Chapter 120 120
Annabeth's POV:
The house was exactly how I left it.
Which was stupid, obviously, because it hadn’t been so much time although it felt like a fucking eternity. But somehow I expected it to look different. Like all the things that had happened to me should've changed the walls or the furniture or the way the afternoon light came through the kitchen window.
But no. Same ugly brown couch Sarah refused to replace. Same stack of mail on the counter that I'd been meaning to sort. Same water stain on the ceiling above the stairs that the landlord kept promising to fix.
I stood in the middle of the living room and didn't know what to do with myself.
My phone was gone, lost somewhere during the attack at the cabin, so I went to the kitchen and picked up the landline. Sarah's cell number was written on a sticky note on the fridge, her handwriting all neat and careful, and my fingers shook when I dialed.
It rang three times.
"Hello?" Her voice was cautious.
"Aunt Sarah. It's me."
Silence. Then: "Annabeth? Oh my god, Annabeth, is that... are you... I mean, where ARE you, I've been calling and calling and your phone just went to voicemail and I didn't know if you were dead or—"
"I'm home." My voice cracked on the word. "I'm at the house. It's... it's over, Sarah. It's all over."
She started crying. Not the quiet kind, the loud kind, the kind where you can't breathe right and you're making sounds that aren't really words. I stood there holding the phone and listened to my aunt fall apart on the other end of the line.
"I thought I lost you," she finally managed. "I thought... you were in danger and I should stay away and then NOTHING, baby, nothing for days, I didn't know if you were alive—"
"I'm alive. I'm okay." I wiped my face with the back of my hand. When had I started crying? "Marcus, he... he saved me. They all did. The people who took me, they're gone now. The whole organization, it's destroyed. They can't hurt us anymore."
"The people who... what? Annabeth, what HAPPENED?"
I didn't know how to answer that. How do you explain getting kidnapped, getting strapped to a machine that drained your blood, transforming into a dragon for the first time in your life, watching your father burn an entire building to the ground? She knew the whole truth about us, but maybe what had happened was a little too much to explain it over the phone.
"I'll tell you everything," I said. "When you get home. But right now I just... I needed to hear your voice. I needed you to know I'm okay."
"I'm coming home. Right now. I'm leaving Helen's and I'm coming home, don't go anywhere, don't—"
"Aunt Sarah." I almost smiled. "I'm not going anywhere. I promise. Just... drive safe, okay? I'll be here."
She was still crying when she hung up. I put the phone back on the counter and stood there for a minute, looking at nothing.
The house was so quiet.
I walked upstairs to my room and found the box under my bed, the one with my mom's diary in it. I pulled it out and held it against my chest and then my legs just kind of gave out and I ended up sitting on the floor with my back against the bed.
And I cried.
Not the angry crying from the cell, not the desperate crying from when I thought Kaelen was dead. This was everything I hadn't let myself feel because there wasn't time, because I had to survive, because I had to keep moving and planning and fighting.
Now there was nothing left to fight. The Order was gone. The facility was a smoking crater in Kansas. My father, the one I'd spent my whole life not knowing, had walked through fire to save me. And Kaelen was alive and his parents were alive and somewhere across town his family was together for the first time in five years.
I cried until my throat hurt and my eyes were swollen and there was snot all over my sleeve because I didn't have tissues and didn't care enough to get up and find some.
The diary was still in my hands. Mom's handwriting, in that language I couldn't read, pages and pages of thoughts she'd never gotten to share with me. She'd loved a dragon. She'd carried me inside her body even though it was killing her. She'd died so I could live.
"I made it, Mom," I whispered to the empty room. "I don't know if you can hear me or if that's even how it works, but... I made it. And I found him: Dad. Or he found me, in fact. He's kind of terrible at feelings and he doesn't know how to talk to me, but he came for me. He burned down the whole fucking building to get me out."
I wiped my face again. The light through the window was getting orange, the sun going down, and I realized I'd been sitting on the floor for hours.
"I'm gonna be okay," I said, and this time it felt like a promise. To her, to myself, to whatever came next. "I'm gonna figure out how to be normal again. Or, not normal, I guess. I can turn into a dragon, that's never gonna be normal. But... okay. I'm gonna be okay."
I thought about Kaelen, probably sitting with his parents right now, trying to navigate the weirdness of having them back after being the one who raised his siblings. I thought about Marcus in whatever hole he'd crawled into, alone because he didn't know how to be anything else. They both had their own stuff to work through, their own healing to do.
But we'd do it. All of us. Together and separately and however we needed to.
I heard Aunt Sarah's car pull into the driveway. The engine cut off, a door slammed, and then footsteps running up the front walk.
I got up off the floor. Wiped my face one more time. Put my mom's diary on the bed and went downstairs.
When I opened the front door, my aunt crashed into me so hard I stumbled backward. She was crying again, or still, her arms wrapped around me tight enough to hurt, and I held onto her and let myself be held.
"I'm here," I said into her shoulder. "I'm home. It's over."
She didn't let go for a long time.
And that was okay. I didn't want her to.