PJO/HOO Headcanons

Blue Toothbrush

Blue Toothbrush-A Percabeth One-Shot

Two years, she had been gone two years. Two years ago from yesterday to be exact, and since yesterday she had spent all her time thinking about a detail.
Annabeth paid attention to millions of tiny details about every little thing. What she'd worn to her graduation, what time it was when she finished her last exam, how her second cousin on her fathers side wore her hair at that party when she was fourteen.
But the detail that had lodged itself into her mind like a splinter was one she did not want to dwell on. The detail that had bothered her when she boarded a plane in New York to London exactly two years ago from yesterday, and it was a toothbrush.
A blue toothbrush to be exact, and now as she sat on her white polyester comforter smack dab in the middle of a London college architecture campus with her laptop beginning to heat her thighs, the detail seemed silly to her.
It was silly, actually but it wouldn't leave her mind and so she reluctantly opened up her hotmail account, which hadn't been touched in months, and began looking through the hoard of emails left unread in her inbox.
The names blurred in front of her as she scrolled through them:
Piper
Dad
Dad
Leo
Hazel
Frank
Reyna
Thalia
Thalia
Thalia

She replied to a few recent ones and deleted old ones, promising to send a text to her friends later and catch up. As she was beginning to feel like she should log out of her account and never touch it again a name caught Annabeth's eye.

Percy
It was the only one she had received from him since she told him it wouldn't work out anymore. The long distance relationship was putting a huge strain on her and Percy and so about a month after arriving to London, she broke it off, feeling it best to let them both live their lives.
She could have taken the easy way out and never even accepted the scholarship to her college but she would never, and Percy knew that too and respected it.
So she left, packing her bags in a small span of three days and then bought a plane ticket to London. She was gone a week after that, and that was the last time Annabeth saw Percy in person since she'd left.
With tremulous fingers, she opened up the email. Less than a second later though, without even having read the first word, she slammed her laptop shut and put it on the bedside table.
"Time for bed." Annabeth told herself fiercely as is she was a mother scolding her child for being up past their bedtime.
But as she lay back in her bed, sleeping on her side just the way she liked it, she couldn't help but let her mind wander and she wondered what could possibly be on the email. What was on the email though, was uncertain, it could be anything and so she fell back on memories. Things that were carved in stone simply because they had already happened. They were not uncertain like the contents of the email.
The first memory that flowed into her head was a simple one, there were many others like it, for it happened often, but she didn't mind because they were sweet and simple and it was a detail. A thread from a quilt of endless moments shared together and she would never forget any of them, because she noticed the details.
It was a usual morning, they were both awake yet not bothering to get up and just lying in a lazy sense of peacefulness, sunlight filtering through the cracks in the blinds, dappling the bed with beams of golden rays.
Had they both had the day off, they would have lied there for hours but as usual there was work and school to get to so they would get up and start the routine and Annabeth would hop in the shower while Percy put a cup of coffee to roast as he tried to pull on his jeans quickly. A coffee, a kiss, and raisin-bran, a hurried half hour and then they were ready to face the day.
And each time after she showered Annabeth would brush her teeth. The apartment in which they both woke up in was not hers, it was Percy's though she stayed over so many times that it was practically hers too. She couldn't even remember the last time she had been in her own apartment and over time most of her stuff would end up at Percy's place, and they would stay there.
As the plane took off from the New York airport though, she thought about that detail. The toothbrush. She'd forgotten it when she'd been packing all her things and now it would surely get thrown out now that it was sitting on Percy's bathroom sink, most likely never to be used again.