Work Text:
There’s one benefit to late night swim practices and it’s enough to outweigh all the hours of rest that it cuts away at. Annabeth’s sleep schedule is something of a nightmare and as much as he makes fun of her for it, it works out in both of their favor because that means he can meet her outside the back door of the school at 11 PM without feeling guilty for keeping her up and waiting. Maybe it says something about him as a boyfriend for enabling her absolutely atrocious sleep patterns, but it’s not like he’s one to talk when the Curse makes him equally as bad as her. They feed into each other’s terribleness, actually.
He tells himself it’s okay, because tomorrow is Saturday and Saturdays are sacred for the fact that they are for sleeping only. For certain, his mother has some things to say about it, but September is still fresh and he has a feeling that the events of last month feel too raw to scold them for something as harmless as sleeping at all the wrong times. She’s never really been one to scold in the first place, opting more towards gentle guidance—the kind that makes you feel like an asshole if you ignore it. At most, he’ll get a “baby, this lifestyle’s gonna wear you down” rather than an actual talking-to.
Her leniency also serves as the primary reason why Annabeth is able to come over on the late nights. That, and also because Sally is one of the plethora of people who just cannot seem to say no to her. The first time she slept over, it had been purely accidental and kind of awkward the morning after. In the kitchen, the soft whistle of the kettle for the cup of peppermint tea that Sally boils every morning was undeniable. There was no way for her to sneak out of Percy’s room and out the front door without being seen—unless she wanted to climb down the fire escape. Eventually, the two of them accepted their fate and met her in the kitchen, utterly mortified. She had looked a little stunned at first, then amused. It would’ve been better, honestly, if she decided to scold them right there and then, but instead they were left with some weird little guessing game of trying to figure out if this was her way of giving them permission.
It was through a grueling process of trial and error that they found out she didn’t care as long as the door was left open. The first time they attempted to close the door was the gateway into the most embarrassing conversation he’s ever had with his mom—which says something because he’s had his fair share of humiliating circumstances.
He feels a bit devilish as he closes the door now, even though it’s only to change his clothes post-shower. Annabeth’s cheek is squished against the back of her hand as she faces him, not even bothering to hide the way she’s obviously ogling him. Quickly, he pulls over a shirt and fits himself into the space behind her, tucking her close.
“Your mom is gonna freak when she opens your door in the morning and finds me in here,” she says.
“Too tired to get up…” he whines.
“Shut up, you did that on purpose.”
“What did you think was gonna happen here, Chase? I'm falling asleep as we speak.”
“You’re the one who closed the door.”
“To change my clothes,” he groans.
“Everyone’s asleep. You didn’t need to.”
“It feels wrong to leave it open while I’m naked in here.”
She mumbles something, but the vowels get lost in his pillow. Her body goes slack, and besides the scent of lemon overtaking his senses, there’s not much else to focus on. It’s quiet for a little too long and he expects to hear her snoring softly soon.
“Are you sleepy?” she asks, jarring him.
He absolutely is not, for the sole reason that it’s impossible to ever feel sleepy when she’s against him, her skin so softly meeting his. This comes up as a problem during Saturdays (sleep days), but it works itself out usually, because one moment he’s completely enamoured by the existence of her —so precious, so beautiful, and until she decides otherwise, his. The next thing he knows, he’s waking up Saturday evening with absolutely no relocation of what happened the night before.
Of course, he can’t tell her that. A part of him wants to, though, because it seems like something that she would like to hear. But they’ve only been dating for a month and have yet to dip their toes into the “I love you” stage as of right now, so he bites his tongue.
“Are you not?” he opts for instead.
When she shakes her head, her nose rubs against him. “I slept in today.”
“...You mean you skipped school?”
“Well, not on purpose. I was up the whole day before and then when I got in bed I just kinda...passed out? And then I woke up and it was 3:30 PM.”
He chuckles lightly and it rings out from the back of his throat. “Did you get a scolding from the nuns?” he asks, because the best boarding school in the city happens to a Catholic one. It’s shameful, honestly, how much of his time is spent trying to stay in her dorm room for as long as possible without being caught by one of them.
“I wish. They called my dad instead, and then Helen texted me some paragraph about how he pays so much money for me to go to boarding school in New York and I’m throwing it down the drain.”
He must’ve been clenching his jaw because Annabeth reaches up and works her thumb in circles on the taut skin, easing it gently. “I’m of the opinion that you should skip more. As protest, obviously.”
She rolls her eyes. “Obviously. What would I do while I skip?”
“Hang out with your boyfriend?”
“But my boyfriend would be at school.”
“Maybe he can skip too.”
“His mother would think I’m a bad influence. I think I’m already on thin ice with her.”
Percy frowns. “Why?”
She smothers a laugh into his shirt. “Because I’m in your bed and the door is closed.”
“Why are you so fixated on the door being closed, Chase? Huh?”
Her eyelids retract as she looks up at him, and the grey of her irises is light in a way he’s never seen them be before. When her lips meet his, he welcomes them softly, then eagerly. He’s gotten better at it—kissing. Not that he was terrible when they first did it, but she’s the only person he’s ever done anything like this with so his skills were so, so limited. It’s funny, kind of, how they danced around their emotions for four summers only to let it all loose within the first 2 weeks of dating. Those 14 days were spent navigating things like kissing and the other perils of diving head first into a relationship formed literally at the tail-end of war. The thing with new relationships founded on old, persistent feelings is that fast-paced doesn’t feel as much fast-paced as it does natural. Like now, as she lifts herself onto her elbows to hook a leg around his waist and deepen the kiss all he can think is that this is how it was supposed to be and everything that unfolded during those summers was meant to lead to this.
She pulls back before he can even register that she’s doing so, and her lips are so blissfully swollen that he barely even hears her say, “See?”
“See what?” and if it comes out a little frustrated, he thinks he has all the right to be.
“What would your mom think if she walked in on us just now?”
“She couldn’t. The door is locked, Annabeth.”
“You are so full of shit.” Slowly, her grin gives way to full fits of laughter and she falls, her back hitting the mattress. “ What did you think was gonna happen here, Chase?” she says, in a poor imitation of his voice.
He sits up and grabs at her arms, pulling her back up into him. “You’re terrible. Acting like it’s a fucking crime that I wanna kiss my girlfriend.”
“There’s a key to your door right? Imagine Sally walking in here while I was straddling you!”
“My mom’s not a gremlin like you, she’d knock before opening. And no one forced you to straddle me. You did that on your own accord.”
She scrunches her nose, feigning disgust. “Only to prove a point.”
He blinks at her. “I can think of many times where you did that with absolutely no point to prove—”
“Shut up.”
“Like that time at your school? When we were hiding from the nuns in the—?”
Annabeth groans, dropping her forehead onto his chest. “I had just forgotten about that.”
“What’s worse—my mom catching us or the nuns?”
“Both are mortifying. I think I’d off myself immediately either way, actually.”
“At least my mom won’t tell on you to your dad.”
She hums. “If my dad ever attempted to give me The Talk I think I’d faint on the spot.”
He quirks an eyebrow at her. “You mean no one ever—”
“Yup. Learned it myself by accidentally catching various senior campers going at it when I was a little kid.”
“You are so lucky,” Percy says.
“Seeing my older siblings doing, um, y’know, was traumatizing, thank you very much.”
“No, I mean, talking about that shit with my mom is the worst thing I’ve ever experienced.”
“Bold.”
“Not even exaggerating. It was terrible.”
“When’d it happen?”
“Like around the time we started dating.”
Her head snaps up and she seems properly horrified, but he doesn’t miss the slight redness to her cheeks. “You’re mom thinks that...we…”
“Maybe? I think it was more of a preventative thing.”
“Preventative,” she repeats slowly, and then drops it all together. Percy didn’t really know where this conversation was going, not that he hasn’t thought about it because he has—a lot. But they’ve only been together for a month and Annabeth won’t even make eye contact with him, so he says nothing.
It’s his stomach’s rumbling that ends up saving him.
“Wanna eat?” she offers.
“When do I not?”
“Fair,” is all she says before stepping onto the floor and tugging him to follow.
It’s comical, almost, how slowly they walk to the kitchen, careful not to disturb the certain floorboards that creak under any sort of pressure.
Annabeth plants herself in front of the pantry, and he stands behind her with his arms circling her waist. “Chips and guac?”
“Chips are too loud,” he whispers. “She’ll wake up.”
She cranes her head back to look at him, trying to figure out if he's joking or not. “You’re serious?”
He nods. “She’s a light sleeper. Kind of had to be, y’know. With Gabe and all that.”
His teeth clamp down on his tongue before he accidentally says too much. Annabeth notices, of course she does. She turns around and presses a kiss to his cheek.
“And, uh, there’s been a few instances where Blackjack would show up in the middle of the night because a dolphin or something needed help. I always tried to come back soon, but I scared the life out of her on multiple occasions.”
Annabeth presses her lips together and he can tell by the look in her eyes that what she’s about to say is way more pressing. She must decide on sparing him because instead she fixes with an almost amused expression. “You snuck out in the middle of the night to save sea creatures?”
“What?”
“Nothing. You’re cute.”
And sure everything else about their relationship feels like nature finally taking the course it was always supposed to, but he doesn’t think he’ll ever fully settle into being adored. He spent years appreciating her in silence, and it’s strange to think maybe she was doing that too. Though he doesn’t really know what she’s been appreciating because up until last year he’d been any lanky teenage boy, just barely matching her height. That’s generous actually, because she towered him for a good year. There’s a considerable height difference between them now. So much so that Annabeth has to push her weight onto her tiptoes to catch his lips.
Another angry roar from his stomach sends them pulling apart and Annabeth clears her throat, now interested in scouring the fridge.
“There’s nothing in here but rice,” she says plainly.
“So? Rice is fucking fantastic.”
She pulls the container out of the fridge, frowning at it. “Yeah, but this is brown rice. You can’t eat brown rice on it’s own.”
“We can’t eat it at all. We’d have to warm it up, and to do that we’d have to run the microwave, which definitely would wake her up.”
She looks like she wants to groan, but then her eyes dart somewhere behind him, panicked and wide.
“Oh, she’s awake alright.”
His mom’s voice is soft enough that he doesn’t feel nearly as distressed as Annabeth looks right now. She walks down the hall with her arms crossed, and a slight smile playing on her face.
“You can warm up the rice,” she assures and he can literally feel the air circulate in the kitchen again when Annabeth exhales.
Percy nods at her and then reaches for the rice. “Sorry for waking you up, Mom.”
“Oh, I was never asleep. Still got lots of revisions to get done.”
Annabeth pushes herself up onto the countertop like she always does, and laughs lightly. “We did all that for nothing then?”
Sally joins him in front of the fridge and picks up a take-out box. “Yellow curry. We got extra for dinner—figured you two would want to eat.”
Percy takes it from her hands thankfully, and busies himself with preparing their plates. “How’d you know?” he asks, already expecting the answer
“Mother’s intuition?”
Sometimes he feels like he’s never had a thought his mom couldn’t guess. No doubt, she knows so much more than she lets on. His bedroom door is open now, but he knows the sound it makes when he locks and Sally does too. She can probably tell they’re hiding something just by looking at them.
She searches the cupboard for glasses, then fills them with ice and water, placing them both on the counter where Annabeth’s sitting. “How was practice?”
“One kid passed out.”
Sally gapes. “Oh my God?”
“Sucks to not be an invulnerable son of Poseidon,” Annabeth teases.
The microwave buzzes, and he places the plates on the counter with diminishing self restraint. “No, honestly,” he says after chewing a mouthful. “I don’t know how they do it. 6 hour practices? That’s just not right.”
“It’s impressive. I don’t even have energy to do homework after school.”
“That’s just because you refuse to sleep at a normal person hour.”
“I’m doing fine, aren’t I?”
“Uh, your attendance record says otherwise,” he jokes.
“It was one day!”
Sally looks between the two of them curiously. “You’ve been missing school?”
Annabeth shrinks into herself bashfully and sets down her fork. “Just today. I slept through my alarm, that’s all.”
She examines her thoughtfully. “Maybe you should nap after school.”
“I do,” she says miserably. “But then I lose time to work on my assignments.”
“And your grades are fine?”
She pauses. “They’re whatever.”
“You know, it’s not the worst thing in the world to take it a little easy on yourself. Drop one of your hard classes. No point overexerting yourself if your grades suffer.”
“My parents wouldn’t like that.”
“Talk it out with them,” she insists. “They’ll get it eventually.”
Everything about Annabeth’s expression shows her fear. Sally brushes the blonde hair off her forehead and then tucks it behind her ear.
“Or I could talk to them,” she adds.
Her eyebrows shoot up her forehead. “You’d do that?”
“Why not?”
“I-I’ll think about it,” she whispers. “Thank you.”
“But if Annabeth’s not sleep-deprived the whole week, that defeats the purpose of Saturdays,” he interjects.
His mother’s glare holds no bite. “Good. Maybe it’ll push you both to stop whatever madness you’ve got going on right now. Crazy idea—go on a date like a normal couple your age.”
Him and Annabeth exchange a glance, and he pulls out a dramaticized version of her thinking face. “Sundays are for dates. Saturdays are for sleep.”
Sally laughs, leaning onto the palm she’s placed over the marble counter. Her eyes close as the sound fades off, and then they don’t open for a while again. For a moment, he thinks she’s fallen asleep there. Then, she rubs a hand on her eyelid and out of pure instinct, Percy moves it away because that’s what she always does for him. “You’ll get wrinkles early if you keep doing that,” she would say.
Annabeth draws a knee up to her chest. “You should go back to sleep, Sally.”
“Wish I could. I’ve still got revisions to do.”
“You can’t tell me not to overexert myself and then keep yourself up late,” she says softly.
“Got me there,” Sally says, snickering. “I’ll go back to sleep, and you try to go to bed earlier this week, deal?”
She grins. “Deal.”
In all the time he’s known her, he never thought it’d be so easy to convince her out of such habitual practices. Her sleep pattern and excruciating work ethic have been out of line for nearly her whole life, but here she is promising to his mom that she’ll take better care of herself over brown rice at midnight. He sees her every single day, but now he’s seeing her in a completely new way and the words “ I love you” come to his mind, refusing to leave. He can’t say them yet because his mom is right across from them, but God does he want to. He loves her and he loves all the ways he knows her and loves the ways he’ll learn more about her from being her boyfriend.
His mom looks him over and again he’s acutely aware of the fact that she could probably fish in his mind and pluck out of his thoughts right now. She settles on a small, knowing smirk and then nods like her work here is done. “Dishwasher’s already going, so just put your plates in the sink, yeah?”
She turns to walk back down the hall, but stops momentarily. “And leave the door open.”