Hey guys, this is the halfway point for Ten Days of Percabeth, I hope you enjoy this one and have a gorgeous week! Please hang on it is nearly Friday, I know you all can do it. This may be a bit weird or cheesy. I've grappled with what Annabeth actually means to Percy a bit- I mean, I know it's a lot. Then I read Will Shakespeare and BAM this happened.
Dedication: a fry
Disclaimer: Me no own
Five
Eternal Summer
Thy eternal summer shall not fade.
-William Shakespeare
Seven year old Percy had found the easiest subject for his oral presentation and he was proud of it. He even had cue-cards on which his mother had carefully written down what he had decided he should say. He stood in front of the class, making faces to Jude in the first row.
"Okay Percy, you may begin." The teacher said, putting Percy into a scramble to straighten up his face.
"Hi my name is Percy Jackson and today I'm going to talk to you about my favourite season," he said talking very quickly like everyone always did during oral presentations. "My favourite season is summer because in summer I don't have to work at school. I can just play and watch TV shows like SpongeBob. I go to work with my Mom and I get candy there because her job is at the candy shop."
Easiest theme ever.
Now he had to answer questions that his teacher would ask him on the subject. This was also written on the flashcard.
"Okay Percy that's great," Miss Portler said. "Now what's a disadvantage to your favourite season?"
Percy froze up.
"I think it's that Gabe is at home so I have to see Gabe more." Percy said. "And that's not fun, but since my mom brings me to work it's okay and since my mom's work is at a candy store it's even more okay."
"And who's Gabe?" Miss Portler asked.
"My stepdad," Percy said.
"Very good Percy, thank you for your presentation," Miss Portler nodded, having decided that she did not want to go in the subject of family, and the class clapped.
He was in sixth grade about as bored as children possibly got.
His teacher, Mrs. Champagne, held a globe up and had it tilting at an angle and circling another yellow ball she held in her hand. Supposedly the sun.
"The seasons are there every year because the earth never stops rotating around the sun," she said. "That's why winter, spring, summer and autumn always come around."
Percy scrambled to find a pencil and scribble that down like the rest of his classmates were.
Many years, around five or six years, later, Percy looked out the van's back window for as long as possible before Argus made a turn and he lost sight of Camp.
Then he turned back and settled in for a long ride back to New York. The two guys next to him, Julian and Kyle, had already fallen asleep. Katie and Olivia were talking amongst each other in the seats in front of him, and Argus was, of course, silent.
He leaned his head back against his seat rest and wished that Annabeth was coming back to the city too. Not just because then his car ride would be better, but his whole year would be. Unfortunately a leg injury was keeping her at camp for a few more months, to make sure she'd be safe once she'd be back in town.
He'd had the best summer of his life after Gaia's war. Activity after activity, teaching class after class, campfire story after campfire story, good foods, great people, the woods were fully stocked with monsters this year…
No apocalypse; no quest; no godly battle immediately after.
It felt suspicious and for the first week Percy expected to wake up in Egypt or something, but summer went as smoothly as a river's flow, and as peacefully as the season's breeze.
And it felt good. It was the greatest summer of his life, and it was amazing the kind of time with your training, friends, and girlfriend you could have when you weren't saving the world at six month intervals. He'd sung the silly campfire songs, he'd allied himself with Cabin 11 to play tricks on cabin five, he and Annabeth dominated Capture-the-Flag and maybe did some other stuff…
The memories felt like they'd all happened five minutes ago. So vibrant and alive and great…
He fell asleep himself, head against the window, hoping that they'd never fade.
Percy looked out the window at school. Having him next to the glass pane, the portal to the outside world, was the poorest seating plan decision any teacher had ever made. He watched the sun's glow shine off everything and light up the scene. The ninth graders in gym class playing soccer in the fields, the trees in their measly park, their battered up soccer goals, the fence surrounding the school property, the dried grass…
He just watched the sun and the light it bathed everything in. It was still summer out there, and to him summer always meant and always had meant Annabeth Chase. It was impossible to look at the sunshine and not think about her. About what she might be doing, about the moments spent at Camp Half-Blood, what kind of meetings and excitement they might be up to next summer, the way the sun would shine off her hair if she was there…
Annabeth was his summers, what could he say?
She pulled her arm away from him and groaned.
"You are the most frustrating thing in existence," Annabeth snapped at him.
"Look, I'm sorry, you're right; I should have told you about Reyna getting hurt-"
"Yes- you should have!" She growled, crossing her arms in front of her chest.
"But I didn't want to worry you!"
"Worry me?" Annabeth snapped. "Percy, there is a difference between not wanting to worry someone and not telling them that one of their best friends nearly got her lung taken out by a dragon!"
"Drakon," Percy corrected. He immediately knew he should have shut up.
"You have to stop overprotecting me," Annabeth said. "We spent a summer in Tartarus. I thought we'd know each other's limits better. I am not fragile!"
"I never said you were!" Percy said. "I just…"
"If I'm not, why do I need protecting so badly?" Annabeth asked crossing her arms. She closed her eyes.
"I need to clear my head." She said before sliding out of the restaurant booth, grabbing her coat off the hook and heading back outside as flurries peppered every New Yorker's field of vision, before her red cheeks had even had time to warm up.
Percy leaned his head back and closed his eyes. What had he done?
"Oh, don't worry sweetheart," the waitress who they always saw and always talked to said. "It's just a fight. You apologised for whatever it is you did. I'm sure it can't be that bad, and I'm sure she'll forgive you. She'll come around."
Percy nodded and grabbed his own coat.
He remembered sixth grade. The seasons always came around.
"Okay," Mr Granger, Percy's English teacher for the year, said. "Flash oral presentation day."
There were groans, but Mr Granger didn't care in the least so they went through the class.
He got to Percy.
"Percy…" He said leaning on his desk and searching through his head for a bit. "What is your favourite season?"
"Summer," Percy said immediately.
"Okay," Mr Granger said. "Care to elaborate?"
"It's just a really fun time of the year for me. I'm a counsellor at this camp. It's really cool, I get to see my cousins and most of my best friends go there and I only see them then. Ditto my girlfriend. There's archery, horseback riding, canoeing, rock climbing. They've got this awesome beach that's way prettier than you'd expect for Long Island, there's this strawberry field that you can basically go pick berries out of if you're hungry and gutsy enough. Like I said earlier, it's really the only time I get to spend a lot of quality time with my girlfriend."
He got some awes.
"Nice," Mr Granger said. "So what's a disadvantage of summer for you?"
Percy thought for a second.
"They end," Percy said.
In history class they talked about the impact the seasons had on the life of natives across the world. Especially in the Northern hemisphere, life got harder in the winter because it was a) cold, b) harder to find food, c) difficult to get around. Life was always easier in the summer.
After history class, he had math and he found out that he'd failed his test on accounts of subtraction and division and addition symbols looking very alike, as well as thinking that the multiplication symbol for an 'x' variable. Also his spelling had been horrid. Like, worse than usual. Something must have happened the day of that test to make him agitated or something. Was it the day that Leo had broken his arm and popped his shoulder from its socket? Maybe.
Then he had lunch, and that sucked because he had detention for something he'd done a million weeks ago and had probably already done detention for.
Then he got to have gym, but the substitute teacher benched him half the time because some guy had been talking to him when everyone was supposed to shut up.
Then in philosophy he found out he'd read the wrong chapter the night before (which was naturally a million pages longer than the actually-assigned assigned reading) so he was lost for the whole period.
His day sucked.
So he wasn't in a good mood when he got home to more algebra, double the philosophy reading, and he forgot his key so he got to sit in the hallway and do aforementioned homework until Mom got home from a meeting with her publisher.
His day really sucked.
The doorbell rang and Percy was wondering if Paul had also forgotten his key, but seconds after mom called out that she had it, Annabeth walked into the living room, her backpack slung across her shoulder, still wearing her uniform. Her curls fell around her face and that always seemed to draw focus on her eyes. She smiled.
"Hi Seaweed brain," she said.
Her smile lit up his whole freaking apartment, and his sucky day.
Annabeth's grave looked all wrong.
He knew that she needed one, even if it was uncustomary for half-bloods, due to her fame in the real world as the architect for the United States Museum of Historical Segregation and Discrimination. And he knew she was dead. He'd been the first to get the call from the hospital where she'd been taken, and he'd been the first to get there and identify the body. So that wasn't the part that was off. The off part was… Just the stone…
It was polished black and grey, with her name and important dates written on it in square letters, as well as a quote about something the president had said about her.
It was dark and cold and dead.
That was not Annabeth Chase.
Annabeth Chase was the smell of burning berries and pine in camp's Capture-the-flag forest, the sound of waves at the beach and endless strings of equations, theorems and Shakespearean sonnets recited in stickily hot afternoons. Annabeth Chase was lemon hair and strawberry kisses. Annabeth Chase was sun kissed skin. She was dirt-smeared cheeks, dried blood over cuts and scrapes, twigs trapped in curls and screaming at the sight of cobwebs. Stormy eyes, summer days.
He looked at the stone and a smile pulled his lips up.
Nice try, stone, he thought. Nice try.
They could try to say that Annabeth Chase was dead. They could burn her shroud, bury her seven feet underneath the ground and put a fancy professional stone on top. But they could not say she was dead. Because Annabeth Chase would always be alive as long as there were sticky summer days to sweat in, strawberries to smell, cuts to kiss all better, adventures to be had, jokes to say, forests to run in, and things to learn.
Annabeth Chase was his summer, and the seasons would not stop for the gods.
Annabeth Chase would not fade.