This Too Shall Pass

After all this time his smile still manages to take her like a honeyed liqueur: warm and sweet and soft-butter slippery. Her stomach swoops in drunken greeting, recognizing a cause that once filled her up like sustenance.

God, that crooked smile.

Rasp clings to his song; she thinks it's the evidence of years spent surviving under the burden of a huge heart, as if the love he finds in himself to spare for the perpetually undeserving weighs just atop his vocal cords. The familiarity of his voice awakens her weary bones from their long sleep as his lyrics snake around her heart, constricting, causing it to weep in the name of old love. He named his album 'Annabeth' and she remembers what she swore to herself she'd forget.

She never kept her promises, anyway.

The interview is a suggested video on her YouTube queue. The picture is fuzzy because the internet connection at her apartment complex is unreliable at any point before eight o'clock at night, but despite the breaks in sound every few moments, pixels getting caught in odd corners of her screen, her heart starts to drum the song of homecoming, as if it thought she didn't know the person on the screen used to be her suns and moons combined. As if it needed to remind her that it was Percy Jackson—their Percy—singing words that knit together the story of their love out of old, dust-clogged speakers.

After he finishes off his chosen song, a raw little thing called Arsenic Tongue, he sets down his guitar—the same acoustic he's had since he was fourteen—and unscrews a cloudy bottle of water.

"Percy, your album is amazing. Life-changing. You have to know that by now," the reporter is saying. She's long and willowy with dark tresses of hair. Pretty.

"Uh, wow." Percy sets down the empty plastic bottle and rubs the back of his neck. "I'm not sure I'd go that far."

The reporter crosses her legs and brings the microphone to her mouth again. "Oh, come on. Your song 'Richmond' has been number one on the charts for weeks now."

His nose wrinkles. Her heart mourns. "I'm still trying to convince myself I won't wake up in a few hours, eat some waffles, and move on with my life."

The reporter smiles like she's charmed, and it lights the wick of something primal inside her. Irrational, but unavoidable. Jealousy brings out her inner Neanderthal. "Sorry to disappoint, but it looks like you're in it for the long haul. We'll try not to take up too much of your time here and move onto the stuff we've all been waiting for."

Percy looks a little wary, a little resigned, like this progression might encompass exactly what he was hoping to avoid. This reaction feels familiar to her, and it feels heartbreaking because of that truth. She never wanted to force him to face hardships at her hands, but she's done it, time and time again. Someone had to clear his rose-tinted haze and show him what he was capable of.

Things that were beyond starry-eyed love for his best friend in their small town.

"The first question is one we've all been dying to know. It honors me to be the one to finally ask: who is she?"

A laugh escapes him, a little breathy, the kind she always used to steal away and tuck into her heart for safekeeping. A familiar pang of regret throbs inside her. "I did name my album after her, you know. That kind of bluntness hardly qualifies as secretive."

"A name isn't much to spare." The reporter is amused, but her amusement hosts a certain hunger. She's a vulture. She wants the details no one else has proved to steal from the new star, and she has no restrained fear of shredding him—ruining him in the process .

"You're wrong about that," Percy says, like it's a word of advice. "She's in every song. Every lyric. There's only one person my music was borne from and I've said a thousand times exactly who she is."

"That's a little cryptic, isn't it?"

"Oh. Would you rather I drew a map to her house?"

"I could hardly refuse an offer like that." The reporter's amusement is back, the same kind of insatiable hunger as before that makes her skin crawl. She wants to wrap a blanket of warmth and ignorance around the boy that used to be hers. He was never meant to be picked apart, he was never meant to be out of reach from her arms.

"Yeah, that's not happening." His expression is dry enough to suck moisture out of the air. "Not even just because I don't know where she lives—because I don't—but I also respect her?"

"She cut you out of her life?"

"Did you listen to the album?"

"Fair enough." The reporter uncrosses her legs, leaning forward. "What could have made a girl decide to leave you..?"

His jaw ticks, finally, a measure of obstructed composure. She knows him because he's always been a part of her, like an extension of her being, a supporter or a lover, a harsh truth or a white lie, from the beginning to the end, and he is wearing thin. It should be surprising, that she still finds herself so attuned to his mannerisms, so greatly aligned to him, but it's not. She wishes it was. It would all be easier if it was. "In more words, probably, but yeah."

"Come on," the reporter goads, slipping an easy smile onto her pretty face. Her eyes are light. "You can't be telling me this girl left you, knowing all that you are. Or, all that you could be."

A burn of embarrassment settles over her. As if any love between them had been that simple, narrow, transparent. It's a discredit and it's a shame. She's always seen bigger things for him, before he even wanted it.

Because he hadn't, until she took his fate into her own hands.

He clears his throat, uncomfortable. "Um, wow."

"Clearly, she didn't see you for what you really are. You'll find someone else, heaven knows there are plenty of people out there willing to give you a shot," the woman is saying, this time, like it's her own little piece of advice.

Percy is beginning to shatter. It's in his suddenly rigid posture and harsh lines. His emotions were always big. They were firecrackers and hurricanes. They were stars and storms and truths. When he let them loose, let them reign upon the earth and heavens, no one came out unscathed.

"I hold her in high regard. She's free to make her own decisions. Leaving me could have been the best one she's made, or the worst. It was still hers to make and I'd never take that away from her."

"What I heard was 'I'm still hung up on her…'"

His eyes roll harder than she's ever seen them, which is a feat considering she's known him her whole life, including his sarcastic teenage phase. He breathes deep, appearing to collect himself. The reporter continues to smile in a way that feels knowing, a way that tells her this person might be more calculating than she lets on. Sympathetic indignation burns inside the girl who sits at home, watching, powerless.

"Put us out of our misery, Percy. Tell us whether or not you're still clinging to the idea of winning back your little heartbreaker. Even after all that she did to you. Even when there are thousands of boys and girls out there willing to give you a whirlwind romance worthy of yellow lights and velvet curtains."

The woman is torturing him and she can't handle it a second more. Before she sees his reaction, his argument, the perfectly possible chance of some kind of signal that discloses the fact that he's moved on from her, nothing left to linger in the name of their proud love, she snaps the lid of her laptop closed. Acid churns and stings her chest the way it always does when she lets herself relapse, finding him again. It's a masochistic kind of pain, she allows herself to love every moment of her self-inflicted torment, but never bringing her any closer to relief. Not a stuttered-breath or highway mile closer to him.

Love is tragedy—she's known since the moment it became clear to her that she couldn't keep him for her own and give him what he deserved in the same fell swoop. Because to keep his presence from the world, to hide him and selfishly stow him away for her own safekeeping is an injustice, and one she was unwilling to make, despite the pain that it caused her every second since.

So she breathes deep, lets it crack her chest and flood her with regret and rage and a fight to be had with fate. She lets the chip on her shoulder grow heavier, because to do her boy right, she had to let him go. And, deep inside her conscience, she knew she'd do it again if all her suffering guaranteed his ultimate happiness.

It's not an unfamiliar sensation; it's one she brings upon herself in frequent moments of weakness. But soon, it will recede, she knows, and she will continue on until her next break of resolve. It's a regiment and it's a pattern. It's something that works to keep her occupied, to keep her boy safe from the steel bands of her love that can only hold him back.

She, who always called the shots, made the decision to free him, and in the same motion, condemned them both to heartbreak. And he responded in a way she could only have dreamed of, not letting her tire tracks and empty dresser drawers remain a vain attempt at nobility. No, when the headlights of her car cut through the fog that stormy midsummer night, she couldn't have wished for more. He always did right by her, even when she abandoned him to the claws of fame and fortune.

Percy might have believed he would have been happier, growing gray next to her in a creaky rocking chair on their front porch in the small town they grew up in. Living out the rest of their days in the very place they began them. But it was her that saw so much more in him. She couldn't imagine taking all the sunlight that lived inside of him and letting it rot and decay under her malnourishment. She loved him with every piece of her body and soul, but she couldn't believe it was enough.

But what she failed to recognize in her hasty disappearance was a resolve that would build within him. It was safer for her heart to believe that he'd eventually move on, fame would distract him and he'd forget her, but she should have known. With his big and loud emotions, the firecracker that he is, she should have predicted his surge of defiance.

She could convince herself that Percy was better off without the knots and ties of her love, but he didn't have to agree. In fact, after a year of silence, it becomes quite clear that he isn't as keen on giving up as she thought he should have been. As she had believed he had been.

Weeks later, the six-and-a-half minute interview is shadowed and thrown to the recesses of her mind among all of the past instances of her breaks in resolve and she comes home from night classes weary and feeling aged beyond her years with aching knees and dry eyes. Her legs wobble scaling the stairs. (Only God knew how long the elevator in her apartment building had been out of order).

She thinks maybe her eyes are playing tricks on her when she finds a heartbreakingly familiar shape planted on its ass outside her apartment door.

He stands when he sees her approaching, and for a second she almost believes she's finally lost it and has now begun hallucinating as her knees buckle and her heart stutters. But the second his mouth opens and a voice she's tortured herself with through dust-clogged speakers for almost a year echoes throughout the hallway, she feels reality slam into her with a tidal wave of rawness and regret and surging euphoria. To see him again, in person, she'd never hoped to dream this proudly.

"Guess I found you. You haven't changed a bit." But she has, they both have, on astronomical levels. He doesn't say that, and she knows what he means.

All she can find in herself to say is, "Percy?"

"If you tell me to walk away right now and never contact you again, I will. But I'll ask—I'll get down on my knees and beg—that you give me the chance to make things right. The way they should be." He takes a step closer to her, bracketing her hands in his. "You and me against the world. Annabeth, I want nothing more than for you to set me free, to do me the honor of letting me continue to love you, not from afar, but by your side. Us, a force to be heard. If you command me to leave, I'll go in a second, but if you let me stay… Annabeth. I'll be the happiest I've been since the moment I last saw you."

After all this time, that smile still seems to take her like nothing else has. She can't resist him, isn't strong enough to do so with the memory of their separation—the life she's lived for more than a year—slowly dissolving like the remnants of a bad dream behind her.

She doesn't tell him to leave.

She remembers all the relapses before they flutter away in his presence, the shattering of her heart time and time again, torturing herself with his songs and interviews and broadcasted love, only to be mended in the numbness brought by time, and she won't overcome it this time, she knows she won't.

She doesn't tell him to leave, in fact, she asks him to stay. She promised she would let him go, she would be strong enough for the both of them, for the better of him. But she glimpses his blinding grin the moment before she takes his face in her hands and kisses him hard, asking him to stay in every way he could read, and she decides her promises were better unkept, anyway.

happy birthday relic! thanks to my beta kendyl (werewlf on tumblr) and rachel (somethingmorecreative(1)) for making this semi-coherent! you guys r the bomb