Percy Jackson Ship Weeks! Once again I'm posting early because I'll be out of town. Quick refresher of the schedule:

July 14-20- Thalia and Luke (story: Keeping it PG)

July 21-27- Beckendorf and Silena (I honnestly do try to call him Charles, I really do... anyways, the story for this is The Girl in the Attic)

July 28- August 3- Grover and Juniper

August 4-10- Chris and Clarisse

August 11-17 Tyson and Ella

August 18-24- Frank and Hazel

August 25-31- Leo and Hazel

September 1-7- Leo and Reyna

September 8-14- Jason and Reyna

September 15-21- Jason and Piper

September 22-28- Free Ship!

September 28- October 7- Percy and Annabeth

So I was going to go all out with this concept -keep it going until Grover and Juniper were both old, incorporate Annabeth in Percy's absence in a later scene... but that had the potential of giving me a chance to make it sad and that doesn't help out anyone. If Brevity is the soul of wit for Shakespeare, it's good enough for me.

Disclaimer: I don't own the world of Percy Jackson or its characters.

The Track of Time

"Why didn't the nymphs try to wake you?" I asked.

Grover shrugged. "Most nymphs aren't good with time. Two months for a tree- that's nothing. They probably didn't think anything was wrong."

-The Last Olympian, Chapter Seven My Math Teacher Gives Me a Lift, page 114

Juniper became suddenly and acutely aware of something.

She'd asked a child of Athena. A second was how long it took to blink. A minute was sixty seconds. An hour was sixty minutes. A day was twenty four hours. Seven days was a week.

You could blink sixty times a minute, 3600 times in an hour, 86400 times in a day, 604800 times in a week.

Time was slow and very, very organised.

"This never bothered you before," Annabeth said when she shared her concerns with one of the only demigods she could endure.

It was a big weight, so maybe it was a good thing that it'd never hit her before.

"I know," Juniper said. She held her elbows. "I guess I just realised… Grover hasn't been around camp in a while."

Annabeth smiled crookedly - an easy, simple and clean way of saying that she missed him too- and put an arm around her.

Blinking was a horrible unit of time.

So she started piling up rocks- one for every time the campers had breakfast; one rock a day, one rock for every 86400 blinks.

One, two, three, four, five…

Grover hadn't given any news in ten days.

Ten days, 240 hours, 14 400 minutes, 86 400 seconds...

She talked to Annabeth about her concerns, but the girl's face was already ashy.

She knew.

Thirty days was 720 hours.

That didn't represent how time actually felt- way slower and way more painful. Juniper couldn't stand looking at clocks or the watch that Annabeth wore because she couldn't help but feel like the hands were teasing her as they ticked round and round, slower than the seasons.

It pissed her off.

Also it hurt.

When she was worrying about Grover, time passed by even more slowly.

In one hour there were 3600 seconds. Wasn't a big enough number- 3600 was nothing. She could brush it off her shoulder anytime, but the worry was twisted inside her stomach so badly that she could barely move.

The numbers had to be bigger, harder to digest.

So.

In one second there were 1000 milliseconds.

In one millisecond there were 1000 microseconds.

In one microsecond there were 1000 nanoseconds.

So in short, there were 1000000000 nanoseconds in a second.

A minute was made up of 60000000000 nanoseconds.

An hour was made up of sixty minutes, ergo 3600000000000 nanoseconds.

In a day there were twenty four hours, which made 86,400,000,000,000 nanoseconds.

Juniper's eyes prickled.

That didn't mean anything. Humans -stupid, foolish, unpractical humans- had divided time with their fancy words full of Greek etymologies, but none of those divisions meant anything. They were all abstract nonsense that they'd all gotten used to nodding at. How long did a second feel? Nobody knew. How long did an hour feel like? Like a bunch of seconds- but then again, nobody knew what a second felt like. Besides, how was it fair that the second of someone kissing the love of their life for the last time felt the exact same as the second of someone who was holding the hand of the dying love of their life? It time flew when you had fun, why was it measured the same way as the kind of time who didn't fly?

No. Time, if you were going to measure it, should have meaning. A weight to it, so to speak.

Juniper was about ready to dig up her roots and go find Grover herself. She was sick with worry. She was sick of watching sunsets and sunrises. She was about to burst with impatience. How much time had passed since she'd last gotten news of Grover?

Oh right, thirty days.

0.985647 of a month.

4.28571 weeks.

720 hours.

43200 minutes.

That was all.

Well, if Juniper was going to pay attention to time and use the human words… the closest word they had was thirty eternities.

Grover came back.

He only held her for a second because the war was already brewing and he had to go back to the city to help Camp win.

The embrace, the sweet embrace, was over in a blink (one second, only 1000 miliseconds, 10 000 microseconds...)

But it felt like 1000 years.

"So it's over then?" Juniper asked. "These stupid wars?"

Grover nodded and put an arm around her waist. He kissed the crook of her neck. His hooves sunk in the sand, his hair glowed in the sunlight, and his eyes did all on their own.

"You and me forever now," he said

How many seconds were in a forever?

Juniper hoped a lot.