Summary: Annabeth struggles to forget her worries while Percy tries to remember. Post TLH, somewhere before the first chapter of Son of Neptune.
Disclaimer: Again, I don't own anything but the writing itself. Percy, Annabeth, Jason, Leo, Piper, Camp Half-Blood, etc etc, all belong to Rick Riordan.
A/N: Sorry it's been so long since I updated this! This one shot is pretty short, but I wanted to write something angst-y about Percy being gone. I angst over it a lot, so I can only imagine how poor Annabeth must feel. I'm not sure I like the tense I wrote it in. Meh.
She stares into the fire and tries to forget.
All around her, signs of the campers' excitement are evident. The fire, which had not so many weeks ago been flickering feebly with the loss of their leader and the hopeless quest of three new campers, is roaring happily now, growing and changing in time with their singing. The return of Piper, Leo and Jason, not to mention the discovery of the ship, seems to have bolstered their spirits; especially for the new campers – the ones who hadn't been in the first war, the ones who didn't know what could be coming.
The ones who hadn't known Percy.
Annabeth swallows the lump in her throat and makes an attempt at looking happy. She had always been glad to sing along to their campfire songs, glad for the feeling of camaraderie and togetherness and family. But tonight as much as any other night since he disappeared, she hasn't been able to muster a smile that is actually, one-hundred-percent genuine. And she feels so alone, even surrounded by people.
The melancholy feels especially profound at the campfires. Generally, she tries to avoid them these days, but at the same time she doesn't want anyone to think she's sulking over maps of San Francisco in the empty Athena cabin or sitting on the beach and staring out at the waves in search of her lost love. In truth, she would rather be alone somewhere than here; perhaps not living in a scene from a sappy love story, but not surrounded by seemingly happy people nonetheless. The campfire was where she'd last seen Percy, and every unconcerned smile is akin to a stab from a poison dagger.
A few seats down from her, Leo is waving his arms dramatically to the music as if he's directing the whole choir, much to the amusement of his new friends and admirers. The only people who seem to be ignoring him are Piper and Jason; Piper is sitting close to the son of Jupiter and looking at the him hopefully, but he doesn't seem to want to make eye contact with her.
Emotions had always been a bit daunting to Annabeth, so she had never really been talented at decoding them – especially when they weren't her own. It wasn't hard to find better things to worry about than gossiping about other people's love lives like some wayward daughter of Aphrodite. But now that this whole thing involves her own love life, things seem to be in clearer focus.
She does not know what Jason is thinking, exactly, but she herself had been giving the boy a lot of thought as of late. He was, after all, Percy's replacement, his tradeoff, his Roman equivalent. And looking at him across the camp fire, glancing nervously at Piper every once in awhile, she can't help but wonder what sort of girls there are at the Roman camp, and whether any of them had been convinced by a sadistic goddess that they were in a relationship with someone who didn't know them at all... But then, did Percy know her any better? Could there be some daughter of Venus on the other side of the country comforting him and accompanying him on quests as he tries to put a face to a flash of blonde hair or a glimpse of gray eye?
Or perhaps there was no one to welcome Percy in San Francisco. They had established by now that the Greeks were far friendlier to new additions than the Romans were. If they made him fight for a place in their camp, he could win; as much as she teased and challenged his abilities, she knew that much. Besides, he had the curse of Achilles – as far as she knows – and that couldn't hurt, either.
But what of the camp itself? What if invulnerability, the thing that was such an asset in the war, made them suspicious? What would they do with his memories, or lack thereof? It would be easy, she thought, from a strategic standpoint, to turn someone vulnerable and lost into a weapon. If they turned him against his old camp, if they didn't want to listen to reason...
He wouldn't do that, she tells herself. This had become somewhat of a mantra over the last few days, Even if he couldn't remember... he wouldn't let that happen.
But at the same time there is always a voice in the back of her mind whispering, Not again. This can't be happening to me again.
Was this what always had to happen when you allowed yourself to get close to someone? If you were a demigod, the answer seemed to be yes. There was only so much time you and your loved ones were allowed to be happy and safe before it was snatched away from you again. Who did the snatching, she was not entirely certain, but if she ever found out it would be a very bad day for the thief.
More than likely, though, it was simply a combination of circumstances: monsters, the Mist, gods for parents, and now, tensions between camps. Logically, it didn't add up to anything very favorable. Somehow, though, she didn't like to think about it in a logical way. It was easier to have someone to blame, even if it was someone you weren't entirely sure existed.
Far across the country on a different coast, a young man stares into the fire and tries to remember.
This fire is smaller than Annabeth's, and there is no singing or enchantment to stir the flames. To keep it going, the young man uses not his voice (as if), but a small branch, which he prods the flames with periodically. His sea green eyes dart briefly from to the darkness beyond, which seems thicker and more oppressive than normal darkness. It could have something to do with the fact that he's sheltering for the night in a deep patch of woods, or the fact that he knows there could be a threat lurking in the shadows, or the fact that he's been keeping the only source of light for miles deliberately dim and hopefully unnoticeable to all but the closest enemies.
Whatever the reason is, he can't see a thing past the tiny orb of light the flames provide. Even so, he, perhaps foolishly, keeps his eyes on the fire like it might start speaking to him, answer some of his questions. At night, in the dark, is when the confusion sets in, for it is the only time he actually has space to think. One would assume that the gorgons would use the darkness to their advantage and attack, but they hadn't seemed to have thought of that yet. Or maybe they just hadn't managed to track him down yet. It was only a matter of time, though. They always found him in the end.
For now, he had pushed them to the back of his mind. There was so much to think about these days that gorgons only occupied a small fraction of his thoughts. They brought up more and more questions each time he encountered them, of course, but the snake women themselves were becoming minor distractions compared to the rest of it.
It was appropriate that the only person he remembers at all had been staring into a fire and thinking about him just a few hours ago, when it was bed time on her end of the country. Not that he knows that, of course. He barely knows how he knew her, let alone where he could find her. If he did know, he would hardly be huddled on the ground next to a stream (camping near the water made him feel safer), hiding from a couple of crazy gorgons who thought they worked at a grocery store.
He wants to know. His memory of Annabeth is infuriatingly dim. He can remember her, but nothing that could help him unravel the rest of the mystery. There are only flashes of things he could connect to her – San Francisco, the gray streak in his hair, the smell of lemon. Things like that, which are interesting and frustrating in equal measure. He could remember how he felt about her, but Hera seemed to have kept anything particularly significant to the bigger picture to herself.
The odd thing is that he misses her, even though he can't remember all they've done together. He doesn't know how they'd come to be close, but he knows that he cared about her. Maybe more deeply than he cared about anyone else – he wouldn't know, because he couldn't remember anyone else.
But he wants to. More than getting rid of the gorgons, more than having a decent meal for once, he wants his memory back. But to do that, he had to stay alive and complete his journey.
He would try, for Annabeth and all the people and places he couldn't remember. Whether he would succeed or not was an entirely different matter.