Annabeth Chase will be damned if this is the way she's going to be remembered- all blood and violence, golden liquid that slides down her arms and mixes with the red sprouting from her own, and she certainly doesn't want this to be the way he remembers her, full of anger and vengeance, so hot and thick it spews out of her like blood, like the rest of the blood that drips down her body and coats her skin.
Because she is nothing more than a women forged in fire, sparks and embers and a goddess herself, even though she is only descended from one (sometimes Percy forgets which one has the real power) for when the blades clash and her eyes darken, monsters alike fall under her gaze, one of dark mirth and intrigue.
Honestly, it's only fitting that this was the way everything should end: because in her seventeen years of life, things have never been easy for Annabeth Chase: easy, simple, happy, forever are simply not less she allows to fit in her vocabulary (they're far too dangerous to waste on her) so how could she have ever elected that she got a happiness and a life.
Because pain was the pulse in her heart and death in the poem that was her life, tears as the water from which she first emerged, blood from which her body thrived on, and because sadness and suffering were as familiar to her as kisses were for young lovers on a hot summer day.
Because the moment she fall on the ground, eyes open and lifeless is not the end of her story, the end of her story will be if he falls, so when she takes the knife for him, she knows that she is protecting everything that she ever wished she could be-loyal, selfless, brave- but more than that, she knows she is protecting the only thing that can protect everyone else.
And the tragedy written in her veins screams out in triumph.