Chapter Text
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Annabeth Chase hated the kids sat right behind her.
She didn't want to learn their names - Rocky, Quinn and Trendy - but it was difficult to not do such when they're all that's been screamed around the plane for the fifteen minutes that had passed since takeoff. Their parents, besides lacking naming habilities, also had zero control over the three creatures they had generated, trying to tranquilize their offspring while playing pretending that everything was fine. Annabeth was in the match, trying as hard as possible to focus on the book she was reading, while her dad won the match by flawlessly checking his expensive watch and apparently important text messages on his phone, using his teacher experience as a shield aggainst whatever was happening in row 13.
- Why do these people keep flying if they can't even deal with their kids on land? - She bickered, closing Little Women as the words seemed to not reach her brain as fast as her eyes.
- Annabeth, please, they're gonna hear you - said her father, noticing her tone was louder than needed. - I know this isn't what you wanted, but you need to understand that some things escape from wants and become needs. You know how much an offer at the Camp Hero State Park means to me, and you loved Montauk as a kid, right?
- I truly don't, and I loved it, in the past tense.
Hearing her father's minute-long rant about "becoming bitter after the divorce, even though you clearly wanted it" was off limits for her, threatening another explosion within her soul, so she allowed herself to drift off for a bit. After the final rulling, she expected to live a stepfamily-free life somewhere calmer, far from her annoying stepmom and full of fun things to do, and her hometown was neither of those two aspects. The beaches were too full of tourists, specially that camp full of bunkers, the old dinner was, well, old, the people were too busy gossiping in the corridors than to focus on any change. Grover, who she had started talking again once moving day came closer and closer, confirmed that, saying that the only big morph those dynamics suffered was 1) when she left and 2) "another thing", not accompanied of explanation, leaving her to presume it was a news reporter coming to do the weather report.
At the same time she thought about the boy's name, a buzz came out of her backpack, problably outing her as the person who didn't have airplane mode turned on. As she pulled the smartphone out, the screen lit up again, displaying her childhood companion's name once again.
G: Hey, how much left for the flight?
A: We just took off, prob still and hour away
G: K, I'm gonna tell everyone here to sit down for a bit then. Have a safe flight!
Wait, "everyone" doesn't include a single person, right? The last thing Annabeth wanted was to become the gossip topic around town, but information probably still ran quick there, and becoming the headline before the first day of school was like replacing a target on her foreahed, knowing the shooter was impossible to be recognized or tracked due to time. Before any survival plan could ressurge from the gazillion ones she'd made the nights before, a foot hit the back of her seat, throwing a fit about not being able to play Steal a Brainrot on his tablet. Rocky, much like her stepsiblings, insisted on some italian nonsense not compatible with any definitions beside "bratty behavior", forcing the girl once again to slightly hiss as the thought of spending the whole flight being bothered by something besides her brain.
Faced with a dissaproving face of the man sat next to her, the teenager grabs her book, later left on her lap, in hopes of atleast boosting her page count along the torture happening on air. Louisa May Alcott had no tips on how to kill a seven year-old, but she did leave her head slightly higher than the cockpit, while her past ressurged through the clouds outside her window seat.