As Flies to Wanton Boys
By: St Jon of PDX
This is best thought of as AU as it was written w/ my much darker and more protracted version of the PJ&tO universe in mind and both the events, and the voice of the piece reflect that. This is a much more mature and wounded Percy, and as such he's more than a bit OOC.
Set chronologically post-BotL w/ a serious dose of Percabeth angst.
PROMPT: Percy/Annabeth, fight.
WARNING: Fic is DARK and contains language, violence, and the implication of the torture and murder of a child.
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"As flies to wanton boys are we to the Gods; they kill us for their sport." (William Shakespeare)
***
"Again."
I think I'm kind of a bastard as I watch Annabeth angrily push herself up to her knees and then back to her feet. Hate myself a little more as I watch her smear tiny streaks of red across the front of her jeans before she stoops low again to pick up the practice sword that I had disarmed her of moments ago. Wonder when I became such an arrogant prick as she falls into a textbook Roman Defense, and I already know how I'm gonna take her down.
A big part of me hopes she proves me wrong, but she doesn't and she's back on the ground inside thirty seconds.
"What the fuck Percy!" She's damn-near screaming and for a second my eyes dart around to where I expect to see the rest of the Athena cabin before I realize they aren't there. At some point in the last half hour I had been sparring with Annabeth they had either decided that this was something she and I had to work out alone or that they didn't want to give an audience to their big sister's—and she was their big sister, regardless of age—repeated defeat.
"Your sword is too low. Against another opponent with a blade you should keep your sword high, you need the extra power in your strike-" I could have been discussing the weather with a perfect stranger for all the emotion I put into my voice but Annabeth wasn't having any of it this time.
"Go to hell. I'm not playing this game." Her voice is an angry breath and it wears mean and hateful proudly on every syllable. Scared and sad and so, so tired is hidden better but I hear them anyway. That's the problem with us—we know each other so damn well.
"You think this is a game to me?" She doesn't bother to respond as she levers herself back to her feet and begins to stalk away and before I can give it a conscious thought my hand is on her shoulder and I am spinning her back around to face me with enough force that I am sure the skin beneath my fingers will darken with a fresh bruise as soon as I take my fingers away.
Somewhere in the back of my head I can hear my mother's voice. Big boys don't hurt girls Percy. My eyes flicker down to the blood on her jeans. Big boys don't hurt girls…. I think for a second that I should be ashamed, that I've scared her, that she'll cry; then I look into angry eyes and remember that nobody at this camp—regardless of sex—fits into the rules my mother taught me when I was five and picking on girls on the playground. We're warriors before we're kids, for better or worse.
"You? You, of all people, think that this is a game to me?" My voice is still as dry as when I had been critiquing her swordsmanship but my eyes bore into hers with all the mean, angry, sad exhaustion she had leveled against me moments before. "We're in the middle of a war Annabeth. Chiron asked me to help with sword training—to maybe help keep some of these campers breathing. You don't like it, take it up with him."
"Bullshit." She's wrestled her voice back under control so now it just sounds like she stating a fact. Bullshit.
"What?"
I release my hand from her shoulder and before I even realize she isn't answering me her fist is colliding with the right side of my face. Not a slap and not for show, she swings her entire body into it; so much so that she almost lands back on her ass without any help from me. But she stays on her feet and before I can fully differentiate the sharp stinging in my temple from the deeper, heavier ache behind my eyes she is swinging again. First across the jaw, then two quick jabs in the kidney that nearly drop me to my knees in front of her.
"Bullshit." Her voice is a furious snarl and it contains all the anger and pain it had lost. Her mouth forms an ugly smirk that looks more like a predator baring its teeth than a grin, but it's still the closest thing to a smile I can remember from her since before The Labyrinth. "This has nothing to do with what Chiron asked you to do and this sure as hell doesn't have anything to do with swordplay lessons. This is about you and I and what happened."
"Nothing happened." It was a lie and before I could stop it my mind played out recollections of tanned skin and heaving breasts and a sunshine yellow bra, slick and soaked through in the deep red of fresh blood.
"Damn it, Percy! Yes, something happened. I almost died!"
"But you didn't."
She looks like maybe she wants to hit me again but she just turns around and stalks away until there's a few yards between us again, arms crossed firmly beneath her breasts and facing away from me. I release a breath I didn't even know I had been holding. This is a safer distance, but not safe enough that I don't feel my hands tremble exactly like they did when I had been pouring straight nectar into a hole in her chest.
"Something happened, Percy." All the angers run off from her tongue and her words come out sad and small. It sounded wrong. Annabeth Chase didn't do defeated; and something in that breaks through walls her anger had only fortified. For just a moment I let that night seep back into my conciseness.
Even going as fast as we could, we never had a chance of getting to her before they did. The child—a daughter of Apollo—had apparently been versed enough in her father's gifts to see through whatever lies they had told her and brave enough to refuse them. By the time me and Annabeth got to the small cabin in Miles-from-Anywhere, Montana, all that was clear was that they had made her suffer before they let her die for her conviction. She had only been twelve years old.
I let my chin drop towards my chest as my eyes slam closed against the image of her.
They attacked quickly, a half dozen Hell Hounds and a burley son of Ares. Outarmed and outnumbered, we were running before we ever got to give the girl the respect she deserved. Fighting there wouldn't have honored her, just got two more demigods killed. There was a stream a half mile away that would even the odds.
I could hear Annabeth sobbing in angry, bitter gasps as she sprinted next to me and I knew I was doing the same.
All I can hear is the rush of blood in my ears as my entire body tenses—fight or flight, remembered.
We only made it maybe 300 yards before the heavy weight of one of the hounds fell on my back, claws gouging painful gashes into my shoulders. Annabeth had her dagger buried in its heart in under three seconds, but it was too late. We had lost our head-start and the other monsters were already surrounding us—a wall of teeth and fur between us and the precious water that could tip the scales in our favor; and an armored demigod calmly jogging towards us from where we could now see the cabin was being engulfed in flames.
My hand hurts as my fingernails dig into the skin of my palm. Not quick enough, hero—
"Not quick enough, heroes. Not quick enough." The half-blood was about our age and huge and his mouth had been turned up into a macabre mockery of a grin. The sick bastard had been enjoying himself and the clean, unused blade he drew stood out like an accusation against the long streaks of blood drying across his armor.
I still see that little girl when I close my eyes. Cold and still and broken beyond any repair. I don't know if she'll ever stop haunting me and I am not sure if I want her too. It seems wrong to just dismiss her to the past.
The hounds struck first. Strong and fast they went for our necks and two of them died quickly for their efforts; but not before I was surrounded on all sides by the other four—cut off from Annabeth and the massive demigod slowly stalking toward her by a shifting row of razor-tipped jaws.
Surrounding me, the beasts had backed out of range of Riptide's bite but stayed close enough to lunge at any perceived break in my guard. All it would have taken was one of the getting within my guard and it would have been all over—massive jaws would have left me dead or disabled before I could have hoped to recover any control and I swung in tight circles to keep snapping jaws away from my back.
Dimly, over the growles of the hounds and the blood coursing through my viens, I had heard sword meet knife in a series of blows that came to quickly for me to discern any pattern. I risked a glance in the direction but all I could see was shadows and trees before one of the Hell Hounds took advantage of my distraction and sunk long teeth into my left forearm. It was the last thing the beast did before Riptide separated its head from the rest of it, but its pack mate took the opportunity to pounce onto my back and once again search out my jugular with its mighty jaws. It may have succeeded too, if not for the third hound—enraptured at the scent of fresh blood it bounded at my front and knocked me, and the snapping hound at my back, to the ground.
The impact with the ground drove all the air out of my lungs and wrenched my back at a sharp angle, but instincts born from the deepest parts of my being—divine and human—drove my hand to motion as my mind was still reeling from the impact. My grip on Anaklusmos tightened and I drove in up between the ribs of the beast above me. As stunned as I was by the tumble, the Hell Hound beneath me was a split second slower still and suffered the same fate as his comrades.
For a moment I just sat there, pulling deep gasps of freezing air into burning lungs, before senses honed by too many glimpses of death jolted my mind back to awareness. The sounds of fighting had stopped. My eyes had darted franticly about until I saw Annabeth slouched against a tree maybe twenty yards away. She was moving, but sluggishly and the front of her white sweater was so dark it looked black with her blood.
A twig snapped to my right and my sword rose just in time to catch the crushing sword blow as Annabeth's demigod opponent appeared before me around a large evergreen. He looked surprised that I was still able to fight but I hadn't bothered to consider it much. All my mind had been able to see was the little girl that had led Annabeth and I out here, Annabeth herself slumped and bleeding to the earth. And suddenly my wounds which had ached so much just a few moments ago were completely forgotten as my expression slackened into cold indifference. He had done more than kill a little girl. He had killed one of us, and he may have already delivered the blow that killed another.
I was on my feet and cleaving Anaklusmos through the air before the demigod had recovered from my first parry and some small part of me that felt too much like Ares relished in the knowledge that I was better than this warrior—this murderer. He dodged my strike but was forced to retreat as I pressed him back with short, powerful swings. Frustrated the warrior retorted with a powerful slash aimed at my mid-section, well within his massive reach but leaving him outside of mine.
It was his first mistake, and his widening eyes told me he knew it as I had casually parried his blow wide and twisted into his body—inside his guard. His last mistake was bringing the dagger—Annabeth's dagger, some part of me had recognized—down toward my throat. In that moment everything Chiron or Daedalus or even Luke ever taught me flashed through my mind. From this position it would be easy to disarm him. To break the fingers holding that knife or bring him to his knees w/ a quick jab to his kidney, ore even bring the knife to his opponent's throat instead. Whoever had dispatched this murderer, they had never counted on him fighting me. I was better than him and I could think of a dozen ways off the top of my head to disarm and disable him. And I didn't use any of them.
I was quick, but I think he knew what I was doing as I dropped and twisted my body so that I was facing him. He tried to bring his sword in closer to his body as I felt the sting of Annabeth's dagger tear through my shoulder but he was much, much too slow. Anaklusmos pierced the armor at his ribs easily and slid almost to the hilt before it would go no farther.
My memories were a blur after that. I remember pain as the adrenaline being fed into my system began to slow and I remember my left arm just hanging, numb, as I pulled Annabeth's knife from my shoulder. I remember stumbling to where she lay and a brief, terrifying minute of shaking her and screaming at her to say something before she managed to crack her eyes open and cough. I remember unzipping and pulling her arms from the bloody mess of her sweater before roughly tearing out the buttons of her shirt in a gruesome mockery of what I had done many times in dreams I would never admit to having. I remember carrying her to that small stream and praying to my father to get her to help faster than I could. Remember her wet, bloody coughs as I let the river take her before the pain of my own injuries pulled me down into darkness.
My memories were a blur, but I still remembered and I don't think I will ever be able to forget.
"Something happened," I admit, and my voice has something like an apology in it.
"Percy…" My name just hangs there between us and when I look up she has turned back towards me and closed the space between us. "You saved my life, Percy."
My eyes close, because she's right and I hate that she was that close to dieing. Hate that a selfish, ugly part of me is exalted in the knowledge that it was me who held her in this world. My will, made reality.
"I killed a man."
"Percy-"
"No Annabeth," She doesn't understand. "I killed a man, and I don't regret it. I don't lie awake at night racked with guilt, I don't wonder if maybe I could have just disarmed him or injured him. I know I could have—I was better than him. I could have stopped but I chose to kill him. Jesus, What kind of person does that make me, Annabeth?"
She doesn't say anything for a long time and my head falls to stare at our shoes. I don't feel any guilt over what I did, but the implication of Annabeth being ashamed of me burns me inside. But then her hand is on my cheek and she's tilting my head up so that I am looking down into her eyes. And she has this look, the look that passes between us more often than either of us admits but that we are always very careful not to notice.
"It makes you the guy that saved my life. That saves my life and has for years."
"Annabeth…" I'm not stupid and even I know that there are things to be said at this moment; declarations and promises and admissions of all sorts. And the teenage boy part of me knows there are things to be done at moments like this; find out exactly how soft her lips are, discover what it sounds like to hear her sigh without any exasperation.
But I don't do any of those things, and neither does she because I am sure she can see as clearly as I can the specters that circle and surround us. The shades of prophecy and Luke and decisions unmade that she wears like armor and chains. The ghosts of moonlace and clean sea breeze and olive skin, of crazy red hair and infectious laughter that cling to and about me. And above it all her mothers words of sacrifice and destiny. And of Loyalty and its price.
Instead she smiles sadly and winds her arms around my neck and pulls me into the first hug we have shared since before the Oracle chose her to lead a quest into the depths of the Labyrinth.
"Thank you, Seaweed Brain."
Her voice is sad, but not hopeless. And that's enough.
***
Soooo, I haven't written anything in a while but I came across this on my computer from, like, a year ago and decided to post it. It was originally written for a PJ&tO prompt challenge but I honestly don't remember where now.
If whoever posted that prompt is reading this, drop me a line and I will put you in the note up top. Also—if whoever originally posted the prompt gets this—sorry. I imagine this is a little bit darker than you were probably going for.
This MIGHT become a prequel to a longer, multi-chaptered AU to flesh out a bit of what I imagine PJ&tO could have become had it gone down a much darker route. Let me know what you guys think—should this be further fleshed out?
Thanks for reading,
Jon