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Reyna has never been the type of person to sit and think about her feelings. Growing up in San Juan with Hylla had left very little time for personal reflection, not that she knew anyone she wanted to have feelings for. After their escape to Circe’s Island, she is still so young, too young to know what a speeding heart rate means beyond fear and too guilty to think about anything except penance. She stains her palms red with pomegranate juice and tries to be the perfect attendant, even when it’s awful. Reyna forces herself out of bed at the crack of dawn and refuses to rest until the night sweeps over her, knowing that not working is thinking, and thinking will make it so she can’t walk again.
Hylla must know it’s a coping mechanism more than anything, because she stays silent. Hylla, who bubbles with almost no effort and is a favoured attendant of Circe without even trying. She greets visitors by name with a practiced smile and gleaming eyes while Reyna learns the precise way to file nails back into shape. Her motions are soft and pointless and monotonous enough to leave her mind wandering. This is no job for the daughter of a war goddess, she thinks, then immediately regrets it.
Entitlement is what drove her father mad.
But it isn’t what killed him, because Reyna killed him, because that is why she can’t force herself to smile or stand or do much beyond hopeless menial tasks. It’s almost worse that she doesn’t regret it, because regret would at least make her feel a little closer to human. No, she knew it was what had to be done. She did it out of duty. She protected herself and her sister. Didn’t she?
Circe offers combat training, but Reyna can’t force herself to hold the sword.
She has always done what was expected of her, even when she’s believed she deserves better. Reyna knows how to fall in line, how to gush over the men that join the island until they are transformed. She talks about male actors to her closest friends and wonders what it must be like in the mortal world, where they see these faces everywhere they go instead of prying them out of magazines and plastering them to dirty walls. It… it is nicer to be on the island, where she is almost exclusively in the company of women.
When she expresses these sentiments to Hylla, she gets a strange look and a warning to keep quiet. Reyna has learned to listen to her sister about matters such as these, so she keeps her mouth shut. And she does, she does through a pirate expedition where a pretty girl makes her heart lurch and through a grand escape with a woman whose eyes show up in her daydreams for several years.
It’s only natural that she decides that love doesn’t fit her.
At Camp Jupiter, she feels like it might. She befriends a boy with golden hair and a steady smile and thinks, if I have to spend the rest of my life with somebody, I’d hope it was him. It is a stabilizing thought. Jason will not leave her; he is solid and steady and smart enough to hold a conversation with. She hugs him and tells him she trusts him. She tells herself it is love.
When Venus says no man shall heal your heart, she takes it as a blessing, as an excuse not to try so hard anymore. The purple robes of Camp Jupiter become less confining, the weight of centurion a little easier to bear. With a couple words, Venus has assuaged her greatest fear. It unspools the knot in her stomach, at least for a moment.
“Will anyone heal my heart?” Reyna asks. She cannot imagine being alone forever.
“You will have to figure that one out for yourself,” says Venus, then smiles. “But if it means anything, I am rooting for you, Reyna Avila Ramírez-Arellano.” She vanishes into nothing.
If not a man, then who?
When she gets back to Jason, she refuses to tell him about the meeting. It’s what she would do if she had feelings for him, real ones that make her want to take his hand and kiss him where no one else will see. When she replays the memory, she tells herself that Venus said demigod.
It is easier than admitting that Gwen from the Third Cohort makes her vision fuzzy and her judgement clouded. She imagines a future of rampant romance and dates in the city that aren’t unlike their weekly pizza lunches. When Gwen strips her shirt off to change (“we’ve got all the same parts anyway”) Reyna tells herself she blushes out of modesty, not attraction. And the smell of cloves draws her attention because she hates strong scents, not because it feels like being close to the centurion. No, because that would be ridiculous. She… she….
Of course she knows that you can like someone of the same gender. She just never thought it would apply to her. In some way, she’s made the association between girls who like other girls and death that doesn’t come from any beast she can imagine. It’s the kind of death that comes with being written out of history, of knowing that your story will never be repeated.
There’s a night in November where Reyna almost kisses Gwen and then draws back. She can almost taste the other girl’s lip gloss before frantically rocking back into her own space and wiping sweaty palms on her torn jeans. She cannot make eye contact, just mumbles a string of apologies and stares helplessly into the night.
“I’m not that bad of a kisser,” says Gwen lightheartedly, in the kind of tone that makes her dizzy during very important meetings. Reyna is a daughter of Bellona and she cannot afford to be distracted like this, especially not a girl.
“It’s not that,” says Reyna. “I want to be praetor one day.”
She still can’t meet the other girl’s eyes.
“Jason would probably be better for that,” agrees Gwen, and she sounds almost disappointed. Like she’d expected better from Reyna. It’s disheartening.
“This can’t happen,” says Reyna, and leaves as though she’d never come. She is going to be praetor of New Rome one day, and praetors cannot afford to have distractions. If necessary, she will love Jason. Jason is solid and steady and will not distract her. For some reason, he does not possess the capacity to make butterflies ruin her appetite.
She sits alone with her dogs in the moonlight and can’t shake the encounter. “I didn’t want to kiss her,” she tells Aurum and Argentum, knowing they cannot respond.
(The dogs howl into the sky because they know Reyna is lying.)
As Reyna ascends through the ranks at Camp Jupiter, she becomes the undeniable right hand of Jason Grace. They work together almost constantly, until she knows his mannerisms as well as she knows her own heartbeat. There are whispers in the ranks about how they would make the perfect couple, seriously, and Reyna kisses Jason’s cheek in front of the whole legion. Even though there really isn’t anything romantic between them, it sparks a wildfire that never quiets down. She wishes they could install reality television and give the idiots something to do, but at least the rumours help her.
The week after she pulls the kiss stunt Gwen moves from the Third Cohort to the Fifth and Reyna would be lying if she said she wasn’t relieved. She wakes up from sweaty dreams where she leans forward and kisses the brunette girl anyway and scolds herself harshly. There’s no other option but to throw herself into work, angry and fervent and determined not to let her emotions get the best of her. She is stronger than that. She has bested enemies stronger than her, so there’s no way she can’t beat herself at this game. Reyna works herself to the bone and learns how to control her dreams. She cannot figure out how to control her heart, but she can ignore it.
(Only Jason notices the change, and she convinces herself knowledge is love.)
If it was love, she could’ve told him. If it was love she wouldn’t be chained up with him at the bottom of a basement while the minions of Krios chat about what to do with them. If it was love she wouldn’t be praying to Venus that Gwen makes it out of the war alive even if they haven’t talked in two years.
“I wish I loved you like everyone expects me to,” she tells Jason when her wrists and throat have been rubbed raw. “It would make things so much easier for me.”
“I love you, Reyna,” says Jason, and he forges forward before the fear in her eyes becomes a concrete thing, “but only as a sister. I know you feel the same way about me.”
“You’re not my sister, Grace,” jokes Reyna, and he laughs.
They defeat the minions and Krios and never talk about that conversation again. But Reyna feels closer to Jason than she was before, and he really does break her heart when he disappears off the face of the earth. She doesn’t won’t can’t date him but she can’t have him dead either. She searches the ends of the world for her brother in arms and turns up empty handed.
When he is gone, she convinces herself that the pain is love deeper than she was willing to admit to herself. She tells the mirror she didn’t want to ruin their friendship. She forces herself to feel the pain of rejection and avoids Gwen like it’s her job. Reyna explicitly tells herself she wants a man to love her back.
Percy Jackson is the answer to all her problems, and the cause of a couple entirely new problems.
He is cursed, and it is natural to rebel against liking someone who is cursed. Even their myths say this. He has very symmetrical facial features, and the younger girls titter about how handsome he is. His colouring is almost precisely opposite Jason’s, like a foil, so she can convince herself she is getting a new start. And the sheer chaos that ensues after his arrival is proof enough that these basic thoughts are enough to comfort her entirely.
But then his girlfriend shows up with sparkling wit and a cheerful demeanor that hides something stronger and stormy gray eyes that make her weak in the knees and Reyna almost forgets she ever knew a Percy Jackson to begin with. Annabeth Chase is one of a kind, and Reyna is essentially dying to know more about her. It’s intoxicating and dangerous and she wants to slam the flat of her hand into her head over and over until she convinces herself that a daughter of Minerva - Athena - is not a suitable date for a Roman praetor. Especially a taken daughter of Athena.
Then the war with Gaea happens, and Reyna is alone and constantly fighting for her life, and she doesn’t really have time to think about it.
When she survives, she decides to chuck everything deemed suitable out the window. There is a moment after the war where she thinks to herself that if she has survived, she owes it to herself to be honest. Reyna decides in her bed that she will not date a man, she will not kiss a man, and she definitely won’t marry a man.
It’s freeing in a way that makes her want to cry out.
“I did want to kiss her!” she exclaims to her dogs at breakfast, and Aurum makes an annoyed sound in the back of his throat that sounds pretty close to obviously. She eats alone in her room at Camp Half-Blood and recovers from her wounds.
“Your mother told me no man will heal my heart,” Reyna tells Piper. “I wish I understood what it meant sooner.” She can’t say the word for it yet but she’s getting there, bit by bit.
“My mother is occasionally useful,” agrees Piper, “but never in the way you expect. For what it’s worth, Reyna… I’m glad you know yourself a little better now.” She hugs Reyna and they talk about girls, because apparently bisexual is a thing that she hasn’t known about.
“You should come visit me in Oklahoma,” Piper says. “I can take you to pride in June.”
“What is pride?” Reyna asks, and learns it isn’t a sin.