CW: Referenced SA of a minor
Annabeth's nightmares always start in the same dark alleyway. She's seven years old again, itchy from a constant fear that spiders may be lingering on her arms and face. Her arms are weak from dragging a hammer behind her, and her legs are cold because her pajama pants are too small.
It's at this moment—both in her dreams and the chilly day it happened—that she resigns herself to a hiding spot behind a garbage can, with a pizza box for a roof. That's why the smell of onion and pepperoni pizza makes her a little uneasy, although she's not sure why someone would ever order a flavor combination that smells so similar to body odor.
She's exhausted, so exhausted that her fear of the monsters tracking her down is almost outweighed by her drowsiness, but she can't go to sleep. She can't rest until she's safe, or more likely, dead.
But even a pizza box shelter and a hammer for a weapon can't protect her from every monster. That's why she has her wits. With a few carefully selected words, she can trick a monster into letting her live a little longer.
Even wit has its limits though. The Greek stories she stole from her father's study had pictures of all kinds of different monsters, and so did the Norse ones too, but never had she seen a monster that looked so human.
She should have trusted her instincts that night; 'no more monsters' means no more monsters. Annabeth was exhausted, and her wits weren't about her, which is why she trusted the monster's deceit with no questions and even less hesitation. We could use a fighter like you. What sane person says that to a little kid?
And this is only how the nightmare begins. Sometimes, he gets straight to the point, but most of the time, it begins like a cleverly placed trap she can never avoid falling into, no matter how lightly she steps.
His appearance is a little inconsistent. This time, his eyes are gold and his cheek is intercepted by a massive scar he got on the one measly quest he was granted. It's not accurate, but then again, this is a nightmare.
"I'll tell you what, Annabeth," he says. "You're pretty fierce. We could use a fighter like you." Again, who the fuck thinks that's an okay thing to say to a kid who should be in the second grade?
Obedient to the nightmare, she asks, "You could?" Her voice is filled with childlike wonder because—she cannot stress this enough—Annabeth is a child.
And then his voice turns a little more sinister. Well, more sinister than usual. "I could also look for a human sacrifice so you can be whole again. A strong demigod should do."
"Yes," says Thalia, who never speaks in these dreams. "But you have to remember we only have a week left to carry out this task. I need more beasts. The monsters you give me can hold off the others. While we pursue-"
"Your beasts fail every time," Luke continues.
Annabeth is so fucking confused right now, she isn't even having a panic attack. She tries to use her voice, but something's stopping her. Maybe this is one of those dreams where she can't talk, or maybe there's this voice in her head telling her that this information might not be a figment of her subconscious.
"A trick," says Thalia. "You do know who could be convinced to aid our cause."
"I do," Luke says, resigned.
"So swallow your pride," Thalia insists. "You know he owes us."
"But he's so... so uncontrollable."
"If we don't have the advantage by the time the demigods get to Prague, we're—what is it people say nowadays?—Ah! Screwed. We'll be screwed."
It's like when everyone at the lunch table has an inside joke they won't let you in on because it would take too much time to explain, but you've got to know anyway because what if they're making fun of you? Annabeth just wants to scream, WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?
Luke looks back down at her, and Thalia disappears back into the shadows of the dream.
"You've gotten so strong, Annabeth," Luke says, stroking her face with his cold hand. Ah, so the nightmare is back to its regularly scheduled programming.
This is the part where he pets her hair like she's an animal.
Here's the part where he gaslights her into thinking the gods are cruel and uncaring and to be fair, he's right.
Here's some more attempted gaslighting where he almost had her convinced that Thalia's time as a tree was Grover's fault. It was not Grover's fault.
Now he's going to ask her for a kiss on the cheek because he's gross.
Blah, blah, blah.
"You have the most beautiful eyes I have ever seen in my life." That's new.
It seems that the dream shifted while she had her head buried between her knees. The alleyway is gone, and in its place is a cozy apartment.
A mirror on the wall shows an older version of herself; she's the same age she is now, but there's no tattoo peeking out from under her silk navy blue nightgown, and she has no piercings except for a pair of owl earrings. Around her neck is a coral pendant.
If dreams had smells, this one would smell like red wine and... whipped cream?
Annabeth hasn't gotten the whipped cream out in a long time. Not since...
"Come off it, Wise Girl," a new voice chuckles. "You and I both know this can of whipped cream was not purchased for hot chocolate."
Automatically, she replies, "So? Whatcha gonna do about it?"
Percy swipes his finger across his clean-shaven jawline and makes a show out of cleaning it off... with his tongue. "It's payback time, Wise Girl."
She squeals like a little girl and lays back on the bed, her hair fanning out around her like a halo. So this is a third-person perspective dream now? Annabeth should just sit back and let herself enjoy a dream that's not about Luke, but she can't help but be dumbstruck by the absurdity of this situation.
Then again, she loves whipped cream.
Percy climbs on top of her, a devious look on his face and a can of Reddi-Wip in his hand. The two of them giggle like teenagers as he sprays the treat on her shoulders, her neck, her lips...
***
Annabeth wakes with a start, immediately reaching for her lip. Relieved to find her piercings still in place, she sits back in her seat and looks out the window. There's not exactly much to look at on the train ride. Now and then she sees a road sign but besides that...
Tree.
Tree.
Tree.
"Are you good?" Percy asks from the seat next to her. "You kind of jumped awake there. Bad dream?"
Percy. She just had a sex dream about Percy fucking Jackson. Her ex-boyfriend. The one she sort of hates. The one she's mad at for making assumptions about her character and calling her useless. She just had a sex dream about him.
And she can't say it wasn't a refreshing change from her usual nightmarish lineup.
"Yeah," she stammers. "All good."
He holds out a bag of candy. "Do you want a gummy shark?"
"Thanks," she says, remembering the strange dialogue between Luke and Thalia. She's been going to sleep drunk the past couple of days, so the last time she had her nightmare was probably a little over a week ago when she still lived in LA with Will.
Now, she's in Europe on a train to Germany with her ex, and the dream is different. Namely, the dream features him.
"Do you want to talk about that dream?" Percy asks.
Of course, demigod dreams are never just dreams. This is common knowledge. You have a dream and then you tell everyone about it because—holy shit—what could it possibly mean and how can we make this about somebody else?
Read: How can we—Chiron and Mr. D—make your dreams about Percy Jackson?
She can't get that weird thing about monsters and tricks out of her head. That's important, and she needs to share it, even if Percy is getting on her last nerve.
"Alright," she says. She starts with the part about Luke and Thalia in the alleyway, and how there were lines taken straight out of her childhood, but they quickly evolved into some other kind of exchange.
"Huh," Percy says. "Is there a reason why Luke and Thalia?"
"Nope." Annabeth hopes her tone doesn't sound too suspicious, but she can't have Percy performing a deep dive into her mind.
"Anything else?" he asks.
"Hmm..." she says, trying to come up with the best way to approach this. She's not about to unpack her trauma on this train, but she should share what details she can. Anything can be helpful.
So she fudges some of the details. Sue her. She skips over her personal issue and to the next part, except then she realizes that the next part is embarrassing.
Annabeth fudges those details too.
"And you have no idea what you were doing laying in bed covered in whipped cream?" Percy asks.
She laughs that one off. "I've been hanging around you for a week. Let's just say potential partners aren't really lining up for a piece of this."
He doesn't seem to find that funny.
"I mean," she says, "this stuff about a demigod sacrifice is super freaky. We should probably focus on that."
Although he doesn't seem convinced, Percy puts his gummy sharks away and says, "Sure."
"The best thing we can do about that one is going for safety in numbers," Annabeth says. "If we stick together, we can be sure that one of us won't get, uh, snatched." She grins, hoping he can see through her plea. Please don't leave me alone.
"Easier said than done," Percy says.
Annabeth scowls, but there's no disagreeing with that one. How could she stand to spend every waking moment of her life with this guy at one time? Sure, she doesn't exactly hate him, but it's like living with a bad roommate. There's this constant anxious feeling in her stomach and she flinches every time he moves.
"So what's our next move?" Percy asks. "Should we hunker down and stay put?"
"No," she says. "Something's happening in Prague."
He sighs. "I know this is no fault of yours, but really? We were deciding between a train to Munich and a train to Prague. This dream couldn't have happened sooner?"
"Oh, sorry," she says, throwing her hands up in defense. "I'll just take that up with Hypnos."
"It's alright," Percy says. "We can just grab a cab when we get there, or get another train."
"I feel kind of guilty draining New Rome's credit card."
"You didn't feel guilty when you got a tattoo the other day."
"Shoot," Annabeth says. "Can you reach my bag? I have to put Aquiphor on the new ink." It's her own damn fault for getting a new tattoo as soon as the old one healed.
Percy stands up, stumbling as the train makes a turn. Instead of making sure her ex doesn't fall, Annabeth holds onto his backpack, checking that the gummy sharks haven't spilled. They haven't—thank goodness—not that Annabeth wouldn't have eaten them if they just spilled into the backpack. There's an important distinction between dropping your snacks on the floor and not dropping your snacks on the floor.
"Thank you," she says, taking the Aquiphor and stepping over Percy as if nothing happened.
She makes her way down the aisle and into the questionable bathroom. If this train makes another sudden movement she can't say she'll be able to recover from falling into a toilet that doesn't flush.
There's a mirror in the bathroom, so she takes advantage of the opportunity to wipe a smudge of eyeliner clean. Was she crying in her sleep again? She pushes this thought away as she dabs at the mascara under her other eye. Nah, she just... fell asleep with her face against the headrest.
"What the hell was that?" she whispers to herself. She can't shake that dream. That's not how it's supposed to go. She has been having the same dream since she was eighteen years old; she could probably recite it from memory. During the dream, she's picked up off the street by... by him, and then it happens all over again. There are no creepy voices that don't belong to their bodies, and Percy certainly is not invited to the party.
Even if Percy has red wine and whipped cream. Shit, especially if Percy has red wine and whipped cream! She cannot be having sex dreams about her ex-boyfriend.
What's worse than having sex dreams about him is the implications of the whole demigod sacrifice thing. If they're looking for a strong demigod, Percy and Annabeth are both pretty good options. Well, good options if Pothos wants to take a sword to the gut, but then again, they haven't quested together in ten years. What if they're out of practice?
Annabeth's affirmational voice says, You're the toughest demigods in the world. Together, you're unstoppable.
Another second voice adds, Yeah, especially if there's whipped cream involved.
You've been training all your lives for this. Now that you've reached full maturity, no monster would dare attempt to face you, especially not together, says the first voice.
Ha! Mature is what's gonna happen if there's a can of whipped cream in that backpack of Percy's.
"Both of you shut the fuck up," Annabeth mutters. She must be going crazy. Yeah, that's it. She'll take some more risks fighting, and that's always worked in her favor.
Despite all that, she knows if worse comes to worst, it'll be her getting... sacrificed. She can't handle the guilt of letting Percy die, especially not after she put him through years of despair when she broke up with him—not that breaking up with him was a bad thing to do. That was a good decision for both of their well-being. Annabeth needed space, and Percy deserved someone who could take care of herself—not that she couldn't take care of herself. It's just that Percy's fatal flaw is loyalty and that started to project into their relationship in a way that made Annabeth feel smothered, and she does not like to feel smothered. Smothering is bad. People who smother other people don't listen to what you want, and then they tell you what they think you want, and that's not good.
Annabeth keeps telling herself that yes, she'll offer herself up to Pothos if she gets in a tight spot because she can't handle a guilty conscience, but that dream... The dream never happens like that. Still, she can't say she's feeling any differently towards Percy. Yes, she's had time to notice the way that his t-shirts hug him a little too closely and how his jawline could probably slice butter. However, that does not mean she's into him. She's in the middle of a dry spell; that has to be it.
Her decision is made though. In the most unlikely and dire of circumstances, Annabeth will give herself up to Pothos and her one-night stand so that Percy can go and live his life. It's not like she has much of a life to go back home to. Percy has his mom, his friends at camp, his stepdad, his little sister, and a job that isn't taboo. Annabeth has a refrigerator full of sangria and that's about it.
She's starting to wonder if the amount of time she's been in this bathroom is becoming suspicious, so she washes her hands and twists the door handle.
At first, she thinks it isn't opening because she enabled some kind of extra lock. She's no child of Hermes, but when the little window turns green, that means the bathroom is unlocked.
Fuck, it's one of her biggest fears, other than spiders and a few select other things she'd rather not get into.
She's locked in this bathroom. She didn't bring her phone—not worth the risk of dropping it in the toilet—so she can't even text Percy for help.
Annabeth is still feeling dignified enough to work this out on her own, so she uses her body weight to bash the door open and then finds the train empty, Percy included.
So there goes that whole 'safety in numbers' thing she was going for.
And then there's the barking.
Yes, Annabeth is a dog person, but the last thing she wants to deal with right now is a stray dog running at her from across a train car.
"Hang on, hang on," she says to the snarling chocolate lab. "I'll just grab my phone and..." And do what? Call animal control from a moving vehicle?
Besides, the aura this thing is giving off isn't quite godly, but it's enough to tell Annabeth the dog hasn't broken out of the Humane Society. Now would be a great time to have her throwing knives on her, except she put those away in her bag with her sword. Her chopsticks weren't exactly made for long-distance throwing or any throwing at all for that matter.
She holds her hand out like a character in a Jurassic Park movie because that seems like the appropriate thing to do when facing a hostile animal.
"Steady boy," she says, reaching for a lost Nutrigrain bar that hit the ground. It's still in the wrapper—perfect for her plan.
Annabeth holds the granola bar above her head and shakes it around, the crumbs working as a perfect attention grabber. "You want this? Huh?"
The dog does not wag its tail, instead crouching and barring its teeth. Annabeth can't kill a dog. That's not a cool thing to do, even if it might be one of Pothos and Marty McFly's monsters. Then again, if she killed the dog, she could just tell the mortals that she ran it over with her car or that she found it dead on the side of the road. The only real consequence would be the emotional turmoil that comes with killing something that could easily be mistaken for a common household pet.
So she freezes.
"This isn't real, this isn't real," she chants under her breath.
Its eyes are so... so emotive like it has a personal vendetta against Annabeth. The way its blue eyes narrow at her isn't so monstrous. It's... It's human.
The first thing that comes to mind is to throw her granola bar at it, so that's what she does.
And then her body is thrown against a row of chairs. At first, she thinks that the dog attacked and is now chewing on her finally healed ankle, but that's not the case.
The train comes to a screeching stop, throwing Annabeth and the dog against opposite sides of the train car.
It takes a minute to get over the new sensations of pain in her ankle, and then another for the spotting in her vision to go away. The situation is actually looking optimistic. She can gather her bearings, and climb out the window using one of the provided emergency exits. Ah, mortals and their safety precautions.
And then when she climbs out the window, she'll have to search the rest of the train for Percy, because again, there's no way he's going to be that demigod sacrifice. There's no way she's letting either of them become a demigod sacrifice.
The only flaw in her plan is that she doesn't get to go through with it because the dog recovers a lot faster than her. Annabeth feels like a fox being hunted by a hound. Holy shit, could this thing kill her if it wanted to? She's heard horror stories of kids being bitten by dogs, but those are just kids with baby fat on their faces to sort of protect them.
She braces herself for the impact, raising her good foot to hopefully hold it off a little longer. Maybe a few extra seconds is enough for a miracle.
They say your life flashes before your eyes when you're about to die. If that's true, then Annabeth doesn't have much of a life to flash. She closes her eyes in anticipation, but there's nothing behind them—only darkness. Isn't she supposed to see all the important people in her life? If that's the case, then where the hell is Will?
This isn't working, so she opens her eyes, just in time to watch the impressive leap the dog makes from the carpeted floor to the seat, although she supposes the train being stopped makes that easier.
This is it, she thinks, not even registering the pain of a tooth sinking into the flesh just beneath her eye. Oh shit, people are going to be able to see her wrecked face when they throw her on the fire, aren't they?
Will people even burn her in her shroud since she hasn't been back to Camp Half-Blood in several years? Do they even still have her shroud? If it weren't for Frank and Hazel's wedding, Chiron and the campers might have assumed she died and burned her shroud already.
Annabeth's tasting blood now; it's metallic and definitely hers, hopefully not combined with too much dog drool. Sure, she could quite possibly be about to die, and she can't say she ever wanted her blood to be her last meal, but does it have to be mixed with dog drool? That's fucking disgusting.
This summer at Camp Half-Blood, the bead will be in her honor—probably a picture of an owl or something stupid—to remember Annabeth Chase: a war hero who hasn't done anything in ten years besides have a lot of kinky sex and mix a lot of drinks. Maybe Will can say something like, "Everyone liked her drinks, and the sex was loud, so I can say with confidence that she was a skilled lover!" Fuck, he would say something like that.
And then all the physical sensations of being attacked by a dog that Annabeth hadn't realized left her body come back all at once. Her face hurts, there's a breeze on her calf where the stupid thing's nails tore her sweatpants, and she can't tell the difference between the blood and tears running down her face.
The celestial bronze edge of Percy's sword cuts down the middle of the dog. Annabeth isn't sure what she's expecting, but there's a pool of black goo beneath the dog's limp body. Some of the fluids got on the legs of Percy's jeans, and for some reason, Annabeth feels bad about that, so she apologizes. At least, she thinks she does. Everything is starting to go fuzzy; her vision is spotty and her voice sounds like when she and Will were kids playing in the lake at Camp Half-Blood, trying to see if they could understand each other's speech underwater.
The last thing she remembers before passing out is watching the raw anger in Percy's ocean eyes morph into concern when he turns to face Annabeth.