if all those endearing young charms
The soulmate "phenomenon" is discovered in 2051. The government tells people that this is something new, that they have just made a groundbreaking but this isn't true. There are stories, there have been stories: the couple whose love burned brighter than the sun; the couple that went out in a blaze of glory, fighting till the very end.
Naturally, people don't believe them, so the government does what governments so: they make laws: no one is allowed to disobey the following decrees; no one is to try to rebel; no one is to be with anyone other than their soulmate; no one is allowed to look for their soulmate…it gets old, eventually. Everything does.
It manifests early for Annabeth, and one day when she is three and a half years old the forest green crayon, and the lime green crayon, and the yellow green crayon in the box look the same bleak shade of grey. She doesn't understand what's going on, so she yells for her parents, who rush into her room clutching a baseball bat and one of her grandmother's nice silver forks. They look around and when they realize that nothing has happened to her, they lower their weapons.
"What's wrong, sweetie?" her mother asks.
"The crayons look the same!" she says, peering at Caribbean Green and seeing grey. She frowns, remembering an old medical textbook she had picked up in the study. "Am I going color blind?"
Her parents sag a little in relief, laugh a little. 'No sweetie.' They exchange looks again. 'What do you know about the soulmate phenomenon?'
;;;;
She grows increasingly annoyed with her inability to see the color green as she grows older and eventually the color blue gets progressively duller too, then one day when she is five, she can't see the sky anymore.
(She hates her soulmate.)
They go to the beach over summer break that year, and while her parents gush about the aquamarine color of the water, the vibrancy of the vegetation, the tranquil beauty of the sky, she curls her lip in disgust unable to understand what is so appealing about this bleak, bland, uninteresting shade of grey that is everywhere, the small abrasive grains of sand that slip into her socks and shoes and rub against her feet.
When they ask about it, she generates false enthusiasm from some corner of her soul and responds brightly (still with a childish lisp,) 'Yeah, Mom! It was so cool!'
When her mother turns to her father again, she glares through their conversation about aquatic ecosystems.
(She hates her soulmate even more now.)
;;;;
She's seven when her father decides to get a divorce. She doesn't get it at first because all of her friends' parents are still happy and in love and together, but when she does she raises high hell, kicking and screaming and crying generally trying to create and much noise and tears as possible, because she's only seven and this is the only way she knows how to tell him 'whatever it is that I did to you please stay' and 'i'm sorry' and 'please don't leave us (please don't leave me.)'
(It doesn't work.)
And this is how she ends up in the back of her mothers SUV (once their SUV) staring at the manor growing progressively smaller through the back window, until it is just a tiny dot and all she can hear are the sounds of her mother's heartbreak, even muffled against her hand.
;;;;
She meets Thalia and Luke when she is ten. She runs away from the house (the building they live in now will never be home, especially not when she can hear her mother wandering the halls like a shadow at night.)
She tries to find her father on the computer at the library, and for a while she stares at the glowing screen with something akin to hope, because computers can do everything, but then she realizes her father has truly picked up and left, so she leaves dragging her feet to the park bench and sitting down dejectedly, shoulders slumped, hands clenched, a frown on her face.
She wallows there for a while until someone says 'Hey princess.'
She looks up immediately and then narrows her eyes suspiciously to see two teenagers watching her. 'Who are you?' she asks cautiously subconsciously leaning away from the guy on the bench, while the girl sits next to her.
He gives her a bright grin, raises his hands in surrender. 'Just Luke. I live across the street from you.'
She nods in realization. Luke's lip curls into a tiny unnoticeable grin. Annabeth turns to the girl raising an eyebrow in question.
'I'm Thalia. I live next to Luke.' Annabeth nods again.
The teenagers exchange looks over her head. 'So…' prompts Thalia. 'Whatcha doin' out here kiddo?'
Annabeth's shoulders slump a little more. 'I was trying to find my Dad.'
Thalia winces, like this has struck a nerve. 'You didn't find him did you.' She says this as a statement not a question.
'No, I didn't.'
They sit there on the bench for a while, staring at the other passerby running up and down the path. And then a while later, Luke says, 'Come on princess. We'll walk you back home.'
Annabeth smiles.
;;;;
When Annabeth is fifteen, her mother dies on her way back from work. A carpet salesman from Kansas of all places has a little too much to drink, and slams into her mother's car on the freeway.
She doesn't feel much at first, but she has this strange ringing in her ears and she's numb and she trembling (why is she trembling?) and then the cops take her in to identify the body, and it all settles in. Her mother is dead. She's never gonna get to be annoyed when her mother fogets cap the toothpaste, or when she leaves the refrigerator door open. She's never gonna hear footfalls in the dead of the night. She starts crying then, great big tears running down her face, snot coming out of her nose, and one of the officers comes into the morgue, drags her away from her mother's body with a gentle pat on the back.
(She knows the only colors she can't really see are blue and green, but everything looks grey now.)
Her father is in the morgue when she wipes her face and cries herself out of tears in the bathroom, and suddenly she's so angry, because she can still hear her mother sobbing into her pillow, she can still hear her shuffling around the halls, she can still feel the ache in her chest from when she realized her dad wasn't coming back so who the hell gave him the right to be heartbroken after he left them?
She stalks up to him. 'What the hell are you doing here?' she asks in a heated whisper. She feels a pang of familiarity in her chest when she realizes he is about to reprimand her for her language.
And sure enough, 'Language-'
'Oh no.' she laughs bitterly. 'You don't get to tell me to watch my language, when you haven't been around for eight goddamn years.'
Her father opens his mouth frowning, then closes it again. 'Fair enough.' he says finally. He looks at her mother's corpse sadly.
She clenches her jaw. (Her father doesn't deserve to be here.) They stay like that for a long time, her father looking at the corpse-no her mother, Annabeth stewing, with tears in her eyes and clenched fists.
;;;;
She leaves with her father a while later, after the medical examiner finally comes in and takes her mother off the slab. The ride on the plane is long (and very very silent.)
When they finally arrive in New York, Annabeth scowls at the house (and it looks too similar to the one she lived in when she was seven, with the squeaky front door and the white picket fence, and that random cat that would sneak it's way in through the window in Annabeth's bedroom her liking.)
Her father takes their bags and drops them on the floor, and then turns to her. 'So…your room is upstairs…I painted it and everything.' he tries to smile.
She smiles back and it's sarcastic and mean and maybe she shouldn't after all he just lost his ex-wife. But screw it, she doesn't care- he left for eight years without so much as a hello, and now he has the audacity to show up and- no. She's not going down that road.
(He left them.)
(The walls in her room are painted blue. She can't see blue. The coverlet on the bed is green, so is the area rug. She can't see green either.)
;;;;
She goes back to San Francisco for her sixteenth birthday. Thalia and Luke had insisted, considering they were leaving to college after break (even though the college they're going to is in New York.) It's a little bittersweet.
When she gets off the plane, the first thing she sees is Luke jumping up and down with an upside-down sign that reads 'Princess!' Thalia is pretending she doesn't know him. (It's not working at all.)
She sighs and waves back. Luke grins so widely she's afraid his face might fall off. He gives her a bear hug as soon as she walks over. It's ridiculous really after all he is eighteen (she hopes he never changes.)
'Princess! How absolutely spiffing to see you again!' he crows.
Thalia shoves him out of the way. 'How was NYC kiddo?' she asks.
'Loud. Populated. Disastrous. Take your pick.'
Luke ruffles her hair. 'As cynical as ever. We'll done, dear.'
Thalia groans. 'Why are you so weird?'
Luke laughs and presses a kiss into her hair, throwing an arm over her shoulder. Annabeth raises an eyebrow suggestively at Thalia.
Thalia leans into Luke's embrace and sticks her tongue out at Annabeth as Luke says, 'Because my weird has to cancel out your weird, Grim Reaper.'
Luke howls as Thalia slaps him, and Annabeth beams. Then she sees a lock of grey in Thalia's hair. She frowns. 'Thalia?'
'Yeah kid?'
'Why is your hair grey?'
Luke and Thalia stop for a minute, and then they start laughing so hard they double over. 'What?'
'Annie, my hair is blue.' Thalia explains.
Annabeth blushes a little. '…Oh.' She says.
Luke gives her a look. 'Blue huh?'
'And green.' she answers.
'Two colors?' Luke whistles, then grins devilishly. 'Your soulmate must be a hot piece of ass. Good job, Princess.'
Annabeth is red as a firetruck now. 'Luke!'
;;;;
Thalia and Luke throw a 'Welcome Back Annabeth!' party at Thalia's father's place. It's small, just Thalia's cousins and their girlfriends (or in Nico's case, boyfriend) Thalia's little brother Jason and his girlfriend Piper, and their friend Grover and his girlfriend Juniper.
Annabeth is going outside to wait for the party to die down, when she almost bumps into someone.
'Sorr-' she begins then stops.
'Whoa.' the guy says.
She laughs a little and then stares some more. His eyes are jade/emerald/navy/aquamarine and she can finally see it. Then she looks around at the pool, the sky and she finally gets it, what her parents were so excited about all those years ago, why Thalia died her hair the way she did, because a stripe of this color in your hair would definitely freak your parents out, this as a color for the sky is beautiful, this as a color for water is breathtaking.
'Grey?' she asks after a while. They've gone back to staring at each other by then.
He shakes his head. 'Yellow.'
She smiles. 'Green. And blue.'
He nods. 'Percy.' he offers with a sheepish grin.
Annabeth smiles. 'Annabeth.'
He smiles at her then and it's bright and happy, and his eyes change colors for a split second. He shuffles awkwardly and almost trips over his own feet. She bites her lip against the surge of emotion. She smiles back.
fin.