A/N: this is a sequel of 'Ignite'. While reading that is not necessary for understanding this, i highly, highly recommend it. It's not too long, I promise!

Retrouvailles

Pronunciation: /ʀətʀuvɑj/
[[French. Meaning: rediscovery]]
The joy of reuniting with someone after a long separation.

It was hotter than he expected, despite the various cautionary horror stories of shoes melting into sidewalks and eggs literally cooking on the sidewalks. He was, of course, referring about Australia. Sydney, to be exact. Birthplace of AC/DC and the site of Nemo's captivity.

That movie never failed to make him cry as a child.

And okay, it never exactly stopped after childhood, per se.

It was a truly haunting, captivating growing-of-age tale of loss, dealing with mental disorders, and finding yourself. Also talking fish, which was cool.

Anyway.

He arrived in Sydney from Chicago a week before, and he still wasn't used to the heat. Finally giving up on his idea of 'exploring the area', he ducked under the worn green awning of a clean looking bar.

He ordered a beer and leaned over it, staring absently down at the translucent liquid. He hardly noticed when a girl slid into the stool next to him until she spoke.

"Okay," she demanded, clearly at him. "What gives?"

He blinked at her. "Uh, sorry?"

"I have been making eyes at you from over there -" she pointed to the other side of the bar. "for the last twenty minutes. You, on the other hand, haven't even given me a second glance since you've got here. Now I'll repeat myself – what gives?"

He stared at her. She was small and pretty, with a delicate mouth and round, brown eyes. She was trying not to smile. "Is this your version of asking me for my number?" he asked, half-confused and half-amused.

She smiled and shrugged. "Sort of," she said. "To be honest I've just finished dumping my boyfriend. You just happen to have won the lucky prize of being my rebound – go ahead and cheer, I won't judge. I'm Leah, by the way. And since you'll ask eventually, I'm half-Chinese, half-Indian."

"Percy," he gestured to the bartender for another beer, which he slid towards the girl. She raised an eyebrow but accepted it with a grin. "You don't seem nearly heart broken enough to be a recent single person," he commented.

"So just because I'm a girl I'm supposed to be weeping right now?" she asked, although it was more of a tease than a challenge.

"I sure did after my heart got trampled."

She raised her eyebrows again. "Do tell. Was this recent?"

"Almost four years ago, actually."

She let out a low whistle. "Girl that got away?" When he nodded she made an encouraging noise, prodding him in the side. "Well? Aren't you going to tell me this heartbreaking story?"

Percy bit his lip. He hadn't really talked about it before now – although now was as good of a time to start as any. "Her name was Annabeth, and I met her when I was working in a music shop in Brooklyn. She was gorgeous, funny, and really, really smart. I kind of… fell desperately in love with her, I guess you could say. She was… everything to me." He cleared his throat, and tore off a bit of the wrapper on his beer. "But it kind of blinded me. I didn't really see everything that was wrong with our relationship until it ended."

"Wait, what do you mean, 'everything that was wrong'?" she was leaning forward, her chin in her fist, biting her lip thoughtfully.

"I kind of tend… off the beaten path I guess. It was worse back then – I was sort of a troublemaker. Down with the system, you know."

Leah smirked, waggling her eyebrows. "Ooh, a bad boy."

He laughed, rubbing his arm sheepishly. "More of a snot-nosed punk, really. Anyway, I was sort of broke and going no where when she met me. Annabeth, on the otherhand, was a genius. She was a little older than me and already she was in this great job with like, dozens of people working for her. In the end, we were never going to work it out." They sat in an awkward silence for a while, while Percy mulled over his words, reveling in how clear it was to him now, how heartbreakingly doomed they were from the start.

"So what happened?" Leah finally asked. "How did it end?"

"I got offered a job in Chicago," he said, wincing.

"Ouch."

"Yeah. Anyway, I brought it up one night, not yet deciding whether or not to go, and she kind of freaked out about me leaving. I guess she thought I had already decided and was trying to break the news to her so she kicked me out of her house and basically told me to have fun in Chicago. See, she was afraid of abandonment. Her mom left when she was born, and her dad never really acted like he wanted her. Even her long-time boyfriend Luke ended up cheating and dumping her. I didn't know that though, and it kind of broke me. I spent the next couple days like, living in the basement of a 24 hour gym with this guy, Chris, and his girlfriend Clarisse."

"Damn," she murmured. "Intense."

"Anyway, Chris was a blessing. We talked it all out, and I kind of realized that the way we were going now never would've worked. I was too immature, and she was too focused on her career, and I was blind to that. She was my entire life – I didn't really have a future before being offered that job. If I turned it down she would be stuck with a loser for the rest of her life, or at least until she decided I wasn't worth it anymore. I didn't want that. She deserved so much better. I didn't want to add to the list of the people who had left her, but did I really have a choice? I couldn't ask her to move with me, not with her career at such an important point, and there wasn't anything left in the city for me that could've helped me better myself aside from her. I just had to hope that in a couple of years I could find her again and somehow make her forgive me."

Leah had gotten an odd look in her eyes. "Where is she now?"

He chuckled wryly. "Umm… Sydney, Australia." She sucked in a giant breath and slapped his arm.

"No fucking way. Is that why you're here."

He rubbed the back of his head. "Uh, sort of, but don't tell my boss that. The real reason I came here was to supervise the Sydney branch of Olympus Records for six months… But I did happen to volunteer for it after hearing that she had moved down here."

"How did you know she was here?" she looked at him in awe.

"An old friend of hers called me a month ago and let it slip… I volunteered the next day."

Leah bounced in her seat, earning an old look from the people around them. "This is the most excited I've been about other people's lives since season three of Game of Thrones ended, I shit you not. How come you haven't found her yet?"

He bit his lip. "I don't know whether or not… it's okay, yet. What do I say? Do I just go up to her like, oh, hello, remember me? I broke your heart and left you four years ago. Wasn't that just dandy?"

"I see your point," she said, deflating. "Do you have any pictures of her? Like on your phone?"

He dug it out and scrolled all the way back to find one they had taken a long time ago. It was a little blurry, but it was easy to tell, even blurry and surprised, Annabeth was beautiful.

"Oh, shit," she said, grabbing the phone out of his hand. "Hold on, I know this girl."

Percy felt his heart leap into his throat. "What?! You do? How? From where?"

"She rides the same bus I do. I think she gets off at a stop at Tamarama, about half a mile east of here. Percy? What're you doing?"

Percy had leaped to his feet, dragging her along with him as he threw the money for their drinks onto the bar.

"Um, Percy?" Leah called as he jogged down the street, panting at his heels.

"What?" he could hardly pause for a breath. The love of my life is half a mile from here, his heart sang, hammering in his chest.

"Um, east is that way."

"Oh," he could feel his cheeks warming. "Right."

-x-

Half-an-hour later, Percy and Leah were wandering hopelessly around Tamarama, which seemed to be the richer part of Sydney. It made sense – Annabeth was fated to succeed.

They wandered the streets for a while, surveying beaches and poking into stores, asking around if anyone had seen a girl with long curly blonde hair and grey eyes. No one seemed to know exactly who he was talking about. Finally Leah sighed and plopped into a chair outside a café.

"What're you doing? We still have like, three hours of daylight left," Percy asked, blinking down at her, confused.

"I'm exhausted," she said. "If I'm helping you reunite with the love of your life, the least you could do is buy me a drink."

Percy scrunched up his nose but agreed reluctantly, still too pumped full of adrenaline. He twitched and shifted his weight every couple seconds, drumming his fingers against the table. Leah happily gulped down her soup, talking with a mouthful of bread. "Don't worry so much; people are staring." she said. "It's not like she won't be here tomorrow. Anyway, we might do better with a fresh start tomorrow. We could wait at her bus stop in the morning if need be."

Percy sighed and stared absentmindedly out the storefront window. The little café had the good fortune to be facing the beach, and there were quite a few families and couples out there enjoying the surf. Most of them were out in the water, it being about a thousand degrees outside, but a few stragglers stayed up on the sand. A couple in matching pink swimsuits cuddled under a colorful, striped umbrella, and five feet away, a chocolate lab chased a couple of kids around a cooler as they squealed, sand getting every where. A little girl who can't be more than three, with dark curly hair and fair skin dashed in and out of the waves, followed by her nanny, a dark-skinned thirteen-year-old with caramel streaked brown curls. Not ten yards away, a woman in her twenties watched them, lying on a green towel under an umbrella. She brushed long, curly blonde hair off her shoulder and bent down to adjust the towel, glancing do.

She tilted her head back and rolls her neck, and Percy sees a glimpse of the part of her face not obscured by her sunglasses. It only lasted a second, two at most, but some part of Percy snapped awake. He blinked back his sudden urge to jump out of his seat and forces himself to calm down. For almost a year while he was in Chicago, new to the city and almost friendless, he used to see her all the time. Well, not really see her. He just thought he did. Anytime he saw a curly-headed blonde he would think that she had, for some crazy reason, decided to come and surprise him or be heading some architecture project in the city or something. He kind of drove himself crazy, seeing her in random strangers in the bus or at work.

When he finally decided that he was 'over her' and started dating again, it wasn't until someone had remarked that he 'certainly had a type!' that he noticed they were all tall and blonde.

But it finally faded to the back of his mind, and he only really thought of her every once a while. But now that he was in Sydney it was like he was driving himself crazy all over again. Twice he had stopped some poor unsuspecting women who beared a slight resemblance to his the girlfriend he had broken up with four years ago. He couldn't help it. The knowledge that she was here, somewhere among the throngs of people here, was driving him absolutely mad.

So instead of running out of the café on the nearly impossible chance that she was the girl, he forced himself to look away and called over the waitress to order another drink. Leah, oblivious to his musings, was checking her phone for texts, mumbling about an upcoming psych exam she was supposed to be studying for. It wasn't until he heard shouting outside that he looked out again. The pink-swimsuitted woman's hat had floated off when a trunk roared past, and she jumped up to run after it, accidently jostling the cooler, spilling ice cold water onto the blonde woman Percy had just been staring at. Everyone in the café (read: Percy, Leah, the chef and waitress, and a middle-aged couple) looked up at the spectacle. The woman in pink was apologizing, and the blonde was waving away her help, turning towards the café as she gathered up the towel to wipe herself off and – oh, my God.

Percy dug through his pockets for his wallet, throwing down a couple crumpled ten dollar bills and nearly sprinted out the café and into the street separating the beach from the store fronts. He skidded to a stop midway, nearly escaping with his life as a car rushed by just that moment, nearly running him flat. Heart-racing, he proceded with slightly more caution to the otherside. His heart seemed to plummet to a stop as she looked up, perfectly pink lips parted as she seemed to look right at him. She couldn't be more than 50 feet away.

40.

30.

20.

The wind picked up at last, her blond hair tossing in the reinvigorated breeze. He was so close he could nearly see the silver in her eyes.

He opened his mouth to call out to her, feeling as if the all the world had come to a stop. Someone ran in front of him, the little girl from before.

"Mama!"

His mouth dry, he stumbled to a stop as she seemed to unfreeze, stooping low and re-emerging with the little curly-haired girl at her hip.

Mama?

A/N: Hello all of you! I'm back with my sequel of Ignite. It's because of all of you and especially all of you who reviewed that I decided to write this sequel. To any of you worrying, Percy is still a punk at heart, albeit a more grown-up one. This takes place three years and ten months after the ending of Ignite. Percy is 27 and Annabeth is 29.

The second chapter is half-way written and should be posted sometime soon. Thanks for reading and please leave a review!

Anna x.

PS: cover image by viria!