A/N: this is the "clean" M-rated version of this chapter. If you would like to read the E-rated 18+ version of this chapter, it's available on AO3 (same story name, same username)!

Perseus.

That was the only thought on Annabeth's mind as she struggled upright, clutching her shoulder. Her mind was too addled by poison to remember why, but she knew she needed him and nobody else. It was important— no, it was crucial.

She could have easily woken Piper, who was still sleeping beside her, but she knew somehow that would be the wrong move. If Piper woke before she found Perseus, Annabeth felt absolutely certain that she would die.

She stumbled out of the room into the hallway. It was swaying slightly, or maybe it was just her vision that was unstable. Annabeth gripped onto the rope unsteadily with her right hand. She couldn't so much as shrug her left shoulder without pain, and she knew she had to be quiet.

A horrible thought entered her mind, that maybe Perseus was still above deck helping Leo with the ship, and not in his room. She pushed it away. He had to be there.

Every step felt heavy, like she had weights tied to her feet. Her mouth was dry, her fingers shaking. But she made it to his door, managed to feebly rap on it with her good hand.

For a few agonizing seconds, nothing happened. Then the door opened, and Annabeth collapsed into his arms.

He caught her, of course he caught her. His grip wasn't hard, but she couldn't help but cry out in pain as if shifted her bad arm, flaring her injury.

"What happened?" he asked, his voice low and panicked. She was already inside his room, the door shut behind them. Annabeth wasn't sure she could speak, but before she could even try to answer his question he caught sight of her shoulder. She could tell from the way he cursed under his breath in Greek, how he shifted his hands from her arm to her waist.

"Poisoned," Annabeth choked out, "The knife—"

He cursed again, more urgently this time. Annabeth closed her eyes. She couldn't take the shifting and swaying of her vision anymore. She felt him lower her gently into a sitting position on his bed, her back propped up against the wall.

"Stay here," he said, as if she could do anything else, "You'll be alright, I swear—"

It sounded like he was trying to convince himself as much as he was trying to convince her, but she tried not to focus on that. A small whimper escaped her lips as his hands left her. She didn't know why she had needed to find him so badly. Maybe she had just wanted to be near him when she died.

The answer came to her in the soft touch of his hand against her face, keeping her head upright.

"Drink this," he said, and she did.

She'd been expecting water, but the liquid was different; better. It was smooth and cool, and tasted like something that she couldn't quite place, but that was most definitely not water. As soon as it passed down her throat her head started to clear, the burning in her arm settling to a dull but still painful ache.

Her eyes fluttered open, and Perseus sighed in relief. He was kneeling beside her, one hand still cupping her face, the other holding a familiar water pouch.

The nectar. That had been why she'd been so insistent on finding him and nobody else. He was the only one who knew she was a demigod, who knew that the drink of the gods could heal her when they had no other antidote.

"Better?" he asked. His eyes were still worried, but the panic had largely faded.

Annabeth nodded, leaning into his touch. The fogginess in her brain was fading more and more with each passing second, her vision sharpening and stabilizing. She looked down at the wound on her shoulder. The swelling had gone down some, and the little tendrils of poison had started to retreat back to the original cut, but it wasn't entirely healed.

"It still looks bad," Annabeth said, surprising herself with how steady her voice sounded. She brushed her fingers over the injury. It stung and she winced, pulling her hand away.

"We'll need to clean it," Perseus said, expression grim. Annabeth bit her lower lip, but nodded.

She started to thread her arm through the shoulder of her dress to better expose the wound, but she got stuck, unable to move her arm without it paralyzing in pain. Perseus helped her pull the garment down, leaving her shoulder exposed, but the rest of her chest still covered.

He left her side again to get supplies from the other end of the room. When he returned, he was holding clean bandages. Carefully, he poured the smallest amount of nectar on a strip of white cloth, staining it gold.

"This will hurt," he warned, kneeling back down beside her.

"It's okay," Annabeth said. It had to be okay, because just drinking the nectar had clearly only delayed the poison's spread, not gotten rid of it entirely. If she wanted to live, she was going to have to be okay with it hurting.

He still faltered though, holding the nectar soaked bandage just over her wound. He looked up at her, as if waiting for something. It took Annabeth a second to realize he wanted her permission. She nodded, giving him the go ahead.

Annabeth very suddenly and very painfully realized why he had been so hesitant. It burned worse than anything she had ever felt in her life, sending a shock of pain through her whole body. She bit back a shriek, covering her mouth with her good hand to try and muffle the noise.

"I'm sorry," he said, flinching worse than her as he pressed the bandage to the wound again, "It's almost done, I swear—"

Annabeth wanted to tell him that it was okay, that it wasn't his fault, but she knew if she opened her mouth all that would come out was another cry of pain. She just tried to keep her breathing steady, to focus on anything but the pain. Eventually it started to dwindle, from a sharp burning to dull sting to a vague numbness.

At some point she'd closed her eyes, but when she opened them again he was wrapping her shoulder in clean, fresh bandages, free of nectar. There was a darkened piece of cloth folded neatly beside her, though whether it was stained with blood or poison she didn't know. Maybe both.

He gave her another half sip of nectar, pulling it away almost as soon as it touched her lips. The little that made it to her tongue cleared the last of the pain away, leaving a glowing warm sensation in her chest. She should have felt tired, but instead she felt alert, awake. She rolled her bad shoulder experimentally. It twinged, but thanks to the nectar it now felt more sore than painful.

He was still kneeling in front of her, nearly eye-level, though he was avoiding her gaze.

"I'm sorry," he said again. He didn't need to be, but she was sure he knew that and had said it regardless.

"Don't be," Annabeth said, "You saved my life."

He laughed quietly, but it was entirely without humor.

"It was my fault it was in danger to begin with."

That wasn't fair or true, not really. They'd all thought Chrysaor was dead, there had been no reason for him not to turn his back. But she had a feeling she could argue the semantics of blame with him all night, and he would never give in. And she didn't want to fight with him, not now.

Annabeth didn't regret taking the knife at all, even if it meant suffering from the poison hours later. It had saved his life, and that was all that mattered.

"Then I suppose we're even," Annabeth said. She'd caught him off guard, she could tell from the way his lips twitched, itching to smile even as he suppressed it.

"That's not how it works," he said. There was the barest touch of lightness in his voice that hadn't been there before. She knew he still felt guilty, though, because his hands were conspicuously absent from holding her own. Annabeth wondered if he realized that withholding his touch was as much a punishment to her as it was to him. So she broke the silent barrier between them, reaching out to him, brushing her fingers through his hair.

"I don't care," Annabeth said. She got a reluctant smile at that, or maybe it was from the way she was touching him. She could feel her heartbeat pick up slightly.

"Maybe you should."

"No, I shouldn't. Because you would have done the same thing for me."

Annabeth knew it was true, just as she knew it was true that she would have taken that knife twenty more times if she'd had too. She watched his jaw clench as he fought back a rebuttal. She was close enough to see every muscle flex with the strain of it, to feel the tension through her fingers.

"Of course I would have, but—"

Annabeth was not interested in hearing the remainder of that sentence. Her hands did all the thinking in the next moment; sliding to the base of his neck and pulling until his lips met hers.

There was half an instant of surprise before he was kissing her back, his lips moving against hers in perfect harmony. His hands soon joined in, tangling in her hair, holding her ever-closer.

Annabeth had expected kissing Perseus to feel like electricity. She had been wrong.

Kissing him felt like a revelation, like being washed clean in a thundering wave. It didn't send tingles down her spine, it sent a rush through her head and her heart and her soul. His lips against hers felt like the most natural thing in the world, like she hadn't quite been living until she experienced it. It was just so overwhelmingly right.

Her hands wandered down, down his neck to his shoulders, his arms, his chest. She could feel every well defined muscle flex beneath her fingers at her touch. His hands wandered too— one stayed in her hair, twisting his fingers around her curls like his life depended on it; the other trailed down her uninjured shoulder to her chest. He brushed his thumb over the sensitive peak of her breast, and Annabeth moaned into his mouth, leaning forward into his touch.

It had been a fairly equal exchange up until that point, their lips and hands moving evenly against each other. But the second the sound escaped Annabeth's lips, something shifted in him. He tightened his grip in his hair— not painfully so, but just on the edge— somehow pulling her even closer to him than she had been before. She melted into him, weakening her defenses, letting him take control.

That turned out to be an excellent decision. He deepened their kiss, forcing her mouth open with his tongue, and she whimpered against him, weakening her resolve just that much more. It was his turn to moan, and she felt it on her lips and under her hands, still splayed on his chest. Warmth was spreading to every inch of her body, pooling in the pit of her stomach; an unfamiliar but not unwelcome sensation.

Somehow it still wasn't enough. She wanted more, needed more, though how much more he could give her with just his lips and his tongue and his hands, she wasn't sure.

Maybe before she had met Perseus, the thought of more than this would have scared her. More was what got her dirty looks in hallways and meeting rooms, more was Octavian's excuse to spread rumors about her, ridicule and belittle her. And having more of Perseus right now might make her exactly what all those people thought she was.

She didn't care.

It didn't matter, and not just because they were on the quest and outside the reach of civilized society anyways, but because being with Perseus was beyond all of that. Giving all of herself over to him and taking all of him in return— there was something vital in that prospect, something holy and untouchable. She never felt more of her godly side than when she was with him, and now she felt it tenfold; their auras tangling in some divine knot, the nectar of the gods coursing through her veins. They were above human convention, at least where this was concerned.

This revelation only heightened Annabeth's desire. She kissed him with a sudden ferocity, a desperation she hadn't known she'd been capable of. Suddenly just feeling his hands over her clothes was simply not enough. She needed his touch directly on his skin.

She pulled at his clothing first, because he could remove his more easily than she could hers. He responded immediately, breaking their kiss so he could tug the garments off his body. Annabeth watched, breathless, as he revealed himself to her.

However divine she felt in that moment, it was nothing compared to how Perseus looked. His heaving chest was perfectly sculpted, every muscle taut with exertion. His hair was wild from her fingers, his lips swollen from her kiss. Even his eyes— usually so startlingly bright— were more black than green, pupils blown wide with desire.

He was sheer, godly perfection, sculpted from the sea itself. And he was all hers.

He started to undo her belt, loosening the grip of the fabric of her dress from around her waist. She shrugged it off easily as he hooked his fingers around her undergarments, drawing them agonizingly slowly away from her entrance, down her legs and finally onto the ground. Annabeth knew they were already soaked through in the center.

She made the mistake of trying to use her bad arm to toss her dress away, unable to hide the ripple of pain the movement caused. She winced and he faltered, his eyes gliding over to the bandages covering her shoulder.

"I'm fine," Annabeth said preemptively, kissing him again to prove it, on his lips and then down the line of his jaw.

"You're hurt," he said, pulling away from her with a very concentrated effort. His voice was low and rough, and the sound of it sent another wave of heat through her, "We can't—"

"Please," Annabeth said, cutting him off.

The distance between them already felt like too much, even though they were mere inches apart. She reached out, cupped his cheek with her hand.

Her fingers brushed over the cut Chrysaor had given him. It was mostly healed, but she could still feel it— skin slightly raised, just barely scabbed over. It would probably scar, imperial gold usually did, but the mark did nothing to deter from the absolute perfection of his features.

"It could get more injured," he said, but defeat was already etched in his tone, "What if I—"

"You won't hurt me. I promise," Annabeth said, kissing his jaw again, just below his lips. The very idea was ludicrous. He couldn't hurt her, not now, not even if he tried. It was practically healed, just sore, and Annabeth didn't intend to stop on account of it. He wasn't pulling away this time, though Annabeth suspected it wasn't from lack of trying.

"Annabeth," he groaned— pleaded, and Annabeth sighed, pulling back.

"I'm fine," she repeated, "I'm fine, I swear, and even if I wasn't I wouldn't care."

"That's not helping," he said, closing his eyes. She felt his hand tighten around hers.

"Perseus," she said softly, and his eyes opened, pupils still wide and black, "I want this. I need— I need you."

That did it. With a defeated moan Perseus dropped his hand, curing it instead around her neck and pulling her into a kiss again. She smiled under him in victory.

Afterwards, they both laid there breathing heavily for what felt like hours, though it was probably only a few minutes. A satisfied ache was starting to settle in Annabeth's muscles and bones. Whatever rush of energy she'd been riding since she'd drinken the nectar was wearing off, and fast.

Perseus pulled himself up to his knees, breath evened out. He leaned forward, pressed a long, languid kiss to Annabeth's lips before sliding off the bed.

Sleep was already starting to settle over her when he crawled back into the bed with her. It was too hot for blankets, especially considering what they'd been doing, but he pulled a thin one over them anyways.

Annabeth knew that she shouldn't stay here. If someone found her completely undressed in his bed, they would have a lot of explaining to do, most of it unpleasant. But she settled onto his chest anyway, letting his arm wrap around her.

She could feel his fingers playing with the ends of her hair. She traced the lines of his stomach absently, waiting for sleep to catch up with her. A memory surfaced, the feeling she'd had looking at him for the first time. He watched her expression shift with curious amusement.

"What are you smiling at?" he asked. His voice was quiet, but she heard him perfectly.

It was somewhat embarrassing, if she was being entirely honest. But laying there in the afterglow wrapped in his arms, she couldn't bring herself to deny him a truthful answer.

"I was thinking about when I first saw you. I thought you were a god," Annabeth admitted.

She felt his soft laugh in his chest just as much as he heard it. He wasn't laughing at her, not really, just the idea in general. It really wasn't so ludicrous, Annabeth thought. She guessed the idea must be so for him, but he'd never seen himself from the outside, never felt the effect he had on people. On her.

"I see you set high expectations for me."

"And you exceeded them," Annabeth said, pressing her lips to his shoulder. He nuzzled his nose into her hair, giving her a gentle kiss to the top of her head. He did it so naturally, like he'd been giving her kisses for years and years instead of barely an hour.

"Go to sleep, before you inflate my ego beyond repair," he said. She could hear the smile in his voice.

She almost wanted to tease him, to keep going, but the prospect of sleep was too tempting to ignore. She closed her eyes, timed her breathing to the steady feeling of his heart thumping underneath her, and fell away into dreams.