.

i'd climb every mountain / and swim every ocean / just to be with you / and fix what I've broken / oh, 'cause I need you to see / that you are the reason

you are the reason / / calum scott

·

He fiddles with the skin on his left thumb. His mum had scolded him for it earlier—Percy, that looks terrible, stop picking at your skin—but it's become a habit. He doesn't know if he can stop now, even though his fingers bleed regularly from the anxious picking, skin worn down to raw flesh and the bloody edges of his nails.

The pain, however much he doesn't want to admit it, is grounding. It reminds him of where he is, what's around him.

He keeps picking.

The elderly waitress comes over, her face kind and sympathetic. "Hello there, dear. Still waiting?"

"Still waiting," he confirms, not really meeting her eyes. Percy feels, more than sees, her nod a little sadly and bustle back behind the counter.

It's the second time she's checked in on him. Annabeth had agreed to meet him here, at a little coffee shop hidden away on the outskirts of downtown London, at three o'clock. He checks his watch, as though the time would have changed from the last time he checked it two minutes ago. 3:37. Is she really going to stand him up? After everything?

Percy lets out a sigh, trying in vain to get the muscles in his shoulders to release their tension. He'll wait for ten more minutes. Ten more minutes, and he'll be done with her. Forever.

It's 3:43, and the door of the bustling little shop bursts open, the bell above the door ringing wildly. He glances up and sees Annabeth, standing with her hair a wild mess of a bun on the top of her head and lavender circles under her eyes. She scans the room, something darkening her expression, until her eyes pass over Percy and hope lights her gaze.

"Fancy seeing you here," Percy says, a little darkly, as she walks to his table.

She grimaces as she slides into the chair across from him. "I'm so—I'm so sorry. I worked a night shift and something happened right as I was about to leave so I didn't get back for a while and then when I got home I passed out and slept right through my alarm. I'm so sorry, this normally never happens, I—"

Despite his irritation, Percy is intrigued as he interrupts. "Night shift? I didn't know you worked."

Again, she winces, and Percy feels a little bad for the jab at her rich parents. They'd worked through that. They'd been over this.

That was a long time ago.

"I—I work at St. Mungo's now," Annabeth explains, quiet. Now she's the only playing with the skin around her fingernails—a habit Percy wonders if she's always had, or developed more recently like he had.

"I didn't know you were into healing and whatnot," he replies, guarded, but curious.

"I wasn't until recently," she admits. "After this school year ended, I wanted to be out of the house as much as possible, and Piper's dad had connections with the hospital. I applied—just to shadow the healers, basically. I normally don't do much except clean up after patients and try to make them comfortable, but the past few weeks I've been doing more helping with more extensive healing processes and severely injured patients."

Percy shudders a little, imagining it. "I could never. I can't stand blood."

"Yeah," Annabeth laughs a little. "It was… a big adjustment at first. But once I got used to it, got more involved, it became fascinating. The healing processes, the herbs and magical treatments combined with muggle medicinal methods—every part of it became a puzzle to figure out. And beyond that—" She stops, as though realizing she's sharing too much, too soon. "But nevermind. Um… what have you been doing for the summer?"

Percy shifts in his seat. "I'm, uh. I'm working at that little bakery downtown. Remember it? The pretty blue building on main street, called Sweets By the—"

"Sweets By the Sea," she finishes with him, nodding. "That's great. It's a cute shop, I bet it's a good job."

He smiles tightly, head dipping. "Yeah."

Silence falls, and Annabeth takes the opportunity to signal the waitress, who looks happy to see that Percy wasn't stood up after all. She takes their orders, Percy listening vaguely as Annabeth rattles off something complicated, lavender and mocha and something else, and then he asks for a black coffee and a pastry.

After the waitress has padded back over behind the counter to start making their drinks, Percy crosses his arms on the table and leans forward. "Alright. I offered you a chance to tell me your side of the story. I'm not saying that once I hear it I want to be friends with you, or even that I'll forgive you, but I'm giving you this chance. I owe it to you, because of what we were—what we were before."

Annabeth's expression shutters, as though she's trying to push back the emotions flooding her eyes. "Yeah. Um. So. Where should I begin, really."

He considers. "Start with that day. The day you saw me kissing Rachel Dare, the day everything went wrong."

She takes a deep breath, and as the waitress comes back with their drinks, he notices her hands trembling as she picks up her mug and takes a sip. "That day… I wish I could do things differently, Percy. I really do."

"That's what everyone says," Percy all but growls, remembering all that day put in motion.

She nods sadly. "I know. It's not an excuse for… well, anything." Another deep breath. "As you already know, Luke and I had been getting close at that point. We were friends, and he kept making advances on me, saying things I wasn't sure I wanted with him. In all honesty, I really never considered him anything more than a friend, because… well, you know." She gestures towards him.

Percy doesn't know. He lets it pass.

"But you were giving me such mixed messages, and I finally decided to tell you. So to find you right after, kissing someone else and telling me in the most obvious way possible that you didn't care about my feelings, I—I snapped. I went to Luke and told him everything, crying my eyes out, and he said that this was what you'd been doing all along, seeing other girls just because you know it would hurt me. I don't think I've ever felt that broken, that used, before, and because of how fresh the pain was and how confused I felt about everything, I believed him without questioning it. I trusted him."

Percy shakes his head as though in a fog, his thoughts jumbled as he tries to process. Something isn't adding up. "You decided to tell me what?"

Annabeth looks at him, and it's such a familiar expression—the one she'd give him when he wasn't paying attention when they were studying for Transfiguration and got stuck on an easy problem they both knew he could do. A look of blank how are you this thick.

But then the expression changes, flits back to that guarded one, the look she hides behind when she knows the emotions flying across her face would reveal too much. She leans back and crosses her arms, not meeting his eyes. "You know what I told you. Everything I said in the letter."

Percy blinks. "Um. What letter?"

Her eyes snap up to him, and suddenly she's a little paler, the dark circles under her eyes more pronounced. "The letter… the letter I wrote you. Explaining everything."

He shakes his head. "I don't know what you're talking about. I never got a letter from you."

She starts shaking her own head in disbelief, not at him, but at herself. "You never… you never got my letter." It's a statement, one that doesn't mean much to Percy but he can see the way it's affecting her. Annabeth's face is ashen, her eyes lined with silver as she tries to hold back tears. He can see the gears turning in her head, as though she's rewriting the events of the last six months with this new information in mind.

"Oh god," she says suddenly, burying her face in her hands. "Oh god."

"Chase," he tries, a pit of worry starting to form in his stomach. "Chase—" He reaches across the little table and touches her arm.

Her head shoots up as she pulls her arm away like she's been burned. Those grey eyes he used to love are wide, like a panicked deer caught in headlights. "Percy. You don't understand. No wonder you thought—after everything, that I'd—"

And then she bursts into tears.

Percy has seen Annabeth cry exactly once—right after the first time they all transformed into their Animagi forms for Grover. That one moment of pure emotion, the crack in her armor that she'd allowed to let slip.

But that had been with him and a few of their closest friends. Not in a bustling coffee shop where anyone could see, not like this—her shoulders heaving, heavy sobs muffled by her arms as her face is buried in them. Annabeth Chase doesn't do this—doesn't let people see emotions like this, doesn't crack under the public's scrutinizing eyes.

But here she is, crying so hard she can barely get a breath in, and Percy doesn't know what to do.

Awkwardly, he touches her arm again, hoping she won't pull away. She doesn't, and Percy strokes it softly with his fingertips, knowing the way touch can ground a person, hoping her choked breaths will follow the rhythm of his fingers and even out.

He ignores the stares and whispers of the people around them, the concerned glances of the sweet old waitress still behind the counter. He focuses on Annabeth, makes himself breathe deep and steady so she can latch onto it.

"Breathe, 'beth. Breathe," he whispers.

Her sobs start to slow, and her breaths come deeper, matching the rhythm of his fingers as he moves them along her forearm, just as he'd hoped. Slowly, her shoulders stop heaving, and she takes one more deep breath before lifting her tear-stained face, eyelashes damp and eyes red as she looks at him.

It's the first time he's seen her like this in a very long time—her face unguarded, every emotion that she feels on full view. He can see the depths of the guilt, the anger at herself, the horror that she feels as she seems to realize what she's done.

The problem is that he doesn't know why this revelation, her realizing that he never read this letter that she'd written, has affected her like that. It doesn't make sense. What could she have put in a letter that would have caused her to react the way she did, that fateful day so long ago?

She wipes her eyes and blows her nose into a napkin the kind waitress brings over, patting her on the head with a soft, it's alright, dearie.

"So what was in the letter?" Percy ventures to ask once she seems to have calmed enough to answer.

Annabeth shakes her head. "It… it doesn't matter now."

Percy presses a little. "How did I not get it?"

"I don't know," she replies, her eyes watering a little again. "I put it on your bed that morning, I know you would have seen it… unless." Her eyes darken. "Luke."

He restrains the wince that passes through him involuntarily. "Luke… what?"

"I told him what I was going to do," she admits, playing with her now-empty coffee cup. "He must have moved the letter so you never got it, so I would think you had read it and ignored it. It makes sense now, especially with what he told me after I found you and Rachel… well. It doesn't matter now."

Percy has never been more confused in his life, but he nods, dazed. "Alright." If she doesn't want to share the contents of the letter with him, she doesn't have to. "So… all that. The way you treated me, dating Luke, everything… that was all because of that letter. Because you thought—what, exactly, Annabeth?"

She sighs, her whole body seeming to let out any ounce of pride or dignity she had left. "Percy, I told you I was in love with you in that letter."

"Oh."

The pieces start falling into place.

He stands up. "I have to go."

Annabeth's eyes widen, the self-loathing so obviously eating her up suddenly replaced with utter exhaustion. "Percy, please—"

"I have to go," he says again, putting a bill down on the table for the coffee in a daze.

Her face crumples, and she nods. "I get it."

Percy turns to the door, and he hears her again—"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry." Whispered through the guilt, through the tears he knows are threatening to choke her.

The door slams behind him. He can't stop now, but he knows, whatever he finds—he'll come back.

·

He goes straight to Hogsmeade.

Once he's there, he heads to the hidden entrance of the secret passageway that he and the Marauders often used to get contraband items from Hogsmeade to the castle. The passage is damp and earthy, and he feels a bug crawling through his hair at one point before he quickly gets it out, but he likes it—this familiar feeling of warm nature and hidden depths, the darkness welcoming instead of unfriendly.

It reminds him of better times, of laughter with his friends and nothing in the world that he had to worry about beyond the next Herbology test.

Percy shakes the thoughts away as he cautiously opens the trap door in the stone hall, in plain sight but completely invisible to anyone who didn't know it was there. The hall feels strangely quiet without the usual bustle of students heading to and from class, the chatter and noise absent in the middle of summer break.

He wonders if anyone's even here, in the giant stone fortress. Maybe even Chiron and the other teachers have gone away from the summer, leaving only the ghosts and maybe the house elves to keep up the place.

Regardless, he keeps to the shadows, knowing that he'd probably get in trouble if he was found on the property during break without reasonable cause.

Once he's in the Gryffindor common room, he stops to think. Luke had probably taken the letter, as Annabeth had realized—but would it still be here? The other boy certainly hadn't been planning on being taken to Azkaban so suddenly, so Percy couldn't imagine that he'd brought his things with him, but his parents or servants probably had cleaned out the place when the news was found out.

Maybe it was all a fool's errand. Maybe he would never find that letter, never find exactly what Annabeth had said to him all those months ago, what had started everything.

The least he can do is try.

He heads to where Luke had slept for almost a year, blocking out the thoughts, making sure to focus only on his goal. If he let himself get sidetracked, he'd break down with anxiety, overthinking and remembering far too much.

He doesn't want to do that. Luke didn't deserve to be remembered.

Percy reaches the room and pauses, trying to remember what bed Luke had been in. Another friend of his had also lived in this room, so he'd been in here once or twice during the school year, and he scrambles back in his mind now, doing his best to think about where Luke's things had been.

He thinks it's the bed on the left. He's almost positive.

Like he'd thought, there's nothing surrounding the bed except an empty wooden trunk at the foot of it—maybe it hadn't fit when the rest of his things had been removed, maybe it had never belonged to him in the first place.

Percy searches the trunk, but all it contains are extra linens for the whole room, bedding and curtains and whatnot stuffed into the large box. He moves onto the bed, putting up the mattress and rifling through the sheets, but there's nothing. So he moves onto the next bed, hoping that maybe he was wrong and Luke slept here instead.

Nothing.

And so it goes with the next bed, and the next.

He even searches his friend's bed, on the off-chance Luke had shoved the letter there, knowing that if it was found in his possession people would be suspicious, and rightfully so. But despite nearly tearing the frame apart, Percy finds nothing.

He finally sits on the ground, leaning back against the now-empty trunk with exhaustion. Defeat radiates through him. Something in him knows he needs to find this letter, needs to know—once and for all—why everything had happened between him and Annabeth. Needs to know her thoughts, her feelings, why this one stupid letter had made her hate him so much.

In frustration, he runs his fingers along the sides of the trunk behind him, trying to ground himself, to not let himself get too worked up. He can't have a panic attack here.

And that's when he feels it.

The corner of a paper, sticking out through a crack in the back of the trunk, underneath the bottom of the wooden container.

Percy carefully pulls the trunk farther away from the bed before looking at what he's found, not wanting to get his hopes up. But his suspicions are correct. A corner of a slightly faded green envelop is sticking out of the crack where the stubby legs of the trunk meet the bottom floor of it.

He uses a pencil found on the wooden floor to enter the crack, trying to pull the corner out a little more without ripping it. It only takes a moment before enough of the envelope is visible that he can use his fingernails to grab onto it and slowly, carefully, pull out the entire thing.

There must be a fake bottom in the trunk, Percy thinks. Luke must have stored it there, knowing no one would be looking for it.

He sits again, leaning against the bed as he turns the envelope over. Percy, the front of the emerald paper reads in beautiful script. Annabeth's script. Her pretty, delicate handwriting that Percy's always envied and teased her about.

His hands are shaking as he pulls the piece of parchment from the already-ripped top of the envelope. He wonders how many times Luke did the same thing, reading the letter and hating Percy for being the one to receive it.

He opens the folded paper.

Dear Percy, it starts.

I honestly can't believe I'm actually doing this. You know me—well, better than anyone, really. So you of all people understand that I don't do this kind of thing. I'm not the kind of girl to write love letters or pour out her feelings into writing. I'm not the kind of girl to fall for her best friend. And yet here I am.

Something about this feels different. Like this letter will change everything. Maybe I'm just being dramatic, or maybe it really will. Change things, I mean. On one hand, I'm not sure if I want things to change. I like where we are—you're my best friend, and nothing will change that. But on the other hand, I know I need to get this off my chest before it bursts. I've been feeling this way for so long that I don't even know where to begin.

I guess I'll start with the obvious.

I'm in love with you, Percy Jackson.

Maybe I always have been. Maybe it really did start that day when you accidentally bumped into me on the Hogwarts Express, making my books fly everywhere. I think steam actually came out of my ears when you did that—I thought you were some arrogant boy, out to make my life miserable just because I was a rich girl and my parents were famous.

Well, I suppose my first impression wasn't entirely wrong.

But throughout those first few years when we would never stop fighting, I think there was always something drawing me to you. A curiosity, perhaps. A wonder at the boy who wasn't a pureblood, didn't have any kind of connections to the magical world, and yet made a name for himself—a Marauder. Percy Jackson. Everyone knew your name, trailed along after you as though they hoped the mere physical proximity would cause some of your magic to rub off on them.

However much I claimed to despise you, a small part of me has always admired you. For sticking through the rough parts of being a muggleborn, for choosing your friends carefully but keeping them forever once you had. The loyalty, the idea of a chosen family appealed to me so deeply because I'd never had that. I had a few closer friends, sure, but nothing that I felt would last beyond Hogwarts, or that wouldn't vanish as soon as they didn't need me anymore.

Maybe that's why I reached out to you, almost two years ago when we first were made prefects. Yes, it was in part because I knew I'd be working with you for the school year and wanted to at least be civil—at least that's what I told myself. But hoping against hope, that deep, hidden part of me wanted you to choose me. I wanted to be part of your family, be within the reach of the close circle you extended that incredible loyalty towards.

And then somehow I was.

Yes, it was the Slytherin in me that first offered you the tidbits of information about Grover. I knew you wanted to help him, and I did too—but I'll admit I had ulterior motives. I wanted to be valued in your eyes—I wanted you to know that I could help with this plan, the fantastic, impossible plan to aid a werewolf in Hogwarts. But it spiraled into so much more than that. I came to truly care about your friends, to want to help for no reason other than the fact that no one should have to suffer the way Grover had over the years.

Through that love for your friends, I came to love you most of all. You were always there for me, always around to make me smile or take care of me even when I refused to acknowledge I needed to be taken care of. When we started having sex, I tried to push down those feelings, and I almost succeeded at first. But as my love for you grew, so did my conflict inside.

You'd be proud of how hard I fought against falling for you. There wasn't really even a reason for the struggle, not a good one, anyway. I mostly fought against it because I knew you didn't feel the same, and I didn't think I could bear it if I told you the truth and you rejected me. I loved you too much, too selfishly, to think of losing you by being honest with you.

But spending last summer with you, truly being a part of your chosen family—it changed everything, I think. It wasn't just feelings anymore. I knew without a doubt that you were the one I wanted to be with, no matter the cost. And it scared me—it scared me so fucking badly, Percy. That constant inward struggle, not knowing how to tell you, not knowing if you'd feel the same.

But finally, I decided the cost of not knowing, of not taking that risk, is greater than the potential rejection. And so I decided to write you this letter. Be proud of me—I'm being vulnerable, something I never thought I'd let myself do around anyone.

I guess I trust you enough to not break my heart.

And now we've come to the end. I guess I just want you to know that I'm in love with you, and I want to be with you. I want to stay a part of your family, the people you've chosen, the people you'd die for. Remember that? Remember how you said you'd die for me?

I'd die for you, too.

I should also say that if you don't feel the same… well. You are still my dearest friend in the world. All I have to ask—to beg, really—is that you tell me. Be honest and open with me, be blunt if you must, but please don't replace me. You said that was one of your greatest fears, but what you didn't know is that you echoed mine. I don't want to be replaced, Percy. I don't know if I could bear it.

I'm sorry for not telling you earlier. Sorry for not being brave enough to express what I've been feeling for so long. That's on me, and hopefully it isn't too late to make amends.

I'm rambling now, so I guess that's my cue to end this letter. Catch you after class, and maybe we can talk about all this, yeah?

I love you.

Looking to you, sweet boy.

Annabeth

·

yes, i'm updating a day early because i just finished this chapter and i'm excited about it. if i'm being honest i was planning on updating last week and then i got sucked into the trap that is the Throne of Glass series. anyone else read it? because i just finished the last book and i need to cry about it with someone

anyways, i hope you all enjoyed this chapter. i keep saying we're getting close to the end and then i keep adding more to my planning chapters document, so idk. we'll see. hopefully soon but who knows

oh btw ! forgot to put the credits to the song in the last chapter but points to the people who pointed it out. it was Exhale by Sabrina Carpenter (who is a queen and i adore her) and i absolutely love that song so yes good job for those who noticed

much love to aisling (allineedisabook) for her sweet encouragement this week. love u lots bby

until next time ! lots of love to all of you sweet readers

wm