5

When she gets a text from Athena after the press conference, it takes Annabeth three days to work up the courage to open it, and when she finally does – in the back of a limo with Percy on the way to a red carpet premiere, where she hopes she'll be too busy to think about her mother for most of the night – it's both ambiguous and incendiary.

Don't be foolish, it reads.

Annabeth frowns at it, first because of the time it takes to translate the symbols on her screen into words, and then at their actual meaning. She scrolls up on the phone to the last message between them, two years ago. The songs are good, that one says. It had come just after the release of her first album, and remains just about the highest praise Annabeth's mother has ever given her.

And that's it. That's the extent of the communication the two of them have had over phone since Athena came back into Annabeth's life at seven years old. It's too little too late taken to the furthest extreme.

"Everything okay?" Percy asks her, and she sticks the phone in a cup-holder and squeezes his hand as Argus pulls up to the kerb. Athena has no business meddling here, she decides.

"Everything's fine," she says, and it's a testament to Percy's reassuring presence that she actually means it.

Five minutes later, they're at the New York premiere of King of Sparta 4: The Sea of Monsters: all dresses, tuxedos, and hordes of reporters and fans there to capture the perfect photo or some autographed memorablilia.

Annabeth wrote the end credits song, Anacyclosis, but fortunately isn't expected to perform it tonight. Instead, with Percy on her arm, she gets to enjoy the red carpet experience, during which time Grover has carefully and repeatedly instructed both of them that they're to attract as little attention to themselves as possible.

That might be easier, she thinks, if Percy looked less good. Despite his protestations, Silena's managed to wrestle him into a tuxedo, and suddenly he's putting the stars of the film and their model other halves to shame. His hair has been left almost untouched, adding an ever so slightly wild edge to his otherwise impeccably cut jaw and cheekbones, but Annabeth is considering asking Silena to make him prune it soon, purely to make him less distracting.

Doubly unfortunately for Grover's plan of a low-key night, the two of them seem to be the most tabloid-ready people there, and their way up the red carpet is slowed significantly by reruns of all the questions they've already answered twenty times before, along with a handful of new ones including Annabeth's all-time least favourite, 'Who are you wearing?'

"Is it always like this?" Percy asks her as they pose for a photo, taking her slightly by surprise – he blends in so well with the other celebrities, is so personable and affable with the reporters, that she forgets how new he is to all of this.

"I've not done many movie premieres," she tells him, "but it's pretty similar to all the awards ceremonies. The press are usually a little less interested in me personally, but you've gone and made me newsworthy at the moment."

"I'm pretty sure you've done that all by yourself," he says, smiling, and something inside her buzzes at the compliment.

The film itself is… fine. Annabeth can't help but feel that it's a handful of exceptional action scenes dressed up with two-dimensional characters, clunky dialogue, and somewhat questionable politics, but it's gratifying to watch Percy enjoy it, and she takes note of the way he sits up attentively as her song plays at the end, even as she sinks into her seat at the sound of her own voice. She watches his silhouette as he watches the credits rolling with rapt attention, his mouth slightly open as if he's forgotten to close it, up until the closing lines:

Even if you never shared the blame, you couldn't hide how you were glad,

To sit and stare at the flames, watching good things turn to bad

He sinks back slowly into his seat so that she can't see his expression so well in the dim light, before he turns his head slightly towards her. "Are all your songs that good?" he asks.

Another compliment, another warm and fuzzy feeling inside, at least until she runs his words through her head a second time. "What do you mean, are they all that good?" she asks.

He seems as confused by her question as she was by his. "I mean… I really liked that. I thought it was great. It fit the film well, but it was really moving by itself, and…" he tails off as he looks at her face, and apparently her confusion is still showing. "What do you mean, what do I mean?"

"Percy," she whispers, hoping no-one overhears her because this is the kind of thing she does not want the press getting hold of, "have you not heard any of my songs?"

He hesitates, so she knows the answer even before he says it. "I mean, I know the ones that you played the other night," he says defensively. "It's just a little different when it's live, you know?"

"So, what, you were at that show… to see Luke's half?" she asks, dreading finding out that her husband, who on the whole she's grown to like over the last week, is a massive fan of her cheating ex.

"I was there for Nico," he says, like it's a guilty secret. "He kind of just bullied me into going on the day."

"So you went to our concert despite knowing approximately none of the music?"

"He said Estelle would like it, too. And she did, to be fair. And I liked it too! Just in case there was any doubt about that – I thought you were great."

Annabeth thinks for a moment. She kind of hates being the kind of celebrity who just expects people to know her and her work, but equally she figures that her husband should probably have a rough idea of what it is she does. "At some point, you're going to be asked what your favourite song of mine is," she starts, but he answers before she's able to finish.

"This one," he says confidently.

"I mean…"

"No, it's this one. I'm sure. It's…"

"It's about self-destruction," she says drily. "I'm not sure if that's the message I want to be pushing about myself right now."

"I can listen to your other stuff too if you want," he says, and then, hastily: "I'd like to listen to your other songs. And I'll be able to go on TV and give interviews about why all of them are great, but this one is… I dunno, it's just, moving, I guess. It feels… honest, I guess. I don't think you should be ashamed of it just because you went crazy and married a stranger."

She lets out an undignified snort that makes the film's star, Tristan McLean, look over his shoulder from the row in front, and is pleased to see Percy grinning, too. "I tell you what," she says. "Are you free tomorrow?"

He nods. "I can be."

"Come over to mine in the morning. We'll have coffee and do your music revision and hang out, if you're up for it. I'd like to do that without all… this."

He nods again, more slowly this time. "I'd like that too," he says. His voice is husky and low, like he's admitting something he shouldn't, like she's some kind of forbidden fruit.

And there go those butterflies in her stomach again.

"Because I know that you're a sensible and well-rounded person," says Percy the next morning, "you may feel that the cannons at the museum should not be loaded."

Annabeth cackles. "You're asking for my sympathy now?"

"You may even feel," continues Percy, undeterred, "that the person to blame is the one who left the cannon both fully loaded and ready to fire at the slightest spark."

"It was a lit cigarette."

"It was Nancy Bobofit's lit cigarette," corrects Percy. "If you've an ounce of feeling in that cold cold heart of yours, you may feel that the twelve year-old who dropped said cigarette onto the fuse of the civil war cannon was not responsible for the damage dealt to the bus."

"You should be in jail right now," Annabeth tells him. "You're clearly very dangerous to be around."

"Wow Mrs Dodds, I didn't realise I'd accidentally married one of the teachers who got me thrown out of school," he tells her.

"Mrs Dodds is the kind of name," says Annabeth, slowly enough that her words take on the weight of a pronouncement rather than a mere opinion, "where she's either your favourite teacher or your worst."

Percy makes a face. "She was definitely not my favourite."

Annabeth pauses, reluctant to ruin the moment. "You realise it's not unlikely that at some point she'll crop up on Fox giving an interview about how you were the student from hell, right?"

Percy makes the same face as a moment ago, except this time worse. "That's a terrifying concept. I didn't know what fear was until thinking about my fury of a Math teacher digging all the skeletons out of my school locker."

"Sorry," says Annabeth, suppressing another cackle at his misfortune.

Then he speaks again, softly this time. "What do you know about my first marriage?"

She can tell instantly that this is a subject he's uncomfortable with, and is struck again by the way in which she's foisted a life on him that he in no way asked for. Besides, for her own part, listening to Percy talk about loving and falling out of love with – or failing to fall out of love with – someone else sounds like no kind of fun. "We don't have to go into any of that," she tells him. "You came here to revise my music, right?"

"I feel like you kind of have a right to know about me," he says.

"I know some things about you. I can tell you don't like the media stuff," she says. "You don't like people asking you about yourself. Maybe you spend a lot of time on a boat because you don't like talking about yourself a lot, or maybe you don't like talking about yourself because you spend so much time on the sea, but I don't want you to feel like you owe me explanations about yourself. You're not actually a serial killer or anything like that, right?"

He smiles weakly. "No."

"Did your first marriage end because you cheated?"

"No."

"Great, no more questions. You can tell me if it's something I really need to know, if, I don't know, if it could bite us in the ass in an interview or something, but if it's just some years-old gossip that some tabloid is going to run to get a few more eyeballs on it, then forget it. I don't want you to feel like you have to tell me anything you don't want to revisit. You don't owe me that."

He's very still as she heads over to the shelf and pulls out her first album, My Grand Plan, slotting the vinyl disc into place on her player. "It feels like you already know plenty of the important stuff about me," he says.

She pauses, holding the needle over the record. "How do you mean?" she asks.

He waves a hand to dispel any worries she might have about what she's just said. "I guess it's no big deal," he says, "I'm just surprised you noticed that. Seems pretty perceptive."

"What can I say, there's a reason why Rolling Stone called me the sharpest voice in pop," she informs him, trying to lighten the mood a little. "Speaking of which, you may recognise some of these bops and bangers from the show, but you're right that it's very different live, so I hope that it doesn't disappoint too much after Anacyclosis."

"What does that actually mean?"

"What, Anacyclosis? It's kinda dumb – it's this Ancient Greek political theory."

"Now you've really got my attention," he says drily, leaning forwards to listen.

"That's another thing you do!" she objects.

"What?"

"That. This. You say something sarcastically and then you act like you really meant it."

"Really?" he asks, looking at his body as if it's out of his control.

"It makes you difficult to read," she scolds him.

"Genuinely! I'd really like to know. Anaphylactic."

"Cyclosis."

"That's what I said."

She narrow her eyes at him, but does explain. "It's the idea that any form of government that has the interests of the people at its heart is unstable and is inevitably corrupted."

"And you just woke up one day and decided that was your next song?"

"They asked me to do a song for the film, and the original draft of the script was supposed to be an exploration of that idea. I figured it was an interesting thing to think about, but maybe not so interesting for a song, so I wrote one about how relationships all turn bad instead. And I didn't have a lot of faith the theme would survive in the movie once it had been rewritten by fifteen different people, anyway. It was – obviously, it was before Luke and everything."

"Do you believe that?"

She sighs. "Yeah, Hollywood isn't the place to go for genuine artistic expression most of the time. I know that pop music might not be what people think of as-"

"I mean about relationships," he says.

His eyes are kind and he's sitting relaxed on the couch, and even so Annabeth feels cornered somehow. Honest, he'd called the song last night. It was the reason he'd given as to why he'd thought it was so good. Maybe she'd been a little perceptive when she'd noticed that he doesn't like talking about himself much, but this question feels like an arrow shot straight into her heart.

He's already promised her that in a few months he's leaving her for the sea, and Luke, the man she'd thought was her soulmate, had moved on from her before they'd even married…

"It's hard not to believe it, sometimes," she says.

She drops the needle onto the record, and lets a past version of herself sing them songs of love and heartbreak and hope.

Thirty-three minutes and forty-eight seconds later, assuming My Grand Plan's Wikipedia page is to be trusted, the eight songs on the album have run their course.

Annabeth's been moving around, checking her phone, making herself a drink in the other room, and generally struggling to stay still. She doesn't hate the sound of her own voice quite as much as some singers, but it puts her on edge in a way that's amplified by her ADHD. She can't imagine sitting still and listening to it for over half an hour.

Percy, on the other hand, who she's noticed is something of a fidgeter himself, has sat largely motionless in the same spot for the duration of the album, a small smile tugging at the corners of his mouth for every song with the notable exception of the final third of Princess, when it had turned into a full-on grin after the big key change. That was especially gratifying as she remembers arguing with Luke in the studio over it, as he'd tried to convince her it was too melodramatic to work, not understanding that the whole song had been written as a vehicle for that very moment.

Something inside her curls up as she realises that she'll never have him by her side when she's recording again, challenging her at every turn and in doing so pushing her to new heights. She'll never see him grimace and pretend to run away at the sound of his own voice coming out of tinny speakers, or watch him sit down with his guitar and dramatically declare that he's written her a new song and if she'll give him a week or so it might even get a second verse.

Percy says something, and she jolts back to the present day, here in her apartment with her really rather sweet husband.

"I'm sorry?" she asks.

"The album, it's about proving yourself, right? I was kind of expecting it to mostly be love songs, just cause that's mostly what I'd heard from you, and there are love songs in there, but the whole thing seems mostly about expectations and – is that right?"

She blinks, more than a little surprised that he's got it so quickly. "Of all the reviews I read of it," she admits, "the only one who actually noticed that the album was about self-fulfilment was from Pitchfork. Alas, he thought it was too immature to go down as one of the great debut albums: six-point-eight out of ten."

"I'm sure there's a lot of interesting stuff in there I missed the first time around, I just thought it was a really interesting idea, and really well done," says Percy, the words spilling hastily out of him like he feels that identifying the theme of the album is an intrusion on her privacy. "It's a solid ten out of ten from me," he continues. "Maybe even eleven."

"Everyone else gave it nines and tens out of ten, which is what made it so offensive that the one who actually understood what it was about didn't like it," she tells him. "But thank you, I'm glad you liked it. Anything on there that trumps Anacyclosis?"

He makes a thoughtful humming noise and checks the back of the record sleeve for the track titles. "I really liked Turning Invisible."

"Do you always gravitate towards the sad ones?"

"Alright, alright, the one where the chorus was like, uh -" he hesitates, and then, in a rough approximation of the tune - "'she's just a princess in a tower, yeah!'"

"Princess."

"I guess that name makes sense. Yep. Great tune."

"Could you tell which one I wrote when I was seven?"

"You wrote one of those when you were seven?" he asks, disbelief evident on his face.

"That's a no, then?" she smirks.

He turns back to the record sleeve. "The Keeper," he tries.

"Wow, I think being at sea so long might have filled your brain with seaweed. I'm actually offended that you think a seven year-old could've written that."

He runs a hand through his hair. "I wasn't expecting to get tested on this kind of thing so soon," he says. "But I feel like if I get the answer wrong too many times, you'll throw me out."

"You'd better believe it," she tells him. "Don't get too comfortable in that seat, Jackson. Strictly speaking, only the chorus was from when I was seven, if that helps."

He frowns at the song titles like he can intimidate them into giving up their secrets.

"I was planning on heading back into the studio next week to record a couple of new tracks I've been working on for the next album," she tells him as she waits for his next guess. "You should drop by if you've time."

"Mmm," he says, and suddenly she feels like an idiot.

"I mean, it would be good to get a couple of publicity shots ready for whenever the next album is, but it's not a big deal, only if you've got time," she stammers, cursing herself for forgetting that he's only here for the money to help his precious squid. He doesn't answer, and she feels her face heating up as she tries to find another way to fill the silence, until –

"Runaway," he says finally.

"What?"

"You wrote the chorus to Runaway when you were seven," he says, proudly handing her the record sleeve like it's evidence of his choice. "And I'd love to come to the studio! I've always wondered what it's like when people are actually recording music, and it'd be awesome to see a real master at work. Find out where all the magic comes from. Speaking of magic, were you wanting me to listen to both albums today, or were you planning it in instalments?"

"It was Runaway," she agrees slowly, more impressed than she hopes he can tell. She takes the case from him and turns to put the vinyl away, conveniently hiding the fact that she's blushing again, this time not from embarrassment, but from something better. "I can't promise magic, but I'll be there Tuesday-Wednesday. And for the next album it's really up to you if you want to-"

She's interrupted by the doorbell buzzing.

She frowns, not able to remember having scheduled for anyone to come round this morning. There was an interview with Vanity Fair… that was tomorrow, right?

She peers through the camera, and sees Grover's anxious face on the other side of the door, druumming something against his leg that's too distorted by the lens to make out properly. She unlocks it hastily, and he stumbles in, looking behind him like he's worried he might have been followed.

"Annabeth," he says, "I'm sorry, but I thought you should know – oh, Percy, hi!"

"Grover, hey!" grins Percy.

Grover's return smile, though, doesn't reach his eyes, and he looks quickly, uneasily, between Annabeth and Percy.

"What's going on?" Annabeth asks him.

Grover gives her a hopeless look, and then, rather than struggle with words, tosses the thing he's carrying – a newspaper – onto the table.

Her eyes automatically focus on the largest text, about a senator who's been caught taking bribes, and she opens her mouth to ask Grover why he thinks this is important. Then she notices an insert box on the front page of the kind that papers often have for celebrity gossip. This one holds a picture of Percy with his arms around a woman Annabeth doesn't recognise, his lips on her lips.

And then, the headline: A GIRL IN EVERY PORT? PERCY'S EX TELLS ALL!

i am watching way too much football and what i'm posting is rapidly catching up with what i'm writing, uh oh. i'll do my best to get ahead again once england lose. or once england win the cup (i can dream).