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The overhead light buzzed, almost thoughtfully; the only sound in a long, long beat in which nobody said anything at all.
"Well, shit," Annabeth managed eventually, as it seemed to her to be the most accurate way to summarize the situation. She sat down.
"I didn't do it," Nico input, ever helpful, and ducked out of the bathroom.
The toilet seat cover had the design of a giant purple octopus on it. She wasn't sure what the significance of it was, but Mr. Blofis gave it to them with tongue firmly in cheek, the Christmas following that episode where Percy saved his life by making their toilet explode with strategic timing. That was a couple years ago, and the edges of the octopus were getting a little frayed from all the times it was her versus the boys, re: toilet seat up or down.
While she engaged it in a staring contest, she could hear Percy pace from shower to door and back, a distance of roughly three steps. He opened his mouth to speak -- probably something stupid, like, "well, hey, at least now we have a real use for that second bedroom we have, since Nico's obviously not using it" -- but closed it again with an audible click of his jaw.
Finally, he sat next to her, obliterating the octopus from her sight, and leaned into her reassuringly.
"Well, shit," he agreed.
-
With a finalistic click of her pen, the doctor pushed herself back from Annabeth's exam table, rattling off easily, "I'm going to give you a prescription for prenatal vitamins -- the nice folks at the pharmacy will brief you again on how often and what dosage. You should talk to Dee on the way out: she can schedule your appointments with the ultrasound technician, get those monthly updates on how quick your baby's growing. Any other questions for me?" She put her hands down on her lap, adopting a friendly, open expression, like she spent most of her day talking to nervous, squirmy girls who were four seconds away from a panic attack over everything they didn't know.
Annabeth fidgeted, and then forced herself to take a deep breath. She was a daughter of Athena; her weakness was pride. She was not going to be so proud as to not ask. "How ..." she swallowed. This shouldn't even be an issue. "How far along am I, do you know?"
"Umm," the doctor lifted the cover page of her chart, eyes flicking. "You're currently at eight weeks, give or take a day or two, so the sooner you get started on those vitamins, the better. Did I give you that sheet of foods to avoid?"
"Yeah," Annabeth answered. Her vision swam. Eight weeks was two months. Two months was ...
Well, shit, she thought, and dropped her forehead heavily into her hands.
-
"So, hang on, I'm not really seeing the problem here."
Clarisse's hands skimmed over her wheels, slowing her wheelchair down as she slid to a stop at the end of Annabeth's check-out lane. "Paper or plastic?" she asked the customer in line with the barest scrim of a smile. Clarisse wasn't known for her customer satisfaction, but their manager was a middle-aged mortal who probably had a whole thick file on people-with-disabilities policies in her office, so Annabeth always figured Clarisse had better job security than she did.
"I mean," she continued to Annabeth after getting her answer, puffing open one of the plastic bags and starting to load in the heaviest things first. "I understand that you're still really young by family-planning standards, and still in school, and this isn't exactly part of your grandmaster 'dominate the world one energy-efficient geometric dome at a time' plan, but it's not like -- do you want your milk in a bag?" she interrupted herself without even breaking stride. "No? Okay. But it's not like you can't take online courses, and your finances are in great shape, and you can totally make Jackson your stay-at-home bitch."
"It's not that," went Annabeth, hand upraised and poised, waiting for the machine to spew out the receipt as Clarisse finished bagging the groceries. "I thought something like this would happen -- I mean, it's not like our kind have any problem getting girls pregnant, no matter how careful we are. We're Greek," she explained to the customer, flashing her a have-a-nice-day smile and sending her on her way, a little more scarred for life. "And yeah, I want a family. It's just --"
"Hades' hairy testicles, girl, what?" went Clarisse, voice impatient. "What's got you so torn up about it?"
Starting to swipe the next customer's groceries, beginning with keying in the fruit, Annabeth glanced around the store. It was only her and Henry at check-out, but that was only because Wolhner's pushed more for than neighborhood grocer feel, despite being a chain, and it was a small enough store that from her vantage point, she could see Nico back in Liquor, folding paper planes out of the free hand-outs from Pharmacy, and Percy with gloves on in Frozen, stacking boxes of Eggos, and the two Iris twins at Deli, who were probably watching the Giants game on the TV underneath the counter.
Working at the Wolhner's in Flatbrush wasn't, like, glamorous, but it was walking distance from the projects around Brooklyn College, and working there had practically become a rite of passage for half-bloods. Graduate from Camp Half-Blood, move to Brooklyn, work at Wolhner's, and you were boss. You could survive anything. Good luck with your life, try not to die.
"Hello!" she said to her customer, a tall, too-willowy woman in a tawny headscarf, who stared at her, glass-eyed. "Did you find everything all right today?"
"I'm going to peel your spleen and drink the juice from your eyeballs, half-blood," the woman answered, secondary set of eyelids fluttering.
"Great!" Annabeth answered, folding up the harpy's receipt and handing it to her. "Here's a quick survey you can take online, if you want to tell us how our service was today. Your order number is here, I've circled it, your feedback would be really appreciated. Thanks, have a nice day!"
The harpy summarily dismissed -- they weren't the brightest monsters, really; she'd gone for her daggers the first time one walked through the check-out, but it wasn't even worth note anymore -- she turned to Clarisse. "Do you remember that scare we had about, like, two months ago, when Freya went missing and everybody thought she was dead?"
"Yeah," went Clarisse, dragging the word out questioningly. "Malcolm went ballistic. He thought they were true love or whatever. It was like a damn Lifetime movie when they got reunited."
"Yeah," nodded Annabeth, and then bit her lip, slid her eyes sideways.
A beat.
Two.
"Oh," breathed Clarisse with dawning realization. "Oh, no fucking way. You didn't."
"It wouldn't have happened if we weren't so absolutely sure that Freya was dead," Annabeth went on a low, hurt noise. She'd been nothing but self-flagellation since Freya came home, no worse for the wear. "We aren't like that. But yeah," she answered the question in Clarisse's high-arched brows. "I'm 99.9% certain that's when I got pregnant."
"Ho, shit, girl," said Clarisse in the tones of admiration people usually save for when they're walking past a demolition site, all terrific rubble and yellow caution tape. "What are you going to do?"
She exhaled slowly. She hadn't even thought beyond confessing to somebody, anybody. She reached that block in her mind and every sense went screaming away from it, going, nope, nope, we're not dealing with this right now.
"I have no idea," she said.
"Are you going to tell him?" Meaning Percy. And Nico, too, because they were a combined entity in Annabeth's head on this matter.
That was enough to make her shake her head emphatically. "I can't do that!"
Clarisse pushed her wheelchair closer, a belated concession to privacy. "Well, you're going to have to do something," she said, voice firm. "Because I'm pretty sure Jackson's gonna notice when you squat down and your spawn comes out with a dot on its forehead."
"Don't be racist."
It was like telling water to please not flow downhill. Clarisse's eyebrows continued their high march over her forehead, all, you know I'm right, and, what were you expecting?
Annabeth swung around. "Paper or plastic?" she demanded of the man unloading his groceries onto the conveyor belt, somewhat belligerently.
-
They were in Hell's Kitchen on a Wednesday, because, "it's not that far from SoHo, Annabeth, come on," -- and it wasn't, but SoHo is forever away from Flatbrush (Flatbrush wasn't even on Long Island, seriously, she hated the Bridge at any time of day, and she also she didn't have that deep, abiding love for Manhattan that Percy did) and she'd rather have stayed home, because she had a headache and she was nauseous (morning sickness is a lie, it's more of a, "whatever time of day is most inconvenient for you" sickness) and her bones felt achy and she didn't want to do all that walking.
She loved Percy's mom, really, but she and Paul didn't need to live in SoHo to prove to people that they were serious artistes. It was ridiculous. And she did mention the amount of walking.
She was in the middle of this list of crimes against today in her head, eyebrows hunched down to make a point, when Percy said, "You know, you're handling this a lot better than I thought you would."
Her head jerked up from her navel-gazing, and she flashed him a quick glare. "There's a blister on my ankle."
Hearing the wealth of issues in her voice, Percy slowed down to match her pace, leaving Nico up ahead, and wrapped his hand up in hers. "I meant the baby. You've been nothing but calm about this whole thing. I thought you'd be more --" he gestured a bit, obviously trying to find a way to phrase it that wasn't going to set her off. "-- Annabeth about it," he finished.
She made another face at him, less angry about it this time. Maybe she would be freaking the hell out -- because unplanned pregnancies were never something that you just took in stride -- but the weight of knowledge that whatever infant she was going to deliver was probably going to have Malcolm's beetle-black eyes and brown skin kind of drowned out all other panicking she could be doing. She could only freak out about so many things at a time.
"No, it's calming," Percy said in response to her expression. "We're taking our cue from you. You're not worried, we're not worried. We're excited, have we mentioned that?"
"He's right," came from Nico up ahead. "This baby is going to be awesome. And since there's three of us raising it, it's going to be, like, three times awesome."
"Fantastic application of math there, Nico," Annabeth quipped at him, but she was smiling and she knew he could hear it.
She'd heard them seriously discussing it before, the question of which of them was the father, because it's not like they'd be able to tell from appearances, right, them being cousins and very similar in looks and all; dark hair, dark eyes, underwater skin, and those could mix with Annabeth's looks in any number of muddling ways.
She'd laughed about it, then, because Percy and Nico would know. It was just how they were; they'd be able to recognize each other anywhere, and in anyone. She'd known this as long as she'd known them, that Nico sought Percy out before anything else and unquestioningly loved anything to do with him, and that Percy considered anything of Nico's to be his responsibility, to be his.
It was moments like that, light-hearted and uplifted and all-together wonderful, where she forgot about Malcolm.
Remembering again in a cold wash of nerves, she gave Percy's hand a brief squeeze, and then dropped it. The thing that surprised her the most about this whole deal was that her mother hadn't put in her two cents yet. For all that the gods insisted that they were just brothers and sisters in soul and didn't go about marrying blood relatives, therefore making it not weird that Freya from the Zeus cabin could date Malcolm from the Athena even though at family meetings she called Athena a big sister, there was still that stigma against dating amongst your own cabin, even though the no-DNA rule still applied. So Annabeth wasn't worried about the health of her baby, but more, what was Athena going to do to it to punish it? On top of what was already going to happen to her and Percy and Nico, and probably Malcolm and Freya, too.
Like she said, there wasn't really room to panic about much else.
They rounded a corner and crossed the street, going against the glaring "do no walk" sign the way New Yorkers do, and after giving her a friendly bump with his shoulder, Percy jogged forward to catch up with Nico, going on excitedly about the supposed underground ambrosia-substitue ring that had cropped up around these parts in the past few months. They were like kids like that, ones that never really grew out of the promise of being able to destroy things and winning.
The next thing Annabeth knew, something solid and slimy wrapped itself around her ankle and gave a great yank, and then she was suspended head-over-heels in midair.
Swinging alarmingly, she pushed her hair out of her eyes and twisted around, finding herself face-to-face with a cephalopod whose slimy body took up most of one alleyway, with a I ♥ New York baseball cap on its head and a half-blood caught up in one of its tentacles. It regarded her speculatively with one big, flat yellow eye, the way you'd idly inspect the food you had on the end of your fork.
She sighed. She hated Hell's Kitchen.
"HEY," came from below her. "What the hell!"
The monster blinked, and, very slowly, looked down at Percy and Nico, who were both standing underneath it on the sidewalk, looking positively livid.
"Seriously, man," continued Percy. "Knock it off. She's three months pregnant, you asshole!"
The octopus-squid-hybrid thing -- it looked surprisingly similar to the one on their toilet seat cover -- blinked again, and, still very slowly and in its deep, otherworldly voice, said, "Oh."
And then, "Sorry, my bad, I didn't know," as Annabeth was put down back down on the ground with a quick influx of vertigo that more or less racketed her nausea up to level ten.
"Thank you," Percy said pointedly, hand catching under Annabeth's forearm and tugging her in to where she was sandwiched between him and Nico, safe.
She sighed to herself again. Yeah, she was never going to be able to tell them.
-
"So," she said offhand one day, sitting on the counter and twisting open Oreos to lick the cream off the inside. "Do you think one of you should, like, marry me, maybe?"
Nico looked up from his spot at the kitchen table, which was their name for the glorified high-top counter like a bar setup. There wasn't really room for a table. "Nose goes!" he went, kneejerk, touching his fingertip to his nose with eyes wide.
Annabeth rolled her eyes at him and turned to Percy, who was stringing green beans at the sink. "Sorry, that was a stupid question. Do you think you should marry me?"
Snick, went the knife in Percy's hand, slicing the tips off the green beans. "Um," he offered, shifting his weight a little and tilting his chin, trying to gauge the expression on her face. "If you want to, I guess."
As a response, it was a little underwhelming, so she scraped the rest of the cream off her Oreo with her teeth and lobbed the cracker part at the trash bin. "It just seems the thing to do, you know." She touched a hand to her belly, curving it over the bump there, just big enough to be suggestive. "Girl gets pregnant, you marry her, yeah?" She caught the brief flick of emotion that crosses Percy's eyes, too heavy to really be identifiable, and hastened to add, "I know that's not what our parents did, nor am I suggesting that it's necessary since we're more than capable as we are, but isn't that the point, really, that we not turn out to be like them?"
"But I like Sally," came from Nico's direction.
"Shut up, Nico," Percy said softly, distracted. He put the knife down and sidled sideways along the counter, taking one of Annabeth's hands in his. His fingertips were pruny, which struck her as odd: she thought Percy was above pruning, between being a son of Poseidon and the Styx thing. "If you want to get married, we'll get married. I told you when I was twelve that you were stuck with me," he flashed a grin. "Haven't backed down from that one yet."
"Well, that's romantic," she said dryly. "You should write that one into your vows."
"Because you asked so nice, I will," he said laughingly, and then gave her that smile, the one that was just for her, the one that reminded her that Percy'd been a more permanent fixture in her life than anything else except maybe life-threatening danger, and this was the boy that, even now, kissed her like he was giving mouth-to-mouth, like he couldn't breathe unless she was breathing with him.
She felt a touch to her elbow; Nico, not wanting to be left out, shouldering in under her arm to wrap them both up in a spidery kind of hug. "As touching as this is, I'd like it a lot better if one of you took off your pants."
"I take it back," Annabeth said to Percy, deadpan. "He makes you look sensitive."
"I know," Percy replied wistfully, and patted the top of Nico's head. "We really should have housebroken him before we started reproducing."
-
I wish you could see it, Nico'd said to her once, back when any affection she had for him wouldn't fit a thimble and she mostly just thought of him as that creeper from the Hades cabin whose sister had been semi-immortal for a grand total of twenty-four hours before croaking, which had to be, like, a Camp record. Just how bright the two of you appear to somebody all wrapped up in darkness.
He was annoying and off-putting and general nuisance, like a dog just a little bit too old and set in its habit of chewing up all your socks and barking at nothing, but sometimes she could physically see the effort that Nico put into playing civil, and in return, she made the logistics of a three-way relationship work. It was hard to not like someone who looked at you and then looked at Percy and smiled to himself, like you were the only things in the world all lit up.
It didn't stop her from wanting to strangle him three times before dinner practically every day, but hey. That was what they were having a kid for: someone to be on Annabeth's side for once.
-
Handily, Nico did most of the work that went with baby-proofing the apartment.
"Anything you want to push, fiddle with, take apart, or stick your finger in, that's your clue to put it away or cover it up," Percy told him by way of instruction, in a voice that was half-fond and half-exasperated, and over the course of two afternoons, Nico did exactly that: Annabeth came home on a Sunday with ankles so swollen the purple veins stuck out like tributaries, and found that all the drawers had catches installed and all light sockets now had rubber plugs in them.
She dropped onto the sofa and surveyed the changes, and when Nico slunk out of the bedroom to sit with her, she dragged him close enough to kiss and say, "You actually did something useful. Color me shocked," and he beamed at her, so wide it crinkled his eyes up at the corners, like she'd just told him she loved him. Which, she supposed, she did, in an Annabeth way.
The bigger she got, the more meaningful the looks Clarisse gave her over "paper or plastic?" became. She had Malcolm's number on a post-it by the telephone, and she had half a mind to call him when she knew he'd be out so she could deliver her confession to the answering machine, but then there was the chance that Freya might hear it and all her courage just withered right then. She made Percy postpone doing up invitations to the wedding without really giving him a concrete reason -- the fewer people knew about it, the fewer people there were to snicker behind their hands if the wedding got canceled because Annabeth didn't have her husband's child. It was the little concessions she could make.
Mostly, Annabeth's course of action was to keep on as if nothing had changed at all. So, when late September came along and the tops of the trees started to go yellow, she stood at the kitchen sink and vindictively squashed what would hopefully be the season's last swarm of ants and felt a sudden, sharp cramp rip right over her belly, she thought, huh, is it that time already?
"Only you would go into labor and then take the subway to the hospital, cool as you please," Clarisse went, rolling herself into Annabeth's hospital room, which was more or less some backroom they stuck her in because a young, healthy woman delivering a baby wasn't exactly exciting news and most of the other rooms were full with higher priority patients.
Clarisse was the only person Annabeth had been able to get a hold of: the no cell-phones clause of being a half-blood was probably the most inconvenient part.
"Ambulances are expensive," she complained, and then flinched forward as another contraction started low in her gut. She was glad Clarisse was here. Being in incredible, excruciating pain was a lot better when someone else was around to hear you cry about it. "Did you --" she started on a pant.
"I got word out on the sub-Olympian grapevine that if anyone gets their hands on a certain Percy Jackson, that they're not to eat him, as it's rude when his girlfriend's having a baby," Clarisse reassured her, and her face was flat, so Annabeth had no idea if she was joking or not. It seemed like something a daughter of Ares would do, though. She supposed she should be glad that Nico and Clarisse really never hit it off: that'd be a match made in hell.
What they don't tell you in the movies is that 90% of labor is mostly uninteresting. After maybe forty minutes of watching Annabeth's eyes dilate with pain and sweat discolor the hair at her temples, Clarisse appropriated her laptop and used one of Deadalus's override codecs to livestream the latest episode of Monster Truck Fight without commercials.
Even when things finally got going, with a doctor standing by and some patient nurses giving Annabeth confusing and contradictory messages involving pushing and breathing, Clarisse didn't really look up from the screen except to go, "Stop screaming, you useless Athena wimp, you're wasting your breath. You need that breath to push."
"Oh, gods, shut up," went Annabeth on a gusty exhale. "Why don't you go to something useful, like go figure out where my damn husband is?"
"He's not your husband yet," Clarisse responded, not even phased.
Annabeth shot her a vicious glare, then vindictively sucked in a deep breath and started pushing like she meant it.
It was all a harried, semi-organized rush after that, with nurses moving efficiently around each other in a flurry of activity, the doctor humming something encouraging in a low, steady voice, and a sudden, cool relief from all the pressure and Annabeth's vision swam with it, just as --
"Congratulations, Ms. Chase," went the doctor warmly, as a nurse did something quick with a pair of scissors. "You have a baby boy."
The baby was toweled off, wrapped up, and summarily deposited Annabeth's arms, brand new and screaming its head off.
"... um," said Annabeth in a tiny voice, looking from her son to the people gathered around and then back.
The resident nurse, who was closest, caught the look on her face and arched her eyebrows, like, were you expecting something else?
Annabeth swallowed, because really, what do you say? "Excuse me, nurse, but I think you just pulled the wrong baby out. This isn't mine"?
How about not.
"Never mind," she mouthed half-heartedly, and took another look at the baby. Her baby. His hair was plastered to his skull, thick and dark, but she couldn't tell if dark was its color or if that was just how it looked when wet, and his eyes, when he scrunched them open to glare around reproachfully, were the same dark marine blue that all newborn babies had before pigmentation started to creep in. His skin was ruddy red from birth and wrinkly, but it was obvious at first glance.
He wasn't Malcolm's son.
Too dazed by surprise to even be relieved, Annabeth smiled dopily and nodded at various people in scrubs until finally they all left, one with the promise to return shortly with a Certificate of Birth for her to fill out.
Left alone with an exhausted baby still tucked into the crook of her elbow and a shit-ton of bonding hormones making everything go golden and kind of loopy, Annabeth looked up as Clarisse as she pushed her wheelchair up to the end of her bed, the corner of her mouth quirked up.
"So!" she said, drumming her fingers on her armrest. "Looks like it wasn't you that made the mistake, it was the doctor who gave you the estimated date of conception."
"Looks like," Annabeth answered.
She must have sounded less than enthused, because Clarisse's eyes narrowed. "But this is good," she said, less of a question and more of an order. "Unless there's some other sob-story affair you've been keeping under your belt, this is actually Jackson's kid."
And because it wouldn't be Annabeth's life if it had any sense of appropriate timing whatsoever, that was the moment Percy finally arrived, Nico close on his heels like he always was. The moment they saw her, they both broke out talking at once, overlapping each other and rambling -- there was some kind of torch-running marathon going on Kesington (and seriously, since when did anybody care about parades in Kesington?) and all the streets had been blocked off, and then they got ambushed by this ridiculous horde of harpies and they were too busy vanquishing them to realize that the harpies just had a message for them, but by the time they'd offed six of them and had gotten to the train station, they realized something was up and they should really work on getting around that cell phone clause, because as dramatic as it makes their lives, it's seriously just annoying -- but they immediately fell silent when Annabeth tilted her arms at them, showing them the baby.
The expressions on their faces was one Annabeth was going to remember for the rest of her life, and the rush of affection for them both in that moment almost stopped her heart, because she was so godsdamn lucky to have them, ridiculous as they were, and to have this, their child, hers and theirs. She was a mom, thanks to them, and right that second, she couldn't imagine being anything better.
This had to be showing clear as day to them, written all over her face, because Nico flashed her that rare hundred-watt smile and came over, hiking a knee up on her bedspread so he could lean down, catching her mouth in a kiss, never mind the fact her skin was clammy with dried sweat and she hadn't brushed her teeth since last night.
Percy came over, too, bending so that he could palm the baby's skull with one shaking hand. He cut into a startled laugh when Nico leaned over, lipping at his mouth too, and caught a forearm across Nico's collarbones, pushing him back with a "geroff," and Annabeth's toes curled up, and she couldn't stop smiling.
And, from somewhere way far off: "Well, shit," said Clarisse, appreciatively. "I didn't see that coming."
-
fin