Hey guys, I'm back! Oh, I know you're soo happy, right? Just kidding, you probably hate me by now. Well, these two words should explain it: writers' block. I HATE it, I don't know about you. Anyway, I know this one's short, but I am working on the next one as you read this A/N.

Because honestly, what comes next wouldn't be as good in Percy's point of view, wink wink.

10/Percy

Wistful.

It's always been a strange sort of presence in him.

His brain recognizes that somehow, though he's not thinking. He can't think. At least, not when he's with her. She does the thinking for him, and he's sure she knows that.

He wishes he could form his words the way he wants. Not the jumbled, clumsy, awkward mess that makes more sense in his mind than in his mouth. He hates the way her lovely face falls, into bitter disappointment that hurts him more than she could know. He wishes he could tell her…

But, he doesn't know what to tell her.

So he watches her walk away.

Her hair, bouncing in curls off her shoulders, taunts him, almost in slow motion. The creak of her shoes on wood seems to jab him with the reminder that she's leaving, that he should do something. Anything. But as the door of the engine rooms swishes to a close, he stands still.

And, as the door clicks shut, the momentary flash of her gray eyes is gone.

Yes, he's wistful. He's wistful for a life he knows he can never have. A world where there are no troubles in store for him. A place where it can just be him… and her. Where he doesn't have to fight for his life and hers. Where he doesn't have to protect…everything.

He's wistful for a chance to be normal. Just him. Just her. Just New York. Just California. Just together.

But he's alone now, standing in an empty, narrow hall, half-lit by the open hatch, rocking slightly on waves that swell with his frustration.

"You're an idiot," a voice comments behind him.

That breaks his trance. He blinks. He turns around to find Rachel Dare standing indifferently on the hatch steps, frowning at him in such a skeptical way she looks like his mother.

"What?" he asks.

Rachel gives him a skeptical look. "You're just as clueless as ever, you know that?"

"So I've been told," he replies.

She rolls her eyes, sighs, and heads up the steps before he can question her further.

"What?" he mutters to himself. Then he follows after her.

He isn't surprised to find everyone else on deck.

Thalia, clad in her Hunter's garb, laughs teasingly during her hand-to-hand-combat contest with Jason, whose forehead wrinkles in concentration. Piper, eyelids drooping in boredom, watches the siblings in a sort of trance as she waits for Leo to take his turn at jacks. Reyna stands near the prow, inspecting her tall spear with a trained Roman eye. Beside her is a table with a plate of doughnuts.

Rachel grabs one, smiling. "Thank you, Reyna," she says, taking a bite. "It was nice of you to make doughnuts." Reyna gives her a strange look.

"It's creepy how you know everything," Leo comments, frantically scooping jacks while the rubber ball soars. "Hah!" He slaps a handful on the floor, making Piper jump. "Take that, Beauty Queen!" He raises his arms over his head. "And the crowd goes wild! Rah! Rah!"

"I do not know everything," Rachel says. "And he cheated, Piper."

"Leo!" Piper punches his arm.

"Ouch! Come on, I only cheated a little—OW! Stop that!"

Their voices seem to fade from his ears as he turns away, towards the water. The morning is cool to his skin, the air laced with the brine of sea spray. He breathes it in gratefully, allowing his father's powers to heighten his senses.

"Sun's high," Reyna's voice says beside him.

He doesn't turn to her. "Yeah," he replies after a moment. "Apollo must be feeling good."

"Yeah," she says after a moment. "Your redhead sacrificed something to him the other night. Not that she needed to. Sybils are always the favorite."

"Oracle," he corrects. "Rachel's an Oracle. Greek, remember?"

He can feel her eyes studying him as his words hang suspended in the air between them. He turns to stare in return, but he is taken aback at the glare in her sharp gray eyes.

And though he hasn't known her long, he can read what's in them, unlike (in so many ways) Annabeth's. And even so, he can't see it all. She thinks he's lying, he knows that much. She thinks he's lying to everyone.

"I am a Greek, Rey," he insists. "I'm not a Roman."

She pauses. "You keep telling yourself that." With those words, she pushes herself away from the ledge and disappears from his sight.

The sigh that comes from his lips doesn't feel like a sigh. It feels more like he's breathing in, rather than out. Like he's breathing in all the doubt and skepticism that Reyna had been twining with the air, exchanging it for the hope he'd been experiencing.

His stomach begins to churn. What if she's right? The four-word sentence wraps around his mind in such a way that he wishes he never met the Roman girl.

His hands clench on the smooth olive wood of the Argo II as that idea, that simple idea, began to grow in the deep of his mind. It's true that, at times, he feels more like a soldier than a peacemaker.

But every single time he looks at Annabeth, he's reminded that she believes he belongs. With them. With her. In New York. And he knows—oh, more than anything, he knows—that he cares for her.

His thoughts flash back to that moment of suspense below deck, where a sliver of light was bouncing off her hair in sparkles, where her gait seemed perfect, where, even though everything had gone so, so wrong, she seemed perfect.

And...he didn't know what to tell her.

He uses both hands to rub his face, in an almost childish attempt to massage the throbbing brain behind it. Gods, why can't it just be easy for him?

"Storm's coming closer."

And speaking of not easy...

"Storm?" he says immediately, glancing up. Immediately he notices—though why he didn't before is inexplicable—that there is a row of furious clouds lurking on the horizon, and moving more quickly by the second.

"Yes, Jackson, storm." Thalia's electric blue eyes roll towards the sky, then swiftly sweep the skyline. "Doesn't look like I can control it, Kelp Brains. Why don't you—"

It takes him a fraction of a second to realize it was Thalia's own yelp that cut off her sentence.

Or, it could have been the horrible, creaking shudder that is tearing its way through the center of Leo Valdez's beloved ship.