PERCABETH ONESHOTS

oneshot #69: memories

ayyoooo, wassup??

please, take this random fluff i concocted. it might not be accurate because i didn't fact check by rereading the sea of monsters, but it's percabeth fluff all the same.

enjoy!

also ignore the fact that my uploads are crazy inconsistent as of now, i'm working on some. . .shtuff 👀

also also ignore typos or anything cuz i literally wrote this and am posting it directly after so :33

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Percy understood keeping memories. 

He did. His mom even had an entire box of his schoolwork and projects stowed away somewhere in storage. Not to mention the photo albums littered around her house, full of shots ranging from his first smiles to his most recent ones.

What Percy didn't understand was how Annabeth could live knowing she had at least five times that stuffed in various closets.

And why she was choosing now of all times, after twenty years of accumulating it all, to go through it.

Wasn't she supposed to be the productive one?

"This just looks to me like you've done an awful lot of procrastinating since grade school."

Annabeth didn't even spare him a glance. She plopped a stack of papers in his lap and pointed to where he should transfer them on what was left of the floor. "I didn't procrastinate. I set it all aside to go through at once so it would all be in one place when I did decide to sort through it."

So. . .procrastinating.

"Besides, not all of these boxes are mine, Seaweed Brain. Yours are over there."

Percy followed her indications, frowning. "Well, don't expect the good grades we see in your stuff. . .my mom only kept the projects that didn't have the grades directly scribbled on them."

She laughed, dropping another stack three times the size of the other one into his waiting arms. "Believe me, I can't wait to see the abominations you made in elementary. Now hand me that pile over there, it goes with this one."

ˏˋ°•*⁀➷

Percy squinted at the paper balancing on his knee. 

He didn't have a clue what any of it meant or even what subject it was for, but there was a proud, bright red 100% scribbled in the top right corner. The date would put Annabeth back in second grade--and, for a moment, he wondered what it would've been like to know her back then. Probably a witty know-it-all that would hate his guts from the very beginning, but the prospect of having her in his life sooner than she had come was fun to imagine. 

Not that they would ever really get to be normal kids together, since demigods didn't have that luxury. Regardless, Percy knew he would've loved her the same back then. Even if he remained oblivious for a good four years.

They'd cleared out most of Annabeth's things (somehow managing to fit the previous five or six overflowing boxes into a respective two) and she had moved onto his things without telling him, but Percy was enjoying himself looking at old school projects of hers.

"Oh my goodness, Percy. . ."

He glanced up, eyebrows raised quizzically. "Hm?"

Annabeth had a funny, hesitant grin on her face, but it was giddy all the same. She held up a square slip of paper, its back towards him. "I cannot believe you still have this."

"Have what?" Percy leaned forward to see what was in her hands. "What is it?"

Still not allowing him to see it, Annabeth held it out in front of her and stared at whatever was displayed on the front for a few moments. Percy watched with amusement--because Zeus knew it wasn't often something of his sparked such an interest in her--waiting for her to let him in on it, too.

Quietly, Annabeth stood on her fuzzy socks, adjusting the hoodie around her neck. She walked across the room, plopped down against him, and placed the paper in his hands.

It was her, ironically, smiling brightly in front of a monument in Washington D.C. She was dressed in jeans and her Camp Half-Blood shirt, curls held back by a bandanna. It was the Lincoln Memorial if he recalled correctly, and Percy remembered thinking how proud she looked the day he got it in his inbox, as if she'd designed it herself.

"You kept it," Annabeth said simply, leaning against his shoulder to see the image better. 

"I did," Percy agreed with a chuckle, turning the photo on its back to inspect it further. "You emailed it to me, remember? When we were thirteen."

"Of course I remember, Seaweed Brain." Annabeth took it from him. When she moved, her curls tickled his chin. "I contemplated sending this to you for a long time," she admitted. "I decided you wouldn't make a big deal of it and clicked send before I could change my mind, but. . .you printed it out."

"I liked the reminder," he said. "Of you, and of Camp. I don't think thirteen-year-old me fully believed that everything was actually happening."

There was a pause of silence, each of them reminiscing in their earlier days. Most of it was bad, which they both could come to terms with, but it wasn't hard to remember the good stuff when they were sitting right next to you.

"Cute," Annabeth said after a while.

"You are," Percy agreed.

He wished they would stay like that all evening, talking and remembering all the fun they had, all the new people they met. And they did, for a couple of hours. But Annabeth would not let their job go unfinished, understandably (she was Annabeth), and the boxes were closed soon enough.

The picture was pinned to Annabeth's blueprint corkboard later that night, right above her desk.