#myjasper

Jason is usually the one out of the two of them who is awake and out of bed first, making breakfast as his wife shuffles in and grumbles until she’s finished her first coffee. He said goodbye to his rare lie in when they had their first child and honestly, he doesn’t miss them as much as Piper does. He’s always been a morning person.

Which is why Piper isn’t a million miles off to assume that something isn’t right. She’s always been so good at picking up on his mood. She dismissed it as a daughter of Aphrodite thing, but it was more than that. She was observant. But she cared enough to observe in the first place. She’d also learnt pretty well over their years together when to prompt and push him and when to leave him be. He’d gotten pretty good at that with her too.

He supposed that’s part of the love and commitment thing.

“I’m fine,” he tells her, smiling reassuringly.

She smiles back, but there’s something left unsaid there, while their daughters eat their cereal at the kitchen table and the radio plays happily in the corner and the sun shines through the open window behind Piper’s head. And despite that unsaid thing, Jason is happy. He’s so goddamn content in this moment that he has all of this.

“Mommy, can we watch ??” Blair asks.

“Fifteen minutes and then you can play outside.”

Blair grins a megawatt smile at her sister like they’ve just achieved mission impossible and Kyle smiles back as they climb out of their chairs and race towards the living room. Piper and Jason sit quietly for a little while longer as the sound of cartoons and their girls laughter and quiet disagreement over the remote add to the background noise of their morning.

Piper is thumbing her way through a book with a complicated title, a frown pinching her features and letting him know it’s a little more difficult than she’d bargained for. Jason has today’s paper in front of him, turning pages for some good news. It doesn’t come.

He ends up on the crossword puzzle and is trying to decipher eleven down (thinking elsewhere) when Piper finds her way over to him, sitting nearly across his lap.

“Hello,” he says, smiling up at her.

“Hi.” She kisses the side of his head. “Preoccupied,” she says.

“Hm?”

She taps her finger on the page. “Eleven down.”

“Oh yeah.”

As he fills it in, Piper’s phone goes off. An alarm. “Girls!” she calls. “TV off please.”

There are some protesting groans, but they do as they’re told and a moment later, Jason hears the patio doors slide open and the girls’ voices bound into the garden.  

Piper taps his cheek. “But also you.”

He lifts his head to give her a questioning look.

“Preoccupied,” she repeats. “What’s up?”

Jason sighs a little. He abandons the paper but keeps the pencil in hand, tapping it against the worktop as he holds Piper in his lap with his other hand. She’s warm and comfortable and familiar against him. It settles him.

“Just. I’ve been having dreams, you know.”

Piper adjusts his glasses. “About what?”

“Dying.” A moment passes. He doesn’t quite look at her as her fingers still against his chest. “I’m younger in them. And I’m always fighting something. Something huge. So huge I can’t really see it and it’s just coming down at me and I can never stop it. It’s.” He pauses to find the right word. “Suffocating.”

“Scary,” Piper says softly.

“Mm. I don’t know what it means.”

“Does it have to mean anything?”

He frowns. Piper’s expression is one of quiet expectation. She’s waiting for him to work through it. “I don’t know. Doesn’t everything mean something for demigods?”

She laughs. A short huffed breath through her nose. “Feels like it. But…it doesn’t have to? Sometimes a dream is just a dream.”

“Yeah.”

He must sound unconvinced because Piper hums as she runs a thumb over his eyebrow. “Or it could be something very human and mean that something is on your mind?”

“So I’m worried about dying?”

“Hm, no. I think it has something to do with change.”

He taps the pencil against the table. It makes satisfying little pops against the wood and helps his mind stop whirring so fast.

“Could this have anything to do with Kylie asking about camp last week?” Piper asks him.

Jason remembers that conversation. It had been over dinner, Kylie had looked up from her pasta and asked when she should start going to camp and which one she should go to. Which had stared Blair asking when she could go and a small argument between them about Blair’s age and it was Kylie’s turn not hers and it had taken both Piper and Jason to switch their brains back into gear to calm them both down and answer Kylie’s questions.

She can go this summer, if she wants to. And she can go to either Camp Half Blood or Camp Jupiter. It’s entirely her choice.

Both girls had been vacationed to each camp since they were born. Jason and Piper hasn’t wanted to ever disguise this part of their lives from them or rose tint their views of the world they’d both brought them into. In his heart of hearts Jason always knew his own children would be enrolled in camp life, assigned a cabin and a weapon and a prophecy to top it off.

He knew some parts of that were always coming, but it had always seemed so far away. A distant worry to wring his hands over.

Kylie asking that question had promptly dumped reality into his lap and smacked him around the face for good measure.

“Maybe,” he allowed. “You can’t tell me it didn’t shake you a little.”

“It shook me a lot.” Piper’s face is serious, worried. “I’m so scared for them. Always. Ever since I found out I was carrying Kylie I’ve been afraid.”

Jason nods. They’ve had variations of this conversation before. When Piper first got pregnant they both had countless sleepless nights over their anxieties. They questioned whether it was fair to bring children into this world with such heavy fates already hanging over them. But they always reasoned, in the end, that they weren’t necessarily destined for tragedy. They reasoned that they deserved to have a family and to live under compromise wasn’t to live at all.

It feels a little different now that they are faced with the prospect of losing their daughter.

“Were we selfish?” he asks her, because he has to. “To have them?”

“I…I don’t know. Maybe we were, but I don’t think having kids is ever a selfless choice.”

She’s looking more upset so he rubs his hands over her back and her thigh, attempting to soothe some comfort into her. Feeling guilty for introducing the guilt in the first place.

“Maybe it’s not either,” he says, taking back his own word. “Maybe it’s just...life. I don’t know. Not depriving ourselves of being happy.”

She laughs that little puff again and looks a little lighter. “Maybe you’re right.”

“And worrying about these things won’t change them, I suppose.”

“Mm. My dad used to tell me a story, like a saying, when I was younger.”

“Is it a Cherokee saying?”

She nods. “Yeah. It’s…and I’m paraphrasing here. It’s about a grandfather telling his son…the battle is inside us, between two wolves. One is evil. It is anger, envy, sorrow, arrogance, guilt. The other is good. It’s love, kindness, benevolence, generosity, truth, compassion, and hope.”

Piper smiles as she lists these things, pushing her fingers through Jason’s hair. Making him feel loved and warm.

“What happens next?” he asks her.

“Well, the grandson asked him, ‘Which wolf wins?’  And his grandfather told him, ‘The one you feed.’”

He hums and thinks and squeezes her waist. “So, you’re saying we shouldn’t think about the negatives.”

“I don’t know. I think it's more about not dwelling on them, not letting them take over. Let the second wolf have a voice.”

“I have always been good with wolves,” he says, letting his mouth curve into a grin.

She laughs. “You’re a dork.”

“Yes.”

Piper’s smile is pressed against his own and Jason leans into her, letting himself get lost in this.

His worries haven’t gone away, they probably never will. But he does feel comforted by Piper’s words. And when his two daughters come skidding back into the house, both making loud disgusted noises at finding their parents making out, and demanding for Jason to go outside with them to judge who can swing the highest on the swing set, he can’t help but think of how lucky he is.

He has a beautiful family, which is much more than he thought he could have when he first joined the legion; a scared boy raised by a pack of wolves with an unshakable need to prove himself. He thought he’d found a family in the legion, and then with the seven, but time passes and connections which had once seemed unbreakable are stretched thin. This, he realises, is the family he’d been searching for his whole life, and he’ll be damned if he takes it for granted.