It doesn't matter how far she runs, trying to distance herself in some crazy attempt to dodge fate. They eyes always find her in the corners of her vision, in the darkness under the stairs up to her apartment, in the gap where a book has been bought at work. They watch her and wait, many eyes blinking.
She wishes they would just close in, give her something to fight against. Instead, they hover, they push at her boundaries, making her pull up her roots again and again and every time her world gets a little smaller. She isn't supposed to be here, working away at some used bookstore, keeping her head down. She's supposed to reach for the skies, make her own skyline, but she's trapped in the gaze of her destiny.
Spiders have always followed her. Her mother whispered to her when her father wasn't listening that there was one in the room when she was born, and when her mother saw it, she tried to keep Annabeth safe inside her, because she knew what that meant. Knew that the curse had skipped her only to find her daughter. Her mother loved her enough to try to keep her from the world, but not enough to stick around to watch her grow up. Once she was seven, once the spiders started to notice her, her mother was gone, her flight a silent one in the middle of the night. Annabeth's not even sure if she's still alive. She's not sure if she cares. It's something she's tucked away in the back of her head, something to think about when she has the time.
Time isn't something she has a lot of, and she supposes this is her avoiding a problem, but it's not a problem she can lay down on graph paper, draft up ways to make corners meet in all the right places. This is a problem that's got no straight lines, and so she leaves it to gather dust.
At twelve, she was tired of making her father move anytime the spiders got too bold. She packs a bag and grabs her lucky cap and shoes made for running. Her father has taught her so much, given her a love for the sky and all the ways humans yearn for it, but she learned how to run from her mother. It's a talent that's in their blood, like the curse, like the birthmark on her collarbone. It's a strange, burnt looking thing, something people can't help but stare at, and they try to be kind by calling it a star or a flower, but she knows there are exactly eight strands escaping the black mark. Annabeth knows a spider when she sees one, just as the spiders know her.
It's her eighth town this year, and she is always weary of that number. Something by the sea, because she likes to pretend that if they catch up to her and decide she's lived long enough she'll be able to make it to the shore, imagines herself jumping into the water and coming out reborn, shedding her curse as she floats to the top, walking out of the water with no second shadow made up of a thousand eyes with an age old grudge.
If only it was that easy.
She works at a cafe on the boardwalk, waitressing, and she's gotten good at keeping her head down, at being friendly without making friends, without causing too much of a stir (which makes her skin itch, because she feels like she has this brilliance inside her, and by keeping it bottled up she's choking it, little by little by little). But there's a boy that works the bar who is infuriating, who can pour a drink without spilling a drop without even looking at the glass. He uses this talent to stare at her, crooked smile only getting wider when she snaps and asks him what he's looking at.
"Nothing," he says, and he spends his days off in the water, surfing and swimming and coming to bother her without bothering to put a shirt on. He's tan and gorgeous, his shoulders alone probably have a fan club, and she hates him, how easily he gets her arguing, how she keeps running her mouth in an attempt to shut his and in doing so tells him more about herself than she's ever told anyone, really.
(Well, there was Luke, another boy with another curse mark, but his curse grew and grew and devoured him whole and Annabeth watched it happen and promised herself that she wouldn't let it happen to her, wouldn't let the darkness inside her do the curse's job for her)
She calls him Seaweed Brain, pretends it's because he spends more time in the water than on land, pretends it's because she can't remember his name (Percy, short for Perseus because his mother loves myths and because she had looked down at her too-small fatherless son and knew he needed a hero's name to grow into, knew that would give him the chance to grow into it). He calls her Wise Girl, because he's an embarrassment. One time, she thinks she hears him call her 'Beautiful' under his breath, but she can't stay here, not even for some annoying boy with a pretty face, so she pretends she doesn't hear.
The spiders don't find her for a while, but when they do, they get into everything. Annabeth puts on her apron at work, slips a hand into the front pocket for her notepad, and is instead met with a hundred tiny spiders, swarming up her arm.
They've always been close, but they've never touched her before. It's such a shock that she screams, rips the apron off and throws it across the back room, stumbles into the staff washroom and barricades herself inside. The logical part of her brain tells her that she's having a panic attack, but she's too busy struggling to breath to take note.
Percy finds her, sits against the other side of the bathroom door, talks about something she can't remember, because she can't really make out the individual words through her terror, but she latches onto the sound of his voice, lets it ground her. It takes her twenty minutes to open the door, and she's exhausted down to her very bones. From the spiders in her apron, from the running, from everything. When she feels up to it, she'll feel anger, probably, a terrible fury at her mother and every woman in her bloodline, all the way back to whatever someone did to upset the world so much that she is still paying for it.
Their boss gives her the day off, and Percy too, and she should be frustrated that he feels the need to help her home, except she's not sure she can quite manage the walk back to her apartment on her own. The thought of going back at all makes her stomach twist, because all she can imagine is her drawers, her sketchbooks, every inch of the little space she has let herself take up covered with a destiny she's getting too tired to outrun.
Percy looks at her with obvious concern, but no pity. That's good. She hates pity.
"Do you want to come to my place?" He holds up his hands. "Not for anything weird. Just like, tea or whatever. And my mom makes really good cookies."
His mom apparently sends him care packages, because he brings her to a little boat that can't possibly have enough space for a mother and her full grown son. He blushes when she asks, but doesn't deny it, and the cookies are for some reason blue but absolutely delicious.
The rocking of the water underneath them is strangely soothing, and she sits at a tiny table and watches him put a kettle on his stove to boil and then do some other things that honestly look more like excuses not to come sit down than anything, but she appreciates the space he's giving her so she doesn't poke fun. She lets herself follow him with her eyes, something she never indulges in, usually, and realizes she's been here almost six months. The longest she's ever stayed in one place. She hadn't even realized.
The kettle boils, and soon she's holding a cup between two hands still barely shaking, and Percy has come down to sit across from her, a matching cup in his own hands.
"My friend makes teas. He's really into nature, what it can do for us and what we can do for it. He lives in a commune and his girlfriend and him have a little garden and everything. This one's really good, it's supposed to be for stress relief and protection."
A strange combination, but the tea is delicious, subtle but strong. She finishes half the cup before she asks.
"Stress relief and protection?"
He laughs, although his eyes flit to the window, and the sea beyond it. "Um, yeah. I have... a condition?" He sounds unsure, and she raises an eyebrow at him over her mug. He runs a hand through his hair, because he can't sit still for a second, and then turns back to face her, pulls up a sleeve to show off the mark on his forearm.
"Have you seen one of these before?"
"A tattoo?" She's never let herself look at it too closely, just assumed that's what it was, and it goes with Percy's whole beach boy image. But now, taking it in with curious eyes, she sees what she missed before. "Oh."
Not a tattoo. A curse mark. Different than hers, a crescent that could be a moon, or maybe a wave. But definitely a curse mark.
He must see the understanding in her eyes, because he nods and pulls his sleeve back down. "I wasn't sure about yours until today," he admits, and Annabeth feels her cheeks heat because even as she's warmed up to this boy she's never really thought of him as particularly sharp, and here he is showing her how wrong that assumption was. "But it's spiders, isn't it? I've heard about... about that. About your family, I guess."
Annabeth nods, takes another sip of tea, her throat suddenly dry. "Yours?"
He shrugs, like one can just shrug at destiny. "It's water. I'm supposed to drown at sea, we think."
That makes her put her tea down with enough force to make the little table shake. She stares at him in open disbelief, and he smiles back sheepishly. This boy, who lives on the water, who swims and scuba dives and surfs, who works a stone's throw away from the ocean. She stares at him, and her treasonous brain tries to imagine him drowning, blue in the face, sinking into some deep part of the sea. It's preposterous, and she says as much.
He's looking out the window again, and there's something in his eyes that she can't put a name to. Wistfulness? Regret, maybe? She's not sure, but she wants to stay, wants to know how this boy's brain ticks, wants to learn what all of his expressions mean.
"I got tired of running." Is what he says. "I didn't see the point, and I'm happy here."
Annabeth wonders if she could be happy here too. She thinks, as she stares at him staring out at the thing that's supposed to kill him, that she might be in love with him, that maybe she has been for a while. Her first instinct is to take that realization and tuck it away with the questions about her mother, bury it so deep within herself that she'll never have to deal with it. But she's getting pretty tired of running herself, her shoes worn all the way through.
She tries a smile and it doesn't feel as alien on her face as it should.
"Hope you're not scared of spiders."
He turns to her with the brightest of grins, and maybe it's not her smartest decision but she knows it's perhaps her first decision she won't ever regret.
The spiders still find her here, on the water. She finds a tarantula in her pencil case one day, and goes out to the pet shop in town, buys him a tank and gives him a name and learns all she can about him. They go back to not touching her after that, stick to the corners of rooms and the cracks in the sidewalk, and when no one else is around she waves to them, greets them by species name.
She reckons she is angry with her mother for leaving, although it's all part of the path that led her to here, so she doesn't let herself dwell on any 'what if's. Anyway, she doesn't have the time. She's working through online courses towards her high school equivalency, alongside a whining but willing Percy. She wants to go to school for architecture, and might even see if she can take an elective with spiders. Percy finds a group of students that have formed a support group for the cursed, and they go there twice a week, bring them more of Grover's tea and their own style of success story.
"Who knows if it's actually working, or if it's just not our times yet." Percy sneaks a look at her as he talks, and she rolls her eyes at his sappy smile. "But I know it's not making anything worse."
There's a girl who can't touch stone without growing cold, there's a boy who's already watched his sister fall to their family curse, there's a boy who melts things and a boy who's life is measured in the smallest piece of wood, and Annabeth is scared for all of them, but she also sees strength in their eyes, and hope. And that's the most important thing, because she knows all too well what losing hope does, still sees Luke's body when she closes her eyes. But they all share their stories in a circle, help each other put down roots, and they haven't lost anyone yet. Percy's right, they have no way of knowing if they're beating the odds or if their timers aren't up yet, but they're learning how not to care either way. Like any group of young adults, they're figuring out how to grow up. That in itself is more than any future Annabeth let herself imagine, while she was running.
The spiders still come, but she's not afraid of them anymore.