Disclaimer: I am not, and will never be, Rick Riordan. Sadly, this means I don't own Percy Jackson.

Warnings: Swearing, PTSD symptoms.

"Families are messy. Immortal families are eternally messy. Sometimes the best we can do is to remind each other that we're related for better or for worse. . .and try to keep the maiming and killing to a minimum."

-Hermes, Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters

It wasn't exactly comfortable, per say, the position Percy and Hazel woke up in.

Not in the traditional sense, anyway.

Percy felt like a vindictive kindergartner had thrown a whole sandbox in his eyes while running away cackling, and he had definitely drooled all over his pillow. He also suspected he could blame Hazel for most of their blankets mysteriously winding up on the ground, and both of them had woken up shaking out a limb or two until feeling had returned to them.

But those fifteen hours—fifteen actual freaking-fracking hours—had also been the best sleep he'd had in weeks, and he'd woken up feeling safer than he had in a long, long time.

Once they'd managed to fully join the land of the awake, he told Hazel to use the bathroom first, and settled for making sure his bedhead wasn't too traumatizing before stumbling into the kitchen for breakfast. Or maybe lunch, depending on the point of view of things.

Bacon was bacon either way.

His mom was at the table, writing away in one of her notebooks; when he saw her there, he froze in the doorway, nearly choking on air and spit when she looked up.

He hadn't actually expected her to be there.

"Good morning, Percy," she said, mirth sparkling in her eyes. "It's nice to see that some things never change."

"Ah—hey—morning," Percy managed, pounding himself on the solar plexus. She seemed alright after yesterday, and. . .everything else before that. "I'm. .okay. Yeah, there we go. Morning, Mom."

She briefly hummed in amusement, before closing her notebook. "Nice to see you survived the walk down the hall. Is Hazel awake? I saw she wasn't in her room when I went to check on the two of you this morning."

"Huh? Oh, yeah, she woke up just fine. She's in the bathroom now," Percy added, feeling thrown off-kilter by her words. She was taking everything so normally. She was amazing, of course, but. . .time travel. He'd gone through a whole puberty that she didn't remember now. He had come so close to graduating high school—possibly the biggest miracle of all for him.

Percy didn't know what, exactly, he'd expected from her, but he had figured that there would be something.

Continuing the theme of unnerving normality, she nodded at this bit of information, calm as could be, before going to the sink to wash her dishes. "Then both of you are okay, no lingering injuries? She doesn't have any allergies to account for in the shopping, if she chooses to stay with us?"

Percy nodded, then hurriedly shook his head for the second question as he made for the orange juice on the counter, deciding to pretend to roll with it.

"She's got a sweet tooth, but doesn't like chocolate. Thinks it's too sweet." He shrugged with one shoulder to convey his mild confusion over this as he babbled, but she just kept nodding and Percy began to wonder if he should see whether Invasion of the Body Snatchers had a Greek mythological equivalent.

She took the dishes out of the sink and put them in the washer, before pinning Percy with a look that made him want to reflexively deny everything.

"Not to pry, of course, but were you and her. . .together, last time?" she asked cautiously. "When you were. . .seventeen."

Percy choked on his orange juice this time, and it went flying up his nose.

"Mom!" he shrieked, his voice climbing up a whole octave. "No! Just—no. She's wonderful, but me with her would be. . .weird. She's family. Gross."

"Had to check," she said, chuckling, her bright blue eyes crinkling at the corners. "You two were very cute this morning when I looked in on you, and well, you were nearly all grown up last time, and. . ."

For the first time, something cracked in her voice, just a little, and Percy realized abruptly that the unnerving normality was her putting on an act. He remembered how she had kept on acting like the situation with Smelly Gabe was normal when he a kid, even when he'd known every minute of every hour of every day that something was wrong with his mom choosing to remain married to him of all people.

This was his mom coping. This time, with him and his truckload of baggage, instead of Percy's "stepfather". ("I'm telling you, we have to go up! My son—")

And meanwhile, he'd been wondering if she'd been replaced with an alien bent on destroying the human race.

"I know what it's like at that age," Mom at last offered, slightly helplessly. "Percy. . ."

"Mom," he supplied, before she could continue on coping. "Are you alright?"

She sighed, and brushed his bangs back from his forehead as she walked by him. "You may need a haircut, dear, it's gotten rather shaggy."

"Gods, who cares about my hair? Mom, I want to know. Are you. . .okay?" he asked, his stomach twisting into a sailor's knot. It was wrong, all so wrong.

His mom sighed, her rueful smile looking rather fragile. "Sweetheart, shouldn't I be asking you? If you want me to, that is."

"But—I, wait a minute, Mom. . .Yes," Percy practically gasped, feeling like he'd had all the breath knocked out of him. His eyes began to sting. "I don't care if I'm two hundred and three years old, and turned into a centaur. Yes."

When Hazel walked in five minutes later from her shower, Percy was trying and failing not to cry for the second time in twenty-four hours; this time it was into his mother's shoulder as she pressed her lips to his bedhead hair and hugged him just as fiercely as yesterday.

"We'll work it out," his mom promised. "Just talk to me. Promise me, Percy. And we'll work it out."

Percy nodded, looked up from the hug, and gave a slightly teary-looking Hazel an awkward but no less ecstatic thumbs-up.

They were having what Percy had at last firmly deemed "lunch" when they got down to business.

His mom had gone to meet up with friends from a writing seminar—a group that Percy was reasonably sure didn't include Paul—and Hazel started wondering about the other legendary teacher of heroes that taught demigods.

"What do you think he'll say, Chiron?"

"Dunno. He's different from Lupa," Percy said, thinking out loud; he figured the obvious was a very good place to start, "Pretended to be my Latin teacher at first—I still can't believe that he was my Latin teacher. But I never saw him again after I was kidnapped by Cowpie in the Sky, and Annabeth never said how much he knew about Camp Jupiter."

"So you have no idea," Hazel concluded, frowning at her pasta like it had been infested with karpoi. ("Stay away from us, or the grass gets it!" "—He'll do it! He's crazy!")

"Not a clue," he said brightly as he tilted his chair onto its back legs and twirled his fork around with one hand, "If the camp finds out who you are, I have no idea how they'll take it."

"Do you think he'll trust me?"

Percy frowned. "What do you mean?"

"Well," Hazel said, her brows knitted together and lips pursed, "Annabeth certainly doesn't trust me, and I think the head of your camp would have more reason to be paranoid than anyone else."

Percy rested his chin in his hand, discarding his fork as he thought it over. She wasn't wrong; he hadn't missed the way Annabeth had looked at Hazel. A mixture of distrust and instinct telling her that Hazel wasn't one of them, if he had to guess based off his experience at Camp Jupiter.

Though, Camp Half-Blood didn't have senile ghosts walking around and telling people they smelled like Roman sewers. They had that much going for them, at least.

"It's hard, sometimes," he admitted, "I still forget that she's not. . .who we knew, especially yesterday. Gods, if the rest of the camp finds out who you are, they won't take it well."

It cost Percy a lot to make that admission, and Hazel gave him a sympathetic grimace.

"Jason said once that it was like he'd lived there all his life, and that they treated him like family," she offered, contemplative. Not arguing, just reminiscing.

Still, Percy couldn't help but snort at the comparison. "Yeah, but that was after Superman beat the King of the Gigantes and helped save the world. It wasn't asking them to trust two weird demigods like us right as the Titans are making their comeback, right after I lose one of the camp's biggest heroes—"

"That wasn't your fault," she said, fixing him with a stern look. "I know how the system of blame works, Percy."

"It'll all come down to what Chiron says," Percy continued before swallowing a giant mouthful of tomato. "I think he'll believe us. Probably."

The stern look turned to a worried one—either over how Chiron would cope with a Roman demigod dropping out of the sky, or Percy blithely acting like they were planning a dentist's appointment.

"Probably? What happens if he doesn't?" As she spoke, she absentmindedly adjusted the sleeves of the overly-large NYU sweatshirt she was wearing.

Much to Percy's entertainment, his mom had gotten some hand-me-downs of their neighbor's daughter for Hazel to wear until they could get "something that won't make you fight monsters in platform sandals." Hazel, for her part, had nearly walked into a wall over the offer, before coming close to strangling Percy for laughing as she tried and failed to convince his mom that it wasn't necessary.

This was something his mom could actually control and help with, first of all; but more importantly, when she wanted to help someone, Percy knew very well there wasn't a person, god, or monster on the planet winning that kind of fight.

And considering the look of quiet disgust Hazel had thrown said really ugly platform sandals, Percy figured she hadn't tried that hard to dissuade his mom.

"I get turned into an Atlantic Bottlenose," Percy said, flippant, "I don't know what they'll do to you, but I don't plan on finding out."

"Thanks," Hazel said, her eyebrows nearly leaping off her forehead, "Do you get threatened with that often, being turned into a dolphin?"

Percy grinned. "Where do you think I got that whole idea with Chrysaor from? My genius ideas don't come out of nowhere."

It took a moment for Hazel to put two and two together. Once she did so, she blinked once, twice, and then nearly fell out of her chair.

"Bacchus threatens to turn you into a dolphin?" Hazel spluttered as she righted herself. "Does he do that a lot?"

Percy stopped to consider the question; it had been a while since Mr. D had gotten the chance to threaten him, what with Hera cramping all their styles by kidnapping him and Jason.

"About once a week, if I remember right. Kept me on my toes when I was younger. He never did do war elephant or anything interesting to spice things up, unlike some of the other gods."

Hazel gave a choked, scandalized laugh. "Why in Pluto's name would they threaten you with a war elephant? Seems too practical for a punishment. We've seen what can be done with it."

"I dunno, Artemis has threatened me, like, five times with being turned into a jackalope. And I still don't know what a jackalope is," he added mournfully. Whenever he'd asked Annabeth afterward, she had just snickered and told him he didn't want to know. "I'd much prefer being turned into a clone of Hannibal."

Hazel continued to laugh, but didn't last long—what with them being down the third person to get the war elephant joke and all.

"I miss Frank."

"So do I."

("Okay. I guess you got a point. But the next time I say you're totally beast—")

They were cutting it close to Annabeth's forty-eight hour deadline when Percy's mom finally drove them to camp.

It had been totally worth it, Percy decided as he watched the dramatic stormy sky through the car window—most likely a result of Zeus making his feelings known about the return of Kronos. Drama queen.

Not that, you know, Percy had any experience in that department or anything.

Anyway, talking with his mom had been worth it, at least.

Percy hadn't told her too much; he hadn't wanted her worrying over things that were already done with or years in the future. What they had done was make a deal: Percy wasn't going to lie to her. Not anymore. He would tell the truth when she asked him about the years he remembered and where he was going. In return, she'd let him quest, and make sure he and Hazel had somewhere if camp went. . .bad.

"You have to live your life yourself," his mom had said sadly, her eyes seeming to search inside Percy. "I've known that about myself ever since I met your father, and I think. . .I have to remember that about you, now."

Rather than cry again, which had been getting rather infuriating, Percy had told her about Annabeth. Not much; he didn't think he'd be able to tell anyone that much about the one he'd known so well for a while. But his mom had understood.

She always did.

Annabeth—proving that if not a spider-sense, children of Athena had some sort of extra sense; barring that, she listened to Grover—hadn't called since the night they had returned, letting Percy and Hazel pull themselves together in peace.

Percy figured it was a good thing, since no one had been electrocuted yet as the grand sequel to Maria di Angelo. He knew that was a good thing.

He still worried about what she would say to him, especially if she remembered that. . .awkward first day—yeah, he was going to go with that, and no words like traumatizing or agonizing, no sir—when he had accused Annabeth of being a hallucination of a girlfriend. And he maybe wanted to talk to her again. Just to make sure they were all right.

He had a hunch. Percy wasn't sure where it was coming from, per say, but it had insisted on hanging around in the back of his head ever since that car ride back full of furtive and occasionally angry glances.

("You're looking at me funny." "—It's, uh, nothing.")

Putting thoughts of Annabeth in the back of his head, Percy tore his eyes from the dark sky, and they automatically fell on Hazel across from him, who was fiddling with her new green sweater.

His mom was still wrestling with social services on getting Hazel the pieces of a legal identity for school and to move into camp if she wanted, but she seemed happy enough with the piece of their apartment she had cautiously carved out for herself. At least, Percy hoped so. It had been. . .nice, having a third person around who wasn't Smelly Gabe for the past two days.

Really nice.

For his part, he still kept tugging self-consciously on his shorter hair, now far from the long mess of a mullet it had turned into while he'd been trapped in Othrys. More than anything, Percy was nervous, the butterflies taking out a mortgage on his stomach for the first time since before the Battle of Manhattan.

("Well, you two be good to each other.")

Percy didn't like it.

"So. Girlfriend."

Percy couldn't really help it when he flinched at the word girlfriend from behind him, said in a dangerous tone normally directed towards monsters.

He traded looks with Hazel, and she gave him an encouraging smile before retreating into the foyer of the Big House, not giving Percy the chance to decide to flee.

He sighed, and reluctantly turned around, leaning against a porch post. "Hello, Annabeth."

She wasn't glaring at him, exactly, but she wasn't far off. Great.

The brief narrowing of the eyes as Annabeth watched Hazel go inside didn't go unnoticed by him, either.

"I've had a lot of time to think the past two days," she said, stalking up the steps and sitting down on the log bench in front of him. He took the cushy wicker seat opposite her, fighting the urge to run as she studied him. She wasn't dressed in her armor, opting instead for the orange camp t-shirt and shorts; the recurve bow and empty quiver strapped to her back indicated she'd probably just come from an archery practice.

The first Annabeth he had known had begun to take on some more of the weapons lessons after the war with the Titans, he remembered.

Annabeth's lips settled into a grim, determined line as she studied him, and Percy was abruptly very, very grateful that quiver was empty.

"I've thought quite a bit about Luke, and what the loss of him to Kronos means for the camp," she admitted baldly, her voice not stumbling over Luke's name. "Sometimes about you, and all the times you've acted strange before the quest for the Master Bolt. But mostly, I have a lot of questions."

"Are we really doing this now?" he asked helplessly, tilting his head back to look at the—honestly really dirty, just what got up there, anyway—ceiling, already knowing the answer and what his reaction would be.

"Yes," Annabeth said frankly, "You don't have to answer all of my questions now, Percy. I. . .I get that there's a lot, for you and Hazel. I've talked to a couple people while you were at your mom's. I get that there are some things you aren't ready to talk about, or can't share yet. But I think there's a few answers you owe me, if we're going to work together to fight the Titans."

And with that, she knitted her fingers together in her lap, sat back, and looked at him expectantly, waiting for a response. Percy couldn't keep his lips from quirking into a small smile.

She was so much younger.

Oh, changing already, definitely. But the carefully practiced speech, stiff posture, the "couple people"—Percy would bet a dozen drachmas that it was more than that—the carefully hidden fear of what answers she would get from him in her open grey eyes.

The surge of protectiveness he felt wasn't at all romantically entangled, for once.

"Alright. You wanna know what I was talking about that first day at camp, don't you?" he asked at last. "When I was. . .running around and calling you all hallucinations."

He cringed as he said it out loud, but Annabeth nodded sharply, her eyes dropping to her lap. "Among other things, you said that I was far too much like your girlfriend for my age, and that you didn't date girls five years younger than you."

Percy gritted his teeth. Not dancing around the bush, then. "Yeah, I guess I did."

Annabeth didn't seem to be enjoying this conversation any more than he was, at least, asking in a rush, "Was I—alternate timeline Annabeth, that is—was she your girlfriend?"

Almost against his will, Percy closed his eyes. When he opened them, he was no longer really looking at her, or at anything else in front of him. ("Don't I get a kiss for luck? It's kind of a tradition, right?")

"No," Percy said quietly. "No, she wasn't. She was my best friend. My partner. I loved her more than just about anything. She was more than a girlfriend, to me."

Partner. Best friend. Better half. He could've taken his pick, really, when they were together. ("Where are the other reinforcements?" "—For now, we're it.")

"She. Not me," Annabeth said in a strangled voice, and Percy's hands dug into the chair's rickety armrests.

("Here we are again.")

"Trust me, I know," he said, more bitterly than he had intended. "You and I have spent the past couple months making that very, very clear."

"I was just making sure we have this clear," she shot back, color rising in her cheeks. "I'm not her, and you can't expect that person out of me. It won't work, and I don't want to be her."

("You idiot. If it weren't for—")

"Of course I know you're not my girlfriend." He was almost spitting the words at her now, and couldn't seem to stop himself from doing it.

Annabeth's nostrils flared. "Apologies for insisting on the clarification. You've seemed to have trouble with it, the past couple months."

"And I'm sorry. I am trying, you know. This isn't exactly an easy conversation for me to have, Annabeth." Gods, the two of them had a way of getting under each other's skin, for better or for worse. Right then, Percy felt himself dangerously close to hating it.

"I'm not exactly enjoying the experience either, " Annabeth snapped, "And I wasn't asking about whether I'm your girlfriend, but this other Annabeth Chase you knew for so long and so well, apparently. I need to hear it, Percy."

"Fine—fine. Sorry. You are not the Annabeth Chase I used to know." Under his breath, before he stopped to really think, Percy added in a mutter, "Gods, are you not her."

The two of them were on their feet now, and he couldn't quite remember when they had gotten there.

He'd thought he'd worked around it. He thought he'd managed to if not deal with it, at least put it somewhere in his head where it wouldn't bother him anymore. And as seemed to be the current theme, Percy was in a whole other fucking universe from anything resembling correct.

It was just so hard. It was one thing to think about it, and convince himself of it. It was a whole other thing to look her seeming clone in the eye every day.

"Excuse me?" she said angrily. "Please tell me you know who I am, Percy. And don't say, 'not her'."

This Annabeth was not the one he had known. She wasn't that, would never be that, and if he hadn't learned that by now, he deserved every verbal ass-kicking she gave him.

So who was she? Who was this Annabeth, and who was she to him?

"You're Annabeth Chase," Percy finally said, at a loss.

Annabeth looked at him, her jaw clenched and gaze cold. "Yeah, I am. And what do you know about me? Do you know what I've done since you wound up back here and dragged Grover and me all over the country, not telling us a single Hades-damned thing? Do you—do you know?"

They were in each other's faces now and yelling. Something inside Percy, battered to pieces by Torrington's words in Othrys, by night after night of dreams, of trying to move on, finally shattered.

"I know that you're not the person I watched die, considering that I watched her die, I couldn't stop it, and then I died while the world ended!"

Percy snapped his mouth, his eyes widening as he realized what had just come out of him.

He had never said it before. Not out loud.

They had died.

Percy had died. Annabeth had died. Annabeth-then-Percy-died. Dead. Done. Gone the way of Clarisse's Confederate war zombies. Their final ticket to Hades.

("What's the point of struggling? You're dead anyway. You'll never leave this place.")

He looked at the ground, feeling. . .he didn't even know.

It was just too much.

Annabeth, for her part, had gone a nasty shade of white, and looked more than a little shame-faced. A small, mean part of Percy couldn't help but think, Good. Clearing everything up went both ways, after all.

The two of them looked at each other for a long minute, and the awkward silence thickened. The sounds of sparring drifted from the general direction of the arena, and Percy desperately wished for something big and nasty and preferably not too heavily armed to show up to distract them.

He was never lucky with these things.

So, when it became clear that Annabeth wasn't going to break the silence first, Percy decided to bite the bullet.

"I. . .sorry. I'm sorry That was not, uh, necessary."

Annabeth shook her head immediately, apologizing before Percy could think of anything else to say. "No, no. I needed to hear that. I wasn't. . .that wasn't right of me to push you like that. Today, or. . .any other day. I'm sorry, Percy."

Percy didn't respond, letting the silence linger as he measured his breathing, waiting to feel at least a little bit less like his heart was about to explode. He went back to inspecting the dirty ceiling, and Annabeth took her bow into her hands, looking at the clean wood closely.

Why, for the love of Aphrodite, Athena, Poseidon, and every other god happening to listen in for kicks, could they not get this right?

"While you and Luke were gone," Annabeth began, her words coming slowly, "Chiron and Clarisse and I were trying to keep camp going, while Mister D was recalled to Olympus because something, we didn't know what at the time, was back, and it's—it's hard. Hard to keep going right now."

Her eyes were wide with sincerity, but Percy could see the steely resolve in them when she looked at him again. "It's especially hard to look at you right now, Percy."

Percy felt as if he'd been kicked in the stomach by Blackjack.

"That's not fair," he protested, "Do you think if I had the choice he wouldn't—?"

"No, no, it isn't," Annabeth said grimly, "It isn't fair, and I'm sorry, but the rest of us are still grieving, Percy. Luke cared for you, and you would have taken his place given the chance, but Luke is still as good as dead, and we're left here to fight. I. . .I appreciate the sentiment. But we're still stuck here."

With you. It went unsaid, but Percy heard it all the same. He lowered his head into his hands, and tried to will the twisted lump in his throat away. Annabeth, meanwhile, seemed drained, her grip lax around her bow and shoulders slumped.

"I'm not trying to be cruel. But you need to know. I won't be the only one who feels this way, and they won't have all the facts that Grover and I do." Annabeth paused, seemingly debating something, and then added, quietly, as if she was afraid some invisible eavesdropper might hear, "We won't tell them."

At that last statement, something deep in Percy uncoiled, and he felt like he could properly breathe again.

There would be time. Hazel and Percy could figure this out on their own terms. Annabeth and Grover would trust them, for now.

Percy really didn't deserve his best friends.

"Annabeth. . .thank you," Percy said quietly. "Really, thank you. And—I'll try and do better. With knowing you. And everything else."

When he looked back up, much to his shock, her eyes were shimmering with barely held-back tears.

"Percy, I—" she broke off, sounding torn between anger and something Percy didn't have the right to name himself. "Damn you, Seaweed Brain."

Percy gave a half-hearted shrug, smile tugging at his lips.

Annabeth cocked her head, her gaze seeming to bore into the back of his head as she studied him. Her cheeks were wet with tears, he realized.

"Thank you, Percy. For telling me the truth."

"Of course," Percy said, startled that she thought he needed to be thanked for it. Desperately, he tried to think of a small way to begin to fix things that had somehow become so broken between them from the beginning.

But—the truth.

"Annabeth?" he queried warily as she began to pick herself off of the bench. She was looking far more tired than she should ever look, in his opinion.

"Yeah?" she said brusquely with a raised eyebrow. "What is it, Percy?"

"If—If you have any other questions. About monsters or Titans or. . .other things, I dunno, where there'll be a dragon family in two years," Percy babbled. That wasn't what he meant and she almost definitely knew it. "I'll tell you."

Annabeth sighed, but it was distinctly not hostile. "Percy, you don't have to do something like that just to make me feel better. I know that you've had—"

"I want to," he interrupted. "Promise. You already know my most embarrassing secrets anyway. You know, that one concerning me and drool."

Percy cheered internally when he saw her look down to hide a small smile.

"Alright, Percy," Annabeth said, with what might have been a second cousin once removed of fondness. "I will be taking you up on that frequently, just so you know. I have a lot of questions."

"You got it," Percy said sincerely. Their eyes locked, only for Annabeth to look away quickly, and guilt began to burn in his chest.

They were better, fixing their own relationship—something that relieved Percy so much he felt almost dizzy—but there was. . .so much to get through before they would be "good". And his fault or not, Percy knew by now, he had a lot of work to do.

"I really am sorry, Annabeth," he repeated, "About everything."

("So what are we going to do now?")

"I know," Annabeth said softly, studying her bow again, and for the first time, Percy realized that in another time and place, the archery practice this time of day would've been taught by Luke. "I know."

("I don't know. But thank you for rescuing me.")

When Percy walked inside the Big House, it was to a pair of relieved sighs from Hazel and Grover.

He glowered ineffectively at both them.

"I take offense to this," he grumbled. "We are capable of not killing each other."

Against the wall, Hazel—the unhelpful traitor—gave him the knowing look of doom that Percy would swear to his dying day she had picked up from Frank's grandmother.

"We have ears," Grover deadpanned. "Neither of you are exactly quiet, Percy."

Percy gave him a funny look. Grover gave him a tight smile in response. "Somewhere in between all the yelling, I think I heard Annabeth mention this, but you were gone. And time travel? You kept that secret for months, man."

Percy groaned in self-recrimination. "G-Man, I—"

"I know," Grover said firmly. "I'm not Annabeth, and I can't imagine what it was like for you, Perce, but I got a taste of it when we found you on that beach after you and Luke disappeared."

"Yeah, you would've, wouldn't you," Percy said, feeling more than a little bit guilty. Nightmare fuel galore, his memories and emotions.

Right then, he noticed that the chair Grover was sitting on looked like its edges had been chewed on many, many times, and was surrounded by a dozen more pieces of furniture, all looking very well-used. The burn of guilt in his chest intensified.

"Percy, it's not that, it's—you can't keep hiding these things. You just can't. It's hard to have your back like this," Grover said none too gently."It's hard to defend camp like this."

"I'm learning," Percy said. Hazel moved over from her place on the wall in his direction, and Grover seemed to unconsciously shift away from her, keeping her in his view the whole time.

Percy fought the urge to grimace.

"When Kr—the Lord of Time returned?" Grover shuddered, seemingly unaware of it. "I felt it. Chiron and Mister D felt it. Don't think we had anything but thunderstorms and baby tsunamis for three days, either, even if it took us a bit to figure out what happened. It was terrifying. And now you're back, I'm happy about it, man, believe me, but. . .it was bad. We're lucky no one's dead."

Percy really hated the picture he was getting of camp after he and Luke had been kidnapped. He tried to will a spontaneous crack in the floor to appear and swallow him up, but that proved to be a Nico-only trick.

"What I'm trying and really failing at saying is you're my best friend. Always. I've got your back after everything that's happened. . .but I need time, P-P-Percy," Grover said, his nervous stutter returning. "We all do. J-Just to. . .figure things out. Get things back together."

"I know," Percy said ruefully, thinking of Annabeth yelling at him on the porch. "Trust me, I know now."

At that, Grover gave him a strained smile before walking him and a sympathetic-looking Hazel down to Chiron's study, and wishing them a sincere good luck.

"You'll do fine, Percy," he reassured them, not seeming to believe himself, "Chiron'll hear both of you out—and, well, you would know better than me, actually."

Percy tried really, really hard not to wince. "A bit, yeah. But it's good to hear. From you, that is. It's good. Thanks, Grover."

Grover nodded, and he walked away in a manner Percy knew all too well: he was trying not to run.

"That was fun," he muttered sarcastically to Hazel, not opening the door yet. "Like getting a root canal. Only without the anesthesia. Or health benefits. Or—"

"I'd have waded in if it got bad, Percy, but they're your best friends," she said evenly. "You had to talk with them. Believe me, you'd regret it if you didn't."

She didn't have to say Sammy Valdez's name, but Percy winced in concession before changing the subject. "Right. You're right. Just. . .those were possibly some of the most painful conversations I've had in my life. You ready for this?"

Hazel tried to shrug nonchalantly, but her body language betrayed itself when her eyes flicked over her shoulder and she began to bite on her bottom lip.

Percy continued to side-eye Hazel, who defiantly side-eyed him right back.

"We can run, if you want," Percy quietly offered. "Don't have to do this right now if you're not comfortable. This conversation can wait."

Hazel was shaking her head before he finished. "Saturn doesn't care if I'm not that comfortable. We need to talk with him."

"You sure? I can cause a distraction, break the plumbing, we can run to the beach, they won't notice for hours—"

"No, no, you don't need more trouble today," Hazel interrupted with a relieved laugh. "But thank you, Percy. You're a good friend. Really."

She straightened her back and her voice's hysterical edge had lessened this time when she spoke. "Let's go, then. We can meet your Latin teacher who taught Achilles, Hercules, and the original Jason, and convince him not to let Bacchus turn you into a dolphin."

"I liked our Jason better," Percy grumbled, letting his inner comedian beat out his inner hysteric. "And Heracles was an ass."

Hazel giggled. Percy turned the doorknob before they let themselves procrastinate further with ways to run, with Riptide a heavy, comforting weight in his pocket.

A/N: I don't know what kind of reaction the fight between Annabeth and Percy is going to spark, so I'm going to say it now: There is no "right" side. They both had legitimate grievances, and it was long past time the air was properly cleared.

Percy and Past!Annabeth had a long-term romantic relationship that was both very intense at times and rather intimate. Present!Annabeth will want to define herself differently than, say, the di Angelos or Grover, and she and Percy both need to have strong boundaries and understanding of their past, weird as it is, if they're ever going to be friends.

Of course, both of them are emotionally constipated where the other's concerned, so this took over 100K words.

This is also, I swear, the last of the arguments about the relationship between Percy and Past!Annabeth. Can't promise it'll never come up again (A Tartarus discussion is in the future), but Percy and Present!Annabeth are, at long last, on somewhat-stable ground.