PIPER
"Annabeth!" Piper yodels as she slams the door open. "Guess who got extra credit w- oops!"
Annabeth and Percy break apart from where they were cuddling on Annabeth's bed.
"You two look pretty wrapped up in each other," she says with a wink. "Somebody finally do the commitment thing? You two girlfriend and boyfriend?"
She knows she has made the biggest of the fuck ups when Annabeth sends her the harshest glare of all time. Piper didn't even know Annabeth was capable of giving the evil eye.
"I'm going to go put myself in a bunker somewhere and never come back," she says, making her way out of the room, but Percy shakes his head. To her relief, it looks like he missed whatever exchange had just happened.
"No, this is your room, Piper, I have to head out." As he speaks, Annabeth continues to send Piper a truly terrifying deal glare.
"It's okay, I can – "
He waves her off, and presses a kiss to Annabeth's forehead. "I have to get a bunch of stuff done tonight," he mutters. "But can I come back tomorrow morning?"
Annabeth nods and he pulls her in for one more hug. "Of course," she says quietly. "But did I suck up an entire day you needed for studying?"
"Nah," he says, standing and pulling all his things together. "I'll get it done. Eventually."
He darts out of the room, gently pulling the door closed, and that's when a pillow comes flying at Piper's head.
"You idiot!" Annabeth yells. "We were just post-having a big talk thing and cuddling and then you barge in and say words!"
"What else would I say, shoe horns?" Piper asks. "Look, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to screw shit up. You know that."
Annabeth drops her head in her hands, curling up into herself. "No, I'm sorry," she says with an exhale, "Jesus, I'm just – I shouldn't take this out on you."
"Take what out on me?" Piper asks gently.
Annabeth's head rises and she looks over at Piper. "I told Percy about the Luke stuff," she says quietly, "and, I mean, he's dealt with things too, but I don't know if he could handle me being crazy. And my crazy is a lot of crazy."
"Did he freak out at a panic attack?" Piper asks. She tries to make her tone gentle, but inside she's fuming. They looked cute and cuddly when she walked in, but maybe what she saw wasn't the whole picture.
Annabeth, to Piper's surprise, just smiles. "Actually," she says, "I talked about it. And I didn't have one."
"Didn't have what?"
"A panic attack."
Piper just stares at her. From what she gathered, and usually she catches things like this pretty quickly, Annabeth's difficulties surrounding the events that transpired with Luke and Thalia were, well, phenomenally damaging. She had expected Annabeth to take ages to be able to talk about it with Percy, let alone talk without a panic attack. "And how?" is all Piper can manage to say. She's just killing it with the best friend job today…
Annabeth shrugs but, to Piper's surprise, is still smiling. "I think…I think talking to you and Reyna about it has made it easier. And better. I've never had friends like the two of you before." She looks up at Piper, and for the smallest of seconds Piper thinks that, yeah, this girl is totally going to cry, but she doesn't. Annabeth just sighs. "You guys are the best."
Then Piper wrecks the moment by crying herself. "Shut up!" she yells. "Stop being all cute and adorable and happy. You're making me cry."
"You're going to make me cry," says Annabeth, a smile breaking through the silly little fake frown. "Because you are a really good roommate."
"You're the good roommate, you jerk!" Piper exclaims, and she tackles Annabeth where she sits, not caring when she knocks her head on the wall and sees stars for a few minutes. She's serious when she says she's never been close to a girl like this before. Sure, she's had Leo for years, but Leo's very much not the same as Annabeth. Leo is boisterous and goofy and gets her into trouble and makes mistakes Piper steps in. Annabeth cleans up Piper's mistakes and throws marshmallows at her head when she's bored and makes Piper study.
And Annabeth's much more fun to dress up with than Leo is.
"I'm all for the lovey ness," says Annabeth, "but I think my windpipe is being crushed by a textbook."
Piper jumps up. "Do you wanna get ice cream?" she asks suddenly. "I think we should get ice cream. You know, because cream. And ice."
"Good explanation, genius," chuckles Annabeth. "I'll invite Reyna."
"Good! That way I can steal some of her rocky road."
Within ten minutes the three of them have met up in the Student Center and are devouring ice creams and chatting. Piper chose a bizarre pistachio and butter pecan combination that she's still not sold on, Reyna (of course) got her rocky road staple, and Annabeth's eating a strawberry sundae.
"I have to say," Reyna says after the three are far enough into their treats that their tongues are getting cold and numb from the treat and speech isn't as easy as usual, "this place does have the best ice cream in the world."
Piper shakes her head emphatically. "Untrue. Italy wins."
"But that's gelato," Annabeth adds, "gelato and ice cream are different."
"And we haven't been to Italy," says Reyna, "unlike Miss International here."
Piper balls up a napkin and throws it at Reyna. "Can it, fudgehead."
REYNA
"Careful, Reyna," says Annabeth, "she broke out fudgehead. She's mad."
Reyna rolls her eyes and, before Piper can say anything else, shoves a spoonful of ice cream into Piper's mouth. Piper squeaks in surprise. "Hey!" she says. "That was rude."
"Was not," says Reyna shrugging, "you were all talking about fudge, I figured you wanted something chocolatey."
The eye roll she gets from Piper is about twelve times the roll that Reyna could ever muster, and Reyna has to keep herself from cracking up as Piper drops her head on the table.
"Why did I ever get myself stuck with you two?" Piper grumbles. "It's a Friday afternoon and, instead of getting ready to go party, I'm eating ice cream with dumb people."
"Dumb people!" exclaims Annabeth. "I'm pretty sure we're awesome people."
"Very awesome people," Reyna adds, and Piper simply throws her hands in the air and books it out of there, heading straight for the bathroom.
"Quite the drama queen, that one," Annabeth says, and it strikes Reyna as strange that neither of them blink an eye anymore whenever Piper goes on one of her ridiculous tirades. It's almost as if they're both used to her going from zero to weirdo with the snap of her fingers. It's borderline concerning.
"Drama queen is right," says Reyna, and before she can catch herself, she adds, "you should hear how needy she is in bed."
When she realizes what she said, she looks up at Annabeth who, to her surprise, doesn't look startled or horrified, but instead is just chuckling. "Of course she is," says Annabeth. "I've had to deal with her banging on the shower stall wall because I was going too slowly for her liking and the other stalls were taken. I do not want to know what happens when orgasms are involved."
"No, you don't," grumbles Reyna. "She gets simultaneously stupid and whiny, which is incredibly annoying when you're not expecting it. But, at this point, I should probably constantly expect it."
"She gets that way all the time. The amount of times I've had to hit her with a pillow to shut her up is ridiculous."
"Who's ridiculous?" asks Piper, sliding back into her spot next to Reyna. "I was going to leave, but then I realized I left my ice cream, and figured eh, worth it."
"You're the ridiculous one," says Annabeth. "According to Reyna, even in bed."
Reyna forced back a chuckle when Piper turns to her, horrified. "You divulged bed secrets to the Pretty Pretty Princess?" she asks, mockingly horrified. "Did she explode with the dirty details of it all?"
"There were no dirty details," says Reyna. "But Annabeth did tell me about how you're annoying and pushy for the showers in the morning."
"At night," Piper corrects, and Annabeth and Reyna just laugh at her when she gets indignant and frowns. "Oh, shut up, you two," she grumbles, "I never should have let you two idiots become friends."
"Ah, yes," says Annabeth, "but do you think you could have ever prevented it?"
"It would have been impossible," adds Reyna.
PIPER
When Reyna left to go get ready for a lacrosse meeting and Annabeth convinced Piper to go home and get started on the weekend's homework early, Piper went along with it easily.
It wasn't until twenty minutes into actually preparing questions to ask the teacher in her Calculus class on Tuesday that Piper realizes what she's doing.
"Oh, my god!" she exclaims. "I'm doing homework. On a FRIDAY. In my dorm room. Come quick, Annabeth, take my temperature"
Annabeth, now perpetually wary of Piper's shenanigans, stands up slowly. "Let me guess. You have a fever and the only prescription is more cowbell," says Annabeth deadpan, but Piper refuses to let her roommate ruin her hilarious comment.
"No! The only prescription is more party! Let's dance!"
"That's the dumbest thing a human being has ever said," says Annabeth. "I'm too tired. I don't want to party. There is no party in these pants of mine, before you say it," Annabeth adds before Piper can interrupt, "don't even say it."
"But don't you want there to be a party in your pants?" Piper asks her, making sure to pout a little bit to make it just the slightest bit more entertaining.
"I don't want any party, neither in my pants nor outside of my pants," says Annabeth. "I need to study."
"Can I teach you how to do makeup?" Piper asks with a grin. "I can teach you how to do that. You can study how to makeup your face. Or something."
Annabeth looks up from the book she's reading, and Piper's eager face is basically impossible to refuse.
"Fine," she sighs. "Teach me how to do makeup."
That's how, within twenty minutes, Piper's made Annabeth look like a deranged woodland fairy and herself look like a princess of the ice land.
"I thought you knew how to do this!" exclaims Annabeth, staring at herself horrified in the mirror. "Dude, I thought you were good at this!"
"I am!" exclaims Piper. "I rarely get a chance to try out my costume makeup, though, and I figured, hell, get an unsuspecting Annabeth to do my evil bidding!"
"I hate you," grumbles Annabeth. "I look like a swamp just hurled all over my face."
"That's the spirit!" exclaims Piper. "Get into character!"
It looks like Annabeth seriously considers throwing a pillow right at Piper's face, but the likelihood the imprint of an Ice Fairy would be permanently adhered to her pillowcase appears to deter her. Piper grins. "I knew you wouldn't throw it," she singsongs, "you don't want to ruin your – OW!"
Apparently, Annabeth was just waiting for the right angle and opportunity.
"You have started a war between the earth beings and the water beings," announces Piper.
By the time the war is over, Annabeth's drenched in water, Piper's got hair spray all over the side of her neck, and there's lipstick running from Piper's jaw to collarbone.
"I yield!" Piper exclaims. Annabeth sighs and rolls off of where she had pinned Piper to their carpet.
"This is going to take years to clean up," says Annabeth. "If only the water beings had yielded before the lip weapon was drawn."
"It was my lipstick, too," Piper grumbles.
ANNABETH
It takes them forty-five minutes and a twenty minute shower a piece to get the room and themselves cleaned up, and by then it's too late to even consider going out.
"I'm exhausted," says Piper, her face distorted by a yawn. "You ready for bed?"
"Am I ever," Annabeth replies. "And you're washing my pillow tomorrow, right?"
"Right."
When Annabeth wakes up the next morning, Piper's gone and there's a text on her phone saying she went to study with Reyna.
"Study my ass," she laughs.
She dresses and gets together her study materials for today, when suddenly there's a knock on her door. Only half hesitant, she opens it.
"Annabeth, will you be my girlfriend?"
It's Percy, and he's holding a bouquet of flowers in his hand, thrusting them toward her, and he's wearing the biggest smile Annabeth's ever seen on anybody before. He also, she notes, looks really sleepy. Her mind flashes back to the day before, when he told her he'd come back that morning. She hadn't realized he was serious.
"You want me to be your girlfriend?!" Annabeth asks, looking at Percy and his bouquet of flowers like he just told her he wanted to turn into a moose and roam the tranquil forests of northern New Hampshire.
Percy nods. "I mean, if you're up for it."
"Seriously?" she asks. "Me? You realize my me is very different than normal people. I'm me. Problem. Me." Annabeth has never sounded like more of a dimwit.
He nods. "Of course you. Unless you're Annabeth's evil twin."
He says things like that sometimes. Annabeth's not sure if that's just him trying to be funny or if that's legitimately how his weirdo brain works.
"I can promise there is no evil twin," she says, fighting back a sad smile. If anything, she is the evil twin. "It's just me."
"There's nothing just about you," says Percy, sticking the flowers out again. "Do you want these or are they too much? They're probably too much."
"They're beautiful," says Annabeth, smiling down at them. "I like them a lot."
He sighs and grins. "I'm glad. They're not, like, expensive or anything. I can't really afford expensive. I mean, I…" His sentence trails off as Annabeth takes the flowers from him and steps close to them.
"They're great," she says quietly as she kisses him lightly. "Really, really great."
"So you'll be my girlfriend?"
Annabeth hesitates. There's a lot nobody on this campus knows about her, a lot they don't know about her and Luke and what happened back when she was still only a freshman in college. And she's scared the second she tries to explain it to anyone, the second she brings it up, every single person she has made any sort of connection with is going to head for the hills. But Percy didn't. Percy only left when Piper barged in like a jerkface and came back in the morning.
She's known since she was fourteen that she had a lot going on upstairs that was very different from everyone else. But maybe, just maybe, what was going on today was exactly what should have been going on. Maybe telling Piper a few weeks before and telling Percy the night before was right where she was supposed to be doing. Maybe, for once, her marbles are all back in place.
"Yes," Annabeth says quietly. "Of course I will."
"Good, because I was going to ask you if we could get lunch again today. Well, later on."
"Later on?" Annabeth asks. "It's almost eleven."
"Yeah, but I'm –" As if the adrenaline of making it official dissolved out of him the second she said yes, Percy yawns wider than she's seen in her entire life.
"Tired?" she offers with a grin. "If you want to, you can take a nap here."
"I live just down-downst…" He loses his sentence again because he yawns so wide it's like she can see down his windpipe – not a pretty look on anyone, she can say – and sways a little where he stands.
"What's up with you?" she asks, fighting back what she's sure would be a fairly rude laugh.
"I was up really late doing a paper when I went home after talking to you. And then I had t- to…" He yawns again. Instead of saying anything further, Annabeth takes his hand and walks him into her bedroom.
"You need to stop thinking for a while. You can explain all of this when you wake up. Right now I think you just need to take a little nap.
Percy begins muttering whatever the hell about sleep and how much of it he'd gotten in the past few days and why he had been awake for so long, then curls up at the foot of Annabeth's bed. He's out in mere seconds.
Annabeth, whose mental image of him taking a nap was him lying next to her instead of him conking out like a cat, suddenly finds herself without an idea of what to do in the situation.
With a deep sigh that's more of a Piper than an Annabeth thing to do, she grabs some homework and sits down against the wall, and finds herself, as she flips through her flashcards about ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, gently combing her fingers through his thick, dark hair. For the first time, she had a boyfriend. An actual boyfriend named Perseus Alexander Jackson (is that a mouthful or what?) who was possibly the dumbest kid she's met on the planet on the surface, but so much more after a few more conversations.
More importantly, a boyfriend who is her age and a weirdly snarky goofball when he wants to be who brings her flowers and a smile for no reason. To her surprise, he snuggles up against her as she brushes her fingers through his hair, and when he turns to press a kiss to her fingertips, a flood of warmth and happiness takes her over enough that she giggles or no reason.
"You are quite the man, Percy Jackson," she says quietly.
PIPER
The first thing she sees when she gets home is the bouquet of flowers – obviously store-bought and silly, but cute all the same – on Annabeth's desk, and she knows Percy took her advice to do something just silly and cheesy enough to be cute.
"He got you flowers?" she says. "Oh, god, that's so lame. I love it. Did you say yes?"
Annabeth's head snaps up from whatever book she's reading, and that's when Piper realizes that Percy's still there, curled up like a cat at the foot of Annabeth's bed.
"Is he asleep?" Piper mouths.
Annabeth smiles and nods. "He was up until five this morning finishing up a paper, got two hours of sleep, got the flowers, passed in the paper, went to class, came here, and then, apparently, passed out."
"He just threw you a bouquet of flowers and then fell asleep on your bed?"
"No, of course not," Annabeth replies. "We talked about whether or not we wanted to be in a relationship officially first."
Piper raises an eyebrow. "And are you? Official, I mean?"
Annabeth nods. "You think he would have been comfortable enough to pass out on my bed if we weren't?"
"Well, yeah," says Piper, "from what I've seen of him, he'd be comfortable passing out in the apartment of an old dude who said a polite hello to him on a bus."
"Fair enough."
Piper studies Annabeth's face as she looks down at Percy. "Damn, girl," she says, "you've got it bad."
"You're one to talk," says Annabeth, not taking her eyes off of Percy. "Are you going to ask Reyna to make it official yet?"
Piper's so startled she crashes into her bed. "Of course not!" she exclaims indignantly. "I will do no such thing! I don't want no such thing! I don't making sense am!"
"I'm hoping that last sentence mix up was on purpose," Annabeth laughs, and with the slight movement, Percy shifts in her lap.
"'susup?" he asks, lifting his head bleary-eyed up to look at Piper. "I do somethin'?"
"Go back to bed, Wee Willy Winky," says Piper. "Go find that dreamland or whatever."
"Got Annabeth," he mumbles, and Piper's got no clue if he's actually awake or not, "dreamy enough."
Annabeth's expression is startled and confused and, from Piper's perspective, hilarious.
"Did he just say I was dreamy?" she asks, sound as dumbfounded as she looks.
"Yeah, he did," Piper chuckles, "what is this, the 50's?"
Annabeth just slowly shakes her head in disbelief. "I have no idea what goes on in that head of his," she says quietly, "but I think I like it."