obsidian black ● jason grace

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cw: mentions of smoking, OCD

Annabeth never wanted to be on guard duty with Jason; this was before his girlfriend, or ex-girlfriend if you liked technicalities, which Annabeth did, went missing. Now, her feelings hadn't changed. She really didn't want to be on guard duty with Jason Grace.

He would switch between outwardly complaining, to muttering to himself, to lapsing into a worried silence. Annabeth was incredibly intuitive; she could feel it from the other side of the deck, radiating like the heat of the Medditeranean.

"Stop grumbling!" She called.

Jason mumbled something that sounded suspiciously like, fuck off, Annabeth, and ended up not replying. It had been two days, and his eyes were still red when the sun hit them just right.

Annabeth sighed. She remembered what Percy had told her after they returned from underwater, about how the son of Jupiter had been...not himself. She knew the feeling better than most. Knew that Daria's absence could be the icing on the cake, knew that she needed to help him if only because she was already used to his snapping at her.

In the nine months that they had known each other, Annabeth didn't know if she had ever had a real conversation with the guy. Their talks had always been fielded by Piper or Chiron; she always got the feeling that Jason was nervous around her, not that she ever cared to amend it.

She made her way over to the other side of the deck, hesitant. "Look," she started.

Jason rolled his eyes, "oh gods, not you too."

Annabeth couldn't help herself. "Have you always been this much of an asshole or do you just need Daria to reign you in?"

Jason snorted. "The first one."

"Look," she tried again. "I'm going to be honest. If you want to cry or something, you'd be better off talking to Buford than me. But, if you want to like, rant, then I'm the person least likely to try and make you a 'better person'."

"That's comforting," Jason replied, still lost in his own head.

"Yeah, I mean if you're going to brood to yourself anyway, I figure it'd look less weird if I was standing next to you."

Jason scowled. "I don't brood."

"Uh huh."

He didn't respond, like Annabeth assumed he wouldn't. "You need to calm down though, we're still on a quest. We don't know when she'll come back."

"Calm," Jason said as if he hadn't heard the word before. "Tell me, Annabeth, how calm were you when you first met us at the Grand Canyon?"

Truthfully, she had forgotten about that. Had blocked that time without Percy out of her mind; but when Jason mentioned it, pangs of anxiety shot into her stomach. She didn't realize how much Jason was really keeping it together.

"Oh," she said simply. "But I thought you broke up with-?"

"You can't break up with someone and still love them?"

"Well," she considered it. "I suppose, but-"

"There you go," he said. "Now, I'm going to continue brooding."

Annabeth looked him over. Jason Grace, she mused, Thalia's brother, and yet...

"When I was 7," she said. "I ran away from home. I guess I just couldn't take it anymore. That's how I met Thalia, and Luke, the son of Hermes. Thalia never told us about you, but I thought of her as an older sister anyway. Thing was, she and Luke used to fight a lot. Luke was older, and Thalia liked to rush off into danger." She laughed, "I'm sure you can't imagine Thalia as rash, but..."