#anst

You had seen Jason in almost every season of his life. Sure, you weren’t at Camp Jupiter when he had shown up, but at your age, who was? He made it all the way there from Lupa when he was two, when you were two, your mortal parent still had some idea of what to do with you.

You had witnessed legionnaire-Jason, the few years where he didn’t have any sort of authority at camp. But he was in your cohort, the fifth cohort. He was funnier back then. It was the same dry humor, deadpanning one-liners under his breath that no one could hear except for you. They weren’t meant for you, really; he was just talking to himself, and you were just close enough to hear him. 

He didn’t really fit into the Fifth Cohort. He was too reputable; he carried himself with the confidence of a centurion of the First Cohort as an eleven-year-old boy who was all leg with too-long arms, a nose that didn’t fit his face yet. It was like the Praetors could tell he would grow into it, like they could already see Jason go from a gangly preteen boy to an over six-foot-tall force of nature. He could fly, literally fly, and here he was in the Fifth Cohort with the others who didn’t have anyone to vouch for them, or just weren’t good enough to go anywhere else. And he certainly was good enough to go to other places; his dad was Jupiter, the namesake of this freaking camp. Jason could have gone anywhere, and yet he chose to be placed in the Fifth Cohort. 

That made people weary of him. But not you. Never you. 

He helped you before you even knew who he was. 

The first day that you got to camp, monsters chased you all the way across the city. Jason was one of the first faces that you saw. You remembered because he had that scar above his lip that made him look older than he was. And the way his hair was so blond that it lit up in the sun like it was a little halo around his head. 

Like some sad demigod version of an angel, you had thought.

Jason was the one who showed you where the infirmary was when you tripped up the stairs to your first Senate meeting. He was the one who showed you how to hold a sword that was too heavy for your untrained arms, how to hold it when it felt like your wrists were going to give out. 

Jason was the one who sat next to you when you didn’t have friends yet. He was the one who stood up and argued that you be taken off of your probatio status and made a full legionnaire.

You had watched when Jason was made centurion of the Fifth Cohort. 

You were the one that Jason ended up choosing to go on his quest to slay the Trojan Sea Monster. He didn’t want you to come with him at first, didn’t want to be the reason that you got hurt or died. So he didn’t want to take you with him; it took an entire week of you popping up unexpectedly behind him, proving that you didn’t have to be a kid of the big three to survive a quest. 

He trained you, of course. You went extra rounds with him, more hand-to-hand, more close-range, more long-range. Jason wasn’t going to let you go on a quest with him unprepared. 

The quest took longer than expected, and the two of you returned to Camp Jupiter with more wounds that would fade to scars than what Jason deemed as acceptable, but you guys did it. And, you were still alive. 

You guys stuck together after that. You were the one he chose to go on quests with him; he was the one that you could rely on to back a proposition to the Senate that you wanted to be taken seriously. 

When Jason was made Centurion of the Fifth Cohort, he was the one who would bail you out of trouble whenever you decided that one of the many rules of the Legion didn’t suit you. He was also the one who would then propose to change those rules. Because he was a Centurion, there were more things that you could get away with, because Jason was not going to sell you out to Dakota of all people, nor was he actually going to report you himself.

He didn’t report you when you snuck out of the barracks to climb all the way to the top of Jupiter’s temple (it was the tallest one) to look at the stars. In fact, he would join you, so if you got caught by someone, he could just say that the two of you were dealing with “Fifth Cohort business.”

Jason would fly up with his arms wrapped around your waist to haul you up with him because “the granite is slippery—can’t have you falling.” After the first few times, Jason started leaving a blanket up there, too. You guys would lie down next to each other and look at the stars, you guys would relax. You would point up at the stars and name the constellations, all the ones that were named after the myths that shaped your reality. With each name came Jason’s regurgitation of the myth. 

You were one of the people who lifted Jason on the shield that declared him Praetor to the rest of the camp. The life of a Praetor was practically guaranteed to Jason the minute that he made it to Camp Jupiter, even though he chose to be in the Fifth Cohort. But that didn’t mean it was easy for him.

He balanced it out the best he could, but there was something buried deep inside of Jason that didn’t let him take a break. He thought that the only thing that could measure how good a person he was or how worthy of anything he was was the number of things that he was able to get done in a twenty-four-hour period.

It wasn’t until the second month that he went three days without more than five hours of sleep that you intervened. It was a constant stream of excuses before then.

“Why would you think I’m stressed?” 

His eye was doing that twitching thing. 

“Do I really look that tired?” 

The bags under his eyes were monumental.

“I’ll come join you at the mess hall once I finish this stack of paperwork—save me a seat.”

He never stopped after just one more stack of paperwork, and he usually never made it to the mess hall. 

You were the one who would physically force him to take a break. After a two-week stint of barely enough sleep and certainly not enough food for a guy his size, you decided that it was your duty as his best friend to trick him into sleeping. 

All it took was you waltzing into the Praetor’s office with two mugs of tea and a sandwich for Jason to get him to look up from his desk piled high with papers and assorted pocket-sized weapons. 

“Oh gods, I think I’m in love with you,” had been his response. His eyes were half-lidded, glazed over, and, as always, had that sad look that made it feel like he belonged in an ASPCA commercial. Hearing him say it so genuinely, and to take the sandwich from you with shaky hands (Jason Grace’s hands never shook), felt like a punch in the gut. 

You convinced him to eat the sandwich first, “to let the tea cool,” and he did. You pulled up a chair next to him, sipping your own tea while he devoured that sandwich like he had never seen food before. 

And then he drank the tea. 

“Don’t sit in the chair like that, you’ll hurt your back,” you pretended to chide him to get him to stop sitting with one leg folded up underneath him, and you watched. Jason, being Jason, of course listened to you and sat in the chair with both feet firmly planted on the ground, murmuring half-thought-through musings about not knowing which sitting position was best for his lumbar spine. Then his eyes started to droop, and he began to yawn because, yeah, you had drugged his tea. Not with anything serious, but with just enough ambrosia that it would fix whatever dehydrated, malnourished, sleep-deprived mess Jason had turned into in the past two weeks. 

When he finally passed out, he face-planted into his piles of papers, not falling off his chair, thanks to you making him change how he was sitting. Then you and Dakota hauled Jason all the way from his desk chair to the couch that was probably too small for him. But you guys managed to get a pillow under his head and fold up his legs enough that they didn’t hang off the edge. He slept for eleven hours, the entire time you stayed to watch him from his desk chair. 

That’s how the two of you would operate for a while. Overworking himself while you tricked him into resting or taking a break with you. 

Then he disappeared. 

And you and Reyna were the only two people who didn’t stop looking for him, not even when Octavian convinced the Senate to stop looking. When he came back, he was different. At first, he didn’t remember anything, absolutely nothing. Then he left again. That was the first time that Jason broke your heart, and he didn’t even do it on purpose. It was something that the gods did to him so that he would do something for them. What else was new?

Jason came back eventually. He remembered you, and he felt horrible about asking you who you were right to your face and shrugging when you turned away on the verge of tears. You were the reason he came back to Camp Jupiter, because how could he have left his best friend? How could he not have remembered you? 

So when Jason came back to Camp Jupiter to make things up to you that weren’t even his fault?

He was different. He wasn’t Praetor anymore. Jason smiled a little bit more than before. Sure, his spine was still as straight as a statue, but his shoulders weren’t squared away anymore. It wasn’t some big thing to try and convince Jason to take a walk from Camp Jupiter to downtown New Rome anymore. 

When the two of you walked by that bakery to get a slice of banana nut bread, he didn’t do all those mental gymnastics to count macros; he just got that fudge brownie and then spent twenty minutes trying to get the chocolate out of his teeth. 

Jason was made Pontifex Maximus, a job that had him designing temples and making sure that all of the gods got their flowers, not making battle formations, not arguing in the Senate, not deciding how a legion full of children gets to march their way in front of imminent danger. 

The two of you got to finish high school, enroll in New Rome University. It was something that neither of us thought you’d live long enough to get there. Jason was still working on the different temples while he was enrolled, and you got to retire from the Legion because your ten years were up. 

It was nice at first. You guys got to do “normal” things together, or whatever it is kids do when one of their parents isn’t a literal god. The two of you got to sit around the table in your dorm and look at all the different majors that you could choose from. 

And they were real classes too. 

Not just “How to Slay Gorgons 1010.”

You were going in undecided because how were you supposed to pick something to major in when the main goal in your life was to not get killed? So you figured that the best idea was to take a bunch of different classes and go from there, see what interested you.

Jason, on the other hand, well, he decided very quickly what he wanted to do. He was decisive about it too, like he was picking battle formations instead of the degree he wanted to leave with in four years. It was almost a no-brainer; you really shouldn’t have been surprised when he said that he was declaring himself an electrical engineering major. A son of Jupiter wanting to get a degree that teaches you how to direct electrical impulses? Who’s surprised?

Not a single soul.

But what surprised you was the fact that he decided to get a dual degree. Not just a double major. No, no, no—that would have been too easy for Jason, or so he thought. He wanted to double major in classics, learn all about the Greek and Roman languages, the culture, and the deities from an academic perspective. The only unfortunate thing was that the classics program was a Bachelor of Arts, while the electrical engineering degree was a Bachelor of Science. So there was no double-majoring for Jason Grace. 

It was only the third week of classes when he practically bashed in the door to your dorm to tell you the news. He looked excited, like he had finally figured out something that he wanted to do, not something that others needed him to do for them. 

The way the tension in his shoulders dissipated, the way his smile actually reached his eyes when he got to talk about all of the classes he would get to take was a relief. It felt like, for a moment, that all that time spent getting Jason to break rules with you was paying off. He was thinking of himself for a change, even if he was getting a dual degree. It was something that he wanted. 

-_-

Freshman year went along just fine. It was full of intro-level classes, big lecture halls with smaller discussion sections later in the week. There were late-night study sessions in the library. Jason even set fire to the communal kitchen when he microwaved a cup of instant mac n cheese for 35 minutes instead of 3 minutes at 50 seconds because he fell asleep on his university physics I packet while he waited for it. 

Somehow, he even managed to finish designing and getting the “okay” from the Senate to build three more temples for Cloacina, Devera, and Mefitis. Freshman year was good for Jason. You got him to go out once, too. 

It was the first weekend on campus, so there wasn’t any homework yet (this was a crucial selling point to him), and you dragged all six-foot-one of him to a house party that was too loud, too crowded, and too sticky. You guys just ended up standing in the corner, not drinking the murky liquid out of the cups that you were handed on the way in, and laughing at all the ridiculous things that some of the other students were doing. 

Freshman year was good. 

Sophomore year, on the other hand, was less kind to Jason. But he didn’t let you see that. All you saw was his smile and wave at you when you passed him on campus, and when he would show up to your weekly dinner/debrief sessions in the dining hall. 

It wasn’t difficult to notice the way that he looked more and more tired each time you two met at your usual table, how he would be carrying more papers, hair more frazzled than it was last time. He spent more time looking down at his work than at you when you were talking. 

He stopped responding in full sentences, instead opting to nod and give a little “mhm” or, better yet, a “hmph.” All while still looking down at his papers, pencil moving at the speed of light. Barely even touching his own food. 

But then one day in the third week of the semester, while you were on your way back from your ecology lecture, which, yes, was given by a fawn, you sent a quick text to Jason. It was your usual text, really, the text you sent to him after every ecology lecture:

Y/N: do you have our table?

Jason always responded to you. Sure, his responses had gone from “Of course. The one by the window.” To a single thumbs-up emoji over the course of the semester, but it was still there, still a response.

But not this time. There wasn’t a response this time. You didn’t worry right away, mostly because the last time you had seen Jason was earlier today from across the quad. He smiled and waved at you, but he was obviously rushing from one class to another. There were books and papers in his arms, a calculator about to topple from a backpack pocket and onto the pavement. He looked stressed to say the least. 

So he was probably just catching up on his work. That just meant that you could do the same at dinner tonight. 

And you did. You had a calculus exam coming up, so of course, you just pulled out your notebook and were doing practice problems the entire time that you were at the dining hall. 

You didn’t mean to, but there were a thousand different things that you had to get done, that calc exam, a sociology paper, and a group presentation in some writing class about Orpheus and Eurydice. 

It’s not like you stopped seeing Jason around campus; you still saw him on the way to class, you still saw him at the grab-and-go food place between classes, and he did respond eventually. Just not right away. It was a day or two later, a quickly sent:

Jason: Sorry, I got caught up with a few essays. Do you want to come over next week after classes? We can catch up while I work on a classics paper. Thursday night?

By the time that Thursday rolled around, you were so engrossed by researching, studying, and writing that you didn’t even notice that Jason had gone radio silent. You just knew that it was finally Thursday and that meant you finally got to see Jason. There was no response to your “still good for after class today?” text, and now that you thought of it, did you even see him on the way to your calc lecture like you usually did? Did he wave at you from across the quad while he was heading to one of his physics labs and you were on the way to your writing class?

The more that you thought about it, the less you could remember. Did you see him pick up a prepackaged sandwich from the commissary this week, or was that last week?

But the two of you had agreed to hang out in Jason’s dorm, so that’s what you did. You headed over to his dorm building, where he lived with Leo, going all the way up to the fifth floor and to their unit all the way at the end of the hall. It wasn’t a very long walk from the elevator to the door, but it felt like it.

Was Jason upset about something?

Did you do something wrong?

Should you have reached out more? Should you have taken charge like you did back at Camp Jupiter and forced him to take a break?

“Hey, Y/N, what’re you doing here?” 

It was Leo’s voice that interrupted your thoughts as you approached their door. He was already stepping out with his backpack slung over one shoulder, hand still on the outside knob keeping the door open just enough for it not to lock behind him. 

“Oh, uhm—Jason and I were going to catch up while he worked on a paper for one of his classes or something,” you told him, standing across from him in the hall. It was… strange. Jason took his roommate duties seriously and felt the need to send Leo a text if he was going to make a noise above 75 decibels. So for Leo not to know that you were coming over was a little bit jarring. 

“That’s good! Just don’t, uh, pay too much attention to the trash, I keep forgetting to take it out,” Leo mumbled out, scratching the back of his neck while he kicked the door back open, “but go on in, Jason needs the company.”

And with that, Leo gestured for you to go in and walked towards the elevator. The door clicked shut behind you, and then you were in Jason’s dorm. It was a studio-style dorm; it looked like one long hallway. A small kitchenette along one side, the fridge, sink, stove, oven, and counter all next to each other on the same wall. One door for the bathroom and the two beds and desks were on the other side of the room. 

It was dark, and the late afternoon light was filtering through the cheap, plastic blinds. The thin lines of sunlight didn’t do much to help you see, so of course, your hand felt around on the wall for the light switch. The second you flipped the obnoxiously fluorescent overhead lighting on, you were met with a groan that practically shook the floor. 

“Leo. I thought that I told you to keep the lights off. I literally just managed to lie down.” Jason’s voice was muffled, like his face was buried into his pillow, and he sounded annoyed, exhausted. 

No, not exhausted, he sounded bone-tired. The kind of tired that wasn’t just surface level, it made his voice sound hollow and almost empty. He hadn’t sounded like that since after the battle atop Mount Othrys. Sure, that was the big event that had made him Praetor; he managed to beat a literal titan in hand-to-hand combat, which helped to end the second Titan War, but there were countless deaths in the Fifth Cohort that Jason had felt responsible for. He was the one who had decided who would go where in the battle formations; he was the one who came up with those formations. Yeah, he ended the battle when he killed Krios, but what if he had managed to do it quicker? Would more legionnaires be alive? Would fewer children be alive if he could have just done it better?

The week after the battle, you stayed with him. You were the one who made sure that Jason knew he did well. That, yeah, even though there were legionnaires had died, many more would have died if Jason didn’t do what he did, how he did it. 

Hearing his voice like that made your head tilt, the muscles in your neck tightening. Now that the lights were on, you could see Jason’s bed. He was wrapped up in his bed, blankets on top of blankets, glasses on his nightstand, blond hair peaking out of the blanket cocoon that he trapped himself in at 6:00 pm. He wasn’t even facing the doorway; his back was to you.

“Not Leo,” you chided in that voice that you used when you wanted to reprimand him without actually sounding like an upset parent. “What’s going on with you, Jason?”

The moment that he clocked your voice, he flipped to his other side and tried to sit up, blankets and all.

“Shit—Y/N—” his eyes were wide, but sunken in. His hair was matted down on one side and sticking up on the other. The blankets were wrapped so tightly around him that he had to shimmy so that they loosened around his arms and he could grab his glasses. “Is it Thursday already?”

You stepped closer to Jason, sitting yourself down on his desk chair that was right next to his bed, letting your backpack plop down on the ground. 

“Yeah, Jason, I’ve been texting you all day. Are you… Have you been okay?” 

This wasn’t like Jason. Jason wasn’t in bed at 6:00 pm on a Thursday. He didn’t get annoyed at people for turning the lights on.

“I’ve just been—I haven’t really had a lot of time to sleep, I guess,” he mumbled, running his hands through his hair in an effort to make it look less like he had pulled two all-nighters in a row. 

You could tell that he wasn’t telling you the whole truth. You always could tell. What was the point of being best friends if you couldn’t tell?

Your eyebrows practically raised all the way to your hairline in suspicion. He knew what that meant: that you were about to absolutely not let this go. You never did. You were the person who forced him to take breaks, to look at the nicer things in life. You were the one who helped Jason to see the stars, to take a second and slow down to actually look at them. 

Jason ran a hand over his face, almost knocking his glasses off his face while he sucked in a breath. It sounded heavy in his chest, like breathing was hard for him right now. Like breathing was harder than summoning the storms that he used to do subconsciously when you two were younger. 

“It’s just—things have been kind of hard lately, I dunno,” he spoke into his hands, like he was ashamed to even say the words out loud, like he was afraid that Jupiter would hear him and strike him down. “Like, I’ve just had so many things to do, but Y/N, I can’t—I just can’t anymore.”

His voice was so small that it fractured under the weight of his words. I just can’t anymore. You got up from the chair and sat on his bed, right next to him. You could see how dirty his glasses were. 

“Jason, what do you mean?” Your voice was soft, like in the way you were supposed to speak to the young legionnaires after they saw bloodshed for the first time. Your face softened, shoulders relaxing, and posture hunching over to be closer to Jason as his shoulders started to tremble. 

“I just—there is just so much, Y/N, so much that I have to do, but I just-just can’t do it,” he rasped out, both hands over his mouth like he didn’t want you to hear him say it. 

The way his voice was breaking was all you needed to grab one of his hands away from his face and hold it in both of your hands, bringing it into your lap. His hand was shaking despite your two-handed grip on it. His hand wasn’t soft. It was dry, the edges of his hand were rough, and his fingers were calloused. His nails were bitten down almost all the way. 

You didn’t know what to say to him, just holding his hand like you could hold the problems that were burdening him, like you could hold the weight of all the things that were dragging him down. 

“It’s just too much, I don’t know what I’m doing—”

You didn’t let him finish his sentence without wrapping your arms around him. You had to go up on your knees and lean over his lap to pull him close to you. 

“Jason—Jason, no one knows what they’re doing, especially during college,” you reassured him, hands rubbing circles into his back. That’s all it took for Jason to break down. 

His shoulders were already shaking—so were his hands—but that’s when he started to cry. The Jason Grace, the former Praetor of Camp Jupiter, son of Jupiter, the same demigod who sent a titan to Tartarus with his bare hands, started to cry. Your hands moved on instinct, one continued rubbing circles into his back, right between his shoulder blades, while the other one cradled the back of his head so he could lean into you more easily. 

“No, you don’t understand—I should know what to do, Y/N, other people don’t know what to do, I’m not supposed to be like other people,” Jason hiccuped into your chest, his arms wrapped around you like you were the only thing keeping him tethered to this planet, fingers curling into your shirt like he would rip it if you tried to pull away. You would never pull away. 

“Jason—”

“Y/N, no, I’m not supposed to be the same, I’m supposed to be better,” he cried, voice cracking and fracturing around your name. “I’m sorry—you shouldn’t even have to see me like this—”

“Jason—stop,” you pulled back just enough to look at his face, to try and look him in the eye. His face was flushed, eyes already red, and lips trembling. “You’re allowed to feel things in front of people, especially in front of me. The world isn’t going to collapse in on itself if you don’t get an ‘A’ on every single assignment or if your temple designs are sent in a few days late.”

The hand that cradled the back of his head started to card through his hair, fingernails tracing nonsensical patterns into his scalp the same way that he did for you when you woke up from a nightmare back at Camp Jupiter, the same way that you used the night after he had to read aloud all of the names of the legionnaires that died at the Battle of Othrys. It was a soothing pattern, back and forth, in circles. 

His breath steadied as he melted into your shoulder. Jason kept sniffling into you, fisting your shirt, but he calmed. His hair had grown out since the beginning of the semester. It wasn’t cropped close to the skin anymore; it was longer in the back, so you twirled his blond hair around your fingers and whispered reassurances into his ear. 

“The world isn’t going to fall apart if you sleep in on the weekends.”

“I can help you draft emails to your professors.”

“Let me help you.”

After thirty minutes or so, Jason calmed down enough not to just spout anxious nonsense between sniffles and your reassurances. 

“Jason, your school assignments aren’t life or death,” you told him, your fingers still tangled in his hair and his tangled in your shirt. “No one is going to die if you don’t do well in a class.”

No one is going to die. 

That made Jason pull his head back from your shoulder and look up at you through damp, blond eyelashes with those devastatingly blue eyes. Those eyes that always made him look like a fallen angel in a Renaissance painting, those eyes that held so much more than they should have at your age. 

“I-I guess,” he whispered, unclenching his fists from your shirt to wipe his face. Jason’s glasses were crooked on his nose, smudged with fingerprints, dust, and tears. His voice was rough, and so, so small. “I just—I just don’t know what to, Y/N, I don’t know what to do, and that makes me want to crawl out of my own skin and—and hide under my bed like a scared little kid.”

Then Jason’s shoulders caved in, like he was making himself look smaller, like there was a little voice in the back of his head telling him to take up less space in this moment where he was trying to be truthful with you. 

“And, Y/N—I don’t even know how to be a scared little kid.”

Those words hit like a punch to the chest. It felt like Jason just reached his hand into your chest, grabbed your heart, and squeezed. 

Jason was never allowed to be scared, never allowed to go to his mom and bury his head in her shoulder if something ever frightened him. He trained with Lupa as a toddler. He found his way from the Wolf House to Camp Jupiter as a toddler.

Jason had never been allowed to be a scared little kid. 

“I know, I know,” you cooed at him as he leaned back into your shoulder, “but you’re allowed to. You’re allowed to figure it out. I won’t leave until you do.”

His arms wrapped around you tighter when your words reached his ears. 

I won’t leave until you do.

I won’t leave.

And that’s all he ever needed.

Liv Yaps: uhm so hey, this semester is actually kicking my ass, and i'm frothing at the mouth to stay sane (i am not sane, i am dehydrated and mentally ill), but this was fun to write!! i love writing about overworked, upset, mentally ill jason !!!! especially when i am the overworked, upset, mentally ill jason !!! a classic case of do i want him or do i want to be him (or in this specific scenario, do i want him or am i him) also like the whole dorm description feels so... ugh but that's literally how my sopohmore dorm was lol idk how to feel about this fic tbh, it's not really as good as i was hoping it to be... it just feels super stiff, especially the dialogue... so idk constructive critisism is always welcome and who knows maybe i'll repost it with improvements idk haha i did in fact write most of this while i was sleeping over my friends apartment off campus and drinking gin while watching the secret lives of mormon wives so if this sucks i am just going to blame the drinks lmao AND YEAH THE TITLE OF THE FIC IS A LYRIC IN A DEFTONES SONG WHAT ABOUT IT ???

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