CW: drugs and alcohol

There absolutely is a way that he would forget that important piece of advice. He was responsible for one thing. Annabeth gave him one warning: Do not drink liquor. Hell, he shouldn't be drinking anything else, especially not liquor.

Annabeth turned around for two minutes to run into the convenience store next door. She just wanted to buy Percy a loaf of wonderbread to get him through the night without coming down with alcohol poisoning. She was very firm when she told him to wait at the entrance.

He did not wait at the entrance. She should have never let him out of her sight.

"Percy?" she calls, not caring that she forgot to use his made-up name. She needs to find him right now.

"Hey, hey, would you like to hear about this place's rich history?" Shit, it's Pothos.

"Uh..." To be fair, Annabeth would like to know a lot about this place; the architecture is super historical-looking. She's wondering how the owners managed to turn this place into a nightclub without compromising those historical aspects. Hell, how does that ceiling support the light structures?

She needs to exercise some self-control. "In a bit," she says. "I uh, I need to find my boyfriend. I mean, my fiance!" Is he her fiance? There have been so many versions of the story they went back and forth on. How's she supposed to know which story is the real fake story?

She turns around and pushes her way through the crowd, wishing it could be her dancing like there's no work tomorrow and accepting the risk of a nasty hangover. "Percy!" she calls again.

"Annabeth!" he turns around from the bar, two drinks in hand.

"Percy," she says, "I told you one thing about drinking beer before liquor, and you thought it would be a good idea to buy..." She looks at the drinks. "Please tell me that by some miracle those are regular milkshakes."

"They're called mudslides!" he proudly declares before taking a sip. "I didn't like the shot this lady bought me, so I got these for us because they have ice cream in them."

"Yeah, I know," she says. Mudslides are a pain in the ass to make. "Don't... don't drink anything more, okay?"

Percy takes a sip a little too large for Annabeth's liking.

"Put that down."

He holds a drink out for her.

"I'm alright," she says.

"Come on, can't I buy a drink for my favorite girl?"

"I'm pretty sure I lost that title to your mother and your sister, who would probably agree that you shouldn't be drinking," Annabeth says. Her cheeks are red from the buzz. She's flushed because she's tipsy, not because the idea of being Percy's favorite girl is compelling—not that it is. It is totally not compelling, no matter how much being his favorite girl turned her on in the past.

Besides, she doesn't usually go for guys who buy her drinks. She usually buys drinks for women, but only after she says something oddly sincere like, "Hey, I noticed you across the bar, and I was wondering if I could buy you a drink." It works about ninety-five percent of the time. She doesn't talk about the time that girl she hit on turned out to be straight.

Annabeth chuckles. The thoughts and prayers the homophobe offered her on that unfortunate day haven't exactly kicked in yet. What kind of homophobe goes to a lesbian bar? There were tits on the shot glasses!

Percy holds out the drink again.

She takes a sip and says, "Wow, that's good, thanks!" Then, she sets it down on an unoccupied table. It's a perfectly good drink with only one sip taken out of it, so as long as someone doesn't spike it, it's good for the taking.

Not that she would recommend taking a random drink sitting on a table. That is a terrible idea.

"Why don't we dance?" she yells over the pumping club music. Dancing sounds like a great way to keep Percy from buying more drinks. Who's babysitting who now?

"I don't do much of that!" he yells back.

"Doesn't matter!" she says, grabbing his hand and leading him to the middle of the dance floor. Some gyrating woman's ass brushes against her hip every couple of beats, but she can look past that.

Percy starts pointing his thumbs like a guy in a disco movie, which is just downright embarrassing, so Annabeth does the first thing she can think of to save him.

She laces her arms around his broad shoulders and dances like there's no tomorrow. "C'mon, Percy," she says. "Listen to the music. Listen to the fucking music—shit!"

He just stepped on her foot. You know, the one with the bad ankle. Maybe if he'd been listening to the pounding club music, he wouldn't have made that mistake. In his defense, the strobe lights and pulsing music are almost a precursor to the hangover he'll certainly be feeling tomorrow. Besides, Percy's already no match for Annabeth's superior dance moves.

A group of guys pushes past Percy to get closer to the DJ, and he stumbles forward, spilling his mudslide onto his shoes and bumping into her. Good riddance, mudslide, Annabeth thinks.

"Hold your ground," she says to Percy. "It's kind of like capture the flag at Camp Half-Blood. You know when you're fighting one-on-one with someone in the middle of a mob of other people also fighting each other?"

"My fighting space!" he slurs, somehow grasping the concept despite his foggy mind.

"Yeah!" Annabeth can't say she isn't pleasantly surprised. "This is our dancing space. Hold our dancing space!"

"Alright!" He bends his knees as if they were actually sparring. It's a little goofy, but Annabeth can handle it.

She wraps her arms around his shoulders again and bends her knees too, trying to grasp his inconsistent pace. It makes no sense. It's like he's never listened to music before.

But gods, when he laughs like that it's like everything's okay and they're just two friends going out for a nice night at the club.

"Annabeth!" Percy shouts to be heard over the music. "Annabeth!"

"Yeah?"

He leans in close and yells into her ear. "I think I am currently at a rave!" His hot breath tickles her earlobe.

She pushes him away and chuckles. "Hell yeah, you are!" She takes his limp arms and guides them to her hips if anything to keep him from getting lost. She can't lose him if he's attached to her.

Annabeth takes the lead in their dance if that's even the right word to describe it. All the songs are bleeding together; she can't tell where one tune ends and another begins, and she's desperately trying to tell herself that the DJ just sucks and it has nothing to do with how much she's had to drink this evening. She promised Percy that she'd take care of him tonight, and she doesn't plan to go back on that promise anytime soon.

What time is it? Pothos has just about disappeared. Shit, what if that wasn't even him? If Annabeth's suspicions were wrong and she dragged Percy on this tangent side-quest for nothing, she'll never be able to forgive...

She'll never be able to forgive that stupid starfish Zebediah for telling them to do this! "What's your starfish got to say about this?" Annabeth asks.

"Uh..."

Relying on a lightweight to interpret a starfish for her is not the smartest thing she's ever done. Maybe Annabeth should throw in the towel on this plan. Hell, there's barely a plan. There was never a real plan. Annabeth checks the time on her phone. It's one in the morning. That's not too late; by her standards, around this time is when she'd be chatting up a potential bed warmer. For Percy though, she's not sure he's ever stayed up this late for something other than the Camp Half-Blood New Year's party the Dionysus cabin used to throw after the supervised party.

Beneath the time displayed on the phone screen, Annabeth has a few text messages from Will—pictures of outfits, mostly—so she ignores those for the time being. It looks like she has something from an Instagram account called @lightning.mclean. That couldn't be Piper, could it?

Something's wrong.

"Percy," she mutters. "Fuck. Percy?" He's gone. Is it unrealistic to hope he got distracted by something shiny?

She lets out a breath she didn't know she was holding. He's just over there talking to that guy wearing a leather jacket and jeans with rhinestones on the pockets.

"There you are, babe!" she says, wrapping her arms around her fake fiance. "I've been looking for you all over!"

"Hey, Annabeth," Percy slurs. "This guy—what'd you say your name was?—this guy gave me this thing... He said I'd be able to see colors!"

"You can already see colors," Annabeth deadpans. She turns to the drug dealer, noticing his glasses are about as thick as soda cans. "I'm taking my boyfriend back now."

"C'mon, baby, you know you want to try it too," he says, popping the collar on his stupid jacket.

Lucky for Annabeth, she's had experience with this kind of thing. "Yeah, sorry, I may not have had present parents, but I still know how to say no. Fuck off, dipshit."

"Ooh, kitty has claws!" he cackles.

Annabeth sighs. "Close your eyes, Percy."

"What?" Percy asks, covering his eyes with his hand anyway.

Annabeth isn't exactly ready for his thick glasses to crack and break the skin on her knuckles, although it does make sense that they do when she punches him. It's totally worth it. She's actually hoping the bouncer will kick her out for fighting, but when she explains that the guy she knocked out was trying to sell her drugs, she's offered a free drink. Yeah, like more alcohol is what she needs right now.

Of course, refusing a drink would be suspicious, so she agrees, and the bouncer comes back, two drinks in hand.

"Oh, thanks!" Percy says, taking the drink.

Annabeth hesitantly takes hers as well, although something's off. She should have been kicked out for fighting.

The bouncer offers her a flirty wink—a little too flirty to be professional—and then disappears into the crowd, the pink light reflecting off his hair just so.

This would have been a good night to wear that color-changing nail polish Will got her for her birthday.

She puts her hand over Percy's glass. "Hang on," she says.

Annabeth presses the glass to her lips and takes a sip, swishing the liquid around in her mouth. It's fizzy like she likes at first, and then it's like Pop Rocks throwing a party on her tongue.

It's spiked.

"Don't drink that," she says, taking the drink from Percy. He's already hammered on account of her; she can't have him drugged too.

Annabeth doesn't do drugs by choice. Unfortunately for her, she doesn't have that much of a choice. If it kills her, she'll at least have saved Percy, and that's not a bad thing to lose her life for.

She downs his drink in one swift gulp, gagging because it's starting to taste like cough syrup. It's more than a little unrealistic to hope that this is just cough syrup, though.

"Hey, I wanted-"

"No, you don't," she says, looking down into the second glass. She could pass it to Percy and let him take half the heat, but that wouldn't be a nice thing to do. "My phone's about to die."

"Gimme mah drink," Percy slurs.

"No," Annabeth says, snatching Percy's phone from his back pocket. "Here's what's happening: you're done drinking. I'm going off the deep end. We'll have to get our information another way." She opens the phone's camera and starts recording a video.

"Awesome! Now we'll remember all the fun things we do tonight!" he says.

"Yep," she says, taking a sip from her second glass of... whatever. "Listen, Percy... I'm sorry." She's not entirely sure what she's apologizing for anymore. She's twitching a lot. Maybe she accidentally bumped into this guy.

"Don't be sorry!" he says, his familiar green eyes full of hope.

For some reason, she feels so much remorse toward this sweet guy at the club and a little bit of confusion as to why she's here in the first place. Did she come with this guy, or is she alone? Would it be bad if she slept with him?

All she knows for certain is that she needs to finish this drink she's holding before he can get to it.