Chapter Text
The war was over.
The war was over and peace reigned over the Camps and all seemed well. The wounded had healed as much as they could – though some limbs and digits had proven themselves rather adverse to reattaching – the dead had been given all necessary funerary rites. Well, all of them except for one. Perhaps two.
Leonidas Valdez – Hero of Olympus, Defeater of Gaea, and all that jazz – had returned from the dead, riding atop a metal dragon he’d rebuilt from scratch inside the bowels of a flying warship. But the girl with him was not Calypso, the exiled Titan from Ogygia. Accompanying him instead was a small, lithe girl of perhaps fourteen, pale and vaguely gothic-looking, with hair the colour of the darkest of shadows. This girl’s name was Bianca di Angelo, and she’d been dead to the world for two years and a half now. But she’d been alive for almost a year, these days.
A crowd had assembled where the two had arrived, Greeks and Romans and Hunters and Satyrs and Nymphs and whoever else could be found.
“Hello,” Leo told the assembled crowd sheepishly, just to be tackled into a hug by his two best friends, Jason Grace and Piper McLean.
“You’re back!” Jason said incredulously.
“He’s back!” Piper called to the crowd. “Leo’s back!”
Then Percy Jackson made his way towards him, the crowd parting like the Red Sea. As he lay his eyes upon the two returned, burn scars on their hands and faces, exhausted and smiling, he only gasped sharply.
“Oh,” he said – no, he whispered it, almost reverently. “Oh my gods.” And then, hoarsely he called, “Nico! Nico, your sister, she’s…”
And then Nico and Thalia pushed their way past the crowd, followed by Reyna and a son of Apollo which Leo only barely remembered. (Bill, perhaps? Nah.)
Nico emitted a noise somewhere between a sob and a scream. Faster than the speed of light – or darkness, in his case – he raced towards Leo’s travelling companion and enveloped her in a hug. They could have been twins, Leo thought, if not for the ways they carried themselves. Sure, both had the unapproachable aura of movie stars, but Bianca possessed a grace and confidence that Nico seemed to often lack.
Hazel stood off to the side forlornly, and he went over to her. “The return of the wayward sister,” he announced with a smile when he was close enough. “As well as that of the wayward engineer,” he added, as if an afterthought. He glanced up as Frank, who seemed to be serving as Hazel’s taller, more openly intimidating shadow. Gods, had that boy grown even more?
“Leo,” Frank told him, kind but firm. “We need to talk.”
“We?”
“You, Frank, and me,” Hazel explained.
“What? Uh, okay. Is everything alright?”
Hazel nodded and took him by the hand to lead him away from the crowd, and his heart sped up as he realised that Frank was still following close behind. They made him nervous, those two. They always did. Perhaps it was Hazel’s laughter – high and clear like silver bells – and the way Frank’s muscles rippled when he fired his bow. Perhaps it was shared memories, and a shared future. Perhaps it was just simple jealousy, though for which one he was not sure.
“We’ve been thinking about our relationship recently,” Hazel announced when they were all sitting inside the Hades cabin. Leo’s words failed him in that instant. Machines were always easier than people, in the end.
“The thing is: Hazel likes you. You like Hazel. Hazel likes me. I like Hazel,” Frank said, though he was fidgeting nervously with his hands.
“So what?” Leo asked. “Are we going to have to duke it out now, Edward and Jacob style?” Hazel gave him a confused glance at that, and Frank rolled his eyes.
Leo had always fallen in love to easily, fast and hard. He didn’t look where he was going for one moment, and whoops, he’d fallen right into another crush.
“However,” Frank continued, sighing. “I also like you.” What? In what world would Frank like someone like Leo? In what world would Frank not just be an unobtainable prize, a love tinted asea-sick green by jealousy.
“The question then is,” Hazel concluded, “whether you like Frank or not.”
“Yes,” Leo gasped out, surprising himself. He did, of course he did. How had he only seen it now? “Yes, I do. Of course, one hundred percent.”
“Hold your horses,” Frank told him, though he could not hide his giddy smile. “We’re not getting married.”
“The war’s over” Hazel said kindly. “We have all the time in the world to figure this out – to figure us out.” And then, she kissed him. It took him by surprise, but it was nice. Her lips were soft against his, warm and tasting ever-so-slightly earthy. He melted into it, let himself be kissed. Hazel was not an experienced kisser, by any means – though he wasn’t either. Yeah, Leo “Hot Stuff” Valdez didn’t get a lot of actual female attention, go figure.
“Hey,” Frank protested. “I want in as well.”
Leo and Hazel parted from each other, and Leo turned to Frank. The other boy slid his hand into Leo’s curls – damn, those needed a cut – but Leo was the one to take charge, this time around, moving into the kiss. Frank tasted like blood, Leo realised. Metallic and salty, like when you were concentrating and chewed on your lip so hard it started bleeding.
But as they parted, gasping for air, Leo knew there was no blood. No, the other boy was simply a son of war. He wandered how he tasted to them, like ash and spices, perhaps? And then Hazel kissed Frank – or perhaps Frank kissed Hazel, he didn’t know exactly – but he wasn’t jealous, not anymore. They were his, and he was theirs, and now, they could by happy for the first time in so long.
“What are we, now?” Leo asked, some time and many kisses – quite chaste, but he didn’t mind, not one bit – later.
“Boyfriends, it seems,” said Frank, lacing their fingers together. Now, Leo held Hazel’s hand in his right, and Frank’s in his left.
“You’re boyfriends,” Hazel explained to them. “I’m the girlfriend in this equation.” Her accent tinged her words, drawing them out into a slow drawl. Thick and slow, like molasses. He loved it.
“Hey!” Leo protested. “What if I want to be the girlfriend?”
“We’d be very supportive,” said Hazel.
“Oh don’t worry, you’ll get your turn,” Frank declared at the same time, and they all laughed.
That was when Nico di Angelo came in, together with the girl that could have been his twin, but was actually his not-dead-anymore older sister.
“Valdez,” the son of Hades said coldly. “Zhang. Explain yourself – no. Hazel, could you please explain why they’re here? Doing that?”
“We weren’t doing anything!” Leo told him.
“We were just holding hands,” Frank added. But Leo could see how the situation would look to an older brother – Hazel, holding the hands of two boys, close together, lying on her bed.
“Oh, so when I bring boys over, we need to explain ourselves,” Hazel said sharply, golden eyes flashing in the low light. “But when you take one here, it’s fine?” Wait, boys? Was Nico gay? Huh. That made sense.
“That’s different,” Nico hissed back, though his face was burning red.
“Why?” Hazel asked.
“Because I’m your older brother, gods damn it!”
“We are literally the same age,” Hazel shot back.
Bianca only laughed. Her voice was a bit like Hazel’s. High and clear, like ringing silver bells. Though while Hazel had always seemed down-to-earth, warm and steady, Bianca was colder and flightier, like a leaf in the breeze. The only solid thing about her had proved itself to be solid was her scent: the sickly-sweet odour of overripe pomegranates, cloying the air. It was unpleasant, if you got too close to her and weren’t used to it.
“Let her be young, Nico,” Bianca told her brother. “You both may bring over as many boys as you like, alright?”
Nico grumbled something under his breath, but the tension seemed to leave his shoulders.
“Let’s go to dinner,” the daughter of Hades told them then. “I’m starving! It’s been ages since I’ve had a good meal – no offense to you, Leo.”
Dinner went relatively well. The twelve of them – Hazel, Frank, Bianca, Nico, the son of Apollo (who’s name was Will Solace, apparently), Jason, Piper, Percy, Annabeth, Thalia, Reyna, and he – sat at one table. He suspected it had once been the Poseidon table, but he wasn’t sure. Nobody questioned them, and everybody was ignoring the normal seating rules. Romans sat next to their Greek siblings, Nymphs and Hunters laughed over the Satyrs trying to get their attention. Coach Hedge’s baby – only a month old or so – was reached around and cooed over.
They talked and talked, old friends catching up (though he hadn’t known any of them for more than a year, really) about this and that. Nico actually was gay and had started dating Will around a week ago – they were in their honeymoon phase, though they already bickered like an old married couple.
Thalia and Reyna, to his surprise, were not actually dating, but they still held hands under the dinner table, and gazed at each other softly, only to quickly look away when the other caught them at it. It was cute.
Jason gazed at Percy with worry and adoration, and so did Piper with Annabeth. And sometimes, they fell into older habits, and Percy gazed at Annabeth and Piper at Jason. He did not know how their relationship worked, exactly – they hadn’t all been dating each other before the battle, at least that he knew.
Reyna and Frank talked about politics and plans for diplomatic relations, and Jason and Annabeth talked about temples and worship and history – also a form of politics, Leo surmised. Hazel stayed quiet, though, and Leo missed her sweet voice.
“So, you guys are twins now?” Piper asked the di Angelo siblings at one point later in the evening, while Leo snuck glances at Hazel and Frank as inconspicuously as possible.
“Well, since Bianca has decided that she is fourteen,” Nico began, only to be cut off by Bianca.
“Triplets, actually,” the girl declared, leaving little room for questions.
“Triplets?” Percy echoed, frowning slightly.
“Triplets,” Bianca affirmed. “I died only days away from my thirteenth birthday, and then I had my birthday this December as well, so I decided that it might as well by my fourteenth. Though since Hazel is also fourteen, our sister, and was born in December as well, we’re triplets.”
Nobody dared ask any further questions. Nobody dared to say, “But you’re only half-siblings”, “You don’t look alike”, or “That’s not how that works”, and Leo was happy for it. Hazel seemed relieved as well. Some of the tension left her shoulders.
“So,” Jason finally asked the question that seemed to have been weighing down everybody’s minds. “What happened since the last time we saw you?”
Leo was quiet for a time, looking for the right words. “Well, I died,” he said then. “It hurt. A whole lot.” The rest of them had the decency to cringe and wince a bit.
But still, he told them. He told them of Festus bringing him back from the dead at the last possible second. Of meeting Calypso on Ogygia. Of her leaving, finding refuge with two aging, retired Hunters in a halfway house somewhere far from here. Of finding Bianca in New York, not to far from Camp.
And then, Bianca told them about her side of the story. About Elysium – Hazel tensed up again at that. About feeling something shift, deep inside her. Making her way to the doors of death unseen, making her way up, making her way out, finally seeing the light of day after years. About living on the streets, on the run from monsters she barely knew. About hearing of battles and wars second-handedly. About ending up in some New York diner and a scrawny guy asking her if she knew a Nico di Angelo.
“’That’s my brother’, I told him,” she finished. “And then, we arrived here.”
“Sounds like an ordeal and a half,” Will said. He had a Texan accent, not to dissimilar from Leo’s original one, before he’d been dragged around the country in the foster system for years. It made him sound like a hick, but in a nice way.
Around them, people had already started singing and dancing as the fire roared almost white, a good twenty feet high. “Listen. Both of you” – the son of Apollo looked at Leo and Bianca – “look as if you’ve had some bad burns. We have ways to fix that here, if they bother you.”
“Nah,” Leo said. “They don’t bother me. They’re just there.” And ugly, he wanted to say. Up his arms and torso, pulling the skin of his face in places. But they really didn’t bother, they just itched the slightest bit, sometimes. The lightest of phantom pains.
“Come on,” Thalia told Will. “Those are medals of honour! You can’t take those away from them!” Her own scars – mainly a large, lightning-shaped burn creeping up the right side of her body, including her face – were on stark display in the firelight.
They were all scarred all over, Leo realised. His and Bianca’s burns. Thalia’s Lichtenberg figure. The claw marks that covered Nico and Reyna. From the multitude of smaller cuts on Annabeth, Jason and Will’s bodies, to Percy’s large and characteristic ones. (A clean slice at the base of his throat. One cutting from his hairline down to almost his jar, splitting his right brow in two. Another, starting at the left corner of his jar and making his way to his left ear. Even more on his arms and legs and torso.) Even Hazel, Frank, and Piper bore small ones. A nick on the chin here, a spilt brow there.
If he were to look at any other Camper – from either side – or Hunter, he’d see similar ones. He’d have seen a missing finger there, a prosthetic foot there, burns and claw marks and wounds from stabbing and slashing and so much more.
“Medals of honour,” Thalia had said, and Leo was almost inclined to agree. Demigods prized scars, as marks of honour, yes, but also of survival, and even beauty. If you’d been blessed with symmetrical, runway-model features, like so many demigods were, scars made you look so much more interesting.
Jason, who’d been considered a hottie at the Wilderness School – at least in the memories Hera had implanted in his head – was considered quite boring-looking for a demigod. Not bad, by any means, just a bit boring. Nothing to write home about. His skin had precious few stories mapped onto it. There weren’t even constellations of stars to be found in his freckles, like some Hunters could boast.
Then, the sing-along had properly started. A son of Apollo, sat at the table in a wheelchair got out a saxophone, while Will bust out with a Ukulele rendition of “I am my own great-grandfather”. The campfire classics were then replaced by newer songs – the Camp Half-Blood hymn (“Be glad you’re still alive” was a lyric that featured multiple times), as well as Percy and Annabeth’s composition, “The Littlest Minotaur”, which everybody sang with a childish lisp.
Only Thalia and Reyna managed to sing along the whole way, competitive to the end. The others were laughing to hard to sit properly, let alone sing.
Some legionary from the fifth cohort had started a tap-dancing circle, and a bunch of Satyrs joined in, stomping their hooves in the rhythm. The Romans began some song in Latin, which Leo didn’t understand that well, but it sounded fun and not quite the kind of song you should sing in front of your commanding officers.
“I thought the only Latin music worth dancing to was that from Latin America,” Leo told his boyfriend and girlfriend. (His boyfriend! His girlfriend! His partners!)
“But ours is good enough?” Frank asked, leaning in close.
“There’s more than just church hymns, you know?” Hazel said.
“It’s not bad,” Leo said. “Come on, you two, let’s dance.”
Hazel smiled tiredly. “Only one dance, though.”
They danced more than one dance, in the end. The music went from Homeric hymns to Jazz to folk to early 2000’s punk rock – that was Thalia and Percy’s fault – to Satyr reed pipes. They danced until their feet burned and their heads pounded, and then they danced some more, getting caught up in the rhythm of the crowd, the noises of their singing and laughing and dancing.
Leo had never liked noise much. No, he didn’t like certain noises. Machines were fine, but people – no thank you. Crowds were a nightmare for him. But now? Now he was singing along off-key, dancing to the music with his friends, his partners (His partners!), and things were fine. He’d be tired tomorrow, exhausted even. But right now, things were fine.
Thalia danced with Reyna, Bianca, and any Hunter that came her way – though she danced most often with Reyna, until the two left together, going towards the beach, where both Hunters and Romans had put up their tents in a sea of gold and royal purple and night blue and silver.
Nico danced with Bianca and Will, and a little bit with Hazel as well – then, Leo danced with Frank only – until he’d been harassed into leaving by Will, who’d made it his mission to get Nico back to full health. “Doctors note,” the son of Apollo had said, taking Nico by the hand and leading him off to the Apollo cabin.
The song became some sea shanty a Roman daughter of Apollo – judging by her golden hair and eyes – had adapted to fit the adventures of the seven. At the verse about “crazy dolphins” Frank blushed beet red, and Percy threw his head back, his whole body shaking with laughter.
Leo danced with Piper and Jason as well, and even with Annabeth once. Percy and Piper danced with wild abandon and simultaneous grace, their movements fluent and natural, while Jason and Annabeth seemed more restrained and traditional, but they were all laughing in the end. The four of them left together, late in the night, heading towards Cabin Three. Leo did not want to know their further plans.
He danced a slow waltz with Frank, though he didn’t actually know to waltz, and then the music changed to a smooth thirties’ jazz tune, and he saw Bianca and Hazel dancing arm in arm.
The sky was pitch black when Leo finally slumped back down at the table. At last, even the last few dancers had tired. Hazel left arm-in-arm with her sister. To the world, they looked like two girls with many things to be spoken between them, but those things would not be spoken – not tonight, at least – but instead communicated through glances and the tiniest gestures for at least a little while longer. It was a very specific picture the two made.
“Do you want to stay with me for the night?” Frank blurted out. “I have a tent to myself, and it gets awfully lonely sometimes.”
Leo wolf-whistled at that. Somewhere in the distance, he heard Festus roar back, while up close, he could see Frank’s reddening cheeks. People were hard to understand, even if you loved them and they loved you. The easy way out would have been staying with his siblings, back in Cabin Nine.
But easy didn’t mean good.
“Sounds nice,” he told Frank instead. “Good, even. Perhaps even great.” He smiled, and Frank huffed out his tired, cute laugh.
“Cheeky bastard. Come on, then.”
Together, they went down to the beach.