Happy New Year everyone! This is a little late, but not too late, I hope. I literally wrote this within the hour after 1:00, so forgive me if it sucks or there are some really bad typos and whatever.
I would've written a Christmas one (or maybe not... I mean, it's not like the demigods are christian...) but Christmas was really hectic for me and I just got back from Cambodia for New Years. Ah well, c'est la vie.
Balloons, let go of their tethers, rise up to the gods, carrying messages of new years resolutions and greetings of different languages. Amidst the throng, two figures let go their own white balloons, their messages quite simply 'Hello Aeolus, Happy New Year! And may this year be better than the last. (You know, without a crazy primordial goddess trying to kill everyone.) ~ Percy and Annabeth.'
Their balloons fly, twirling around each other, reminding the boy of the lighted lanterns in Tangled, dancing together, skirting around one another, never touching, and yet unmistakably together. Spotlights hit the two, lighting them up for a brief moment and it looked like maybe they were lanterns, lit up from the inside, but then the spot moves away and they revert back to their original, pearly white selves, turning lazily around each other and rising slowly into the pitch-black sky.
The countdown starts, and the two join in the yelling of the drunk, deliriously happy people waiting for a better year. They grin at each other, drunk, too, but not on alcohol, just the fact that it was New Years, and they were still alive and together, and when they all scream 'zero' with the crowd, one grabs the other and pulls her in for a kiss.
Later, back at home in their apartment, late showers of fireworks popping in the background and other, similar sounds, most likely of gunshots, marring the air, they sit wrapped together with a blanket on their couch. They're tired, but not too tired, cups of coffee on the table in front of them to keep each other awake, and although it's already the new year and there's no real reason to stay up, they both feel an urge to pull and all-nighter and simply not sleep until the next day's sun has set.
After a few moments of silence, the girl—for she is still underage, despite all she's gone through—raises her head from his shoulder and kisses him lightly. "Thank you." She whispers. The boy looks at her in surprise, not because there was nothing to thank, but because she rarely thanked anyone—that suggested she needed help and it was provided, and needing help was being weak in her opinion, something that could never be shown.
"What for?" He asks in a low voice, already beginning to become hoarse from their yelling during the previous hour.
"Being here." She lays her head back down, but onto his chest this time, so that she can hear the steady beat of his heart. "The year I met you, my New Years resolution was to go on a quest." She's mumbling, almost incoherent and too soft for him to understand, but he strains a bit and can make out the words. He doesn't ask her to speak louder, and she continues after a few more heartbeats, getting louder with each sentence. "The next year, I wanted to become on better terms with my brothers. The third year, to never think of Luke in a romantic way—positive, maybe a few times, but never romantically. I knew he wasn't worth a broken heart, or at least not two. Thalia was already hurt, but that didn't mean I had to be too, not in that way. The fourth year, I wanted to tell you I liked you, to get together with you or at least get it through your thick skull that I liked you and figure out if you liked me back or not. Year after that, for this war to be finished, won, and Luke gone. And I might have made a second one wherein we got together." She looks up now, pressing a firm kiss onto his lips. "Last year, my New Years resolution was to find you and finally spend the first New Years with each other, like we'd planned last year." She whispers against his lips, before moving back so that they can see each other, face-to-face. "What should mine be this year?"
The boy's soft smile turns into a grimace. "You shouldn't ask me." He said. "I used to make New Year resolutions." He looks away, down into his lap. "Back when New Years was still a magical thing, with beautiful fireworks and white snow. And back when mom was still with Gabe. Each year, I'd say that I was gonna get rid of him, I was gonna finally convince my mom that he was terrible and we should leave him. And then I started to forget Gabe, have things like 'stay in the same school for two years' or 'not blow something up accidentally.' None of them happened. I gave up in the fifth grade. I'm pretty sure the definition of New Years resolutions on the urban dictionary is something like 'a drunken resolution made by desperate men and women who think life will get better if they can pinpoint what is wrong with it.'" He looks at his girlfriend. "You're the only one I know of whose New Years resolutions have come true."
"Maybe yours come true late." She suggested. "Or maybe it's the gods' way of telling you that things happen for a reason, like why your mom was still with Gabe. So when it doesn't get broken this year, it can be the gods' way of telling you that you chose a good resolution."
"Of course you have to choose a good resolution. Of course that's why yours always came true." He mutters. "It's not wishful thinking or drunken determination, it's cool, calculated goals that could come true, if you worked hard enough."
"That's what a resolution is."
"Not a New Years one."
"Percy, let's just figure out a New Years resolution."
"You figure one out. I'll just go along with it."
"Well I was thinking of 'not breaking up or getting into bad fights or being apart from each other for more than a few weeks without contact' but that might be much, huh? And out of our control." Percy lets out a breathless chuckle, and she takes that as an agreement. "Not letting the gods push us around?" Percy gives her a look. "Finish designs for Olympus?" Percy snorts at that one. "Well I don't know!" She throws her hands into the air and gives up.
"Maybe you don't have one because everything's been fixed already, because this is the happiest we've been in almost forever. Well, there's the two weeks after we got together, when Chiron extended the camp days. But aside from that, this one's… great. There's nothing in our lives to be resolved."
"Then for our lives not to get more messed up. To stay resolved and more or less good, just like today."
"And even boring would be nice."
"Boring would not be nice, boring would be boring."
"Then normal would be nice."
"We'll never be normal. We can try, though."
"There. There's a New Years resolution. Try to have a normal, more or less happy, not messed-up life."
"And stay together."
"And love each other."
"Now you're just getting cheesy."
"You love me for it anyway."
She whispers a 'yes I do' against his lips a few moments later, but he doesn't respond, only smiles and kisses her back.
Aeolus gets his men to sort through the New Years messages the next day, as they have every year, balloons going in one place and boring messages with 'Happy New Year!' written on them in another. He keeps the interesting ones, the wishes and the resolutions. Sometimes he'll try to make them come true, if he can find the right person. His secretary brings in a pair of pearly white balloons, bobbing lightly in the air, and leaves it there for him to see. He tacks them up next to a surprisingly precise, coloured crayoned drawing of a big boat with a golden dragon head, a wish he'd granted to a five-year-old child, just a decade or so late.
Yeah, I kinda ran out of steam towards the end, but hey, it was 2:00 in the morning and everyone else was telling me to go to sleep already. Also, I've never had New Years in San Fran or New York, so I have no idea what they do there (watch the ball drop, right? I have no idea what that means-why would you want to watch a ball drop? Is it like a special ball? Really big? I've never had New Years in the States. That I can remember.) but in Cambodia they had all these balloons and people were letting them go with papers attached to the bottom of them and I was like, hey! and this happened.
And also, that Leo thing... I dunno where it came from either, I guess to show Aeolus'... wish-granting personality? Just came out and so I kept it because I didn't have a better ending.