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THEY'RE ON A FACETIME CALL IN OCTOBER. It's three in the morning. Annabeth has to be awake because she's editing an essay and Percy is trying to stay up with her as a show of solidarity. She's two Red Bulls in and has her phone propped up next to her laptop. That's another good thing about ADHD: neither of them has any trouble multitasking. The problem is that the two tasks Percy is trying to do simultaneously are talk to Annabeth and sleep. It's not going quite as well as Annabeth's essay. His room is dark, his face lit by the screen of his phone, bright with the background lighting of Annabeth's dorm room.
"Just go to bed, Percy. I'll finish this and we can talk tomorrow." No response. "Percy." No response. "Ok, Percy, I'm going. Good night"
"Love you," he mumbles, face half visible.
Annabeth briefly stops breathing, not sure how to respond. He doesn't say anything else, so neither does she. Just says "Go to sleep" in a slightly weirder voice than she had aimed for and quietly ends the call.
Part of her feels shitty for not saying it back. Part of her thinks he's not even awake he will not remember and/or pass future judgment based on this exchange. She abandons the essay in short order, sitting cross-armed and deep in concentration in her chair.
Why does it matter this much? It matters because until now it went unsaid. Until now it was nameless feelings and unarticulated devotion. To Annabeth, love is much more a promise than a feeling. She's had people—Luke, her father—give her love in words and abandonment in actions. She doesn't want to be that kind of hypocrite. The issue isn't that Annabeth doesn't feel love, her affection for Percy is something big and bright and near tangible. It's the feeling of sunshine in her chest and the way half the time they can barely kiss because they're smiling. She gives her affection away in hugs and touches and lingering kisses. Annabeth doesn't want to say 'I love you' if it's not a promise she is prepared to keep.
She tries it out in the too bright light of her empty bedroom: "I love you."
The words come easily, but somehow feel heavy.
Is it true? she asks herself. There's no hesitation when she thinks, yes.
It's always been true. At least, for her. It's hard to reflect on events from the outside, but she knows that all of her affection and feelings for Percy had been bottled up tightly and stored away in the past year as she tried and failed to prepare herself for the eventuality of the prophecy. She also remembers a single night maybe five days after the eruption at Mount St. Helens, where she skipped supper, sick with worry and grief and sat sobbing on her bunk because she was terrified of this. She was terrified that she might love someone and the second she got brave enough to show it, he had died.
Annabeth always tried so hard to project the image she created for herself: her mother's daughter. Wise, strong, intelligent, aloof, divorced from the baser elements of fear and love, like her mother. But, the past summer and fall she had watched that image crumble and learned that it was alright for her to feel strong insane emotions, she was allowed to fall in love and be scared because she was a teenager, not a goddess.
