June

III

Percy crept through the darkened bedroom, balancing a cardboard tray with two takeout caps and a paper bag already translucent with grease on the nightstand as he made his way to the window. Annabeth was curled up asleep, lying on her side. Her blonde hair was tangled around her face and slopped onto the surrounding pillow; the eye makeup she had been wearing yesterday had gathered in clumps and smudges around the lower rim of her eye sockets. Her face was crisscrossed with red pillow creases; yellow rocks of rheum nestled in the corners of her eyes.

She looked stunning.

Percy opened the curtains; light sliced through the gloom, falling on Annabeth's face. Her eyes twitched a couple of times and she frowned, reaching up to rub sleep from her face. She glanced over at the alarm clock and sat bolt upright, tossing the covers off her so hard most of them slid onto the floor.

"Percy, please tell me that clock is wrong and it's not 11 in the morning."

Percy straightened the curtains. "Do… you want me to lie?"

Annabeth growled and began charging around the room, yanking her robe off a hook on the back of the door and whirling it around herself before opening the closet and pulling items of clothing off hangers, strewing them across the rumpled bed. She grabbed a can of dry shampoo off the dresser and plopped down on the end of the bed to spray it through her hair while looking in the dressing table mirror.

"My alarm didn't go off. I'm supposed to be at work. Why the hell didn't you wake me up?"

Percy leaned back against the windowsill. "I, uh… I turned it off. You didn't sleep well last night. When you finally got to sleep, you would have been up in like three hours. That's not enough."

Annabeth accidentally frosted her forehead with dry shampoo as she jerked her head towards Percy. White flakes fluttered in front of her vision like falling snow. "You did what? Why would you do that? I've functioned on less sleep perfectly well in the past. And anyway, of course I didn't sleep well last night, but whose fault is that? I'd just been told Kronos was coming for my baby and I was the last person to know about it. What do you expect?" She swiped the blob of dry shampoo off her face and set about scrubbing it through her hair.

"Don't get mad. You need your rest and I wanted us to talk."

If there hadn't been a large, jawed hair clip in her mouth that second, Percy knew he would have been eviscerated by Annabeth's response. As it was, he felt the heat from the glare she shot at him as she finished putting her hair up in a ponytail and then started winding it up so she could clip it in place.

"You don't get to decide whether I get mad or not. Especially after yesterday. And you don't get to turn my alarm off so we can talk. The world doesn't revolve around what you want and need. This is my career, Percy. I can't just drop it because you feel bad about what you did."

"I called your office and told them you were puking your guts up with morning sickness. Your assistant bumped your morning meetings and moved the rest of your schedule around for you. It's fine."

Annabeth had been peeling the sticker off the top of a pack of makeup wipes when Percy told her the news; her hands spasmed and she ripped too hard, tearing through the entire packet. It cleaved into two halves. Wipes splatted onto the vanity table. "What?"

"I called your office and—"

"I heard what you damn well said, Percy. I'm not deaf. I meant what the hell do you think you're doing and, while I'm thinking about it, where the hell do you get off doing something like that? I don't have morning sickness. I'm fine. Do you know how many women there are in my firm at my level? Three. And you know how many men there are? In fact, I don't even know how many men there are. Too many to damn count. You know the reason? Because when people are hiring, they took one look at the résumé of a woman of reproductive age and think no, we can't risk hiring her, she'll just go and get pregnant the second she gets good and that will be more trouble than it's worth. You just played right into their hands!"

Percy blinked. "But… what?"

Annabeth's elbows thumped onto the dressing table and she buried her face in her hands, using her fingers to massage her hairline. "Never mind. Forget it. Of course you wouldn't know anything about it. Everything comes so easy to you."

"Excuse me?" Percy demanded, shoving himself forward off the windowsill. "You think my life is easy? You've known me since we were eleven. When has my life ever been easy? If it wasn't Medusa it was the Hydra or the Nemean lion and an automaton that killed someone I promised Nico I would protect. Then do you even want to talk about the Titans, or the Giants, or anything else in my life and then tell me you think it's easy? And none of that compares to how hard it was for me to watch you pull yourself to pieces because you couldn't get pregnant in the first place. I would have done all of that again that afternoon you told me if I thought it would have changed things."

Annabeth's spine and demeanour softened. She dropped her hands from her face. "You're right. Sorry, I didn't mean your life had been a cakewalk. I just meant that things still come so much easier for guys in so many cases and half the time, they don't even know how good they've got it. I was talking about jobs and careers, not… the rest of it. But it's still why you don't call my office and tell them I'm too sick through pregnancy to come to work. It just reinforces the stereotype, okay?"

Percy nodded. "Fine, okay. I screwed up. Again. I was just trying to look out for you. And you're right: I do feel guilty for what I did. I was trying to help make it better." He paused. "I bought cronuts. And coffee."

Annabeth glanced at the offering on the nightstand. "I'm off caffeine. You know that."

"It's decaf."

Annabeth's lip curled. "Are you kidding me? You know how I feel about decaf."

Percy smiled and crossed the room, popping the lid off the top of one of the takeaway cups to waft the steam towards her. "And yeah, while I'm totally on the same page with that and non-alcoholic beer, it still smells good though, huh? Just this once?"

The smell worked its way into Annabeth's nostrils and she crumbled, reluctantly rising from the bed and moving towards Percy. "Fine," she said, her lower lip jutting as she said it. "I guess as I didn't buy it, I'm not supporting coffee companies' delusions that this is a remotely acceptable invention." She took a sip of coffee and stared at Percy. "Well? I'm still waiting for the promised cronut over here."

Percy jumped like he'd been shocked and scrabbled for the bag, unrolling the top and offering it to Annabeth. She took the bag from him and sat down on the bed, pressing the cup of coffee between her knees and starting to flake pastry off the first of two in the bag.

"What?" she said, as Percy looked slightly crestfallen. "You didn't think you were going to get one of these, did you, after what you did?"

The corners of Percy's mouth dropped and he sighed, shaking his head. "That's a valid point."

"Yes," Annabeth said through a mouth full of pastry, pausing to flick a crumb from the corner of her mouth, "it is."

The bed creaked as Percy sat down next to Annabeth. He reached for his own coffee and she took another sip of hers before starting to demolish the rest of the first cronut.

"You don't know how sorry I am." Percy pressed his hands against the walls of the cup; the scalding liquid within was burning through the paper, stinging his palms. Coffee sloshed underneath the little mouth in the plastic lid. He risked a look up at Annabeth as she sighed and plonked the paper bag off her lap and onto the bed on the other side of her to Percy.

"I do know how sorry you are. I can tell. I'm not completely heartless you know. But Percy, being sorry isn't enough. You systematically lied to me about something that is so important that I can't even fathom why you thought it was a good idea in the first place. You stopped me trusting you. If I can't trust you, where does that leave us?"

"I get it. I really screwed up. But don't I get any credit for doing it for a really good reason? When Rachel told me the prophecy and we found out that Tartarus had already started the assault by sending someone for the Oracle, I was terrified. Paralysed. And then after that, I put my fist through Rachel's wall, for the gods' sake. All I wanted to do was keep you safe."

"Ignorant is not the same as safe."

"Maybe not. But I wanted to make sure you didn't suffer the same way I did. Make sure you didn't have any stress that could affect the baby. Make sure you weren't terrified every damn day. And… I spent a long time feeling really guilty. I wanted to protect you from that." The burning between his palms became too much and he put the coffee down on the nightstand. His palms were glowing like the element inside a toaster.

"Yeah, guilt is what happens when you do something wrong like keeping giant secrets from your wife."

Percy shook his head. "No, not that. Well, yes. That. I did feel guilty for that. I still do, and it's killing me. But before that, all I could think was what have I done? If I'd only been a mortal, or even if I was only the child of someone other than Poseidon, this wouldn't be happening. I couldn't be happy that you were pregnant and I was going to be a dad because all I could think about was how we'd done something that was going to end the world. This isn't the Titans or the Giants. This is something I did that's going to bring about the apocalypse. Something I wanted for so long and then when it finally happened, I didn't even get to feel happy for five minutes before it all came crashing down. You were so happy to be pregnant and so excited to be a mom. Who am I to take that away from you just because it had been taken away from me? It feels like there's just this trail of destruction following me around, and everything I touch ends up in a world of hurt and pain and suffering and loss. If that's the case, fine. I can deal. But why should you and my baby have to suffer because of that? I couldn't make you feel as guilty as I did. It wouldn't have been fair." He swallowed hard.

"Take this," Annabeth said, thrusting her coffee at him.

Percy blinked at her and took it.

Annabeth rolled her eyes. "Put it down. Don't just sit there holding it like the village idiot."

The cup squeaked next to his into the cardboard holder on the nightstand.

Annabeth pulled her legs up onto the bed, curling them underneath her and then gathering Percy's hands into his. "Look at me," she said, shaking Percy's hands when he at first refused to meet her gaze. "Hey. Look at me. This is not your fault. It's not your fault, it's not my fault, and it's certainly not the baby's fault. The only thing that's at fault here is Tartarus. He wants to rise and he wants to use our baby to do it. We're the victims here and we're not going to blame ourselves and feel guilty for it. We're not going to let this stop us being happy. In fact, we're not going to let this stop us doing anything. It is what it is. We'll kick ass, we'll move on. Just like we always do. Okay?"

"But—"

"No. I refuse for there to be a but. There are no buts. I'm sorry you had to feel this way, and thank you for trying to protect me from that, but that's not how I feel right now. Why should I? I love you, okay? But you've had to save the world too many times. You've got too used to everything coming down to you, whether it's the prophecy that happened when you turned sixteen or all the other times you've had to stop the world ending. But not everything that happens is your fault or your responsibility to fix alone. Sometimes, things just happen. And they suck, but we're here to deal with these things together and we'll be fine."

"Will we? This whole thing scares me to death, Annabeth. I can't lose you. Either of you."

"And you think you have the monopoly on terror? Because this just in: you don't. Not even close. I'm terrified as well. But I know we'll fix it. We have to."

Percy raised their hands to his lips and kissed them. "I love you."

"I love you too," Annabeth said, squeezing Percy's hands before disentangling them and picking up the paper bag again. She pulled out what remained of the first cronut and bit into it, sending flakes of pastry fluttering down onto her lap.

"So… if you love me…?" Percy tried.

Annabeth frowned, tightening her grip on the neck of the bag. "Can you have the second cronut?"

"Well…"

"Yeah, I'm still kind of mad, so the answer to that is still no. My pastries. Back off."

Percy plucked a flake of pastry from Annabeth's lap morosely and popped it in his mouth. "I had this coming, huh?"

"Oh yeah," Annabeth said around the last mouthful of cronut, spewing pastry crumbs from her lips. "Big time."