#dotshiiki

I WILL TALK ABOUT AFTER INTO THE SUN TBH my child

and god i’m still super proud of that whole passage even five years later, it really marks a Step Up in my writing in general and my fic writing in particular

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Whatever fears they have on that long fall down aren’t enough.  this is on of the really wonderful effects of listing. ‘long’ ‘fall’ ‘down’ - they’re all conveying the same thing, but when they’re all together like that it just emphasizes howwwww faaaaaaar they’re falling.Whatever expectations they’ve had are overwhelmed. Whatever hopes, prove hopeless. i used the rule of threes for these opening sentences - essentially for the same reason as the listing, to really hammer home that this is a mental fall as well as physical and they are not going to come out unscathed The single, solitary alliteration! there really is One Reason! reason they make it through is because of a stubborn, desperate determination to keep their hands locked together and to drag each other onward. a call back to ‘never again’. the whole thing with After as a story was that they were the only reason they survived, and as such they were capable of doing the worst damage to each other after

The worst thing about Tartarus, isn’t what happens to them inside it. Tartarus isn’t only a place; it’s a living, breathing, thinking thing, and it breaks off a piece of itself inside them even as they crawl out over the threshold. Tartarus is something that stays with you, becomes a part of you, long after you’ve passed through its doors. THIS IS MY FAVOURITE CONCEPT and i have replicated it across dozens of pjo fics over the years because i firmly believe it! this isn’t hell is other people, it’s hell is yourself; the damage that is done to you and the damage you do to other people. it’s ptsd as hell, it’s the idea that just because something is over in the literal, physical sense, that doesn’t mean you have escaped the repercussions.

in order for After to be a story about healing, it had to be first a story about damage.

They try. They give everything they have to each other after it’s all said and done, and then they scrounge around and give more. They’re the only ones that can calm the nightmares, but every time they look at each other, it’s a reminder or what happened, what they went through, what they’ll never, ever be able to escape. this is where we start to understand that damage. interestingly there was a narrative of ‘codependent is bad and these two are codependent’ floating around at the time, which i was not actually engaging with! Percy and Annabeth’s story here is about how you can’t rely on your partner to fix you, especially not went they are just as broken. they need each other desperately because they’re the only ones who understand, but at the same time their jagged edges are cutting each other, not soothing.

She’s the one who voices it. annabeth always takes charge, says the uncomfortable thing, and is more willing to leave percy than percy is willing to leave her. It’s late on a Wednesday night i like the juxtaposition of being extremely specific about the day here (because of course they remember), but then....not knowing the exact time lol., or maybe early Thursday morning, and they’re curled up on the floor of his cabin. Wrapped around each other. i did very much want to lead into this with the implication of sadness and exhaustion, and then hit you with the ugliness underneath it. It might have been a sweet scene, if heartbreaking, but there are scratches on his face from her fingernails and she wears bruises on her arms. There is no sweetness left here. They mistake each other for the monsters more often than they save each other. Just because they’re the only ones that can help, doesn’t mean that they don’t hurt more.

this is the thing that has bugged me over the years because there’s a lot of discourse about Abuse etc in this fandom, but....by and large people have missed in this story (or dismissed) the fact that Percy and Annabeth were hurting each other. Not just Angst, but literal physical hurting. i went there because i genuinely thing it would take something momentous to pry them apart, which is not to say that mental anguish ISN’T momentous, but that physical damage is more obvious and usually an Escalation. i wanted it established that percy and annabeth leaving each other in this universe was very much the necessary, and in fact Only choice they could make.

Every time I look at you, she says, I see the end of the world.

WHAT A GOOD FUCKING LINE i remember very clearly that this line is the distilled version of a number of conversations i had while RPing with @romanitas. this sounds sort of Dramatic and Metaphorical but it’s actually very literal - essentially that when Annabeth looks at Percy, she knows that he chose to jump into Tartarus with her rather than continue on with the quest/saving the world. At the time i wrote After I was very convinced that there would be some serious consequences for Percy saving Annabeth instead of the world which did not...eventuate in canon, but definitely did in the (somewhat ill-defined because who has time for that) world of After

And he has to let go of her, because clenching his fists and hating himself are more necessary than holding on.

this is just a pretty baldly stated sentence about what is happening. they can no longer support each other, they are too hurt and damaged to do it.

 I know.

this is percy giving up.

Annabeth leaves the next day, returns to her boarding school and forces herself to remember the definition of normal. Annabeth is just better at....locking everything up than Percy is. her way of coping (toi begin with) is by pretending that she han’t just ripped her own heart out. Percy stays at Camp, because he knows he can’t. and honestly, he’s not safe in the real world. like it’s not safe for other people to be around him. he is so violent and dangerous at this point, it probably took a straight year before he was in any kind of place to venture out into life again

It’s six months after they make it out that Tartarus wins anyway.

Rules: answer and tag 20 of your followers you want to get to know better

Nicknames: Jason/Son to my friends, my surname when I was in college

Gender: Male

Star sign: Virgo

Height: 170 cm

Time: 3:25PM

Birthday: September 20

Favourite bands/artists: Imagine Dragons, The Script

Song stuck in my head: Satisfied from the Hamilton soundtrack

Last movie I watched: Don’t Breathe

Last tv show I watched: Brooklyn Nine Nine ep 1

What do I post: Mostly Riordanverse stuff, Boku no Hero Academia, dogs, and some random reblogs that I find interesting, too.

Do I get asks: Never. I’m new here

URL meaning: My favorite character, shortened his first name to rhyme with his last name, 4 is my default number for usernames

Overcast: if you could, how would you change the world?

This might seem cliché and a lot, but I’d want to get rid of hatred, disrespect and greed. I feel like a lot of our current issues are due to hatred or dislike of others who are different, so eliminating that would be a step forward, and the same goes for disrespect, although that applies to our surroundings as well. Greed is something that I feel holds us as a society back a lot; big companies don’t want their market ruined or taken over by better products so they inhibit the growth of smaller companies.

This is my small fic for the @pjosecretsanta2k17 and I got @dotshiiki ! Merry Christmas! I hope you like it! I’d also like to thank @rosyredlipstick for betaying the fic and suggesting a great song!

I also made a small playlist to go along with it! 

Don’t Talk (Put Your Head On My Shouder) - The Beach Boys/ Somewhere Only We Know - Keane/ The About Time Theme - Nick Laird Clowes/ Silenced By The Night - Keane/ Long Live - Taylor Swift

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Annabeth liked to watch Percy sleep. They were in his cabin, and she’d woken up first. He was laying on his stomach, arm cascading down the bed and drool as ever present. She watched him and absentmindedly started memorizing every single detail of his face in that moment. She’d done the same at the stables back in the Argo II and even when they were in Rome, watching him talk through dinner. She’d only been able to catch half of what he’d said because she was so terrified that he’d vanish. She couldn’t afford to look away. And then Tartarus. He was dying and she kept looking back at Bob and Percy just looked so frail and small. They were only sixteen at the end of the day.

       She liked to look at him because she was so scared of blinking and finding that he was gone.

He’s here. We’re here. It didn’t feel real.

      Percy started to wake under her gaze. He stretched and quickly wiped the drool of his chin. Then he finally noticed her, staring intently at him, and paused. She looked almost frozen in her spot on the bed across from him. “Hey,” he said, “how long have you been awake?”

      Annabeth didn’t answer which made Percy worry. She was looking at him weird. He threw the blankets off him and walked towards her. “Hey,” he tried again. Sitting beside her, “You okay?” She nodded but didn’t look away. He smiled shyly in return because he wasn’t used to her staring at him like this. “What’s wrong?”

       She tried to tell him she was fine but she found that there was a knot in her throat. He’s here he’s here he’s here. Annabeth reached out to cup his face, to trace his dark eyebrows, ease the little crease in between them that formed when he worried. He’s here he’s here he’s here. He was so familiar. He was so new.

        When you miss someone you exhaust any memories you have of them. You revisit your favorite ones so much that, in time, the details become hazy. Annabeth liked to remember one particular moment in the beach, back when they were fourteen or maybe barely fifteen, during those months Percy had been missing. She would try to drown out the panicked voices in her head with his laughter. She remembered Grover had said something that had made them both laugh, but she didn’t remember what. She remembered that was the first time she’d noticed how much deeper his voice had gotten. She remembered how he’d said her name. She remembered because that was the first time that terrifying thought had first popped in her head: I love him.

When she finally got to see him again, he said her name different. It wasn’t bad, it just surprised her. All this time she’d been remembering the feeling instead of the actual sound of his voice, she’d made up the cadence of it because it had become a hazy detail. But it was still so familiar to her that she couldn’t imagine why she’d thought it sounded anything but the way it did in the first place.

“Annabeth?” She still couldn’t tell him, couldn’t explain, why this simple moment had floored her. He kept searching her face for any clue as to what was wrong. Nightmares? Panic attack? She didn’t know herself. Annabeth hadn’t taken her hand from his face, she pulled him closer. He was all around her, beneath her touch, against her forehead, pressed to her leg. He’s here he’s here he’s here.

He was right there, so why was she so scared?

Percy touched her hand, the one resting against his face. She could tell the intensity of her eyes had made him nervous. And she laughed. She saw his eyes widen in shock and confusion and laughed harder. Percy tried to rub the last of sleep out of his eyes, totally confused by what was happening “What the hell, Annabeth?” He grinned, a bit relieved, but when he looked closer he noticed she was crying.

Finally she said: “You’re here.”

“Yeah?”

Annabeth shook her head. “No, Percy,” she told him, “you are here.” Not in Rome or in Athens, or in Tartarus. He was home and he was going to live and she was there too.

His face softened. He seemed to finally understand. Percy pulled Annabeth into a hug and allowed himself to believe what she’d said. He held her tightly against him, probably too tight, but found that he couldn’t loosen his grip in case she slipped away. “I know. I missed you.”

“You didn’t even remember me, Seaweed Brain.”

“I did. How do you think I survived?”

She laughed because he was cheesy, as always, and he kissed her because he’d promised himself he’d never miss a chance to ever since that day in the lake. “I thought I’d made you up,” she confessed, pulling away just for a moment, “I thought I was crazy and that you weren’t real.”

“I’m real,” he promised, “are you?”

“Yes.”

It might’ve seemed foolish to anyone else, but they’d been in survival mode too long. The number one thought in their heads had been war and surviving and when it got too bad they reached for one another. There was no time for contemplation. Worst of all was the almost absolute certainty that they wouldn’t make it. Then all they could do was comfort and reach for the other when they ran out of bravery. Annabeth had convinced herself they would die in Tartarus, she’d even prepared her mind. She wasn’t thinking about his laughter then or the way he said her name. She was forcing the air in and out of her lungs and anticipating when she wouldn’t be able to anymore, and they were squeezing their hands in order to brace themselves for when the time came. To be brave enough to see him perish if it came to it, but comforted by the knowledge that she would soon follow. Together, that was enough to survive for just a little bit longer, as long as necessary but not more.

Percy pulled them back into his bed, no longer worried after understanding what her mind was doing. He let her look at him as he dozed off again. Annabeth noticed how he never let go of her, and how every now and then he’d squeeze her hand or run his fingers through her hair. His own way of making sure she was still there.

(cont'd from previous ask) I also love that you analyse the characters and dissect the series in a way that isn't solely focused on shipping. I quite agree that the relationships aren't a central theme of the movies or the tv show and that's one of the best things about it IMO. I like hiccstrid and all, but it's the friendships among all of them that really get me going! 

As for canon inconsistencies, I like your view on it and your ability to discuss all the great things while acknowledging thatinconsistencies exist, but it needn't take away from the experience of the story and the fun of being a fan. And yeah, I don't think I've ever watched a show or even read a book that didn't start having little inconsistencies pop up or WAIT HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE moments (and after trying to write chapterfics, you realise just how hard it is to keep everything straight sometimes!) 

I think it's way more interesting to put our imaginations to work figuring out how we COULD square the inconsistenciesand a lot of your analyses do that beautifully. So yes, very sorry for the crazy long four-ask box full comment (and I hope tumblr doesn't eat any of them randomly because that would be awkward) and I'm just going to say again I really love reading all you have to write about httyd because it's interesting AND you're so nice about it.

Oh my goodness, thank you so much for your nice words about my responses to prior asks on this topic, and thank you for bringing up your perspective about how to handle inconsistencies, as well. <3 You phrased it so nicely: it’s good to acknowledge inconsistencies exist in any story, while at the same time still enjoying the story as a fan. 

And I am 100% with you that it’s more fun to use our own imaginations as fans to unite the materials than to pick them apart. Frankly, I think it’s really fun to take all the information and try to synthesize it together through analyses, discussion, and positive fandom interaction!