The Path Of Glory (Annabeth Chase x Male Reader)

5. Down With The Flag!

The next day, Y/N followed Percy through the camp. He would not have imagined making a friend so fast, but that certainly was for the best. After breakfast, they went to the farm—or the Big House, as the other campers called it.

There, they found a girl with blond hair. She must have been the same age as Y/N and Percy and just an inch smaller than Y/N. With her deep tan and her curly blond hair, she looked like Californian girls on postcards, except the eyes—not that you could see eyes on a postcard. They were starling grey, like storm clouds; from her look, Y/N had the impression she was going to judo fight him. And she would win.

She looked at him from top to toe. "You suck your thumb while you sleep."

Y/N blinked. She had said it in such a normal tone, like talking about the weather, that he wasn't sure she really had said what he had heard. He turned to Percy. Why am I here, actually?

Percy repressed a smile and said, "Y/N, this is Annabeth. Her mother is Athena. Annabeth, this is Y/N."

"I know who he is," the so-called Annabeth said. "I was glued to take care of you two, remember? Don't worry, I had time to hear your names, and more than once, Percy."

"Er—yes, that's right," Percy said. "Anyway, I thought it would be nice if you helped him out as you do for me."

Annabeth looked at Y/N from head to feet again. "Okay," she said, shrugging her shoulders.

From then on, each morning, Annabeth gave Y/N and Percy lessons in Ancient Greek. The weirdest in it was talking about gods and goddesses in the present tense. But at least, speaking ancient Greek wasn't any harder than English. Apparently, it was because his brain was hardwired for it—so Annabeth said.

The rest of the day, Y/N would rotate through the outdoor activities, looking for something he would be good at. Chiron tried to teach him archery, and he wasn't that bad, but clearly not gifted for it. Same for foot racing; he wasn't bad, but wood nymphs left him behind each time.

He had a little more success in wrestling. It was there he met the Clarisse Percy had mentioned the other day.

"Oh, another punk!" she said when she saw Y/N coming next to Percy.

Surely she had thought it would be easy to run over him, but he was pretty proud to have given her a hard time. After wrestling with a giant two-headed serpent, a bully didn't seem like a big challenge.

Y/N could see the senior campers and counselors watching him, trying to decide who his godly parent was, but they weren't having an easy time on it. He wasn't as strong as the Ares kids, or as good at archery as the Apollo kids. He didn't have Hephaestus's skill with metalwork nor Dionysus's way with vine plants—maybe that last was for the best. Luke told him he might be a child of Hermes, a kind of jack-of-all-trades, master of none. But Y/N got the feeling he was just trying to cheer him up. Nobody in the Hermes cabin looked like him. For that matter, nobody in the whole camp looked like him; he had seen no one dark-haired with a reddish tinge and blue-grey eyes.

Despite all that, Y/N liked the camp. He got used to the morning mist over the beach, the smell of hot strawberry fields in the afternoon, even the weird noises of monsters in the woods at night. He would eat dinner with Percy and cabin eleven, scrape part of his meal into the fire, and try to feel some kind of connection with whoever his parent was.

He felt like he had finally found his own family, not just mates as in Champlain. And he really had; he was more or less related by blood with everyone here.

Thursday afternoon, three days after he had woken up at Camp Half-Blood, he had his first sword-fighting lesson. Everybody from cabin eleven gathered in the big circular arena, where Luke would be the instructor.