Chapter Text
Annabeth Chase is born unworthy of her mother, too weak, too slow, and can not sit at her mother’s altar for worship in fear of desecration. She is handed off to an ill-prepared father, a man who is still a boy, still a lovesick fool who doesn’t understand the concept of his own emotions, somehow more blessed than Annabeth herself, a girl whose veins are filled with gold and red.
Here is this child, Athena says, who is your flesh and your bone and my soul.
Frederick Chase is not a bad father. He is actually quite a good one with Annabeth removed from the equation, his forgotten daughter born angry and with something to prove. His daughter who is defined by her mother before herself, but too mortal to change it.
Her stepmother is not a bad mother. She tucks her children into bed, sings sweet lullabies to them when they have nightmares, gives them soup when they’re sick. She does not understand Annabeth. She does not want to. The little girl with a stare so deep and shocking, mind too big for her body, curls that are always pulled back into a ponytail, reaches into her heart and pulls it out to the world, saying, this is what you are. This is what you can never be.
She doesn’t trust her. She possibly never will, no matter how many times Annabeth feigns her agony, pretends she is more than a simple liability.
So, Annabeth runs away. Why would she stay, stay in this home that has no place for her? This house with remnants of her on the floor and the walls and yet nothing that would let you know it once held love. She’s not sure it did.
Athena decides Annabeth is worthy after watching her 7 year old child bear her weapon (a tool hammer) with her tiny palms, and smashing it down with no hesitation. Specifically, Annabeth is deemed holy when she stops flinching out of fear of death. She is much, much stronger than death. She has accepted it.
Annabeth has spent her short life filled with grief, and hurt, and confusion. Slowly, as the monsters warp and twist to take her to the depths of the Underworld, it begins to fester into something inherently cannibalistic, shaping itself into her rage, into her own motive to live. She doesn’t dwell on it. There is simply no time to, even if she wanted to.
Thalia Grace is 12 years old, scared but brave, fighting her way to something greater. She will scale a mountain with her bare hands if she has to, just to prove to the world that She is Here. She is Here, and now do you understand? Zeus, do you understand? I am going to kill you, like you killed your father for the betrayal of defining your life before you had a chance.
She doesn’t say that, of course. She knows better.
(Even if Luke doesn’t understand they still listen in the darkness of the Night.)
Annabeth Chase scares her, a bit. She wraps her arms around her thin frame, tight, regardless. But in her nightmares, Annabeth appears with the hammer, fully prepared to swing down onto flesh and blood and devour it. She is scared of this little girl’s heart. She is scared it will break from how brittle she has made it. She is scared of how many that tiny heart will take before it breaks.
Luke Castellan thinks he knows what Annabeth is, and therefore, he doesn’t need to fear her. He needs her to protect herself, knows he will be safe against this girl who looks at him and Thalia like they hung the moon and the stars in the sky. He wonders if it feels as good to love someone as it does to be loved by someone. He doubts it. His mother was destroyed by her love for the world. He will not be like her.
Luke craves the feeling of being loved. He watches the awe of Annabeth, the concern of Thalia and is quenched by it as he picks another fight with something he cannot beat. He will die trying, just for a taste of their affection.
“ You will kill us too, you know. Even the three of us will fail at some point,” Thalia had said.
Grover Underwood is refreshingly human. You lose a bit of your humanity when all you’re surrounded by is tragedy and hunger and the looming fear of death. Grover is all worried, all coward and softness. Annabeth likes him that way, but she would never say that. He is kind. She wonders how he has stayed kind.
When Thalia Grace dies to protect them, Annabeth doesn’t know how to mourn. She has spent so long at her own funeral pyre, she doesn’t know how to build others. So, she doesn’t. She clenches her fists and her teeth and breathes, breathes, breathes, thinking that if this is the divinity her mother covets so, she would rather be blasphemous.
Luke stays. He grits his teeth at those pine needles, holds in his anger like a corked bottle until it explodes.
Annabeth doesn’t know what to do before Chiron sees her and thinks, Oh, this child is so terribly hurt. She is so powerful, who has treated this child so poorly? It doesn’t confuse him, because demigods are always tragic, but he wonders sometimes. They all have their stories, but Annabeth is particularly interesting.
Especially when he talks about Cabin 11 and its unclaimed children.
She’s sitting with a book, comically larger than her, big eyes looking at him in a haze, like her brain is moving much, much faster than anything he’s ever seen before.
She opens her mouth before closing it, chewing on the words.
“Why would they care?” she asks, something that has both no answer and one so blatantly obvious, “The gods do not care about them. They are too sacred, too worshiped. Who wants to be devoted to that by birth right until they die?”
Annabeth, with her newly missing front tooth, can’t even pronounce the word devoted right. Chiron decides there, looking down at this girl full of paradoxes, apathetic and so full of love she can barely breathe with it, immortal and mortal, holy and heathenous, that he must, someone must raise this girl before she grows to destroy cities. Before she grows to convince him to let her destroy them. No Big Three child wields as much power as this girl, one who can conquer the world.
So he trains her, mostly because she likes it and doesn’t ask for much, and he was not fit to raise demigods. He was here to save them, to teach themselves to protect, to survive.
Annabeth Chase is 10 years old when she asks to go to school. Chiron desperately wants to tell her yes. He knows that Annabeth Chase can read fluent Ancient Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, and Arabic. He knows that she does math faster than a blink, knows that her mind is chaotic but functional, moves in mass waves of hysteria shaped like a Greek temple. He also knows that she wrote on the last English book he gave her intensely passionate feelings about the way she feels about the language. He had to throw it away.
He’s not worried about the monsters, as much. She could kill one with her eyes closed, he’s certain. He’s worried about the kids. The ones who cross a line as all 10 year olds do, the bullies who suffer at home, the rich ones who he’ll have to pay off.
“Annabeth,” he tells her, firmly, making sure she’s actually listening from the alertness in her eyes, “What don’t we stab?”
She totters, swaying side-to-side with her oversized backpack over her shoulders, a black one (“I’m not a child, Chiron, no I don’t want the Ninjago one.”), but littered with notes from older campers and her friends, good luck charms and pins, bits and baubles and trinkets. Her hair is in two braids, and she’s wearing a pair of embroidered jeans with a green sweatshirt on top of it. Luke and Silena had told her not to wear her combat boots. She did.
“We do not stab humans,” she tells him confidently, “Even with Celestial Bronze.”
One of the older girls takes a picture with a snuck-in digital camera. For once, Chiron does not take it. Luke is there too, now 17 and brooding, smiling at the photo as Chiron ignores the sinking feeling in his stomach. He walks Annabeth down to Thalia, and she presses her hand against the warm bark, feeling it underneath her palm almost as if she’s speaking to it.
“Be brave!” Grover says, tears running down his face. She rolls her eyes, and steps into the Mist.
Annabeth is pretty sure the smartest person she knows is herself. Well, after her mom, she adds, just in case. Deep down she knows she’s smarter. She doesn’t have any accidental brain children.
So, if Annabeth can’t figure out the loops and twists and curves of New York, she’s not sure anyone can. “ Make a right,” Luke had told her, “ Then a left, and another right.” She’s pretty sure Luke is wrong. He had walked to her school before the first day, gotten her signed up and everything and made up a lot of bullshit about her family, and Chiron (Who apparently is a Latin professor?) being her father. She had gotten bored halfway through, and instead, focused on the way the window was slightly off center. It had made her angry, and she had spent the rest of the visit noticing the slight imperfections in the architecture, trim too long there, tiles spaced poorly.
“What time is it?” she asks a stranger, giving her a rude look. She pulls together her best impression of her mother’s statues, eyes stony and fierce. The stranger seems put off by it, an older woman with honey blonde hair and warm brown eyes crinkled with proof of her joy.
“It’s 8:45, baby,” she worries, “Are you lost?”
“No,” Annabeth tells her confidently, now having focused on the route rather than the buildings around her. She lets herself have a cheat, lets herself think, I wouldn’t mind this woman as my mother, before eradicating the thought. Because mothers are not there to be warm and inviting. Mothers are there to be something to prove yourself to, mothers are gods you ignore to show that you are everything and more than they want. Mothers are there to be told that their daughters are here, they are present and strong and better than they could ever be.
She focuses on the path, taking her mind off the idea of sweet hugs and kisses and bedtime. Annabeth does not have that life, and it’s perfectly fine. She was not born to be anything less than a warrior in fine steel to protect the heart that connects to arteries and veins.
When she makes it to the school, a crowd of elementary schoolers are there. She fits in, oddly enough, blending in with the crowd of 4th graders. She doesn’t say anything, just stands in line like a well-trained soldier. Except for the hand that picks at her nails and messes with her jacket and taps the beat of a song she barely knows on her jeans. She is a warrior. She will not be best by this concept of crowds Chiron warned her about. She has stood in front of cyclops and ran, fought boys twice her age and won, shot arrows in perfect groups through the center.
“Hi,” a girl turns to her, short blonde hair poofing out like the sun’s rays, “I’m Charli. What’s your name?”
Annabeth stares at her. She takes in the girl’s appearance, shocked by the blueness of her eyes and the freckles that look scarily similar to her friend Lee’s, as if they were made for the sun itself. She blinks. Her name.
“Annie Bell,” she tells her.
“Really? Like Tinkerbell?” Charli asks, excited, bouncing on her toes.
“No,” Annabeth tells her.
Charli laughs, “No, as in not Tinkerbell?”
Annabeth replies, “No, as in that’s not my name.”
Charli blinks. Squints. Looks into Annabeth’s eyes as if they hide the secrets of the universe.
A teacher calls Annabeth’s name from the line, pulling her up to the front, saving her from the battle she was about to partake in.
The teacher is tiny, in Annabeth’s opinion. She can’t be over 5’7”, really, a short height for an adult woman, at least all the ones she knows. Her mother is, like, 20 feet tall. Her nose curves down like Athena’s, but her hair is light brown, a little red. Her mom has deep brown hair, so dark it feels like you’re looking at molten chocolate. Her mouth curves into a frown. She doesn’t know how to feel about her.
“Annabeth, yes?” she asks, redundantly. Annabeth only nods her head to agree. Her words are too important for a response so unnecessary.
“Okay, one second dear, just stand here with me,” she tells her, gently leading her to the wall. Annabeth sinks into the touch, and immediately stiffens, pretending like she didn’t just do that. The teacher, thankfully, doesn’t notice. Instead she turns, standing posed and perfect, hands straightening her skirt, and promptly screams louder than Annabeth thought mortals could. Her eardrums ring. She feels the sound of the name imprint on her brain.
Percy Jackson is the same height as her and looks as if his parents made an attempt to dress him and ultimately failed. His hair is deep black and wild, sticking up every which way. Luke’s does that sometimes, and she always tells him before one of the Aphrodite kids notices and takes him away so they can’t spar. It makes her angry. She makes the perpetrator spar with her every time before they can regret their actions.
He has a pair of nice jeans on, except they look freshly torn at the knees, and the red sleeves underneath his black t-shirt have remnants of dirt or mud on them, pulled high up in an attempt to hide the cuts on his fingers. The black shirt covers up whatever he did to it. His whole outfit is slightly large in a hilarious way, draping his frame so he’s all shirt and no boy. He’s also holding a skateboard, one comically small so he can use it.
Annabeth’s gut is telling her something important, like, hey, isn’t he strange? Aren’t you drawn to him? Doesn’t he smell like the sea and salt and laundry detergent with faint cigarette smoke?
The teacher looks the two of them up and down, making a face that usually means bad things. Percy grimaces, as if he’s seen it before. Luckily, she doesn’t say anything.
The more Annabeth looks at him, the more unpleasant she feels. The sharpness of his eyes. The childish nature of his face, the way he seems so clean covered in mud. His hair. The way his eyes are bouncing from wall to wall, knee bouncing in its own separate tempo. She picks a curl from the side of her hair, and spins it on one restless finger. Her whole body aches to move. She doesn’t listen.
He meets her eyes, jaw dropping slightly open in a ridiculous way. She watches as he studies her eyes to the slope of her nose to her lips to her hair, and her hands, then realizes he was caught and his ears slightly turn pink, jerking his head away.
Rookie mistake. Never let the enemy know you’re watching them. She knows he’s studied her now, prepared himself for a fight. Her muscles stiffen as she analyzes his joints, the way the ligaments move and twist. He moves like a demigod, Annabeth realizes. She’s supposed to do something, but can’t remember what. Something, something, call Chiron. She’d figure it out if it was important.
“Okay,” the teacher says, clapping her hands together firmly. Both their eyes jump to the sound, stabilizing their own bodies against the waves. Percy’s eyes flash with something harsh, like angry ocean waves.
She’s building a theory in her mind, brick by brick, qualitative and quantitative combining into substance, thought, an experiment. Her knife weighs down her boot.
“I am Ms. Lucost,” she continues in the background of Annabeth’s head, “And I will be your teacher this year! Class doesn’t start for another ten minutes, so I’ll give you a brief tour of the school before we go to class, m’kay?”
Percy flashes her a smile, dimples popping (possible weakness?) out as he gives her a thumbs-up. “ Lame,” Annabeth thinks.
She stares at his hair, the messy mop sticking up in the back as Ms…Locest? Lotus? Whatever. As she drawls on and on and on about Ms. This and Mr. That. She wants to learn. She is in a sense, but she really couldn’t care less about this school with its hospital walls.
“Your hair is a mess,” she tells Percy, blunt as can be.
His ears turn bright red as he goes to fix it, hands raking through the mess. It does nothing. She giggles into her hand. He glares back at her, making a face. She laughs harder.
“It looks like seaweed,” she whispers into his ear, “You have a seaweed brain.”
He glares at her, “Shut it, wise guy. Wise girl.”
She sticks her tongue out at him. “Seaweed Brain.”
“Wise Girl.”
“Seaweed Brain.”
“Children!” Ms. Glucose claps her hands together, smile tightening, “It is time for class!”
Percy groans, and Annabeth smiles faintly, pretending like she is not excited. Her enemy is next to her. He cannot know.
The day goes by semi-quickly, going over names she won’t remember, but it might be simply because Annabeth spends her day in a daze, distracted by all the posters and people and things.
“How was the first day?” Luke asks her when she comes home.
Her eyebrows bunch together. “I don’t know,” she says, and leaves it at that.
The second day is similar, but she spends it focusing on Jackson, not the math equations she already knows on the board. What kind of 10 year old needs to learn how to divide? When do they start doing functions?
Today he’s relatively less covered in dirt, but his sneakers are soaked. The cuts on his hands are gone now, oddly enough, as if they weren’t there before. She makes a note, watches as he bounces his leg over and over again, struggling to pay attention. He gets yelled at at least 6 times before lunch.
At lunch, she watches from her lone perch with a piece of pizza, as he gets picked on by some boys with egos too big and insecure and intimidated. She knows their type, knows the way they’ve been told of the power they hold without any backing, false compliments festering in their brains.
She watches as the water from his shoes lifts in tiny droplets in the air, just a bit, as he increasingly gets more upset from their jabs.
The third day, however, is the worst.
Jackson looks tired, bags under his eyes sinking, not helped by the teacher consistently poking and prodding at his wounds. It’s an odd sense of familiarity Annabeth has with him, from the way his eyes flick over the same lines over and over again with confusion, the constant movement as he tries to scratch an itch he can’t identify.
At recess, she spots a large, metallic bird in the sky, circling around her. Another is perched on a tree, and as she blinks the Mist out of her eyes (the mortal world is misleading, okay. Yesterday she almost stabbed a pigeon), she sees the bronze of its beak, the direction of its eyes focused on Percy like it’s watching its prey. She waits approximately two seconds to check the way its feathers ruffle, no, that’s definitely a Stymphalian, before sprinting over to Jackson eating his sandwich.
“Can you see that?” she asks him, whispered, lightly pointing to the bird.
He shoots her an incredulous look, clearly startled, “What—I mean, yeah, but it’s just a pigeon, why does it matter?”
“No,” she tells him, “Look closer.”
He squints, eyes opening in recognition before shrugging, “Wow, that is a weird bird, man.”
She hesitates to roll her eyes, before pulling her dagger out of her boot where it’s been hidden.
“ Absolutely no stabbing mortals,” Chiron had told her. Well, she pauses, if her theory is right, he’s only kind of mortal.
His jaw drops, “Hey man, what the hell—”
She promptly digs it into arm, and watches as it bleeds.
He looks up at her, in shock. Down at the wound. He opens his mouth, but before he has the chance, she’s grabbing his water bottle and promptly dumping it all over the cut, watching as his skin pieces back together, blood clots turning to white lines that fade to skin.
“Shit,” she says, grabbing his hand, “We need to leave, right the fuck now.”
His eyes are as wide as dinner plates by this point, but she doesn’t really care as she practically drags him to somewhere no one is watching, and climbing the fence around the school. She runs, dragging him along with her.
As they reach a corner, the birds stop following her, but she still scans the alleyways, the streets, the people.
“Okay, actually what is wrong with you, I mean I’m all for skipping, but why did you stab me, holy shit, you stabbed me , and that was just a big bird, what is your problem, are you crazy or something? Cool, I guess, but leave me out of this, my mom is going to kill me, oh god, oh god, oh god—“
Annabeth cuts off Percy’s rant, grabbing his wrist again, as she sees two harpies lurking in the alleyway, focused on them, smiling as they make eye contact with her.
“We have to get to camp,” she tells him, even as his eyes show absolutely no recognition at all.
They run, he runs after her, mostly dragged along, and there are so many monsters, everywhere, corners and blocks and in the sky, all focused on Jackson and his blood, his stupid hair and baggy clothes and disgusting converse. He seems to pick up on it around the third monster, one who swoops down with a vicious human-like grin. The demigod instinct kicks in, or maybe he’s just scared shitless, but either way, the two of them are moving faster than the wind.
The hill is the final battle, as it always is, and there’s something, someone waiting for them at the base.
“ Oh my god,” she whispers, eyes flooding with terror, “What is wrong with you! Why is the fucking Minotaur here!”
“The what?” Seaweed Brain answers, stupidly.
She ignores him. Her gaze switches to Percy, currently cradling the water bottle she forgot she had given back to him, mind moving faster than a mile per minute. Her eyes dart between the knife and the water.
“Okay,” she tells him slowly, “You need to use that.”
“What is that?” he squints. She points at the water bottle.
“This is a water bottle. This is a water bottle .”
“Just figure it out,” she shouts, bracing herself as the Minotaur runs at them.
It’s shockingly fast. She slides under it’s legs, slicing its Achilles tendon, spinning as it roars to the other side. It makes a grab for Percy, who, well. She’s not sure what he did, but the next thing she knows, its throat is being strangled by a ring of water, blood gushing out of its ankles, before falling back into a tree, and evaporating into fine dust.
She looks back at him, the two of them breathing heavily. Percy looks terrified, staring down at his hands and not returning Annabeth’s fierce grin.
“Nice on, Seaweed Brain.”
He passes out into the dirt, directly to the right of Thalia.
Chiron is actually having a perfectly pleasant day. The breeze is nice, the sun is out just enough to warm his bones and joints, and while he does feel particular strange from the loss of Annabeth shadowing his or Luke’s side like a silent cat, it is quite nice to not constantly fear the shaking cradle of thoughts and power radiating at his side.
It is a perfectly pleasant day until his strongest warrior arrives at the edge of camp approximately three hours too early, hauling an unconscious boy seemingly from her school over her shoulder, with a grin so wide it hurts. There’s a horn, a Minotaur horn, in her other hand. And the boy, a boy with black hair and sun-kissed skin, has the familiar feeling of Annabeth, one of a cursed strength, one like the two of them are going to tear the world around him and rebuild it.
Dionysus looks up from his spot on the Big House rocking chair, taking a sip of Coke and raising his eyebrows. Chiron doesn’t move, stuck to his spot like glue, even when Luke appears out of fine air.
“Annabeth Chase,” his voice trembles, “What have you done.”
Her grin doesn’t falter, even though he’s certain she knows what his tone of voice means.
“This is Percy,” she answers, incorrectly.
“Son of Poseidon,” Luke whispers.
“Okay,” Chiron attempts to maintain his composure, “What happened?”
She recounts the events, the birds, the monsters, the water. At that, he scrubs a hand over his face, exhausted, but she doesn’t let him say anything, continuing to ramble. It’s the most information Annabeth has ever given him about another person, including Thalia and Luke, so something is clearly dangerous.
Luke is nearly in tears, by the end of it, laughing so hard his words barely come out. “So,” he laughs out, “You stabbed someone random kid because you thought he was maybe a demigod–”
“--And possibly my archenemy, I wasn’t sure,” she corrects him. Luke bites his lip so hard it bleeds to stop himself from laughing.
“And, then, you kidnapped him,” Chiron deadpans, interjecting.
Her lip twists, “Okay, yes, maybe, but also I was saving his ass.”
When Percy wakes up, he’s a bit dizzy, a bit out of it, and no one can really tell if it’s the possible concussion or the fact he just got kidnapped by another 10 year old. Actually, it could be a lot of things.
“It’s probably all of them,” Grover groans, there for emotional support, or just because he is always at the center of things that revolve around the Big Three.
“Yes,” Percy groans, 10 years old and concussed, “It is all of them.”
Annabeth narrows her eyes at him for that comment. Percy pretends like he’s not scared.
“Can I go home now? I miss my mom ” he says, instead.