Wow, I'm... lazy. I haven't had tons of time. If I were you, I wouldn't expect more updates until summer. (Maybe a bit sooner. Ish. Meh.) Review this one for me?

V.

So maybe it takes a just a bit too long to get to archery this time. It wasn't really that she was sad or having a self pity party, or that she's even just walking slowly. It's that she's sort of dazed, and so she trips over a tree root and has to run back to the infirmary to grab a Band-Aid.

So she's 24 minutes late to her 30 minute class. And so she spends the lovely last six minutes -that she should have spent shooting arrows- explaining to Chiron that she fell and needed a bandage. She even shows him the Snoopy Band-Aid that now decorates her elbow.

"Annabeth, I know you miss Percy, but you really can't spend all of your time moping around, coming up with excuses not to come to archery."

"I'm not moping!"

And it's really unfortunate that Travis Stoll just had to walk by and add to the conversation at that moment.

"Yes you are."

She receives a knowing look from her teacher.

She's been ordered to help Leo build the ship in her hour and a half break until canoing starts. She wouldn't dream of showing up though. She can't go canoing. Not in a million years. That was his sport. And there was no way in Hades she's going to the lake. That was where they had their first real kiss. Too many memories surrounded that place. Every single dragonfly seems to whisper "You failed again." "You can't find him." Every cattail swishes with broken promises. Even the dock tells her that she'll never see him again.

It doesn't really make that much of a difference though. She has plans to go back to her cabin and... not mope, but when she arrives at the door, Chiron is standing, arms crossed, just waiting for her.

"I knew you'd try to get out of this. Come on." And suddenly, she feels her ponytail being yanked up, and before she knows it, she's on his back, and they're galloping across the woods. He dumps her off at the bunker, and she has no choice but to go in.

The second she enters the bunker, the clanging sounds of hammers surround her, and she has to wonder how none of the Hephaestus kids have gone deaf yet. Then, a young boy, couldn't have been more than twelve, comes up to her and hands her a pair of bright pink earplugs. She doesn't put them in though. None of the Hephaestus kids are wearing them. Only the kids from all the other cabins. She throws the squishy pink things into the scrap pile. Maybe if she can't hear, she won't have to listen to the whispers about him. She won't hear all the speculations about what exactly the Romans might do to him. She's thought of all of them. And more. All they do is scare her.

Her feet seem to have carried her over to where Leo is attaching some special devices to one of the sides of the ship. She stands there, watching his hands fly over the golden wood. Whatever he's doing, it's taking twice as long as it needs to. Joe Fulmer, on the other side, is working on the same thing. While his doesn't look as pretty as Leo's, Joe is done, and as he says when Nyssa asks him if he's really done, "It'll hold up in a hurricane."

The swift handed boy comes over to talk. "Hey, Leo." he begins.

THUNK. "Ow."

While Leo is, undoubtedly, one of the best builders at camp, she's decided that he's not exactly the most coordinated person she's ever met. In the time she's been watching, he's dropped three buckets of nails, hammered himself in the hand at least seven times, and, well, she lost count after the thirteenth time he accidentally set fire to something.

She's been standing there for at least ten minutes, but she can't bring herself to help, much less move. She's still overcome by the idea that this ship could bring him back.

"Leo," she asks, feeling foggy. "When do you think we'll finish?"

"Well, Annabeth, I don't know. We've got great people, like Nyssa over there, and then we've got people like you, who just stand there and distract us."

She has no rebuttal to this, so she stays quiet. She is just standing there and distracting Leo.

She feels a bit bad though, and she picks up a hammer, and starts to bang on a seemingly bent nail.

"NO, NO, NO! STOP!" she hears the boy's voice bellow from behind her. In all his craziness, he bangs into her, yanking the hammer from her hands.

"I was helping." she says, in a small voice.

"Sorry. Look, Annabeth, it's a hook. We need that." Leo takes the hammer that he's now holding and taps the "hook" back into it's original shape.

She doesn't feel bad anymore. She feels horrible. The stress of five months is a lot, and she really doesn't have anyone to talk to about it. The only person that knows him like she does is Grover, and he's been in western Washington for about three weeks now.

She takes off into the forest, and doesn't stop until she makes it back to her cabin. Chiron starts to tell her off or something but she's so done with all of it that she just pushes past him and locks herself in the bathroom. Normally, this would be the point where she would cry, and wish he was there to comfort her. But this is an entirely different feeling. She hasn't felt anything like this since last August. She feels... angry.

She really has no reason to. The reason she's angry isn't here. It probably won't be, for a while, and if it was here, it would make some stupid remark right now. No, this reason has been causing her trouble for six years, and she's so done with it, that she doesn't care if it ever comes back. The reason, however much she loves it, should have tried harder not to go and get itself kidnapped by the goddess of marriage. She considers this, and when you say it, after all the other things the reason has done, purposefully or not, to hurt her, it doesn't seem that out of place. It's definitely stupid enough. And annoying enough. If she were the goddess of marriage, she would probably take him too.

But she had really thought that they were past all this. This reason will never stop haunting her. The five months are slowly carving away a section of her heart that may or may not ever come back.

Slowly, but surely leaving an internal scar.

She knows that when she finds this reason, she is going to give it a real scar. She doesn't deserve this. She's lost every real friend she's ever had.

He's still alive though. The part of her brain that's not made of mush finally kicks in.

Maybe there's still a chance for something permanent.

Please review!

~PurpleShadowMonster