Annabeth smiled as she watched her boyfriend laugh at something Leo had said.
She was sitting beside him on the blanket they had spread across the ground at the Roman camp. Percy had his arm draped around her shoulders, his hand absentmindedly playing with the curls that had fallen from her messy bun. He was shooting loving glances at her, not caring who was looking. He didn't even care if Athena was watching at the moment.
She was hardly paying attention to the joke Leo was telling or anything else anyone was saying. She was too busy marveling at how much she missed her seaweed brain's laugh.
It was a beautiful sound, a carefree sound. She had never realized, when she heard that sound almost every day, how it truly made her feel until now. It sent butterflies through her stomach, and she didn't understand how she could be so oblivious to his laugh for this long.
She never realized when she had heard that exact sound when they were all sitting around the soaring fire back at Camp Half-Blood after a particularly fun game of capture-the-flag, singing the Greek versions of campfire songs led by the Apollo cabin.
She never realized when the two of them first started dating and were slung across his mother and Paul's couch, watching a movie and trying not to make it too obvious that they were not laughing at the movie. They were instead laughing at his parents, who were watching them from around the corner, thinking that the two demigods were oblivious to their grins and the smug looks they wore that seemed to say, It's about time.
She never noticed when he was chasing her along the beach after she had dumped sand on his head as he napped by the lake. She remembered shrieking as he used his water powers to pull her towards him, since he was still half asleep and too groggy to chase her for very long, and she still didn't notice.
She never noticed that last day before he disappeared when he grabbed her into his arms and swung her around by means of hello, or the hundreds of other times he had laughed that day.
But now, she would forever be in live with his loud, infectious laugh. She would live everyday of her life from this point on hoping to hear that laugh, her new favorite sound.