Chapter Text
The first gas station appeared like a mirage: fluorescent-lit, gloriously mundane, and weirdly enough, a bit too abandoned by the world beyond the highway.
"Thank the gods," Percy said, already indicating, already easing off the highway like the building itself had personally called his name. "I've had to pee since the Tappan Zee."
"That was forty minutes ago," Annabeth said.
"It's been a journey, wise girl."
The van rolled to a stop beside a pump with a hand-lettered OUT OF ORDER sign taped over the card reader. The doors slid open and ten teenagers spilled out in various states of cramped, groaning in disrepair, stretching limbs that had not been designed to fold into a minivan for five consecutive hours.
"I have a knee where my hip should be," Leo announced, cracking his back with a sound that made Will wince on principle.
"That's called sciatica," Will said. "You're fifteen. You shouldn't have sciatica."
"Well, that's unfortunate. Woopsie!"
Frank ambled toward the door already, Hazel's hand caught loosely in his, both of them squinting against the sudden, aggressive fluorescence of the storefront like moles surfacing into daylight. Nico peeled himself out last, one earbud still in, and immediately made a beeline for the shade cast by the awning, as if neon store lights were something to be avoided.
Jason didn't move right away.
He sat very still in the doorway of the van, hand braced on the frame, jaw tight. The lot buzzed with sound most people wouldn't have noticed—the electric hum of the sign, a dozen overlapping radio stations bleeding out of parked cars, the tick of the van's cooling engine, someone's dog barking three rows over. It all came in at once, layered and loud, and for a second his shoulders climbed toward his ears like he was bracing for a blow that wasn't coming.
Leo noticed. Leo always noticed, in his own scattered, unhurried way.
"Hey." He didn't make a production of it—just looped back, easy as anything, and bumped his shoulder against Jason's. "C'mon. Walk with me. I need a professional opinion on whether this place sells the good beef jerky or the sad, chewy kind."
"I don't know anything about jerky."
"Exactly. Fresh perspective."
It wasn't really about the jerky, and they both knew it, but Jason let himself be steered anyway, one hand finding the hem of Leo's sleeve and staying there, not quite holding on, not quite not. By the time they reached the door the noise hadn't gotten quieter, but it had gotten more bearable, somehow, with someone solid beside him.
Piper caught Leo's eye over Jason's head and mouthed thank you. Leo just winked.
Inside, chaos reassembled itself along entirely new lines.
Annabeth had wandered in for gum. This would later be recognized, by everyone present, as the precise moment things went to shit (for the first time. Not really though).
She emerged from the snack aisle eleven minutes later with a rotating postcard rack's worth of options fanned in one hand, a pair of fuzzy socks patterned with tiny owls tucked under one arm, and an expression of intense, focused purpose that Percy recognized from every architecture crisis she'd ever had.
"Wise Girl," he said carefully. "You went in for gum."
"I got gum." She held up a single mentos strawberry flavoured pack as evidence.
"You also got—" He counted. "Socks. Postcards. Is that a keychain shaped like a lighthouse?"
"It's regional!" Annabeth said, with the wounded dignity of someone defending a doctoral thesis. "This is a genuinely well-curated tourist selection. Look at the postcard rack! Look at the rotation mechanism! Someone thought about traffic flow in this store, Percy. It's good design."
"...It's a gas station."
"It's a gas station that understands itself!"
Percy opened his mouth, considered several responses, and settled on wisely saying nothing at all, filing the entire interaction away under things he would absolutely bring up later and (lovingly) torment her about.
Near the register, Nico had drifted toward a spinning rack of cheap keychains with the deliberate, unhurried focus he brought to very few things. After a long moment of consideration, he plucked one free—a small enamel skull, chipped slightly on one eye socket—and set it on the counter without comment.
"Bold choice," the cashier said, not unkindly.
"It was on sale," Nico said, which wasn't an explanation so much as a deflection, and everyone within earshot let him have it.
Frank, meanwhile, had located the jerky aisle with the single-minded focus of a man on a mission and was reading ingredient labels with genuine, furrowed concentration.
"You good?" Hazel asked, looping an arm through his.
"Just checking it's not the teriyaki kind. Teriyaki jerky tastes like a mistake,"
"That's oddly specific,"
"..I have opinions, Hazel"
She laughed—bright, easy, the sound turning a couple of heads by the coffee machines—and pressed up on her toes to kiss his cheek, quick and unselfconscious, and Frank went the particular shade of red that had become something of a normal occurrence lately.
Reyna had bought a bottle of water and nothing else, and was leaning against the ice cream freezer with the unbothered patience of someone who had traveled with worse company and survived. Piper drifted over to stand beside her, watching Jason—steadier now, tucked into the jerky debate with Leo, Hazel and Frank—out of the corner of her eye.
"He does that," Piper said quietly. "The overwhelmed thing. More than he lets on."
"I noticed." Reyna didn't look away from the window. "You handled it well."
"Leo handled it. I just watched."
"Watching is handling it," Reyna said, in the flat, certain tone she used for things she considered simply true. "Not everything requires you to fix it in the moment. Sometimes noticing is the entire job."
Piper turned that over for a second, then huffed something like a laugh. "You're annoyingly good at this, you know that?"
"I've had practice." A pause. "Being noticed less than I fix, mostly."
It wasn't self-pity—Reyna didn't do self-pity, as a rule—just fact, delivered plainly, and Piper didn't push. She just bumped their shoulders together, a small thing, and Reyna let her. And maybe let a little smile show, but Piper wouldn't point it out anyway.
By the time they reconvened at the register, the group had accumulated: gum, socks, a lighthouse keychain, one skull keychain, three kinds of jerky (Frank had, in the end, bought all three, "for research"), a postcard of a cow that Hazel had declared essential for reasons she refused to elaborate on, and Will's non-negotiable bottled water for everyone, distributed by their local field medic, the one and only Will Sol-ass.
"Twenty-seven dollars," Annabeth said, staring at the receipt with something between horror and academic fascination. "I spent twenty-seven dollars. On impulse."
"Welcome to gas stations," Percy said, slinging an arm around her shoulders and steering her back toward the van. "I hear it gets worse."
"It does not get worse."
"Wise Girl. We have eleven more states to go."
Annabeth opened her mouth to argue, looked down at the fuzzy owl socks still tucked under her arm—which she had, notably, no memory of deciding to keep holding—and closed it again.
Back in the van, snacks distributed and jerky already dividing the group into passionate, competing factions, Jason leaned his head against Piper's shoulder, quieter now, steadier, Leo's hand resting loosely against his knee.
"Better?" Piper murmured.
"Yeah." A pause, small and honest. "Thanks for not making it a whole thing."
"We don't do whole things," Leo said, without looking up from a photo he was framing of Nico glaring at his own skull keychain like it had insulted him. "We do not-whole things. Occasionally with jerky."
Jason huffed something that was almost a laugh, and it settled over the whole van like a held breath finally let go.
Percy pulled back onto the highway as the sun climbed higher, radio low, ten teenagers, three packets of beef jerky, and absolutely nowhere they had to be.
In the distance, the gas station shrank to a speck in the mirror. Ahead of them, the rest of the country, entirely unbothered by prophecies awaited.