If there's one thing Annabeth Chase is good for, it's her extensive knowledge of alcohol. Thus far, Percy has learned not to drink beer and then liquor, and that the fastest way to get drunk is not, in fact, with beer, but with liquor.

He also vaguely remembers learning the recovery position for some reason, but that's beside the point. Percy's a responsible guy. He won't need that.

He won't even need that kind of knowledge by the time he's on his sixth drink... or is it seven?

Percy thought the alcohol would fix things the way it seemed to for Annabeth. He thought he'd be fun and carefree like her. Instead, his head pounds every time the rowdy group of men next to him make comments on the soccer game on television. His thoughts are still very present, and one Annabeth Chase still haunts them. Her image is painted on his eyelids in such a way that he can't rest without seeing her—her devilish smile, and her soft pink lips around the straw of a mojito. The way she studied his face while drawing him on the ferry still makes him feel like a bug under a magnifying glass. The sound of her rollerskates along the Dutch pavement clouds his hearing. The fierce look in her eyes when she impaled a centaur in the Alps brings him to tears. Remembering the way she moved against him last night makes his body ache for her touch again.

That's right. Percy Jackson got drunk on purpose. If he wasn't so wasted he might be able to figure out how he feels about that, but the only thing on his mind is Annabeth.

It's sort of a "pick your poison" situation. He'd rather not think about his most recent shortcoming—hanging Nico out to dry while he looks for his hellhound puppy alone—or the fact that Nico and Will were kind enough to give him and Annabeth a hand in a life-or-death situation, only for Percy to lose Will. Maybe Annabeth was right. Maybe it's all his fault Will's gone. Maybe Will and Nico should have left him and Annabeth to die in the Alps at the hands of a bunch of nasty bloodthirsty centaurs.

But then Annabeth would be dead and Percy would be here drinking over that. At least she's alive right now, even if she does have every right to hate his guts.

Now would be a nice time for that stupid starfish to start criticizing him. He could use the motivation, but Annabeth took Zebediah when she left looking for Will. There's nobody to call Percy out for being an idiot except for himself.

A glass of water clinks against the wooden bar, causing Percy to jump and look for its source. The bartender smiles at him, wrinkles forming around his old eyes when he smiles. It's almost like a look his mother would give him when he used to spend a lot of time wallowing on the couch with a pint of ice cream over an episode of Love is Blind.

"Here's a good one," the bartender says, tugging on his overalls. "A horse walks into a bar. The bartender asks, 'Why the long face?'" He clutches his beer belly and laughs a good jolly laugh you might expect from a guy like him. It's kind of like Santa Claus, but Percy doubts this guy could conjure up a Christmas miracle.

Percy raises his head to look at the bartender because it hurts too much to simply move his eyes.

"Get it?" the bartender asks. "Because horses have... Nevermind. It's probably not funny if I have to explain it." He goes back to drying a pint glass with his dishrag, and now Percy feels bad.

"Wait," he says, not loving the sound of his voice. "I get it. It's funny."

"You think so?"

"Yeah." And then just for good measure, he adds, "I like horses."

"Me too," the bartender says. He might be talking down a little, but Percy can't find it in him to care. This man's knowing smile is ironic; he has no idea why Percy's practically face down on the bar. Nevertheless, his kindness is appreciated.

Percy sits there for another moment, gazing up at the screen showing the soccer game but not processing anything that's going on. If you were to ask him, he probably wouldn't be able to tell you which teams are playing.

In an attempt to tear his thoughts away from his failures, he thinks about getting up and walking away. He wouldn't do that without paying, of course, and then there's the matter of figuring out where the hotel is. He was so distracted last night that he didn't even pay attention to the name of the hotel—that was all Annabeth.

Percy takes a long sip of his drink, only to find that his last vodka cranberry was replaced with water when he wasn't looking. Who did that? No matter. He can order another drink.

He could order another drink; he's finally starting to get used to the taste and that weird sensation in his throat every time he takes a sip.

He could also walk out and figure out what direction the hotel is in.

No, that would be a bad idea. The hotel would just remind him more of Annabeth and what happened, and he'd go back to feeling sorry for himself. That's pathetic—almost as pathetic as drinking the pain away.

"You know," the bartender says, "your eyes are the same shade at the River Seine. It's unreal."

Luckily, Percy is too drunk to consider how strange it is for a random bartender in Paris who just conveniently speaks English to be poetically describing his eyes.

"Uh, thanks," he says. "You... You have nice eyes too."

He says it because that seems like the right thing to say, but with a glance into the man's eyes, he realizes just how true his halfhearted compliment is. The bartender has an actual ocean in his eyes with calm yet rolling waves that would be any sailor's dream conditions. Some people say Percy has eyes that are green like the sea, and some have even gone so far as to say that he has an ocean storm brewing within them, but that was all figurative. Percy is so lost in this guy's eyes that it probably looks weird.

It's at this moment Percy considers that drinking more than he can handle is maybe not the best idea. Now, he's seeing sailboats in people's eyes. He can't imagine how much worse this would be had he bought drugs from the guy in the trenchcoat outside the bar.

Annabeth mixed an unhealthy amount of substances once. She did it for him. She didn't want Percy to have to undergo the effects of both drugs and alcohol for the first time in one night, so she drank two laced drinks. She very well could have died. She might have saved Percy's life. That would be two times she saved his life this week.

Percy couldn't believe it when she told him. He couldn't believe that she would do something so stupid and that she couldn't find a way out of it.

More than anything, however, he still can't believe that she would risk her own life for his. He's not sure how she could find it in herself to do such a selfless thing.

The bartender snaps his fingers. "I've got it!"

Percy jumps. "What?"

"My soulmate. You look like my soulmate," he says wistfully.

"Your... wife?" Percy asks. He's let a lot of the weirdness of this situation slide, but he can't exactly get past this guy casually calling someone his soulmate. That's weird.

He sighs, lost in nostalgia. "No, we were never married. I suppose it never could have worked out, even if I hadn't been such a fool back then."

"Oh, that's... that's really sad," Percy offers.

"Not that sad if you think about it. Sure, if I could, I'd go back and stay with her. Hell, I'd at least like to explain why I left so quickly, and that it wasn't her fault things ended the way they did," he explains. "I guess losing her is better than never getting to meet her in the first place."

"I can get behind that," Percy says. After all, he was in love once a long time ago. He'd give anything to have that feeling again, even with the impending doom of heartbreak.

He chuckles. "I suppose you could."

Percy isn't quite sure what he means by that, but lucky for him, the bartender continues his tangent.

"I'll never forget the day I realized I was in love with her."

"Oh?" Percy says, suddenly ready to pay off his tab. Yes, he's a good listener. No, he is not prepared to spend his afternoon entertaining some old guy he just met. Maybe this is his punishment for turning to alcohol after swearing to never drink, and then breaking a second promise to never drink again.

He takes another sip of his water and patiently waits for the bartender to finish his story about some woman he met on the beach, probably back in the nineties.

"She told me about how her parents died in a plane crash," he explains. "And... well, this is kind of strange, but when she looked up at me from across the picnic blanket, the only thing I could think was that she had never looked so beautiful to me."

At first, Percy is kind of baffled because what are the odds of meeting another guy who met a woman on the beach whose parents died in a plane crash only to leave her after falling in love? He doesn't know, but they must not be as low as he thinks because he's encountered two such men on his trip.

And then Percy contemplates what this man just said about people being the most beautiful when you love them.

And then it all kind of makes sense. The feeling of sickness in his stomach might not be a consequence of binge drinking. The slideshow playing in his head isn't called My Failures, but rather something like Europe with Annabeth or My Favorite Summer Ever, Featuring Annabeth Chase. Gods, that sounds like something his mom would write on a photo album.

In the slideshow in his head, Annabeth has never looked so beautiful, which is weird because he recalls being kind of weirded out if not completely repulsed by her drunkenness at the wedding. When he tries to conjure up an image of her flopping around the back of Leo's truck on their way home from the club, all that comes to mind is her gentle breathing, asleep in his bed, or the way her blue dress fell off her shoulder.

But it's more than just the physicality of it all! He wishes for just one more minute, he could sit next to her on the train in comfortable silence while unbeknownst to her, her head rests on his arm while she sleeps. He wants to talk to her about things she's passionate about. He wants to see her through her work problems, her upcoming apartment hunt, and everything else waiting for her when they get back home.

Percy wants to rub her feet when she gets back from a long shift bartending at Hooters. He wants to wake up early and make her breakfast the way she likes. He wants to pretend he likes the sangria she allegedly keeps in the refrigerator. He wants to adopt one of Nico's hellhound puppies and take it for walks in the park, one hand through the leash and the other laced in Annabeth's.

The whole realization isn't good for his stomach, his head, or his general mental state. Of all the places where he could have figured something like this out, he had to do it at a bar in Paris.

He should sleep on this. Life isn't a Hallmark movie where you can realize you love a girl and then just run through a thunderstorm and somehow find her on the most romantic bridge in the city, sweep her off her feet, and roll the credits.

Percy isn't going to drop some love confession on Annabeth, but he won't sleep on it either. Something tells him not even alcohol or exhaustion can make him question his feelings for Annabeth. He has to tell her, but not before Nico finds his hellhound puppy or before Will is safe and sound, or even before Percy punches Annabeth's one-night stand in the face for being such a dick to her.

"You ready for another one, son?" the bartender asks, reaching for Percy's empty glass.

Percy chuckles under his breath because he is not the bartender's son, and he is certainly too old to be referred to as son by someone who isn't his mother.

He surprises himself when he says, "Nah, I'm good. Thanks though." He drops some money on the counter and walks out of the bar.

"Anytime, son." He sprays the bar with a lemon-scented cleaner and whistles a sea shanty. Percy wonders what it is that drew this guy to the restaurant business when he so obviously should be on the sea.