Annabeth woke in an olive grove, which was her first indication that she was dead.

The second was that she didn't feel any pain. Annabeth looked down at her arms and legs. They were completely free of blemishes, not a single scrape or bruise or scratch.

The third was that her hair was soft and clean, no longer tangled. That was a miracle that could probably only be achieved via magic or death, and right now death seemed the most likely option.

Annabeth stood up, only just realizing she had been sitting down. It was late evening, warm but not overly hot. A cool breeze swept through the grove, rustling the leaves on the trees, blowing Annabeth's dress around her ankles. She could see the skyline of Athens in the far distance, and could smell the sea in the air.

"Annabeth."

Annabeth turned around, following the source of the voice. It was female, vaguely familiar, and when she met the face that matched it, she realized who it was.

"Mother."

Athena gave a slight nod in recognition, her grey eyes sparkling.

She still had dark hair and Annabeth's exact eyes. Beyond that, she looked entirely different from the last time Annabeth had seen her. Her bones no longer stood out, nor was her face hallowed with apparent starvation. She had a healthy complexion, high sharp cheekbones, smooth unblemished skin. Her hair was shiny and dark, falling in a simple neat plait down her right shoulder. She wore a dress similar to Annabeth's; plain white, Greek styled.

Most unfamiliar of all was her expression: peaceful, with just a hint of a smile playing at her lips and around her eyes.

"Come walk with me, daughter," Athena said, gesturing towards the line of trees.

Annabeth followed her, feeling dazed. It was strange to see her mother like this, when the only other iteration of her had been… well, deranged.

"Aren't you..." Annabeth started, then trailed off, unable to think of a delicate way to phrase the question she wanted to ask. It didn't matter though, because Athena was one step ahead of her.

"Mad?" she said, a small twinkle of humor in her stormy eyes.

"I mean— yes."

"Yes, and no," Athena said, starting to walk down the row of olive trees, "Forcing me into that trap required gathering what was left of my life force. They summoned my Greek form, not my Roman, knowing that it would be easier to trap me over any of my brethren, given how weak I am, and that destroying my life force to bring Kronos back would sever the other gods from their roots."

"Because you're the most Greek, out of all of them," Annabeth guessed.

"Precisely," Athena nodded, "The Roman forms are still powerful, of course, but without the basis of Greece, they would be nothing. I am not the only tie to that foundation, but I am one of the strongest. It is the same principle Kronos was employing when trying to kill you."

"But you're not in the trap anymore," Annabeth said. It was a rather obvious statement, but Athena seemed to understand the question inherent in it.

"The fact that we were in my patron city, your presence, and that trap— it was just enough to collect what little is left of me into a working consciousness, in my natural Greek form, at least for the time being."

"So this isn't permanent?"

"Oh, no," her mother said, with a sad little smile, "Even now my essence is beginning to scatter. Soon I'll be reverted back to Minerva, but I wanted to speak to you before that happened."

"Am I dead?" Annabeth asked, finally blurting out her first assumption. Athena's smile widened. Annabeth had a feeling she wanted to laugh a little at her question, but was holding back.

"Not quite, but you did come close. When I was released from my trap, it triggered my true form. Looking directly upon it would be enough to dissolve any human's essence, half-blood or no. But your... friend knocked you out of the way, obscured your eyeline just in time."

Even in this dream or hallucination or whatever it was, Annabeth was still capable of blushing. She felt her face heat just barely at her mother's pronunciation of the word 'friend', which was a not entirely inaccurate description of Perseus, but an incomplete one all the same. Athena continued, unperturbed.

"Still, it's taking your body some time to recover from the shock, and in the meantime I was able to pull your consciousness into this neutral space. In that sense, neither of us are really here."

"I see," Annabeth said, face still hot.

Unfortunately Athena noticed, and correctly guessed what exactly she was blushing at. She wrinkled her nose, just slightly.

"If you had to engage in a romantic entanglement, a son of Poseidon would not be my first choice. Though I suppose he's better than a Roman."

Annabeth thought that was perhaps a bit rich of her mother to say, considering she hadn't exactly been an active participant in her life up until this point, but she also supposed that was not entirely Athena's fault. Still, Annabeth wasn't going to leave Perseus undefended.

"He's a good man," Annabeth said, keeping her voice mild.

"Perhaps. But despite all that connects you, rivalry is still in your blood."

Annabeth glanced over at her mother, but she was looking away, forward. Annabeth could see just a sliver of the sea on the horizon, past the edge of the trees.

Annabeth knew that her and Perseus's godly parents had… not the best relationship. That they had fought over the name of the very city they seemed to be in now, and hadn't liked each other since. There were other discretions of course, but she couldn't remember the finer details, and regardless they felt deeply unimportant.

It wasn't that Annabeth didn't see that aspect in her and Perseus— it wasn't like they hadn't fought, and he had infuriated her when they first met. But they were also so much more than that. Athena and Posiedon may have feuded— and were still feuding— on an immortal scale, but Annabeth and Perseus were capable of change in a way that gods were not.

"We've moved past that," Annabeth said. To her surprise, her mother sighed, seeming defeated.

"I suppose it was inevitable, in a way. Demigods have always been drawn to each other, but being the last two Greeks— that connection is powerful. Your paths were always set to cross, and when they did it's no wonder you… bonded, the way you did."

"Inevitable," Annabeth repeated. She didn't know why she felt so surprised to hear her mother say it, when she herself had had the same thought on more than one occasion. Perhaps it was just the confirmation that she'd been right, that what she felt with Perseus was stronger than a regular mortal connection. Or even a regular half-immortal connection.

"Don't mistake my words, daughter," Athena warned, voice suddenly sharp, "You always have a choice. It would be difficult, but not impossible to separate yourself from him."

"Are you telling me to not be with him?" Annabeth asked, fighting to keep her voice neutral.

"I'm simply providing you with relevant information."

Maybe it was because she was a goddess, but Annabeth found it difficult to read her tone. Annabeth still had a feeling that her mother disapproved, but perhaps she recognized that Annabeth wouldn't take well to being told what to do.

"Is he the one you told me about? Last time, I mean," Annabeth asked.

Athena nodded.

"Indeed. I'm sorry I couldn't provide more guidance to you over the years, but as you saw, my mind was quite… disorganized. I won't pretend I enjoyed being trapped, but it did give me some clarity, and allowed me to reach out more."

Annabeth was about to ask what she meant, but Athena glanced over at her, a little mystery in her eyes. Her words were coaxing, trying to get Annabeth to follow along. Sure enough, something slotted into place.

"You were the one that sent me dreams," Annabeth realized suddenly, "That's why I had so many more than the others."

Athena smiled, pleased that Annabeth had figured it out.

"Yes. There was not much I could do to assist you from my cage, but that was one of them."

"Why did you show me all those things about Luke?" Annabeth asked, unable to help it, "I understand the conversation with Octavian, and those other memories, but why the one with Mercury?"

Athena was quiet for a moment, letting her hands trail over the branches of the nearest tree.

"You needed to be prepared," she said, finally, "I knew it would cause you to sympathize with him. But that moment was as much your history as it was his. You deserved to understand, before you saw him again."

"I thought I could fix him," Annabeth admitted, "I thought I could— I don't know. Make him good again. But he'd been gone for so long. I think I only got more people hurt."

'More people' was probably mostly herself, but she couldn't count Perseus out of the equation either.

"You may have influenced him more than you know," Athena said mildly.

Annabeth wasn't so sure. Did he even regret any of it? Or had he only died so that he wouldn't take her down with him? She wanted to believe he'd done the right thing for the right reasons, but she had no idea if that was true. If Perseus, or Jason, or anyone else had been at the other end of his hand, would he still have sacrificed himself to send Kronos back to the pit?

Annabeth suspected the answer was no, but she also didn't think his morality could be so simply defined.

"Maybe," Annabeth relented.

"Luke was a troubled man," Athena said, as if reading her thoughts. A small frown had formed between her dark brows, little lines appearing in her forehead. "He had grievances, some of them legitimate, some of them not, but regardless, he was led astray. That doesn't absolve him, but the person you knew wasn't a lie, either. Not everything is black and white, simply good or bad."

Annabeth didn't know what to make of that. She wanted to be able to put Luke in a box, define him one way or the other. She didn't want his complexity, because that meant she would never know exactly what to think of him.

Especially not with everything she'd learned in the past week. She'd been suppressing some of it more than she'd like to admit, just to keep herself sane. But after her conversation with him, she felt herself struggling to ignore it much longer.

Annabeth swallowed, her mouth suddenly dry.

"And what he said about me, to Chrysaor—"

"I don't pretend to know his thoughts," Athena said, cutting Annabeth's question off, "Nor did I witness the conversation between the two of them."

"So he could have been lying," Annabeth said, trying not to sound hopeful.

Athena gave a tight shrug.

"It's certainly possible."

"You don't think so, though," Annabeth guessed. Athena just shrugged again, her expression infuriatingly blank and difficult to read.

"He might not have said those exact words, but how far off do you find the sentiment, really?"

Annabeth wished that her mother had said anything but that, because in the back of her mind, she had been thinking the same thing. Maybe Luke hadn't said that at all— it certainly hadn't sounded like his words, especially not out of the pirate's mouth. But once she'd seen him, talked to him… she couldn't really deny that something in the way he viewed her had shifted, and not in a good way.

He had always treated her like a sister. Always. And he had always been a brother to her. She'd been too young to even think of him in other ways. And Annabeth felt confident at least that even if his feelings had changed, it had been well, well after she'd been with him.

But still. When they'd talked, he'd shown his hand, inadvertently or not. And it hadn't been Jason that he'd been jealous of. Jason, who was like a brother to her in every aspect of the word, Jason, whose relationship with her was the closest to how Luke's had been, before.

No. He'd been jealous of Perseus.

That was something Annabeth felt less willing to unpack, at least not right then. From what she'd picked up, Kronos had used her as a point of manipulation against Luke for years. That was sure to warp his view in less than healthy ways, though even that didn't feel like a good enough defense for it.

He had been a good man before. He hadn't been after, but did that have to cancel out everything he had done for her?

How much of it all had been his fault, his doing, and how much of him had been twisted from beyond his control? Had he kept his promises, in the end? Or where they just left ambiguous open-ended, a wound on her heart that would never quite heal?

Annabeth felt certain that she would likely never get the answers to those questions, given her mother's very definitive use of the past tense.

"Is he dead?" Annabeth asked. It was mostly to change the subject, or at least move it along. She'd known from the second they hit the edge of that cliff that Luke was never coming back.

"Quite, I'm afraid," Athena confirmed.

Annabeth hesitated before asking her next question, but she knew she needed the answer.

"And Kronos…?"

"That remains to be seen," Athena said, with a small grimace, "In revealing my true form, I cleared the room of any remaining essence, destroying what idolatry was left of him. But that isn't to say he couldn't rise again. His essence in the pit is still more collected than it's ever been."

Annabeth's stomach flipped with anxiety.

"So he could rise again?"

"Maybe, maybe not," Athena said, her expression finally dipping into the territory of troubled, "It took him many years to build a base of worshippers powerful enough to summon what was left of him into something of a corporeal form. Without them, he would have a very difficult time trying to escape again. But it is not outside the realm of possibility."

That was not a particularly comforting thought, but Annabeth didn't have much else to add. Her mother didn't seem to be one to sugar-coat things, and Annabeth was sure she wouldn't like what she heard if she asked any more questions about it. It was enough to know that his rise was unlikely. She didn't need any more details.

She tried to focus on something else, anything else, which surprisingly wasn't hard. The scenery was truly breathtaking, even if Annabeth wasn't entirely sure it was real.

But she couldn't entirely enjoy it, not when there was a nagging worry still wriggling around in her stomach. Something that had been bothering her since her last time she had seen her mother, but especially so now.

"I never got your vengeance."

At that, Athena did something entirely unexpected. She laughed. Annabeth stared at her, a little taken aback, but Athena seemed unbothered.

"I suppose not. I admit, it was unfair of me to put that on you in the first place, but you must remember the state I was in."

"But you'll go back to the way you were before," Annabeth protested.

"I will," Athena agreed.

"You don't seem overly concerned about that," Annabeth said, unable to hide the confusion in her tone.

Athena just shrugged.

"It is unwise to worry oneself with the inevitable," she said, "Besides, empires that rise must also fall. Rome will not last forever, and neither will this fractured state I'm in. Someday, perhaps one of my children will restore my essence permanently, but I fear that it will not be possible until the empire collapses."

Annabeth felt a small surge of guilt at her mother's words. That very thing had been in her hands just hours before, and she'd thrown it away. The cost would have been astronomical, and she knew that, but still— she didn't know whether her guilt was stemming from wanting to take the offer in the first place, or not taking it at all.

"I almost did it," Annabeth confessed, looking away, down the seemingly endless line of olive trees, "I was tempted."

"Understandably so," Athena said, nodding, somehow completely free of judgement, "But you made the wisest choice, in the end."

"I still don't think it's right," Annabeth said, "Rome, I mean."

"It's not," Athena agreed, "But as cruel as this place may be, Kronos would be a hundred times so."

"I suppose," Annabeth sighed, but she still felt unconvinced. She knew her mother was right, and that she had done the right thing. But she couldn't shake how suddenly resentful she felt towards herself after making that choice, even knowing it was the correct one.

Athena seemed to sense her dissatisfaction— or at least her next words addressed it.

"Kronos wanted to destroy the gods by going to their roots," she said, mildly, "Joining him would have meant destroying a part of yourself as well. Would turning your back on your heritage have been worth it?"

Annabeth considered that, really considered. Admittedly the thought hadn't really passed through her mind in the moment, but she half wondered if that was part of what had pulled her back in the end. Turning her back on the gods like Kronos had wanted would have meant giving up the part of her identity, the newly discovered and yet somehow most important part.

It would have meant severing the connection to her mother, who Annabeth was starting to realize had shaped her more than she knew. To her home, which she barely remembered, but whose memory still held fondly— at least before the end.

To Perseus. The thought of breaking that bond was scarier than anything else. It was the shared connection, the shared history and struggles and love and loss that had brought them together in the first place. Maybe they could have survived together without that foundation, but they never would have been the same, not if it had been replaced by cruelty and evil and revenge like Kronos would have had it.

"No," Annabeth admitted, "It wouldn't have."

She felt confident in that at least, though she couldn't help but think that it was a somewhat selfish reason. It felt like a small comfort in the scheme of things— she hadn't lost anything, but she hadn't gained anything either, besides a more jaded perspective.

"I know I did the right thing," Annabeth said, hesitantly, "But I — I was so angry— I'm still so angry at everything this place has taken from me. And I had to lock up all those feelings for so long because I couldn't afford to have them, but now that they're out I don't think I can put them back."

Athena nodded, like she understood.

"Sometimes the best form of revenge is simply to live. Your survival, your very existence is a defiance of Rome. Take comfort in that."

Annabeth wanted to, but it was hard. She felt useless, like their sacrifices meant nothing. They may have defeated the external threat— in theory, since there was still no telling exactly how permanent Kronos's position in Tartarus was— but the world felt just as cruel as when they'd set off for their quest in the first place.

"Is there nothing else I can do?"

"There are always ways to fight injustice. Some are just on a smaller scale than others."

Annabeth sighed, trying not to let her frustration show. Being the goddess of wisdom, it was only expected that some of her mother's words were annoyingly cryptic, but that didn't make them any less difficult to swallow. She half expected Athena to reprimand her, but she just smiled.

"You'll know what to do. You've already started, in some ways."

Annabeth glanced at her mother, sure that she was just messing with her now. Athena just kept looking out ahead, unrelenting.

"I suppose," Annabeth said, purposefully non-committal.

They were coming up on the edge of the grove, a cliff overlooking the sea. The sun was setting on the horizon, the last bits of light bouncing off the sea giving everything a soft golden glow. It was beautiful, but it sent an ache to Annabeth's chest anyways, her heart constricting on nothing and everything all at once.

"Our time together is ending," Athena said. Annabeth noticed that she was bracing herself against the trunk of one of the trees.

"Will I ever see you again?" Annabeth asked, already knowing the answer. Predictably, Athena shook her head.

"I will not be able to collect my essence enough to be this coherent again, I'm afraid."

Annabeth wanted to cry, to complain that it wasn't fair. But she wouldn't act like a petulant child, not in the last few moments she could spend with her mother. Annabeth still hated it, hated that she was leaving her again, even if it wasn't her fault. Hated the crushing injustice of it all, and most of all her lack of ability to do anything about it.

She felt like there were still a thousand things she wanted to say and ask, but now that her time was almost over, they all seemed to be slipping away.

"I just feel so lost," Annabeth said, her voice breaking, "I— I feel like I only now realized that I don't know who I am, I never have, and I only barely started to figure it out. I don't— I don't know what to do."

Annabeth could feel the scenery around them fading, replaced with a hazy light. But Athena reached out to her anyway, her hand cupping Annabeth's face in a soft, gentle gesture.

"You are my daughter," Athena said, sincerity shining in her warm grey eyes, "You're strong, and brave, and wise beyond your years. And whatever, or whoever, else you decide to be, just know that I am proud of you."

With one last warm breeze, the scene dissolved softly into light.