ᴄᴀᴠᴇ ᴄᴀɴᴇᴍ: ᴘᴀʀᴛ ɪɪ ᴏꜰ ᴛʜᴇ ᴘᴇʀᴄᴀʙᴇᴛʜ/ꜱᴏʟᴀɴɢᴇʟᴏ ᴘʀᴏᴊᴇᴄᴛ

ɪx | ᴀɴᴏᴛʜᴇʀ ɪɴᴛɪᴍᴀᴛᴇ ᴍᴇᴅɪᴄᴀʟ ꜱᴄᴇɴᴇ™

CW: As the chapter implies, another medical scene (stitches, blood)

Percy comes back to the hotel with a bag of those tasty pretzels, ready to apologize to Annabeth for whatever he may or may not have done. This is fine. She just needed some alone time after throwing a borderline tantrum. She probably calmed down and stitched up her face all by herself and then maybe took a nap or called Will and now she's totally fine and normal and ready to talk about things rationally. Maybe she even cleaned the blood off the counter.

He opens the door, ready to sing something silly like, Honey, I'm home! except he does not sing that because the room is completely trashed. It's like Annabeth hosted a raccoon family reunion while he was away.

It looks like that family of raccoons got into a squabble over their competitive yard games. Percy gathers the white sheet from the floor and sets it on top of the unmade bed, noting that the fitted sheet is missing. Everything smells kind of funky like the family of raccoons weren't very good at cleaning up after themselves.

"Annabeth?" he calls. Maybe he can draw her out with treats. "I brought all these pretzels and I have nobody to eat them with."

No answer. That plus the horror movie-esque spots of blood on the off-white carpeting tell him something terrible just happened. What else is new?

"Annabeth, it's just me," he says after knocking on the bathroom door. The water isn't running, so the worst-case scenario is he walks in on her changing and says "OOPS," before slamming the door and forgetting that ever happened.

"I'm coming in," he warns. He turns the knob and peeks in the door. Is she even in here?

The trail of blood leading into the bathroom tells him that yeah, she is. Is that new blood?

"Are you alright?" he asks. "I uh... Sorry for upsetting you earlier." It's certainly not the best apology, but it's better than I'm sorry that you're upset. At least he's owning up to some kind of fault, although he's not sure specifically what he did.

Finally, he sighs and enters the bathroom, careful not to step on any more fluids than he would like to come in contact with. Is that barf?

The mystery of the missing fitted sheet is solved when he looks down into the bathtub and finds Annabeth wrapped in it.

Like an idiot, he stage whispers, "Are you sleeping?"

A hoarse voice from below says, "No."

"Okay," he says. "Are you bleeding?"

The lump in the sheets moves, scaring Percy half to death before Annabeth looks up at him, her face mostly covered by the sheet, which is pretty bloody. He thought he'd gotten that bleeding to stop, but maybe he didn't put the stitches in well enough.

It also looks like she might have tried to pull the thread out, but he won't bring that up.

"I brought pretzels," Percy says, holding up his to-go bag. "They've got all kinds of crazy flavors."

She sniffles, and with one look at her runny eye makeup, Percy realizes that she probably hasn't stopped crying yet. "Hey," he says, "are you okay?"

"I'm fine," she says. Her voice cracks, although Percy's not sure if it's because she's hoarse from screaming or trying not to cry. He concludes that she is not fine.

"I'm just tired," she adds, rolling over in the tub.

Percy tries to smile even though he's pretty sure there's more to it than that. It's okay if she doesn't want to talk about it. "If you give me the sheet, I can make the bed for you."