#liv locus

There was always something unsettling about how kind Jason was to you. Maybe it was because every time he saw you from across camp he would smile at you. It was small and crooked, it made the scar on his lip pull the skin in a way that made it look like his skin was too small. That small, crooked smile made his nose scrunch, just enough for you to be reminded of how Roman he looked. It made his glasses skew enough to one side to be reminded that he was part human too.

His smile was always so genuine. So genuine that it hurt because why was he the only one who smiled at you like that.

Camp Half-Blood wasn’t small. No, there were many campers, not that they spoke to you a whole lot. And they certainly never smiled at you. 

When they did smile at you, it was stiff and awkward. Like they got caught staring at you like an animal in a zoo and didn’t know what to do. 

They made you feel small, like you had five heads, like you were crazy instead of like a daughter of Hades. 

You sat alone. You ate alone. You trained alone. You were alone. That was your default, to be alone. 

So when Jason Grace came to Camp Half-Blood and gave you that little half smile, lips pressed tight together, crinkling his eyes, you glared at him. 

You could count on one hand the amount of friends that you’ve had since coming to camp all those years ago, and then one day, a son of Jupiter decides to just… smile at you? Like that?

Like he didn’t see you and see someone that shouldn’t exist. Like he didn’t see someone who ruined everything around them. Like you were just a girl, just another demigod at camp instead of an omen. 

-_-

Jason tried to talk to you. When you got up from the Hades table to scrape your food into the fire for your father he would get up too. At the first sign of movement, your shoulders straightening out, your hands going to your plate, your legs swinging over the bench of the table, he would bolt up. 

He’d finish the last bites of his meal, saving the best bits for his father of course, scarfing it down in a way that made Piper side-eye him from across the pavilion and rushing to the fire. He’d try to look casual, tried his best to make it seem like he wasn’t anxiously waiting for the moment you got up, but the way his head would whip around just watch you scrape your food into the fire was noticeable to say the least. 

He’s rush up to the fire in the middle of the pavilion from the Zeus table, where he was sitting alone too, and scrape the food into the fire with you. He’d look up at you through those blond lashes, through the reflection of the flames on his glasses with those blue, blue eyes and he would smile. 

Jason would jump out of his seat and sprint over to the fire just so he could smile at you.

It took a few weeks for him to do more than smile, but eventually he would say little things when you would look across the fire at him and his stupidly blond hair. 

“Hey.”

“How’s your day so far?”

“Nice sword work earlier.”

You didn’t answer him with words. You would press your lips together in a tight line and let the corners turn up into something that maybe looked like a smile and jut out your chin just a bit so you weren’t overtly rude. Maybe if it wasn’t a particularly horrendous day you would let your eyes crinkle, let the edges of your smile drift a bit higher than usual, let your smile reach all the way up to your eyes. 

It made you wonder why he even wanted to talk to you in the first place. Did he want to be friends? Did he think you were interesting? Maybe something to study, something to observe?

He was new to camp, so he probably didn’t know.

Jason probably didn’t know that the only thing that you were good for was getting your friends killed. Jason didn’t know that the friends you didn’t get killed you managed to ward off with sour moods and even sharper words because you couldn’t watch them die too, not when you could stop it. 

Being a daughter of Hades meant that monsters knew you. They knew what you smelled like, they knew the way your hair blew in the wind when you ran, they knew how your blood tasted like when they licked it off of their claws. When you first got to Camp Half-Blood you thought that being surrounded by people like you would mean that they would stop leaving you. 

You friend from the Dionysus Cabin got turned to stone by a gorgon, the Apollo girl got crushed by a giant a few summers ago. The boy from the Demeter Cabin lasted the longest, but eventually a misguided quest with you got him killed too. A sword to through the ribs. 

It was like you were a homing beacon for the worst monsters some scared little kid could think of, like being a daughter of Hades unlocked the monsters that only came to people in nightmares. The ones with tongues and teeth that could reach out, the ones with wings lined with spines, the ones with tails strong enough to snap your neck. 

Being a daughter of Hades attracts the kinds of monsters that killed your only friends. 

So you pushed away the ones who didn’t die. You stopped hanging out with them, stopped leaving your cabin, stopped looking at them from across the nightly campfires. You even stopped going to the camp fires.

It didn’t take long for your friends to just stop trying. You didn’t blame them, not really because you were driving them away on purpose, that’s what you wanted. 

Sure, it stung when it only took two weeks for you to push all of your other friends away, but you weren’t getting other people killed anymore. They didn’t seem to mind that you weren’t in their lives anymore so you shouldn’t mind that they weren’t in yours anymore, right?

So, yeah, you didn’t answer Jason when he tried to make small talk over the fire in the middle of the pavilion while you scraped bits of your food to burn for your parents. 

It wasn’t his fault that he didn’t know, that he didn’t know to treat you like the plague, that he didn’t know that you would get him killed if he kept trying to talk to you.

-_-

It started with a coffee. 

You didn’t mean to accept it. Not really. After a whole month of Jason looking at you like that, like you were the prettiest sight his eyes had ever been allowed to gaze upon, you made yourself promise not to be friends with him. 

You didn’t want to see him die because of a monster that you brought to him. 

But then he brought you a coffee. And it was iced, the perfect shade of brown, and it didn’t smell burnt. It was a morning where you were late to training, sleeping too long because you stayed up too long immersed in a book that had no bearing son your real life. It was merely an escape, something to fill that twisting empty feeling that pushing your friends away had left. That meant you overslept and still somehow didn’t get enough sleep or have enough time to get your usual caffeine fix.

The coffee smelt good. It smelled like vanilla and it made you smile because how did he know how you liked your coffee? You never told him, but here he was, your coffee was iced, and the milk to coffee ratio was perfect.

So you took it and smiled at him. A real smile. A smile that meant thank you, a smile that tricked him into thinking he should start a conversation. 

“I’m glad that you like it, I kinda just—I just guessed really.”

You would later learn out that was a lie, that Jason had gotten Piper to Charmspeak one of your old friends into tell him how you liked your coffee. But that’s not something that you knew just yet. 

“Then you must be really good at guessing.”

Maybe it was rude, he did just give you coffee, but you walked away. No “goodbye,” no “thank you,” no “see you later when you eventually meet me by the fire at dinner and try to make small talk with me.” Because that’s how you stop someone from being friends with you, and you couldn’t be friends with Jason Grace.

He seemed too nice for what you would do to him. 

Jason started greeting you in the mornings with that coffee, the same exact coffee every morning. It was like he had some sort of equation that guaranteed the perfect coffee, your perfect coffee. 

Every morning, like clockwork, there would be a jar of coffee on the porch of the Hades Cabin. Not a mug, not a glass, a jar. One of those big glass jars that once held something like soup or sauce but had been cleaned out and filled to the brim with the most perfect ratio of coffee, milk, and flavored syrup. 

He never said it was him who left the coffee outside your cabin, but he didn’t need to, not when he would greet you with that same smile every morning. You would be sipping from the jar of coffee, looking across the training grounds at Jason while he spared. 

Jason made it look so easy, too. The way he dodged without breaking a sweat. The way he hopped backwards without making his glasses crooked. Every morning that’s what happened. Every morning Jason would drop off the jar of coffee for you before you’d even wake up, and you would drink it, smile at Jason while he spared. 

And then one morning, when you opened the cabin door to check for the coffee (you had made a habit of assuming it would be there after two weeks of this and started grabbing it the second you got out of bed to start drinking before getting ready for the day) and he was just there.

“Morning,” Jason greeted you with a smile that was much too genuine for the time, suggesting that he had been awake for far longer.

You weren’t used to actually getting your coffee from him. Jason usually just left it there, like the same way people leave nuts on their back deck for chipmunks to take later. So you stared up at him, trying to blink away sleep and muster up a polite response because truth be told, the coffee was nice. 

“Hi,” you rasped out with a gravely voice because yeah, you had just woken up. And by woken up, you rolled out of bed after practically punching your alarm off and shuffled to the door like a zombie because on what planet is a daughter of Hades a morning person? Certainly not this one. 

This was not what you were used to. Jason was standing so close to you, maybe a foot away from where you stood in the doorway and he was somehow significantly taller now than when you saw him from across the dining pavilion. 

There was a little voice in the back corner of your head that wanted to say something kind, or maybe even a “thanks” but that was how you made friends. And making friends with someone got them killed. 

“But he’s a son of Jupiter!” That little voice pointed out, “he can take care of himself—we’ve literally seen him fly for gods’ sake!”

You almost did. You almost gave him a sideways smile as you reached out to grab the jar of coffee from his hand, but then your fingers brushed and his face softened. He went from looking like a marble statue to whatever that was. Jason’s eyes crinkled, the corners of his lips tugged up into a smile. 

He was too nice for you to do that to him, too nice to be friends with you. 

So instead of taking the coffee, you pulled your hand back like his fingers brushing yours gave you third-degree burns. That was a good way to make sure he didn’t think you were “friend-material.” But before you could close the door all the way, Jason managed to wedge his sneaker-clad foot in-between the door and the door frame with some sort of indignant noise. 

“Hey—”

“You don’t want this,” you interrupted, still trying to pull the door shut, hoping that if you kept pulling he would get the message and leave you alone, “you’re too good for this.”

Too good for me to get you killed. 

Apparently your words confused him enough to pull his foot out of the path of the door and it slammed shut. You almost fell onto your ass. 

You spent the rest of the day in the cabin, skipping training and all of the other “mandatory” activities because even though you could be rude on purpose to people, that just felt… mean in a way. He was just trying to be nice and you slammed the door in his face and told him what he didn’t want? 

Jason probably hated you now. He probably scoffed at the mention of your name, the same way everyone else did. 

But that was good. That meant you would never be close enough for you to get him killed. 

You spent the rest of the day thinking, really. Thinking about what it would be like to have some company. To have a friend again. It would be nice. But it would’t be worth it. 

After the sun set, after the campfire fizzled out, after the sounds of campers settling into their bunks went quiet, you opened the door. Maybe to go for a midnight stroll, or maybe to just look at the stars. 

But then you saw it. 

The glass jar. The ice had melted, the milk and the coffee had separated in a strange way in the summer heat, and there were gnats floating by the rim where they had tried to drink the sweet syrup in the coffee and drowned. 

Jason had left your coffee anyway. 

He didn’t stop leaving the coffee outside of the cabin door despite how you practically slammed the door in his face. But you did stop accepting his coffee. Some days you would let it sit there until the summer heat melted the ice and made the milk go bad. Some days you would dump it out into the grass. 

It felt bad to waste it, but it felt worse to let Jason think that he could somehow bribe you with coffee into letting him be your friend. His smile shined too bright to let it get smothered by whatever wretched monster was looking for you. His eyes were too blue to end up staring unfocused and clouded over at the sky. 

So you kept wasting the coffee, kept giving him reasons to stop trying to be nice to you.

You started grimacing whenever he stood across from you at the fire at the dining pavilion. Stopped returning the much-too-genuine smiles he gave you from across camp. Stopped acknowledging his existence really. Started pretending that he didn’t exist. 

That would do it, it had worked on all of your other friends. 

But then Chiron assigned you to patrol duty one night. It was a pretty simple rotation, usually consisting of kids from the Ares Cabin because they insisted that they were the best for it. It was normal for you to get patrol duty, you liked it. Typically you were able to convince Chiron to let you patrol alone, to let you walk around with your twin daggers and just be. You’d threaten the occasional rogue harpy, but the boundaries in place usually kept things pretty quiet. 

But tonight was different. Tonight, Chiron didn’t accept “I can handle it myself” as a proper response. And of course, of course, you were assigned on patrol with Jason. Of course! The one person who kept trying to be friends with you despite the endless glares, rudeness, and ignoring that you were trying to use to keep him at an arms length. 

-_-

Patrol wasn’t that bad at first. Not really.

The patrol started with you and Jason meeting up at the Big House. You had gotten their first, leaning against the porch railing, hands on twin daggers strapped to your thighs. Then Jason showed up with that face schooled into it’s typical hard-set, just-a-bit-sad composure.

“Hey, Y/N—I haven’t really seen you around a whole lot,” is what Jason decided to break the awkward silence with when he approached you and you didn’t greet him with anything besides a faint nod. 

Without missing a beat, your feet descended down the stairs of the front porch to start the nightly patrol of camp. 

“I’ve been busy.” You didn’t look at Jason, you didn’t want to encourage the conversation. If you were lucky the patrol would pass by in a suffocating blanket of awkward silence that would solidify your persona non grata status in Jason’s mind. 

Jason didn’t have to rush to find himself walking next to you. It only took about three strides of his unfairly long legs to catch up to you.

“Busy with what?” He asked you, craning his neck to the right to look at you. If you had bothered to look back, you would see his bemused expression, the way that his eyebrows went up to his hairline, the way his nose scrunched and the scar on his lip stretched out a bit, catching the faint light that lingered of Camp Half-Blood after dark.

Busy making sure you aren’t my friend.

“In all honesty? None of your business,” you mumbled mostly to yourself, but it was just loud enough for him to hear too. 

Yeah, great idea, alienate the last person at the camp who doesn’t hate you already. Get rid of all the people who could ever care about you before they leave you. Genius plan.

That was what cracked the oh-so-perfect armor that Jason wore over his own feelings. Just the smallest crack in the marble of his carefully chiseled facade. He scoffed at you. A legitimate scoff, like he was fed up with you. Good.

“Oh, really?” Jason let out a dry laugh, “so you’re not avoiding me? You just so happened to decide to never drink coffee ever again?”

It was probably very silly of you to assume that he wouldn’t bring up the fact that you had been rejecting his coffee offers for the past week and a half, ever since the failed attempt at the in-person coffee delivery he tried to pull off. 

“That’s not—“ you sighed, running a hand over your face because you had decided to turn to look at him. And gods, Jason was too genuine for you to keep trying to push him away like this. 

He looked like a puppy wondering why his owner kept kicking him every time he came back. Those sharp blue eyes wide with intrigue, real curiosity around why you didn’t accept his kind gestures anymore, but that little smile was still there. It still tugged at the corners of his mouth, glinting those too-sharp-to-be-natural canine teeth at you in the starlight. It was like the smile was there to not scare you away, like he was trying to approach a skittish cat. 

Like he didn’t want you to know that he was being real.

You jerked your head away from him, facing forward as the two of you walked around camp. Your lips pressed together, your tongue swiping over your top teeth like it could get rid of the sudden sour taste in your mouth. 

Your feet took you farther along the borders of Camp Half-Blood, drifting to the side to put a bit more distance between you and Jason. Nothing left your mouth for a few moments. The two of you walked through the trees and brush with nothing but silence between you. 

Jason clearing his throat is what makes you look at him again. And then you start talking before he can even open his mouth. 

“I liked the coffee!” You admitted to him, throwing your hands up in defeat, your voice much softer than you meant for it to be, “it was really nice of you to keep giving it to me.”

A brief moment of silence where Jason decided that patrolling could wait (nothing tended to happen anyway). He blinked down at you, lips parting to respond, but you just kept talking.

“I just couldn’t let you think that we could be friends.” Your words came out quickly, you wanted to explain before Jason even had a chance to think of a response, “I’m not a good friend—you seem like someone who should have a good friend… so obviously not me.”

The words spill out of your mouth before you can stop yourself and before you know it, it’s too late. Like oil spilling into the ocean, you can’t put it back, you can’t take those words back and pretend like those inside-thoughts didn’t just make themselves known. 

Jason looked taken aback, almost personally offended but on your behalf. Like he couldn’t fathom you being perceived as a bad friend. 

“I literally saw you untangle one of those spiky-ball-things out of that Demeter girl’s hair last week—“ Jason interjected, and he wasn’t wrong. That is something that you did. Mostly because she was seven years old and crying. It would have been mean to just not do anything. And besides, you practically owed it to her after getting the older brother she’ll never meet killed. 

“That’s different,” you protested, holding your hand out to Jason, palm facing him, “I just—you’re not understanding what I’m trying to say. I get people killed. The people who hang out around me get murdered horribly by some monster that Chiron hasn’t seen for a millennium. So unless that’s something you see in your five year plan, I suggest you just let us finish this patrol in silence, or whatever.”

You could had sworn that you should hear Jason’s jaw clench in response to you. His entire face scrunched up in disagreement, his eyes narrowed and crinkled, his lips pressed tightly together and he shoved his hands in his pockets with a huff of air from his nose. The way that Jason proceeded to take a deep breath in through his nose should have been a dead giveaway that the rest of this patrol was not going to be spent in silence.

“I think I’ll work with the ‘or whatever’ option if this is conversation is turning into a standardized test,” Jason deadpanned to you, his eyes widening in begrudging amusement, like he was about to have fun with this conversation, like you didn’t just try to explain that being friends with you would get him killed. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I can handle myself. I tend to be a homing beacon for monsters too, you know—whole son of Jupiter thing and all.”

Oh. You weren’t used to being around other kids of the big three. But you shut down that line of thinking as quickly as possible because there was no way that something as simple as that, something as simple as parentage was going to be the reason that you let yourself get close to someone after years of not letting yourself enjoy the company of others. 

“I’m not even a good friend, I don’t even remember how to be one,” you mumbled softly, your face heating up from the embarrassed flush that crept up your cheeks. 

Because who actually admits that? How sad must that be to hear from someone, that they don’t even remember what it’s like to have friends? Or what it’s like to even be a friend? Who had the patience for that? 

Jason’s entire demeanor softened. His face relaxed, his shoulders slumped over just enough to be considered “normal” instead of “annoyingly perfect.”

“I can wait,” he said simply, like it was a fact, like it wasn’t a life-altering event for you. Like he wasn’t just forcing his friendship into your hands like something fragile that he pretended was indestructible. “I’m good at that.”

You jerked your head to the side at that. That wasn’t how this conversation was supposed to go. He was supposed to be insulted, he was supposed to be hurt, he was supposed to leave you. 

“Why?” Was all you were able to get out. Your voice sounded strangely thick. Definitely not because you were trying not to cry since this was the first time in years that anyone even gave you a second glance.

It felt strange to want this, to want a friend after working so hard to push them all away, to make it so no one else wanted to talk to you. People only spoke to you at camp out of necessity, when they needed an undead army, when they wanted someone to help fight a giant or a god that had tried to stage a coup. 

And now Jason Grace, the Jason Grace, was trying. Of all the people, too, a son of Jupiter. The god who had gone out of his way to make your father’s life miserable, to kill your mortal mother, your half-siblings mortal mothers. It was his son that insisted on being your friend. The Roman equivalent, sure, but still. It wasn’t not strange. 

“You remind me of someone that I knew,” he said, gesturing vaguely with his hand and looking off into the woods, like he knew he just brought up someone that he didn’t want to talk about, but decided to anyway, “and she was one of my best friends—one of my only friends, really—until I came over to Camp Half-Blood. So, yeah, I can wait while you figure it out.”

You looked up at Jason through your lashes, blinking at him like that would somehow make what he just said compute faster in your brain. 

Spoiler alert: it didn’t.

-_-

Patrol ended that night with a conversation fueled by sleep-deprivation because as it had turned out, your half-brother Nico had neglected to tell you some very interesting facts about his time at Camp Jupiter. And after remembering how fun it could be to just talk to someone, reluctance turned into excitement, turned into casual banter, turned into sleep-deprived questions, turned into delirious giggling on the couch in Cabin 13.

Jason still delivered a jar of iced coffee to you every morning, but now, he waited outside of the cabin door until you opened it in a mess of sleep-warmed skin, bedhead, and rumpled pajamas. You accepted the coffee now, and usually invited him in, it was lonely in Cabin 13 after all. Sometimes he would tell you all about some god you had never heard of while you sipped your coffee and got ready for the day. Most of the time he would read a book while you got ready. Just someone that made their presence known enough so you knew you weren’t alone.

You had someone to spar with now, someone to train with, someone to rant to when whatever remnants of your mortal family tried and failed spectacularly to reconnect with you. You had someone to explain the plot of whatever book you found secondhand in the Big House to.

You actually had someone now, someone that wouldn’t let you get rid of him. 

Liv Yaps: I am currently in the trenches and procrastinating by taking a whole week to write this fic, but here it is!! it exists now !! woo hoo everybody dance !! and yes, the fact that their entire relationship revolves around coffee is something that i added because my life revolves around my caffeine intake at the moment. but yeah i tried to keep it more simplistic but i also fear that it is not and that jason is extremely out of character yet again... for a character that i am literally obsessed with getting into the mind of, i do a strange job at writing him... anyways, enjoy !!

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Jason Grace Masterlist

@fl4weriessz . @babydolliexo . @lvsrckk . @fridasstrawberriess . @sunshinewhosketches . @vicariousandvain . @graylilacs . @jjsblueberry

Percy Jackson loves it when you fall asleep on him. He loves to just be doing something random with you, like helping him organize the mess that is his desk in Cabin 3 or listening with him to Grover’s ramblings about nature when you fall asleep on him. He just keeps you there.

Percy Jackson just adjusts you on his shoulder and wraps an arm around you like it’s a normal thing, and continues. Doesn’t flinch, doesn’t falter, just lets you lean into him and sleep. Keeps nodding along to Grover while tucking you into his side, fixing your hair so it isn’t in your face, and just… lets you sleep. He loves the way that you blink awake at him, eyes still glassy and cheeks flushed from sleep. The way that you hum a little “hmm?” At him when you finally wake up, confused as to what happened, and he mumbles a quick little explanation into your ear so you can catch up with whatever it is that’s going on. 

Luke Castellan likes the way that people look at him when you fall asleep on him. At first, he’s a bit surprised that you just fell asleep sitting upright, next to him at the campfire, with Apollo kids practically screaming whatever song they decided on in everyone’s ears. But then he realizes that this is just your version of normal, which, now being your boyfriend, means it’s his version of normal now, too.

Luke Castellan likes it when the two of you are in the middle of something, and you need him, you need him to lean on, to support your weight or help you stumble over to a bench as your lashes start to flutter and your limbs start to get all heavy. He loves that he is the person that you need, not your siblings, not your friends, him. He always sits down with you, lays you down across his lap so that he can thread his fingers through your hair while everyone else watches the way he hunches over you like some sort of dragon protecting his hoard. 

Jason Grace makes it his professional duty to always be there for you when the two of you started dating.  He learned to see it before it happens. He learned to see how your feet started to drag, or how your head would loll to the side and then jerk upright as you tried to stay awake, tried to pay attention to whatever it is you were doing. He always makes sure to be there when he sees it start happening, to make sure that his shoulder is there to cushion your head as your eyes flutter shut and your lips part with a sleepy little huff. He feels like it’s his duty to take care of you, so that, to show you he truly loves you, he’s going to be the one to take care of you.

Jason Grace makes sure to scoop you up whenever you fall asleep on him. He usually brings you to your bed, a couch, or the nearest soft surface he can find for you, even if it includes his chest. He tucks you in, makes sure that you have some water for when you wake up. He can’t help himself when his hands trace little, nonsensical patterns on the small of your back, fingers dipping underneath your shirt so that his calloused hands can trace silly little shapes on your skin while you sleep, so you know that he’s there. 

Leo Valdez thinks that it’s the best thing ever that he gets to be the one that you constantly fall asleep on. He’s obsessed with you, practically worships the ground that you walk on. The man is practically a human furnace, so of course, you fall asleep on him constantly. Sitting next to him in Bunker 9? You’re curled up across his lap where he’s sitting on his workbench like some sort of cat lounging in a sunbeam. He just keeps tinkering away, smiling down at you, careful not to let any grease drip on you while you sleep. Hanging out with him in the forge? He made you a specific chair in the corner where he keeps his things; it’s the perfect size for you to pull your legs up to your chest and curl into a little ball while you bask in the warmth from the forge’s fires and doze off.

Leo Valdez is so honored that he gets to be the one you fall asleep on. He makes it known that you are his priority whenever you start to doze off. When you start swaying during a training exercise, it’s him that the other campers wave over to come and help sit you down. When you fall asleep at the nightly campfire, he is the one who carries you back to your cabin with more care than he reserves for his most beloved inventions. 

Frank Zhang never knew what to do when you fell asleep on him. The first time that it happened, sitting next to him at dinner, your head lolling onto his shoulder, he panicked. He patted your cheek until you woke up and then promptly asked you if you meant to fall asleep on him of all people. You did, he was, after all, your boyfriend. After that, he calms down about it, lets it become a more regular thing, a thing that doesn’t freak him out. You start dozing off while reading on a bench? He’s there right next to you, arm around your shoulders, letting you sleep right there if the weather’s nice enough. Maybe he’ll even shift into a big, fluffy dog—put his paws in your lap so he can lie his head there like the world’s most attentive guard dog… Literally.

Frank Zhang isn’t afraid to haul you up against his chest and carry you somewhere nicer to sleep. If you fall asleep in a weird position at a table, one that made you complain about your neck last week, he just scoops you up, the tips of his ears burning up when you sleepily nuzzle into his chest, and deposits you on your bed. If he doesn’t have plans, he’ll stay with you. He’ll lie down right next to you, gather you right against his chest so you can feel how warm he is through the layers of your clothes, and twirl your hair around his fingers until you wake up. 

Liv Yaps: hey so let's pretend that this didn't just totally take over a month to finish... finals are killing me, i can't wait to not have to worry about them anymore omg but here we are !! i kind fo tried a new style?? mostly because i was trying to just pump this out and not make it too long but i also didn't want it to look like not a lot of writing?? idk lmk what you guys think. i know that the request only asked for percy, jason and leo but i had to include all my guys bc there just isn't enough frank content, it should be illegal tbh. i fear that you can tell which ones are my favorite *cough cought* jason and luke *cough cough* sorry not sorry. but anyway i hope that everyone likes it!!!

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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 ???

Masterlist

Jason Grace Taglist

Everyone already knew. They all knew what happened because you couldn’t control the volume of your own voice when you told Annabeth, when you told her with your shoulders shaking and your voice all wobbly with tears that you refuse to let fall just yet. 

Because if you cried, that meant it hurt you, and if it hurt you, that meant that it was real. And it didn’t feel real yet. So you didn’t cry when you told Annabeth, despite the tight, sharp, twisting feeling in your chest, like someone had punched through your chest to grab your heart, twisted it, and then squeezed. 

“I’ll kill him. I’m going to tell Chiron, and then I’ll kill him,” is what she said first when she wrapped you in a hug. It was bone-crushing, and she could feel your pulse racing where her cheek pressed against the side of your neck. She probably shouldn’t have hugged you so quickly like that, so unannounced, but she didn’t know what else to do. 

You couldn’t be upset at her for that, so you insisted that you didn’t want to tell Chiron and walked so fast back to your cabin with trembling hands that you might as well have been sprinting before Annabeth could insist on it. Because if you sprinted, that would mean you were running from something. If you were running from something, then that would mean you were scared. If you were scared, that would mean that something happened. If something happened, that would mean it was real. It wasn’t real yet, so you walked as fast as you could.

Before you could get far, though, Percy had a hand on your shoulder.

“I’m going to drown him in the lake—make sure he sinks all the way to the bottom.”

He didn’t hug you, he didn’t make a joke. It would have been better if he had made a joke, a dumb, stupid joke, to let the tension between your shoulders loosen just a little bit. But he didn’t, so the tension stayed tight as you plastered a tight smile across your face and nodded at him. Percy probably heard when you told Annabeth what had happened a bit too loudly. Or maybe Annabeth had just told him herself. 

-_-

Your hands didn’t stop shaking. Even as you sat at your cabin’s table for lunch. You almost dropped your fork twice in five minutes. You spilled your water down the front of your shirt when you tried to take a sip. 

Tears burned at the backs of your eyes, and the lump in your throat made it hard to chew. But you didn’t cry because it wasn’t that bad. It really wasn’t. You’d be fine.

Then Piper sat next to you at the table, hand on your knee. You tried not to shove it away by gripping your fork tighter. It made your hand shake worse.

“Do you want him to apologize? I can make him. Or I can make him piss his pants in front of everyone at the campfire tonight.”

You knew that she would. That’s just how Piper was. But it wasn’t that bad. 

So, you shook your head no and pressed your lips in a thin line because if you tried to talk, you would break down. And breaking down would mean that it had happened, that it really was that bad. So you didn’t talk. You went back to eating so Piper would get the message that you didn’t want to talk. She got it after a few minutes and then walked away, but not before she gave your knee another little squeeze. 

That made your breath hitch hard enough to choke on crumbs from your lunch. Before anyone could look at you, you started walking away from the dining pavilion because this wasn’t real. It wasn’t even that bad. You would be fine because it wasn’t that bad. No need for anyone to worry about you if it wasn’t that bad.

The first place you got to was the forge. It was so hot that sweat beaded your brow in a few minutes, and the constant, rhythmic clanking of metal was easy to focus on. So that’s what you did because you were fine. The heat of the forge felt like a reprieve, like it was cleansing. Like if you stayed there long enough, got close enough to the fire, it would burn off all the filth he left on you and cauterize all of your wounds.

“Piper told me what happened… I can set his closet on fire if you want?”

At least Leo made you laugh. Albeit a strangled, choked laugh, it was a laugh. The tension in your shoulders eased just enough for you to spit out a false reassurance at him.

“No, I’m fine.”

He raised an eyebrow at you, eyeing you like he was waiting for you to elaborate, like he knew that there was more because Leo wasn’t born yesterday. But he let you walk away. Because who was he to tell you that you weren’t fine?

And you were fine. Just peachy, really. 

-_-

You didn’t mean to walk to Cabin 1. You really didn’t, but you had been on autopilot all day since it happened. Which meant that you were fine, because if you weren’t, you wouldn’t be able to function like normal, right? If you weren’t alright, you wouldn’t be moving still, you wouldn’t be in control right now. And you were. So that meant that you were fine. 

You were sorry. You had to tell Jason that you were sorry because he was your boyfriend, and he should know that you were sorry. Maybe that’s why your body brought you here, because it knew that something was wrong before even you could admit it.

Jason opened the door, and his face was all scrunched up, chewing on his bottom lip. He didn’t say anything at first, just looked at you through crooked, smudged lenses. 

Jason heard rumors all day around camp, but he was waiting until you told him because unless it came from you, it wasn’t true. It was your story to tell, so he would wait for you. When Piper ran up to him after lunch, words coming out of her mouth so quickly, sentences somehow came out sounding more like an amalgamation of words, Jason just clenched his jaw so hard that it clicked. This wasn’t Piper’s story to tell; it was yours. Even if it was true, he wasn’t going to say anything about it until you did. 

You sucked in a ragged breath; it was wet and sounded like you were choking.

“I’m sorry—Jason, I’m so sorry.”

You practically threw yourself at him, burying your face into the warmth of his chest, wrapping your arms up and around his neck because it felt like your legs were shaking so bad you would fall down.

Jason didn’t say anything. His own hands just held you up, one hand rubbing circles between your shoulder blades with his knuckles while you finally—finally, cried. Your tears soaked through Jason’s shirt, maybe even your snot, too. You couldn’t help it because it was real. It had actually happened, and it was that bad. You weren’t okay, and you weren’t fine because it was real.

Jason stayed quiet, shutting the cabin door with his foot and letting his free hand find your scalp, fingertips rubbing the same way you did for him when he got too deep into his own head. He didn’t tell you not to be sorry. He didn’t tell you how you should be feeling, if you should be sad, if you should be angry, if you should be a combination of the two or something else entirely. 

“I didn’t like it, I swear I didn’t like it—“ you had choked out the words into his shoulder once he sat on the edge of his bed, keeping you close to his chest, in his lap so that he could hold your weight up for you.

Jason’s breath caught in his throat before he finally spoke. Thinking about what you meant made his head hurt.

“I know,” he whispered into your hair. 

Jason didn’t make threats at him or promises you had to dismiss. He just held you, he held on to you so that you didn’t shake apart like you had drunk too many of those energy drinks you liked. 

He just kept rubbing circles into your back and into your scalp, keeping his own hands moving so that you didn’t know that his hands were shaking too.

“He shouldn’t have done it.”

A beat. 

“Please don’t be sorry, please,” he rasped out against your temple. His voice was thick, and he was trying to not let himself sound so wrecked because this wasn’t about him. This was about you and how you felt. Not how he felt for you, not how he felt about this whole situation. There would be a time for that, and it wasn’t right now, not when you were sobbing into his chest, fingers twisted up in his shirt, trying to convince him that you didn’t like it, that you didn’t mean for it to happen, that you were sorry,

You shouldn’t have been sorry. Jason was sorry. But he didn’t say that because what would that do for you now? 

Nothing. 

He didn’t tell you that it was going to be okay; he didn’t tell you that everything would get better because that wasn’t something that he could control, that wasn’t something that he could guarantee for you. 

He wished that he could. In that moment, he would burn down Olympus to guarantee that for you. In a heartbeat, he would do unspeakable things to guarantee that for you. But he didn’t. Because right now, you needed him to make sure that the weight of this didn’t crush you entirely. He could do that. Take some of the load for you, that’s what he was good at, so that’s what he did.

You almost cried yourself sick; you were already halfway there by the time you got to Cabin 1. That feeling of unease in the pit of your stomach, churning and churning like some traumatic stew of self-repulsion and guilt. 

But Jason just held you. He whispered sweet little truths into your hair until you believed them. Because the only thing that he could guarantee was that—the truth.

“I love you so much.”

“You’re my favorite person.”

“You’ll never be alone if you don’t want to.”

“I’ll never leave you.”

“You never have to tell me what happened.”

There were other things that Jason wanted to say, but he didn’t, because it wouldn’t help. They were things that he wanted to say to make himself better, to make himself feel useful, but this wasn’t about him. This was about you.

He wanted to say, “You’ll never have to see his face again because I’m going to bury him.”

He wanted to say, “I’ll go to Chiron with you so you don’t have to go alone.”

He wanted to say, “I’m going to make sure that you never feel like this again.”

But he didn’t. So he just held you until crying turned into sniffling. Until you finally looked up from his shoulder and at his face, blinking your red-rimmed eye at him, your lashes clumping together from the tears. 

You didn't tell Jason everything. But once you started talking, started recounting everything that happened, sure, that tightness in your chest came back, but it was different now. It wasn't the same ugly twist that it was before. 

Because Jason didn't look at you with pity, he looked at you with love and devotion. Like you could just say the word, and Jason would make him disappear. But only if you told him to, only ever then. 

That tightness in your chest is there because, despite everything, Jason still loved you. He didn't look at you like you were broken, he didn't make you feel like you had to comfort him, and that made your chest tighten from something warmer, less sharp. It made you feel like you would be okay, despite how real it felt; you were going to be okay.

Liv Yaps: thank you sm @livvieeeeeee for reading this before I posted it!! ily girlie!!! hey so this was just something that i word-vomited up after consuming too much caffeine while being in a depressive hole lately, so i just... got it all out and it turned into this. i probably won't write a lot of stuff like this in the future, so if this isn't your jam, don't worry haha. hopefully maybe it helps a few other people besides myself. this is such a purely self-indulgent fic that i really just wrote for myself, like i wrote this purely to make myself feel better after a super shitty past few weeks haha. it's mostly based on my own experiences and what i wished happened after my own experiences so... lol if you know me irl no you do not !!!!

Masterlist

Jason Grace Taglist

You didn’t mean to find the tapes. It was a slow day at Camp Half-Blood, and you were bored. Your feet just brought you to the Big House, to the chest shoved under the bay window. It was filled with board games, packs of cards, and random craft supplies. 

For some reason, all of your siblings were busy—your friends seemingly disappeared into thin air. Your boyfriend was busy training, or overexerting himself, as you liked to say.

“This isn’t Camp Jupiter—you aren’t Praetor anymore,” you tried to remind him every time you caught him training for hours on end instead of just taking a break.

“Y/N, I know, but I like doing this. It keeps me busy,” he always seemed to respond, like he was trying to convince himself as opposed to you.

He never managed to convince you, but you played along for his sake, to preserve whatever facade Jason felt like he needed to keep up, even in front of you. So that day, you let him train, let him give his undivided attention to how his body seemed to move on autopilot, how the angles of his face seemed to get sharper, how his shoulders seemed to get stiffer.

While Jason was doing that, you knelt down in front of the chest in the Big House, digging through the chest, ignoring the board games that were missing pieces from years of abuse from kids who never stayed in one place to have anything of their own. Ignoring the cards whose corners were bent and peeling and smelled like they had been rained on and never dried properly. 

That’s when you found them.

A box set of VHS tapes.

-_-

You kept them in your room for a while—honestly, they were forgotten under your bed for a week or two before you had the perfect time to watch them. 

It was a weekend, and most of your siblings went home to see their friends from school, so there wasn’t a lot for you to do. So you grabbed your bag, shoved in the VHS tapes, a bag of pretzels, your sorted blanket, sticky notes, and a pen.

You would relax today. A day of relaxation after a few months of summer at Camp Half-Blood.

The day of relaxation started with a sticky note strategically placed on the door of Cabin One. 

I’ll be in the Big House when you wanna hang out, look for me in the back room :)

Then it was off to the Big House, waving at Mr. D and asking Chiron how he was—having a brief conversation about how your summer work was going—all while you made your way to the back room, where there was a big, boxy television that wasn’t connected to cable, and you only ever watched The Lion King and The Rescuers on with the younger campers when they had a good first week.

It only took a few minutes for the back room to be transformed from the oftentimes stale, dated room into a cozy, nest-like place for you to watch your newfound VHS tapes. The blanket—along with the other throw blankets you were able to find in a closet down the hall—was layered and draped over the worn-out sofa so it was easier to pretend that the springs didn’t dig into your butt when you sat on it for more than fifteen minutes at a time. 

The bag of pretzels was already open and set up next to the mound of blankets, ready to be munched on mindlessly while experiencing whatever was contained on those tapes. 

The cover looked like it was some sort of legal drama? Something like Law & Order but older? Significantly fewer women characters, only one going by the faded picture of what you could only assume was the regular cast, all under the name of the show, Order in the Court: Seasons 1-4.

There seemed to be a tape for each season in the box, and they were from a year that seemed to have at least twenty episodes in a season.

Fruitful find.

This would last you maybe the whole weekend if you were left uninterrupted. A great way to waste your time while you waited for Camp life to get a bit more interesting. 

Once you popped the tape into the television, it was go-time. 

-_-

You managed to get through the first half of season one. 

It was interesting, to say the least.

Very dated, one could add. 

It seemed to be centered around an assistant district attorney and all of the other people he worked with. The cases were interesting in the way that old television made crazy scenarios logical in shows, and after the second episode, you already had a favorite character. 

Her name was Vanessa, and she was the courtroom stenographer. She had this dry humor and that kind of auburn hair that all actresses seemed to have in whatever era this was filmed in. It seemed to be a bit that the camera would zoom in on her eyes whenever someone said something crazy. Her eyes were so blue, so intense, like the kind of blue that somehow was able to transcend the fuzzy lines in the television and speak. Vanessa had the kind of eyes that you were able to have conversations with without even talking. 

Yeah, so she was your favorite. 

The plush faux-fur blanket wrapped around you like a cocoon of comforting warmth, and the half-finished bag of pretzels was the best kind of relaxation that you could have at the moment. It was a nice break from almost dying from monsters trying to eat you.

“Hey, got your note—just finished a great few rounds sparring with Percy,” a familiar voice pierced through the sound of overdramatic courtroom dialogue, meaning that Jason was finally done with whatever fresh new hell he considered training. “He’s pouting about it to Annabeth ‘cause I won three out of the five rounds.”

Which would explain why it’s raining outside. Percy really is pouting right now.

You sat up on the couch to grab the television remote and pause it so not only could you hear that proud tone that wiggled its way into Jason’s voice that he tried to hard to hide (even when it was well deserved), but also so you didn’t miss any of the show because it was getting good!

Jason was smiling at you, that pale sliver of scar tissue his lip catching the light in a way that the rest of him didn’t when he bit his bottom lip between his teeth because he always tried so hard not to brag, not to seem smug when he beat Percy, but his smile got a bit larger and his nose scrunched just so to give him away. His blond hair was damp—presumably from a post-training shower and the rain outside—and stuck up in every which way, like he had run his hands through it, trying to dry it faster only to make it static, like he had stuck his finger into an outlet. He blinked down at you on the couch through his smudged glasses as if you were a surprise, as if he didn’t expect you to actually be where you said you would be on your note. 

Like he was surprised that you cared enough not to lie to him. Like you were some kind of divine being to wait for him. 

“Good job, he’s probably going to be crabby about it for a hot minute,” you laughed, scooting over on the couch and patting next to you so that Jason could join you. He plopped down, arm wrapping around your shoulders and pulling you in all your blanketed-cocooned glory close to his chest. 

Jason’s always loved having you close to him, not in an overly romantic way, just close enough so that he knew you were real, so he could remind himself that you weren’t going to disappear if he let the tension go from between his shoulders.

So, when you bolted upright with a sudden, excited noise, Jason quite literally whined at the absence of you against his chest. He whined like a dog was presented with a rotisserie chicken only to have it taken away at the last second. He was lucky that you were too excited about whatever you remembered to tease him about it.

“Oh! Jason, you wouldn’t believe what I found!” You were practically squealing with excitement as you grabbed the VHS box set and waved it around in Jason’s direction, as if somehow the nonstop motion would make it easier for him to understand your excitement. “It’s so good! You have to watch it with me—I’m in the middle of an episode where they’re prosecuting this dude who eats eyeballs!”

Jason shuddered in utter horror because literally, what the hell?

“The defense is trying to plead temporary insanity, but this guy absolutely knew what he was doing,” you continue to ramble on, hands waving around enthusiastically as you explain the plot of the current episode that you’re on, going into probably too much detail for Jason’s stomach. Jason purses his lips together, scrunching his face in a way that makes his glasses go a bit crooked on his nose as you explain, torn between disgust and endearment because he adores seeing you so excited over something.

“I mean—sure, I guess I would be missing out if I didn’t witness them put away that… guy,” Jason deadpans, but then relents as he pulls you back to his chest while you hit play on the remote. 

The episode resumes in the middle of a witness recounting her experience, something about how she saw the defendant talking to one of the victims on a street corner. At every new detail, Jason winced and cringed into you, his arm wrapping tighter around you, hand rubbing at your arm through your blanket, thumb going in circles to mostly distract himself from the description of how someone would even remove an eyeball from someone’s head to eat it. It was gross. He didn’t even understand how you could stomach it, but every time he looked at you instead of the television, he just saw you engrossed in morbid fascination, enthralled by the outdated show. How this was ever allowed to air on daytime television was beyond him.

The show’s cadence was predictable for you now. Back and forth from the assistant district attorney to the witness, to a quick pan over to the defense lawyer, and repeat until the end of the witness’s testimony. Then, a quick zoom into Vanessa, the courtroom stenographer, to show whatever face she made in response to the drama of the courtroom and the sarcastic remark she made to lighten the mood. 

When the screen showed Vanessa, zoomed in on her auburn hair, business clothes, and oh-so-blue eyes, Jason’s grip on your arm went from comforting to harsh. His grip was comparable to a vice, like the time he had taken you flying over the Long Island Sound, and you wiggled too much for his comfort, and he thought you were going to fall.

You turned your head to look at Jason, to ask him why he was holding on to your arm like he was afraid of dropping you from two hundred feet in the air, to look at his face, and hopefully get a peek into his mind, like it would explain whatever had gotten into him and made him stiffen up like a board.

Jason’s face was pale, his eyes had a glazed and faraway look to them, like he wasn’t really looking at the television anymore. You would have thought that he looked like he was going to be sick, but he was practically vibrating with anxious energy all of a sudden, like he was going to blow a fuse like the old electrical box outside of the Big House if he didn’t get up from the couch right now. 

“Hey, Jason? Earth to Jason—“ You turned on the couch to face him, trying to get his attention, maneuvering yourself to get a better look at the too-still Jason Grace who sat beside you.

He didn’t move his head first; Jason’s eyes moved first when you said his name. They went from unfocused and glassy, trained on the television, or maybe something past the television, to you. Head still facing forward, trained on the television, but his eyes found you first. Then he turned his head, like it was playing catch-up with his eyes. 

His motions were mechanical, like he was on the same autopilot mindset that he entered into during training or a fight. But this time there was no fight. Just you, Jason, the television, and the sound of rain beating on the windows of the Big House. 

“Sorry, I just—I just remembered something…” he told you with a strange hint of far-away in his voice that you hadn’t really heard from him before, “I just—just remembered that I have to go, uh—find Leo for something, I promised him I would help him with—with a thing.”

Liar. 

Jason was never good at lying to you.

But you didn’t argue. Because he stood up just as quickly as his mood changed. Jason stood up like he was part automaton. Like he was just told to march in lockstep as Praetor with the Legion. His shoulders squared, spine straightening like there was a sword threatening to cut through his ribs if his posture wasn’t perfect.

“Oh, okay,” you mumbled, pulling the blanket around yourself tighter, to make up for the loss of warmth when Jason stood up, “just, uh, have fun, I guess.”

Then Jason practically marched out of the backroom and the Big House. You didn’t follow him.

-_-

You knew that Jason didn’t remember that he had to go help Leo with something. You knew that, but you didn’t want to call him out on it, because instead of telling you, he would just look at you, with those eyes, the ones that made you feel like you just kicked a puppy when in reality you just wanted to know what was bothering your boyfriend. Those eyes that made it seem like really opening up to you would somehow get him smote by the gods. 

So you just let him go. 

It didn’t take long for watching the show to become unpleasant once Jason left. You felt restless; not a single position on this gods-forsaken couch was comfortable, and your knees had started to ache. 

You paused the tape because you decided that you would explode if you spent any more time wrapped up in that blanket on this couch. After throwing all of your things back into your bag, your legs had already started to bring you back to your cabin. 

On the way from the Big House to your cabin, you passed the training grounds only to see Jason.

You weren’t surprised. Not at all. If anything, you should have guessed that this is where he went when he went stiff like that.

His face was red with exertion, his chest was heaving, but he didn’t seem like he wanted to stop training with what looked like a straw dummy. Just punch after punch, kick after kick. A steady rhythm of thumps and thwacks. He would probably have bruises later. 

You couldn’t let him keep going like that. Not when he left you in that backroom the way that he did, like he was being threatened with a dagger to the neck. 

“Jason.”

He didn’t look at you, nor did he stop as you walked up to him. The closer you got, the more you could see of him. He looked exhausted, his arms were shaking, and there was a thin layer of sweat on him. It made him look like he was glowing. A reminder as to who his father was. 

“What’s up?” He still didn’t stop, just circling the dummy so that he didn’t have to face your direction. He was out of breath, but even then, his response came out short, snippy. 

You couldn’t help it. It was almost ridiculous. “What’s up?” Like it was just another Tuesday, and not like he had turned into a little soldier-robot at the drop of a dime for no apparent reason.

Yeah, sure, Grace, play dumb. 

The snort that you tried hard to stifle just forced its way out, loud and abrasive. It cut through the awkward tension and made it something worse. Something sharp, something with edges that, if not handled correctly, would hurt.

It was startling enough that Jason finally stopped, turning around to look at you, just in time to see you roll your eyes at him.

“Are you joking?” You didn’t mean to sound so upset, but it was hard not to be upset when your boyfriend made it almost impossible to ask him what was wrong. You’re arms were crossed over your chest, weight leaning on one leg. You couldn’t have picked a more dramatic stance, but it was instinct because he was trying to pretend that it didn’t just happen.

Jason looked at you. His lips pressed together in a thin, firm line as he searched your face for any sign that you were joking, that you weren’t actually going to ask him about earlier, that he didn’t make you upset. That you didn’t look like you wanted to leave him. 

But you didn’t leave. You actually went to him. Not away. Sure, it took like an hour, but Jason felt like maybe he deserved that. The same way he felt like he needed to feel his muscles burn for a while, to feel like he was breaking down just to get built up a little bit more, the lactic acid singeing away at the hurt of seeing her.

“Y/n, I-I’m sorry, I just couldn’t keep looking at her,” Jason sighed, ragged and tired, his shoulders slumping over as he inched closer to you, like he wasn’t sure if it was okay for him to come within a five-foot radius of you, even though you were the one who approached him.

You scrunched up your face and threw up your hands in confusion as if to say “explain” because who the fuck was “her?” 

Jason sucked in a breath through his teeth when he realized that you didn’t know.

“Uhm—well, the uh, the lady who was typing, in the courtroom on that show,” Jason started, inching even closer, step by step, inch by inch. He looked like he was trying to decide whether or not he wanted to cry or scream. “That’s my mom.”

Oh.

So that made sense. 

And now you felt like an asshole. 

“Shit, Jason.”

You knew that Jason’s mom was a sore subject. He told you a little bit about her when you first started dating because, of course, you had asked about the little scar on his lip. Beryl Grace was an alcoholic who neglected her children to the point of leaving a two-year-old alone long enough for him to somehow get his hands on a stapler and try to eat it because there was nothing else for him. 

You knew she was in the entertainment business, an old TV show actress, but you never felt like it was ever appropriate to ask Jason what she was even in. 

“Yeah. Shit,” Jason echoed back to you, his voice a bit hollow, his lips pressing together in a subdued frown, like he wasn’t letting himself be sad. His breath hadn’t evened out yet from sparring with the dummy, but it was ragged in a different way, not in an overexerted way, it was ragged in a sharp way. 

“I didn’t even realize—I’m sorry, Jason,” your hand scrubbed over your face because how did you not notice the eyes.

Those blue eyes that seemed to be talking to you through the screen without any words were the same as Jason’s. It was because her hair was dyed auburn for the show. That’s why you didn’t put it together. Once you imagined Vanessa with blonde hair—oh gods—that was Jason. She was practically Jason in a pencil skirt. 

Jason just shrugged at you and made a noncommittal noise. 

“Not your fault, how were you supposed to know?” He frowned for real this time, fingers picking at his nails, like it could somehow distract him from this conversation, his breath hitching. “It’s just weird to see her like that. All put together? I dunno, I know it’s all fake, and I barely even remember her, but it was just…”

He trailed off only to shrug again, like he couldn’t come up with the right words anymore. You could tell that he was forcing himself to breathe through his nose by the way his nostrils were flaring and how he was pressing his lips together.

Since you came over to him, he had only moved closer to you, but not too close, like he was afraid that you would be mad at him if he tried to inch any further into your personal bubble. He wasn’t exactly subtle about it either. Jason was looking at you with glassy blue eyes, eyelids drooping from exhaustion, physical or emotional, you weren’t sure. It could be both. His breathing was loud enough for you to hear, ragged and uneven. 

You closed the gap. Wrapping your arms around his neck and hugging him. He didn’t need you to be upset at him right now. 

“I’m sorry,” he whispered into your hair. It muffled his voice, but it didn’t muffle how sad he sounded, “I should have just told you—gods, I’m such an idiot, I just should have just told you.”

The next few minutes were filled with quiet, comforting words mumbled into Jason’s sweat-damp shirt, your hands carding through his static blond hair until his breathing evened out.

“I’m not upset, just tell me next time.”

“You’re okay, don’t worry.”

“I’m not going to leave you, Jason.”

His arms were wrapped tightly around your waist, like he could somehow merge the two of you, as if he squeezed hard enough, you two could never be separated. 

“Thank you, Y/n,” he breathed into your hair, small and soft. Not how you would usually describe Jason Grace’s voice. 

It started raining again. Maybe it was from Jason, or maybe it was still from Percy. It didn’t matter.

“How about you rinse off real quick, and we can pop in the Star Trek tape that I saw last week in the Big House?” You suggested with a little smile against the skin of his throat.

“Yeah—yeah, that sounds good.”

Liv Yaps: hey so i did NOT mean for this to take so long... pls forgive me !! but hopefully you enjoy reading this, i tried my best to make it angsty but also fluffy towards the end... if you can't tell, writing angst is hard for me because i feel like i have to really make it make sense for the character and so this took a while. but anyway i present to you emotionally constipated jason grace! also big thanks to @livvieeeeeee for reading this before i posted :))

Masterlist

Jason Grace Taglist:

@fl4weriessz . @babydolliexo . @lvsrckk . @fridasstrawberriess . @sunshinewhosketches . @vicariousandvain . @graylilacs . @jjsblueberry

Jason Grace was sitting at your desk reading a novel on the first Punic War when he heard a crash in the bathroom.

About an hour and a half earlier you had been talking about what you described as “the first everything shower of spring.” Jason didn’t realize how big of a deal a shower could be, but after you told him what it entailed he had gotten comfortable at your desk and started reading his book in your dorm at New Rome University to pass the time. For an hour and a half he read his book listening to the sounds of the running water and you singing along to your playlist in the bathroom. He spent most of that time smiling while he read.

The crash consisted of plastic crinkling, metal clanking, and then a thump. Jason jumped out of your desk chair with his heart in his throat and essentially sprinted over to the door that joined your dorm room and the bathroom.

“Uh— hey,” Jason knocked on the door with his ear against it, “Love? What was that?” He tried not to sound panicked, but his head was running through a list of worst-case scenarios as he waited for a response from you.

There was nothing but running water and a song with a guitar that was a little too aggressive for his liking. Maybe there was a groan, but he couldn’t tell over the sounds of the music and the running water.

Jason didn’t appreciate the lack of speaking on the other side of the door and used that to justify him opening it to see what was happening. He felt guilty invading your privacy, but what the hell was that crash?

-_-

You were in the shower and it was hot. Maybe a little bit too hot. But the steam in the room felt nice on your usually cold skin and you were almost done anyway. All you had left to do was shave the little bits of hair that you forgot about above your left ankle and rinse the conditioner out of your hair, and then you would be free. Free to go do homework with your boyfriend who was waiting for you in your dorm room. 

You were listening to the new Thornhill album as you bent down, hinging at your hips to keep your leg straight, to shave the hair above your ankle. It was nice, quick, and easy. But then you stood back up, and you felt it.

Shit.

Your head felt too light and your vision started to blur. You heard your heartbeat in your ears and it was getting faster as you braced yourself against the shower wall. You dropped the razor that you were using onto the shower floor, not caring too much about it at the moment.

Just have to rinse the conditioner out of my hair. Then I’ll sit down and this will go away, maybe have a sip of water—

You were wrong. Your head started to spin and your body felt hotter than it actually was. 

Then you blacked out.

-_-

Jason opened the door and was hit with a wall of steam and the smell of cherry vanilla (your shampoo that he very much enjoyed when your hair was in his face). The steam quickly fogged his glasses but he was still able to see the outline of your body on the bathroom floor and hear a groan.

Jason quickly entered the bathroom while trying to wipe the steam off of his glasses with his fingers. He saw you on your back on top of the plastic shower liner that was now on the bathroom floor and he felt a pang in his chest. The tension rod that held the curtain up was on the floor too, a little bit too close to your head.

He quickly focused on you, obviously disoriented and your face usually pale considering how hot the room was from the water. Jason quickly kneeled down next to you, gentle hands on your head and shoulder. He could see your eyes, half-lidded and glassy. The water beads on your skin were rolling off of your body to drop on to the shower curtain. His hands were clammy and seeing your face so pale made his stomach turn. 

“Hey, love, can you hear me?” He asked, trying to keep his voice steady as he processed that you probably fainted in the shower and took down the shower curtain, creating the crash that he heard. He needed you to respond, he needed to know that you were okay. Jason grabbed your hand, the one that was closest to him, needing to make sure that you were here.

Your ears were still ringing and you could hear the blood pumping in your ears, but you could also hear Jason. You felt him squeeze your hand and you slowly turned your head to the side to face him.

“Mhm,” you hummed, looking up at his face trying to blink your vision back to normal, “don’t think I hit my head.”

“Let’s get you up, okay?” Jason felt the tension in his shoulders leave, he didn’t even realize how tight they had been until he heard your voice, slow and a little clumsy, but it was still your voice. 

You were okay.

“Yeah, yeah,” you groaned, slowly starting to feel normal again, “I— I still have conditioner in my hair, though.”

“That’ll have to wait, love,” Jason looked over your face one last time, smiling softly before he spoke again, “Think you can stand?” He was relieved to see the color returning to your face, the glazed-over look leaving your eyes.

“I don’t know if I can get up,” you felt shaky, and your head was feeling better, but you didn’t trust your legs to keep you up right now.

“Don’t worry, I got you,” Jason nodded and stood up. He leaned over you to shut the water off and quickly turned off the aggressive music coming from the speaker. He turned around to grab your towel that hung off of its hook on the back of the bathroom door and kneeled down again. He smiled at you, the little scar above his lip changing shape as his mouth moved into that familiar shape. 

“I’ll dry you off and then you can lay down for a bit?” Jason asked, but he already started to dry you off with the towel. His glasses still had condensation on them from when he tried to wipe the steam off.

Cute.

You felt your head starting to return to normal and your body less shaky. It was strange, how quickly you felt bad, passed out, and then started feeling better. But, hey, that’s vasovagal syncope for you.

“Yeah, but I still have conditioner in my hair,” you mumbled, moving the wet hair out of your face. You were annoyed that you couldn’t have waited to pass out until after you were done with the shower. “I passed out because it was too hot in the shower, I’m fine, Jason.”

“I can braid it back for now,” he raised his eyebrows at you, crinkling his forehead, “are you sure? How are you feeling now?”

“I’m alright now, I’m feeling normal. It was definitely from the hot water, I bent down and then stood back up too quickly,” you explained, confident that’s what happened.

“If you insist, love,” he smiled again, more relaxed now that you sounded like normal; steady, and quick.

Jason made quick work out of drying you off. He was so gentle, afraid that if he pressed too hard with the towel you would somehow pass out again. When he was done he sat you up, still on top of the shower curtain and liner, using one hand to hold the back of your neck and head while the other pulled you up and forward. He moved you slowly, looking only at your face, his eyes only ever looking at your own. He needed to know that you would stay okay as he moved you. Most of the steam in the room had dissipated and it was a much cooler temperature now.

Jason scooted on the floor, on top of the shower liner, so that he was behind you, his legs on either side of you as you sat up. He carefully ran his fingers through your still-wet hair, it was slick with conditioner. He did that until there were no knots. Gently, and slowly, Jason began to braid your hair with his calloused fingers, making sure that he never tugged too hard. He tied it off with a hair tie that was around his wrist, he always wore one just in case you forgot. He liked having the things that you needed.

“Okay,” Jason leaned over to grab your towel again, “you’re gonna lay down now.”

“Fine,” you grumbled, still upset that not only you had passed out in the shower in the first place, but also at the fact there was still conditioner in your hair, “I think I’m fine now.”

“You should still lay down, love,” Jason started to move again, crouching down next to you, “at least for a little bit, drink some water? And to make sure you didn’t hit your head.”

“I don’t think that I did, nothing hurts,” you turned your head to Jason as he crouched down at your side. His clothes were wet now, from sitting on the shower liner and braiding your hair.

“Well, that’s good,” Jason began to scoop you up, one arm under your knees and one around your waist, hoisting you up, standing with you in his arms. He held you to his chest thoughtfully, his nose instinctually pressing into the top of your head and breathing in the smell of your conditioner. 

Cherries and vanilla. Tart and sweet.

Jason carried you over to your bed, placing you down softly, making sure that your head was on the pillow.

“I’m alright, Jason,” you insisted, truly feeling alright now. Your head was back to normal, you really just felt thirsty and a little embarrassed if anything.

“I know, but you literally just passed out in the shower,” Jason looked at you, eyes wide, full of concern and glasses still smudged from when he wiped them with his fingers, “you should lay down for a bit, I’ll grab you some water? I’m assuming you haven’t had enough today- considering you just passed out in the shower.” He said the last bit with his eyes narrowed at you, his blue eyes almost entirely filled with the black of his pupils as he looked at your face. Your hair was pulled back in a braid so his view was unobstructed, your skin was clean and damp, and he wanted to press a kiss on every square inch of it.

“Okay, Jason,” you looked back at his face, it was full of so much concern that you agreed to his requests just to make sure that he felt better about this, “I’ll stay in bed for a bit, but no more than an hour.”

Jason smiled and nodded, content with your answer. His hand found yours again and gave it a squeeze.

“I’ll grab your water and then clean up the bathroom,” he said as if he was telling you that he was going to check the emails on his laptop. His eyes met with yours through his smudged glasses one more time before he turned around, looking around the room for your water bottle. He brought it to you the second he found it, undoing the lid for you as he handed it your way. He didn’t even wait for you to say thank you when he planted a kiss on your temple and walked back into the connected bathroom.

You could see into the bathroom as you sat in your bed, drinking the water that Jason handed you. You watched as Jason picked up the tension rod that held the shower curtain and liner, looking at the shower and trying to figure out exactly where it went back. His eyes narrowed and his face scrunched a bit as he wedged the tension rod with the curtain and liner back into place. His aquiline nose was more pronounced on his face when he scrunched it like that. You loved that face. Sometimes you would say silly things or reference topics he didn’t know enough on to talk to you about just so you could see him scrunch his face like that. It made his glasses go crooked on his nose and his blue eyes peak through as he squinted. 

Jason grabbed another towel and started to wipe the water off of the floor that had spilled out of the shower, he grabbed the razor that you dropped, putting it in its usual place. He walked back out, leaving the door open so that the bathroom could continue to air out. 

“I can’t believe that your bathroom doesn’t have a fan in there,” Jason huffed as he sat down in your desk chair and turned to look at you. Your desk was perpendicular to the side of your bed, right next to where your pillow was. Your bed was lofted high enough to fit your shoe rack and two drawers for your clothes that didn’t fit in the closet, so when you laid down in your bed, you were at eye level with Jason when he sat on your chair. “And no window? Do they want you to suffocate in there?”

Jason didn’t have a fan or a window in the bathroom connected to his dorm either.

“I know, maybe I should invest in a dehumidifier or something,” you chuckled out, amused with how Jason was complaining about the poor design of your bathroom.

“Are— are you feeling better now?” Jason rolled the chair closer to the bed, so he could be closer to you. He reached out his hand and took your hand that wasn’t holding the water bottle. You took small, little sips.

“Yeah, I’m fine now,” you reassured him, wanting to finish rinsing the conditioner out of your hair and put clothes on. You started to scoot towards the edge of the bed despite the slight panic you could see growing on Jason’s face. “I can go back in and just rinse the conditioner out—“ Jason interrupted you, not letting you finish your thought, something he always made sure to avoid doing to you.

“I’ll help.”

You looked at Jason, about to laugh.

“You want to help me rinse the conditioner out of my hair?” You couldn’t help but chuckle, “I feel alright now, Jason, really.”

“Let me help,” Jason looked up at you, blue eyes wide and pleading through his smudged lenses, that little scar above his lip stretching as he opened his mouth, “Please, love.”

You let out a huff.

That damn face.

“Fine, Jason,” you conceded, hands up, surrendering to your boyfriend's demands to help you finish showering.

He smiled at you, lips pressed together, his eyes narrowing and his nose scrunching up just a bit.

“Just give me a minute and then I’ll help you get into the bathroom,” Jason shuffled back to the bathroom, turning the water back on and coming back to you on your bed. Without a word, he scooped you up from the bed and carried you into the bathroom, despite your protests that you could walk just fine.

There was a clean towel laid out on the floor, right next to the shower. He set you down gently on top of it and smiled when he heard you grumble about how you could stand on your own to finish showering. He knew that you could, but that didn’t mean that you had to.

“I’m gonna lay you down and I’ll rinse the conditioner out for you,” his voice was so soft, like if he said it any differently you would shatter like glass, but he was still firm enough for you to decide to stop grumbling.

You let Jason unbraid your hair, taking his time, making sure that he didn’t accidentally pull pieces of your hair when they got caught on his hangnails or the rough edges of his hands. He laid your head down in the shower, grabbing the shower head and he began to rinse the conditioner out of your hair. 

The water was nowhere near as hot as it was earlier, but it was still warm, it gave you the chills when the water dripped past your hair and down your neck. Jason made sure that the towel that was wrapped around you was tight enough when he saw the goosebumps on your skin. One of his hands held the shower head while the other went back and forth from covering your eyes to make sure that water didn’t drip into them and massaged the conditioner out of your hair. He took his time, not wanting to get any more water on you than he had to. 

Soon the bathroom smelt like your soap again, like cherry and vanilla, tart and sweet. 

Soon the conditioner was out of your hair and Jason turned the water off, placing the shower head back in its holder.

“All done.”

“Thank you, Jason,” You smiled up at him, he was grinning at you, enjoying how your hair felt in his hands. He liked feeling something so soft in his rough hands. He squeezed the water out of your hair, the water splattering on the shower floor and dripping down his hands. He didn’t care, he was just glad that you were letting him take care of you. He just wanted to make sure that you were alright.

You sat up, looking at your boyfriend's face, his eyes were practically shaped like hearts and it made your own heart flutter. “I can stand up now,” you grabbed his hands with your own and held them tightly, “I’m okay, I promise.”

Jason was hesitant to believe you, but you were squeezing his hands so hard that it was obvious you were okay and he nodded. Jason didn’t let go of your hands as you stood up, but he let you stand up by yourself.

“Get dressed and I’ll take care of everything in here,” he leaned into your ear, his voice soft. You padded back into your dorm room to get dressed with your hair now pulled back and twisted up in a claw clip while Jason wiped up more water on the floor and picked up the towel, he put away the various things that were out of place in the bathroom even if they were like that before your shower today. He just wanted to make your day easier for you, especially after what just happened.

You stepped into sweatpants and were shrugging on a baggy shirt when Jason came out of the bathroom. He walked up to you and without a word he hugged you. He was warm and his arms wrapped around your arms, holding you close to him. His nose found its place at the top of your head, inhaling the familiar smell of your hair. 

“I’m glad that you’re okay,” he mumbled, his voice muffled from the way he was pressing his face into the top of your head, “I was scared for a minute there.” His voice was smaller than usual, the confidence and self-assurance that usually came with Jason was gone for a brief moment.

You leaned into him, unable to wrap your arms around him because his arms were trapping your own by your side.

“I didn’t mean to scare you,” you smiled into his chest, letting yourself absorb the warmth that radiated through the scratchy material of his t-shirt. You pressed your lips into his chest, kissing him through the shirt

He smiled into your still-wet hair, taking a deep breath through his nose.

Cherries and vanilla. 

Tart and sweet.

“So, love, I seem to remember that you had an essay on the goddess Mefitis that you needed help with?”

Liv Yaps: hey guys lol so me in my fanfic era??? i wrote this after i almost passed out in my shower this past week and went what if i did pass out and my bf was here and then went what if my bf was jason grace? and voila magic now we have this?? also i say it in the fic but the reader passes out from vasovagal syncope which is just when your blood pressure drops suddenly (#womeninstem) its happened to me more than a handful of times so this was lowkey just a self-insert lmao sorry if it sucks i haven't written anything like this since like middle school haha but anyway it's all under the cut!