Disclaimer: I am not, and will never be, Rick Riordan. Sadly, this means I don't own Percy Jackson.
Warnings: Swearing, unbeta'ed, PTSD symptoms, some unreliable narrator, character deaths, life-threatening injuries, moral ambiguity.
"These woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep."
-Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, Robert Frost
"So. Is Thalia the one, Bird Brain?"
"No idea what you're talking about," Annabeth snapped back as she started to take her armor off from patrol. Even with the tree healed and a small dragon acting as guard, Chiron wanted them patrolling the borders just in case Luke or his forces attacked. Annabeth had been forced to take more than her fair share with the disappearances to keep newer campers from being thrown out there. "Please clarify and try again."
She lacked energy of any kind for this conversation. With anyone.
Clarisse rolled her eyes and kept charging on like a bronze bull into camp. "The Great Prophecy. I know you've heard it. We need a Big Three kid to complete it, right? And I'm guessing that with Kronos—"
"Don't say the name."
"—with Kronos on the return, it's about to be completed one way or the other. And you and her are too quiet about it."
Annabeth unstrapped her breastplate, undoing the buckles with shaky hands as she took the opportunity to mull over how much she wanted to tell Clarisse. Outside of one brief conversation with Chiron and Thalia, she had been sworn to secrecy outside of Thalia, gods forbid, dying. But on the other hand. . .
And camp was already ragged from attacks, with Thalia one of its fiercest and most visible defenders. The last thing they needed was a panic.
The hero's soul. Cursed blade shall reap. Annabeth prayed it didn't mean what she thought it did.
"Not bad," Annabeth conceded after a moment. "And I've been sworn to secrecy by Chiron.
"I'm not that dumb, Chase. Figured the centaur would make sure of that. But you can give me something. It is Goth Barbie, right?" Clarisse was adjusting her greaves as she spoke, and Annabeth would've been fooled by her casual body language if she hadn't gone on a whole quest featuring Sirens with Clarisse.
She was worried. Annabeth tried desperately to ignore the part of her that said Clarisse was smart to be.
She took a deep, steadying breath before answering the daughter of Ares. "Well, we had better hope so. Children of the Big Three aren't exactly common, and if Thalia dies or doesn't fulfill it for some reason, there isn't anyone else around that we know of who could be anywhere near old enough—"
"Right, the whole Poseidon's kid thing. What's-his-face-Jackson, right?"
"—Perseus Jackson. And are you trying to get the attention of someone angry?"
Clarisse scoffed. "He can't still be pissed about that."
"You weren't at the last Summer Solstice." Annabeth winced at the memory. Ares and Clarisse had disturbingly similar lines of thinking on the matter. "Anyway, Thalia's sixteenth birthday is in December."
"So we keep her alive until then, she ends Kronos like her dad did, war's over, all is good. We can work with that," Clarisse reasoned with a decisive nod.
"You assume that nothing will go wrong," Annabeth said skeptically.
"Yeah, I do remember the part where the three of them tried to stop having kids because one of them might be the one to overthrow Olympus. But Thalia's not Luke."
Annabeth flinched before quickly changing the subject. "It's not that. We've already had several close calls, and it's only going to get worse as they get stronger."
Grover still had the burn scars from the quest for the Master Bolt. Travis Stoll had lost a finger from the attacks after Thalia's Tree had been poisoned. Annabeth knew that Clarisse still had nightmares about being turned into a hamster after mouthing off to Circe one too many times. Silena had been nearly killed trying to free all of them from the spa with the help of a girl named Hylla.
They hadn't lost anyone since a mission to the Princess Andromeda's last location a month ago, which two unclaimed campers had never come back from. People just disappeared. So many disappearances to places Annabeth suspected she knew.
She wasn't sure which was worse. Chiron had braced them all for the possibility of seeing familiar faces again on the wrong side of battle, but Annabeth didn't know what her first instinct would be if that happened.
It scared her, not having a plan.
"It's gonna be war, Chase. These things happen," Clarisse said, her voice grim. She finished strapping her armor on, and put her helmet on her head. "Now, where's Maimer?"
Annabeth was glad she had taken the extra dagger today.
"Thalia, get everyone evacuating from the campfire! We're under attack!" Annabeth yelled over her shoulder as she ran to the Big House to alert Chiron. The Celestial Bronze dagger had been a birthday gift from Silena, with deadly elegance in its carved hilt and cruel edge of the blade that had made Thalia smirk knowingly at the time.
Knife-fighting was her specialty, and she was damned good at it. But she had learned that battles where she needed to be visible—playing general was both something that she was excellent at and despised in equal measure—required something else in her open hand to keep her from getting eaten alive by an eager monster.
Such as the ones she could hear shrieking right then—much too close for her liking, if she was tracking the source right.
Thalia was already sprinting into the forest. "On it! Tell Fletcher to get his cabin's asses in gear while you're there, I hear harpies!"
Annabeth let out a breathless Greek curse as she increased her speed to the house, her legs burning in protest as she dragged a reluctant Nico di Angelo behind her. He was just a new arrival and not even ten; the only thing he could do in a battle right now was get killed.
She ran up the steps, dropping a wide-eyed Nico on the porch without losing a step. "Stay here, don't go out past the boundary, do whatever Chiron tells you to, it'll be fine."
"But Bianca's with the Hunters, and they're down there—"
Annabeth almost rolled her eyes at the petulance. She didn't have time. "Bianca is two years older, and has immortality along with heavily-armed sworn sisters on her side. You have no training. Stay here. Promise me, Nico."
"Fine. I guess." Nico gave her a childish pout so out of place with the sounds of battle in the distance that Annabeth would have laughed if she had time to spare.
"Thank you. Really. Chiron, they're on the beach!" Annabeth barked, not sparing any time as he came galloping out of the Big House, hauling her onto her back on his way down to the beach.
The minute she could saw a sphinx, snarling at Michael Yew as he tried to shield one of his younger siblings, she launched herself off of Chiron's back, the gifted dagger and her knife humming in her hands.
She kept herself visible as a distraction, but the sphinx still didn't last long. It burst into dust, and Annabeth pivoted to tag-team Thalia, who was in the process of electrocuting a manticore as the sky darkened above them with storm clouds.
The battle from there was a bloody blur. It remained confined to the beach and water—until some of the monsters figured out they could press elsewhere along the boundary and made for Half-Blood Hill and Thalia's Tree. But the biggest, most vicious monsters—Cyclopes, Annabeth fought her way around with a hint of panic, Stymphalian Birds, and was that a hydra?—remained on the beach.
No apparent target, unless you counted seeing how many bloody battle deaths demigods could die. Annabeth could feel the realization sink in among all of them, as people began to fall and not come back up: The goal was to endure.
Annabeth was in the middle of scaling down the cliff after using one of Cabin Nine's launchers to bring down a group of Stymphalian Birds with a spiked net of Celestial Bronze, when that the entire horde of monsters retreated without warning, flying or swimming to where a large cruise ship was waiting on the horizon.
She stopped climbing to let her lip curl at the sight, the blood of her injured siblings still on her armor. This? This was what he wanted? Demigods, terrified, injured, and dying in the one place they believed to be safe?
She didn't know what had happened. She didn't know what she had fucked up or should have seen. She didn't know how to reconcile the son of Hermes she knew with the demigod trying to destroy them. But it was him. Insistently, proudly him.
And Annabeth was finding it harder to care by the day.
Once back on the sand, she tracked down a shaken Bianca—who was in the process of being fussed over by Phoebe and Zoë Nightshade—for her and Nico's sanity. Thalia wasn't far off from the Hunters, and as Annabeth came to her, the daughter of Zeus greeted her with a relieved grin—one slightly marred by the amount of blood and monster dust she was covered in.
"Annie! You're not dead or mortally injured!"
"Don't call me that," Annabeth snapped, shooting a poisonous glare at a snickering Malcolm. "Is that all yours?"
"Just got messy when fighting a hydra. I'm fine," Thalia said dismissively, at the same moment a healer from Cabin Seven took one look at the two of them, paled, and hurriedly gave them both bars of ambrosia. Thalia gave them a look of offended skepticism while Annabeth savored the sensation of her bruised ribs, a gift from the sphinx she had killed, healed over.
"Any sign of why they were attacking?" she asked Thalia.
"Oh, we know why. There was some sort of creature trapped in the water, a sea bull serpent thing. One of the Stolls—Connor, I think—was about to raise the alarm about when all of them arrived. A pair of dracaenae waded through the chaos and netted the thing." Thalia downed the nectar in one swallow, giving a relieved groan as the bloody slashes on her arms and face disappeared. "Gods, I'd like to know what for. Don't think Kronos is into catching sea monster because they're fucking cute."
Annabeth frowned. "Sea bull serpent thing?"
"Yeah, I didn't recognize it, and last I checked, Kronos is the Titan of a lot of hand-wavey bullshit, but creating new monsters isn't one of them."
The monster certainly sounded familiar, Annabeth mused. But without seeing it herself and fresh off the messy battle, anything beyond what she had just fought was escaping her.
As she and Thalia walked the boundary on their way back to the Big House, Annabeth tried to wrack her brain for any references of sea serpent-bulls in myths, much less one that would interest the gods. Something from Ovid sounded like it could fit the bill. Maybe Fasti, she considered.
She was brought out of her thoughts, however, as they neared Half-Blood Hill, and could hear the distinctive sounds of sobbing.
She and Thalia jogged over to see what had happened, but were stopped by a grey-faced Sherman Yang.
"There were new arrivals," he said quietly, "They got caught in the crossfire. Harpies."
Behind him, Annabeth could see the two prone bodies on the ground.
Teenagers.
Thalia inhaled sharply at the sight, and Annabeth put a hand on her shoulder. Thalia quickly reached up and squeezed it as her eyes remained on the two dead demigods.
Besides the two dead demigods was Chiron, trying to comfort a sobbing satyr.
"What were their names?" Chiron asked them, "We will honor your charges. Who were they?"
Young, Annabeth thought in a daze. They were supposed to be young. Not what looked like two years older than her.
"A-Amelia Nowak," the satyr managed in-between heaving, wet gasps, "A-And h-his name was Ethan. Ethan Nakamura."
Annabeth didn't say it at the memorial.
She didn't say it as she watched the cabins mourn the losses of their own, and shared the same wary looks with Clarisse and Silena. But as she shared a look with Malcolm, and he went off to his spreadsheets without another word to start adjustments for supply runs and projections for future losses, she knew that day.
It wasn't going to get better.
"Don't do it, Thalia," Annabeth begged. "Please."
Six years of war.
"Annie. . ." Thalia murmured, and for once, Annabeth couldn't find it in herself to correct her, "You know it's for the best. You saw what happened. It's a weight I've never wanted, and I can't be trusted with it."
Annabeth did not have it in her to do six more years of this.
Outside the throne room of the gods, knowing that they had a strict time limit, and desperately trying to keep her voice low, Annabeth continued to plead with her, to try and make Thalia see. "You saw what Bianca did during the battle with those skeletons, and she and Nico are siblings. Full siblings. You know that means, Thalia, and Bianca's joined the Hunt. Nico is ten."
"Then you have six years to make him the greatest hero we've ever seen. I have all the faith in the world in you and Chiron, Annabeth."
"I will not raise him to be a soldier, much less to potentially die!" Annabeth had her lines. She didn't feel like she had many these days, but she had them. And one of them was telling a doe-eyed child that they were going to grow up and either destroy or save the world, likely dying in the process.
"And you think I want to?" Thalia spat. "I just spent a couple years as a tree, thank you, I did my time."
"You might survive! And I wouldn't trust anyone else to do it. People are already dying, Thalia. This war is here, today, and running away with the Hunt is not going to fix it," Annabeth said, incredulous. This war was going to happen whether they all liked it or not, and Thalia could end it tomorrow.
"The Hunt will keep a power-hungry maniac from getting all she's ever wanted," Thalia said sharply, "I don't know what kind of rosy glow you gave those memories of yours from before camp, Annie, but wipe it off right now. Fuck, I've always wanted power. Same as Dad. Giving me the Ophiotaurus is a recipe for the apocalypse."
Annabeth didn't immediately respond. The sensation of losing the last person from her rag-tag runaway family, the one she had thought she could rely on to spit destiny in the face and fight, was paralyzing. Had they all changed when Annabeth wasn't looking, or had she always been this incompetent with people she loved?
She thought of her father in San Francisco and how it had taken him a minute to recognize seeing her for the first time since she had run away all those years ago, and how her not-so-evil stepmother had offered her and her questing companions lemonade before rescuing Artemis.
Luke didn't bear thinking about. But now Annabeth had another one in front of her.
Annabeth didn't know anymore.
Thalia, in typical fashion, broke the heavy silence with a blunt knife. "Maybe the solution to all of this is tracking down the asshole who killed Poseidon's kid and ask what he was thinking. Because Di Immortales, it would be nice to have a backup right about now."
Annabeth was pretty sure it wasn't healthy to be as bitter towards a dead toddler as she and Thalia were. She was also failing to care.
"Considering it would mean he would be alive, he would likely agree with you," Annabeth said with a scowl, "But what's done is done. We have to make our choices with what we have. I believe you'd make a good one. Please, Thalia. Don't do this."
She didn't beg, as a rule. But she was shamelessly begging Thalia now.
But it was, evidently, the wrong thing to do. Thalia's face darkened. "Have you listened to a word of what I said?"
"Have you listened to me? You're going to get people killed!"
"You'll get more people killed if you get your way," Thalia snarled, "I will not be subject to that fucking prophecy because you're so afraid I'm not whatever version of me you have dreamed up you refuse to face reality. There are no good options here, Annabeth."
Annabeth felt as if she might cry from frustration. "I have, Thalia. I have used my brain, and I've done the math, and then I did it again, and then I had Malcolm do it twice. The Titans are not going to stop with camp during this war, and even if they did. . .they won't spare us. They won't spare the mortals either. Six years, Thalia."
"I heard you the first time," Thalia said wearily, "But we still have the whole world and Olympus to think about, Annabeth. I'm one of the worst people you could have wake up tomorrow and face that fucking prophecy after this quest. I nearly ended it today. I was so close to just. . .taking the easy way out. So easy."
Her eyes glazed over the same way they had when Dr. Thorn had offered her the Ophiotaurus for the power to destroy Olympus, and Annabeth, for the first time in possibly years, was truly afraid.
"So easy," Thalia whispered, "To just end it."
Then Thalia shook herself, her eyes clearing. It was like the moment had never existed. "N-No. No. We all deserve better. I'm sorry it's come to this. But I will not turn sixteen, and I will not be the half-blood of the prophecy. You're wrong about me."
She was going to leave. Something in Annabeth, made of the dreams and idealism she thought destroyed by Luke already, shattered at the realization. And short of tying Thalia to that horrifying statue of Zeus in Cabin One, nothing was going to stop her from joining the Hunt.
The fact that Thalia may be right in her measure of herself—a measure Annabeth would never agree with—didn't stop it from feeling like a knife in the ribs. They were stuck between a rock crushing them and a hard place ready to break beneath their feet in terms of their choices, and Thalia had picked the fate that would take her away from camp.
Annabeth clenched her jaw. It wasn't like she had no practice at being left alone.
"Then go. Go back to the council," she ordered coldly, "Lady Artemis is waiting. Lieutenant Grace."
Thalia flinched, and Annabeth felt a flash of ugly satisfaction.
It would have been one thing if she had just been leaving Annabeth. But leaving Nico di Angelo, a ten-year-old who knew more about Mythomagic than wielding a sword, to a prophecy that he had already lost his mother over, for a Hunt that had already taken his sister, was quite another.
"I am sorry," Thalia repeated, shaking her head helplessly, "But I believe in you. Chin up, Annie. Always."
When Annabeth crossed her arms and gave her nothing but an icy stare, Thalia sighed. Annabeth watched her going into the throne room, and from her place outside in the cold night air, she could hear her begin to recite the oath of the Hunt.
"I pledge myself to the goddess Artemis. I turn my back on the company of men. . ."
Men wasn't what Annabeth would have suggested.
It helped that Bianca was still alive, if with the Hunt. It helped with Nico's state of mind, if with nothing else.
Every so often, a part of the Hunt came by camp to allow Bianca time with her brother—something becoming more and more infrequent as Bianca came into her own as Hunter, Nico argued with her over the importance of family, and Annabeth began to worry the di Angelos would go the way of her and Thalia. And every time, Annabeth had to bite back the urge to beg Bianca to become mortal again long enough to fulfill the Great Prophecy.
But she still had some morals, and they weren't that desperate. Yet.
Thalia never visited, and Annabeth told herself that she was glad.
So with Kronos openly returning, and the rumors of just what he was forcing Luke to do in order to give him a body becoming ever darker, Annabeth threw herself into the problem of the Labyrinth's exit into Camp Half-Blood—as discovered by the unlucky Will Solace when he fell in and met two confused aeternae.
Giant, bloodythirsty things. And Solace had barely been claimed a week ago.
As Lee Fletcher met them outside the hospital wing, his scrubs more crimson than blue, Annabeth and Chiron shared identical looks of resigned worry.
"No need for the funeral looks yet. He'll live," Lee said grimly, "Mostly. The aeternae bastards nearly tore him to shreds. He'll be sporting some interesting scars for the rest of his life and will probably want a knee replacement if he makes it to middle age, but it's better than the alternative."
Annabeth grimaced. Chiron asked delicately, "Do you have an idea of when he'll be conscious? We will need to know whether it was a chance attack or scouts."
"Likely three or four days. Suffered some head trauma. I'd bet on accident, though, the aeternae aren't exactly smart."
Chiron nodded. "I would imagine you are correct. In the meantime, Annabeth, Lee, I would suggest the two of you lead a quest into the Labyrinth with one other demigod. We can, of course, put guards on this entrance, but only the gods know how many other entrances are nearby."
Sound enough, Annabeth supposed. She would want backup at least when they were getting used to the Labyrinth, but Clarisse had been nearly immovable from the Big House and Chris Rodriguez's bedside.
"A quest for what, though. You can't map the Labyrinth, unless. . ." Lee trailed off. "Daedalus died millennia ago. He wasn't even a demigod."
"The Labyrinth was said to have died with him, but Clarisse and Will are proving the first part isn't true," Annabeth reminded him, "And even if we wanted to, we don't have any clear-sighted mortals on speed dial. Ariadne's String is likely our best shot at navigating maze, and if Daedalus is somehow alive, of which there is a chance, he'll be the one who has it."
Annabeth knew it was for the war. She knew the high stakes and that if they didn't do everything right, they would all die. She knew that anyone who escaped death for this long didn't do so for good reasons.
It didn't stop her from feeling like Christmas had come early at the idea of meeting Daedalus, one of her oldest heroes.
Something wasn't right with Quintus.
Annabeth wasn't sure of what, exactly, but there was something about him that put her teeth on edge and made her reluctant to go along with Chiron's plans for him to teach Nico. It wasn't his personality; while Annabeth was the first person to admit the bar was nonexistent after Tantalus, Quintus was perfectly charming and kind to all of the campers and from what she had seen, a patient tutor with an increasingly reticent Nico.
It was something in the way he moved. Annabeth couldn't put her finger on it, but something wasn't human about it.
"Hey, Olympus to Annabeth Chase. You still with us demigods?"
Annabeth blinked. "Sorry, Lee. I was just caught in my thoughts."
"It's cool. I just figured that if we're going to get to the forge soon, we should get moving again." Lee pointed over his shoulder, further down the relatively-harmless brick tunnel they had been following. "I did some scouting, and the tunnel seems all clear to me. It's also warm enough that I think we're close."
Annabeth got to her feet and the two of them began to carefully pick their way down the tunnel, trying to avoid triggering another death trap or sleeping monster. The last one had been a sphinx who had gotten annoyed when Annabeth had reasoned her way out of answering the riddle and eaten most of Lee's medical supplies.
"This would be a lot easier if we had help," Lee grumbled as he cut off a swath of vines with a knife, clearing out a window and revealing what looked like mountains, "Someone who could see through the Mist so we don't get killed by bad special effects from an old Western. Or at least Sherman and Grover before they left for Carlsbad and maybe Pan."
Annabeth chuckled. But at the same time, an old memory sprang to mind from the quest to find Artemis. When Bianca, still jittery after her close call with Talos, had shot a red-haired mortal girl in an elevator.
"Do you always shoot people who blow their noses?" she had snapped. "How about you do something about those glowing skeletons?"
She'd been grouchy. And even more annoyed when they had promptly left on the next floor with no explanation. And—not that Annabeth had cared much at the time—she had also seen through the Mist better than some demigods.
Much as Annabeth hated to admit it, she was a mortal whose help would have come in handy.
It wasn't long before Annabeth began to feel the heat Lee had mentioned. The air seemed to be doing its best to bake them alive, and as her hair began to curl, Annabeth had to fight to not think of that awful beach with Ares from what seemed like so long ago. A dull roar became louder the closer they got until they finally emerged in a giant cavern the size of a sports stadium.
Below them, lava bubbled away, and above the two of them moved several dark shadows. She and Lee managed to leverage their way off the rocks to get a better look: several creatures that looked familiar over a forge—
"Telkhines," Annabeth breathed at the same time Lee muttered, "Shit."
"Good thing that sphinx didn't eat everything, huh?"
"Lee—"
Annabeth was about half a mile away when the volcano blew, aided by Greek fire and a son of Apollo.
"You're the daughter of Athena. Tell me the best way to blow this place sky high and get out there. Camp's going to need you more than they need me."
"That's not how this works. Give me time and we can do this without anyone dying."
The tunnel shook and rattled around her for what felt like eons, raining dust down on her until she was blinded from stinging bits of rock.
"The telkhines behind us aren't going to give it to you. I'm the one with the supplies. Tell me what to do and get out of here so one of us can live."
". . .You'll need to start further down on the last level. It'll be easier to trigger the volcano that way, especially with kind of magic I think the telkhines have done. From there, work clockwise, setting them evenly until you run out or are forced to trigger."
And still she kept trying to outrun the explosion.
"Makes sense. Tell my siblings I'm really sorry, won't you? Tell Michael to raise some hell against these guys in my name."
She was a mile away when the tunnel stopped shaking and she let herself start crying.
"You look terrible." Drew Tanaka's look of profound disdain accompanied her acknowledgement of Annabeth as she climbed out of the Labyrinth.
Annabeth wished she could find it in herself to care.
"Thanks." After all the running and fighting she had to do, with every muscle in her arms and legs burning, Annabeth couldn't even feel the grief or the pain anymore. Just numbness.
"Your hair's never going to be the same after all that dust, sweetie," Drew warned as she inspected Annabeth up and down.
"I'll take it under advisement," Annabeth mumbled. She needed to find Chiron. Then Michael and the rest of Cabin Seven. She owed it to them, at the very least.
Annabeth could see the moment it occurred to Drew that Annabeth hadn't gone into the Labyrinth alone. Could see her eyes widen, already knowing the answer Annabeth was about to give. "Lee—"
"Is gone." When would it be enough, Annabeth wondered. When would they have lost enough for the Fates to give them a break? "Place we needed to find for a god was infested with telkhines. He bought time for me to get out and blew the place."
Detached. Clinical. Play the leader.
"Anything else you have to say about that, I would really appreciate you saving for someone who gives a shit about your snark, Tanaka," Annabeth added, as much for Drew's sake as her own.
Drew Tanaka, renowned for her love of ripping the metaphorical throat out of anyone who looked at her funny, ignored this remark altogether. "You'll need to see Chiron, then. Mitchell will be back any second, and he can deal with this guarding nonsense. C'mon hon, let's go to the Big House."
She must've been using her charmspeak, because Annabeth followed her without a second thought. In normal circumstances, Annabeth would've spent ages lecturing the other demigod about the importance of autonomy and consent.
In her current circumstances, Annabeth wasn't even ashamed of the brief relief at not having to make one decision, after having to go through yet another quest, finding her way through the Labyrinth, yelling at Lee what are you doing, don't play the martyr, get down here, we're smarter than this, and then—
She hadn't quite made it out in time. The explosion had knocked her out. She had woken up to a world of ashes, and down another friend.
Annabeth was getting really tired of watching people die. Or leave. Or turn evil. Or all three.
To be fair, she hadn't found the one who did all three yet. But even if she just played the odds, Annabeth figured it was a matter of time.
Annabeth and Drew nearly walked through the Iris Message in Chiron's office before Clarisse yanked them back into the hallway by the backs of their shirts.
"Shut up," she whispered harshly as she frog-marched them towards the lobby, "He's meeting with Poseidon about protecting Long Island Sound."
Without losing a beat, Annabeth escaped Clarisse's grip and straightened herself out in the hallway before escaping to the bathroom to get the feeling of death off of her.
Safely alone, she spared a moment at herself in the mirror. Her hair was more ashy grey than blonde thanks to the volcano, the path her tears had taken was stark on her dirty cheeks, her shirt was destroyed from fighting telkhines, and she was bloodied and bruised at the edges. She looked like a wreck.
Annabeth wasn't a complete masochist. She allowed herself five minutes to break down over the sink.
Five minutes, to let her eyes burn without shame. To heave and sob and curse the Fates for taking Lee from them until she was hiccuping.
Then she washed out her hair and face, changed into some extra clothes from the lockers, strapped her knife and dagger to her hips, glared at her own reflection for good measure, and walked out.
Clarisse and Drew were waiting for her in the lounge. As Annabeth walked past, Drew pursed her lips and gave her a once-over. "Make sure you let that cute second of yours bully you into sleeping tonight, Chase."
Annabeth ignored the disgust at hearing anyone describe her nerd of a half-brother as "cute". She was capable of looking after herself, and told Drew as much.
"Sweetie, I'm not your mother," Drew drawled with disdain, "I don't care if you can tie your shoes or remembered to clean your favorite dagger. I do care if the smartest person in this camp is functioning properly to keep us all from dying, and you need sleep after what you experienced. Possibly therapy and more crying time. Seriously, that monk repression y'all have going in Cabin Six can't be good for all of you."
Annabeeth wondered how her younger self would feel if she knew the real reasons for disliking children of Aphrodite, five years on from her arrival at camp. They enjoyed ripping the emotional guts out of someone and inspecting them far too much, just like their mother.
"If you're done trying to do what her own mother couldn't do, junior," Clarisse said, "I believe you were bugging me about what Chiron said."
"I wasn't 'bugging you'," Drew said with a sniff. "I was curious about who he was talking to. I thought that was encouraged around here. Was that seriously Poseidon?"
"Yeah. God of the sea, lord of horses, king of barnacles, blah blah. He and Chiron are making sure we don't repeat the bullshit with the serpent-bull and other things. What about it, junior?" Clarisse looked like she was contemplating if she could challenge the daughter of Aphrodite to a fight and get away with it. Annabeth empathized.
Drew sneered. "I'm Silena's second, sweetie. Address me with respect."
No charmspeak, Annabeth noted, so she had learned from the last time she tried to pull it with a child of Ares. It was progress, she supposed.
"Tanaka, I promise no one cares outside of the newbies you bully."
"That's rich," Annabeth said with a snort. Clarisse not hazing anyone less senior than her was a relatively recent development.
"No one asked you, Annabeth. Anyway, your point about Barnacle Beard, junior?"
Drew gave an elegant shrug of one shoulder. "Oh, it's nothing. I'd never seen him before, that's all. But he looks like a weirdo I go to school with. One of the Kanes. Lacey could tell you about them. The biggest losers in the whole school, and that's saying something."
"Age?" Annabeth asked, half-curious despite herself. Clarisse looked similarly intrigued, if only for something to stave off boredom—or the urge to pick a fight with one of the most vicious children of Aphrodite in camp. Drew cheated enough to make the Stolls jealous. Never crossed any lines, but Annabeth couldn't remember an actual fair fight.
Drew burst out laughing. "He's an idiot who goes to Brooklyn Academy for the Gifted, honey! He's a demigod, much less who I think you're thinking of, and I'm Queen Helen of Troy."
"It's Sparta," Annabeth corrected. "She was never crowned Queen of Troy."
Drew gave her a withering look. "No one cares about the backwaters."
Clarisse looked ready to throw her through a window, so Annabeth was supposed she should be grateful when Chiron entered the room before anything permanent could be done. Should be.
"I understand you wished to see me about the Labyrinth, Annabeth? Drew?"
Annabeth watched the years be added to Chiron's face as he took in the absence of Lee.
"Chiron! You need to stop the game. Get everyone out of the forest."
"Chris? You're. . .coherent."
"Clarisse made a sacrifice and prayer to Mister D this morning. Godly compassion hits once a millennium or something. But you need to get everyone out of here. Now, please, Chiron—"
"Who? Slow down, my boy."
"Luke, he's leading them, they're coming—"
"Kronos."
"What?"
"Yes, thank you, Annabeth. You have missed quite a lot, Chris."
"Chiron, he's telling the truth, I saw it myself. They have Ariadne's String, and Daedalus's Labyrinth, right in the heart of camp—"
"How long do we have, Clarisse?"
"Minutes—nothing. There is no time."
When the army exploded out of the Labyrinth, and Clarisse roared at her siblings to lock shields, in those precious few seconds before the monsters fell on the campers and Hunters and chaos would reign, Annabeth let herself think about Kronos.
About Luke.
("He took advantage of being your dearest friend—")
("Annabeth. You know why I did it.")
He had promised her, once. Family. Never again would she be let down by family. Given her a knife to seal the deal.
A promise that he shattered a hundred times over by now.
Clarisse stood to Annabeth's left, the spearhead of Lamer II glittering in the harsh sunlight above her head. On Annabeth's right stood Grover Underwood and Silena Beauregard with Drew Tanaka behind them. Visibly nervous, but both of them with steady hands clenched around their pipes and swords. Respectively.
Annabeth couldn't see them, but the faction of Hunters who had answered their call in time, led by Bianca di Angelo and Phoebe, stood behind them at the ready.
And if he had his way Kronos, using Luke's body, would kill them all.
("So I had the guts to poison the tree.")
Annabeth gripped the dagger in her hand just a bit tighter. A dracaena approached her, snarling. Annabeth snarled right back and wished it was Luke—or Kronos, or was there much of a difference at this point? A small part of her still hoped there was—and wished it was them instead.
("Kill some monsters for me, eh?")
She lifted the dagger Silena had gifted her and swung hard.
They won.
Or rather, they "won".
With so many people dead, it felt like a Pyrrhic victory to Annabeth.
She dared to look back at Bianca's body, laid out beside Phoebe and the other casualties, all too pale and still. She remembered Nico's panicked screams that had turned into a horrifying battle cry as he had pursued his sister's killer into Labyrinth, a small army of skeletons summoned by the siblings hot on his heels. She quickly looked forward again and was greeted with the Stolls hugging each other tight on the ground. Connor's ankle had been shattered by Kampê, but it was a small price to pay for being alive.
Not too far away, two healers were splinting Chiron's broken legs while Grover sat in a daze, recovering from the Panic he had created. Annabeth watched as Michael Yew, who had gone into shock over the news of Lee's death, commandeered his siblings and healthy Hunters with gravitas belonging to someone far older, and they did triage to the best of their ability.
As she did her walk around the survivors, Silena and Clarisse walked up to her.
"Nice to see you're not dead, Bird Brain," Clarisse said gruffly. Her left shoulder was in a sling and Silena was on crutches. Annabeth gave Clarisse a weak, genuine smile. The three of them were alive. They were alive.
"What do we do now?" Silena asked her.
Annabeth looked at her, startled at the deference to her authority, before she realized: They were all looking to her. Travis and Connor were sitting patiently nearby. Drew had an arm around Mitchell's shoulder, and had an admittedly impatient look on her face.
"Yeah," Michael Yew chimed in with an exhausted sigh, "What now, Chase?"
They had lost so many people. But now the battle was over and Daedalus's final death had ended the Labyrinth and the danger it posed—and gods, Annabeth hoped the time she had made him wait had allowed Nico to escape. But if not—
If not. . .
Death was a fact of their world. But it didn't mean Annabeth ever had to like it. Or that she ever had to accept it. The same thing went for failure.
Annabeth would break the gods-damned Great Prophecy open and rip its guts out if that was what it took to win this war. That was her plan. No more waiting for immortal best friends or scared children or the Fates to rescue them.
Annabeth Chase, daughter of Athena, tilted her chin up and made sure she stared each demigod down in turn. "Now? We keep moving."
A/N: Fasti by Ovid is where the Ophiotaurus is referenced. This has been your regular nerd alert. Also, yes, I sort of reboot Drew's character in this 'verse, but she was one giant racist, sexist stereotype in canon, and I do what I want.
Anyway, with this complete, next up on the docket in this 'verse is an account of the defeat of Apophis titled That Strength Which in Old Days. Will be a one-shot with Percy, Carter, Sadie, and company. Should be fun, so keep a look out for that? I'll update this when it's up. And after that, yeah, we're at the one everyone's been waiting for.
