A/N: Heey, I wrote this mainly because it was my first day on a pre-med course and I was feeling really uneasy. But I also truly believe demigods would have trouble settling in on a normal life because they have so many instincts built in them from two thousand years in the past and so much to carry on their shoulders, specially Annabeth, who's live in camp a big part of her life. Just a thought.
Haze
Sometimes she's get hit by such a strange sensation, sitting in class, taking the bus, paying for her coffee. She'd be overcome by a sudden feeling of not belonging. For a few seconds she'd feel so completely disoriented. The world around her seemed to blur, like a thin sheet of mist had fallen. For those couple of moments, it had stopped spinning in its axis and the one spinning was her, or it spun too fast and she couldn't keep up. She'd be just slightly out of sync with the rest of the world, just a bit, one second out of time, just enough to make her reality seem surreal.
She'd stop and wonder just what she was doing, stuck in a classroom listening to a man who's learned all he knows from a book talk about things he doesn't understand when she's designed the home of the gods, when she's traveled this whole country and beyond saving their puny mortal lives. She was a hero, a demigod, daughter of Athena goddess of wisdom and warfare, what was she doing in that place? Shouldn't she be doing something else? Didn't she have somewhere else she ought to be?
She'd feel trapped, like the walls were closing in on her, the place was too crowded. She'd unconsciously start tracing battle plans with her fingertips, looking for way outs, calculating how long it would take her to reach the door, how high was the window and could she survive the fall? Her battlefield instincts would kick in, her mind going on overdrive, she'd have the sudden overwhelming urge to run. Run, run, run away and fast, leave everything behind, feel the impact of her sneakers on the pavement, the throbbing of tired muscles, the tingling of adrenaline just beneath her skin. For one second she'd be tense, shoulders stiff, knees bent, poised to flee to that somewhere else she should be going to.
And then she'd blink and it would be gone. All of it vanished, leaving a dizzying sensation of displacement in its wake. She'd rub her eyes and the mist would lift. She'd relax, her trembling hands the only signal of the adrenaline shock she'd had. She'd take a deep breath, pick up her coffee and go on her way.
The strange sensation that she'd forgotten something important would linger in the back of her mind for the rest of the day.