head canons on how marriage comes up with percabeth ? like where their head spaces are at over the years on the subject and how they end up at Ok Yeah I Wanna Get Married Now!
so, you came to me for this. which means you get my response. which is, essentially, me walking you through a bullet point story, one that is filled with miscommunication on an incredible level and also pet ownership headcanons. enjoy.
contrary to popular belief, i think percy’s pretty lax about marriage. i don’t think the thought about marriage specifically even occurs to him until he hits late college, and even then it’s like, i would love to if she wants to but i would also love not to if she doesn’t want to. i think he’s okay with getting married someday and i think he’s okay with never getting married. he’s not a big traditionalist, and he’s seen firsthand how marriage can trap people, and he’s also not the type to push annabeth farther than she wants to go. and i think percy had a hard time when they first moved in together for a lot of reasons, mostly pertaining to his childhood, and i think he’s learned the hard way not to press his advantage, so to speak. moving in together sucked because he had a lot of buried trauma with the concept that he was trying not to think about. by the time he’s ready to ponder the question of marriage, he’s still working through that - he’s more of a, “i don’t need a certificate, i don’t need a law,” type.
annabeth is hesitant to think about marriage for a long time, but when she does, she thinks about it regularly. she’s a daydreamer. she loses a lot of time in very boring classes that way. for annabeth the appeal is that there’s something concrete, that two people could look at them and see their rings and see that they’re a pair. these demigods are a set, do not separate, and all. it’s less about proving her love, or percy proving his love, and more about showing it off, more about feeling like she made it. there is something permanent about a marriage certificate because it’s something she can pull out and look at. the rings they’d wear would be visible to everyone. being able to say, “my husband,” feels a lot more dignified and romantic and solid than saying, “my boyfriend.” but she doesn’t start thinking about it seriously until later, after she’s been with her first architecture firm for three years, when she’s considering moving to another one for a nice raise and a better office and maybe more chances.
in her defense, it’s a weird time in her life. she’s in the career she’s always wanted but it’s not quite measuring up to re-designing mount olympus at sixteen, and her life is - it’s domestic. she loves it, but things are also not happening in it, and maybe the best time to do something is when the waters are calm. so she makes a plan, scribbles it down in her head, and she tells percy that she’s going to the grocery store when she’s actually visiting sally and asking for her blessing. sally cries. sally cries a lot. she deserves it. and then starts the process of actually buying the ring, planning the proposal, the works. this is a lot longer of a process than you’d think, because she has to slowly pack away funds for a down payment on a ring, and even if it isn’t a diamond ring (diamond rings are made of lies), it’s still gold. and it took her at least five hour-long discussions with sally to settle on gold over silver, anyway. and she has to pack away funds without percy noticing, and he’s pretty shrewd about finances, so it’s work. it takes a couple months of orchestrating, but she’s okay with taking her time, and also by the time she makes the down payment on a gold band, she’s got a nice pay raise because she has a new job. score. time to enter the stage where she fleshes out her ideas for a proposal.
and then percy comes home from a run, it’s 9am, NYC is bustling away despite it being sunday, the city in full hectic swing, the morning sun bright and warm through the windows because it’s spring, now. and this bastard, after months of annabeth planning, after annabeth is anticipating months more of planning, says, “hey, how do you feel about marriage? we’ve never really talked about it, but, y’know, i guess we should.” and annabeth, who bought an engagement ring yesterday, is fuming. and panicking. the point of the proposal is the surprise, right? and what she says next is, “we can’t get married. we can’t.” and then she realizes how harsh that sounds, and how mildly hurt percy looks, and she backtracks.... a little. “until we have a dog,” she amends. but it’s 9am, and percy just ran four miles, and as fitting as it would be to point out that mrs. o’leary is a dog, technically, his brain is mush. it’s 9am and he’s just run four miles. anything would sound reasonable.
annabeth pushes back her timeline because now she’s convinced percy noticed the missing funds from their bank account and guessed what it was for, like a love mastermind, or something. so she has to throw him off the trail. she has to play it cool. a month later, percy disappears for a day, saying that he’s going to hang out with friends - which is confusing, because usually percy hangs out with his friends in the capacity of playing basketball at the gym. that’s it. he’s really not great at being friends with people who didn’t spend their teenage years fighting Magic Wars. but he comes back at midnight, and he’s carrying a tiny little puppy, and he says, “we have a dog,” almost expectantly. this is inscrutable to annabeth. she can’t tell whether he wants to talk about getting married or actually get married and she’s afraid that if she asks, the jig’ll be up, and that’s how they get their first dog. annabeth makes the strategic choice to avoid the conversation. percy makes a strategic choice to mention, “we have a dog,” every day.
because he’s curious, right? annabeth is being really weird. he thought he’d approached the subject super casually on that one sunday at 9am, but apparently he’d unnerved her, but also he’s a little too stubborn to back down. he’s curious. so he turns on a terrible romcom that features the two main characters getting married while annabeth sifts through emails. he binges those speed dating shows. they go out and percy looks for couples wearing wedding rings and points them out and says, “aw, they’re cute.” he can’t be direct and ask her, because clearly annabeth will avoid it, but he can push her into a patented Annabeth Moment, where she accidentally talks about her feelings. but this time it’s not working, because it’s not actually an emotional problem annabeth is having, it’s her desperation to make this a good and memorable thing for percy. and she’s stubborn, on that subject.
so annabeth doesn’t give any ground and percy sits her down one day and is like, “okay, we should talk about why we have a dog,” and alarm bells go off in annabeth’s brain, she loses the plot, and she says, “we should get a cat first.” and percy’s reasonably confused, and annabeth is losing her mind at how dumb she’s being, but she has to cover her ass first. “i just think that caring for a cat is a different experience than caring for a dog. and we should, you know. have knowledge. you know. about caring for things.” and she sounds so awkward and this is such an utterly inscrutable response that percy’s thinking is she trying to imply i don’t care about her enough, but annabeth is thinking in only the kill bill sirens. so percy comes out of that conversation with a new resolve; he’s gonna prove it. fuck his initial thoughts on marriage, he’s gotta Prove It. i like percabeth, but i never said they were aces at communication, okay? it’s a comedy of miscommunication.
somewhere in here annabeth breaks and calls grover and goes WHY IS THIS SO HARD and grover’s like....... why can’t you say the words to each other? and annabeth’s like HE DESERVES SOMETHING SPECIAL I HAVE TO SURPRISE HIM.
the challenge is accepted. percy buys a cat. before he can say anything, annabeth says, “a houseplant,” in a strained voice, and he buys a houseplant. he buys two, actually, because he is in this game to win. after a week of percy being unbearably smug about the houseplants, annabeth says, because she’s running out of ideas, “i think snake care is really unique and difficult, and will give us a good experience,” and percy’s like are you fucking kidding me, but a week later they have a corn snake. and now annabeth is out of ideas and out of physical space to comfortably house more living things, so she switches to experiences. “i’ve never been on a rollercoaster,” and, “i’ve never seen the parthenon,” which turns into smaller things like, “i’ve never been rollerskating,” and, “i’ve never had a shirley temple.” percy pulls it all off, in one form or another, but internally he’s increasingly frustrated because he’s not used to not knowing what annabeth is thinking. he’s not used to her brushing off direct questions, and she should’ve given into whatever it is that she’s feeling by now. and because percy is percy, he’s increasingly getting the sinking feeling that the reality is that she doesn’t want to marry him. which he was, as i said, okay with. but the fact that she’d absolutely refuse to just say that gives him the idea that maybe she wants less than what they have. maybe she wants to leave him altogether, and if that’s what she wants, he needs to stop pressuring her.
remember how i said percy is pretty shrewd about financial stuff
this is exactly when he notices the missing funds, because annabeth’s still putting bit-by-bit away for her Proposal Plans. and it is hard to convince a guy who doesn’t have great self-esteem to start with, who is already thinking that his girlfriend is leaving him, that missing funds doesn’t mean she’s saving for a place of her own. so he calls grover. and he tries not to cry while he talks about it, but he kind of fails, and the problem is - the problem is that grover has been annabeth’s confidant through all of this, and grover is listening to this with an expression like he has swallowed a lemon. but then percy makes him promise not to say anything to annabeth, and grover goes, “sure, man, i’d never betray your trust like that,” but internally grover kind of wants to throttle them both.
so grover calls annabeth. he can’t say exactly what percy’s thinking, because Dude Code Of Honor, but he can tell annabeth that she needs to be honest right now. if annabeth would pick up the phone. which she doesn’t. because annabeth is telling sally this entire story, because sally’s been left out of the loop, and sally’s like, sweetheart, i love you, and i know you have this idea that you can make it perfect. you can’t. he’ll say yes anyway. so there’s a really awkward three weeks, there, where percy’s waiting for the other shoe to drop, and annabeth’s organizing a weekend rental at the same montauk cabin percy and sally always went to. when she suggests it, percy’s like okay, that’s when it’ll happen, and this is when he calls rachel like, “hi, i might need to stay with you for a bit, annabeth and i are probably breaking up.” to which rachel loses her fucking mind, because she never actually got around to telling percy that she has accidentally fallen in love with thalia, and it’s gonna be pretty unavoidable. and also, why the hell are they breaking up? so rachel tells thalia, and thalia and rachel call grover, and grover’s kind of done with being bound by Honor Code, and at some point things leak to nico and - i just need you to know, there is total chaos happening in the background here. total chaos.
the drive to montauk is awkward. percy can’t bring himself to joke around and annabeth is mind-numbingly nervous. annabeth orders them pizza, half hawaiian and half olives the way they always do it, and they sit on the beach and percy eats exactly one pineapple slice he plucks off of his pizza. it’s 9pm and it’s a saturday night and it’s cold, because it’s spring but the sun isn’t out to warm things up. annabeth doesn’t have words, so she pulls the box out of her pocket, opens it, and slides it across their beach towel in front of percy, and percy is so distracted he doesn’t notice it for a full minute. when he does notice it, he sees a gold band that annabeth had engraved with little waves, just like the ones crashing against the shore thirty feet away. the very romantic thing percy says is, “what in the fuck,” but he’s holding the box and his fingers are shaking.
so annabeth explains that she’d bought the ring a year ago. she got caught up in trying to make everything perfect, but the thing is that they’re not perfect, they never will be, and love is about loving someone for all the things that make them imperfect. and she loves him, and they don’t need to be married to know that, but she really would like everyone else to know that. she wants to be able to call him her husband, she wants people to know that they’re a team. and then she says the waves aren’t because he’s a son of poseidon, either - they’re because he always told her the image he had of her in the styx, she was pulling him out of the water. and she’s always there to do that. it’s a really romantic speech. it is a once-in-a-lifetime speech, because annabeth has given up on making it perfect, she’s resigned herself to the fact that she’ll cry during it and her voice will crack and the world will keep turning anyway.
the very romantic thing percy says is, “holy fuck,” and annabeth starts getting nervous, but then he picks up the ring and slides it on his finger and asks, “how did you even know my ring size,” which is pretty much a yes in her book. and then annabeth admits that he sleeps like the dead and that she got one of those ring measurement things, and she did it while he was asleep, and then immediately tossed the measurement think. to which percy romantically responds, “what the actual fuck.” and then because it’s a romance, he pulls her in and kisses her and that’s annabeth’s fuck yes, i’ll marry you, and when they break apart he’s finally crying, too. gratifying. annabeth really hates it when she’s the only one who cries.
it’s all fun and games until they walk back up to the cabin and have cell service and percy has 50 messages from the loose group of motherfuckers he and annabeth call friends, and percy’s about to say, “i, uh, have to go, uh, take a phone call,” because he’s a little embarrassed to admit he thought annabeth was breaking up with him. but thalia beats him to the punch, because she calls annabeth, and percy’s just staring at annabeth listening to this call in abject fear, because he literally just had the best emotional 180 of his life, and he’s not ready for another one in a significantly worse direction. his brain’s a little mush, okay? he’s feeling a little raw. he’s going through a lot. if his knee-jerk assumption is that annabeth is going to break up with him after learning that’s what he thought was going to happen, come on, give him a break, he needs a minute. eventually annabeth - after not saying anything in response - hangs up, and turns to percy like, “you thought what?”
it’s a good weekend vacation. it is too bad that they turned their phones off, so everyone else they know was just thrown into chaos, thinking the absolute worst until grover gets a call from percy on percy’s monday morning run and percy’s like, “so we’re getting married,” and grover’s a peaceful guy? he loves his friends. he’s happy for them.
but he is going to kill them in their sleep.
