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In retrospect, he should’ve known she’d be here.
New York is diving head first into winter, and Annabeth has always felt the cold a little worse than he does so why she decided a sweater would suffice as a means to protect her from the snow he doesn’t know. It’s a side effect of being raised within magical boundaries meant to keep the weather at a temperature that little kids can play in no matter the season. It only makes sense that she’s bouncing up and down on Silena’s doorstep, knocking at the door impatiently like the winds gushing through the Village are out to kill her.
Autumn is closing in on itself which means the leaves that had fallen at the end of September are now colorless and brittle. When he walks up the first step, they crunch under his feet and she whips around from the top of the stairs, seeming almost as surprised at him being here as he was about her. Except she doesn’t have an excuse. Percy lives twenty minutes away from Silena and over the month that it took to coordinate this evening, it was always a given that he would attend. Last time he checked the group chat, Annabeth had still been on the fence about whether or not she would too.
But here she is in front of Silena’s home with a suitcase in tow, leaving him reeling. The jeans she’s wearing are ripped on the knees, which he knows she must be regretting now. Her hair is a little shorter, too. Short enough that she can pin it up in one hair claw, and her curls have always been too long, too thick to do that before. He sees his name ghost over her lips, creating no sound, like she doesn’t even remember how to say it. He realizes he should climb the rest of the stairs, but the distance between them feels so unapproachable. The door swings open, and now with Silena standing right behind Annabeth, he thinks the sweater she’s wearing isn’t hers because he can easily imagine Silena wearing it too. Actually, he can imagine multiple senior counselors wearing it. Maybe it’s Beckendorf’s—whatever.
“You’re here!” she says, pulling Annabeth in for a hug and while her arms are wrapped around her body, she seems to notice him for the first time. “Did you come here together?”
Annabeth answers before he’s even up the stairs. “Uh, no. Just weird timing, I guess.”
“Yup,” he agrees, and leans in to hug Silena too, once Annabeth has already disappeared inside. “Weird timing.”
She gives him a look, then smirks and tugs him inside, shutting the door on the cold. It’s immeasurably warmer here, and the aroma of rosemary and thyme swells in the air. He follows Silena down the hall and into the kitchen, where Beckendorf is hunched over the gas stove, sauteing vegetables. In the yellow lighting of the Beauregard home, he looks awfully mature here in a way Percy’s never thought of him before.
“Perce,” he says, dropping his wooden cooking spoon onto the counter. “Nice to see you.”
He looks around the kitchen and the empty living room next to it. “Am I early?”
“Nah, the others are just late. You know how they are.”
“Sure.” He doesn’t really, because he’s never hung out with any of them outside of Camp Half Blood. The bulk of them are still year-round, which makes it hard to organize anything.
“Annabeth’s here, though. I think she’s just putting away her suitcase in Lena’s room.”
He shoots her a curious glance. “She’s staying with you?”
Silena nods. “Clarrise too. Her flight lands a little later, so she’ll be here soon. Travis is picking her up, I think.”
“Annabeth and Clarrise? In one room?”
She rolls her eyes and breathes out a laugh. “They’re friends. They just hate to admit it.”
“Right,” he says slowly. In truth, he and Clarrise are also friends who hate to admit it.
The doorbell chimes again, but this time Beckendorf heads to answer it. He comes back bringing boisterous laughter and Percy grins, knowing exactly who’s arrived. It must draw Annabeth’s attention too, because she walks back down the opposite hallway, sparing him a small smile when their eyes meet on accident. If he didn’t know better he’d think that was her way of dismissing him, getting the hard part over with. But she rubs at her arms and avoids the kitchen entirely, and he can tell from that action alone that they’ll tiptoe around the evening the same way they did around the summer. They’ve managed five long months like this, though technically the past three consisted of no tiptoeing, but radio silence instead. He’s drawing close to the end of his patience, but the year spans out in front of them and he wishes this was a trait he’d acquired from his mother. He wonders if Sally was always this way or if a lifetime of waiting has worn her down.
“Connor,” Silena whines, though her tone is as light as always. “You’re dragging in mud and my dad just got these carpets redone.”
He chuckles bashfully, offering a small apology and he wraps her into his arms. The past couple months seemed to have treated him well, offering a few inches to his height to the point that Silena’s head only reaches his nose. They pull apart and he tugs the beanie off, then runs a hand through his brown hair and it’s almost striking how much he resembles Luke in a way.
“What are you doing here, Chase?” Connor says, facing her with a boyish smile. “Didn’t think I’d see you here.”
She falters for a second, unsure of what to say, maybe. In true Annabeth manner, she settles on rolling her eyes and draws him into a hug. They seperate, and the conversation swells around her. Every once in a while, the group will burst into fits of laughter and her lips will turn up in an attempt to make it seem like she’s listening. Somehow, in a room surrounded by their closest friends, he thinks she looks awfully lonely. It seems too late now to tell her hello, but it doesn’t feel right to let themselves linger like this. Their friendship has strayed into some weird liminality all while dying out, and the fact that he can’t even greet her himself already makes it feel like the two of them are a lost cause.
Silena pauses mid-sentence, wrinkling her nose. “Do you smell that—oh fuck, it’s burning.” In a hurry, she shuffles past him and tugs at the oven handle, revealing a pie he thinks is meant to be pumpkin, but can’t be sure with the blackened layer that it’s developed.
“When were we supposed to take that out?” Beckendorf barks a nervous laugh.
She eyes her phone screen, and then the time on the oven. “Like twenty minutes ago?”
“Oh. So not salvageable?”
“I mean, how would you go about salvaging it?”
He takes a moment to think about it. “Scrape off the burned bits—”
She sighs. “Baby, we can’t serve that to guests.”
“If you want I can try to go buy one real quick?” Percy offers.
Silena is still mulling the idea over by the time Annabeth says, “I’ll go too.”
All eyes snap to her. Maybe if their other friends weren’t watching them so intently, he’d gawk and show the surprise that jolted his veins on his face. Instead he smiles gratefully and assures Silena that she’s got nothing to worry about and they’ll be back soon. She agrees, though she doesn’t let Annabeth out the door without slipping a coat over her body, and a scarf around her neck.
They break out of the warmth of her home and into the Village. It’s cold, but that’s not anything he isn’t used to. His mother’s birthday lies at the end of February, when spring first begins to dip it’s toes into New York’s harsh winter. He was young then, and he didn’t know much, but if there’s one thing he was certain of it was that his mother deserved a day to celebrate her life and one gift is only the beginning of what she deserves. Sally wasn’t necessarily strict, but he knew she worried. He also knew a couple other things; their bills were piling and she could only work so many hours on top of raising a kid too. They didn’t have the money for a nice dinner, or a day at the movie theatre, and they definitely didn’t have enough to be allotting him an allowance. And he also knew he wasn’t an easy kid, though he didn’t really understand why, but for some reason it meant she had to marry Gabe.
She’d brought up the topic of boarding school while they sat on the street corner in Coney Island, their ice cream cones melting into their hands. He didn’t get it then; why would she marry a man she’d have to send her son away from? Of course, he does now. But that doesn’t change the fact that at nine years old he had cried and begged his mom to not go through with it. He’d said a lot of things to try to persuade her out of it, but mostly it boiled down to I don’t care what he does to me as long as I get to stay with you.
Being away from her was hard, and during the first couple months of autumn he didn’t even feel like he lived in New York anymore. He watched it through the boarding school windows, and felt like the city he lived in with his mom must be a different one because now it looks so ugly. November came, and he spent one blessed week with her before heading back and the sky began to give way to snow instead of rain. But Percy had a coat, and he had powdered hot chocolate packets, and he would make the most of it. His mother doesn’t know, still, that he’d spent his winters selling watery hot chocolate to any adult feeling badly enough for him. But he assumes she must be skeptical of where the money behind his birthday presents to her came from. By the time February rolled around and came to a close, he’d usually garnered enough cash for a bracelet.
November kisses fall goodbye, and though the cold weather hasn’t quite set in yet, he feels like he wouldn’t be able to tell either way. After all those months of setting up hot cocoa shops in the snow, sometimes he feels like his skin itself is enough to keep him warm, and these days, the scars from Mount St. Helens always feel a little hot.
“It’s not like this in the Bay,” Annabeth says, tugging in Silena’s coat a little tighter around her chest. It’s not the heaviest coat, and she probably wouldn’t even need a heavy coat, because honestly the weather is bearable.
Percy looks both ways before jaywalking because he may not be law-abiding, but he is cautious. “I don’t think I like that you’re on a nickname basis with the Bay Area.”
“I don’t think I like that I live in the Bay Area,” she says indignantly, busy kicking away the leaves on the sidewalk.
He quirks a brow at her. “Is it so bad?”
“There’s not much of anything good in San Francisco.”
“I think Los Angeles has got something way worse.”
“I’d still pick Hades over Mount Tamalpais,” she says, tone flat.
He can’t blame her. At least when he leaves Long Island, he loses sight of the blood on his hands. Annabeth goes to bed and wakes up in a city where the girl she looked up to most pushed her love off a cliff and they left him for dead. It’s fascinating, kind of. The amount of times Luke has died. He wonders where his body is right now and if his consciousness is still holding on in there somewhere. Even in comparison to Manhattan’s November, the thought of Luke’s golden godhood feels blisteringly cold.
“But would you pick New York over San Francisco?” He asks.
She swipes at her already red nose, and he can tell the skin there is beginning to get raw and dry. “It snows in New York.”
“Is that good or bad?”
“Uh, both. I like snow. I hate the cold. Take that as you will.”
“It doesn’t snow where you live?”
“You’re talking about California, Percy,” she says. “It rains and it gets ugly and windy, but it never snows.”
He nods, studying the shops lining the streets in hopes one of them may be an open bakery. If they had held the party on Thanksgiving day itself, the stores for sure would’ve been closed by now. But they had decided on holding “Friendsgiving” (that’s what Silena called it) the day before and he thinks they’ve got a pretty good chance of finding a new pie to replace the burned one.
He thinks of telling her New York can get ugly too because for a good couple months when he was a kid, it really had been. But it doesn’t feel right to say that now, as they wander through the Village and it glows gold from the warm light flooding out from apartment windows. Annabeth’s hair catches the glint of it, and though he knows she was born for summer, he thinks autumn suits her pretty well too.
“So why’d you come here for Thanksgiving?”
She reaches up to her collarbones, as though expecting her clay beaded necklace to be there so she can roll it between her fingers the way she always does. Instead, her shoulder slump and she shrugs. “Honest answer?”
“Were you planning on lying to me?”
“I got kicked out.”
He hesitates. “Is that the lie or the honest answer?”
It takes her all too long to formulate a response, but he doesn’t mind waiting. Not until she seems to forgo answering him at all and points across the street. “Perce, over there. I think they’re open.”
Percy shoots her a look, but she’s already half-way across the road with her eyes dead-set on the bakery. With no other choice, he follows, holding the bakery door open for her to enter first, and get in the horribly long line. He listens to the woman at the cash register tell a customer that they ran out of pumpkin pies this morning, and he and Annabeth share a dreadful look before retreating back onto the streets.
He groans, after they’ve walked away from the shop and the scent of cinnamon no longer follows them. “Just our luck.”
“It’s too cold for this,” she whines.
“If you think this is bad, winter here will take you out.”
She glares at him. “I’m normal. You’re the weird one for being able to stand out in the snow in, like, hoodies.”
“I’ve got practice.”
“From?”
“You know how kids set up little lemonade stands in the summer? Well, I used to do that but with hot chocolate during the winter.”
She makes a face. “Your mom let you do that?”
He chuckles, but it rings out hollow even to his own ears. “She didn’t let me do anything. I don’t even think she knows.”
“You think your mom of all people doesn’t know?”
Annabeth’s point would stand in any other case, because as much as his mother can read his thoughts from a single expression, there’s a lot he purposefully keeps her blinded from. For the most part, he thinks he’s successful in it. But sometimes she’ll get a sad look on her face when he mentions a topic that would be completely harmless on it’s own and he can’t help but think that she knows.
“It doesn’t matter if she does,” he says eventually, as they walk down a street he doesn’t think he’s ever seen before. “It was a long time ago.”
Annabeth hums. “What’d you use the money for?”
“Her birthday present.”
“Aww,” she coos. The blush that invades his cheeks is almost instantaneous. “Like that little friendship bracelet she always wears? Is that one of them? Y’know, the one that says ‘mama’—”
“Yes, Annabeth, that’s one of them,” he admits, slightly embarrassed.
“Why are you being like that?” She shoves him playfully. “I think it’s cute of you. It’s cute that she still wears it too.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he says, ducking his head and willing his cheeks back to their normal color.
They pass by an eternity and a couple more crosswalks before another bakery comes into sight. Together, they stare into the dark windows, unsure whether or not it’s closed until a woman comes to open the door and assures them that they aren’t. After how far they walked to get it, it’s a little funny how little time actually buying the pie takes. It’s freshly baked now, but he’s certain it’ll be cold by the time they get back to Silena’s place.
“It’s fine,” Annabeth says, holding the door open for him so he can exit smoothly with the pie box in his arms. “I mean, is pumpkin pie even supposed to be warm?”
He gawks. “Have you been eating cold pie?”
“To be honest, I’ve never eaten this before,” she says. “We don’t celebrate Thanksgiving at Camp and I kinda do everything in my power to not eat dinners with my family.”
“So that’s why you came to New York this week?”
She laughs scratchily. “No, I really did get kicked out.”
He stops in place, but she keeps walking before turning her head and realizing he isn’t by her side anymore.
Annabeth tries for a smile and shrugs. “It’s not really as bad as it sounds. I mean, it’s not a permanent thing. I already bought the plane ticket back.”
“Why’d you get kicked out?” he demands.
She crosses her arms. “Why does it matter?”
“The fuck do you mean ‘why does it matter?’”
“Ok, let me rephrase. Why does it matter to you ?”
“Because you’re my friend.”
For a moment, she looks stunned. As though what he just said is so outlandish she can’t even begin to process it. Then she rotates on her heels, giving him just enough time to catch up with her. “My stepmom and I fight a lot. That’s it,” she says, and he knows that absolutely is not it, but it’s not really his place to press anymore than he already has. “They think me being around will ruin the holidays.”
He frowns. “That’s—I’m sorry, Annabeth.”
Annabeth shrugs, tucking her hands into the coat sleeves for a little bit of warmth. “Not like I wanted to be there anyway.”
“Why are you going back there? Why not just go to Camp Half-Blood for the year?”
She’s quiet for a moment, looking down at the sidewalk as they step across it. “Because it could be my last year with my dad,” she says softly.
It feels like a slap in the face; a harsh pull back to their inescapable reality. It felt so easy to walk through his city with her and forget that they’re running through their allowance of time. Truly, it’s a dumb realization because today’s gathering probably only came together because of the looming fate of the world. Like a desperate grab of having one good night with each other. His mom is somewhere in Brooklyn now, on a date with her fiance Paul, and he feels undeniably guilty knowing that their days as a married couple are numbered if he can’t stop the ball from dropping. It would be a hundred times easier to be a little kid on his own, freezing during the winter to gather up one dollar bills and pool them into buying a cheap bracelet making kit for Sally’s birthday. Saving the world will take more than a couple dollar bills, but he’s willing to sacrifice more than just his warmth to make it happen.
He thinks Annabeth going back to San Francisco just to be with her dad a little more is a pretty big sacrifice. His heart aches, mostly because he doesn’t want her to hurt at the hands of her own parents anymore. Also because San Francisco is terribly far from New York, and if they’ve only got a handful of time left, he wants to spend it with her.
“Are we ever gonna talk about it?” he says, as casually as possible. But he supposes there’s nothing very casual about whatever is going on between them.
She meets his eyes for a second at best. “We’ve tried. It doesn’t end well. And I don’t really feel like getting into a screaming match in the middle of the street.”
“Why does it always have to be a shouting match with us?”
Annabeth giggles quietly. “Because it’s us.”
“Hey,” he says. “I think we did pretty well today.”
There’s a slight gleam in her eyes when she says, “I guess so.”
The conversation dies with forgone words and bit tongues, and the walk back to Silena’s place feels so much shorter now that they aren’t wandering aimlessly, hoping to find a bakery at any corner. When they get back, there’s two more cars parked out front, and he can only assume they belong to Travis and Katie, which means Clarisse must be here now too.
“They’re probably waiting for us,” she says, as they start up the stairs. Her teeth chatter loud and clear even over the cars honking on the street and the rain that has begun to wreak havoc on the pavement.
At the top step, he faces her. “We should get inside, then,” he says. “I think they can hear your teeth all the way from California.”
“I’ll have to get used to it.” He thinks he sees the semblance of a smile on her lips. “My flight back isn’t for a while.”
“It only gets colder from here.”
She shrugs. “I think I can stand it. This city’s got a lot more to offer than where I’m coming from.”
He lifts a brow. “So you are picking New York over San Francisco?”
The way her eyes take a hold of his own is infuriatingly strong, and he thinks she could ask him to do anything for her right there and then and he wouldn’t think twice of it. “What would you do if I did?”
Somewhere inside Silena’s house, their friends laugh together and he can hear the sound of it just from standing by the front door. He imagines the Chases doing the same in their pathetic excuse of a home over a family dinner, and his mother out on a date at a five-star restaurant, yet still wearing the bracelet he made for her when he was nine.
Annabeth stands in front of him, nose to nose, and maybe she doesn’t really belong to any of those homes, but he thinks if she chose New York he could give her all that and more. It’d be so, so easy to lean in, but they restrain. There’s nothing he could say now that would make a difference. Not when they’re clutching onto borrowed time and she’s already sentenced herself to a plane ride back to San Francisco.
“Ask me again after next summer,” she says, pushing open the door and they step back into the warmth.
Annabeth shimmies out of the coat and they go to meet their friends in the living room. Clarisse grunts at them as a way of greeting, and Travis makes a comment about the two of them out all alone, which leads to comments of the same variety being made the whole night. They couldn’t be more wrong, really, because nothing happened between them at all. At dinner, he watches as Annabeth laughs so hard her head falls to Katie’s lap and can only think of the restraint as another sacrifice among many.