Holding hands with Percy and laughing at his fish puns was never so hard, even towards the end of their relationship when Annabeth realized that the puns weren't so funny. It's not that hard to pretend to be happy.
So you can't really blame her for thinking it would be easy ten years later. They're friends now. There's no black cloud reminding her that she's procrastinating on breaking his heart, and there is no sexual tension.
There's definitely no sexual tension, no matter how much Pothos thinks he's messing with her mind. Annabeth is really starting to think that was just a bluff. There's nobody there—just her own existential dread.
Her biggest challenge at the moment is trying to get over Percy's nervous clammy hands. To be fair, it makes sense that he's so nervous. She can't imagine how she would feel if she had to trust her ex to guide her through the ins and outs of alcohol consumption.
They take a seat at the bar next to a bunch of men with beer bellies accompanied by women who will be buying their souvenir t-shirts and driving them home.
The bartender, a woman with gauge piercings and short spiky brown hair hands her a menu. Annabeth is definitely getting a vibe from her. Curse this tourist trap for making her pretend to be hopelessly in love with her ex-boyfriend! Shit, what if she runs into someone she knows? Annabeth hasn't been around the world, but she's certainly been around.
She looks through the menu for something that'll be good for Percy, something that won't get him super drunk but that won't taste like dog water. If he's going to drink against his better judgment, he should at least like it. At least, she thinks he should. This guy deserves to have a good time.
"Percy," she whispers, so as not to make the situation obvious. "Maybe you should go for the-"
"I'll try this one, please!" he says, passing his menu to the bartender. He looks quite proud for someone who just ordered an IPA.
"You have got to be shittin' me," Annabeth mutters under her breath. "Yeah, can I get this orange one," she says, pointing to a beer she wouldn't dare try to pronounce. Her brain is wired for Ancient Greek, not German.
"What?" Percy asks like he just got smacked with a menu for no reason.
"I thought you were going to let me help you," she says.
"I can order my own drink," he says.
She rolls her eyes. "Really? 'Cause that's an IPA," she says, pointing to the cloudy drink that was just dropped in front of him.
"Should I just pretend I know what that means?" He picks up the glass and takes an experimental sniff.
"It's a highly hopped beer with more than—what the hell, you won't know what that means," she says. "In a nutshell? Higher alcohol concentration."
"Oh," he says, looking back down at the beer. And then his eyes widen as he realizes. "Oh!" This poor guy is too dumb for his own good.
"That's alright," Annabeth says, pushing her beer down the bar.
"What are you doing?"
"We can switch. Can't have you getting drunk this early," she says.
"For real?"
She takes a sip from her ale before letting Percy have it. That is not a craft beer. That is just Blue Moon, except warm. Beer should not be warm.
Percy doesn't know that.
She takes a sip from his IPA, and it's good, but more alcohol than Percy should be drinking with little to no tolerance.
"Okay," Annabeth says, "make sure you take slow sips, not too much at a time."
He nods and presses the glass to his lips.
"Don't crinkle your nose; I know that face you make when you don't like things." Their cover is not going to be blown just because Percy isn't used to the taste.
"I don't not like it," Percy says. He drinks a little more. "It's just... different."
Annabeth continues to walk him through her beer crash course: eat those bar peanuts as a last resort, but maybe order fries or something first, try to keep the alcohol content at a low percentage, don't leave your drink unattended, and of course-
"Beer before liquor, never sicker."
"Excuse me?" Percy asks.
"You heard me."
Annabeth is in for the longest bar crawl of her life.
***
By the third stop, Annabeth regrets taking that IPA from Percy. She's not drunk per se, although she's definitely reached the healthy buzz she likes to get in her before going out clubbing with Will. It makes her fun and flirty and gives her the confidence to pull out that dance move that makes her little leather top threaten to flash her date.
Fun and flirty is not the vibe she's going for, and with good reason, she left that leather top at home. It's probably in New York with the rest of her stuff that Will offered to hold for her. Hold for her where? She has no idea, but if retrieving her clubbing wardrobe and other personal items involves going to Camp Half-Blood and retelling a bunch of war stories that involve an Annabeth Chase with a special interest in architecture, she's out.
Oh fuck, Drew Tanaka might see her clothes. If that's the case, Annabeth hopes she dies on this quest because she does not want to have an embarrassing conversation about a few select outfits with that particular daughter of Aphrodite.
Percy is on his way to what Annabeth likes to call The Wasteland. She can practically see the stick coming out of his ass with every glass he drinks. Under normal circumstances, she'd be pretty happy for him. He deserves to let loose a little. However, this isn't the time or place to do so.
Well, this should be both the time and the place, but knowing that Pothos may be looming somewhere waiting for his chance to strike is sort of cramping their style.
Annabeth orders a basket of fries and a glass of water for her—yikes—fiance. That's the story, anyway. Her name is Giselle and she and her husband Peter Johnson canceled their wedding last minute so they could go to Europe for their—gag—honeymoon, and they'll elope when they get back to Canada.
They were American grad students studying abroad, and her fake name was going to be Victoria, but Tipsy Percy decided it would be better if they were Canadian circus acrobats madly in love despite their parents' disapproval.
"C'mon, Peter," she says, passing the bowl of bar peanuts to Percy. He needs to be eating a lot more if they've got more stops to hit.
"The last place had pretzels," he whines.
Annabeth rolls her eyes. She's not like this when she's drunk, is she? "Babe, you have to put something in your stomach."
"I don't wanna..."
"Yeah, you do," she says. "Do you want to get yourself killed?"
"Zebediah says you're a-"
"Don't finish that." Annabeth cannot take shit from a starfish. "Seriously, Percy, are you feeling alright?"
"I like this," he says, tracing the fresh laurel leaf tattoo on her arm. His touch is light and intimate, and it's just Percy, so she shouldn't be uncomfortable. She's not uncomfortable. She's just a little thrown off. That's all. Everything's fine.
Annabeth pushes his hand away, just in time for the basket of fries to arrive. "There," she says, pushing the basket closer to Percy. "Eat."
She unlocks her phone to make sure Will still has her location. Can he track her from all the way across the ocean? Hell, what's he going to do if she finds herself getting into trouble? It's not like he can just teleport.
Well, she thinks, his boyfriend can shadow travel. That's certainly a plus.
But just in case. She won't bother her best friend unless there's an emergency, like, an honest-to-gods emergency where something is on fire and someone has lost a limb. Percy being a little bit drunk is not an emergency. At least, it isn't an emergency that Annabeth can't handle herself.
She takes some fries for herself; it's the least she deserves for taking care of her lightweight travel partner. Besides, the tour guide is getting increasingly hotter. She can't slow down because that would be suspicious, but she can put some solid food in her stomach to offset the effects. Percy, on the other hand, might be past the point of no return.
"Why don't you go every other?" Annabeth suggests, passing her glass of water to Percy. Drunk Percy isn't a bad guy; he actually seems like a very friendly guy that she might bring home from the beach club.
Mmm, surfers.
You stop that, she scolds herself.
Surfer boys with washboard abs and stubble that tickles your neck.
Stop that right now! She cannot be having these thoughts—not when a very unavailable drunk surfer-esque guy with stubble and abs is right next to her.
Surfers and the way they fold their hands behind their heads when you boss 'em around.
Annabeth chuckles. Surfers are really easy to boss around in a totally hot and consensual way.
No! Bad Annabeth! Down! Sit! Stay!
She reaches for her water—the one she gave to Percy—and downs the whole thing in one gulp. It is not cold. Someone needs to get on Europeans about not putting ice in their water. That is a crime against humanity. A girl deserves a cold glass of water on a hot day.
Annabeth jumps when a cold clammy hand touches her shoulder.
"How're y'all doing over here?" the tour guide asks. She could have sworn his hair was an auburn kind of color at the beginning of the tour. Maybe it's just a trick of the light, but his hair looks pink.
Then she sees his eyes have that same pinkish tint and she can't decide if she should try to kiss him.
And that's the final clue she needs to know that this is Pothos. The enemy is right in front of her asking if she's having a good time on a fucking brewery tour of Prague.
She needs to answer in a way that implies she's stone-cold sober. "Uh, yeah. All good," she says. "Thanks." She turns back to Percy and acts like they're in the middle of some intelligent conversation. Maybe Pothos will get the hint and walk away so that Annabeth can have some space to formulate a plan. She can't kill a minor deity, but she can foil his plan, so if she can catch him monologuing like he likes to do, she's set.
"I am having the time of my life!" Percy shouts, drawing a little too much attention to himself.
Or maybe Pothos won't walk away and give Annabeth the space she needs. "You two seem like a fun couple."
Annabeth bites her tongue to keep herself from correcting him.
"You might like to go on our club tour," Pothos says, not unlike a regular tour guide trying to scam them into spending more money on tourist traps. It's Pothos. Annabeth just knows it.
"Holy shit, that sounds fun!" Percy says. "Can we go? I've never been clubbing!"
Now the question is whether or not they're going to go on this club tour; there's no fucking way it's not a trap. Annabeth just can't figure out if the risks are going to outweigh the information they could get.
"We're going to need a minute to think about it; we'd have to uh, cancel our dinner reservations," she says to Pothos. It's a terrible lie; she and Percy have been picking at bar food for the past few hours, so there's no possible way they could be hungry for dinner. Hell, the fries sitting in front of her don't even taste like anything anymore.
"Annabeth," Percy whines.
She shushes him. "I thought my name was Giselle."
"Nah, it's Victoria."
"It was Victoria until you changed it to Giselle," she says.
"Yeah, but—Oh." His beer teeters over the side of the bar and gets on his pants.
There's no point in arguing Annabeth's incognito persona; both sound like strippers' names anyway. She reaches for some cocktail napkins and dabs at the wet spot just above Percy's knee. "It won't stain," she explains, "but you don't want it to get sticky."
"It'll be pretty hard to dance at the club with a sticky leg, I guess," he says. Oh god, his speech is slurring. This is not a guy who should be going on a club tour of Prague.
Annabeth squeezes the bridge of her nose. There's no way going on a club tour is a good idea for Percy, especially given his current blood alcohol content. He'll be a lot harder to keep track of among strobe lights and sweaty bodies.
Then again, this is probably her only chance to get to Pothos and figure out some aspect—any hint of anything at all—of his plan. If going on a clubbing tour is the only way to get that information, then now is her only chance to get Percy on board with that plan.
"Alright, Peter," Annabeth says. "I'll take you clubbing, but you have to stay close. Follow my lead, don't get into any trouble, don't take anything from anyone-"
"You're no fun," he complains. "I wanna have fun..."
Annabeth rolls her eyes. "You won't have fun if you're not safe. Remember, no liquor. You've already had a few beers. Hell, no more drinking tonight." If there's one thing Percy is going to learn about drinking, it's beer before liquor, never sicker. It even rhymes. There's no way he won't forget that important piece of advice.