u-evangeline.livejournal.com

“I explained over a hundred times, Percy, I just can’t believe you still don’t understand!”

Annabeth exclaimed exasperated. She started teaching him with all the good will in the world, but now it was almost three hours later and they were still in the same problem. For the gods, how could he be so, so… obtuse?

“Hey, don’t yell at me, okay? I’m dyslexic, remember?”

“So am I!”

“You and all your siblings don’t count. Being a child of Athena gives you all immunity to the dyslexic problem of demigods.”

“Stop giving excuses. This is simple math, sweedbrain!”

“No it is not. It has letters on it.”

“Still, the whole process is basic arithmetic. How did you pass first grade being unable to add, subtract, multiplicate and divide?”

“I know how to do those things, what I don’t know is the value of o x!”

“Oh, gods, I just give up! My mother was right not to mingle with the likes of your father.”

“Hey, no need to start insulting my father, okay?”

She could see the hurt in his eyes, so she just took a deep breath and tried again.

“You have to isolate the x, okay? And to do that you have to pass the numbers to the other side of the equation, inverting their operation. If it was summing, now is subtracting, got it?”

He nodded, but there was a crease between his brows that told her he wasn’t understanding a thing. She was about to start crying.

“Percy, I don’t know what to do anymore. I explained it over a hundred times, rephrased my explanation thousands of times and you still don’t get it. There is nothing I can do anymore!”

Percy sighed.

“Okay. Okay. I just don’t get it.”

“Just put everything on the other side, Percy!”

And he tried, he really did, but he always forgot to change the operations, so his results were never right.

“I’m never getting into university, am I?”

“To your luck, yes you are, because the university of New Rome takes anyone with god’s blood, and you are the famous Hero of Olympus who saved everyone asses twice, so...”

He grinned. Although everything still seemed surreal. Did he really do all that stuff? It seemed like memories of someone else.

“One last monster to slay, Percy. Slay Math and you can have early vacations, okay?”

And that seemed to do the trick for him. Thinking of Math as a monster made his mind focus harder, and soon he had the value of x, a simple 13.2.

Annabeth rolled her eyes.

“You really have problems, sweedbrain.”

He grinned largely and gave a peck on the lips.