Three (Part Two) - the second part
Title: Three
Author: Icy Roses
Rating: PG-13 for language
Disclaimer: Not mine. Don't sue.
Summary: One life is not enough for love. Percy and Annabeth try for the Isles of the Blest, but it seems that fate is not always kind to them. Post-series.
Author's Note: Part Two is apparently too long to fit into one post.
(Part Two) - the second part
It’s by the grace of the gods - perhaps because she saved Eric’s pitiful, ungrateful ass - and Shondra’s leniency that Rose doesn’t get sacked. When she showed back up at the plane, everyone searching frantically (apparently, they called in an emergency notice in the airport too, but she had been too busy to hear it), sleeve torn, and a bruise on her cheek, the immediate reaction was fire her. But perhaps because Shondra sees her on the verge of tears, is her friend and conveniently the senior flight attendant, Rose gets off with a warning and the instruction to get her uniform patched up.
Shondra gives her the look of death, and Rose knows if she even sticks a toenail over the line, she is done for. So for the next few flights, she serves with stiff formality. She hardly dares utter a single curse word behind the curtain - that’s quite a feat for her - and she is polite. Nice. Perfect. She does her job flawlessly. And she is glad, glad because she will never see Eric again - good riddance. Hopefully, he has a great life, and just maybe, the empousa taught him that sleeping with unknown women can bring worse things than chlamydia. In which case, she shouldn’t feel bad at all. Why should she? She saved his life, and she taught him about the wonders of death by demon. Truly, he should be grateful.
Asshole.
Rose can’t wait for her break, which comes in two weeks. She’ll go home, kiss Allie hello, and for a couple nights, she might sleep in Allie’s bed too, just to imprint the smell of her baby girl in her head, so she’ll have something to cling to the next time she flies halfway around the world. She’ll say hello to her father. Maybe she’ll even tell him about how she killed an empousa. Maybe he’ll write a poem about it.
So maybe she won’t tell him.
But it’s a delicious little secret she keeps to herself. She is proud of herself. And why shouldn’t she be? Things have gone back to normal, the way they’re supposed to be. The gods can forget about her, and she can forget about them. It is tiring, letting her life bounce back and forth between the times Eric is on board and the times in between. So she is glad that everything is right again.
At least, everything is right until one day, she stands in the front, greeting the passengers as they board and he shows up again. He has no computer bag this time. He’s come empty-handed, and that is enough to put her on guard. What’s he doing without his work stuff? He looks pensive, so lost in his own thoughts, that he doesn’t see her until he leaves the tunnel. “Rose,” Eric says, without preamble.
She’s so stunned that she can’t even offer a response, her usual cheery, “Welcome aboard!” She just stares at him and at that moment, he looks so archaically familiar that it scares her. There is nothing, nothing at all, in that speck of time that would convince her they hadn’t known each other before. The memory teases her, dusts past her consciousness and out of sight, like a wispy butterfly.
“Hello,” he says. His hands are in his pockets, thumbs sticking out, and his shirtsleeves are rolled up.
The first thing she thinks is how nice his forearms look, but her conscious quickly shuts that down. No, she thinks. Bad.
“Can we talk?” he asks softly. He sounds sincere. Rose has since learned that there are two Eric modes. One is as a typical rich little shit who acts like a jerk to her and who she hates. The other is the gentler, quieter version of him, the one whose laugh she likes and who is buried most of the time under the other version. But it proves that he isn’t always an asshole. Just some of the time.
She can’t think properly, so what she ends up saying is, “So you finally came around, huh? Crawled out of the pit of denial you dug for yourself?” She is immediately sorry for her sarcasm when a spasm of guilt flashes across his face. Since when did he begin caring about what insults she had to throw at him? And since when did she begin caring about him caring?
Someone behind Eric coughs loudly. “Excuse me, but you two are holding up the line.” Rose looks beyond Eric and sees a gathering trail of angry people, some of them hauling heavy baggage and tapping their feet, waiting to get on the plane.
She colors up. “Sorry,” she says, letting him pass. He gives her a lingering look before slipping past without a word.
He sits in first class, as usual, but without the suit and tie. She knows while the plane lifts off that he is waiting to speak to her, and the thought sends her into a nervous frenzy. She drops the seatbelt she is supposed to demonstrate safety with. But that wasn’t as bad as when she drops a half-full pot of coffee on the carpet and has to babble apologies while she attempts to sponge it out of the carpet with paper towels. Shondra raises her eyebrow, but says nothing. The implication is clear. Why don’t you stop carrying breakable or spillable objects for a while, hon? Face aflame, she quarantines herself to handing out plastic packages of peanuts and delivering extra blankets.
When the first round of meals is doled out, she makes her way through the sleeping rows of people, the blinds on the windows pulled down, and to Eric. It is inevitable that she speak to him. For some reason, she dreads it. Or maybe she looks forward to it. She can’t really separate out the feelings anymore. From behind, he looks like Eric. She breathes. He doesn’t look like this mysterious someone from her past that she can’t put her finger on.
He turns.
“You rang?” she says, a hand on her hip.
“Yeah,” he replies eventually after a long pause. “I think - I think I believe you.”
“About what?” she asks, momentarily confused.
“About me. Being a semi-god or whatever you called it. I think you’re telling the truth.”
“Demigod,” she corrects. “Gods, you’re hopeless.” She considers him briefly, looking lonely, looking lost, and decides to be gentle with him. It’s not every day one discovers divine parentage. It’s probably a jarring thing to most people. Rose was an exception because for her, it had been too natural, just part of growing up and finding out that - whoops! - she’d never get to see Grandma and Grandpa because they were actually Aphrodite and Apollo. It hadn’t seemed like such a big deal at the time. But who knows? Maybe Eric’s mortal parent lied about it, so he thought his stepmother or father was his real one. That would be quite a surprise, wouldn’t it? She clears her throat. “Look, sorry. I didn’t mean to dump it all on you like that. It wasn’t very nice.”
“It’s not your fault,” he tells her. “Carmella - the empousa, I mean - started it.”
He doesn’t blame her. For some reason, it makes her feel a little bit lighter. He’s still looking at her strangely, and it raises goose bumps on her skin, even though she doesn’t know why. She resists the urge to run away. “So,” she says in an effort to fill the silence. She can’t remember the last time an encounter between the two of them was punctured by awkward silences. “Why are you going to Italy this time?”
Eric shrugs, as if he could care less. “I’m not.”
“What do you mean ‘you’re not?’ You’re on the plane to Venice, in case you missed the sign in the terminal. We can’t fly you back,” she says. Maybe the encounter tipped him over the deep end. Maybe she’s cosseting a crazy man.
“I mean,” he clarifies, shifting in his seat, “I took the plane because I wanted to talk to you, not because I had to go to Italy. I don’t have your phone number or anything. It’s not like I had any other way of contacting you.”
She backs up. “Whoa, whoa. I thought you said you never wanted me to talk to you again.”
He gives her a small, crooked smile. “I changed my mind.”
Carefully, she sits on his armrest and perches precariously close to him. She is daring today. “What made you do that? You’re usually so set and stubborn on everything you do.”
“Me? I think you’re the stubborn one.” He quiets, regarding her for a while.
..o..
He wonders if it would be stupid if he told her he had dreams about her. Would that make him sound like a pervert? She already thinks he’s a pervert anyway, so maybe that wouldn’t matter. She certainly wouldn’t believe him if he told her they were completely innocent dreams. If indeed it is her in the dreams, she was quite a prude in a past life, apparently. She won’t even let him get close enough to touch her arm, her cheek. But this is Rose, he remembers, startled. This is Rose.
This is not the nameless gray-eyed girl who knows him.
This is Rose.
Is it all the same?
He looks deeply into those identical gray eyes and feels a stirring in his belly. This is -
..o..
“Um, hello?” Rose says, wagging a few fingers in front of his face. “Are you alive in there?”
He blinks. “Yes.”
Vaguely, and completely unrelated to the current topic, Rose thinks about how absurd it is to buy a plane ticket just to talk to a flight attendant. Nobody normal does that kind of thing. Eric must be obscenely rich. She finds herself wandering again to the land of dreams where how great would it be if there was enough money to pay for Allie’s tuition in twelve years? She wonders if Eric has any children. Her guess is no. Eric is too light and insubstantial to know the weightiness of parenthood. She wonders if his wife ever wanted children. All things too private for the casual observer to think about, and why is she contemplating them now?
She shifts from the armrest, feeling flushed and embarrassed without knowing quite why. “So are you just going to stare at me like a baboon the entire time or do you actually have something substantive to say?”
“Oh, yes,” he says. “Why don’t you bring me a bottle of Grey Goose and we’ll talk?”
And she finds, surprisingly - that’s okay with her. Perhaps there is something about saving someone’s life in an Italian airport that makes it impossible to harbor feelings of dislike anymore. She pours him the customary glass, and he solicitously offers her a sip first. She says something like, “I don’t think I’m supposed to be drinking on the job,” and he hastily retracts.
There is a lot for him to catch up on. He has as million questions, about the gods, about their world, and about how science fits into all of it. She tries her best, but honestly, she doesn’t really think about how science fits into Greek mythology - she just kind of ignores the incongruities and hopes that the mutual exclusiveness of the two aren’t currently tearing a hole in the fabric of the time-space continuum. Eric finds her general lack of curiosity amazing and shoots out another twenty questions for her. She provides them, patiently, realizing that it’s kind of nice to know another person who believes in all of the craziness. For so long, she thought she was going mad with secrets.
“Do you know who my parent is, then?” Eric asks.
“If you don’t, then I don’t either. Your mother or father?”
He takes another swig. Half of the bottle is gone. “My mother,” he says quietly. “I don’t have a single memory of her. She didn’t leave anything when she left. Well, she left my dad, I guess. He never married. Still a bachelor. I think, when I was young, the claiming thing you talked about happened to me. There was a sign, but I didn’t understand it at the time or I just thought it was freaky and ignored it. I probably shouldn’t have. I probably should’ve gone to that Camp Half-Blood thing. Sure would’ve been a change. My life’s not that interesting, you know.”
Rose shakes her head. “Firstly, if you’re still alive, your mother is most likely just a minor goddess. You don’t draw too much attention, and that’s a good thing. Being a demigod is not the kind of ‘interesting’ you want to have in your life. Besides, there’s nothing more interesting in life than learning to live it with passion and joy.” Even as she says the words out loud, they amaze her. Since when did she become good at giving out advice? She certainly never took any of it herself. Or maybe it’s because she has no passion for being a flight attendant, nor does she have any joy in living the way she does now, always worrying about next month’s bills. And gods, if tax season isn’t the worst.
The flight is almost too short. Eric doesn’t have anything to pack up, so he twiddles his thumbs as the other people are gathering their belongings, the plane slowly rumbling to a stop.
“What are you going to do in Italy?” Rose asks. He has no reason to be there, after all. And no matter how great their conversation was, sleep is more important. She’s about to pass out. There is absolutely no reason under the sun to use the fourteen hours between landing and taking off again for anything other than sleep. She’s going to check into her hotel room and crash.
He shrugs. “I dunno. Do some sightseeing, I guess. I never thought about it.”
“You never thought about what you were going to do after reaching the destination?” She is incredulous. “You suck at planning. And living. Seriously, how do you get by?” With a lot, a lot of money, her brain supplies helpfully.
His devil-may-care attitude shines through in his grin. “Rose - you need to learn to live a little. Be spontaneous.”
“Poor people can’t afford to be spontaneous,” she shoots back.
“Can poor people also not afford a sense of humor?”
“Hey!” she says indignantly. “I do too have a sense of humor!”
But he has slipped out of his row and is moving steadily forward with the crowd, being pushed out of first-class cabin and into the tunnel, out of the plane. “See you next time, Rose!” he shouts brightly.
She stands there with his empty bottle of vodka for a long time and wonders when he became a permanent fixture in her joyless, passionless life.
..o..
In his free time, Eric peruses old, worn books in the library about Greek mythology. He reads about how the world was created, the ancient myths of Heracles and Jason, Theseus and Perseus. He feels strange about it, as if he has slipped into another skin of himself, when he runs his fingers over the pictures of titans and gorgons. He feels erudite and scholarly and remembers way back when in college when he shunned the humanities. He used to say he majored in learning how to make money. That is, he majored in economics and finance. Mythology was stupid and old. Technology, stocks, the rise and fall of the economy - that was today and tomorrow. That was new.
Now, he pages restlessly through The Iliad and The Odyssey and finds a new thrill of learning what he was. His past, perhaps. It reads familiar. It reads like home. And that both exhilarates and terrifies him.
(He misses Rose.)
He doesn’t tell Nigella. She would think it was stupid, although Nigella’s obsession with shopping at high-end stores is stupid too. He finds he can no longer connect with her. Who is this woman he has married? Who are they? One day, she walks into his study with a book he bought from one of those independent bookstores. The cover is bare and cold; the title rests on the spine alone. She holds the book between her forefinger and her thumb, as if touching it with more might dirty her manicured hands. “This,” she says.
Eric looks up from another one of the myths he is reading, tucks it under some business files quickly. “What?”
“Since when did you become a philosophy professor?” She shakes down her wavy, dark brown hair.
“It’s mythology,” he tells her. “And it’s a new hobby.” Get over it, he thinks.
(He misses Rose.)
“Who cares what it’s called? You’ve been totally distracted for the past weeks. And you’re leaving these things all over the place. What’s your problem? Look, I’ve been trying to plan out our yearly vacation to Fiji, and you haven’t been pitching in at all. I can’t do all of the work around here.”
You don’t work, he thinks. You sit at home and watch the Real Housewives of Orange County on TV. But it’s a bit of a defense mechanism in reality. He had forgotten about the trip to Fiji. He also finds, now that he has remembered, he doesn’t really care about it. “How much planning can it take? We go to the same resort.” He pulls out the book and begins reading again. He doesn’t care if Nigella sees.
She stamps her foot. “It’s the principle of the thing! If you don’t care about it, then why don’t we just skip it this year?”
She’s saying it as a threat, but suddenly, Eric is tired of this argument. He doesn’t want to go to Fiji anyway. “Fine,” he says. “Let’s skip it.”
He can tell immediately - that wasn’t the answer she wanted. She is stunned into silence. “I’m throwing this away,” she says about the book she holds. “I don’t want the ratty thing sitting on our coffee table. You always waste money on the dumbest of things.” She stands there, pouting ferociously.
He half-turns. “Don’t. It’s mine.”
Nigella is pissed. She tosses the book onto the ground, where it lands open and face down. Without another word, she flounces out, slamming the door shut behind her, and Eric knows she’s not going to talk to him for days. She is really, really good at holding grudges. Carefully, he picks the book up by the spine, and the pages fall into place with a gentle rustle. He brushes off the cover. And he tucks it into his bookshelf. Whether it was yesterday or a week ago, a month ago, perhaps today - he has changed.
(He misses Rose.)
The tidal wave has gathered, and he is waiting for it to crest.
..o..
In the middle of the night, Rose stares at the shadows on her ceiling and thinks about Ricky. She was nineteen when she met him, a freshman in college, her whole life ahead of her. She loved linguistics, the turn of a foreign phrase sounded like poetry in her ears. She felt, like everyone else in college, that she was going to go far. He was a philosophy major, brown-haired and green-eyed - intelligent. He was an agnostic; he cared about politics. He argued with professors about the meaning of Hobbes and Locke - they loved him. He was bright. He was the star of the classroom.
She liked him too. On a snowy winter day, they met. She was too poor to afford a good pair of snow boots, so she trudged through the knee-deep snowdrifts, powdery white clinging to her jeans. She had too many books. Ricky walked out of Smith Hall - he was in her World Religions class - offered his scarf and carried her books back to her dorm. They started dating and kept at it all through college. Everyone thought they were going to get married. Everyone thought he would propose before graduation.
Instead, she got pregnant, and he got scared away. He was going into the Peace Corps - he didn’t have time for a poor girlfriend and child.
And the rest of the story played out, as everyone knew. Rose hasn’t attended any reunion of any kind - high school or college. Those are for the people who make a difference, who have something to show off. She has nothing except the bills waiting for her on the dining table. Sometimes, her father calls to make sure she is doing all right. He is a good man, her father, and he means well. She just can’t help feeling bitter that he left nothing for her.
She turns onto her side and flips over her pillow for the colder side. Since then, she hasn’t ever dated anyone. Allie doesn’t need a stepfather, and Rose doesn’t need another man to leech off of her savings. She doesn’t want to leech off anyone else either. She likes being independent. It probably looks strange to anyone on the outside, but Rose stopped caring about other people’s perceptions of her when she swallowed her pride and became a flight attendant. She’s kept her degree, but only for her to look at. A promise, a hope of what could have been. She doesn’t look at it too often, though. Nobody can make a living off of promises and hopes.
There are times, though, when she thinks there is something more that life had in store for her. Her life doesn’t suck, not really. She has Allie. That makes everything worthwhile. But sometimes - a secret she doesn’t tell anybody - she wonders if the gods didn’t have something special in store for her. She believes it because, well, she can’t ever feel happy with what she has. She always thinks that maybe tomorrow is the day her life will turn around. Maybe tomorrow is the day she will discover what she is truly meant to be. Maybe tomorrow is the day she finds herself.
The thing that scares her is, when she sees Eric, she feels the future come crashing in through her window, a quiet roar.
She will either swim in it - or drown.
..o..
With red-rimmed eyes from lack of sleep, Rose dully greets the passengers as they board the plane. She stifles a yawn. It’s probably around 5:30 am. She ran out of Ambien, so here she is. She hopes desperately that she doesn’t slump over snoring on the cart when she serves breakfast. After this, she thinks, I am taking a period of sick leave. She has enough days for about a week off. It’s close to Christmas, anyway. Time for a break before she works herself to exhaustion.
It’s a cloudy morning with light flurries in LaGuardia. The airplane takes off without a hitch, and her ears do their usual popping. When she started working, her ears used to take forever to pop, and they would hurt until she was prostrate on the ground with pain. She did everything, chew gum, hold her breath, blow up her cheeks - none of it worked. Eventually, her ears got accustomed to making the switch, and she barely notices it now.
She casts a wistful gaze at first-class, wondering when the next time Eric shows up will be. There’s a man who looks a bit like him from behind, sitting in the fourth row. He has black hair. It’s kind of pathetic how she looks for him now. Except - oh! He looks over his shoulder, and it is him. He breaks into a grin and for some reason, it roots her to the spot. When she finally gets up the courage to come closer, she notices yet again he does not have any carry-on items, not even a copy of the newspaper. What was he doing? Just staring at the back of the seat behind him?
“Hey,” he says.
“Hi there.”
He pauses as if he is drinking in the sight of her. Or maybe that’s just her, drinking in the sight of him, being stupidly and foolishly hopeful - of what? “Business trip?” she asks.
“Nope.”
“You came to see me,” she says. It’s not a question.
“Well, since you seem so set on that, then sure. Yeah, I came to see you.”
She twists her mouth. Even in the best of times, he still has that jerk side to him. But he’s laughing now. “It’s a joke. Calm down. Of course I came to see you.” He touches her hand.
In amazement, she looks down where his fingers have taken a hold of hers. What is he doing? He’s - her lips are dry and she licks them. She looks up, and he really is staring at her this time. All of the laughter has died. He pulls her slightly closer. “Eric,” she mumbles.
Abruptly, he gets up. Starts walking down the aisle and pulls her with him. She’s so stunned that her feet trip over themselves as she follows him. It doesn’t occur to her to pull away. He’s sure, determined, wherever he’s going. He pushes aside the curtain, and then - it’s the bathroom, and it’s unoccupied, and suddenly, Rose knows exactly what he plans on doing. There is a huge lump in her throat and her heart has started fluttering around, unsure of whether to slow down or speed up. Her fingers tingle where he holds them. The next thing she knows, he’s stepping into the bathroom and pulling her in too. He shuts the door, locks it.
The space is small - there’s barely any room to move. Her back presses into the metal sink, and his is against the door. She blinks. “Eric - what are you - no!”
Except, she does the exact wrong thing and looks into his eyes, those green, green eyes, that were so familiar from the beginning, and the words catch in her throat. He leans down and his breath washes over her - his lips are on hers.
Her body catches on fire. This - she knows this. Then, she is kissing back; his hands cup her face, and hers snake into his hair. He leans into her, and the edge of the sink cuts almost painfully into her back - if she could bring herself to care about it - and his hand comes down on the metal lip, trapping her. She is dying. She is dying together with him, and she has been waiting her whole life for this. Her hands trail slowly down to his shoulders while his hot mouth moves down to her exposed neck and then, her fingers find their way to the shallow dip at the small of his back -
- you drool when you sleep, because you’re my friend, Seaweed Brain, stupid son of Poseidon, Riptide, my team in Capture the Flag, the gods are real, princess curls, Kronos, pine tree, the Golden Fleece, you made a good guinea pig, see you next summer, so you owe me what else is new, stop thinking so hard, Wise Girl, I am never going to make things easy for you, I love -
..o..
“Because you and I, we’re meant to be. We just - have to remember to find each other next time.”
..o..
“-Percy,” she gasps.
He has stopped. “I know you,” he says. She is sitting on the sink, and his face is inches away. “Annabeth.” He wipes a tear away from her cheek. “I know you.”
Someone knocks sharply on the door. “Hello? This is cabin crew personnel. Please open the door.”
Slowly, Rose gets off the sink and the happiness that had been steadily expanding inside her chest deflates, leaving her feeling old and empty. Eric removes his hands from her, and he opens the door. Shondra stands there, looking stern. The expression slides off of her face when she sees who it is. Her hands go flying up to her mouth.
“R-Rose?”
“I’m sorry,” she whispers.
Shondra is trembling, either with fury or sadness or shock, Rose isn’t sure. “Y-you’re fired,” she says. “When we return to LaGuardia, we’ll file the paperwork. For now, please just - sit behind the curtain and - keep to yourself.”
“Shondra-”
“Please, Rose.” She turns to Eric. “Sir, I ask that you return to your seat. I’m going to have to ban you from future United Airline flights.”
“I understand,” he mumbles.
Shondra leads Rose to the seat behind the curtain, where she is to sit, like a child in time out. They are silent as the grave, until Shondra says, “I gave you all of the chances I could. I can’t believe you would do this.” And she paces away, Eric behind her. Rose locks eyes with Eric for a brief moment, and he mouths, I’ll find you, Wise Girl. Like I promised.
Rose has the dignity to sit there, composed, for the entire way there and the entire way back - nearly twenty-seven hours, but when she reaches her hotel room in New York City, there is nothing that keeps her from screaming and crying until her throat bleeds.
Percy, she thinks.
I know you.
..o..
She returns to Seattle, where Allie is waiting with open arms. She picks up the pieces of her life. She doesn’t know where Eric lives, doesn’t have his phone number. It doesn’t matter anyway. He is married to Nigella. She should feel ashamed for going after a married man like that, having feelings for a married man like that. She should feel ashamed - but she can’t. Because he belonged to her first, after all. Does that count? She’s going to pretend like it does.
She falls asleep at night dreaming of the life they might’ve had if she met him earlier.
She goes over the fragmented memories of them every day, because she is afraid that one day, she will wake up and forget them again. She needs to know they were real. She needs to know that he is Percy and that she is Annabeth.
She needs to know that she isn’t crazy.
Because taxes and bills still have to be paid, she finds a job as a waitress at a local restaurant, and another part-time as a barista at Starbucks. It’s an even lower step than she was as a flight attendant. Ironically, she probably should’ve appreciated her first job more, even if it wasn’t everything she wanted it to be. But in a way, this is better. She likes being able to tuck Allie into bed at night. She likes being able to go to parent-teacher conferences.
She finds that she has forgotten how much she likes being a mother. So perhaps it was a good thing she was fired. It still hurts to say - fired.
Her father stays at home, and he never asks why she has returned to Seattle. She doesn’t tell him.
Every few nights, she gets a new dream, a new memory of things that were. They come in such fast progression now, like that one split-second in time opened up the floodgates to another separate lifetime. She looks forward to the new memories, and she dreads them too. Because they already happened, but she is here. What can she do about that?
A year passes. Allie goes to first grade. She has no dyslexia and no ADHD. Lucky that Ricky was a mortal. She is glad Allie doesn’t have the same problems she did. This also means Allie will never get attacked by an empousa in an airport. She smiles a little at the memory and is startled that she is smiling. For a while, she thought she had forgotten how. But Allie - Allie can always make her smile.
So everything goes back to normal, except for the shadow life Rose keeps to herself. Sometimes, the nighttime memories make her laugh - like the time he thought hubris was hummus. Other times, she wakes up sobbing - like the time she thought he had died after Mt. Saint Helens. She gets to know him little by little each day. It is almost enough.
One day, she goes home to find that Allie has checked the mail already and put it on the dining room table. There’s a letter addressed to her in a messy scrawl - she can barely read it. It’s a thin letter with no name, but the return address reads from New York City. It’s not professional mail. It’s personal. She can’t find the letter-opener, so she just rips it open on the side, fingers trembling. Carefully, she slides out a single-paged letter and unfolds the elegant, monogrammed paper. The ink is heavy and dark, obviously written with a good fountain pen. The words jump out at her.
Dear Rose,
I found you.
Heart stuttering to a stop, her hand drops limply to her side. She takes a deep breath to steady herself. She never thought - never dreamed - that this would happen. The curiosity is too much to bear, so she continues reading, but she sits down. Just in case.
One year and two months later. It wasn’t easy. I don’t want you to think I just forgot for all this time. You would not believe how many Rose Parkers there are living in the continental U.S. alone. I never would’ve guessed you lived in Seattle. It took a lot of searching - and probably not all of it was legal, either. But you won’t report me for stalking, right?
She smiles a little.
A promise is a promise. I promised I’d find you. And now, finally, I have. I’m sorry. For everything. I’m sorry I got you fired. That was really irresponsible of me, and I take full credit. I am terrified that I ruined your life. I hope I can make up for it. By the way, I take Delta Airlines now. United wouldn’t be the same without you anyway. So I guess we have a lot to catch up on.
It would’ve been idiotic to say this before - on the plane, I mean - but I dream about you all of the time. It drives me crazy. I should get a therapist, but I don’t want to get sent an asylum. I dream about us. About the time - before. I think I know what it means now. I remember when I met you at Camp Half-Blood however long ago. I told you that you would look pretty with long hair.
She touches one of her curls and realizes that her hair has grown out past her shoulders. She just forgot about getting a haircut in between working two jobs. But maybe she’ll keep it this way.
The memories come all of the time. Sometimes when I’m getting my morning coffee. Or in the middle of a business meeting (ask me about that sometime; it really sucked). But I keep feeling like the story isn’t complete. There’s a whole life there - I think it was amazing, but I can’t remember the whole thing. And I think that’s because you have the other half. Is this making any sense? Anyway, this is all in a desperate attempt for you to write to me, to tell me what you remember, and maybe -
Well, maybe we can piece together that something that I always felt I was missing.
I miss you.
I don’t need to tell you that I love you because you already know that.
-Eric.
P.S. Because I have caused irreparable monetary damage, I sent you a check. You can keep the change. Just, don’t write your name when you send me the next letter because my wife might flip her shit. But don’t worry about the money. I’ll square with her on that one.
Rose shakes the envelope, and true to his word, a check flutters out. She catches it before it reaches the floor. She blinks and her heart does another ungraceful thunk. Printed neatly on the monetary value line: fifteen thousand dollars.
Fifteen thousand dollars! Rose feels faint. Reads it again. There it is, plain as day. And when she puts it into the bank, the teller doesn’t say anything different. She cannot believe he can write fifteen thousand dollar checks. But it sure makes her happy. When Allie comes home that day, Rose is grinning from ear to ear, takes her little girl in her arms and takes them all out for a meal on the town.
Then, when everyone has gone to bed, and she is sitting under the light of her lamp, she writes.
..o..
Dear Eric,
I can’t - I don’t know what to say about the money. Thank you. It has made everything better. I am - truly in your debt.
There is so much that cannot be expressed. It is a secret. And I am glad that I can share that secret with you. I’m not sure I will say it in the right way, but here, I will try.
Remember the time you rode with me on the back of an animal transport van and we shared Double-Stuf Oreos? I was feeling tired and miserable, but I think that was the first moment I realized if we were either going to be the best of friends, or we were going to fall madly in love with each other and have way too many children. It was both. It was both.
Remember the time you told me you wouldn’t rather have anyone reattach your head but me? That was the summer of the fireworks we went to together. You got so red when you said it - it was hilarious, actually - but I think it was the most romantic thing you ever said to me. Honestly. Better than anything in The Notebook or Moulin Rouge. But that’s probably just because it was me. I mean, nobody else would think that. You weren’t really suave - before, I mean. You’ve gotten a bit better since then, but still no cigar.
Remember the time you danced with me on Olympus after we got out of Mount Othrys? I wasn’t an idiot. I knew Athena had said something to you that made you all shy, but I didn’t bring it up. You should know, though, that I never was more annoyed at my mother than at that moment.
Remember those, and it will be better than before.
-Rose.
..o..
Dear Rose,
Nigella and I are going through marriage counseling. Or - she’s making me go through marriage counseling, but it’s not going to work. I wish I could be honest with her about you, but she would never believe me. We signed a pre-nup, and she doesn’t get any money if we divorce, so she is hell-bent on staying with me. I don’t know. I think I loved her, once. I remember that. But something fell out of place, and you know the rest. If I had met you a long time ago, everything would be perfect, wouldn’t it?
It can still be perfect. I’m going to leave her. We can start over, just like we intended last time. I’m sorry I ruined it. I’m sorry I didn’t remember sooner.
Remember the time you first taught me Greek? I was twelve, and I felt like the biggest idiot ever. And you were all accomplished and smart, and you kept rolling your eyes at me. Not that I blame you, because I obviously had no idea what was going on. But gods, it was humiliating to be shown up by a girl. I’ll admit though, I thought you were the coolest thing. Totally gave up on trying to impress you. Guess I succeeded anyway, in the end.
Remember the time I came back from the failed mission with Beckendorf? You ran onto the beach, and I think I almost kissed you right there and then. I was so afraid of losing you. If I could’ve, I would’ve made you stay behind so that you wouldn’t get hurt. But then you dislocated your shoulder and broke you arm, so I guess I didn’t do a great job there, did I? Still, you wouldn’t have listened to me even if I tried. You are stubborn. That’s not so bad.
I am coming for you. Wait for me.
-Eric.
..o..
Dear Eric,
Don’t.
Her pen stops in midair, quaking. In that one word, she has undone every dream. In that one word, she might not only break his heart, but hers too.
I don’t know about your history with Nigella. You say you loved her. I believe you. You say you don’t love her now. I don’t. Even if I did, I don’t want to be the reason you break up your marriage. I’m not going to be the other woman. That’s not me. You know I won’t agree to that, and I swear to you, if you come to my doorstep with a proposal, I will close it in your face.
I’m sorry. I can’t.
Maybe this is wrong, because we are living on memories instead of in the present. I don’t want you to forget me, but I don’t want you to live in the past. We can never return to it anyway. In the past, I wasn’t a flight attendant for United Airlines. In the past, I was a daughter of Athena. In the past, I had only you.
Now I have a daughter and you have a wife, and I am Rose and you are Eric. There are a million things I would’ve wanted to do and say if it weren’t so. But it seems, here is where it all ends for us.
Please do not make this harder than it is. So this is the last time I will say this, but I will say it once, so I can let it go. There is always next time.
If you believe in the Fates - as I do. Love is eternal. So are you and I. In the grand scheme of things, even though we are thousands of miles away, even though our second chance has happened, I hope you realize in that one instance where we met each other on a flight to Italy has changed everything.
Remember the time I taught you the constellations? (Or tried to, at least.) You said all you saw was a bunch of glowing dots in the sky, no lines connecting them. I told you that only an idiot like you wouldn’t be able to understand something as basic as constellations. They’d been around since ancient times. How could I admit to you then that I couldn’t see the lines either? I only knew them because I had practiced looking hard for so long. I think if we were all honest with each other, nobody really gets constellations. Some old farts created random lines between stars to draw pictures of things that don’t really even look like what they’re called. But you see, that is the trick. You might not see them and I might not see them, but the important thing is - they are there. The lines are there. You just have to have faith in them. Do you understand?
I love you, Seaweed Brain.
She ruins two sheets of paper crying over this letter. She thinks about not sending it. But there’s no choice. It’s not exactly the truth, the letter. She is not only Rose anymore. It’s as if she has another soul entwined around her current one, and they have mixed and mixed and mixed until she can hardly tell one from the other. She is Rose, but somewhere inside, she is Annabeth too. But she is Allie’s mother, and Eric is Nigella’s husband.
It’s not fair.
Nothing is fair. But Rose learned that lesson long before, and she is not apt to forget it. She is stubborn, like he said. So she puts the letter into an envelope, along with part of her heart, and seals it away. She sticks on the stamp. She methodically, painstakingly, writes his address on the front, and she drops it into the mailbox. Rain begins to pitter-patter on the sidewalks, and another rainy day in Seattle has begun.
As she walks back to her new flat - with the consistent fifteen thousand dollar checks, she was able to afford a new house - she has this overwhelming feeling that everything is over. Wasn’t the reason she picked to come back to find him?
But then, she realizes, she did find him. By some unthinkable twist, their paths intersected, a girl from Washington and a boy from New York (again), and they remembered. And she is no longer unhappy about Ricky.
And she is no longer unhappy about her job.
And she is no longer unhappy about her life.
So the rain falls over Seattle, falls on her rooftops in light clinks. It falls over all of the city and the surrounding countryside. Clouds darken and gather over the mountains. The outside air smells like the ocean, and it filters into her house. Rose sits on her couch and watches the gentle summer storm roll on by. There are children outside her window, splashing in puddles, and one of them is Allie. She leans back with her cup of coffee and remembers some more.
..o..
In New York City, it is raining too. The rain darkens the cement on the streets, and it causes cursing while people try to hail for taxis. Somewhere, in a penthouse, Eric is sitting, reading the letter. He is looking out the window and trying to see all the way across the country. Nigella is in the kitchen, watching Food Network and making dinner.
He leans back in his leather chair with his book of Greek mythology propped open on his lap, the letter on his desk, and he remembers some more. He can learn to be happy one day at a time.
Happy, at least, that he found her and kept his promise.
..o..
They are glad.
And they are waiting to connect the dots.
Author: Icy Roses
Rating: PG-13 for language
Disclaimer: Not mine. Don't sue.
Summary: One life is not enough for love. Percy and Annabeth try for the Isles of the Blest, but it seems that fate is not always kind to them. Post-series.
Author's Note: Part Two is apparently too long to fit into one post.
(Part Two) - the second part
It’s by the grace of the gods - perhaps because she saved Eric’s pitiful, ungrateful ass - and Shondra’s leniency that Rose doesn’t get sacked. When she showed back up at the plane, everyone searching frantically (apparently, they called in an emergency notice in the airport too, but she had been too busy to hear it), sleeve torn, and a bruise on her cheek, the immediate reaction was fire her. But perhaps because Shondra sees her on the verge of tears, is her friend and conveniently the senior flight attendant, Rose gets off with a warning and the instruction to get her uniform patched up.
Shondra gives her the look of death, and Rose knows if she even sticks a toenail over the line, she is done for. So for the next few flights, she serves with stiff formality. She hardly dares utter a single curse word behind the curtain - that’s quite a feat for her - and she is polite. Nice. Perfect. She does her job flawlessly. And she is glad, glad because she will never see Eric again - good riddance. Hopefully, he has a great life, and just maybe, the empousa taught him that sleeping with unknown women can bring worse things than chlamydia. In which case, she shouldn’t feel bad at all. Why should she? She saved his life, and she taught him about the wonders of death by demon. Truly, he should be grateful.
Asshole.
Rose can’t wait for her break, which comes in two weeks. She’ll go home, kiss Allie hello, and for a couple nights, she might sleep in Allie’s bed too, just to imprint the smell of her baby girl in her head, so she’ll have something to cling to the next time she flies halfway around the world. She’ll say hello to her father. Maybe she’ll even tell him about how she killed an empousa. Maybe he’ll write a poem about it.
So maybe she won’t tell him.
But it’s a delicious little secret she keeps to herself. She is proud of herself. And why shouldn’t she be? Things have gone back to normal, the way they’re supposed to be. The gods can forget about her, and she can forget about them. It is tiring, letting her life bounce back and forth between the times Eric is on board and the times in between. So she is glad that everything is right again.
At least, everything is right until one day, she stands in the front, greeting the passengers as they board and he shows up again. He has no computer bag this time. He’s come empty-handed, and that is enough to put her on guard. What’s he doing without his work stuff? He looks pensive, so lost in his own thoughts, that he doesn’t see her until he leaves the tunnel. “Rose,” Eric says, without preamble.
She’s so stunned that she can’t even offer a response, her usual cheery, “Welcome aboard!” She just stares at him and at that moment, he looks so archaically familiar that it scares her. There is nothing, nothing at all, in that speck of time that would convince her they hadn’t known each other before. The memory teases her, dusts past her consciousness and out of sight, like a wispy butterfly.
“Hello,” he says. His hands are in his pockets, thumbs sticking out, and his shirtsleeves are rolled up.
The first thing she thinks is how nice his forearms look, but her conscious quickly shuts that down. No, she thinks. Bad.
“Can we talk?” he asks softly. He sounds sincere. Rose has since learned that there are two Eric modes. One is as a typical rich little shit who acts like a jerk to her and who she hates. The other is the gentler, quieter version of him, the one whose laugh she likes and who is buried most of the time under the other version. But it proves that he isn’t always an asshole. Just some of the time.
She can’t think properly, so what she ends up saying is, “So you finally came around, huh? Crawled out of the pit of denial you dug for yourself?” She is immediately sorry for her sarcasm when a spasm of guilt flashes across his face. Since when did he begin caring about what insults she had to throw at him? And since when did she begin caring about him caring?
Someone behind Eric coughs loudly. “Excuse me, but you two are holding up the line.” Rose looks beyond Eric and sees a gathering trail of angry people, some of them hauling heavy baggage and tapping their feet, waiting to get on the plane.
She colors up. “Sorry,” she says, letting him pass. He gives her a lingering look before slipping past without a word.
He sits in first class, as usual, but without the suit and tie. She knows while the plane lifts off that he is waiting to speak to her, and the thought sends her into a nervous frenzy. She drops the seatbelt she is supposed to demonstrate safety with. But that wasn’t as bad as when she drops a half-full pot of coffee on the carpet and has to babble apologies while she attempts to sponge it out of the carpet with paper towels. Shondra raises her eyebrow, but says nothing. The implication is clear. Why don’t you stop carrying breakable or spillable objects for a while, hon? Face aflame, she quarantines herself to handing out plastic packages of peanuts and delivering extra blankets.
When the first round of meals is doled out, she makes her way through the sleeping rows of people, the blinds on the windows pulled down, and to Eric. It is inevitable that she speak to him. For some reason, she dreads it. Or maybe she looks forward to it. She can’t really separate out the feelings anymore. From behind, he looks like Eric. She breathes. He doesn’t look like this mysterious someone from her past that she can’t put her finger on.
He turns.
“You rang?” she says, a hand on her hip.
“Yeah,” he replies eventually after a long pause. “I think - I think I believe you.”
“About what?” she asks, momentarily confused.
“About me. Being a semi-god or whatever you called it. I think you’re telling the truth.”
“Demigod,” she corrects. “Gods, you’re hopeless.” She considers him briefly, looking lonely, looking lost, and decides to be gentle with him. It’s not every day one discovers divine parentage. It’s probably a jarring thing to most people. Rose was an exception because for her, it had been too natural, just part of growing up and finding out that - whoops! - she’d never get to see Grandma and Grandpa because they were actually Aphrodite and Apollo. It hadn’t seemed like such a big deal at the time. But who knows? Maybe Eric’s mortal parent lied about it, so he thought his stepmother or father was his real one. That would be quite a surprise, wouldn’t it? She clears her throat. “Look, sorry. I didn’t mean to dump it all on you like that. It wasn’t very nice.”
“It’s not your fault,” he tells her. “Carmella - the empousa, I mean - started it.”
He doesn’t blame her. For some reason, it makes her feel a little bit lighter. He’s still looking at her strangely, and it raises goose bumps on her skin, even though she doesn’t know why. She resists the urge to run away. “So,” she says in an effort to fill the silence. She can’t remember the last time an encounter between the two of them was punctured by awkward silences. “Why are you going to Italy this time?”
Eric shrugs, as if he could care less. “I’m not.”
“What do you mean ‘you’re not?’ You’re on the plane to Venice, in case you missed the sign in the terminal. We can’t fly you back,” she says. Maybe the encounter tipped him over the deep end. Maybe she’s cosseting a crazy man.
“I mean,” he clarifies, shifting in his seat, “I took the plane because I wanted to talk to you, not because I had to go to Italy. I don’t have your phone number or anything. It’s not like I had any other way of contacting you.”
She backs up. “Whoa, whoa. I thought you said you never wanted me to talk to you again.”
He gives her a small, crooked smile. “I changed my mind.”
Carefully, she sits on his armrest and perches precariously close to him. She is daring today. “What made you do that? You’re usually so set and stubborn on everything you do.”
“Me? I think you’re the stubborn one.” He quiets, regarding her for a while.
..o..
He wonders if it would be stupid if he told her he had dreams about her. Would that make him sound like a pervert? She already thinks he’s a pervert anyway, so maybe that wouldn’t matter. She certainly wouldn’t believe him if he told her they were completely innocent dreams. If indeed it is her in the dreams, she was quite a prude in a past life, apparently. She won’t even let him get close enough to touch her arm, her cheek. But this is Rose, he remembers, startled. This is Rose.
This is not the nameless gray-eyed girl who knows him.
This is Rose.
Is it all the same?
He looks deeply into those identical gray eyes and feels a stirring in his belly. This is -
..o..
“Um, hello?” Rose says, wagging a few fingers in front of his face. “Are you alive in there?”
He blinks. “Yes.”
Vaguely, and completely unrelated to the current topic, Rose thinks about how absurd it is to buy a plane ticket just to talk to a flight attendant. Nobody normal does that kind of thing. Eric must be obscenely rich. She finds herself wandering again to the land of dreams where how great would it be if there was enough money to pay for Allie’s tuition in twelve years? She wonders if Eric has any children. Her guess is no. Eric is too light and insubstantial to know the weightiness of parenthood. She wonders if his wife ever wanted children. All things too private for the casual observer to think about, and why is she contemplating them now?
She shifts from the armrest, feeling flushed and embarrassed without knowing quite why. “So are you just going to stare at me like a baboon the entire time or do you actually have something substantive to say?”
“Oh, yes,” he says. “Why don’t you bring me a bottle of Grey Goose and we’ll talk?”
And she finds, surprisingly - that’s okay with her. Perhaps there is something about saving someone’s life in an Italian airport that makes it impossible to harbor feelings of dislike anymore. She pours him the customary glass, and he solicitously offers her a sip first. She says something like, “I don’t think I’m supposed to be drinking on the job,” and he hastily retracts.
There is a lot for him to catch up on. He has as million questions, about the gods, about their world, and about how science fits into all of it. She tries her best, but honestly, she doesn’t really think about how science fits into Greek mythology - she just kind of ignores the incongruities and hopes that the mutual exclusiveness of the two aren’t currently tearing a hole in the fabric of the time-space continuum. Eric finds her general lack of curiosity amazing and shoots out another twenty questions for her. She provides them, patiently, realizing that it’s kind of nice to know another person who believes in all of the craziness. For so long, she thought she was going mad with secrets.
“Do you know who my parent is, then?” Eric asks.
“If you don’t, then I don’t either. Your mother or father?”
He takes another swig. Half of the bottle is gone. “My mother,” he says quietly. “I don’t have a single memory of her. She didn’t leave anything when she left. Well, she left my dad, I guess. He never married. Still a bachelor. I think, when I was young, the claiming thing you talked about happened to me. There was a sign, but I didn’t understand it at the time or I just thought it was freaky and ignored it. I probably shouldn’t have. I probably should’ve gone to that Camp Half-Blood thing. Sure would’ve been a change. My life’s not that interesting, you know.”
Rose shakes her head. “Firstly, if you’re still alive, your mother is most likely just a minor goddess. You don’t draw too much attention, and that’s a good thing. Being a demigod is not the kind of ‘interesting’ you want to have in your life. Besides, there’s nothing more interesting in life than learning to live it with passion and joy.” Even as she says the words out loud, they amaze her. Since when did she become good at giving out advice? She certainly never took any of it herself. Or maybe it’s because she has no passion for being a flight attendant, nor does she have any joy in living the way she does now, always worrying about next month’s bills. And gods, if tax season isn’t the worst.
The flight is almost too short. Eric doesn’t have anything to pack up, so he twiddles his thumbs as the other people are gathering their belongings, the plane slowly rumbling to a stop.
“What are you going to do in Italy?” Rose asks. He has no reason to be there, after all. And no matter how great their conversation was, sleep is more important. She’s about to pass out. There is absolutely no reason under the sun to use the fourteen hours between landing and taking off again for anything other than sleep. She’s going to check into her hotel room and crash.
He shrugs. “I dunno. Do some sightseeing, I guess. I never thought about it.”
“You never thought about what you were going to do after reaching the destination?” She is incredulous. “You suck at planning. And living. Seriously, how do you get by?” With a lot, a lot of money, her brain supplies helpfully.
His devil-may-care attitude shines through in his grin. “Rose - you need to learn to live a little. Be spontaneous.”
“Poor people can’t afford to be spontaneous,” she shoots back.
“Can poor people also not afford a sense of humor?”
“Hey!” she says indignantly. “I do too have a sense of humor!”
But he has slipped out of his row and is moving steadily forward with the crowd, being pushed out of first-class cabin and into the tunnel, out of the plane. “See you next time, Rose!” he shouts brightly.
She stands there with his empty bottle of vodka for a long time and wonders when he became a permanent fixture in her joyless, passionless life.
..o..
In his free time, Eric peruses old, worn books in the library about Greek mythology. He reads about how the world was created, the ancient myths of Heracles and Jason, Theseus and Perseus. He feels strange about it, as if he has slipped into another skin of himself, when he runs his fingers over the pictures of titans and gorgons. He feels erudite and scholarly and remembers way back when in college when he shunned the humanities. He used to say he majored in learning how to make money. That is, he majored in economics and finance. Mythology was stupid and old. Technology, stocks, the rise and fall of the economy - that was today and tomorrow. That was new.
Now, he pages restlessly through The Iliad and The Odyssey and finds a new thrill of learning what he was. His past, perhaps. It reads familiar. It reads like home. And that both exhilarates and terrifies him.
(He misses Rose.)
He doesn’t tell Nigella. She would think it was stupid, although Nigella’s obsession with shopping at high-end stores is stupid too. He finds he can no longer connect with her. Who is this woman he has married? Who are they? One day, she walks into his study with a book he bought from one of those independent bookstores. The cover is bare and cold; the title rests on the spine alone. She holds the book between her forefinger and her thumb, as if touching it with more might dirty her manicured hands. “This,” she says.
Eric looks up from another one of the myths he is reading, tucks it under some business files quickly. “What?”
“Since when did you become a philosophy professor?” She shakes down her wavy, dark brown hair.
“It’s mythology,” he tells her. “And it’s a new hobby.” Get over it, he thinks.
(He misses Rose.)
“Who cares what it’s called? You’ve been totally distracted for the past weeks. And you’re leaving these things all over the place. What’s your problem? Look, I’ve been trying to plan out our yearly vacation to Fiji, and you haven’t been pitching in at all. I can’t do all of the work around here.”
You don’t work, he thinks. You sit at home and watch the Real Housewives of Orange County on TV. But it’s a bit of a defense mechanism in reality. He had forgotten about the trip to Fiji. He also finds, now that he has remembered, he doesn’t really care about it. “How much planning can it take? We go to the same resort.” He pulls out the book and begins reading again. He doesn’t care if Nigella sees.
She stamps her foot. “It’s the principle of the thing! If you don’t care about it, then why don’t we just skip it this year?”
She’s saying it as a threat, but suddenly, Eric is tired of this argument. He doesn’t want to go to Fiji anyway. “Fine,” he says. “Let’s skip it.”
He can tell immediately - that wasn’t the answer she wanted. She is stunned into silence. “I’m throwing this away,” she says about the book she holds. “I don’t want the ratty thing sitting on our coffee table. You always waste money on the dumbest of things.” She stands there, pouting ferociously.
He half-turns. “Don’t. It’s mine.”
Nigella is pissed. She tosses the book onto the ground, where it lands open and face down. Without another word, she flounces out, slamming the door shut behind her, and Eric knows she’s not going to talk to him for days. She is really, really good at holding grudges. Carefully, he picks the book up by the spine, and the pages fall into place with a gentle rustle. He brushes off the cover. And he tucks it into his bookshelf. Whether it was yesterday or a week ago, a month ago, perhaps today - he has changed.
(He misses Rose.)
The tidal wave has gathered, and he is waiting for it to crest.
..o..
In the middle of the night, Rose stares at the shadows on her ceiling and thinks about Ricky. She was nineteen when she met him, a freshman in college, her whole life ahead of her. She loved linguistics, the turn of a foreign phrase sounded like poetry in her ears. She felt, like everyone else in college, that she was going to go far. He was a philosophy major, brown-haired and green-eyed - intelligent. He was an agnostic; he cared about politics. He argued with professors about the meaning of Hobbes and Locke - they loved him. He was bright. He was the star of the classroom.
She liked him too. On a snowy winter day, they met. She was too poor to afford a good pair of snow boots, so she trudged through the knee-deep snowdrifts, powdery white clinging to her jeans. She had too many books. Ricky walked out of Smith Hall - he was in her World Religions class - offered his scarf and carried her books back to her dorm. They started dating and kept at it all through college. Everyone thought they were going to get married. Everyone thought he would propose before graduation.
Instead, she got pregnant, and he got scared away. He was going into the Peace Corps - he didn’t have time for a poor girlfriend and child.
And the rest of the story played out, as everyone knew. Rose hasn’t attended any reunion of any kind - high school or college. Those are for the people who make a difference, who have something to show off. She has nothing except the bills waiting for her on the dining table. Sometimes, her father calls to make sure she is doing all right. He is a good man, her father, and he means well. She just can’t help feeling bitter that he left nothing for her.
She turns onto her side and flips over her pillow for the colder side. Since then, she hasn’t ever dated anyone. Allie doesn’t need a stepfather, and Rose doesn’t need another man to leech off of her savings. She doesn’t want to leech off anyone else either. She likes being independent. It probably looks strange to anyone on the outside, but Rose stopped caring about other people’s perceptions of her when she swallowed her pride and became a flight attendant. She’s kept her degree, but only for her to look at. A promise, a hope of what could have been. She doesn’t look at it too often, though. Nobody can make a living off of promises and hopes.
There are times, though, when she thinks there is something more that life had in store for her. Her life doesn’t suck, not really. She has Allie. That makes everything worthwhile. But sometimes - a secret she doesn’t tell anybody - she wonders if the gods didn’t have something special in store for her. She believes it because, well, she can’t ever feel happy with what she has. She always thinks that maybe tomorrow is the day her life will turn around. Maybe tomorrow is the day she will discover what she is truly meant to be. Maybe tomorrow is the day she finds herself.
The thing that scares her is, when she sees Eric, she feels the future come crashing in through her window, a quiet roar.
She will either swim in it - or drown.
..o..
With red-rimmed eyes from lack of sleep, Rose dully greets the passengers as they board the plane. She stifles a yawn. It’s probably around 5:30 am. She ran out of Ambien, so here she is. She hopes desperately that she doesn’t slump over snoring on the cart when she serves breakfast. After this, she thinks, I am taking a period of sick leave. She has enough days for about a week off. It’s close to Christmas, anyway. Time for a break before she works herself to exhaustion.
It’s a cloudy morning with light flurries in LaGuardia. The airplane takes off without a hitch, and her ears do their usual popping. When she started working, her ears used to take forever to pop, and they would hurt until she was prostrate on the ground with pain. She did everything, chew gum, hold her breath, blow up her cheeks - none of it worked. Eventually, her ears got accustomed to making the switch, and she barely notices it now.
She casts a wistful gaze at first-class, wondering when the next time Eric shows up will be. There’s a man who looks a bit like him from behind, sitting in the fourth row. He has black hair. It’s kind of pathetic how she looks for him now. Except - oh! He looks over his shoulder, and it is him. He breaks into a grin and for some reason, it roots her to the spot. When she finally gets up the courage to come closer, she notices yet again he does not have any carry-on items, not even a copy of the newspaper. What was he doing? Just staring at the back of the seat behind him?
“Hey,” he says.
“Hi there.”
He pauses as if he is drinking in the sight of her. Or maybe that’s just her, drinking in the sight of him, being stupidly and foolishly hopeful - of what? “Business trip?” she asks.
“Nope.”
“You came to see me,” she says. It’s not a question.
“Well, since you seem so set on that, then sure. Yeah, I came to see you.”
She twists her mouth. Even in the best of times, he still has that jerk side to him. But he’s laughing now. “It’s a joke. Calm down. Of course I came to see you.” He touches her hand.
In amazement, she looks down where his fingers have taken a hold of hers. What is he doing? He’s - her lips are dry and she licks them. She looks up, and he really is staring at her this time. All of the laughter has died. He pulls her slightly closer. “Eric,” she mumbles.
Abruptly, he gets up. Starts walking down the aisle and pulls her with him. She’s so stunned that her feet trip over themselves as she follows him. It doesn’t occur to her to pull away. He’s sure, determined, wherever he’s going. He pushes aside the curtain, and then - it’s the bathroom, and it’s unoccupied, and suddenly, Rose knows exactly what he plans on doing. There is a huge lump in her throat and her heart has started fluttering around, unsure of whether to slow down or speed up. Her fingers tingle where he holds them. The next thing she knows, he’s stepping into the bathroom and pulling her in too. He shuts the door, locks it.
The space is small - there’s barely any room to move. Her back presses into the metal sink, and his is against the door. She blinks. “Eric - what are you - no!”
Except, she does the exact wrong thing and looks into his eyes, those green, green eyes, that were so familiar from the beginning, and the words catch in her throat. He leans down and his breath washes over her - his lips are on hers.
Her body catches on fire. This - she knows this. Then, she is kissing back; his hands cup her face, and hers snake into his hair. He leans into her, and the edge of the sink cuts almost painfully into her back - if she could bring herself to care about it - and his hand comes down on the metal lip, trapping her. She is dying. She is dying together with him, and she has been waiting her whole life for this. Her hands trail slowly down to his shoulders while his hot mouth moves down to her exposed neck and then, her fingers find their way to the shallow dip at the small of his back -
- you drool when you sleep, because you’re my friend, Seaweed Brain, stupid son of Poseidon, Riptide, my team in Capture the Flag, the gods are real, princess curls, Kronos, pine tree, the Golden Fleece, you made a good guinea pig, see you next summer, so you owe me what else is new, stop thinking so hard, Wise Girl, I am never going to make things easy for you, I love -
..o..
“Because you and I, we’re meant to be. We just - have to remember to find each other next time.”
..o..
“-Percy,” she gasps.
He has stopped. “I know you,” he says. She is sitting on the sink, and his face is inches away. “Annabeth.” He wipes a tear away from her cheek. “I know you.”
Someone knocks sharply on the door. “Hello? This is cabin crew personnel. Please open the door.”
Slowly, Rose gets off the sink and the happiness that had been steadily expanding inside her chest deflates, leaving her feeling old and empty. Eric removes his hands from her, and he opens the door. Shondra stands there, looking stern. The expression slides off of her face when she sees who it is. Her hands go flying up to her mouth.
“R-Rose?”
“I’m sorry,” she whispers.
Shondra is trembling, either with fury or sadness or shock, Rose isn’t sure. “Y-you’re fired,” she says. “When we return to LaGuardia, we’ll file the paperwork. For now, please just - sit behind the curtain and - keep to yourself.”
“Shondra-”
“Please, Rose.” She turns to Eric. “Sir, I ask that you return to your seat. I’m going to have to ban you from future United Airline flights.”
“I understand,” he mumbles.
Shondra leads Rose to the seat behind the curtain, where she is to sit, like a child in time out. They are silent as the grave, until Shondra says, “I gave you all of the chances I could. I can’t believe you would do this.” And she paces away, Eric behind her. Rose locks eyes with Eric for a brief moment, and he mouths, I’ll find you, Wise Girl. Like I promised.
Rose has the dignity to sit there, composed, for the entire way there and the entire way back - nearly twenty-seven hours, but when she reaches her hotel room in New York City, there is nothing that keeps her from screaming and crying until her throat bleeds.
Percy, she thinks.
I know you.
..o..
She returns to Seattle, where Allie is waiting with open arms. She picks up the pieces of her life. She doesn’t know where Eric lives, doesn’t have his phone number. It doesn’t matter anyway. He is married to Nigella. She should feel ashamed for going after a married man like that, having feelings for a married man like that. She should feel ashamed - but she can’t. Because he belonged to her first, after all. Does that count? She’s going to pretend like it does.
She falls asleep at night dreaming of the life they might’ve had if she met him earlier.
She goes over the fragmented memories of them every day, because she is afraid that one day, she will wake up and forget them again. She needs to know they were real. She needs to know that he is Percy and that she is Annabeth.
She needs to know that she isn’t crazy.
Because taxes and bills still have to be paid, she finds a job as a waitress at a local restaurant, and another part-time as a barista at Starbucks. It’s an even lower step than she was as a flight attendant. Ironically, she probably should’ve appreciated her first job more, even if it wasn’t everything she wanted it to be. But in a way, this is better. She likes being able to tuck Allie into bed at night. She likes being able to go to parent-teacher conferences.
She finds that she has forgotten how much she likes being a mother. So perhaps it was a good thing she was fired. It still hurts to say - fired.
Her father stays at home, and he never asks why she has returned to Seattle. She doesn’t tell him.
Every few nights, she gets a new dream, a new memory of things that were. They come in such fast progression now, like that one split-second in time opened up the floodgates to another separate lifetime. She looks forward to the new memories, and she dreads them too. Because they already happened, but she is here. What can she do about that?
A year passes. Allie goes to first grade. She has no dyslexia and no ADHD. Lucky that Ricky was a mortal. She is glad Allie doesn’t have the same problems she did. This also means Allie will never get attacked by an empousa in an airport. She smiles a little at the memory and is startled that she is smiling. For a while, she thought she had forgotten how. But Allie - Allie can always make her smile.
So everything goes back to normal, except for the shadow life Rose keeps to herself. Sometimes, the nighttime memories make her laugh - like the time he thought hubris was hummus. Other times, she wakes up sobbing - like the time she thought he had died after Mt. Saint Helens. She gets to know him little by little each day. It is almost enough.
One day, she goes home to find that Allie has checked the mail already and put it on the dining room table. There’s a letter addressed to her in a messy scrawl - she can barely read it. It’s a thin letter with no name, but the return address reads from New York City. It’s not professional mail. It’s personal. She can’t find the letter-opener, so she just rips it open on the side, fingers trembling. Carefully, she slides out a single-paged letter and unfolds the elegant, monogrammed paper. The ink is heavy and dark, obviously written with a good fountain pen. The words jump out at her.
Dear Rose,
I found you.
Heart stuttering to a stop, her hand drops limply to her side. She takes a deep breath to steady herself. She never thought - never dreamed - that this would happen. The curiosity is too much to bear, so she continues reading, but she sits down. Just in case.
One year and two months later. It wasn’t easy. I don’t want you to think I just forgot for all this time. You would not believe how many Rose Parkers there are living in the continental U.S. alone. I never would’ve guessed you lived in Seattle. It took a lot of searching - and probably not all of it was legal, either. But you won’t report me for stalking, right?
She smiles a little.
A promise is a promise. I promised I’d find you. And now, finally, I have. I’m sorry. For everything. I’m sorry I got you fired. That was really irresponsible of me, and I take full credit. I am terrified that I ruined your life. I hope I can make up for it. By the way, I take Delta Airlines now. United wouldn’t be the same without you anyway. So I guess we have a lot to catch up on.
It would’ve been idiotic to say this before - on the plane, I mean - but I dream about you all of the time. It drives me crazy. I should get a therapist, but I don’t want to get sent an asylum. I dream about us. About the time - before. I think I know what it means now. I remember when I met you at Camp Half-Blood however long ago. I told you that you would look pretty with long hair.
She touches one of her curls and realizes that her hair has grown out past her shoulders. She just forgot about getting a haircut in between working two jobs. But maybe she’ll keep it this way.
The memories come all of the time. Sometimes when I’m getting my morning coffee. Or in the middle of a business meeting (ask me about that sometime; it really sucked). But I keep feeling like the story isn’t complete. There’s a whole life there - I think it was amazing, but I can’t remember the whole thing. And I think that’s because you have the other half. Is this making any sense? Anyway, this is all in a desperate attempt for you to write to me, to tell me what you remember, and maybe -
Well, maybe we can piece together that something that I always felt I was missing.
I miss you.
I don’t need to tell you that I love you because you already know that.
-Eric.
P.S. Because I have caused irreparable monetary damage, I sent you a check. You can keep the change. Just, don’t write your name when you send me the next letter because my wife might flip her shit. But don’t worry about the money. I’ll square with her on that one.
Rose shakes the envelope, and true to his word, a check flutters out. She catches it before it reaches the floor. She blinks and her heart does another ungraceful thunk. Printed neatly on the monetary value line: fifteen thousand dollars.
Fifteen thousand dollars! Rose feels faint. Reads it again. There it is, plain as day. And when she puts it into the bank, the teller doesn’t say anything different. She cannot believe he can write fifteen thousand dollar checks. But it sure makes her happy. When Allie comes home that day, Rose is grinning from ear to ear, takes her little girl in her arms and takes them all out for a meal on the town.
Then, when everyone has gone to bed, and she is sitting under the light of her lamp, she writes.
..o..
Dear Eric,
I can’t - I don’t know what to say about the money. Thank you. It has made everything better. I am - truly in your debt.
There is so much that cannot be expressed. It is a secret. And I am glad that I can share that secret with you. I’m not sure I will say it in the right way, but here, I will try.
Remember the time you rode with me on the back of an animal transport van and we shared Double-Stuf Oreos? I was feeling tired and miserable, but I think that was the first moment I realized if we were either going to be the best of friends, or we were going to fall madly in love with each other and have way too many children. It was both. It was both.
Remember the time you told me you wouldn’t rather have anyone reattach your head but me? That was the summer of the fireworks we went to together. You got so red when you said it - it was hilarious, actually - but I think it was the most romantic thing you ever said to me. Honestly. Better than anything in The Notebook or Moulin Rouge. But that’s probably just because it was me. I mean, nobody else would think that. You weren’t really suave - before, I mean. You’ve gotten a bit better since then, but still no cigar.
Remember the time you danced with me on Olympus after we got out of Mount Othrys? I wasn’t an idiot. I knew Athena had said something to you that made you all shy, but I didn’t bring it up. You should know, though, that I never was more annoyed at my mother than at that moment.
Remember those, and it will be better than before.
-Rose.
..o..
Dear Rose,
Nigella and I are going through marriage counseling. Or - she’s making me go through marriage counseling, but it’s not going to work. I wish I could be honest with her about you, but she would never believe me. We signed a pre-nup, and she doesn’t get any money if we divorce, so she is hell-bent on staying with me. I don’t know. I think I loved her, once. I remember that. But something fell out of place, and you know the rest. If I had met you a long time ago, everything would be perfect, wouldn’t it?
It can still be perfect. I’m going to leave her. We can start over, just like we intended last time. I’m sorry I ruined it. I’m sorry I didn’t remember sooner.
Remember the time you first taught me Greek? I was twelve, and I felt like the biggest idiot ever. And you were all accomplished and smart, and you kept rolling your eyes at me. Not that I blame you, because I obviously had no idea what was going on. But gods, it was humiliating to be shown up by a girl. I’ll admit though, I thought you were the coolest thing. Totally gave up on trying to impress you. Guess I succeeded anyway, in the end.
Remember the time I came back from the failed mission with Beckendorf? You ran onto the beach, and I think I almost kissed you right there and then. I was so afraid of losing you. If I could’ve, I would’ve made you stay behind so that you wouldn’t get hurt. But then you dislocated your shoulder and broke you arm, so I guess I didn’t do a great job there, did I? Still, you wouldn’t have listened to me even if I tried. You are stubborn. That’s not so bad.
I am coming for you. Wait for me.
-Eric.
..o..
Dear Eric,
Don’t.
Her pen stops in midair, quaking. In that one word, she has undone every dream. In that one word, she might not only break his heart, but hers too.
I don’t know about your history with Nigella. You say you loved her. I believe you. You say you don’t love her now. I don’t. Even if I did, I don’t want to be the reason you break up your marriage. I’m not going to be the other woman. That’s not me. You know I won’t agree to that, and I swear to you, if you come to my doorstep with a proposal, I will close it in your face.
I’m sorry. I can’t.
Maybe this is wrong, because we are living on memories instead of in the present. I don’t want you to forget me, but I don’t want you to live in the past. We can never return to it anyway. In the past, I wasn’t a flight attendant for United Airlines. In the past, I was a daughter of Athena. In the past, I had only you.
Now I have a daughter and you have a wife, and I am Rose and you are Eric. There are a million things I would’ve wanted to do and say if it weren’t so. But it seems, here is where it all ends for us.
Please do not make this harder than it is. So this is the last time I will say this, but I will say it once, so I can let it go. There is always next time.
If you believe in the Fates - as I do. Love is eternal. So are you and I. In the grand scheme of things, even though we are thousands of miles away, even though our second chance has happened, I hope you realize in that one instance where we met each other on a flight to Italy has changed everything.
Remember the time I taught you the constellations? (Or tried to, at least.) You said all you saw was a bunch of glowing dots in the sky, no lines connecting them. I told you that only an idiot like you wouldn’t be able to understand something as basic as constellations. They’d been around since ancient times. How could I admit to you then that I couldn’t see the lines either? I only knew them because I had practiced looking hard for so long. I think if we were all honest with each other, nobody really gets constellations. Some old farts created random lines between stars to draw pictures of things that don’t really even look like what they’re called. But you see, that is the trick. You might not see them and I might not see them, but the important thing is - they are there. The lines are there. You just have to have faith in them. Do you understand?
I love you, Seaweed Brain.
She ruins two sheets of paper crying over this letter. She thinks about not sending it. But there’s no choice. It’s not exactly the truth, the letter. She is not only Rose anymore. It’s as if she has another soul entwined around her current one, and they have mixed and mixed and mixed until she can hardly tell one from the other. She is Rose, but somewhere inside, she is Annabeth too. But she is Allie’s mother, and Eric is Nigella’s husband.
It’s not fair.
Nothing is fair. But Rose learned that lesson long before, and she is not apt to forget it. She is stubborn, like he said. So she puts the letter into an envelope, along with part of her heart, and seals it away. She sticks on the stamp. She methodically, painstakingly, writes his address on the front, and she drops it into the mailbox. Rain begins to pitter-patter on the sidewalks, and another rainy day in Seattle has begun.
As she walks back to her new flat - with the consistent fifteen thousand dollar checks, she was able to afford a new house - she has this overwhelming feeling that everything is over. Wasn’t the reason she picked to come back to find him?
But then, she realizes, she did find him. By some unthinkable twist, their paths intersected, a girl from Washington and a boy from New York (again), and they remembered. And she is no longer unhappy about Ricky.
And she is no longer unhappy about her job.
And she is no longer unhappy about her life.
So the rain falls over Seattle, falls on her rooftops in light clinks. It falls over all of the city and the surrounding countryside. Clouds darken and gather over the mountains. The outside air smells like the ocean, and it filters into her house. Rose sits on her couch and watches the gentle summer storm roll on by. There are children outside her window, splashing in puddles, and one of them is Allie. She leans back with her cup of coffee and remembers some more.
..o..
In New York City, it is raining too. The rain darkens the cement on the streets, and it causes cursing while people try to hail for taxis. Somewhere, in a penthouse, Eric is sitting, reading the letter. He is looking out the window and trying to see all the way across the country. Nigella is in the kitchen, watching Food Network and making dinner.
He leans back in his leather chair with his book of Greek mythology propped open on his lap, the letter on his desk, and he remembers some more. He can learn to be happy one day at a time.
Happy, at least, that he found her and kept his promise.
..o..
They are glad.
And they are waiting to connect the dots.