Reyna and Annabeth finally found a safe place to sleep, underneath a freeway overpass. As the sun set, it was cold, but relatively dry. Their parkas provided most of the warmth that they would need.
Reyna sat a careful six inches from Annabeth, who hugged herself for warmth. Annabeth frowned when she noticed that Reyna had pulled a familiar-looking thermos from their bags.
"Hot chocolate has caffeine in it, which interferes with the ability to fall and stay asleep," said Annabeth. "You shouldn't be drinking that so close to bedtime."
"I'll take first watch," said Reyna.
Annabeth noticed Reyna smile slightly. She liked that Annabeth showed concern for her.
"Why were you so defensive when we met Sulis Minerva?"
"Because you could've been killed! It could've been another monster!" Reyna exclaimed. Then she seemed to remember something else. "And I don't want to give you a piggyback ride all the way across the country. I would have to go back to camp and explain why I got a quester killed."
The rain came down in sheets.
Annabeth sighed. "All my life, I thought I would finally be happy once I'd finished questing. Maybe settling down at Camp Jupiter would be a nice retirement from war. It isn't, though. I'm always on edge. It makes me feel like I didn't do a good enough job. I don't deserve happiness."
Reyna blew wisps of steam from her hot chocolate. "That's something that daughters of war goddesses share in common."
"What if quests have broken our minds in unforeseeable ways? What if years of fighting have made domestic life impossible?"
Reyna took her time drinking hot chocolate. Finally she admitted, "That's plausible."
"Maybe that's part of the reason that I called this quest. On one hand, I desperately want to be able to live in the moment. This month, I didn't remember that I'd fallen into Tartarus at all. Before, my mind wouldn't stop replaying what I saw in Tartarus. I saw my friends dying. My worst fears played themselves out in my mind constantly. Now it's like I can hardly remember the past at all. I just feel uneasy and worthless all the time."
Reyna took a long time to think before she answered. "I don't know about your situation, but I'll share mine. Maybe that will help you."
Annabeth waited with bated breath. She could feel something electric in the air between them.
"I felt worthless for a long time. I admired my sister, so I modeled myself after her.
"I thought I'd be happy if I could be more like Hylla. But in the process, I'd gotten my position in society mixed up with my self-worth. I joined Camp Jupiter, but that didn't make me happy. Maybe that was because I was a soldier, a worthless person, but I promised myself I'd be happy when I became a praetor. Eventually I got political power, but I still wasn't happy. I thought I needed to quest for Camp Jupiter to find happiness. I was miserable on that quest, but I got myself through tougher parts by imagining how happy I'd be once I got back.
"I was in the middle of a swamp, staring at the night sky, close to death, when the truth hit me. I realized that I sacrificed my happiness every day for the idea of happiness in the future. Sometimes you need to work really hard today to reap the benefits of your hard work tomorrow. But delayed gratification is a double-edged sword. I had always worked hard, but I had yet to see the benefits of that work. I had yet to be happy. When I got back to Camp Jupiter, I wasn't going to be happy; I never was. All that would happen was that I'd feel dissatisfied for this or that not being better. Then I'd sign myself up for a new quest, imagining that's what would make me happy. If I always put off happiness for the future, then when would I ever be happy?
"So I changed. I climbed out of that swamp, I returned to Camp Jupiter, and I swore to myself that I would make changes in my day-to-day life. And I did. I made time to be grateful. I made new friends. I focused on positives in my day instead of self-criticism.
"For a while, it really worked. I'd changed the way I thought about success and failure. Success is all in your head, Annabeth. So I focused on tiny victories instead of nitpicking everything in my life, looking for all my failures. I stopped obsessing about the small stuff. I changed how I thought about my life. And over time, I was a lot less miserable.
"Then a new problem arose. I remember I couldn't sleep. I felt anxious about something. I couldn't put my finger on what it was. Most of the friends I'd made at Camp Jupiter were...hm, very Roman. Lots of their mortal parents were, uh, European descended."
"White," interjected Annabeth. "I'm from Virginia. I lived in New York. I noticed."
"Most people...Yeah. White. Most of my friends were in relationships and I wasn't. I mean, I'm from Puerto Rico, yet a lot of people didn't think of me as American, even my friends who should've known better. It bothered me. Most of my friends who were girls dated exclusively boys and I...Gods, every time they asked me if I'd found 'a man' or 'a boyfriend' yet, it made me so nervous, like what if they found out I liked girls too? What if they thought I was a loser for being single?
"I finally realized that was what made me feel so awful, so I sulked for a bit, maybe two weeks. Then I remembered something from my past, a resource on Camp Jupiter's college campus. I took some time to build up the courage to use that resource.
"It surprised me how much mental effort it took. But after a while I was ready. I braced myself for the worst and I visited the Sappho Community Center at school."
That made Annabeth giggle. Reyna jumped slightly, like she was afraid that Annabeth had laughed at her.
When she realized she'd said something kind of funny, she half-smiled. "I finally met some of the most friendly, inclusive people at Camp Jupiter. They embraced me for who I was, even though I wasn't ready to tell anyone. I knew that they understood me in ways that some of my friends never could. And they accepted me. They liked me.
"After that meeting, just the knowledge that a community existed for people like, well, like me, made me feel human.
"I realized I'd felt like a failure for being different. That's ridiculous.
"The anxiety that I couldn't name before was lifted off my shoulders. I was relieved. A small part of my self-worth that I had denied myself returned. My heart wasn't fixed, but it was made less broken on that day, by that group of people."
Annabeth hugged Reyna. Reyna tensed. Annabeth noticed and slowly returned to the safe distance of six inches. "Sorry."
"It's fine. You just surprised me."
They went back to listening to the hum of highway traffic and rain. Annabeth knew that if she said anything else, Reyna could start to cry. Seeing Reyna on the brink of tears made her want to cry too. She'd never seen Reyna be anything except stoic.
A large truck passed by overhead. The entire bridge rattled.
Annabeth wrapped herself tighter in the parka. She missed being at home. She missed Percy.
Reyna was the first to break the silence. "Do you mind if I ask you a personal question, Annabeth?"
"Not at all."
"What exactly did you see in Tartarus?"
Did it matter? Annabeth wondered how she could possibly conceive of a way to describe the horrors she'd faced to someone who had no idea what it was like.
She began wringing her hands together. "When I fell, I thought I was going to die. I saw horrible things, so many horrible things, that no one should have to experience. And it made me understand monsters' hatred of demigods. Monsters don't truly die. They are vanquished by heroes, millennium after millennium, forced to endure unbearable torture, until they resurface to be murdered again. If I spent a year in that place, I would turn into a monster too. I would hate demigods. I would want to exterminate demigods if it meant I wouldn't have to go back there."
"That doesn't make it okay for a three thousand year-old monster to kill twelve year-old demigods."
"Their trauma explains their actions. It doesn't excuse monsters."
"Or define them."
"Or define them," echoed Annabeth. "Sometimes I wonder if empathizing with monsters will lead me to become one."
"Never."
"Did Nico ever tell you about Bob?" Annabeth's voice was strained. She could feel tears coming. She didn't care. "He sacrificed himself so that we could open the Doors of Death. I think about him all the time. If there was anyone whose death I felt truly responsible for, someone that made me feel like a monster—"
They fell silent for a time.
Annabeth thought about empathy. If she were a monster, it would be so easy to excuse killing demigods. Demigods got nice afterlives. So killing a demigod, even multiple demigods, to prevent her own suffering, was a good thing. It was virtuous. She was fast tracking dead demigods to Elysium.
Of course, she knew the suffering that came along with death all too well. But if she were a monster, it would be easy to ignore that too. It disturbed her that she could understand where they came from, literally.
Chiron had told her that monsters were created from the hatred that bubbled beneath the surface of Western civilization. Thus, monsters were simply manifestations of hatred.
How did she know that the punishment itself wasn't creating hatred and barbarism? Dostoevsky had written, The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons. If that was true, then the Greeks were monsters too. The gods wanted to make monsters suffer. She was the legacy of that cruelty.
No one had ever listened to Annabeth talk about empathizing with monsters or her fear of becoming one. It felt good to be heard. It felt healing to be heard. She could only imagine what coming out felt like to Reyna.
It must have been one in the morning. Annabeth buried herself in her sleeping bag. She started crying, hidden from Reyna's line of vision. She wasn't even sure why she cried at all. She cried until her eyelids grew heavy. She knew Reyna pretended not to notice her quiet sobbing. She wasn't sure how that made her feel. Maybe Reyna had silent tears of her own.
The rain broke. Annabeth slept soundly for the first time in months.
~~~
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