Years after the War, her first war, after the rubble had been allowed to settle and the world is no longer soaked in blood. Years after her grief had dulled itself out of both necessity and time. Years after Annabeth Chase did not die when she should have - she sees him.
Death hasn’t changed Luke Castellan, and he still looks at her like he knows her. Like he’s always known her.
The scar is the same, but he lacks the hollowness of death. Luke looks nineteen, he looks free, he looks like the easy-to-smile boy who would have died for every last one of them.
And she gets it now, how she never saw it. How despite her brain and how she was constantly six steps ahead, Annabeth never saw his betrayal coming.
Because she hadn’t wanted to.
Because she had loved Luke Castellan with all her bruised heart, and there was no word in which he could betray them, in which he could kill them. Because Luke was good, he was kind and angry but he was still good.
It’s not the first time Annabeth was wrong, but it was the most damming.
He shifts on the balcony looking out onto New Rome, and she can faintly hear Percy tossing in his sleep inside. His heartbeat a low buzz in her ears. The logical part of her says this isn’t real, that the dead don’t come back like this. It whispers of Tartarus and lingering nightmares, of Gods with a taste for vengeance.
She should go back inside, should run from this boy she would know blind and dead.
Annabeth quietly shuts the balcony door behind her and lets the breeze flutter against her skin. She leans against the railing, and Luke Castellan, a ghost or a hallucination or a curse, stands beside her.
So many years have passed, so many battles and smoking funeral pyres. She had lost count of the siblings she buried, because of him, because of the second war they fought. Annabeth had not forgotten their names - Rowan, Sarah, Declan, Adrian, Luca, Miriam, Lila, and on and on and on - but their faces had blurred, and the grief slowed.
The world had changed, the world had sharpened and Demigods stopped being anything other than soldiers. Any deniability was gone, and six-year-olds were strapped in armor and taught how to fight.
She knows too that she’s changed. A grey streaked braid falling down her shoulder, a long keloid scar on her shoulder, slipping out from her tank top straps. More scars, smaller or bigger, a burn patch on her lower back.
And that’s only physical changes. She has bags under her eyes, a new haunted look that fits grief-soaked cathedrals. Her fingers are constantly ink-blackened, and it’s better than the blood she can sometimes still see.
No, Annabeth Chase is a far cry from the girl she used to be, and even the one who watched Luke die. And yet -
Yet she falls into place beside him so easily it’s as if nothing has changed.
As if everything has changed.
His voice drifts on the wind, and Artemis or Diana flies across the sky above them, “You’ve grown up Beth.” If she was three years younger she would have let out a sound that could be described as keening, as her heart leaping from her chest.
But she isn’t, and all Annabeth does is shift on her feet. She takes a breath, her lungs still ache from the constant pine-body smoke of pyres. “That’s what happens when you don’t die at sixteen.”
Luke laughs, and she wonders how he could do it - how he could kill them and not flinch, she wonders when the blood stopped bothering him. “Still got that sharp tongue, I’m glad you didn’t lose it.”
Annabeth tightens her grip on the railing, across the city lights flicker on and off. New Rome is alive, it is breathing and thriving, and Camp Halfblood is still recovering from its last major attack and subsequent massacre. It’s so unfair, so wrong she wants to scream.
“I couldn’t lose my words any more than you could lose those thieving hands.” It’s not as sharp as it should be, and these days her anger never lasts long. She’s just so tired.
Out of the corner of her eye, she can see him shift, leaning further on the railing. His hands do not reach for a knife or a sword, death does not cling to Luke Castellan, and yet she still watches. Annabeth Chase does not forgive, and she does not forget.
She remembers, a curse or a blessing, she f*cking remembers.
He’s closer now, their shoulders would brush if she leaned over just a little. Annabeth could see the white scars on his knuckles, could remember his wolf-smile that matched his bloody hands, and Had to teach those Ares kids a lesson. “I know Beth, I know.”
His words rest in the air, and she’s trembling slightly. Ever since - since Tartarus and the Fall and the attacks and everything - she’s always been on the edge of breaking, of shattering. And in her worst moments she looks in the mirror and Luke, not nineteen and happy, but twenty-four and so damn angry, looks back.
The funny part is that it’s only gotten worse, that it’s been happening for years. The funny part is that as the years pass, Annabeth gets Luke and why he did what he did more and more. At first, it terrified her, all children feared becoming their parents, but then she stopped having time to worry about it.
And there are far worse things than hating the Gods, she’s learned that well enough.
Luke tilts his head back, staring at the stars with an unhidden thirst. She used to find him like that, drinking in the stars when Camp got bad, when it got quiet and they all knew quiet meant death. “You’ve made quite a life for yourself.” Annabeth can hear the admiration, she can hear the unsaid despite me.
Percy asleep in her bed, hair spread around him and dotted with grey. The scar pulling at the corner of his mouth, and how he always smiled when she kissed him. Sally and her warm, blue cookies, Estelle giggling in her arms and she will never know the horrors they lived through, will never have to endure what they had to survive.
Thalia and Nico and Piper and New Rome and Camp. Slowly learning to put down their weapons, slowly looking at the Gods and not breaking. Slowly going half mad and coming back. Slowly standing up and realizing that she has to live, that she did not die at sixteen.
Annabeth finally gives in and looks over at Luke, they’re the same height now and that is its own sort of grief. “Yeah, I made a good life. Carved it with bloody hands and bared teeth.”
She had gotten that feralness, that need for more from Luke. It was one of the few things she never regretted.
He nods, his hair still curling around his ears, and he looks like a boy. He doesn’t look like the man who nearly ended the Gods. He doesn’t look like the man who drove a dagger into his own body, who cut his golden thread to take out Kronos. He looks like her Luke, he looks nineteen.
They’re the same age, oh Gods they’re the same age.
“Why are you here?” It’s nearly a snarl and Annabeth doesn’t try and hide it - There is no place for lies or silver-coated truths, not here at least. (Better anger than grief, than agony.)
Luke smiles, Hermes son through and through despite how much he hates it. (You can’t run from your blood. You can hate it and condemn it. You can spit in its face and curse it, but you can never f*cking run from it.) “So you’ve decided I’m real then?”
He shifts on his feet, like he has his father’s wings, and they’ve played this game before. “Does it matter? Hallucination or not, real or not, I asked you a question.”
“And do you spend all your time talking to nothing? Or do you ignore them like the rest of us?” His smile sharpens, “Am I the exception, Annie?” It’s dripping with condescension, and she had nearly forgotten what he was like when he was angry, nasty without the threat of violence.
“Avoiding the question and trying to run, Luke? You really are your father’s son?” Luke’s eyes twitch, the scar still pale, still half recent. A howl rests on his lips.
Then his face smooths out, and he shrugs. Maybe death has made him - not gentler, but less sharp, less jagged. “Fine, you win. You can decide if I’m a hallucination, a curse, or some other third thing.”
Annabeth raises her eyebrow at his silence, “My question?”
“Maybe I just wanted to see my sister. See how much you get now.” Her first instinct is to break his nose, her second is to scream in his face, to bare her scars and ask him what Gods Damn right did he think he had to claim her as family after everything he’s done. But she’s not impulsive, not now, so instead she looks at Luke.
And to her horror, or maybe to her pain, she only finds the truth in the eyes of Hermes’s son. Because he did love her, because he was her brother despite his betrayal, despite the world on her back and Thalia’s pain. Because Luke was hers as much as she was his, as loathe as she was to admit that.
She takes a step back, as if that will save her now, and uselessly she says, “I’m not your sister.” It sounds too much like I’m not you for Luke to do anything but laugh. He always knew her too well.
He laughs a little, “You and I? Beth, we bleed the same. You couldn’t run from me if you tried.” Then she watches as his eyes soften, and his lips curve down. It’s an odd sight, Luke trying to gentle himself for her. “And you’ve tried.”
Because while Percy desperately clung to his mortality, to the few things that marked him as different from the Gods who watched them die - Annabeth tried desperately to believe in them, to look at her dead siblings, at the funeral pyres around them and say that it was for a reason. Because she knew if she let herself do anything other than that, suddenly Luke would make sense.
And maybe Luke couldn’t have killed the Gods, couldn’t have torn them from their golden thrones. But Annabeth, a General of two Wars, a survivor of Tartarus, of so many battles they blur in her mind, the architecture of Olympus. Annabeth Chase, the greatest mind of her generation and one of the most desperate, she could tear Olympus to the ground and the Gods wouldn’t even realize until they were already dead.
If Luke had used her, if he had been a touch crueler and had decided a weapon was better than a girl, if he hadn’t loved her as much as he did then the Titan War would have been so much bloodier. The tiny terrible, angry, and resentful part of her sings at the thought.
“Did you just come here to remind me of that? Because I am well aware of how much you’ve shaped me.” Annabeth could see his fingerprints on her, just like she could see Thalia’s and Percy’s, every person who made her who she was.
He tilts his head, and for a moment she is utterly bare before Luke. And he sees it all, not just her scars but the way Tartarus lingers, the way there is a dull want in her that’s only growing, the way she looks at the Gods and her resentment grows.
He sees more than that.
The life she’s never dared breathe to life - Living until she has smile lines from laughing. Dancing with Percy and Grover, spinning under brightly flashing lights without a care in the world. Kissing Percy in a white dress, his hands pressed to her back, warm and unwavering. A house and a degree and a job as an architect, rebuilding Camp and New Rome, leaving behind a legacy that isn’t one of blood and death, of war.
Living until she’s old and gray, living past twenty and twenty-five and thirty, living and never once breaking beneath the weight of her own grief. No more damn funeral pyres for children.
Luke sees it all, and he doesn’t look so young anymore. He looks older, despite nothing having changed. He looks like a God, frozen in his grief, frozen in his pain and his love. “I came here to see you. I was always worried you would have burnt out, killed yourself for them. I’m glad you didn’t.”
For the first time in years, it occurs to her that maybe Luke too is haunted by the fact that she’s so alike him. Maybe he’s also terrified that one day Annabeth will wake up, and she will be everything that he was.
Her hands shake, and they haven’t been still in years, except for when she’s fighting. Annabeth swallows, “I’m not you.” And it’s a promise and an insult and the kindest thing she can give to him. I’m not you, despite our similarities and the blood we do not share. I am not you, and I will not be you. I will not let myself become you. I will fight and claw my way out of this, but I will not be you.
Luke didn’t lash out, instead, he smiled so brightly she nearly broke. It’s been a long, long time since she last saw that look. “I know Beth. You’re not me.” And there was too much pride, too much bittersweet joy in his voice for her not to hear it. You’re not me, and I love you for that.
And what a pair they made - all their regret and their love and their hatred and their rage. All their messy, broken parts and the horrific things they’ve done. She wonders then, if the Gods get it, if they know they made Luke. If they know that he used to be good before them.
If the Gods know that their damnation, by Luke’s hand and by the next set of Demigods who look at the unjustness of it all and say No, I won’t let this stand, will be entirely their fault. She wonders if the Gods know that history is always going to repeat itself, that no one can ever really stop it - they can delay it, but it always comes back in the end.
“I’m going to live, and I will never apologize for that.” There are too many words she needs to say, and so little time. Annabeth could scream herself hoarse at Luke, she could cry until she became like Niobe, carved in stone and eroded by her own salt-soaked grief.
Annabeth could kill Luke, could tell him the names of the children he killed. The ones she remembers, Lee Castor Charlie Michael Silena Rowan Luca, and the ones she doesn’t, the hundreds who died because of him, the thirteen-year-old she killed because he had a sword and it was a battle and he had only wanted his father to love him and if he couldn’t have that then they could burn.
She could rage or grieve or fall to the ground and get up and figure a way to bring Olympus to its knees. She does none of those things, Annabeth stands tall, her back straight and in this way, she is his sister. “I won’t apologize to you, not for living. I’m never going to apologize to you for that.”
Because she will give him nothing, and Luke does not get to take anything more.
He smiles, sad and soft and an echo of every angry, dead-too-young Demigod. Luke raises his hand, and when she doesn’t recoil back, he gently brushes back a strand of her hair. It reminds her of Sally, holding Percy’s face and looking at him with so much love. Something like grief tears at her throat.
“I know Beth, you would never.” Then, and she thinks the last time he looked at her like this Thalia had yet to die. “Always knew you were gonna beat this world, glad that I wasn’t wrong.”
Annabeth, who has fought for the Gods at every turn, who has given up so much, allows herself a brief moment of selfishness. She closes her eyes and leans into Luke’s hand, because for a moment he is still the nineteen-year-old boy who loved her. Even if she is no longer the twelve-year-old who believed in him, who believed in good.
His hand lingers, soft and reassuring, and then it’s gone. She doesn’t have to open her eyes to know that no one is standing in front of her. That whatever this was - a hallucination, a god’s cruel trick, her broken mind, the dead risen - is over.
She stands still for a moment, the night calmly watching her. And then Annabeth Chase does what she has always done, she gets up and moves on.
She slips back into the apartment, Percy somehow having taken over the entire bed in her absence. She watches him for a moment, and she can see it all - their life and living and stumbling but always finding a way out of hell, a wedding and Sally walking him down the aisle and so much love it bursts from every seam. She watches Percy and for the first time, she allows herself to think of a future, of more.
Because Annabeth Chase did not die at sixteen, and she will never apologize for that.
