This was written in response to the prompt "winter" provided by D.M. Evans for the Just One Word meme on LiveJournal.
"Ha!" I shouted as another of my Slushballs of Doom hit Annabeth square in the face.
Hey, don't look at me like that -- she'd started it, sneaking up behind me and shoving that icicle down my shirt. If I'd known that becoming the snowball-fighting champion of Camp Half-Blood was the equivalent of having Tyson engrave KICK ME in giant letters on the backplate of my armor, I would've stayed on the sidelines drinking hot chocolate with Chiron and Mr. D. (Okay, maybe not.) But now I had a reputation to maintain. Believe me, that reputation, the tripwire at my door, and the bucket of water beside the bed were the only things allowing me to get a decent night's sleep since I buried the Ares cabin with an avalanche. Not my idea of a relaxing winter break.
Annabeth ducked, scooped up a handful of powder, and heaved it at me. I didn't even have to dodge -- her face was half-covered with the remains of my slushball and she could barely see to aim. "Yoo-hoo!" I yodeled at her. "I'm over hee-ere."
"You'll regret that, Seaweed Brain!" she shouted, but as I reached down and goosed the snow at my feet with just enough of my power to make it projectile-ready, she turned tail and ran for the pine grove.
I jogged after her. She could drag the fight out, dodging around in there, but I'd knocked off her Yankees cap of invisibility with my first slushball, so she couldn't hide for long. She might have allies waiting to ambush me, but I thought of all the snow clinging to those big green branches and chuckled. I could take on three cabins' worth of campers with that much ammunition. "Just surrender, Wise Girl," I said. "Drop the snowflakes and nobody gets hurt."
"Never!" she answered, ducking behind one of the thicker trunks. Another scrabbled-together lump sailed defiantly through the air toward me. It would have looked a lot more defiant if it hadn't been coming apart the minute it left her fingertips. "Molōn labe!"
Tossing a slushball up and down in my hand, I grinned and moseyed into the grove. I'd fought Annabeth to a draw often enough that an absolute victory was something to savor. Don't get me wrong -- having a girlfriend who's brave and clever and does amazing things on a regular basis is awfully cool. It's easy to believe you're a hero when someone like that wants to hang out with you. On the other hand, the pressure to do something amazing yourself, just to keep up, can get pretty intense. You might find yourself rescuing capsized fishermen during a nor'easter or wrestling the giant clams in Long Island Sound-- or perfecting a Slushball of Doom and making yourself a walking target for a valley full of demigods. I know it's not the smartest way to cope, but even Einstein would have dropped a few IQ points dating Annabeth.
I stopped about six feet from her tree, close enough to nail her with a quick cast if she tried to jump me. She was hunkered down on the windward side, neck hunched into her shoulders. With her blonde hair plastered with slush, her cheeks flushed, and her lips pale, she looked pathetic. "Had enough?" I asked. Heroes are magnanimous to the defeated -- Chiron drills that into us from day one.
Unfortunately, Annabeth didn't consider herself defeated. "C-come on and f-find out," she snarled through chattering teeth. She raised her left fist, which was clenched around what couldn't have been more than a tablespoon of snow, and shook it at me.
I took another step forward, still juggling my slushball, because honestly, I'd seen more convincing displays of bravado from Grover. "You know," I said, doing a pretty good job of keeping the smugness out of my voice, "there's no shame in losing a fair fight to a true champion."
Annabeth's gray eyes blazed so brightly I was surprised steam didn't rise off her scalp. "Oh, really?" she asked, and the hand that wasn't menacing me with a chance of flurries plunged into the lumpy drift blanketing the tree's roots to yank something up -- a rope.
Did I mention that it was Annabeth who'd shown me how to set a tripwire?
The branches she'd drawn away from where I was standing whipped back and knocked me flat on my butt with the force of a million hairbrushes, coating me from head to toe with frigid powder for good measure. I felt like one of those little plastic figures in a snowglobe must when some overexcited five-year-old whacks it into a wall. I lost my grip on the slushball, of course -- I think I ended up lying on it -- and before I could get enough of my wind back to contemplate creating another, Annabeth was sitting on my chest, making breathing impossible for all kinds of reasons. "Who's the champion?" she asked sweetly.
I wheezed.
She shifted her weight off my lungs. "I didn't quite catch that," she said, turning her head to bring an ear in line with my mouth and sprinkling my numb cheeks with meltwater from her hair.
When I still didn't answer -- have you ever have the breath slugged out of you by a twenty-year-old pine? It takes more than a minute to be in a condition to do anything except wheeze -- she raised her left hand over my face and opened it. A tablespoon of snow fell from her fingers onto my nose. "Who's the snowball-fighting champion of Camp Half-Blood?" she asked again.
"You are," I admitted at last.
It's funny -- losing my reputation wasn't as humiliating as I'd thought it would be. Then again, none of my other challengers was as pretty as Annabeth, even dripping wet and shivering, and none of them would have given me a kiss to take the sting out of defeat, either. But true heroes are always magnanimous.
Author's Note: "Sphairochionomaché" is classical Greek for "snowball fight," of course. "Molōn labe" is the famously laconic response of the Spartans at Thermopylae to their Persian adversaries. When asked to lay down their arms, the Spartans replied, "Come and take them." They held their ground for three days against overwhelming force, defeated in the end by treachery. This phrase is engraved on the monument which memorializes the battle site today.