown larger, and she can see no point in fighting a battle he’s so keen on not losing.

“Where’s Luke?” She settles on instead. Her eyes are begining to burn, and her muscles weigh more than they should. Still, she blames her exhaustion more on Travis than the quest. She had been feeling perfectly fine before now.

It takes her a moment.

A moment to notice the temperature drop, the sudden stillness of the air.

It doesn’t matter how many years go by- she has never walked into the Hermes cabin and found it silent. 

She’d always proclaimed that the Athena cabin was better in that regard. When it got loud, it got deafening, because that would only happen during an intense debate. But silence has been there longer than most things have for her, and she loves to bask in it. It’s like a blanket- she envelopes herself in it and she’s at peace.

At the same time, sometimes it chokes her, and it’s then that she goes to the Hermes cabin.

Luke had once told her that he liked the quiet too, sometimes, but you would never guess it. She’s been there at three a.m. before, and even then, there’s been at least two people talking.

So when the cabin goes quiet now, her heart feels as though it is being dragged to the pits of her chest.

A feeling of want for something (or someone) she can’t name settles in her. One of her hands finds the other and squeezes.

Travis’ eyes are bright, but not as much as before. His smile is not impish anymore- instead, it’s softer, and Annabeth resists the urge to swallow.

“Aw.” Travis says, but it sounds less like a reflexive sound and more of something he’s forcing out. Silence again, and Annabeth’s lungs burn, too.

“He’s out for the day, Annie.” Travis says. His smile twists, but she can’t tell what his expression is supposed to be. “I’m sorry.”

“Out?” Annabeth wants to say, “Out where?” But the words get stuck in her throat. They form a painful lump in it, and now she forces herself to swallow, giving a quick nod.

“Do you need anything else?” Someone calls out. Their voice is like honey, too, but a different kind. Annabeth shakes her head, her hand fumbling for the dooknob. 

She could- she should- ask one of the Hermes kids to sneak into the library for her. If there’s any group of kids who would want to break the rules, it’s them. But she can’t get that out either. 

“Thank you.” She manages, before the door opens and she tumbles outside. Before the door shuts, she gets one last look at the cabin.

It looks like it always has. Clothing littered all over the floor. Comics strewn happahzardly over desks and beds. Too many people in the cabin, too, (although maybe a little less than before). 

They’re smiling at her. Waving at her.

But her stomach twists and curls in on itself, and when the door closes, all the breath leaves her lungs.

She turns, her scowl returning as she looks down at the crowd. They look back up at her, eyes round. She stomps down the steps and passes them again, giving another sigh.

“ What?” Is another thing she wants to say. “I don’t talk to him anymore?”  

The thought is supposed to make her roll her eyes, or realize that she’s being ridiculous.

Because she is being ridiculous. Yes, Luke hasn’t left camp in who knows how long, but he has his own life. And Travis had said that he was gone for today- not for forever.

Nothing had been out of the ordinary apart from that, and she has to accept that she’s the new variable here. Of course, people would react differently to her asking a question than older Annabeth. 

Even if that question should have a straight-forward answer.

Her eyes hurt more than they should. 

If you’re going to act like a baby, then you can’t get mad when people treat you like a baby. The voice in her head drips with scorn. 

She’ll just have to find someone from her cabin, then. 

She stops, praying for the crowd to just pass her again. Their chatter is almost as loud as her thoughts, and yet pieces of conversation try to snag her attention.

Concentrate. She thinks, closing her eyes. She opens her mouth just enough to let the air hiss through her teeth as she sucks it in.

No one moves past her. No one stops talking, and, even with her eyes closed, she senses the presence of them enveloping her.

And then suddenly a collective breath, and the presence eases away. It’s such a drastic shift that her eyes snap open. They don’t need to adjust, or search for a particular person, because the boy in the aviator’s jacket stands right infront of her.

The boy from earlier, her brain supplies as she spins around. 

A few of the onlookers have begun to wave at the boy, while others only stare over Annabeth’s head to him. But, where once Annabeth had almost felt their breaths on her neck, now she has enough room to stretch out her arms, if she wants to.

Her thoughts begin to slow, and she draws herself up to her full height as she turns to face the boy again. He’s watching her now, although he’s stiff, like he hadn’t been planning on seeing her. Before he gets the chance to run, she grabs his wrist, pulling him off the path and to the closest tree. 

This time, the silence remains blissful. All she hears for a minute is the odd snap of a twig and the breathing of the boy which sounds too measured to be natural.

Once they reach the shade, Annabeth turns once more, her shoulders relaxing as she notes the distant faces of the crowd. While she does, she feels the boy’s wrist slipping away from her fingers, drawing her focus back to him again. 

During her walk, the sunlight must have grown even stronger than before. Or maybe she’d been too caught off guard (which she doens’t like to think about), because this is the first time she properly sees him.

Dark eyes study her from underneath bangs. They’re so dark that she has a hard time believing that they’re any sort of brown. Now that he’s not on the hellhound, she’s able to tell that he’s not much taller than her. He doesn’t look too much older than her, either, if he’s older than her at all. As she studies him, he pulls his jacket around him further, and it’s then that she fully recongizes the absurdity of that, too.

As a demigod, she’s accustomed to seeing flying women, people with the legs of animals, creatures that can turn into plants. But, as she is a demigod, she also knows that heat tolerance is something the children of the gods get. Sure, the few times in recent years where she’s gotten cold has paralyzed her, but it never gets cold. 

And so she wants to ask what sort of demigod wears a jacket in ninety degree weather. What sort of demigod knows a hellhound, but the boy’s staring just as intensely, and she has more important things on her mind, anyway.

“Did you see anything?” She says, and the intensity lessens slightly. He pulls back, his eyes flicking to the crowd. 

That’s another thing.

Ares kids and Athena kids are usually not ones to get along with anyone outside of their cabin. That’s the way it’s always been.

But, most of the time, you can’t tell who’s part of which cabin from first glance. You really have to focusing in on each invidviual person.

And Annabeth’s never seen people pull back the way they’d just done now. Her instinct tells her that she should stay away from the boy, then. Because hellhounds, no matter how they act originally, are never good news.

But there’s something about him. The way he stands. The stiffness of it, like he’s the one who’s in the wrong time period. Altogether, he’s unnatural, but Annabeth doesn’t find her hand flicking to her dagger, or her breath catching.

Most likely, it’s because he’s the first to not baby at her. Still, she doesn’t get the usual flash of irritation when he takes a moment to respond.

“No.” Is what he finally says. He meets her gaze. “I would have told Chiron.” He pauses. “Or Dionysus.”

Annabeth stiffens too, cursing herself when she realizes her mind hadn’t ever gone to the god. Damn it. 

Part of her supplies that Dionysus still calls her by the wrong name, and he’s too preoccupied with pinochle to be of much use anyway. 

But the other part of her kicks herself, and that’s the part that ensures what she says next. 

“Where is he?” She wants to take back the words as soon as she says them out loud. She may not have “watched any sci-fi horrors”, as Percy had said, but she understands what she can and cannot know. So she answers before the boy gets a chance.

“You can’t tell me.” 

He pauses, then nods. “There’s a lot I can’t tell you.”

His voice is quieter than before. He looks away again, although not for as long this time. 

“I saw you.” He shoves his hands into his pockets, so deep that Annabeth’s sure that he’s going to tear through them. “At the library.”

The inside of Annabeth’s lip stings, and it’s only then that she noticed that she’d been chewing on it at all. I should have seen him. 

Of course, there had been such a cluster of people that he could have been there and she just hadn’t seen him, but she doesn’t think that’s possible. 

The boy casts one last look at the crowd. For the first time, it’s as though he’s looking at them, rather than looking away from her. 

“You need books about portals.” He says. The wind almost snatches the words out of his mouth, and for a moment, she thinks she’s misheard him. She’s nodding before she even fully understands his words. He watches her.

“And,” he says, a scowl begging to form, “books about Kronos.”

The very name makes goosebumps sprout along Annabeth’s arms. “Don’t say that name.” The words are more snapped out than she wants them to be, and the boy blinks. 

“Sorry.” He pauses. “He wouldn’t be close by.” Somehow he doesn’t convince either of them. 

At that thought, Annabeth frowns. 

Calm down, she tells herself, rubbing the goosebumps away, no one’s seen him in thousands of years.

That’s why she’d kept Percy blissfully unaware of the theory. That Kronos is involved somehow. He may be the lord of time, and they may be time travlers, but it’s stupid, and dumb, and the last thing she needs is an overactive imagination.

Still, the boy infront of her makes her think that she’s right again. She doesn’t remember the last time she’d wanted to be wrong. 

“But you think he has something to do with this, too.” 

The boy shifts his stance. His scowl becomes deeper.

“Not directly.” 

She thinks of the faceless figure counselors have been warning her about since she was seven. Lately, danger’s been arriving wearing a friendly face, but there is something in her- the same thing that tells her that the boy is not someone she should fear- that tells her now that she is back at camp. Not just because of the safe-question, or because Chiron’s here in general.

Something else.

Underneath her racing heart, there is the sense of something else. 

And so if she is right, if this is camp, there is a strict lack of motive from Kronos. 

And again, he is in the pits of Tartarus. 

But one of his powers sending them here, whether on purpose or by accident, is the only thing she can think of right now.

She opens her mouth to agree, then catches herself. She doesn’t think the boy notices.

“Meet me by the pier in five minutes.” He says. He makes his descent back to the pier before Annabeth can ask him why. She stands there, adrenaline buzzing in her veins as she watches him approach the crowd. Only a few people remain now, but they still part as he slips past them. 

Five minutes sounds like too much time, but by the time Annabeth arrives at the pier, the boy’s already waiting for her. Under a tree, his expression obscured by the shade once more. 

As she makes her way to him, finally free of the crowd for now, she lets herself wonder for a few seconds who his parent is. She can’t place the girl he’d been with in a cabin either, although she hasn’t seen her since they’d met. After five years of staying in camp, she can usually get a good read on which god someone has descended from. 

At least, she thought she had been able to do that, but then Percy had come and proved her wrong. 

And she can’t think of anyone who looks or acts like this boy, either. Of course, not every child of a god is a carbon copy of another, but still. 

It doesn’t matter, at the end of the day, she thinks, as she enters the shade. Automatically, she aknowdlegs the book hugged to his chest. Her heart skips a beat. 

As he hands them to her, she reads the titles. There’s a total of three, and despite the blurred and wavy letters in front of her, she knows that each holds information about magic, portals, Kronos, or all of those topics. 

“If you need more books, I can find them.” The boy says, and Annabeth eyes him, the warnings which were muted becoming louder in her head. 

“Why are you helping me?” 

The boy stares at her, then shrugs, and for a strange second, the act is almost Percy-like. 

It’s been too long of a day. The voice in her head says. 

“Chiron told us not to tell you anything about the future. He didn’t say anything about not helping you.” The boy says it so matter of factly that Annabeth can’t even find it in herself to argue. Instead, she files it away. 

“I’ll look through these for now.” She says, and as she does so, she remembers the twenty minute deadline. She holds back a curse. 

Knowing Percy, leaving him for longer than twenty minutes, like she’s probably done, means that he’ll find trouble. As he always does.

The boy, oblivious to Annabeth’s urge to run back to The Big House, takes a few steps back. “That’s fine. Chiron’s asked for Mrs. O-” he stops himself from saying the hellhound’s name, but it’s too late for that. “The hellhound’s help. In case she can track your scent, or her own.” He seems to settles on that.

“She wasn’t sent out already?” Annabeth asks. She understands that the monster could get confused, but if they haven’t even sent it out yet-

“They have. They’re sending her out again. She couldn’t catch a scent.” The boy says. He shakes his head, like he’s trying to clear his thoughts. “She doesn’t take too long to scour the woods.”

Oh. 

“I’ll be with her. The girl you saw me with can help you if you have any questions.” The boy says. Annabeth nods, and then, despite the deadline, curiosity gets the better of her.

“You’re the hellhound’s handler?”

The boy stares at her again. Then, for the first time, he smiles. It’s a small one, but one nonetheless. 

“No.” 

Annabeth bites her lip again for asking who is. Instead, she tucks the books under her arm. “Then I’ll ask.”

 She doesn’t think she’ll need the help, but if she needs more books, maybe knowing a camper from this time could be useful.

 Her thoughts begin to circle back to Luke and where he could be, but she refuses to let that happen again. 

“Thank you.” She says. The boy’s voice grows soft, and a little halting as he responds.

“Yeah.” He shifts a little, and their eye contact breaks. 

One book begins to slip from Annabeth’s grasp, and she turns her attention to catching it. Once she’s re-adjusted her hold on it, she glances back up, ready to watch as the boy leaves again.

Instead, all she finds is open air, and a slight chill in her bones.

Chapter Text

Today’s been starting to feel less like a horror movie and more like a fever dream. The only thing that’s been creepy have been the wide smiles people have given Percy whenever he’s knocked on their doors. His hair, which he knows is probably worse than a rat’s nest right now, has gotta be looking even more bad, given the amount of people who have ruffled it.

When he starts asking them for supplies, feeling like the reverse of a door-to-door salesman, they always kneel down. Which, okay, isn’t necessary. He knows that he’s not the tallest (standing next to Annabeth has made that clear) but he’s not that short. 

Each cabin gives him the same answer:

“We’d love to help, Percy, but-”

“Nah, sorry, we can’t give you any because-”

“Awww, you were so small! But, sorry, we-”

After the fourth cabin, Percy gets the picture. He debates whether or not to head to the Hermes cabin. He even figures that it can’t hurt, but that’s before he sees the gaggle of people following Annabeth down there. So he decides to use that as a last resort.

Knowing Luke, if he’s up for helping them out, he’ll give her the supplies. He’d given Percy the shoes, so he doesn’t know why he wouldn’t, anyway, unless Chiron’s talked to him too.

Which would only result in him slipping her cliff-bars or something under the table. 

Percy going to the cabin is a little redenundant. And, again, his shoes are very clearly not winged, so that could be awkward.

So instead, he backtracks, entering The Big House in record speed. Not knowing where Chiron or Mr. D are makes him itch, but if this place is as safe as it seems, the worst case scenario if he gets caught is that he’ll get an earful.

He’ll get an earful if he doesn’t try to check in here, anyway, so he figures it’s a lose-lose situation.

Still, he thinks, pushing the door open to the infirmary, I’m not really proving Zeus wrong right now.

He tells himself that he’s not stealing. Technically he has access to pretty much everything at camp. It comes with staying here. 

Maybe it’s because Chiron told him to sleep, or maybe it’s because the thievery accusation is so fresh in Percy’s mind, but he still doesn’t feel like he’s really just borrowing anything.

“Oh!” 

He freezes, hand on the doorknob, blinking into the infirmary. His gaze lands on the boy standing with a cup full of ambrosia. Instantly, his face heats as he takes a step back.

It’s his turn to say “oh,” followed by a “Sorry, am I not supposed to be in here?”

From the looks of it, he shouldn’t be. Not every bed in the infirmary is filled, but there’s still quite a few. Just a quick glance around the room gets him to notice the haggard expressions, cuts and scrapes, and just general aura of no one here being in the best shape. Still, they smile at him, and few of them even wave. He waves back slowly. 

He’s gotta be bright red now. Forget his quest, he’s sure that people here need these

supplies way more than him. 

So he takes another step, before the boy shakes his head, breaking into a smile. “Hi, Percy. No, you should be fine. You’re not supposed to leave The Big House, anyway.”

Cringing, Percy nods. “Right. Yeah.”

He thinks the smile grows more crooked, but it might have just been a trick of light. 

“Do you need help with anything?” The boy says, handing the ambrosia to someone who cradles their arm. 

“Uh, no.” Percy rocks back on his feet. “Um. I just. Do you have any bandaids or anything?” 

So much for not asking for supplies, but band aids have never saved anyone’s life before. Percy doesn’t think so, anway. 

The boy studies him, like he’s actually thinking about saying yes and handing him some. Then, he shakes his head again, his smile faltering a little.

“I’m sorry. If I had any, I couldn’t give them to you.”

“Chiron said you can’t.” Percy guesses, and the boy nods too. “He’s really cracked down on this, huh?” He watches the boy, trying to see if he freezes, or tries to backtrack. Instead, the boy’s smile returns.

“He has.” He takes a seat on an empty gurney. “If it makes you feel any better, you never had many supplies.”

But you survived anyway, Percy thinks the implication is. He knows the boy can’t tell him even that, but he assumes that there would have been a lot more tears if Annabeth, at least, had died a tragic death and suddendly showed back up at camp.

Surprisingly enough, the hand around his heart lessens its grip a little at the boy’s words. 

“Yeah.” He says. “It actually does, a little.” 

The boy huffs a laugh, and now that Percy’s really seeing him, he’s struck by a sense of familiarity. The fact that the boy had brought in the ambrosia for someone else tells him that he’s probably a kid of Apollo. If his memory serves him right.

Which is still weird, because he doesn’t think he’s really gotten to know any kids of that god. And yet, from the smile, and the way he holds himself: confident, but not the point of being full of himself, Percy’s sure he knows him.

He knows that spark in his eyes, too. 

A breeze from somewhere in the room carries the scent of ambrosia to him, and it morphs into the smell of freshly baked cookies. 

He says the name before he even reconginzes that he knows it.

“Will?” 

The boy straightens, practically beaming. “So you do remember me!”

“Yeah, but,” Percy’s eyes dart to the floor. He holds up a hand to his waist. “You were like. Tiny.”

He remembers that too. A mop of blond hair constantly falling into Will’s face. A face that was hardly visible anyway, since the boy could barely peer over the gurney. 

Will laughs. “I don’t think I was that small.” 

Percy shakes his head as he glances back at him. He smiles too, and he’d forgotten how good it feels to do that. “Sorry. My sense of time and height is a little weird right now.”

Will laughs again. “Don’t worry about it. But yeah, it’s me. I don’t think you’re supposed to know that, though.”

“Yeah, well…” Percy murmurs. Will is right though. Either he’d gotten a giant growthspurt in two weeks, or Annabeth’s wrong, and it’s been way more than a few months.

And if Annabeth’s wrong, maybe the world really has ended.

“So.” Will says, tilting his head. “What’s happened in your quest so far?”

“We just killed Medusa.” Percy says, and then starts a little as he realizes how easily that phrase came out of his mouth. Yeah, he’d been able to say that to Annabeth, because she’d been there, but now that he says it to an outsider, he really feels the gravity of it sinking into him.

They’ve just killed Medusa.

Medusa, like the actual monster from Greek mythology.

Percy knows that that’s small potatoes compared to things like the fact that his dad is literally Poseidon. But still.

All Will does is nod, and something in Percy wonders what sort of life future him has lead, if Will’s not even gonna react that much. 

“Musta been scary.” Will says, like he’s also realized that he should have said something else. 

“Yeah.” Percy says, but to be perfectly honest, Medusa’s death feels like it happened years ago. And when he does think about it too long, his stomach curls in on itself, but the jiterness is beginning to fade.

Will opens his mouth, like he’s going to say something else, but before he does, a hand claps Percy on the shoulder. It about breaks his collarbone.

He yelps, attempting to spin around, but the hand’s practically glued to him. 

“Holy shit.” He hears someone saying, and here comes the nervousness. He sinks underneath the hand, holding back a sigh.

“Holy fucking shit.” The hand leaves him, and he turns. A girl, a girl who’s face he knows almost as well as his own at this point, grins back down at him. “You were a twig.”

He takes a step back. “I’m not a twig.” Which is like saying “Hey, Clarisse, feel free to give me a swirly. I’ve been waiting all day.”

Clarisse looks to get that, too, because her grin turns more feral. “Yeah, right.”

It happens all at once. The plunge of Percy’s stomach as his feet leave the floor, the grip around his wrist so he doesn’t fall altogether. Within seconds, he’s staring up at Clarisse as she holds him bridal-style. His own words tumble to the back of his throat. 

“I could probably bench press you.” Clarisse says, then reajusts her grip. Percy’s caught between trying to telepathically soothe his now aching wrist, and letting out a pretty undignified yelp, if he does say himself. 

Clarisse either doesn’t hear it (which is doubtful), doesn’t care, or both, because Percy’s around six feet off the floor before she acknowledges him again.

“Yeah, man,” her voice is even, as if she’s not hoisting him over her head like it’s nothing. Percy thinks that maybe this is how this all ends. That he’s destined to die from being dropped by the daughter of Ares. He half thinks she’s going to hurl him out of the nearest window. 

“Clarisse-” Will warns, and Percy’s still choking on his words to tell him that saying her name won’t really cut it. But his gut swoops again, and he’s back to just being carried. Clarisse isn’t even looking at him now.

“You think I’ll break him or something, Solace?” She says, but sets him down. It takes everything in him not to stumble, his knees suddenly weak. 

“He’s dealt with worse, anyway.” She finishes, clapping him on the back, and maybe she hadn’t broken him completely, but he’s sure that his spine is just about shattered. He must have made some noise, too, because Clarisse finally looks down at him.

And yeah, thirteen year old Clarisse could take him easy, but given the fact that Percy has to crane his head to look at this version of her, she’d probably eat the two of them for breakfast. Her muscles bulge under her sleeves, and when she runs a hand through her hair, he catches a bandage wrapped around it. He’d think her the daughter of Ares, even if they didn’t know each other. 

The grin on her face is another thing, too. He thinks he’d rather take her scowling, because then, at least, he knows what he’s gonna get.

“What? That’s too hard for you?” She says, then shakes her head. “Man, Jackson, you really have changed.”

“I don’t know, Clarisse. Kinda,” Percy mutters, “you used enough force to kill a grown man.” 

She stares at him, and of course, now would have to be the time where he can’t shut up. Now he’ll be dragged back to the watery pits of the bathrooms, and the first drink he’ll get this entire day is toilet water. Or, if he’s pissed her off enough, she’ll give him a broken nose to match hers. 

But she doesn’t get the chance to knock him out. He doesn’t have the chance to run, either, because a quick intake of air from Will gets all of them frozen.

Will’s eyes dart to the side, like he’s trying to signal someone. It’s that that unglues Percy’s feet from the floor, and it’s that gets him to turn around. As he does, his hand moves to his pocket, and he fiddles gently with Riptide’s cap. He sort of expects for his fingers to slip and for the sword to stab in his leg, but more than that, he anticipates seeing some sort of hideous monster right behind him.

Another hellhound, or a giant, or something he’s never even heard of before. 

What stands behind him isn’t a “what”. It’s a “who”, and Percy’s tongue stills altogether. 

Eyes. Searching, then piercing. 

Hair, carefully crafted into braids.

A light frown. 

Percy knows that frown. Knows it probably too well. 

But there’s differences, too.

The necklace that she clutches holds more beads now. He can tell, even with her trying to conceal them from him. 

And she’s taller. Not as tall as Clarisse, but when she moves to stand at her side, she’s past her jawline. 

And with that height comes age. She looks like she’s closer to Luke’s age than to his, and he swallows. 

She still doesn’t smile, but he doesn’t expect her to. What catches him off guard is the slight indent in her cheek, like she’s biting the inside of her mouth to keep herself from doing so.

Her eyes finally give her away. Her gaze is soft. She’s giving him the same look everyone else has been all day, but this time he’s sure that she has to be looking at someone else. 

But her eyes are focused on him, and there’s a spark in there that he knows, too. 

She knows him, he realizes, and his palms have always sweat at that realization. But now his face is heated, hotter than the sun could ever make it.

His voice cracks as he speaks, and he cringes again. Still, the name falls out of his mouth anyway. 

“Annabeth.” 

And then the smile peaks through, and his heart thuds against his chest.

“Percy.” Annabeth says.

For a few seconds, all is good. 

Then the frown returns, and her eyes narrow. “What happened?”

Chapter Text

Annabeth screams.

Almost as instantly as she does, she’s snapping her jaw shut, squeezing the books against her so tight that they could have bent, if they hadn’t been hardcover. There might as well have been an explosion- she crouches, adopting the same position that she would have in that situation, and using her body to shield the texts from the attack.

But when she spits the salt from her tongue, the sand isn’t stained red, and instead of burning her, what lands on her skin soothes it. Her ears don’t ring- instead, they find the sound of droplets of water crashing back down to from whence they came. 

It takes her a moment. A moment to see the warping at the edges of several pages of her books, a moment to swipe the water from her face, to notice the laughter.

There is a voice in her head that tells her that maybe the laughter isn’t meant to be loud. When there’s nothing else other than the sound of lapping waves and birds singing to the trees, it’s not hard to miss, and Annabeth wouldn’t have done so had it not been for the eruption of the lake itself.

But she knows the howling laughter in the woods during Capture The Flag all her life, laughter that reaches pitches that are almost impressive. 

This laughter bubbles out, flowing like a river. But it’s the sort of laugh you hear when you’re friends with someone. 

Annabeth’s damp hair reminds her all too suddenly that there is not any way that she could be laughing with whoever launched themselves from the water.

She pivots on her heel, ready to yell at whichever idiot ruined the books, which idiot decided to mess with her, when her eyes land on the boy responsible.

“Boy” is the wrong word to use. Even as he treads water, she can tell by the broadness of his shoulders and the length of his arms that he’s into his teens. She’s proven right when he pulls himself up from the lake onto the nearby pier, but she can’t find it in herself to care.

That is one of the thousands of reasons that she knows that something is wrong with her.

Her mouth, once full of saltwater, turns dry.

The rest of her skin burns from what she thinks is the sun, until she remembers that camp was designed so that sunlight was never too much.

The worst thing is that a memory comes to mind. An elbow in the ribs, a quick shove and light laughter.

The Aphrodite kids were never the only ones to hang up posters or photos of their crushes on their wall. There has always been at least one Athena child, hiding pictures of who they like in binders or journals, pretending as though the rest of their siblings do not know they have them. 

Luke had always thought it funny that Annabeth had never once had a poster or picture of a crush by her bunk.

She had always said that she hadn’t met anyone worth her time.

The teenager approaches, running a hand through blonde hair. His grin is crooked, his stride long and purposeful.

“Got-” He begins, voice still shaking from laughter. And then his eyes land on Annabeth’s books, and the laughter dies. The smile drops.

His eyes widen.

“Shit. Shit, you were carrying books, I’m-”

His gaze meets hers. He stops.

Once more, nothing but the sound of waves.

Annabeth does not know why she looks down at her books again. Her grip on them remains tighter than ever, but her eyes dart down to them regardless.

The edges of the pages staring at her are straight. As they had never been near a single ounce of water in their lives.

Her heart plunges to the pits of her chest, and taking a dip into the River Phlegethon would have made her feel cooler.

“Percy.” She chokes out.

A monster. She decides. The teenager in front of her must be a monster. A monster who uses her own emotions against her. Except that they must have been twisted and morphed into something unrecognizable, because fear was what had gotten her body to react in the way that it did. She has already determined that.

Percy Jackson does not invoke any memories of pictures or posters of crushes on walls.

And monsters have gotten past camp’s borders before. 

It’s a good reminder, she thinks. That no place is safe, and now all she can think of is that she’d trusted Chiron all too easily.

“Annabeth.” The figure in front of her speaks. Even the way he says her name- more like a question than a statement- sounds as though the monster has read from a guidebook on how to act like the boy. But the name is spoken in a voice deeper than his, and, with a small twinge in her chest, she notes another reason why the person in front of her can’t possibly be him.

“You’re not supposed to see me.”

If he was Percy, he would be correct. But Percy wouldn’t be here. They may only really know each other through this quest and the tutoring studies she’s led. But what would he be doing at camp, when one of the only things she truly knows about him is how desperately he wants to get out ?

Annabeth’s hand lowers to her tucked-away dagger.

“If you really were Percy, someone would have IMed you. You wouldn’t even be here.”

The monster’s eyebrows furrow. His eyes dart to the dagger, and Annabeth grabs the hilt of it, holding her breath. 

“Yeah?” He straightens. “There’s not gonna be a whole lot of rainbows around when you’re underwater. Or when it hasn’t rained in Long Island Sound for weeks. Years, if we’re counting camp.”

Annabeth curses internally. She would have hoped that a monster would be stupid.

“How am I supposed to know that anyone else knows you’re here, either?” The figure says. 

The answer catches in Annabeth’s throat. Her hand drifts away from her dagger. 

What sort of monster asks a logical question like that? The sort of one which is so plainly self-indulgent?

Maybe she could have come up with an answer for that, too. Except that now the teenager pretending to be Percy lowers his hand to his pocket. She can’t think of any monster incapacitating themselves in that way. 

Still, her own moves back to the dagger. 

Her books weigh down in her spare arm, and she wishes that she could break eye-contact long enough to try and squint through any Mist and to the pages too dry. As it is, she keeps her eyes on someone who is looking at her like she has just given him a riddle. 

“You don’t.” She manages to get out. She would say that, if she herself was a monster, the border would have kept her out, but given recent events, that’s not as likely anymore.

He gives a slow nod.

“I guess so. And marching right up to Chiron and asking him is off the table for now.” The teenager’s hand digs deeper into his pocket.

“Obviously.” Annabeth says, although some part of her informs her that it’s not all that obvious at all. She sucks in a breath.

“We’ll have to ask each other questions. You can start.”

 The question itself could be based on what he knows. The teenager blinks, like he’d had the same idea.

“Oh. Uh.” 

He’s also clearly gone to Percy Jackson’s School of Being Inarticulate.  

Annabeth can’t even smile to herself.

The boy’s gaze drifts to her beads before speaking. “How many days did it take me to get through The Argonautica?”

Two lessons. At the very most, it should have taken three. Once the eyes adjust to the ancient Greek and the writing style, most epics lose the capacity to be tongue twisters.

But that’s not how long it had taken Percy to finish it, and Annabeth grits her teeth at the look on the figure’s face.

He knows exactly how long it had taken them.

“We never finished it. I thought we could get through it two to three days, but-”

The boy’s eyebrows raise. He doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t have to. 

“There was-” Greek text may not be a tongue twister for Annabeth anymore. English, in everything other than reading and sometimes writing, has never failed her, either. But the figure is expecting an English answer, yet Annabeth’s tongue refuses to cooperate.

A different sort of expression shines through the boy’s eyes. As if he’s properly seeing her as Annabeth. Not a stranger.

Annabeth’s breath hisses through her teeth. “Something happened.”

This time, she’s sure that he smiles, and that action alone hints at two possibilities. Percy hasn’t exactly been in the habit of smiling at her, although she will admit that that goes both ways. 

So this could be a monster.

But if he is Percy, if he does remember the utterly mortifying shriek Annabeth let out as soon as one of those spindly banes of her existence clambered over her arm, then it’s no wonder he would smile.

Oh no. 

“My turn.” She snaps. She stays steadfast to the idea that she does need a turn, although the teenager’s hand has left his pocket, and no pen or hilt of a sword sits in his palm.

Even with that thought in mind, she finds herself struggling to think of any questions at all. She’s half-tempted to keep to the theme of lessons, but any monster could have figured out what Percy does and does not know. Although, to be fair, based on what Grover’s told her about the Fury attack, that’s not a set rule to live by.

Still, Annabeth finds a different question leaving her mouth anyway. It might be petty. She can practically hear Chiron scolding her for it, but she does have to relish the way that the boy’s expression drops when she speaks.

“What’s “initiation?”” She flips her hair over her shoulder, letting a small smile peak through.

The boy shifts  his weight. “Yeah, okay. Don’t know what I was expecting, but I deserved that.”

He sighs. “Clarisse La Rue dunks newbies’ heads into toilet water. Says it’s to “toughen them up” whatever the he… heck that’s supposed to mean.”

This can’t be him.

And there’s no doubt in Annabeth’s mind that it is him. Even with the gray streak that she finally spots in his hair. Even with the scars that line his jaw and his hands. 

It was a fluke. That’s her next decision. 

She saw Percy from far away, and mistook him for someone else. Someone more threatening than Seaweed Brain could ever be. Even if he had been looming over her. Even if the water had exploded further than it ever should have. 

That was why she had been scared.

She had still felt scared.

Something tells her that thinking about it will lead her down a rabbit hole that she’ll never be able to escape, so she doesn’t.

 She forces herself not to.

“I’m twelve years old, Percy, not two. You can swear in front of me.”

Percy begins to grin, and she almost tells him to wipe it off his face, but then his eyes go round and he jolts. 

“Did you say twelve?”

She frowns, bracing herself for the instant infantilizing. But Percy glances back towards the cabins, his voice far away as he speaks again. 

“You weren’t on a quest, were you?”
Annabeth stills.

“The Big House.” She says, without thinking. 

She doesn’t know when she starts running. What is obvious is the rawness of her ankles from where grass cuts against them. Her own curses through gasping breaths, the pounding of feet behind her.

She barely has time to look to the side before Percy has left her vision. When she turns her head, she can make out the neon orange of his shirt, although it gets further away by the second. 

It’s just because he’s older. She now admits to herself, but each step he takes is another bound. Then, for the first time, she realizes that he never told her how much older. Her heart almost tears itself out from her chest.

Fourteen, she thinks. 

He has to be fourteen or fifteen , she tells herself as her feet find the steps of The Big House.

But the heart thuds and thuds and thuds, and it does not stop thudding until she yanks open the door and sees Annabeth Chase, standing there and fiddling with her beads.

Her sneakers squeal against the hardwood floor. Her books almost fall from where she’d tucked them underneath her arm at some point. How she’d been able to hold them is a mystery in itself.

But she stays focused on the girl who stands in front of her.

Her hair is longer, donning the same gray streak that Percy’s counterpart had. There’s a scar right above her eyebrow. Another below her cheekbone. 

“Woah.” Older Percy says, and in her peripheral vision, she sees him standing directly across from the Percy that she knows. A Percy who, for once, she thinks she can empathize with. 

“Hey.” The older one says. “Um. How’s it going?”

If the younger Percy responds, Annabeth’s not aware enough to hear it. 

At the age of six, she was told that she was creepy. Unsurprisingly, the girl who had said that couldn’t tell her why, only saying that it was because she looked at people the way the scary characters in movies did. 

No matter how much Annabeth tries to scrub her brain of that memory, it has stuck to her like glue. It should have stopped stinging once she got to camp, but Luke had once accidentally reopened the wound by saying that she looked like she knew things about everyone long before they even brought those things up to her.

Of course this older version of herself should know everything about her. But she does know everything about her, and the way she looks at her now, a variety of different emotions written plainly on her face, makes Annabeth’s stomach twist in on itself.

Then her counterpart notices the books in her hand and speaks.

“Did you find anything?” 

If she had been anyone else, Annabeth might not have noticed the grimace. As it is, she does, at the same glad to have a proper question to answer.

“Nothing yet.” Her voice is choked, even to her, but she keeps her chin tilted up. She watches as her counterpart reads the book titles. Evidently satisfied, she rocks back on her heels at the same time that older Percy finally speaks.

“How’d you beat me here?"

“I ran.” Annabeth Chase of the future says, her tone blunt. And then, to the younger Annabeth’s horror, she smiles. “I told you that giving me a head-start was a bad idea, Seaweed Brain.”

“I didn’t. The fish were just a pain in the-” he catches younger Annabeth’s eye- “butt.”

Her counterpart snorts. “Nice save.” Which earns her a look from older Percy. Even that is as practiced as the rest of their conversation. 

Annabeth deliberately chooses to ignore the fact that said conversation had implied that they had been around each other before this. If anything, Chiron had probably forced them to interact, just as he had forced older Percy to be back at camp. A few years could, realistically, be enough for even an immortal centaur to have some sort of change in personality, as unlikely as that is.

“Did you know?” The teenager asks, and the Annabeth Chase of the future responds.

“I heard rumors when I got back. I managed to prove them when I snuck in here. It would have been easier if I had my invisibility cap.” She says pointedly. Annabeth almost asks why she’d be bringing this up to Percy, when the older boy takes out her cap from seemingly nowhere and hands it. He starts to say something, when Clarisse La Rue enters the room with a paper cup in her hand. 

She curses when she sees Annabeth.

“We’ve got two know-it-alls instead of one. And an extra idiot, huh?” She looks at older Percy.

“Why did you have be so fucking tall? Can barely shove you around anymore.” 

Annabeth visualizes the both of them standing next to each other, then starts. The difference in their heights is almost half of her own. 

“You should have tried harder to grow a little more, Clarisse. Then we wouldn’t have this problem.” Older Percy deadpans.

Idiot. Annabeth echoes Clarisse. It’s hard not to, especially when she watches for the well-earned sock to the stomach that he’ll be getting in a moment.

But a moment passes. Then another, and then another. And all Clarisse does is fold her arms and grumble that she bets that she could beat him up so that he’d lose a few inches. 

Annabeth stares, her ears straining for any screaming. 

Realizing that her jaw has dropped, she closes her mouth, and looks to her counterpart, willing her to distract the two teenagers. To say something that’s the verbal equivalent of a piece of string held in front of a cat, although she is unsure of which person would be the cat in the situation.

But her counterpart has returned to studying the books, as if the confrontation is some sort of ambient noise.  

Maybe this is normal. Annabeth tries to reassure herself, taking a quick look in at her Percy. Percy likes to run his mouth and Clarisse isn’t one to shut up, either. 

She breathes easier once she grows mindful of his position near the wall too. It’s like he’s staring at the hellhound all over again. 

He is still enough to be one of the statues in Auntie Em’s garden.

His face is the color of paper.

Annabeth frowns, a thought beginning to form. She shifts, but he still doesn’t turn away from his counterpart. 

She curses the fact that her own counterpart is staring at the books so intently that an irrational part of Annabeth worries that they’ll burst into flame. 

If Percy had some information that she didn’t, he would have taken out Riptide by now. 

Wouldn’t he have?

“How are we supposed to call you guys?” Clarisse asks, and reluctantly, Annabeth acknowledges her. 

“Brat One and Brat Two?” The teenager nods to her and younger Percy respectively. 

Older Annabeth sighs, then regards Clarisse. “Hilarious. Annabeth One and Annabeth Two wouldn’t work either. Maybe…” She searches the floor infront of her. Then, a smile, slow and one that Annabeth hasn’t seen directed towards anybody in this room, appears on her lips.

“Percy and Perseus?” She says. Older Percy shudders.

“Ugh. Who are you, Mrs. Dodds?” He shakes his head. 

Annabeth jolts at the laugh. Not a loud laugh. Not a shoulder-shaking laugh either. A laugh that she could have missed if she had left the room for ten seconds. But a laugh nonetheless. 

Another fluke. 

A startled laugh. Annabeth has almost given those before.

That’s all it is.

“Fine. I’ll go by Chase, and Percy,” the older Annabeth jabs a finger at Percy’s counterpart, “will go by Jackson.” 

“You gotta steal those names from me too, Chase?” Clarisse asks. Chase rolls her eyes. 

“I can’t steal my own last name, Clarisse.” 

Annabeth swallows. 

She shouldn’t be able to. But Chase hasn’t been her last name in years. If ever. Not really.

She won’t bring that up to her counterpart. It’s stupid to do soShe already knows that.  There’s no logical reason why she wouldn’t go by it, and it’s not like Annabeth will be taking the name anyway.

But her mouth tastes bitter. 

“No questions?” If Chase has noticed her hesitation, she doesn’t take that as a yes.

“Good. Percy’s already filled me in on what happened. I’ll need you,” she addresses Annabeth, “to tell me if you noticed anything else important. As for now… Will’s already doing lookout in case Chiron comes back, but I’ll need Clarisse to help him.”

“Kicking me out, huh?” Clarisse pushes herself off from the wall. Annabeth watches, transfixed, but the daughter of Ares moves past Chase without incident. She does, however, elbow Jackson.

“Maybe I should give you or the brat a last minute swirly. To say goodbye. I could still take you in a fight. Just can’t push you around.”
Jackson huffs. “Go ahead, if you want a mouth full of toilet water too. I heard the sewage tastes great, this time of year.”

Annabeth is angry. Undeniably angry. The proof is right there, with the heat of her cheeks and the thudding of her heart. She is unable to take her eyes off of Jackson because she’s clearly pretending to glare holes into him.

Just as angry as Clarisse is, she’s sure, until the girl turns her back and barks out a loud “Ha!”

And with that, there is only Annabeth and Percy and the two older versions of themselves.

At the thought of Percy, Annabeth turns to him again. Maybe she’s not angry at Jackson’s sheer stupidity. Maybe she was right the first time, and Percy’s clocked onto it too. 

“Do you know what’s going on?” Jackson asks, and Annabeth does not need to see Chase to know that she’s frowning, too.

“I think so. But I need to make sure.”

Come on, Percy. Annabeth tries to tell him telepathically. If you have something to say, say it now.

As if he can hear her, his shoulders raise his to his ears. He takes a breath.

It shakes.

Annabeth stops biting her lip.

When they’d been with Medusa, the sword in his hand had trembled slightly. His voice had shifted in pitch when he spoke.

But he had not been this pale.

“What-” He says, and their counterparts turn to him. His concentration remains on his counterpart, but she can practically hear him forcing his voice not to strain as he says the next words. The words that make the world stop dead.

“What happened to Mom?”

Chapter Text

Most of the things Percy’s learned about being a demigod, he’s picked up from experience.

Don’t use phones.

Don’t trust random sculptors.

The easy way is never actually easy.

He might have understood that last thing years ago. 

But he doesn’t need to be a demigod to know that you never let anybody see you cry.

Not that he’s close to crying. A few quick blinks and he might as well be as good as new. Other than the scrapes on his knees and the fact that, if he ever makes it to ninety, he’ll still probably smell like a dirty oven. 

He’s not a crier. Hasn’t been since the first time he saw Gabe’s ugly face. Actually, that might be a lie. He’s sure the guy’s BO has made him tear up at some point or another.

He scuffs the ground with his sneaker. Digs it into the hole into the ground that he’s managed to make in the past minute of being under the tree. Swallows down the lump in his throat, though that’s kinda hard to do when you’re staring at the floor.

“Dunno.” He says. When all he gets back as an answer is silence, he adds:  “Didn’t look any different from the rest of the woods.”

A couple of feet away, a boot, worn at the toe, taps the dirt and kicks up some dust. It stops after a few seconds.

“It wouldn’t have.” A- Chase says, and when Percy looks up at her, (blinking one last time for good measure) she’s rubbing her chin with her finger- like she’s substituting it for her unclasped necklace. If current circumstances weren’t current, maybe he would have laughed at the cliche. 

By the time he’d told her the basics and Annabeth and his double had burst in, she’d managed to get her expression back to normal. Normal for this version of her, anyway, up until she’d seen her younger self.

Still, out of everyone, she’s the one who looks to have it the most together. She’d barely even looked back when she’d lead them to some spot of woods outside of the Big House, and she’s not as bug-eyed as she reads over Annabeth’s shoulder- who still could be giving her some sort of competition.

 The younger girl’s eyes snap to Percy, and she’s itching to tell him “I told you so”- he can tell by the way her mouth twists into something like a smile. But there isn’t anything about their current situation that she’s really told him, so she has to settle on: “I was right.”

Percy doesn’t realize that he was supposed to respond until she ducks her head back down to the text again. Chase fills in the rest.

“You went through a pocket portal.” She says, like the words “pocket portal” and “peaceful forest path” are one and the same. Her eyebrows furrow, her gaze beginning to roam around the rest of the group, lingering on Percy. For a split-second, her frown lessens, and Percy forces himself to meet them. 

“That’s the colloquial term, anyway. They’re found in literal pockets in time. Kronos created them during the,” here, Chase trails off for a second, before making up her mind, “the battle between the titans and gods. He attempted to force a few of them into entering the portal themselves, but for one reason or another, he was unsuccessful. It’s assumed that he was hoping that trapped and isolated, a god would lose the willpower to even free themselves from the portal. They’re notoriously difficult to leave.”

Jackson shifts, leaning against a tree. “Hold on,” he says, a pitch to his voice that Percy’s never heard from himself. “If uh. Kronos ever did come back- he'd be able to use those portals again. Unless they were all destroyed when he was chopped up.”
Annabeth huffs a laugh. “I doubt that Kro-” she pales, “that he would be able to leave Tartarus.” The rest of her words don’t look to have the confidence that she clearly wants them to.

Chase turns her attention to Jackson, frowning. “They weren’t- if only for the fact that completely destroying something related to time could mess with the natural order of things.”

Percy faintly realizes that that just sounds like Olympian PR-speak for “it was too hard and we don’t want to admit it”.

“And he wouldn’t be able to use the ones he’d created if he’d returned after the shift to America.” Chase continues, studying a patch of grass. “They’re invisible, and paradoxical. Someone returning from the past would forget the future, because it technically hadn’t happened to them yet. I think they were supposed to be traps, rather than direct weapons. Even if you were able to leave a portal, you could stumble right back into it, so no one could have confirmed to Kronos where they were. I can’t imagine Kronos sending spies into the future and keeping them there, anyway. It would have been putting too much trust into them. ” 

Silence again, one that Percy barely notices. There’s some part of that’s keeping track of this. But the other part of him, the part that’s in charge of his thoughts, keeps blasting one on a broken record, and it’s not about Kronos. 

Chase starts talking. “Finding a specific one for a specific time would be almost impossible. And it’s not like the times you travel to are flexible. Each portal’s set to a specific time period- years into the future, millennia into the past, etcetera. Kronos would have probably had to create new portals all over again.” She takes the book from Annabeth without much effort, then squints down at it. 

“Kronos- admittedly- is strong, but he’s not invincible. I’d assume that creating things of that magnitude would have been incredibly taxing for him. It would make little strategic sense to waste that much time and energy creating something that hadn’t worked the first time.” She finishes. She focuses on Percy and Annabeth again, and somehow Percy has a question and can speak it.

“How come we know so much about the portals, then, if you’re supposed to forget about them the second you get out of one?”

“Mostly from the gods themselves,” Chase answers, quick and curt. Maybe a bit too quick. 

Percy wonders (but doesn’t ask), if maybe the gods, in charge of a whole lot of creatures, some that they didn’t particularly like, had thought that maybe Kronos had had the right idea. 

He’s no expert on the gods, but he thinks that they could have destroyed the portals if they’d really wanted to. Excuses don’t work on him.

He swipes his palms on his pants. Bile rises in his throat, and the volume of the record in his head reaches an all-time high. 

Chase gnaws at a nail, then drops her hand. “Even though pocket portals were never destroyed, they are weaker than they would be if Kronos was in his hayday. They tend to blip in and out of existence sporadically, though they typically reappear in the spot that they were. There are two ways of getting out of one. You either, one, retrace your steps immediately, until you’re back in your own time, (that’s what you did, Percy), or two, wait until the date and time matches the date and time you came from. Then the portal should reopen.” 

She doesn’t leave much time for Percy to understand what she’s said before continuing. “If you’ve just handled Medusa, then it’s still the quest’s first day.” She pauses. 

“Unless you were out in the early hours of the morning.” She only gets her momento back when Annabeth tells her that they weren’t. “Good. Then it should have been June eleventh.” 

“Good”. That means something.

Annabeth confirms the date. Then her eyebrows furrow. “What time we left is a different problem.” 

It's her turn to look at Percy. She starts to ask a question he’ll never hear the tail-end of, because she fixates on his hand. It takes a second for that record to stop playing, for the fog to clear a little. Then his fingers remember the watch before he does, peeling some of the strap away from clammy skin.

 Given the way it had been chafing earlier, he’s half-surpised it hasn’t left blisters. Annabeth had tightened it an extra notch earlier- making the warning to keep the watch on (even if separated) seem more like a threat than it probably was. He hadn’t said anything then, even when his fingertips had grown cold and begun to buzz. He’d almost felt like he should have given her something in return, but he didn’t think that lint or a stray thread were all that useful in a quest. 

He glances at the watch now, breath steadying a little when his hunch is right. For the first time in his life, he has an answer when she asks him what the face says. Some god decides to play nice for once- his voice doesn’t crack when he responds. 

“Eight twelve.” 

Annabeth nods, not saying anything. Then she nods again, quicker. 

“We’re behind.” Jackson says. 

“Ten hours behind.” Chase agrees, snapping the book shut. She hands it back to a wide-eyed Annabeth. “Though it doesn’t matter. Like I was saying before- the time pockets are fixed. You could spend a whole year here, and if you met the terms of re-entry, you’d return to the exact second you left the past.”

Annabeth flips through the book, and it's only when she relaxes, closing the book too, that the coal in Percy’s chest crumbles. Not much. But there’s a difference between that heat and the one that settles in Percy’s limbs. His hands unlench bit by bit, like they belong to some action figure who’s coming to life. The record’s noise fades a little.

He lets the rest of them talk. He doesn’t think there’s much else to say, anyway. Nothing that matters right now. He sucks in a quiet breath through his teeth. Watches to see if anyone will notice. If anyone will call him out on it.

No one does, and so he lets it out and takes in another one. Then does the same thing again, and again, until the ground underneath of him isn’t a wobbliling blur of brown and the occasional green.

He doesn’t think he’s ever done this because of something good happening. Then again, he can’t remember the last time he hasn’t sucked it up before. Probably years before he even met Grover.

Grover! He starts. He cuts into whatever Chase had been saying.
“What about Grover?” He asks, mouth dry, and their eyes all snap to him. Chase’s sharpen after a split-second. 

“We’ll look for him.” She decides. “But even if he did find the portal, I doubt that he’d stay here for very long. He’s aware of time pockets, and he knows how to get out. Unless Mrs. O’Leary chased him away.”

Percy doesn’t miss her glance at Jackson, but more than that, he doesn’t miss the way the hellhound’s name flies off her tongue like it’s her dog. As his heart slows at her words, he tries to remember how Annabeth had reacted to Mrs. O’Leary. Other than panicking. 

She’d smiled a little, after the dog had licked her. He’d caught her trying to hide it, but she hadn’t shoved her away. He tries to imagine her with a dog now, or, he guesses, back in the past. Walking a little Pomeranian or some giant Great Dane. Sighing exaperatedly when the dog doesn’t sit when she tells it to. Or maybe telling it that it drools in its sleep.

He almost laughs. If she can’t handle human drool, she’d lose it at a dog’s. 

He doesn’t even know when Mrs. O’Leary had left. One minute she’d been there, and then at some point, when the world was turning up-side down, she’d vanished. Which could be a bad thing, but Annabeth interrupts his train of thought.

“We’ll have to find the portal too.” She says. “Or where it will be, once it pops back up.”
Chase nods, then hesitates. “We’ll help you.”
When Percy and Annabeth stiffen, she adds on: “You won’t leave the watch in the Hephaestus cabin. I wouldn’t have either. But you have no way of telling the time.”
Percy glances down at his watch. It still reads eight twelve. Chase angles her wrist to show them her time. Ten-forty-two. 

“Couldn’t you just give us your watch?” He asks, and they all turn to him. He wills himself to ignore the divot in the ground again.

Annabeth snaps back to Chase and Jackson, straightening. 

“I don’t think that’s the best idea…” Chase trails off.  She exchanges looks with Jackson, who rubs the back of his neck. His eyes dart from Chase, to Annabeth, to a tree just behind Percy, then back to Chase again. He sighs, and some remaining embers in Percy’s spark. 

If, for whatever reason, Chase is a monster, he sure can’t picture it. Maybe it’s the way she tilts her chin upwards like Annabeth does, or how she talks, so matter of fact that he’d feel a little stupid not to believe her. Maybe it’s because she obviously looks like Annabeth, and okay, maybe it’s the fact that now that he can see her clearly again, he’s had a really hard time looking away. 

But he can’t visualize her with fangs, or talons, or a voice that hisses on the letter “s”. To be fair, he can’t really do that with Jackson, either. He might as well be staring at his reflection. A reflection that’s aged like what? Ten years, sure, but even without the streak of grey in his hair, he knows it. He knows those eyes, too, and when Jackson works his jaw, he knows there’s words at the tip of his tongue that he’s swallowing down.

He guesses it says more about him than the guy infront of him that he sort of wants to be able to see glowing eyes and claws. It’d be better than seeing a guy who sighs like he’s ready to get rid of him, too.

“Look, trust me,” Jackson starts, the words slow, like his mouth doesn’t want to say them. Percy bites back a scoff. 

Right. Where’s Mom?

He hadn’t said that out loud. Annabeth isn’t glaring daggers into him, so he knows that he hasn’t. But Jackson finally looks back at him, though his hands find his pockets, like he’s bracing himself to do even that.

“I get it. I wouldn’t want to be followed around either.”

“It’s a precaution for all of us.” Chase cuts in. “Percy and I asked each other questions only the real versions of us would know. I’m assuming you two did the same?” She waits for Jackson’s confirmation.

They had, and Percy vaguely wishes that he’d been there to see Annabeth’s reaction to the guy infront of him. He must have pissed her off somehow, because the only time Percy had been able to look away from him at The Big House, she’d been staring at him like he was the only person in the room.

He hopes that Annabeth doesn’t ask what question he’d given Chase. He’d been too busy trying to pronounce words correctly at all to really even listen to himself. All he remembers is that she’d answered correctly- he thinks he’d asked her about the flooded bathroom situation. He definitely hadn’t paid much attention to what she’d asked him. It might have been about class or tutoring, but given that he hadn’t gotten a dagger to the throat, he must have answered truthfully. Whatever it was. 

“Perfect. But there’s still the risk of you running into something you aren’t supposed to know about yet.” The hellhound shaped elephant in the room remains unaknowaldged by Chase. “And it wouldn’t be particularly responsible of us to let you run around on your own, either. In case you aren’t supposed to be here. Moreso than you already are, anyway.”

She says that last bit in the same tone as she’s been speaking in this entire time. The word flow doesn’t falter, and she waits for their response like that hadn’t been particularly ominous. 

He peers at Annabeth, just in time to catch her looking right back at him. Then her focus shifts back to the other two people. And yeah, what exactly are they supposed to do? Make a run for it? Hide from people with access to a hellhound for eight hours? Without an invisibility cap?

And he can’t shake the idea that Chase is waiting for them to reply. Like they could say no and she’d have to deal with it.

“We’ll have to stay in the forest.” Annabeth finally says. 

“Sure.” Jackson responds. “If we find Chiron, he can take over, too. It’s not like he’ll be able to argue.”

Chase hums her agreement as the pressure on Percy’s shoulders falls. But her mouth twists.

“Then we have a plan.” Annabeth exhales. 

 ****

He becomes aware of the color of their shirts only as the sun begins to blind him, but no one calls out to stop them. After a while, once The Big House is far from view, the only noises he can hear are the occasional cracks of twigs underneath their feet, and his own puffing as he tries to keep up with the two people far out infront. 

If Chase and Jackson are trying to lure them away from camp, they’re doing a terrible job of making sure that he and Annabeth are keeping up with them. They’ve looked back once or twice, shortening their strides for a moment, before picking up speed again. 

There’s no way, he decides. Or maybe he begs, but he’d like to have a little bit of his own agency for once. There’s no way I would have stayed here if I didn’t rescue Mom. Not long enough to learn how to match Annabeth’s pace, or for her to want to walk so close to him that they’re practically brushing shoulders.

Absolutely no way. 

But he would have thought that, if Chase is right, and he’ll forget about all of this anyway, that the older version of himself would give him a hand and tell him some good news. But, other than the looks back, Jackson hasn’t addressed him at all. 

A few times, Chase leans into him, or he leans into Chase, and they speak just low enough that even snippets of their conversation are quickly carried away by wind. Percy chews on this as his mouth turns bitter.

Whatever’s made Chase chatty to Jackson has not affected Annabeth in the slightest. To be honest, it looks like she’s actively trying not to talk to him, gnawing at her lip with renewed vigor. 

Her eyes find his, and she stops her attack. Her face turns a little red, but if she’s angry, her voice doesn’t show it. 

“We should come up with a meeting spot,” she whispers, “in case things do go wrong and we get separated.”

He nods, slowing. A plan. Rules. He usually trips over rules. Breaks them before he can scramble back, but somehow any remaining shakiness inside of him vanishes as soon as Annabeth keeps talking.

“Maybe Thalia’s tree.” She thinks out loud. “It’s obvious, but it’s so obvious that they might think we wouldn’t be that naive. Or-”
“Sorry,” Percy interrupts, “”Thalia’s tree?””

Annabeth wrinkles her nose. “The tree at the border of camp?” She says incrediously. “The one that… that..” She blanches so violently that Percy doesn’t have time to remind her that he hasn’t been in camp for five years. 

“Oh.” He says, needing to reassure her and not knowing why. “Yeah. Yeah, I know that one.” He doesn’t ask who Thalia is.
He guesses that hiding by that tree would be pretty obvious. It would be like stealing the British crown and then hiding in The Tower of London. 

“No.” Annabeth asserts, after a pause that doesn’t suit them. “It wouldn’t work. Half of camp already thinks that I’m a baby, they’d-” 

She breaks off again, and Percy has to fill in the blanks.

“They’d think it’s your safety blanket.”
She nods, flashing a brief smile that sends Percy reeling. Another time he should have kept his mouth shut, he thinks. Even Chase hadn’t grinned at him like that.

Even Chase. That thought, which had suddenly come oh so naturally to him, makes the world spin. 

“I’d say to maybe find a body of water, but given who’d we be facing-” Annabeth shakes her head. Percy blinks.

“Yeah,” he says, “makes sense.” He’d gotten as far as exploding toilets. If it’s been years since then, Jackson probably could do a lot worse.

His foot snags against dirt, and he topples forwards. His palms sting as they hit the ground, but that’s nothing compared to the little pride he has. He curses interally, beginning to stand, cheeks almost as hot as the stares that bore into him. Not wanting to look up yet, especially when Jackson asks if he’s okay, he stands, glaring down at the patch of upturned grass.

“Yeah.” He manages. The dent in the ground puts the small little divot he’d made earlier to shame. Great. Now they’ll have something to remember me by. 

Annabeth moves over to him, peering over his shoulder. Suddenly, she grabs his wrist, and he’s surprised that his face doesn’t burst into flame.

“Look!” She hisses, pointing at the ground. Percy obliges, swiping at his scratched up palms. All he sees is grass, until he surveys the rest of the ground to the right of him. He freezes. 

About five feet away, another dip. His heart leaps at the sight of four little dints right above them. In another ten years, two more dents. 

Pawprints. 

“Mrs. O’Leary.” Jackson says from behind them. When Percy turns, he points up at splintering branches a few feet up. 

They all start to run. 

She’s been everywhere, Percy remembers. There’s a chance that these are old paw-prints. Still, he keeps sprinting. 

He bursts onto the clearing faster than if the dog herself had been chasing them.

A stitch radiates up his lungs, and he stops just as Annabeth crashes out from behind him. She pants, wiping the sweat from her forehead. His arm curls around his ribs, but he doesn’t have time to ask if they’d lost Chase and Jackson before those two find them. He drops his arm, and Annabeth steadies her breath.

“Here?” Jackson says, his voice just as the same as before. A few strands of hair stick to his forehead, as does Chase’s, but Percy can’t hear their breathing at all. Though, his own is still loud and raspy, and all he can do is shake his head and gesture to where the pawprints still keep going. 

They walk this time, and when Percy turns his head to talk to Annabeth again, he comes face to face with Jackson instead. He turns his head back to the front, where the two girls have pulled forward and managed to compromise on how fast to walk. 

He takes a breath, and the stitch stings once more before fading. Hoping he can pull off the same sort of quietness that Jackson and Chase had been able to achieve, he speaks.

“Uh.” He says, which is a great way to convince anyone to do anything. “So, since I’m not gonna remember anything-”

“Listen.” Jackson says. For a minute, he stares right out infront of him.. Then, like someone has pushed his head down, he looks at Percy. “If I could tell you literally anything without the small chance that the world would shatter in the process, I would.”
“Annabeth- I mean, Chase said-”

“I know.” Jackson narrows his eyes. “But I know you’ve watched time travel movies before. How many times did things change anyway?”

“Yeah, but-” Percy half-expects him to argue back. Now that Jackson just waits for him to continue, he has to come to terms with the fact that that’s the only reason why he’d spoken. 

He wouldn’t exactly call any of the gods his friends at the moment, and for all that he knows, this could be another test. Or payback for the Medusa thing. 

“You don’t even have to tell me about Mom.” He says, which might have been the weakest thing he could have said. Although Jackson has to tell him about Mom. He has to. Has to do something other than look at him the way he had at The Big House, has to explain that he’d just come back here for fun. That Mom’s okay and at home and waiting for him to come back. 

The world’s not over, right? The world’s not over so that means that she has to be fine. Jackson has to say-

“Just. Just, you know. Anything.” He says. And Jackson has to tell him that the only reason that he’s acting like Chiron or the social workers or Grover is because it’s an off day for him.

“Percy, if.” Percy only fully understands how tall he’ll get to be when Jackson straightens. “If I tell you, it’d help you out. But if the portal works how it’s supposed to, that means that we’re risking bad blood with the gods in the future for no solid reason. There’s people we care about now that we could screw over.”

Percy almost says that knowing how his life turns is a reason. A pretty solid reason, too. He even opens his mouth to say so.

Stillness settles between them instead.

He trips over another divot as Jackson walks ahead. He examines his hands as they enter the rest of the woods, trying not to choke on that same old lump in his throat. He counts each and every scratch, then shoves his hands in his pockets, and keeps his eyes pointedly away from Annabeth.