Previously on ltbsltbr for those who lost track a little during my unexpected absence:
They got married
It was going great
Percy came to Annabeth's flat to listen to some of her music
Unfortunately Grover followed shortly after with a bombshell newspaper article dun dun dun
And that's where we're picking up the action folks.

6

At first, Percy simply doesn't recognise the boy on the page. He sees the messy black hair and the ugly sweater he hung onto for longer than he should have done, but the first thing he actually recognises in a real, identifying way, is Calypso.

She looks more or less like he remembers her, albeit a little younger – that makes sense, of course. She must be, what, in her late teens in the picture? There's the caramel hair and bronze skin and the floating white dress that she'd made herself and wore at every opportunity. Her hands are on the boy's forearms, gripping tightly as she stands on tiptoes to press her lips to his, and that's when Percy has the woah, holy- moment where he realises that the boy is him – that he's the one in the picture.

Percy's spent years thinking of himself as only just entering adulthood, and though he knows it's a false image of himself, a photo like this hammers home just how wrong it is, how much he's grown in recent years, and how much he's changed for better or worse. The boy in the picture is so young that there seems to be little connection to the way he is now. What was Percy Jackson like back then, almost a decade ago? He probably thought less and worried more about his future than the Percy standing in Annabeth Chase's living room. There'd have been ways in which he was angrier, or stupider, but there were ways, too, in which he was kinder or more patient. Sometimes, standing on the deck of the boat at night with nothing but the ocean for company, Percy has found himself wondering if at sixteen he was the best version of himself.

"You did warn me they were likely to get in touch with Calypso," he says, the words thick and muddied in his mouth by memories he's tried not to think of for years.

Annabeth doesn't answer him, picking up the paper like it's liable to burst into flames, and turning to the page with the full offending article.

"I've had a skim," says Grover finally. "Most of it's not too bad, just an account of your relationship. But, the big headline is that she says…" He looks between the two of them. "She alleges that you cheated, Percy."

He hears rather than sees Annabeth scrunching up a fistful of newspaper, and when his eyes flick back to her hands, they're clenched into white fists. "I didn't cheat," he says instantly.

"Okay," she says.

"Whatever she says, it-"

"I said okay, Percy."

"Does, um," Grover begins nervously, "does the name Rachel Dare mean anything to you?"

"How does Rachel come into it?" asks Percy, frowning. He's spent so many years trying to suppress the unhappiness of his time with Calypso, and yet Rachel's name is one that he's not even thought of almost since their relationship ended – it's actually surprising to have her brought up. Rachel had been Calypso's polar opposite, and when it had ended with Rachel, there had been no arguments, no sluggish decline, only an almost-silent agreement between them that it had been fun while it lasted, and now was over.

"Well…" Grover's reluctance is palpable. "The cheating, mainly."

"Calypso thought I cheated on her with Rachel?" Percy asks.

"Looks like she still thinks it," says Annabeth. What's that tone of voice? Is it cold and distant, is it controlled anger? If it's anger, is it directed at Percy, or at the article?

"She's wrong, then," he snaps, irritated at the implicit accusation before he can remind himself exactly why the idea of cheating will be a particularly tender spot for Annabeth. "Look, I – if you don't believe me, you can ask Rachel. Calypso and I were separated by the time we started dating, and I wouldn't – I mean, it wouldn't be fair."

"Okay," Grover nods eagerly, obviously ready to accept Percy's version of events in the name of keeping the peace. "That's great. If we could get her to say something publicly, that'd be even better. Have you got her number?"

"Yeah, we've stayed in touch," says Percy. He digs in his pocket for his phone and opens his contacts for Grover. He knows where he'll find Rachel's name, lodged between Pollux and one of the newest additions to the folder, Silena.

"I'm sure that will be useful so that you can go back to her once you're finished here," comes a voice behind him.

Percy whirls around to find its source: a tall, stern-looking blonde woman with piercing grey eyes just like Annabeth's, albeit with an unfriendly glint in them that he's never seen in Annabeth's. She's holding a lit cigarette pinched tightly between two fingers, despite the fact that he's pretty sure this is a no-smoking building.

"Perseus Jackson," she says coldly.

"Who are you?" he demands. His immediate reaction that she's an insane stalker only lasts a moment until he reasons that she must be known to the building staff for them to have let her in, but he's missing vital details like what on earth she's doing standing in his wife's apartment glaring at him.

Those vital details fall unnervingly into place as he hears Annabeth's resigned mutter: "Mother."

"Daughter," acknowledges the woman coldly. "I am Athena," she directs at Percy. "And I believe that I have the misfortune of now being your mother-in-law – for the moment."

He has to admit, that's a hell of a way to make a first impression. "Oh," says Percy. "Nice to meet you?" He doesn't mean the words to come out as a question, but Athena's cynical expression does a lot to dent his confidence.

"I rather doubt that," she says.

She falls silent after that, like she's expecting him to respond in some way. Her eyes rake over his body in a way that feels like she's trying to peel back his skin to see what's underneath.

"Mom, what are you doing here?" asks Annabeth. Her voice still has the same edge that it did when she was asking Percy about Rachel and Calypso, and he has the sense of being caught in the crossfire of a conflict he doesn't quite understand.

"I am here to try to salvage what remains of your career, my dear," says Athena, as if her presence is an act of extravagant generosity.

"I've got it under control," says Annabeth briskly, but Athena frowns.

"I did not raise you to be tabloid fodder," says the older woman.

"I'm not tabloid fodder…" Annabeth begins.

"The paper on the table would suggest otherwise, Annabeth, and tomorrow so will every other news outlet in the country."

"They print that stuff about everyone-"

"Except you. Or, it used to be, before you abandoned your common sense altogether. If you wish to be regarded for your music then you had better get back to making it the most newsworthy thing about yourself, not your boytoy's casual whoring."

"Which is exactly what I'm doing," grits out Annabeth.

"Exceedingly poorly, if his presence here is any indication. You are far too intelligent to let a moment of madness define the rest of your life like this."

"I'm sorry," Percy butts in, "but is that me? Am I the moment of madness?"

"Precisely," snarls Athena. "What are you still doing here?"

"I'm here because I was invited," he says as levelly as possible. "Were you?"

There's a silence so frigid that Percy could have sworn that Athena had brought the Holocene to an abrupt halt and plunged the earth into a new ice age, an impression only slightly ruined by Grover gasping quietly behind him.

"I will not pretend to understand what game you think that you are playing, Jackson," says Athena. She reminds him of the most judgemental of his old school teachers. She looks straight at him, and instead of seeing Percy Jackson, she sees trouble. "But even so," she continues, "I know a parasite when I see one."

"Mom…" says Annabeth in protest, but Percy can hear in her voice how reluctant she is to argue with her mother, and Athena takes no notice as she leans in close to Percy and jams her cigarette into his t-shirt. The ashy end crumbles into an ugly black mark and he's overwhelmed with the nauseous feeling that he's back in the tiny apartment that they'd shared with Gabe.

It is, all of a sudden, very hard to breathe.

"Leave," says Athena.

Percy wants to argue. He already dislikes Athena, and there's a part of him that sounds suspiciously like his Mom's voice pointing out that it's a bloomin' cheek for her to come in without an invitation and kick him out of an apartment that isn't her own, but then there's another part of him…

How can he argue with her, really? How is he not a parasite? He's sticking around to further his career, to spend some of Annabeth's money on a cause that she has no interest in. He takes a paycheque for every appearance with her, offering nothing in return but his surely-underwhelming presence.

Athena's gaze bores into him, a bored expression on her face, and he knows that he can't fight this. She's right, or close enough to right that the truth isn't a hill worth dying on. He tries to shrug, to play it off like he was leaving anyway. "Whatever," he mutters. He turns on his heel and heads for the door.

"Percy!"

He stops at the sound of Annabeth's voice, and looks back. Athena's back is turned and she's looking at her daughter, but Annabeth's gaze is flicking between the two of them. Grover, meanwhile, is doing his best to disappear without actively hiding behind the furniture.

"You're right Mom," says Annabeth. "We should leave." She marches over to Percy and loops her arm through his, practically dragging him through the doorway as he's caught in her path.

"Don't be stupid, Annabeth," Athena calls after them, and from the way she tenses against him Percy can tell that the words sting, but they keep on moving, through the door and into the elevator, where she jabs clumsily at the buttons until the machine starts moving so slowly that it feels like it's travelling five-hundred floors as they descend in silence. She leans against him and lets out a slow breath. He leans against her and takes a deep one in.

There's a soft ding as the elevator opens to reveal the ground floor, but Percy's relief is short-lived as they step out to see the crowd of people beyond the main doors to the building. He wonders briefly about ducking back to take cover in the lift, but before he can suggest it, they've been noticed. The crowd seethes against the glass as if they're at an aquarium to catch a glimpse of a particularly exotic pair of fish.

Annabeth disentangles her arm from his and instead takes his hand, squeezing it like a vice. "Ignore their questions," she says. "Don't answer anything, alright?"

"We're going through them?" Percy asks. With the protection of the glass, it feels like they're in an oversized fishbowl. Without it, he suspects it would be rather more like trailing blood through shark-infested waters.

"There's a car in the basement," says Annabeth. "...except the keys are back upstairs."

A shiver runs up Percy's back just thinking about Athena. He wonders if she'll have settled down in the apartment and made herself at home like a spider in the centre of its web, or if she'll be following them down to make her exit shortly. "Okay," he says. "So we just pretend they're not there."

"As much as possible."

Percy tries to squash the sick feeling in his gut, with limited success. The crowd outside is probably not that big, really, he can see that it's not more than two or three dozen journalists and camerapeople, but he isn't sure that he can push through them when like a single entity they will converge.

No, he doesn't think he can do it, but before he can say so, Annabeth is already moving, pulling him towards and through the doors, into the glare of flash bulbs and microphones being held like morning stars.

"Percy, is it true you cheated on your last wife?"

"Annabeth, did you know about his affairs?"

"Do you endorse your husband's actions?"

"Did Rachel Dare know you were married?"

"Annabeth have you met Calypso?"

The stench of smoke still curls in Percy's nose, like Athena is there in front of him, jabbing the smouldering stub into his chest.

They're just reaching the edge of the clamour, just reaching the point when Percy feels like he might be able to breathe again, when the crowd surges and overtakes them again. Microphones wave unsteadily in their faces as the people holding them try to keep up with Percy and Annabeth trying to powerwalk away, and there's another cacophony of clicking as the cameras capture their pictures for tomorrow's papers.

Annabeth's grip on Percy's hand tightens.

And then, as they're struggling to the crossroads at the end of the block, a black car, its windows tinted, pulls up to the sidewalk. The driver's window slides slowly down.

"Get in, losers," says Grover. "We're going shopping."

Percy could cry with relief as they scramble in. He slams the door shut behind, blocking out the noise from outside and breathes deeply, steadying his heartbeat. The car glides into the middle of the road and Grover pulls the wheel gently sideways to turn left.

"Sorry," says Grover, after a minute of silence. "That was a mean thing to say. I literally just watched Mean Girls last week and-"

"No," Percy cuts him off. "It was pretty funny."

"Really?"

"Yeah," Annabeth agrees. "It was pretty funny."

"Oh, nice." There's another long silence. "Ditching me with your Mom wasn't very funny," says Grover eventually.

Percy winces. Things had moved so quickly that he'd barely registered that they'd left their friend behind.

"Sorry," says Annabeth. "That's on me. I kinda freaked out."

"Sorry," echoes Percy.

Grover sighs. "No worries, I guess. She's not happy – I mean, you probably know that already. She's saying all sorts about how she'll get the label to drop you if you stay married to Percy, and how you're risking her business by behaving like this, and then I managed to grab the car keys and sneak out. She might still be talking to herself up there for all I know."

"You're a lifesaver, Grover," says Annabeth sincerely.

"Agreed," says Percy, "did you say she'd get Annabeth's label to drop her? Can she do that?"

"She can't," says Annabeth.

"Probably," comes Grover's verdict from the front. "She probably can't. She probably wouldn't really want to."

"...reassuring," says Percy.

"I don't know if you've noticed, but my Mom's not a regular Mom," Annabeth tells him.

"She's a cool Mom," says Grover. "Ah, I'm sorry, that wasn't helpful, it's like I said, Mean Girls is just going around in circles in my head at the moment. Listen, do you guys want me to drop you off somewhere? I'm kind of at the point where I'm just gonna start going in circles around the block and I've got to make like fifty phone calls to make to get this story under control and also to make sure that Scylla and Charybdis actually turn up to the Electronic Music Awards with an acceptance speech ready in case they win Best Duo.

"Did I mention you're a lifesaver, Grover?" asks Annabeth. "We can just walk from here, it's fine. I think we've left the crowd far enough behind."

Grover pulls over to the side of the road and turns around in his seat to look at them. "When all this is over," he starts, then pauses and rephrases. "When this has all settled down, I'm having a holiday. Probably in Maine. And it's totally possible that I just won't come back, you hear me?"

"You'll have earned it," she tells him. "See you soon, Grover."

A few later, the two of them are outside in the sun. Percy blinks a couple of times as his eyes adjust to the brightness, before he recognises some of the buildings around them. "Oh, hey," he grins, "this is my Mom's neighbourhood."

"Oh, right?" says Annabeth. She sounds less than enthusiastic, and he's embarrassed to have been so obviously excited when he's just learned that her relationship with her own mother is so rocky.

"I mean, we don't have to go see her or anything, I just recognise the area," he says, but she shakes her head.

"No, I don't – it'd be cool to meet your Mom if you want me to. I mean, I don't want to be a downer on the whole day after this morning, so, if that's what you'd like…"

"Okay," says Percy. "If you're cool with it. It's just a few streets that way."

They start walking slowly. "My Mom… the long and short of it is that she had me, dumped me on my Dad and then did her best to disappear from my life," says Annabeth.

"You really don't have to…"

"I think I do, after that display earlier. She's this expert in corporate law, but these days she runs a company that basically hires out lawyers to big firms to help their legal departments. Sometimes I'm sort of proud that she's so good at it. Other times I think she's basically just helping them find legal ways to break the law. It's what she was so busy with that I'd have got in the way of if she'd kept me around. So she left me with Dad, and Dad didn't really want me either, but these days you're not allowed to just leave unwanted children on a mountainside to die like the Ancient Greeks did, so I stayed. Until I was seven, when I decided I was sick of staying, and I ran away instead."

"Wait, you ran away?"

"I lasted about a week on the streets as well. I went back eventually because… I wasn't sure what else to do. That song, Runaway, that I wrote the chorus of that year -"

"It was literally literal," realises Percy.

"Literally," she agrees. "Music was just another part of me that Dad wasn't interested in, so I tracked down Mom and basically made myself a nuisance until she agreed to let me live with her instead. Except her definition of living with her was boarding schools and summer camps, and then doing exactly what she told me to twenty-four hours a day to get a foot in the door of the music industry, and… to be fair it worked. But she's not good at giving up control. She's not good at recognising I'm not a teenager anymore. So that's why things can be a little… weird, between us."

"I get it," says Percy. "I mean, I don't get it perfectly, but… my Dad runs a fishery from the Florida Keys – he sends a cheque once a month and a Christmas card every year. I've met him about five times in my life. Things have been 'a little weird' between us every single one of those five times."

"Do you ever worry that if you had kids, you'd mess them up as badly as your parents did you?"

The question takes Percy by surprise. It's not something he's thought a lot about, partly because he doesn't particularly feel like his parents have messed him up, but something tells him that this might not be the answer that Annabeth is looking for. "Not really," he answers after a moment's thought. "My Dad set the bar low enough that I can clear it without really trying. Sometimes I worry that I'd never be as good a parent as my Mom, but I think if I'm half as good as she was, then I'll be doing OK."

She stops walking. "You love her a lot," she observes quietly.

It seems so obvious that Percy's a little surprised that she feels the need to say it, and his heart breaks a little when he realises that it's something that Annabeth hasn't been able to take for granted herself. "Yeah," he acknowledges. "I do. That's her building, there," he says. "You can meet her now, if you want. But don't have to, though – if you're not comfortable with it, if you're not happy to, we can just walk around instead, that's fine."

Instead of answering, she says "About five minutes before Grover came in, I asked you if your last marriage ended because you cheated, and you said it hadn't. Was that true?"

"It was," he says. "I can't remember if we were legally divorced by the time I started seeing Rachel, but we were separated. Our relationship was over. It might count as stupid and immature, but I don't think it counts as cheating."

She's silent, and he can't tell what it is she wants from him.

"I can probably prove it, if you need," he says. "I can get in touch with Rachel and Calypso and figure out the exact timeline of who did what where and when. Would that help?"

She shakes her head slowly. "If we're going to try and make this work, I have to trust you," she says. "So I trust you." Then she looks up at the building he'd pointed to. "So what's your Mom's name?" she asks.

He smiles. "Sally," he says. "Sally Blofis. She married a guy called Paul Blofis when I was in high school, he's Estelle's dad, that's why she doesn't have the same surname as me, but -" he catches himself rambling and cuts it short. "Yeah," he says, "you're gonna hear this from her about five times in about five different ways, so I'll spare you, but Sally. Her name's Sally. She – I think she's pretty cool."

i am ALIVE and i apologise for the extended break and i make no promises about future updates, anyway here is a chapter slightly more heavy-going than i ever intended for this fic to be but nevermind

i myself did not watch mean girls last week but that's fine because much of the movie plays on a loop in my head anyway