ᴄᴀᴠᴇ ᴄᴀɴᴇᴍ: ᴘᴀʀᴛ ɪɪ ᴏꜰ ᴛʜᴇ ᴘᴇʀᴄᴀʙᴇᴛʜ/ꜱᴏʟᴀɴɢᴇʟᴏ ᴘʀᴏᴊᴇᴄᴛ

ᴠɪ | ᴀ ᴅᴇᴍᴏɴꜱᴛʀᴀᴛɪᴏɴ ᴏꜰ ᴘᴏᴏʀ ᴅᴇᴄɪꜱɪᴏɴ-ᴍᴀᴋɪɴɢ

Percy wakes up to the smell of rubbing alcohol, and much to his surprise, it's not on him. There's a gentle buzzing in his ears. Either he needs to get his hearing checked out or...

"You any better?" Annabeth asks from the chair next to him. Her Hooters t-shirt is covered in black gunk, which means that the encounter with the Erymanthian boar was no hallucination. It seems like the operation was a success though, so there's something.

"What kind of a hospital is this?" Percy asks. The last thing he remembers is riding a wild boar in a tulip field, and then flying through the air, and then nothing. Annabeth could have pulled a one-eighty and shown some responsibility and he would have completely missed it.

He almost chuckles at that thought. Yeah, right. Like this woman has shown an ounce of responsibility in her life. Well, based on the smell of the rubbing alcohol, she must have brought him to a mortal hospital instead of feeding him the ambrosia from his bag. Speaking of his bag-

"Have some more ambrosia," Annabeth says, holding out the Ziploc bag.

He reaches in for the ambrosia because anything helps.

"Woah, hey, not that much." She snatches the bag away. "You've had a lot already; you were burning up by the time I got you here."

"Again," Percy asks, "what hospital are we at? What town are we in?" He looks around, examining the ornate drawings on the wall. A butterfly behind Annabeth's head looks as if it has eyes. A skull above the doorframe smiles, practically laughing at their situation.

Annabeth clears her throat and rubs a paper towel against her arm. The sleeve of her t-shirt is rolled up. "We're not at a hospital."

That's not something you want to hear when you wake up in dire need of medical attention. "Where are we then?"

"Running errands?" she offers sheepishly.

Percy huffs. "Try again."

Annabeth removes the paper towel and shows off her arm, or rather, the fresh ink on her bicep. It's a lot simpler than the snake tattoo on her thigh—just some line art of a sun. A sun of all things! Hasn't she learned her lesson getting tattoos representative of other people's godly fathers?

"Seriously?" Percy asks. "We were in a life or death situation and you took me to a tattoo shop? How long have we been here? Hours?" So much for assuming Annabeth might be responsible enough to take him to a hospital.

"Hey, listen, you were knocked out pretty bad-"

"Hell yeah, I was!" he says, raising his voice.

"Percy, the way you were just thrown into the-"

"Yeah," he says. "I was there! And apparently, you care more about getting tattoos for people who left you than about my life!"

"Actually, I was-"

"Don't," he says, waving her off. "Just don't. You're practically useless anyway."

He stands up and takes his bag from the otherwise empty chair on the other side of Annabeth. He's had enough of this. He's had enough of unconsciousness and Dutch windmills, and his crazy ex-girlfriend, and tattoos, and not being with his mom, and more than anything, he has had enough of the fucking Netherlands.

"Percy?" Annabeth says.

"What."

"Can I use the New Rome credit card?" Without waiting for an answer, she unzips the backpack. Percy has to arch his back to compensate for her height.

She pays for the tattoo she got instead of going to therapy like a normal person. Gods, Percy would like to see a psychoanalysis of her.

"Woah," he says under his breath. He needs to sit back down. Chair. Where is the chair? He lowers his butt to sit in a chair, even though he has no idea if there is a chair to catch him.

The chair wobbles a little upon impact, so he centers himself. At least, he thinks it's a chair. He isn't sure at this point. The ground is spinning. His head is pounding. The skull on the wall smiles at him menacingly, as skulls do, and then it winks and erupts into flames, gone without a trace.

"You are such an idiot sometimes," she says, but it's not as genuine as it should be given their current relationship. She's calling him an idiot in the same way she might call someone else handsome. When did she change into her Camp Half-Blood t-shirt and why does it fit her all of a sudden? Where did her piercings go?

And then everything's back the way it should be. Well, not exactly the way it should be. Annabeth is still a hot mess, dressed in a ruined Hooters t-shirt and booty shorts. Her hands are in Percy's backpack.

"Are you eating my sharks?" he asks weakly.

"No," she says, popping a blue gummy shark into her mouth. She holds one out for him. "You need to eat real food. You took quite the hit back there."

"How long was I out?"

She winces. "You... You don't want to know."

Percy has a lot more questions, including Where the hell have you dragged my body?

"Please tell me you didn't turn this quest into that Tom Hanks movie," he begs. Images of his limp body spending the day with his ex-girlfriend invade his imagination. He tries to make it stop, but it persists nevertheless. The Sharpie over his eyelids barely casts the illusion that he might be awake. His limp body sits slack on a barstool next to Annabeth while she yells over a soccer game and downs the beer she ordered for him when she thinks no one is looking. Then, she drags him into the tattoo shop. She props him up in the waiting room and tells the teenager getting her ears pierced that her friend had too much to drink.

"Okay," she says, not denying that she may have dragged his body around like in that Tom Hanks movie. "Just eat something so we can get somewhere safe. It's almost dark out."

So that explains how long Percy might have been out. It was mid-afternoon at the latest when they started tracking the boar. If it's almost dark now...

"That's going to bruise," Annabeth says, matter of factly.

"Yeah, thanks to you," he says. He's allowed to be mad at the person who did little to nothing to help him.

She looks like she wants to say something more, but then shuts her mouth, seeming to have decided against it. Nothing she can say right now would help her case, yet for some reason, Percy wishes she'd say something to defend herself.

Still feeling weak, he holds out his hand.

Instead of helping him to his feet, she puts the credit card from New Rome in his palm. "You know," she says, "'cause I'm so useless."

As soon as those words fall from his lips, he regrets it. That crossed a line. Nobody's completely useless, especially not Annabeth considering she probably killed yet another cloned monster.

And now he has to deal with some much-deserved consequences.