Jason’s caught a scent.

It’s taken him awhile--months, he guesses, even if it feels like years--but he’s finally caught it, the familiar, dusky scent of something like himself. Veiled as it is by the thick shroud of mist that hangs heavy around everything in these parts, it’s unmistakable, and Jason follows it further north along the coast for a few weeks.

That’s before it strikes him: The hunger, white-hot and thrumming up and down his spine, churning in his gut like a gallon of mercury.

He stops to sleep in a few marshy tidepools, a few vacant caves, eating handfuls of anemones and jellies and kelp. Kelp, of all things, as if he hasn’t recently become an obligate carnivore, as if anything less than meat will satiate him. He can’t find nourishment anywhere along these shores, and the yearning has become so acute that he swears he can smell the briney sweat of a sailor six miles off the coast.

          ( swears if he weren’t so feeble and weak he’d swim the distance out             and eat the sailor alive, bones and all )

He supposes succumbing to his true nature is the only way of surviving. But he’ll be damned--well, double-damned--before he does that. All he can hope, stumbling vaguely through this maze of damp caves, is that the r ugaru he’s been pursuing finds Jason before Jason finds him. He can only hope the other monster like himself murders him before he has the opportunity to lose himself completely. The opportunity to feed.

          ( and oh, jason wants to feed so, so badly )

He doesn’t know how he finds him, doesn’t know what fever dream drags him to the monster’s cave, but he finds himself there soon enough. His vision swims. A blob of vague brown skin and dark hair blurs before him, and he leans against the cave wall, chest heaving, teeth bared.

     “Hungry,” he mumbles, sagging. A patch of rough mollusks on the wall catches his shirt and gashes his skin, bleeding him. “I’m...I’m so, so hungry, I can’t...I don’t care anymore. I can’t take it.”

He stumbles toward the figure and manages to catch hold of his shirt (shirt, which is so strangely human Jason doesn’t know how to process it). His dry, cracked lips find the skin of the monster’s neck and his numb, dull teeth scrape at the skin in an effort to bite. As if he has the strength to break the skin, let alone gnaw the creature’s head clean from its body.

The taste of sweat on the corner of his lip draws an ugly, inhuman noise from Jason that, even in his subdued, delirious state, causes him to recoil with horror. He sinks to the ground and succumbs to the hunger, eyes stinging. He shivers.

For the most part, he wants to stay reasonable. Even if he's not always the most logical or strategic person, there are a few senses of reason that make sense to him no matter the time or place. Up until the point he's reminded that he's the one who's supposed to be interrogating, it seems like it's working out fine. About as fine as you can get with a robot that's aware of its capacity to attract humans around it.

Not that he hasn't made it easy to pick up on that fact. Good work, dude. The twenty-five hundred some ways he could screw up the tests have multiplied at least twice by now. Trying not to let the glass half empty look wash over his face and leave Jason with any more questions of his own, Percy allows himself to be led to a seat, and finds that their hands don't cease contact when they get there. "Yeah," he teases a little, brow quirked."Guess I should do my job."

"But I wouldn't doubt if this whole test is to see if you can put me out of one, either." Being that this is an internship, and nothing of the occupational variety, this statement is a question of his own. Are AI's built with or without the ability to grow autonomously? He can barely focus; are they really touching hands still?

The question is picking his head apart, just enough so that he doesn't pull away. As a matter of fact, he drops his other hand on top to run a foreign pattern or two over Jason's knuckles. For synthetic skin, it sure seems real."So like, you can feel all of this? What kind of signals are you getting? Are they good or bad?"

But then he brings up his mom, and Percy yanks his hand away to run it through his hair. His dad, too; what kind of a personal inspection is this? 

"Are you background checking me?" 

     "Not background checking," says Jason, withdrawing his hands into his lap in an effort to seem contrite. What are the physical cues? Wide eyes, downturned mouth, flushed face? He deploys all three of them for good measure, attempting to look pitiable and sheepish. "I was just curious. I wanted to know more about you, seeing that we'll be spending a lot of time together. Or…I hope we will, anyway," he adds, glancing down and smiling tiny for effect.

Jason fidgets, which isn't something he's programmed to do. The new gesture delights him privately. Still, in keeping with the slightly pathetic overtones of his demeanor, he asks, quietly and cautiously: "Was that wrong…? I'm sorry for prying. I should have behaved more humanly, shouldn't I? It's just – it's just that I don't know how humans are supposed to behave."

He twists his words in an upward inflection, an anguish response. It's a lie. Jason knows exactly how humans are supposed to behave, but he figures if he's working a guy like Percy, the best route to take is to make himself appear as helpless as possible. He wants to learn. Human customs are so foreign to him. Only someone like Percy…patient and wonderful…could teach him how to be a real boy. Etcetera.

     "I won't do it again. I promise. I'll – ask questions. That's what I was supposed to do, right?" His eyes flicker upwards toward Percy's face, but only briefly. They're quick to flit sideways again, focusing on Percy's hand. "The signals you were tripping when you stroked my knuckles like that were good. Pleasure responses. But they don't act up like that for just anyone."

That part is true. Generally speaking, any kind of stroking or petting is supposed to trigger positive responses from Jason, but something about the way Percy handled him made Jason spark up with mild pleasure. He wonders if Percy touched his knuckles in a specific sequence.

Either way, he's going to use that response to benefit in more ways than one. He looks Percy in the eyes and triggers his blush response. Then, in a quiet, almost shy voice, as if he's asking for some monumental prize that he doesn't quite feel he deserves:

     "It felt really good, Percy. Can I…" The perfunctory pause, to signal his inability to demand something from an organic life form; then, he jumps the hurdle to signify throwing caution to the wind. Percy is special. So, so special. Jason would defy his very being to be close to him. Etcetera. "Can I have your hand back…?"

[ deadrneat ]

It’s been awhile since Nico’s been back.

He can’t say exactly how long. A few weeks, maybe? The last time he was here, he’d brought all this horrible, grimy stuff to the surface and watched as Percy brushed it all aside to embrace Jason anyway. For you. The words in Percy’s voice sent some kind of unpleasant jangle through Nico’s nerves, and he’d had no choice but to leave.

He feels bad about that, among other things. He picks a time when he knows Jason is out getting food to stop by and visit.

Truth be told, he’s jealous of Jason’s proximity to Percy, of his ability to just help people in a way that Nico can’t. He’s jealous of the way they seem so close, of their shared spaces and breaths and bed. When he shadow travels into the cabin, he half-wonders if he’ll come across something that confirms his worst suspicion: That something has started between the two of them, something irreversible. He doesn’t find anything to that end, but he does find Percy, looking sad and pretty and perfect as usual. Nico clears his throat.

     “Hey, Percy.” He moves to sit at the edge of the bed, where Percy’s perched. “Sorry it’s been so long since I’ve been here. How are you feeling?”

Before Percy can answer the question, Nico fishes around in his jacket pocket and pulls something out: A piece of string strung through many colorful beads. Percy’s necklace. He had to steal it from Annabeth; he’s sure it’ll raise another stink at camp, but Nico thinks it’s worth it. After all, if Jason can resurrect Percy’s memories so easily...

[ deadrneat ]

There’s something strange about these woods.

Thalia can’t really place it; she hasn’t hunted alone for a long time, and while she wants to chalk it up to the lack of her sisters’ presence, she knows that’s not what’s prickling at the nape of her neck like static. Jason, maybe? It would explain the currents that are latent in the air here, but...why would he be out this far? She’s not aware of any missions he’s been sent on lately, and she’s pretty good about checking in with her sources at either camp.

She creeps closer to the cabin, which appears to be deserted. Peers through the windows to see no sign of life. Shrugs and just about turns around to head back to base camp -- when suddenly, the skies part and it starts to hail. She scowls.

     “Really?” she mutters, pulling the hood of her parka up over her head. “Gee, Dad. Thanks.”

Thalia starts to walk back, but it’s not long before the hailstones are the size of eyeballs and they’re leaving welts all over her arms and shoulders. She huffs out an exasperated breath and takes shelter under a tree, gaze wandering back to that cabin. Is there something there...? Something Zeus wants her to be aware of? She doubts it runs that deep, but the place might be worth checking out just in case.

          Besides, there’s no way she’s making it back to base camp in hail like this.

Inside the cabin is dark, but not dank; warm, but not musty. The place smells spicy and clean, and more than a little familiar, as if someone’s been living --

     Thalia barely has time to find her footing when she feels the presence at her back and whirls to greet the shadowed stranger, brandishing a knife.

    “What the...?”

Thalia swipes and sidesteps and ultimately ends up with her back against the wall (gods, how is she being so careless today?); she slides down and makes an attempt at crawling through the stranger’s legs to freedom, even successfully slices at his calves, drawing a line of blood on either side.

Yet he pins her. She can tell he’s a demigod; his strength alone is indicative of that, but she can’t figure out who he is. The noises he’s making are more like that of an animal, or one of those awful zombies you see on TV these days. As if to add to the ridiculous motif, a flash of lightning cracks through the sky, briefly throwing the stranger’s features into relief. Thalia’s heart surges into her throat, and she goes slack.

Three days. It’s only been three days, and already, Jason wonders if he’s hit his limit.

Feeding Percy is near-impossible, mostly because there’s little that he’s capable of stomaching in his current state; Jason is careful to keep his face trained into an expression of perfect calm, but he’s scared. He’s worried that when Reyna and Frank come back, they’ll suspect him of something; he’s worried that the others already do. When he returned to camp briefly to make an appearance, to make the others think he was sleeping there, Annabeth confronted him, crazed with grief.

“Did you do it?” she rasped, eyes almost black with anguish. Jason stared.

     “Do what...?”

When Annabeth started toward him, it was Piper’s hand who stilled her, Piper’s clever, miraculous hand; it was Piper’s voice that calmed her, without even a whisper of charmspeak thrown in for good measure. “Annabeth, stop. You know it wasn’t him.”

The “it” in question, Jason quickly learned, was digging Percy out of his grave; he had to make himself appear as scandalized, as sickened as possible as Piper explained it to him; he had to make a show of going back to his cabin to “sleep” before sneaking out the back and kicking up a cyclone to carry him back to his strange, new home again. 

Leaving Percy alone for even a few hours was disorienting and upsetting for Percy, and Jason knows it. He doesn’t want to do that again, if he can avoid it.

Still, he’s not sure how much good he’s doing his friend here. Percy’s vocabulary hasn’t expanded all that much, and Jason can tell he’s getting restless. They’ve fallen into a sort of comfortable routine, in which Jason points things out and Percy names them, but there’s only so many things to name within the confines of this cabin, and Jason is afraid he’ll lose Percy if he lets him out of the house. He’s afraid of a lot of things: That Percy will be stuck in this limbo for the rest of his half-life, that Nico won’t return to help Jason care for him, that they’ll be discovered here, like this, and Jason will have to take the blame for it. That Percy will be disposed of, an abomination.

So many thoughts course through Jason’s brain throughout the span of a day, but he finds the nights oddly quiet. He and Percy are lying in the tiny bed together (another awkward but necessary adjustment, one that Jason’s found himself settling into more readily than he thought possible), and Jason’s enjoying the relative calm of his own thoughts when suddenly, he gets an idea.

       To say he was tired would be an understatement. Jean had woken up that afternoon with the intent to enjoy yet another busy, mind-numbing shift at the city morgue. He would stop in at the closest gas station to grab breakfast for himself and a midnight snack for Marco, and then once he struggled his way past the heavy chrome double-doors of his workplace, he would shrug on his lab coat, and go over some possible applications for an assistant.

       If only his life had continued to muck forward so slowly. Rather than open up and dig into the insides of some poor sap, he ended up stitching up the cadaverous body of who he had hoped would be a good fit for his job search. At least he hadn’t had to stray far from his safe haven room out into police-hell to find Marco, who had carried Eren Jaeger’s stiff body in and strewn him out on the clean autopsy table.

       Some mild part of Jean wondered, as he washed the shadow of blood from his hands, exactly how Marco had earlier managed to drag a dead body in without anyone seeing, but he supposed it was late enough for those on duty to be really aware anymore. Regardless, the state of the boy he had safely stowed on a refrigerator table had him completely on edge. Eren Jaeger was literally a hungry monster and that was terrifying. The head wound Jean had cleaned and stitched was minor, but the boy’s body had been completely taken over by what he had assumed was rigor mortis. He partly wished the situation was that simply; maybe then he woudn’t have a living nightmare snoozing so near him. Marco’s convincing tale of a mugging turned feeding session should have been a disgusting and in-poor taste joke, had Jean not pried Jaeger’s bloodstained mouth open to find actual flesh still stuck in his molars. That had been a truly frightening discovery, but convincing nonetheless.