I Don't Wanna See You With Her (Are You Gonna Keep Her?)

Annabeth was doing really well. She wallowed in tears and sorrow for a day and then picked herself up. She went to work at nine every weekday and arrived home at 5:30. She put her heels and makeup on and gave her presentation. And, sure, she can't really remember the last time she hadn't come to work hungover, or, on the rare occasion, drunk, but no one has said anything.

So, yeah. She's been good. And then Percy Jackson got a girlfriend.

Her name was Rachel Elizabeth Dare, and she was beautiful, and Percy Jackson was in love with her.

Annabeth was never one to stress about how she looked, but she was aware of it. After all, she was raised by a stepmother who wouldn't leave the house without her hair curled and went to the grocery store in heels. So, yeah, Annabeth Chase liked to think of herself as an adequate judge of physical beauty. She's well aware that she's "magazine pretty", with an athletic figure and curves. And, while she never knew her mother, her father had been quite the looker during his prime, if the fact that he had hooked up with so many girls during the time that Annabeth was conceived was anything to go by, and she knows she has a pretty face that's a mixture of both her parents'.

But Annabeth Chase was an orthodox kind of pretty, the kind you find on the dolls little girls play with. She had an immaculate sort of beauty, with a sharp face and a stiff posture.

Rachel Elizabeth Dare was nothing like Annabeth. She had wild red hair and sparkling green eyes. Her facial features were soft and kind, and freckles dotted her entire face. She wore ripped jeans with doodles and paint marks on them. She was a simple, easy kind of pretty. She was Percy Jackson's kind of pretty.

Annabeth always knew that she and Percy were direct opposites. He liked waking up early in the mornings to watch the sun rise, while she stayed in bed to catch up on the sleep she lost the night before when she stayed up late working on blueprints. He was polite and sweet toward people, even if they were rude to him. She was brash towards everyone. Cleaning calmed her down, and he spent more time making messes than cleaning them up. She had a temper that could rival that of a lion, and he had more patience than she thought possible. She was egotistic and he would give a part of himself to a stranger. And so they fought. They fought over everything, from who needed to calculate the bills to who ate the last of the potato chips.

That's why she broke it off.

She was stressed; her father and stepmother were going through a split - a split, not a divorce, they were very clear about that fact - and her stepmother wanted to go back to Laos to be with her own family. Which, would be fine, if she didn't have a twelve year old and a fourteen year old who were just beginning to make friends at the school where they were, didn't know the language, and had never lived a life with their parents separated, no less in different countries. Annabeth had offered to take them, but she was a twenty-six year old woman just beginning to launch her career, and no one knew how long she'd have to support two adolescent boys, one of them autistic.

On top of that, the weather was becoming an issue for the new bridge she was overseeing, so construction commenced at 5:00 a.m. Even better, the construction manager, Luke Castellan, kept hitting on her, which wasn't really something she wanted to deal with at any time of the day, no less at five in the morning.

All she wanted to do was come home to the love of her life, eat dinner on the couch, and complain to him, but whenever she brought up her workplace or familial problems he would shut off or argue.

She got tired. She started to just avoid him. On the off chance they did speak, they exchanged bitter words.

She had seen it before. Her stepmother and father rarely acknowledged each other during her childhood. When they did talk, they fought. The house was tense at all hours of the day. Her parents slept in separate beds. It wasn't even her father sleeping on the couch one night and then making up with Lulani in the morning. They each had their own room, complete with shelves and a vanity.