Riordanverse Flash Fic Fridays

Annabeth hated Texas. She didn’t know why her dad had dragged her away from Virginia to live here of all places. Then again, she also didn’t know why he stayed married to her step-mother, even after she had begged him with tears in her eyes to let it just be the two of them again. Maybe she wasn’t allowed to know any of the things that actually mattered to her.

What she did know was that there was a library in town at the corner of Government and Bay Avenue. It was too far for her to walk there from her house or school, and considering she was fifteen and carless, she couldn’t exactly drive herself, but that was fine. There was a bus stop in front of the library and at the end of her street, and her dad didn’t ask enough questions to notice that her allowance was being spent mostly on bus fare, he was too busy driving her brothers to soccer practice. 

The library itself was nothing too terribly special. It was one of the oldest buildings in the city – which wasn’t saying much, seeing as the city was founded in the mid-1800’s, but it was designed to look much older and grander than it was. It had massive columns inside and out, marble floors polished to a shine, big open cathedral-like ceilings, and massive floor to ceiling windows that let in every last summer sunbeam from dawn until the sun sank back down beneath the waves. It wasn’t special, objectively speaking, but Annabeth had always been a terribly subjective girl. 

More importantly, and far more embarrassingly, the library had the one and only Leo Valdez. He was a year younger than her (he called her a cougar when he found out and she most certainly did not get even a little flustered, but she did sock him in the arm) almost a head shorter, he laughed too loud at his own stupid jokes, and he somehow spent even more time at the library than she did, which she had never said about anyone she’d ever known before. He was always, always moving in some way or another, whether it was tapping his fingers on the table, fidgeting with some little project he fished out of his cargo shorts, or actually bouncing or pacing around their table. Annabeth expected to get irritated with him, she hated being distracted when she was trying to work, but she never did. Leo Valdez was pretty much everything she hated in a study partner, but she never hated him, and she knew exactly why.

He listened. 

No matter how distracted Leo got with words on a page or with sitting still, he never made her feel like he was ignoring her. Every time she opened her mouth to speak, his gaze zeroed in on her face and his expression sharpened into something almost serious. Sometimes when she was done speaking, he’d make a joke about the thing she just said (sometimes they were even funny) but most of the time he’d just think about her words, carefully parse through them, and give her a brilliant answer. Because Leo Valdez was a genius. None of his teachers seemed to notice, nobody seemed to notice, but Annabeth did. She saw right through every last one of his deflections to the actual source of that wit.

She’d asked him one time why none of the teachers realized he was as smart as he was, and he just shrugged. Cognitive dissonance, he dismissed. It was easier to just assume that the class clown was exactly as smart as he looked and any test scores saying otherwise were a fluke and/or proof of cheating. Annabeth, who had dealt with her fair share of teachers taking one look at her and deciding they didn’t need to ask any more questions, felt the injustice burning in her chest, even if Leo seemed to just let it roll off of his back without effort. Annabeth didn’t buy it, but Leo refused to offer anything else. They were at a stalemate, it seemed, and all she could really do was make sure he knew she expected more from him than anyone in the world.

Maybe that’s why she didn’t deck him when he just screwed his face up, got up on his tip toes, and kissed her one Saturday evening when they’d stayed at the library together from its opening minutes until the librarians kicked them out. 

Dating Leo, if she could even call it that, wasn’t all that different from being friends with him, honestly. She got to sit in the chair right next to him instead of across the table, and he’d play with the fingers of her free hand when she was studying, and sometimes they’d both get distracted kissing each other in the fiction section, but other than that, it was all the same. He was still her best friend, and they spent every spare moment together, hidden in the sanctuary of the Government Branch Library.

Then one afternoon Leo asked her a question that changed the track of their relationship. “So, it feels kind stupid to ask after knowing you for, like, eight months, but why do you spend so much time here? I know you’re not studying for school.”

Annabeth brightened immediately. “I’m studying to get into Olympus University.”

Leo’s eyebrows shot up, and he let out a low whistle. “Shooting for the moon, I see. Olympus is that fancy school up in New York, right?”

She nodded. “They have the best architecture and engineering departments in the country. My mom – my real mom, not my step-mom – is a professor there. I’m applying under my dad’s name so nobody knows we’re related, though.”

“Annabeth Chase never takes the easy path out of anything,” he grinned. “So, what’s your mom like?” The air suddenly went very still, and Leo’s expression fell. “Annabeth?”

“I don’t know my mom,” she confessed quietly. Leo squeezed her fingers, and she didn’t know when he’d managed to grab her hand but that tiny gesture made her heart clench. “She gave me up to my dad as soon as I was born, and she hasn’t been around since. My dad told me all about her, though, and I’ve always wanted to meet her. I feel like getting a full-ride academic scholarship to her school is pretty solid as far as first impressions go.”

Leo didn’t joke, which was how Annabeth knew he was listening, and after a moment he finally spoke, “You shouldn’t have to earn your own mom’s attention.”

Annabeth felt the world around her freeze in place, then tilt violently. Neither of them spoke for a very long time until Leo broke the silence with some asinine comment about something Annabeth forgot immediately afterwards but still laughed at. After that, their afternoon went just like it normally did. Annabeth studied, Leo joked, and they stayed side by side the entire time. This time, though, Annabeth held his hand all afternoon.

When the sun was finally setting and the librarians were making their rounds, she pulled him to a stop on the stairs, making sure he was on the step above her. Then she cupped his cheeks in both of her hands and kissed him. Just like he did every time they kissed, Leo’s breath caught in the back of his throat and his hands fluttered around, looking for their assigned place, until they landed on her own cheeks. His hands were warm, like they always were, but his cheeks were warmer still. He smiled against her mouth and she pressed as much affection and gratitude into her kiss as she could. 

Thank you for being here every day.

Thank you for every last one of your ridiculous jokes.

Thank you for asking questions no one’s bothered to ask.

Thank you for looking at the answers no one’s willing to look at.

Thank you for listening to me.

Thank you for actually hearing.

Thank you for seeing more of me than anyone else ever has and deciding you like every bit.

Will knew how getting sick worked. He was a– well, he wasn’t a doctor, exactly, but he was the closest damn thing Camp Half-Blood had to one. He’d been in the Infirmary healing people since he was a whopping twelve years old, and in order to be a healer, you had to know what made people hurt in the first place. He knew that the best cure for the common crud was not getting it in the first place, and the best way to do that was with a good diet, plenty of water, and at least seven hours of sleep a night. 

Unfortunately, Will’s days usually consisted of four pots of coffee, cat naps whenever he found fifteen minutes to sit still, and a peanut butter sandwich, if he was lucky. He was rarely lucky. 

So, it was no surprise when Will woke up in his bunk after about four hours of fitful sleep with his head throbbing, his muscles stiff, his throat scratchy, and a spectre of death looming over him. Still, the Infirmary wouldn’t run itself, demigods would keep trying to kill themselves, and Will would keep patching them up so they could haplessly wander in front of another round of archery practice or fall off a pegasus or trip face-first down a ravine or pick a fight with an acid-spitting monster or half-drown themselves trying to kiss an Nereid or– Well, there were a lot of things that could go wrong at a training camp for child soldiers souped up on divinity and new ones were being discovered each and every day, much to Will’s chagrin. So, with a groan that sounded more like stone being rubbed against stone than he cared to admit, Will swung his legs over the edge of the bed and forced himself to face the day. 

Kayla and Austin both tried to argue him out of working that day. Kayla said that he’d get other people sick, and Austin claimed that he looked like he was one heavy breath from just falling out right in front of them, but Will just flipped them off, ignoring the way his vision was getting fuzzy at the edges, and got back to work. He did his best to ignore them, but in his current state, he could only tolerate their concerned glances and shared whispers for so long before he snapped.

“Do the two of you have something you’d like to share with the class?” he asked sharply after Kayla did an interpretive dance with just her eyebrows and Austin nodded solemnly back at her.

Kayla glanced between him and Austin a couple times before she cleared her throat. “Well, we’ve tried telling you to take the day off nicely, but you wouldn’t listen to us, so we, uh…”

“You, uh… what?”

“You can’t be mad at her,” Austin said sternly. “It was my idea.”

“What was your idea?”

“We tattled on you,” Kayla said, jutting her chin out defiantly. “And we’re not sorry.”

Will looked between them both before scoffing incredulously. “Is that supposed to scare me? I’m head camper, and Mr. D and Chiron have given me full jurisdiction of the Infirmary. What, did you tell dad? Hate to break it to you, but he’s got some really bad time-management skills. He’ll be down here in six minutes to six years. So, just who did you tattle to, exactly?”

“Uh, that would be me.”

Will whirled around to see his boyfriend filling the entire doorway, looking every inch the Roman superhuman he was. Will’s eyebrows knit. “What are you doing here?”

“Kayla said you needed a day off and refused to take one,” Jason explained. “I’m here to make you take it.”

“Yeah, all right, Hercules, let’s see you try it,” Will snorted, turning his back on Jason to focus on his work. 

Turning his back was a very foolish decision.

The thing that Will had forgotten in his nearly delirious state was that Jason was a very physical guy. If he saw a problem that he felt needed to be fixed, he’d use his whole body to fix it without a second’s hesitation. At that moment, Will was a problem Jason felt needed fixing, boyfriend status be damned, so Will was hoisted up, and flung over Jason’s shoulder without a shred of remorse.

“Jason Grace! Put me down this instant!”

“Are you going to come with me voluntarily?”

“No!”

“Then no.” Jason shrugged, which Will felt because he was being handled like a god damn sack of flour, then turned to face Kayla and Austin, who were grinning like the traitors they were. “Bye, guys. I’ll see if I can get him to nap.”

“I’m putting you two on KP for a month,” Will growled, but it did little to curb their amusement.

The trek through Camp was, quite frankly, the most humiliating thing Will had experienced up to that point in his life. Jason had no problem tossing Leo and Piper around – the freaks even seemed to enjoy it – but that was because they were short. Will, standing at a proud six foot, was at least seven inches taller than them both. Unfortunately, Will was also lanky everywhere but his shoulders and biceps, which made him a  prime slinging victim. Apparently.

“I hate you,” Will seethed as Jason casually tossed him on one of the Zeus cabin beds. Much to his dismay, his body immediately betrayed him and all but melted into the cloud-soft mattress. “You’re literally the worst person ever.”

Jason ignored him and just climbed in the bed, flopping his entire body on Will like a dog napping on the rug. There was a concerned crease between his eyebrows and a frown on his lips as he brushed his thumb over Will’s cheek. “You’re almost as hot as Leo.”

“Jason, I’m your boyfriend,” Will drawled, trying not to press into Jason hand like a cat. “I don’t know how things are done on the Roman side of the river, but Greeks typically don’t tell their boyfriends they’re only almost as hot as another guy.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Jason said softly. “You really are sick, aren’t you?”

Will wanted to insist that he wasn’t sick, just stressed out and tired, but Jason’s big blue eyes held him in place and stripped his defenses down to nothing. “It’s not that bad.”

“But it is some bad.” Will didn’t correct him, so Jason just nodded his own confirmation. He leaned in for a kiss, and without thinking Will’s hand came up and shoved him away. Jason looked like a kicked puppy. “What was that for?”

“I’m sick,” Will snapped, and that was the first and only time he’d actually admit it. “I’m not going to let you get yourself sick, too.”

“I have a really good immune system.”

Will narrowed his eyes. “Sorry, but the only person whose immune system I trust is Leo’s, and he’s hotter than you.”

“I said that’s not what I meant!”

“I know exactly what you meant, and I know what I mean,” Will said, arching his eyebrows. “Leo’s resting body temperature is high enough to kill pathogens, so his is the only immune system I trust. He’s constantly running a fever.”

“Oh.” Jason looked very sulky and watched Will with those big eyes of his. “So no kissing.”

“Absolutely no lip-on-lip action.”

Jason’s brows knit for a moment before he suddenly brightened. “Okay then.”

Before Will could even think to question it, Jason once again used his body to solve a problem. He placed his massive hand over the bottom half of Will’s face, then pressed a long, happy kiss to the back of his own hand. When he was done, Will was left laying there shock still, blinking. “What the hell was that?”

“Kissing with absolutely no lip-on-lip action,” Jason said cheerfully. “Will that work?”

There was no universe where that would actually work, but Will was too busy being a dumb, stupid teenager in dumb, stupid teenager love, so he just breathlessly nodded. “Uh-huh.” Jason smiled like he’d solved world peace and kissed him again.

———

Thalia woke up thoroughly disoriented. This was, at least in parts, due to the fact that she had no memory of falling asleep. She tried to make sense of her hazy surroundings and hazier recollection of past events. 

The last thing she vividly remembered was their final standoff with the Teumessian Fox, assisting Laelaps in catching his ancient foe. She remembered Piper moving towards the beasts—fearless despite the fact that she did not even have Artemis’ blessing to protect her, wielding nothing but the power of her words.

It hadn’t been enough. They’d needed a distraction. 

Thalia could do distractions. 

She had arrows and lightning bolts and her shield Aegis, and she’d wielded them all without hesitation. The monster hadn’t been thrilled, immediately retaliating with claws and teeth.

She remembered the pain, dulled as it had been by the layers of her armor and the rush of adrenaline. She remembered thinking that it didn’t matter if she was hurt, so long as the distraction had been enough. 

And it had been. It had been enough for Piper’s voice to do the rest. To remind the beast how it had missed its ancient foe and their endless chase across the stars. This world was too small to contain them. But the universe was vast, and it was theirs to return to. 

And so they had. The fox never meant to be caught had turned to glittering dust, a streak of gold moving through the night sky to take back its rightful place among the constellations. Laelaps had followed soon after, welcoming a final affectionate petting from Reyna before it had chased after the Teumessian Fox.

Thalia had still barely felt the pain at the time. She’d been too preoccupied making sure the other hunters were unharmed, especially since she’d lost track of Iphigenia during the fight.

Despite the immediate danger being over, the adrenaline had kept her on her feet a while longer after that. The chase had gone on for months, and after so much time spent barely able to mitigate the destruction the Teumessian Fox had caused, her body took a while to process the fact that the danger was well and truly dealt with.

But then the memories grew hazy around the edges. They were snippets, like a film reel that had been exposed to too much light, half the sections faded beyond recognition.

Thalia remembered traveling, but couldn’t remember where they’d traveled. She remembered the warm, slick feel of blood against her fingers. She remembered sitting against a wall, breathing growing increasingly harder. There was only inky blackness afterwards.

There was no more darkness now. She blinked hard, struggling to get her eyes to adjust to the harsh light of the room she was in.

“You’re awake.” Thalia spent several seconds trying and failing to place the voice. “Thank the gods, Lia. For a second, I thought…”

A hand slipped into hers, cold fingers squeezing hers.

Thalia didn’t need to recognize the voice, then. There was only one person in the world who called her Lia. 

It was the first word her little brother had ever spoken. Despite his best efforts, that had been the only part of her name he’d been able to pronounce at the time. Even through all of their devastating losses of each other, it had stuck.

“Jay?” Her voice came out brittle.

“You’re going to be okay,” Jason said gently. “You lost a lot of blood, but once we got you to the infirmary, it was nothing a little nectar and a blood transfusion couldn’t fix.”

But Thalia wasn’t okay. None of this was okay.

The wrongness of it all settled deep in her bones as her brother spoke. She could tell his smile was strained, but he spoke with this strange calm, as if to soothe her. Her little brother was trying to comfort her.

She hated this. Hated that he felt the need to comfort her when, as the older sibling, the comforting should have been her job. Hated that she had not recognized him by his voice. Hated that she should have known it immediately, but did not. Hated knowing that, had it been Annabeth, she would have known her, no matter how dizzy and disoriented she felt.

The thought of letting herself love Annabeth like a sister had felt like a betrayal of Jason’s memory in the early days. She had failed one little sibling, and there she’d been, opening her heart to another. Teaching her to fight and survive when she hadn’t been able to save the first person whose life had ever depended on her. Dark hair intricately braided between her fingers when Jason’s had never had the chance to grow past his shoulders. Listening to her stories and seeing her be foolish and brave and fierce in ways Jason had never gotten to be. It had been a kindness and a cruelty, to know Annabeth—this little sister she had not looked for but had found regardless—in a way she’d never known her brother.

But then Thalia had died, and miraculously, both of her siblings had lived. And sometime in her absence, both Jason and Annabeth had outgrown her. Her little sister had grown accustomed to no longer needing her, and Thalia wasn’t even sure her little brother remembered ever needing her at all. 

Jason’s hand squeezed hers a little tighter. Thalia remembered what his tiny hand had felt like in hers, back when she’d been nine and Jason had been two. She had clung to the memory in its stead once she no longer had that hand to take in hers. But this hand was no longer the same she’d held as a child. His hand was larger than hers now, and it didn’t have the same fragile softness she remembered. It was strong from years of wielding weapons, and scarred from fights Thalia had not been privy to. 

It wasn’t just that she hadn’t recognized his voice in an instant the way any halfway decent older sister should. There was so much about Jason that she didn’t know. Thalia had grieved her brother twice, but she hadn’t truly known him even once.

She didn’t know where to even start with that. Didn’t know how to be an older sister outside of trying her best to protect her younger siblings—a job that she couldn’t help but feel like she had failed at miserably.

She didn’t know how to say any of that. She tried to will the water out of her eyes, to will her voice to steady. “How long was I out?”

“It’s Monday, almost three pm. You were out for a full day,” Jason said softly, his big hand trembling in hers.

“You have lacrosse training on Monday afternoons,” Thalia realized, alarmed.

Jason blinked owlishly at her. “I- what?”

“You love lacrosse,” she said softly. “You should be at training.”

“Lia, forget about lacrosse for a second, you could have died!” Jason snapped, staring at her with a distraught expression. “Lacrosse will still be there for me next week, but I… I had to be sure you would be, too, okay?”

“Jay…”

She was startled when she realized he was crying. 

She’d barely known her little brother—that tiny, vulnerable bundle full of warm, fussy baby that had been pressed into her arms at seven years old and that she’d sworn to herself to never let go—any other way. He’d had a strong pair of lungs and voiced his upset loudly, even when Thalia desperately tried to shush him so he wouldn’t wake their easily upset mother. His cries had grown softer as a toddler, once he’d started to understand and fear what would happen if their mom got mad, but he’d still spent so much time clinging to her, tears muffled against her nightgown.

She hadn’t ever seen this Jason cry. He’d had to be a strong leader at Camp Jupiter for so long that a part of her had feared he’d utterly unlearned how. But here he was, crying over her, of all things.

“I can’t lose you,” Jason said with a quiet, trembling voice. “Not again.”

Thalia say up slowly, ignoring the way her injured side protested. It felt more like a giant bruise than anything now—not life-threatening, just a serious pain in the ass—but even if it had been worse than that, she didn’t think she would have cared. Her little brother was crying, and the only thing she wanted was to pull him close and hold him and tell him everything would be okay until at least one of them believed it.

Jason looked hesitantly at her bandages, but she held up her arms, and he collapsed into her. He was much too big to cry into her chest now, but he sobbed fiercely into her shoulder, and he still fit into her arms all the same. 

“I’m right here,” she told him, and she was fifteen and twenty and nine years old, all at the same time. Her voice wasn’t steady now. She could feel the way her eyes were watering, a few stray tears dripping down into Jason’s hair and she gently pressed a kiss to the top of his head, the way she hadn’t since he’d been a toddler. “I’m not going anywhere. I promise.”

They both knew she couldn’t actually promise that, but Jason didn’t protest. He accepted her gentle reassurances with the same ease he had as a child—and even then, he’d known some of them were untrue. The fact of the matter was that things weren’t magically going to be okay just because your big sister told you they would be—but his willingness to believe her had always made the impossible things she promised seem slightly more possible.

They’d both gone places before where the other couldn’t follow. They had no illusions about what the reality of their lives looked like—couldn’t have, after everything that had happened to them. 

But they had each other back, at least for a little while. 

The best they could do was make it count.

“I think I should stay here a few days to properly recover before rejoining the Hunters,” Thalia decided, almost surprised at the ease with which the words left her mouth. The fox was dealt with. She could leave the world for other people to save—at least for a little while.

Jason immediately perked up. “I have a game on Friday, if you want to come watch,” he said softly, slightly muffled by her shoulder. “Only if you’re feeling well enough, though.”

“Stop trying to parent me. You may look older than me now, but I’m still the older sibling here,” she said, a smile spreading across her face. She squeezed his shoulders as tightly as her bruised body would allow. “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

———

Notes:

-This is my first ever Thalia POV, which is a little scary! I do also realize that it’s kind of evil of me to write this instead of the Thalia and Jason hug I promise you of them reuniting post Leo’s little Orpheus maneuver, but this one fits well into my usual formula of getting a tough character into a situation where she’s forced to be a little vulnerable, so it felt like a less intimidating approach for my first proper Thalia focused fic!

-It also very nicely fit one of this week’s Riordanverse Flash Fic prompts, which I love!

-You will still be getting the other fic, I promise, but we’ll have to see when I get around to it!

Jason was in trouble. He was in big, big trouble. The biggest trouble he’d ever been in in the whole ten years of his life.

He was not supposed to be on this quest. Camp Jupiter had rules, and one of those rules was that you had to be 13 before you were allowed to go on quests, but he was special. He was the son of Jupiter, and that meant he got more responsibility than everyone else his age because he was going to be a leader one day. So, Alexios had begrudgingly agreed to let him be the third member of their questing party, and Luciana had told him specifically that he was not to go wandering off on his own because she refused to be responsible for the death of the King of Olympus’s son. 

Honestly, Jason had done a really good job on the quest. He’d stuck by Luciana’s side, fought monsters, and followed all of Alexios’s orders without fail. He’d even gotten a crooked grin and a “Good job, kid,” while the older boy ruffled his hair. Their quest was pretty much done, they were just waiting around in a cheap motel while Alexios finished writing his mission brief and Luciana slept off over-using her powers. They’d be in the black SUVs headed back home in less than an hour, and Jason decided that he’d do something nice for his quest mates and go get snacks for the trip home. 

And that was why Jason was in trouble.

He hadn’t planned on running into the Cyclopes, especially considering that he’d left his sword in the motel room, but the voice had sounded just like Luciana telling him that he needed to get to her right then, and he’d followed the order without question. That had resulted in Jason being cornered in a dead end as a Cyclopes bore down on him with a nasty grin. “My my,” he said in Alexios’s voice. “What a yummy little demi–”

The Cyclopes was interrupted by a tennis shoe bouncing off the back of his head, and Jason and the Cyclopes both looked to see a very small boy standing there, looking furious and only wearing one shoe. “You leave him alone!”

“Why you little–” the Cyclopes charged, but the boy darted away, leading the monster away from Jason. 

Jason just stood there for a moment, blinking in shock for a moment while he tried to register what just happened. Before he could though, the little boy was back, grabbing his shoe with one hand and Jason in the other. “Come on! We gotta scram before that bozo comes back!” he ordered with bright, manic eyes.

Still blinking away his shock, Jason just let himself be led through the twisting roads of Houston until the boy ducked between a pair of dumpsters and uncovered a little alcove. He was panting, but he was also grinning like he’d just won something. “Okay, I think we’re safe here.”

Jason probably should have thanked the boy for saving his life, but instead he just frowned. “Who are you?”

“I’m L–” the boy stumbled over the word before recovering. “Emil. You can call me Emil.”

Jason’s ears pricked, and he heard the half-truth, just like Lupa had taught him. That was fine. He could fib, too. “Okay. I’m Michael. Did you see anything weird about that guy?”

Emil paused for a moment, assessing before he shrugged. “Does there have to be something weird? He was a big guy picking on a smaller kid, and that’s not fair. You’re, what? Twelve?”

“Ten.”

Emil brightened considerably. “Me too!”

Jason cocked his head to the side. “Really? I thought you were eight.”

Emil scowled at him. “Next time I’m letting bad guys eat you.”

Jason ignored that, figuring that there probably wouldn’t be very many more chances for Emil to feed him to monsters. “What are you doing out here?”

“Same as you, I guess,” Emil said with a shrug. “It’s summertime, so there’s no school, and my foster mom doesn’t let me in until sundown. She doesn’t really care where I go before then.”

Jason frowned. That didn’t sound right, but he didn’t really know enough about mortal childhoods to dispute it. “Uh, yeah. Me, too. I guess.” He frowned at Emil, thinking about how he’d seemingly recognized the Cyclopes and how he’d run even faster than some of the Mercury kids at Camp. “Do you know who your mom and dad are?”

Emil puckered his face and looked away. “My mom and dad are dead.”

Jason immediately shrank in on himself, feeling very bad and more than a little dumb. “Sorry.”

“It’s whatever,” Leo muttered. “You didn’t know.”

That was true, Jason didn’t know. What he did know was that this boy saved him, and he refused to just leave him behind. “Do you like your foster mom?”

Emil looked very suspicious. “Theresa’s fine.”

“Would you like to come live with me instead?” Jason offered. “I live in a camp for special kids. I think you’d fit in really well. Plus I’d like to have a friend.”

Emil’s eyes went wide before he glanced back and forth like he was looking for a trap. Then he said in a small, shy voice, “I’d like to be your friend, too.”

“Great!” Jason beamed. He offered Emil his hand this time. “Come on. If you’ll take me back to the motel, we can go together.” Emil nodded, took his hand and led him back to the motel Jason described. Right as they rounded the corner, Jason grinned because he saw Luciana standing at the door, looking frantic. “Okay, wait right here! I’ll be right back!”

Jason ran up to Luciana, who whirled around and grabbed him, shaking him a bit. “There you are! You had me worried sick!”

“Sorry!” Jason said through laughter. She put him down, and he looked up at her with wide eyes. “Luciana, I made a friend. He saved me from a Cyclops and I told him he could live at Camp Jupiter. I think he’s a demigod. He’s waiting at the corner.”

Luciana’s eyes widened and she looked past Jason’s shoulder with a frown. “Who’s waiting?”

Jason whirled around, and was heartbroken to find that Emil was nowhere to be seen. “I– But I told him to wait. He said he’d be my friend.”

Luciana was quiet for a moment before she sighed. “I’m sorry, Jay. Maybe now just wasn’t the right time.”

Jason felt his eyes start to sting so he bit down hard on his lip. “Why not?”

“You know as well as I do that Lupa’s the one who brings in demigods to Camp,” she reminded him. “Maybe the Fates aren’t ready for the two of you to meet just yet.”

“Maybe,” Jason said morosely.

Luciana squeezed his fingers. “Come on. Al’s done with the report, so I was gonna buy some car snacks. You wanna come?”

“Okay,” he agreed softly, letting her lead him away, just like Emil had.

“Cheer up kid,” she smiled. “I bet you’ll see him again when the time’s right. Can you wait for that?”