YAY PJO FANFIC

It had been a long time since she had seen snow.

It was unusual – one would expect someone so practical to not care about standing under the sky just to be engulfed under the falling snow. Ever since three years ago, she had never wanted to even touch the white drops that were so cold to touch. It was always staying in New York when it was summer or spring, and then spending time with her dad in Australia when it was autumn or winter back home. But never actually experiencing snow softly falling on her eyelashes or cheeks.

But everything had to change – Thalia ultimately dragged her back to New York during the winter this year, mentioning that she 'really needed to stop being so fucking depressed all the time about the douchebag.'

It was terribly funny in her eyes – wouldn't Thalia support him instead of her? As far as she remembered, she was with them for a shorter amount of time than Thalia was with him, which would mean that the two were closer. Shouldn't Thalia have been more devastated than her at finding out that their best friend for years – no – that their elder brother had simply abandoned them? He had left them alone in the world as he departed to Hades' realm, probably making his way into Elysium.

She was being harsh though – Thalia had not been fine for about half a year after he left them. The metal-obsessed, smug girl that used to be the binding factor of their little family was left to become a plain shell of what she was – staring at the thunder that would roar from the skies, as if Zeus detested seeing his daughter like that, with her head leaning against her knees and her eyes tilted to the sky. Occasionally, Annabeth would find a small tear trickling down the elder girl's face, but Thalia would brush it away in a hurry, blame it on the fresh paint on their apartment walls and rush to the washroom to splash water on her face.

As Annabeth stared at the snowflakes falling down, a fond memory flashed across her eyes – one where Luke, Annabeth and Thalia were celebrating their first ever Christmas together when Luke was 18, Thalia was 16 and Annabeth just 11. They were just having a picnic at Central Park when it started snowing. She could still remember the bliss on Luke's face at the sky and the words that he whispered. 'If you look up at the sky, it feels as if you're falling upwards.' A small part of her then would have admitted that seeing Luke like that warmed her heart so much, she was afraid that she might have had a crush on him. But an adolescent crush soon turned into plain and platonic love, and Annabeth was Luke's sister, and Luke was Annabeth's brother, and that was that.

But now… Annabeth closed her eyes slightly and backed up until her back her a tree and she slid down, settling herself onto the snow-covered ground. It was weird – one would have expected Luke's death to be sad, or heroic. And it was, but the day he took a sword to the heart so that Annabeth wouldn't have died instead was a day that was full of sunshine. The weather didn't care that her elder brother had died – oh, no. It just wanted to be annoyingly sunny during the winter and on the day of his death.

According to Chiron, she was going through something called Suvivor's Guilt, whatever that was. She wasn't guilty… was she? No, she was, because her elder brother died saving her and he didn't deserve to because he had his entire life ahead of him and Annabeth was just useless, that's why her stepmother hated her and her dad had been resenting her.

If only Percy was still here.

Keep in mind that this is a two-shot. There's more to come.