It's late at night. It's raining. iTunes is apparently determined to play music that results in depressing fic. Enter the oneshot below, which is Annabeth trying desperately to cope after she believes Percy has died in the volcano in BotL. I would normally say enjoy here, but it's quite a depressing insight into a grieving mind (at least, I really hope so, otherwise I haven't done my job right at all) so perhaps that would be too perverse an instruction.
It had always felt wrong to run. After that blazing moment of triumph where she had leapt on Percy and kissed him, trying to impart something on him so that he would remember that he had to come back, to live, placing her Yankees cap on her head had just felt plain wrong. For the first time in her life, using the gift from her mom and left her feeling cold as she disappeared, a feeling that worsened as she fled Hephaestus's forge back into the relative safety of the maze. Her heart was tugging at her, reminding her with every pounding running step, every laboured exhalation, that she was leaving Percy behind.
She knew now, of course, that she had put too much faith in plans. Plans. Her stopgap, something that had always been a constant in her life thus far, had failed her. Percy had promised her that he had a plan to defeat the telkhines, promised her that he had a plan that would keep him safe. And she had trusted him blindly, not just because he was Percy Jackson, but because he had said that magic word that every child of Athena wanted to hear: plan. She had assumed that everything would be fine because Percy had thought it through, but if Percy had ever had a plan, and she doubted now that he had — why hadn't she seen at the time, tried to intervene? — then it had gone badly wrong. Needless to say, even as a child of Athena, Annabeth would never put such faith in the mere concept planning again.
The explosion revisited her in her dreams, and had done so every night for the past two weeks. It was always the same. Percy would be standing there, smiling to her and reaching out for her. He would be just about to brush his hand against her cheek, maybe cup the back of her head to his chest in a hug, when Mount St. Helens would erupt beneath him, blasting him to black ash which scattered with the force of the blast. She was always left with her arm flung over her eyes to shield her face, screaming his name over and over again until she sat bolt upright in bed, clammy with sweat, the covers knotted and balled somewhere near her feet. For the first few days she had woken her whole cabin, and lights would invariably be blazing throughout the building. People would be sitting on the edge of her bed or hovering near it, gaping at the total collapse of the confident, certain Annabeth Chase they had always known. The first night someone had tried to hold her hand to comfort her — it might have been Malcolm — but she had responded by bursting into a violent fit of sobbing and lashing out at anyone she could reach. The next night, her siblings had not stood so close when she awoke with tears already coursing down her face. Soon, though, she learned to control herself on waking. She held the screaming inside when she woke from the nightmare, slipping out of the bed and the cabin before anyone could know she was gone, squeezing four crescent-moon indentations into each palm with her nails as she went. Her siblings did not need to see her like this. No one needed to see her like this.
If sleep was going to evade her, then she could still make herself useful. She had stashed a jar of Greek fire under the pier along with as many reference books as she could get away with without drawing suspicion to herself. By the flickering, greenish light she devoured text after text, trying to find some way to break the Labyrinth, some way to complete the mission that Percy had given his life for. She owed him that. Being next to the lake helped, too; dipping her feet in the cool water was almost like having a connection with Percy. Almost. It still fell so far short.
Food became anything she could shovel down with one hand so she could still hold a book with the other and her weight seemed to dwindle quickly, not least because she was losing muscle tone from not training for the first time in years. Camp activities and her duties as Head of Cabin were put on hold, and the lack of sunlight coupled with the lack of sleep sucked away her usually tanned complexion, replacing it with red blotches on her cheeks and purple smears around her eyes. Chiron kept telling her to have hope, have faith, to pray, but he hadn't seen the explosion. She had seen and felt and heard the eruption for herself; logic told her that nothing could have survived that. That Percy couldn't have survived that. And so she worked feverishly because she owed him, dammit. He had given his life for her quest, for her, and she was going to crack the Labyrinth if it was the last thing she ever did.
She hadn't got far from the forge when she had stopped running suddenly, the harsh sound of her shoes scrunching the loose earth beneath her feet sounding ridiculously loud in the echoic silence of the tunnel. What was she doing? She had never run from a fight before and this was not about to be the first time she did, simply because Percy Jackson had commanded it. Sure, she trusted him with her life, but who was he to tell her to run? The fact that she still had a quest to complete and a god to warn didn't matter in the grand scheme of things, not when Percy was risking his life in the bowels of a volcano. For her. She whipped the cap off her head, letting her ponytail tumble out and unsheathed her knife. If Percy was going down, she was going down with him, and that was the end of the matter. She took off sprinting in the direction she had come, pumping her arms to gain as much momentum as possible. No quest was more important than going out fighting. For the first time in her life, she didn't have a plan. All she had was adrenaline and passion coursing through her body and a tight grip on the hilt of her knife. Strangely, she felt more invincible, more certain, than she had ever done before, even when she had been entering battle with an elaborate, well-crafted plan. She could fight and she could win, planning be damned.
But she had never got the chance to prove that, had she? Halfway back to the forge, the force of the explosion had knocked her clean off her feet, blasting her backwards down the narrow passage to land hard on her back. The wind had been knocked out of her and she struggled to breathe as searing air wafted over her. The entire Labyrinth seemed to tremble and lurch. Cracks raced towards her as if she was lying on thin ice, not solid rock, and huge pieces of the ceiling came crashing down around her. She shrieked and pushed herself up, scrambling backwards on her butt as the very roof seemed to groan, straining with the effort of simply staying over her head.
It had been a while before she could bring herself to stand, and even then she had to drag herself to her feet using the wall. She stumbled dazedly in the direction of the explosion, but the air just got hotter and hotter the closer she got until she felt like another step was going to blister the flesh right from her bones. The heat was so intense it was searing the tears out of her eyes before she could even shed them. She could barely breathe; it felt like her lungs were broiling, she could no longer see… All she could do was turn around, leave it all behind and make her way back to Camp. She felt hollow. One thought was reverberating around in the numbness that had overtaken her body. Percy.
She had seen something as inherently powerful and ever-lasting as Daedalus's maze come close to collapse at the force of the explosion Percy had been at the centre of. That was how she knew that Chiron telling her to have hope was just going to lead to her lying to herself. It wasn't that she didn't want Percy to be alive. She was craving it with every fibre of her moral being. She was yearning for him to have somehow survived, but she just didn't see how he could have. What was more useful, spending her days hovering around the Big House, weeping and waiting for news of Percy that would probably never come, or her research? Solving the riddle of the Labyrinth would protect the Camp against Kronos's advancing forces, which in turn could lead to them saving the entire world. Percy would understand. The weight of the world — literally, in their case, she thought grimly, remembering Mount Tamalpais — so often rested on the shoulders of demigods and Percy knew that. He would have wanted her to succeed; she could practically hear him murmuring encouragement in her ears.
Gods why did this have to hurt so much? Something felt like it had been scratched out of her chest, leaving a gaping, raw wound that didn't look like it was going to heal any time soon. She had left Percy. If she had been there, she could have helped somehow. There had to have been something she could have done, instead of just… abandoning him to the telkhines and the lava.
The Greek fire was guttering in its jar now, and she was finding it harder and harder to read by its waning light. Not that she had been doing much reading, she reasoned, dragging herself from the endless cycle of reflections and re-runs of that moment inside the forge. Her thoughts had become a swamp of ifs and should haves and whys. She sighed and closed the book she was half-reading, scooting to the edge of the pier and dangling her feet into the cool water. She kicked them gently, enjoying the soothing, rhythmic plashing and inhaled deeply before sighing again. A lank lock of blonde hair fell loose and she reached up to tuck it back behind her ear, closing her eyes as she remembered Percy doing the same thing once, not so long ago.
The sky had started to lighten above her, exposing a wide arc of pale blue-grey above her head. No clouds. It was going to be another beautiful summer's day in Long Island, another one Percy would not be enjoying. As she watched, the horizon began to bruise a light purplish colour in preparation for the sunrise. She led down on her back and turned her head to watch, still keeping her feet firmly in the water. The horizon began to flush a deep orange as the sun slowly crept up, and she suddenly felt an overwhelming wave of fatigue. As the sun made its full appearance, her fair lashes fluttered closed over her eyes. Soothed by the water lapping at her feet, she was soon fast asleep.
Percy finally managed to reach her. They were still standing in the depths of Mount St. Helens but for the first time in her dream, Percy managed to stretch out and grasp her. They hugged tightly, Annabeth clinging desperately to him, thinking that at any moment this would end up like her other dreams, with Percy burning to death in front of her eyes, but no. The moment held. And held.
Eventually she broke away from him and looked up into his green eyes, which were lit up to the point of glittering with his beaming smile. She grabbed his arm again, just to make sure he wasn't going anywhere, make sure this wasn't some cruel joke, but he remained solid.
"Percy," she began, emotion bubbling up and cutting off her words.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I got lost."
Annabeth let go of his arm and began backing away, nodding. "Lost," she said hollowly. "I know, Percy. I know you're lost. I wish you weren't but… you are."
As if to confirm her suspicions, Percy began to whiz backwards, as if the floor beneath his feet had become a very fast treadmill, spiriting him away backwards into the darkness.
Annabeth nodded again. "Goodbye, Percy. I… I love you."
It was the sound of hooves on the pier's boards that woke her. She came to from her dream drowsily, not entirely sure where she was for a few minutes. The sun had climbed in the sky, telling her it was now nearly noon. She turned her head, sitting up immediately when she discovered Chiron standing over her looking grave.
"Annabeth," he began gently, pausing to give her time to rub the sleep out of her eyes.
"Is there any news?" Annabeth asked quickly. "Is Percy—?"
Chiron cut her off by shaking his head sadly, hating to watch her deflate in front of him as he dashed her hopes. "No, there has still been no word of or from Percy." He sighed, suddenly looking older than she had ever seen him look before. He wet his lips slightly before reluctantly continuing. "Its… it's been two weeks, Annabeth. We have been wondering if, maybe… maybe if you feel that it's right then it's time to lay him to rest."
Annabeth couldn't answer immediately after Chiron finished speaking. The silence following the question seemed to ring on for an eternity before she managed to gather herself up enough to speak. "You're asking me?" Annabeth eventually croaked quietly, wrapping her arms around her and suddenly realising she was still wearing the thin nightie she had gone to bed in the night before. It had been such a warm night she hadn't needed anything on top.
"You were perhaps his greatest friend here, Annabeth," Chiron reminded her. "This being so, we have decided to ask you to… officiate in some capacity at the funeral. I think we both know that there was no one else Percy would have wanted to send his spirit on. I do not want to rush you in this decision, but I also do not want to fill you with false hope. If it is your wish that we wait a little longer and keep up the search for Percy then of course we will, but—"
"No," Annabeth heard herself say, slightly stunned that she was speaking.
"No?" Chiron echoed, frowning in confusion. "No to the funeral?"
Annabeth drew herself up to the full height she could manage while sitting, then pulled her knees up to her chest. She stared out over the lake, hugging her knees. "I think we should let go," she murmured quietly but with gravity, effort making her voice strain and a single tear rolling down her cheek as she said it. "Percy wouldn't do this to us. To me. If he's still alive, Chiron, why don't we know?"
Chiron placed a hand on her shoulder and gave a gentle squeeze. "Very well," he said heavily. "You know, I see wisdom growing within you every day, Annabeth. These are difficult times and as such they require difficult decision-making. Your mother would be proud that you kept your reasoning skills in the face of such a loss. I shall make the necessary arrangements. Percy will be sorely missed by all." He trotted away down the peer and was gone.
Having lived at Camp for as long as she had, she had been to many demigod funerals. It had always served as a reminder for her that their mortality was fleeting, that the lives that had been carved out for them by their immortal parents were fraught with danger and death. Yet she was sure she had never been to funeral like this one. She was sure she would never have to go to one like this again.
She stroked the cover of the book next to her, concentrating on the rough leather binding beneath her fingers in an effort to stop the prickling in her eyes and nose that meant more tears were threatening. The book did not provide the desired distraction, however, and she soon found herself wracked with silent sobs, gripping her upper arms with the opposite hands and rocking slightly, trying desperately to find somewhere inside of her where she could find solace.
When the tears finally subsided, she swiped angrily at the sticky trail her last one had left with the back of her hand. Percy would not want that. Today was a day for celebrating Percy's life, for living life to the full in the way he had always striven to do. That was the way he would want to be honoured. She was going to do her best to hold it together, and that was the way she was going to honour him. She got up, stacking the books on top of each other and walking towards her cabin.
It was time to dress for a funeral — for one last final, yet necessary goodbye.
Mush happens! I'm not sure I'm great at it, but sometimes it happens. How did I do? This is probably the quickest thing I have ever wrote (which... probably says something bad about me) so I don't really know what it'll have been like to read. I don't even know if you'll have got this far! But congrats if you did. Run now. Be free!