Disclaimer: I don't own Percy Jackson

My Little Treasure

I named her Annabeth; a tribute to her lovely mother. I tried to get Athena to take her back; I had too much to do to have a child. After nearly an hour of arguing, I was left with the baby. Alone, ill-prepared and with absolutely no time to raise a baby. For the first few months, before I finally found my bearings, I averaged two to three hours of sleep a night.

I'd like to say that after a year, I adored my daughter more than life itself. That would be a lie. At best, I learned to priorities her above myself out of obligation. I was her father, it was my job to take care of her. My heart was a roller-coaster where she was concerned. Some days, I resented her and fantasized about a life without her. On these nights, I would feel horrible for these feelings, like I was barely any different from those parents who were arrested for beating their children. Other days, usually on my days off, I was filled with love for her; playing with her, buying her gifts and generally doting on her. My feeling for her were polarized, and each side wondered what the other was thinking.

When she started school, I realized just how intelligent she was. Building elaborate constructions out of building blocks, reading the thickest books in the class (or struggling to, after a week or two I had her tested and found she was dyslexic) and analyzing anything and everything. Unfortunately, she also had busts of energy that would disrupt class and land her in trouble. Meaning I had to miss work to deal with her.

Annabeth might insist differently, but she was a big part of the reason I started dating again. I was loosing sleep again thanks to her trouble in school, I needed someone. I needed help and my daughter needed a mother. She knew full well about Athena, I had told her on one of my worst nights and after a long, hard day; maybe trying to curb my resentment by letting her know she wasn't wanted. I was awake all night with my guilt, even without hearing her crying from her room. I needed someone who would reign me in on those nights. What if one of these nights I got so mad at her, I...

Between her dyslexia, ADHD and higher intelligence above her class-mates, it wasn't long before the other kids would ostracize and eventually bully her. With a single phone-call telling me there had been a fight, my fatherly instincts truly kicked in for the first time and I wanted punish the brat who had so much as raised a hand against my little girl.

That afternoon was our first real argument. An argument – not just me sending her to her room after yelling at her. Annabeth was her mother's daughter and was quickly becoming just as feisty. Just as determined to have her way. As it turns out, Annabeth had started the fight, punching a couple of girls who called her a super-freak with a bad father and a dead mother. If there were rumors about me as a bad father, they surely wouldn't be helped by the bruises and bloody nose my five-year-old sported. She was suspended for two weeks.

I didn't like leaving her home alone, but I couldn't very well take her with me to the university and in light of some of the news stories being televised lately I was quickly loosing faith in baby-sitters. Frankly, I trusted Annabeth to look after herself more than someone who could have ended up hurting or neglecting her. No, I treated her badly enough myself already.

Expecting to come back to a ruined house, I was shocked to find everything as it should have been, and it took a bit of searching to find Annabeth. By the dishes in the sink, she'd eaten the lunch I'd packed for her that morning, so she was in the house. I found her in my study, panicking for a moment – my models! When I finally found her, I was even more shocked – everything was fine. Everything perfectly in place save for two fake solders on horseback which she was playing with like they were action figures. This sight did something to me. I started smiling without meaning to and walked over to her. It was one of the only times we played together like that.

Finally I found a woman I loved. Irene Hikumi had met Annabeth several times and they seemed to get along. I had tried to explain to Irene a few times that Annabeth was a demigoddess, the daughter of Athena, but I'm not sure how much she really believed. Maybe we rushed things a bit, but I was desperate for both assistance and adult companionship. We got married a couple of months before Annabeth turned six.

I knew it was a big adjustment to make, no matter how smart Annabeth was, so I was determined to make this birthday extra-special. Thanks to her still being an outcast in school, only two or three kids showed up for the party. Midway through the party, I disappeared to the basement, leaving Irene to watch the kids. You should have seen the way Annabeth's face lite up when I came back up holding that puppy. She named him Magnus, after her favorite cousin which is a whole other story.

Thankfully, the party was over and the guests had gone home by the time the monster attacked. It looked like a hydra. Not knowing what else to do, I yelled at the girls to get to cover as I got behind it and climbed onto it's back – thankfully it only had one head, so as long as nobody tried to decapitate it. I managed to strangle the thing to death.

Annabeth was staring at it in shock. I thought she might be, I could hear Irene screaming at her to run throughout the whole thing, but she was frozen in place. Athena told me this would happen as she got older and I in turn told Annabeth; she knew this could happen.

I ended up yelling at her, telling her that she has to run when I or Irene tell her to. She did run – straight up to her room in tears. My job pays well enough and the hole in the house wasn't really what bothered me. Irene now fully believed that Annabeth was a demigod, and that her presence would start attracting monsters. I had to refresh her on everything, and that was when she told me what should have been happy news – she was pregnant. This only made things worse, now we had two children to figure out how to keep safe.

We ended up having twin sons – Matthew and Bobby. Annabeth seemed to not like them, not unlike how I had been with her. Maybe she was feeling the same resentment I felt for her – new faces she had not asked for and yet now had a degree of responsibility for. Seeing as I actually had time to get used to the idea this time, I was openly loving with my sons. I wouldn't blame their sister for being jealous of them, either; I hadn't treated her half as good.

About half a year after their birth, we moved out of state to escape the monsters. I had lost count of the monster attacks in the meantime, and for a while it seemed to work. Things seemed peaceful as they could be. Irene and I both saw the resentment in Annabeth's eyes growing with every monster attack as she insisted that she didn't do whatever it was that lured the monsters to them, as though she was being accused of something. Still, Annabeth, now seven, seemed to be growing more and more resentful towards us even without the monsters. I should have known something was wrong when I saw Annabeth looking tired – like she wasn't sleeping.

I'll never forget that morning. I had just begun my classes when I was summoned to the school office with an urgent phone call from Irene. She was frantic and sounded like she was crying. Annabeth was gone, her bedroom window wide open. Irene had already notified the police, but I still came right home. When I got home the police where searching for anything – signs of a break in, a ransom note, a letter indicating she ran away. Nothing was found.

Well, one thing was, and it made Irene break down even worse than before. Dozens of tiny spiders' nests had been found in her closet, the things clawing into cracks and under anything they could. Irene had broken into a fresh batch of tears, swearing that she didn't know the spiders were real and that this was her fault. She told me everything about the last few nights about Annabeth's constant nightmares of spiders and apologized over and over, saying she never meant for this to happen. I knew Annabeth hated spiders, if I had a quarter for every spider I killed when she was small, or every time she'd crawled into my bed because of a spider in her room I wouldn't need a job. Needless to say, the boys and us had to find a place to stay the night, as our house was being thoroughly fumigated.

It was only three long, horrible months later that we received that first Iris message by Chiron, telling us that our daughter had somehow made the journey to a place called Camp Half-Blood in New York and was safe there. For the first time, I really wanted her back. She was my daughter. My little girl.

Her home was here with me and our family. She refused.

A couple of years later, Annabeth had relented to my requests to return home. I didn't care when the monsters attacked, my girl was back. More than that, she demonstrated amazing battle skills - as if I can be surprised. Only nine years old and she was taking down monsters as easily as if they were made of Popsicle sticks. Unfortunately, the boys treated her like a stranger, she failed to make any friends at school and she and Irene continued to argue after each monster fight. One thing that had changed, however, was that Annabeth was now starting the fights, sometimes out of nowhere, insisting that Irene didn't want her there and blamed her for everything that happened. When I told Annabeth to stop this, she looked betrayed. She returned to her camp before winter break. If anything, at least now I could rest easy knowing that she was learning to defend herself.

Three years later, at the end of summer, Annabeth contacted me again. Apparently, a new friend of hers had encouraged her to give living with her mortal family another try. I immediately crowded Irene and the boys into the car and we took off to New York. It was a three-day trip, but I hardly cared.

By the time we got there, the atmosphere in the car was tense. The boys were only six, so the long car ride made them cranky. Irene was quiet and seemed destructed, she was probably worried about what would happen. The camp looked like a strawberry farm with kids coming up the hill were many other cars were waiting along with us.

We got out of the car to stretch, which each of us needed, and I opened the trunk for any luggage we'd be taking. The boys' complaining stopped abruptly as three creatures trotted over to us, carrying luggage and placing it in the trunk. Satyrs. Real satyrs, goat-legs and all! The boys watched the creatures in wonder – one of them caught the stares, happily greeted the kids with a smile, and went back to his work as though this was perfectly normal. Maybe it was for them. The last bit of luggage was a new backpack, which I slung over my shoulder seeing as the trunk was full.

I saw her talking with another camper – probably the new friend from her letter. Seeing that this friend was a boy had me feeling suddenly protective of her, which also presented me with an uncomfortable reality; Annabeth was twelve. Twelve. It's been five years since than. What kind of person had she become? What did she like to eat? What were her interests? My own daughter was a complete stranger to me.

The hug we shared was awkward, and the way she looked back at the valley and placed her hand on the nearby pine tree told me that she considered this place her home. Part of me wondered who I was to take her from this, but another said she was my daughter. She shortly greeted Irene, took her backpack and got into the car. The rest of us took that as a cue – it was time to go.

We made it to the city in silence. Irene and I kept looking at Annabeth through the front mirror of the car. The boys seemed to be even more agitated to be even more agitated now that what space there had been in the car before was taken up. They still didn't know her. Maybe I could get a head start on the bonding, break the ice for the ride home.

In her letter, Annabeth had said she'd gone on a quest with her friends, Percy and Grover I believe their names were. More boys. Still, I asked her about it. So Annabeth had told us about it. The whole story seemed to take up a couple of hours, but Irene and I watched in a mixture of wonder and joy at our kids. Matthew and Bobby were listening in rapt attention, as though they were watching a great movie, as Annabeth detailed the journey from outwitting Medusa and playing ball with Cerberus to confronting Hades and facing off against Ares.

Nothing made me happier than one of the boys, I think Matthew, asking Annabeth to elaborate on how she tamed Cerberus, to which she asked about Magnus, the dog. They looked at her like she was some kind of super hero, asking if she could teach them how to fight (something Irene shot down with a glare). All the same, the way the kids acted was as if Annabeth had never left with how familiar they acted.

Again, I can't help but feel a pang of protectiveness when she talked about this Percy, the boy she was with before. The way the boys started expressing over-the-top disgust at their sister's 'boyfriend', and her resulting brooding reminded me or myself and my own siblings.

We'll be fine.

The Chase family has always fascinated me and after rereading The Lightening Thief and realizing a couple of things, I felt the need to write this down. I feel like Annabeth and her father have a complicated relationship that goes deeper than the old 'evil stepmother' trope. Also, is Magnus's series any good? Review.