Chapter Text
I.
Leo’s pretty sure there’s nothing to worry about. The boat (still unnamed, but he’s been kicking around a couple of ideas with the Athena kids) started making this weird ticking noise when Leo flicked the motor on for a test run last night, so he’s kinda been stuck in the hull of the thing trying to tinker around, figure it out, he’s not sure what time it is now but he’s pretty sure there was just a loose nut that he got tightened down. Should run right as rain, now.
He climbs back out of the engine room, face tacky with grease, and flops dramatically across the floor, gulping down the non-humid air. Gods, he’s glad he’s flame and heat resistant, he really is, but sometimes he doesn’t realize how much he’s freaking dying for a breath of cold air until he’s guzzling it down, seriously.
“Oh, you are in here, dude, I thought you’d gone missing or something.”
Startling hard enough to bash his forehead into the floor, Leo scrambles to get upright - or at least face up, reaching into his toolbelt for something, a weapon, anything-
Jason grins, his head tilted off to the side, leaning on the doorway with a wicker basket slung up over his shoulder. Leo puts his hand on his chest, heart pounding so fucking hard against his ribs he’s pretty sure it’s visible.
“Dude,” he exhales, hunching over with his hands on his knees at the overpowering wave of dizziness that creeps up next, fuzzing his vision out. “Don’t do that.”
“Sorry, ha-ha, I just- I figured you heard me, I guess I underestimated how loud that engine is. Is it…working, and everything?”
Leo shakes his head a little bit, blinking the last of the white out of his vision. “Yeah,” he says, straightening back out. He gulps, glancing between the basket and the way Jason looks all nonchalant. It’s definitely later than Leo thought. “Uh…what’s that?”
“Oh! Well- I figured you forgot to eat, Annabeth told me that you were fixing the boat up some but I hadn’t seen you since before dinner. I thought- y’know, we could eat together or something. You could tell me how it’s going…?” Jason puts his hand around the basket handle and smiles, that stupid, dopey, golden-boy half-smile that looks like he’s asking and hoping.
Leo’s chest squeezes. It’s definitely just the leftover panic, the adrenaline, and not- not anything else. Not anything weird that Piper would hit him over the head for. Jason just- brought dinner for them, because that’s what he does. He cares.
“Sure,” he finds the breath to say. When did he get so breathless? Gods above he needs to get a grip. “Uh, we can go eat out on the upper deck, it’s a little…” he glances around to the strewn about engine parts, the empty quarts of oil, torn apart sheets of metal. “Cleaner.”
“For sure,” Jason chuckles, his eyes catching over the old fragments of a figurehead Leo was thinking about going with, back when Festus wasn’t really an option. “Is that…?”
“I was trying to make it like, you know, the sirens?” Embarrassing. He’s not that great at the whole sculpting part of his dad’s domain, forming great figures and shit. He’s good with the inner workings, the mechanics - the making it pretty shit is best left to the guys like Jake. “It’s dumb, that part is, I was gonna scrap it.”
“Don’t,” Jason says fast, sharp. Leo startles. Jason puts a hand on the back of his neck. “I mean- you should keep it. You could use it for something else, is all. It looks cool.”
“Oh.” That…that makes him feel a little dumb and dizzy, actually. Maybe he breathed in too many fumes or some shit. Is Aphrodite playing some dumbass trick on him, seriously, this is- he hasn’t thought about Jason like that- not since the school-
Stop.
He exhales, long and deep. It’s cool. He and Jason are bros, and it’s totally chill. He loves being Jason’s bro.
“Uhm…are you okay?”
“Yeah.” Leo adjusts his toolbelt and nods to Jason’s basket. “Come on, let’s go eat - I’m starving.”
Jason’s stupid scar quirks when he smirks, shifting the basket down to his hand. “That’s generally why you shouldn’t stay up until four in the morning working on projects, you know that, right?”
“It’s four?”
Jason’s laughter follows him all the way up into the open air, the ship suspended high above Bunker Nine’s floor. Leo’s heart flutters again, stupidly.
It’s just because of the height. That’s it.