January

Annabeth had never been one for introspection, not really.

The real mysteries to be solved — not to mention all manner of other interests — were out in the real world and not buried deeply in her psyche, so why would she ever spend time examining each little twinge of feeling inside her?

She was smart enough to know it was unlikely to lead to a happy place and so she wasn't into the whole dark, brooding, emo thing (although she knew a certain son of Hades who still could be in certain circumstances). It was that simple. She had never understood where it would get her — well, not until now, she guessed.

It had ended in her sitting on a park bench wrapped up in about a hundred layers, all of which were proving ineffective against January and all of its bastardry.

Otherwise known as precisely nowhere.

And yet she couldn't stop. The whole situation was going round and round in her head like a nightmarish carousel and, to clash metaphors spectacularly (metaphor cage-fighting, even), it was eating her up inside to boot.

Her breath smoked in front of her as she looked down at her gloved hands. They were clasped in her lap pretty much entirely to quell the sudden need she felt to wring them, because she would not allow herself to stoop to useless handwringing, despite how dire the situation was. She would give herself a lot of leeway in most situations, but handwringing was a heavily-guarded line she would not cross.

Her nose was so cold it hurt. Its intermittent dripping was a fun added bonus. Equally as attractive, she had taken to cuffing it with the shoulder of her coat, because you only ever had tissues with you when you didn't need them. There was absolutely no feeling left in her feet; the pain she had initially felt in her toes had fizzled away into tingling and numbness beyond long ago, although probably only because she was losing them to frostbite.

Gods, how long had she been sitting here?

Enough. She stamped her boot-clad feet and lurched upwards from the bench and started walking, no destination in mind, only the desire to get warm.

When she shoved her hands in her pocket, her left hand closed reflexively around her phone. It had been buzzing and trilling and beeping the entire time she had been sitting here — the office, no doubt, wondering why their star project manager (and the youngest ever at just thirty) had gone out for lunch early and not come back — and she'd been ignoring it. Now, though, she pulled it out. Her gloved thumb fumbled across the track pad.

Emails. Text messages. Voicemails. Stuff she didn't want to deal with right now.

And yet, because technology was nothing but a cruel master, the speed at which she caved was alarming. The little red blipping LED on the top right was really starting to grate on her last nerve as it demanded her attention.

The first text message was from Percy, asking her when she'd be home.

Her heart plummeted towards somewhere near her frozen feet. She shoved the phone back in her pocket, wishing she could go back and pitch it into the Meer, but the surface was frozen so solid it would only sit there and gloat, blinking LED mocking her.

Even as she cursed Malcolm for taking that engineering job with AT&T and secretly upgrading the entire network to remove the threat of imminent monster attacks from cell phone use, she regretted it. It wasn't Malcolm's fault.

And it wasn't Percy's, either. She wasn't mad with Percy, not at all, not by any means. If anything, she was seething at herself. It was just that texts from Percy were something on quite a long list of things she couldn't deal with right now. The news she had heard today was going to be impossible to tell him.

Even the thought of giving it to him was all but killing her.

Annabeth knew Percy so well, knew every square millimetre of his face, and she could already see the expression he would pull when she told him. He wouldn't pull it consciously, of course, but she knew the instant sag of disappointment and concern that would probably be there, and it would no doubt haunt her for some time.

Annabeth Chase had never failed at anything, not once in her life. It wasn't in her nature. And now… Failure had to catch up with her eventually, she guessed, but this was huge, tugging away at her insides huge.

Her feet crunched on the salt and frozen snow as she walked. She was nearly shoved off the path when an insane jogger — wearing shorts, no less, and sporting a pair of blue knees — came flying at her in the opposite direction. It was insanity being out running in these temperatures. What was wrong with letting the layer of insulating winter blubber build up like everyone else did? It worked for seals, didn't it? She paused to dwell on the irony of the fitness fanatic probably getting fatal hypothermia before starting walking again.

Right now, her life with Percy was so damn complete; she had everything she had ever wanted, he had everything they ever wanted, they both lived on this insanely happy cloud where everything was so damn perfect and, according to Nico, so saccharine it made him puke.

They had been married for five years in April, and as far as she was concerned the honeymoon period had never ended. The Plan (capital P, always capital P) for their lives together was meant to be progressing by now, but suddenly there was a brick wall in the road.

It felt like she'd hit it at supersonic speeds.

Something brushed her eyelashes and she blinked. Whatever it was lodged there obscured her vision. She reached up to brush it off and pressed something cold into her eye. Looking up, she realised it had started to snow again. If she'd been paying more attention, she'd have noticed the sky had turned a threatening shade of pearl grey, looming overhead and ready to dump what would probably be another six inches on the city overnight.

With a sigh she pulled her hood up and hunched her shoulders. She had barely walked ten paces before the world in front of her started to swirl white as the snow began to fold itself over the Park.

It was so cold; it had gone to the very core of her body, down to her bones, and she knew it would take hours to be able to feel properly warm again. San Francisco may be misty, but at least she didn't have to contend with four thousand feet of snow every winter. Although, despite the more temperate climate, not once had she been tempted to return to California since Percy slipped the engagement ring on her finger, since she'd said an emphatic yes.

It was as if the brief, snatched memories of her childhood in San Francisco from before she had run away were a completely different life or, rather, someone else's life. The life of a person much, much less fortunate than her. It was thousands of miles literally, but billions of miles figuratively, from the life she had now.

The world in front of her was white. An icy wind blew, finding out every single chink in her heavy, wool-based armour and making her shiver. On her hood, snow dislodged from the trees above her plopped down.

Still she kept walking, being ambulatory apparently better for her brain than sitting morosely on a bench and indulging in a little bit of wallowing in the self-pity mud pool. Plus, you know, hypothermia and all. Even though the snow was blinding her, it felt like she had a purpose this time, somewhere to go, even if she didn't know quite where yet.

She took out her phone again, shielding it from the driving snow with one hand and checking through the recent calls with the other. Work had phoned three times on various different numbers and then, right underneath that, was the tailspin-inducing phone call she'd received from the doctor's office just before lunch

Her thumb hovered above the green call button (as if, somehow, it was sampling a case of calling them back and tell them no, they were wrong and she didn't accept their news and therefore it wasn't real or happening to her) but then she shoved the phone back into her pocket. What good would it do? What would ramming her two cents home to the doctor actually do to change anything, except perhaps make her feel one hell of a lot better?

It wasn't the fault of the doctors she'd been to see. She couldn't blame them or get angry with them, no matter how easy it would be, because the only person to really be mad at here was herself.

Gods, she felt so low right now. It wasn't a feeling she was accustomed to struggling with because it wasn't in her nature. She ploughed instinctively right on through any issues any issues with the potential to make her feel blue, and that was that. She didn't have time for them, just like she hadn't had time to miss her dad for a long time because she was trying not to get killed. Then, even though she had been safe, she had tried not to miss him by telling herself he was better off without her, that he had her stepmother and stepsiblings now. That was her way of dealing.

But this… How did you burst through this and come out of the other side?

There was no answer right there on the tip of her tongue, but she made up her mind to put one there, by force if she had to. Sure, she didn't know yet, but she'd figure it out, she decided. Or, even better, they'd figure it out, she and Percy, as a couple, because that's what they did.

She didn't know to break it to Percy yet, but she'd find a way because he deserved to know at the end of the day. It was his right as much as it was hers to know what was going on.

The snow didn't slow on the way back to their apartment. The sidewalks were total death traps, and she could barely see in front of her. Every time a bus or big truck fought past on the road beside her she flattened herself against the nearest building to avoid being sprayed by the slush and grossness building up near the curb.

When she finally got to her building, she took the stairs. Screw the elevator, she thought, as she burst into the service stairwell and clomped up the first flight. She needed to get warm and quickly — she had been shivering all of the way home — and there was no quicker way (or, perhaps, a better distraction) than hauling her ass up and up and up and up what she had never realised before today were apparently endless flights of stairs to their apartment.

She was breathing hard when she finally arrived at their door, which worked quite well because she needed so many of those exhalations on her hands to get them working again so they could manage the key to let her in.

The door squeaked — still, after all this time — as she slipped through, her ears trained on the apartment beyond. There was no indication from Percy's text whether he was at home or not when he had sent it. It would be just her luck if he wasn't, especially after she had resolved to be totally, bluntly straight with him.

He was home, however, and came peeking his head around the bedroom doorjamb when she closed the front door. He smiled at her and came to greet her, giving her a quick hello peck on the lips which terminated with an abrupt and horrified recoil on his part.

"You feel like ice," he said. "What have you been doing, playing abominable snowman?"

"Snowwoman," Annabeth corrected automatically as she lowered her hood and yanked off her hat, sending her hair into peaks of static frizz. "And I resent the abominable. I've been for a walk."

Percy quirked an eyebrow at her. "In the snow. In January. In New York."

Annabeth sighed, offering a tired tilt of her head in agreement. She conceded now, as the warmth of the apartment got to work melting her frozen insides, that perhaps her choice of locations to brood earlier had not been the best one given the temperature.

Instead of saying anything, she clamped her teeth onto the middle finger of first one glove and then the other, ripping them off, balling them with her hat, and shoving them into one of her deeper coat pockets so they wouldn't have disappeared by the time she had to go out again. Things had a habit of disappearing in their apartment. Percy and Annabeth blamed each other, heatedly at times.

Percy grabbed her newly-naked hands and almost winced, moving to envelop them in his. "You feel like you've got hypothermia."

Annabeth quirked an eyebrow at him. "Uh-huh. Because hypothermia's always diagnosed by touch and touch alone."

Percy ignored her. "How long have you been out there?"

"Maybe too long," Annabeth admitted grudgingly. "I was thinking about stuff. Percy… there's something I have to tell you."

The direct approach. No pussyfooting around would do.

Percy gave an authoritative shake of his head. "Not before hot chocolate." He led her to the kitchen by her hands, which were still clasped in his, despite Annabeth's attempts to protest.

"Yes, before hot chocolate," Annabeth said, trying to pull her hands from his. He wouldn't let her; instead he kept dragging her forwards and eventually steered her into a chair at the table in the kitchen. She huffed as she sat down against her will while he opened the fridge and pulled out milk.

"Seriously, Annabeth, Khione is warmer than you are right now and she's one frigid bitch. In more ways than one. You are gonna drink this, and you're going to like it."

Percy was already busy making hot chocolate and she bit her lip, watching him as he worked. As she contemplated bursting the happy little bubble he was bobbing around in right now, her heart sank all over again.

Instead of saying anything, she unbuttoned the toggles on her coat and then drew down the zip, shrugging out of it and throwing it over the back of her chair.

"Percy, sit down." If she watched him any longer in this state of blissful ignorance, she was never going to be able to say anything, was never going to be able to work up the courage to ruin everything. As much as she wanted to, she couldn't put this off indefinitely.

"Not before hot chocolate," he repeated, his tone almost singsong. "There is nothing what can't wait until after hot chocolate."

"This can't."

"Yes it can," Percy said with easy confidence. "Seriously, you can't say anything if you turn into an ice cube on me. Or an ice statue. And I have nowhere to keep you if you become an ice statue. Come spring you'd be all drippy, and by summer you'd be a puddle."

Annabeth bit her tongue, trying to hold back a weird combination of frustrated growl and desperate whimper. She managed to stay quiet until Percy deposited two blue mugs filled with hot chocolate down in front of her. There were blue marshmallows floating on top. Improbably, Percy was fantastic at making hot chocolate. She had never, ever had better hot chocolate than Percy's, not even one she'd paid about five bucks for in Starbucks, even though she was married to a demigod who had thought you actually toasted French toast.

Hello, shopping for a brand new toaster…

Annabeth looked down into her mug and sighed to herself, wrapping her hands around it, despite the painful prickles the warm ceramic attacked her fingers with, stabbing them back to life.

"I told you it could wait until after hot chocolate," Percy said, grinning and unable to keep a hint of smugness from his voice. Despite the scalding temperature of her mug, Percy's was already half gone. He had a chocolate moustache and was dabbing whipped cream from his nose with his sleeve. Table manners, after all, were part of the curriculum at a finishing school, not Camp Half-Blood.

"There wasn't much of a choice in the matter, was there?" Annabeth couldn't look at him as she abandoned her hold on the hot chocolate. Her eyes roved over the tablecloth, the faint splotch of coffee she hadn't been able to get out, the hole where she'd proudly accomplished a small piece of sewing and found out she'd stitched it to the tablecloth.

Martha Stewart, eat your heart out.

Everything in this apartment told the story of the life she and Percy had spent together, even the tiniest of things like the tablecloth, haunted by memories of cups of coffee past, all the way up to the frames with photographs and smiles and happy faces bursting out of them. Each one radiated happiness out at them from moments and adventures long over, like a time machine but not quite as good.

Perfect. It came back to her again. Her life right now was perfect; like a pair of magpies, Percy and she had lined their nest with all of the things that mattered in their life, material and otherwise, and so far it had all been so fantastic.

She couldn't help but feel she was about to tear apart everything they had built.

"The doctor called today," she said at last, sneaking a peek up at him through her eyelashes.

Percy only nodded, smiling at her as he waited for her to continue. "Okay."

"They… they've looked at those test results," she elaborated with difficulty now she actually had to face him and say it out loud. It was fine to resolve to do something, but to actually have to do it…

She saw the smile sink slightly off Percy's face; his hands twitched like he was going to reach out for hers but thought better of it. His second thoughts on offering her human contact stung. Did he already understand what was going through her head right now and feel disappointed in some way?

"You're okay, though. Right?" he asked, his forehead creasing into a frown.

Annabeth could barely give him an answer. "I'm okay, yeah."

Percy relaxed. She could see now the twitch of his hands had not been an aborted attempt to give her comfort but an actual flinch at the thought there might be something wrong with her. "Good," he said, blowing out a relieved breath. The smile returned to his eyes. "Then why the drama? The coming home as an icicle? If you're okay then nothing else matters."

Annabeth's sigh heaved her entire torso as she looked down, massaging her eyes. Her fingers had robbed her mug of a lot of its heat, but her eyelids were still freezing. It was a weird sensation. "I am okay. It's not me. He said… he said there might be a few, uh, complications." Her speech was broken and fragmented, almost as if her tongue didn't want her to form the words. "In fact, it's not good news. At all." The last part was blurted out in a rush and she didn't know where it came from. Its sudden appearance had frightened her, not just because of the speed it had tumbled out of her mouth with but also because she had suddenly given voice to the news which had previously only existed in her head.

Percy did grab her hands this time, and she was grateful. She squeezed back as her throat bobbed at the tears trying to work their way past where her tonsils should have been had she not had them out when she was six.

"You can tell me," Percy said, looking straight into her eyes. "There is nothing you can't tell me. Nothing. I love you. Now, what did he say?"

"Oh gods," Annabeth moaned. For all the comfort the contact of Percy's hands were giving her, she was torn between wanting to keep them there or using them to cover her face and play the ultimate game of peek-a-boo, the one where she hid behind her hands and basked in the comforting glow of denial because her problems were all blotted from view. "I know how much you want kids. And I realised actually yeah, I do, too. So much."

Percy thought he saw where this was going. His lungs surprised him by making their protests known about the fact that he was holding his breath; he hadn't even realised he was.

"He said there was scarring," she eventually managed, clearer and steadier than she had sounded before. "Lots of scar tissue, in fact. In my womb. I think he called them uterine adhesions."

Using the medical term made it all seem a little bit better — for a brief moment, she could pretend this cold, medical jargon wasn't about her and her body and her life, but stuck in the pages of some medical textbook on the shelf of a doctor's office and nothing to do with her entirely.

Annabeth bit her lip to trap in what would have been a very choked sob. She felt selfish, evil, for sitting here and quietly and systematically dismantling everything Percy wanted out of life.

"He asked me if I'd ever had any blows to the abdomen," she continued. "He said, if he hadn't seen my notes, he would have said I'd been rushed to the ER after a car wreck or something."

She laughed humourlessly, bitterly. Being a demigod, taking blows to every part of your body, including the abdomen, was pretty much par for the course, especially when you lived with a child of the Big Three and got your ass catapulted through drywall while your husband was hanging from one hand from the fire escape.

She looked over at the wall she had plunged through, at the slightly mismatched paint on the repair job, and remembered it all so vividly. There had been the rush of air as she soared through it, then a cloud of plaster dust and the noise of popping and crunching that she had been unable to determine whether it was her or the wall.

She had often wondered how far the prayers to Apollo, the nectar and the ambrosia, had actually gone towards fixing the wounds they'd all sustained over the years. Now, apparently, she had found out and was paying a huge price.

"So what does this mean?" Percy asked, pretty sure he knew already but asking anyway, just in case he was getting the wrong end of the stick. He didn't want to make her say it, not if she didn't want to, but he had to make sure he knew what she meant so he could help her deal.

Annabeth let out a shaky breath. "It means… it means it will be very, very unlikely for me to conceive naturally. One of my fallopian tubes looks like it's been scarred closed. Even if by some miracle the ovary that's actually open for business manages to get a viable egg into my uterus, the scar tissue would make it hard for it to attach. Has made it hard to attach. He thinks I've probably lost a few fertilised eggs really early on because they couldn't attach. And even then, if it does manage to attach, it would probably be hard for it to cling on long enough for me to even notice, let alone to carry to term. It's why we haven't had any luck, even though we've been trying… I'm so sorry Percy. I wish there was something I could do to make this better."

Percy shook his head so hard that Annabeth blurred in front of him. "No. You don't need to," he said, his eyes glinting with dogged determination. "Firstly, this is not your fault. Secondly, 'very, very unlikely' is not impossible, okay? There's still a chance."

"Fine, not impossible," Annabeth admitted. "But improbable and implausible."

"Hey, don't be confusing me with your fancy words, Wise Girl," Percy said. He nudged her leg under the table, a grin trying to return to his face, even if it was a shadow of its usual self. "All I need to know is that it could happen, okay? That's good enough for me."

"It's not though, is it?" Annabeth demanded, annoyed because, for some strange reason, Percy wasn't blaming her as much as she was blaming herself. "You want kids, Percy. I want kids. What if we can't do that? What if I can't give us that?"

"Hey, this isn't about you failing. This isn't your fault. Anyway, do you want me to tell you about some other supposedly impossible things?" Percy said. "How about me kicking Hyperion's ass? Us kicking Kronos' ass? Or how about the fact the Greek gods exist and are moored above the freaking Empire State Building in a citadel designed by you? We can get through this. We can keep trying until it happens."

"It might not, though." Annabeth was determined now to let Percy pin his hopes on some tiny, remote chance. It wouldn't be fair. "In fact, it probably won't."

"Nope. Not interested," Percy said with a light shrug. "Who cares about probablys or maybes or anything else? A slim chance is still a chance."

"You're not listening. What if we can't?" Annabeth persisted, frustration and heat rising through her voice. She had to know the answer and Percy wasn't giving it to her. His face crumbled when he heard bad news and it wasn't crumbling and she had to know why. Why was he so okay with this? What wasn't she seeing?

Again, Percy shrugged. "We cross that bridge when we come to it. Anyway, Piper used to do a whole load of babysitting for the Jolie-Pitt kids. Something tells me their mom might have the number for a decent adoption agency." His eyes twinkled as he said it.

Annabeth gave a loud snort of laughter; she began to smile, which initially felt like there were ten pound weights dragging her entire face downwards until her muscles loosened up. "Idiot. Thanks. I needed that."

"By 'that', I'm gonna assume you meant me. You've got me no matter what. I'm here for better, for worse, for blah blah blah, you may kiss the bride, remember?"

Annabeth smiled, mostly because her mind had wandered as well during their wedding ceremony. Both of them had barely managed to stay lucid enough to do the repetition thing thanks to the fact they were floating on love and their ADHD brains were elsewhere.

"So we're okay?" Annabeth asked.

Percy scoffed. "Please. We're better than okay: we're awesome."

"I love you," she said, leaning across the table and kissing him square on the lips.

He kissed her back for a few seconds before pulling away. "I love you too," he said with a grin. "No matter what. We are going to get through this, Annabeth." He paused. "In fact, I love you more than you love me."

Annabeth smiled but kept silent, chewing on the inside of her cheek. This was a favourite game Percy played to wind her up; if she disagreed and said that no, actually she loved him more than he loved her, then it was all out war until the other conceded. As much as she did love him, of course, her brain was in a sort of fragile state right now. She didn't think she could handle coming up with the verbal ammo.

So she had told him and the world hadn't fallen apart. They were still standing, and she hadn't destroyed anything. Apparently, it hadn't been the bomb she thought it would be and that, she realised, was why she and Percy worked so damn well as a couple. There was nothing they couldn't do together, nothing they didn't want to deal with together.

No matter what happened, they would be rock solid.