Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Three days before she turns fifteen, on a nice December day, Hazel Levesque flexes her fingers. Then, she has a panic attack.

Some context might help.

Three days before she turns fifteen, on a nice December day, Hazel Levesque is permitted a day’s leave. This privilege is granted in recognition of her valuable service, of her rank. It is also granted because the junior centurion of the First Cohort drove a pilum through her sword hand a week ago in a war game; drove it through and then pulled up hard. It ripped up and out, out between her ring and pinky fingers, and the wound burned and boiled like all those from Imperial gold. The healers saved her hand, sewed it up with silvered thread and dusted it with unicorn shavings, but it still shakes, and they tell her it will for another month.

“Between you and me,” one of them had whispered in her ear, “you’re lucky we didn’t have to amputate.” If she had looked, she would not have seen who it was; they would already be tending to another patient, lost in the bustle of the medical tent. She did not look. The negativity broke protocol.

Without the grip strength to hold a sword, Hazel can’t run drills. That was fine before, because she could still shout and order and lead, but today they are working on individual swordsmanship. One of Jason’s reforms, or maybe Percy’s, or maybe Frank came up on it all on his own. Whoever’s idea it was, Hazel isn’t any use, and so: a day’s leave, to rest and recover. She’d more than earned it, Reyna had said, and then gave her something that might have been a smile or might have been a glare. Hazel had smiled back and said thank you very much.

Frank was still on duty, is still on duty, so she scraped together her money, the little leftovers from Nico’s gifts, mostly, and she went into town, and since she had more denarii than dollars that meant New Rome, and so she ended up here, at a little coffeehouse overlooking the Forum. It’s a quiet place. Piper took her here a few months ago when she’d been in town, and they didn’t really talk because what was there to talk about, but it was a good place for that sort of non-conversation. There were little vines growing all over the shop, outside and inside and over the windows and through the cracks in the floor, and Hazel had ignored how they’d seemed to curl towards Piper whenever she spoke, and so they’d had a nice time. Hazel wasn’t-isn’t sure if this place, with that memory, is what she wants right now, but she didn’t know anything else to do in the city, so she’d gone anyway. It was a pleasant day, a little warm, because it always was pleasant but a little warm on this side of the Little Tiber, but Hazel had seen the snow on the mountains around the camp and ached for the chill in her wrists and so she ordered an affogato, espresso poured over ice cream, and she lets each bite melt in her mouth, lets the cold soak in.

Then, on that nice December day, Hazel’s hand starts spasming again. She rubs at it, looking out over the city, the rolling hills, the statues, the townhouses all tucked together and the estates all sprawled out, the other statues, the fountains, the gleaming marble statues, the gleaming gold statues, the gleaming silver statues, the gleaming copper statues, old praetors, old augurs. And then, then, she flexes her fingers, just to flex them, to stretch them, to feel them move, and for a glimmer of a moment she feels that pull and, hand clawed, she freezes.

A thought comes to Hazel’s mind, unbidden. She could pull all this down.

With a flick of her wrist. A flutter of the fingers. That’s all it would take, and this city, all the glimmering gold, the shimmering silver, all the marble all the power all, all, all of it, she could end it all right now. She could.

She can feel it in her tongue pressed up at the roof of her mouth. She can feel it in her curled toes. She wants to be free of it all. She can be free of it all.

Then slowly, slowly, slowly, Hazel raises her other hand. She takes her fingers. One by one, careful like they might bite, she folds them down. One by one, she folds those thoughts away. Slowly, slowly, slowly, she lets that pull, that glorious, candy-in-her-mouth, is-it-a-smile-or-bared-teeth pull fall away.

Hazel lets out a breath, and then sucks in another one, and lets that one out too. Her head feels like it’s burning.

She takes her bowl and her cute little spoon, with a little laurel wreath carved into the tip of the handle, and she puts them in the dishes tub. She says thank you to the cashier as she leaves. She walks back through the streets and lets the summery winter air warm her core. She grabs her sword from Terminus. She strolls back to camp; she strolls back to her barrack. She sits on her bed, shoulders square. She does not cry.

She is exactly where she is meant to be. She is exactly who she is meant to be.

There is nothing to cry for.

If that were the end of it, everything would be fine. Everybody has bad thoughts sometimes; Hazel sees how Frank looks at fires a little hungrily on bad days, how Nico tilts his eyes at his friend Will. You’re allowed to want bad things, and it doesn’t make you bad – so long as you don’t want to want them.

That’s not the end of it.

Hazel sits in a white van with SPQR written neat on the sides and dangles her feet out the back and watches the road and the hills zoom by. There is a jumble of armor and weapons and children behind her, some crying, some still. A group of campers on a quest had gotten ambushed by a pack of hydras – who knew they came in packs now – and Reyna told Dakota to take a group and bail them out. They had gotten ambushed too, of course. Someone mutters an apology, and after a second there’s a crack and someone else screams, and Hazel thinks I could jump out of the back of this van right now, and nobody would notice.

But that’s just stress. She can ignore it.

Hazel stands on the Field of Mars in formation with her cohort. The Senate is inspecting the legion. She’s looking straight ahead, not flinching, not blinking, but she can see their delegation out of the corner of her eye, pacing through the legions like a tiger on the hunt, or maybe like a shopper in the supermarket, trying to get the best deal on a pack of ground beef. She’s meat to these people, is the point. One of them, an old, bearded man in a toga, is arguing with Frank and Reyna. His words float over to Hazel on the breeze, and he’s asking if they can really afford to contract for new onagers, when the ones over there (the ones with rotting frames) look perfectly adequate, and they’re so expensive to maintain and supply, you know. Frank gives a good response, about how rocks are cheaper than lives, and Reyna mutters to another Senator, a different man who keeps wiping his palms on his when he’s not insulting the first man’s manners, that if they’re expected to fight sieges they need the tools for the job, and he laughs. It’s a good twist of politics, getting the second man on their side even if they can’t get the first, but Hazel just thinks if I stomped my foot right now, the earth could swallow me up, and nobody could stop me.

But that’s just fatigue. She can ignore it.

Hazel lies on Frank’s bed, her head on his chest. Praetors have their own rooms, and his has a little television in the corner. They’re watching some terrible horror movie, one that’s far too proud of its cheesy, predictable jump scares, but she lost track of the plot ages ago. She thinks she’s rooting for the monster. It’s cute. Reminds her of Percy’s dog.

Hazel shifts a little to look up at Frank. He looks happy. His office looks good on him; he’s just wearing a sweatshirt, but he carries a sort of authority in his shoulders, a quiet confidence in his eyes. It’s been there since the Argo, since Venice, but it’s settled since then, gotten fuller, somehow, with experience. She’s proud of him. She loves him.

She looks at his lips and thinks about what it might be like to kiss them. The thought that comes is I think we should break up.

Her breath stills.

Frank glances down at her. “Everything okay?” he murmurs.

“Yeah,” she says.

His brows furrow, ever so slightly, but they smooth out in a moment. He nudges her, and then he looks back to the movie.

She can’t ignore this.

“No,” she says.

Frank’s eyes flick down again. They search her face: brows, eyes, lips, cheeks. Calm, steady, like he’s assessing a battle. He’s always so steady, these days. “…do you want to talk about it?” he offers after a moment.

“I don’t know,” she says.

He takes a breath. “’Kay,” he says.

She burrows her face into his side. She feels him take in a slow breath and let it out slower.

“You know I’ll always care about you,” he says, ten minutes later, while the monster on the screen is making some horrific yowling noise.

“Yeah,” Hazel says, and means it.

“Okay,” he says again, enunciated this time.

They fall asleep like that, pressed into together, feeling each other breathe, with the screams of the poor movie characters for a lullaby.

A week later, Hazel slips into Frank’s office and sits in the chair across his desk. Instead of breaking up with him, the words that come out are:

“I think I’m gonna desert.”

Frank, who’s mouth is wrapped around the straw of his coffee, some sickly-sweet iced thing with whipped cream on top, sputters. To his credit, he manages to keep everything in his mouth and swallow without making a mess. “Camp Jupiter?”

She appreciates that he’s taking her seriously. He’s always been good at that. “The legion, yeah.”

“Now?”

“Not – not like now-now, but yes, now. This week. Sooner.”

“I – why? You –” he closes his eyes. When he opens them, he says “You’ve thought about this.”

“Probably less than I should have.”

“Can I ask… why?”

Hazel sighs and leans back in her chair. “I’m not quite sure.”

“Right,” he says, and leans back in his own chair, and runs his hands through his hair.

They both sit for a moment. They’ve both always been good at that, just giving each other a moment to think, to process.

“I don’t think,” she says, and then the words start to rush out, “that I want to spend the next eight years of my life fighting and killing and maybe dying just so I can, just so I can live in New Rome and make a bunch of other kids fight and kill and die for me. I don’t want it. I don’t want this, not any of it, and I don’t know what I want but I –” and then all at once, her momentum vanishes and she screeches to a halt. “I just want to be happy, Frank.”

Frank looks at her across the table and it’s not revelatory. It’s not like he’s seeing her for the first time, and he doesn’t look tired, and he doesn’t look like he thought this was inevitable. He just looks at her, scans her face like he always has, and oh she loves him, she loves him not, she she she.

All he asks, then, is: “Am I coming with you?”

Quietly, Hazel says “I don’t think that’s what you want.” And Frank purses his lips, because they’re each other’s best friend in the world, and they both know she’s right.

Two days later, on a quiet February night after most of camp is asleep, Hazel grabs her backpack and her spatha and wraps the Mist around her and she walks out the front gate, right past the watch, who just see a hunchbacked faun scurrying along.

She finds Arion a mile down the road, shaking his mane, waiting for her. He whinnies. She just scritches his neck and pulls herself onto his back.

She looks back. She can see Camp Jupiter, still, and she can see the temples, and she can see New Rome on its rolling hills, streetlights glittering like stars and golden ornaments reflecting their light like they’re Venus herself, maybe the planet or maybe the goddess.

And she looks forward. The bridge over the Little Tiber is in front of her. Beyond it, the Caldecott Tunnel yawns open in front of her, dark and deep and scary. Beyond it?

Hazel presses her legs together, and Arion runs.

Chapter Text

Reyna pulls Frank aside nearly a week after Hazel leaves. In his defense, he’s a terrible actor; he’s surprised she lasted this long.

“You aren’t nearly as worried about Hazel as you should be,” she says.

“I’m worried about her!” Frank says, trying to sound defensive, but it sounds weak even to him.

“Frank,” Reyna says, and pinches her brow.

Frank keeps his mouth shut. Better to not say anything.

“I’ve worked with you for nearly a year now,” Reyna says.

“Yes.”

“I think we work well together.”

“I think so too.”

“…I consider you a friend.”

Frank blushes. That’s actually really sweet, coming from Reyna. She hasn’t said that about anyone but Nico, as far as he knows, and sort of Jason but that’s still complicated. “I’d like to think so,” he says.

Reyna looks him in the eye. “Is this a desertion case?”

Frank widens his eyes. “Is it a – Reyna – Praetor, what are you talking about?”

“Frank,” Reyna says, and crosses her arms. “Where is Hazel?”

She looks genuinely upset. This isn’t, or isn’t just, the angry-stern mood she armors herself with. So Frank slumps his shoulders and drops the act.

“I don’t actually know.”

Reyna huffs a breath out of her nose. “Oh, you don’t know where your girlfriend is. Don’t give me that, Praetor, I am this close to –”

“Yes, it’s a desertion case.” Reyna blinks, stopped in her tracks, and tilts her head. “I actually don’t know where she is. I wasn’t lying.”

“I… see,” Reyna says.

Frank shifts his weight. Reyna licks her lips. They blink at each other. Frank considers turning into a frog.

Reyna blurts “I was actually just saying that to try and shock you. Into saying whatever was actually going on. It’s an interrogation tactic.”

“Oh,” Frank says. “Well now you know.”

“Yes.”

“Also, I think we broke up.”

“Oh.” She looks at him with actual sympathy, then, her mask gone for once. “Sorry.”

Frank lets out a breath. “Yeah. It’s okay.”

“Wait, you think?”

“It was – it’s kind of complicated.”

“Yeah. Did she just… leave?”

“…She said goodbye.”

“No closure.”

“We’ll get there.”

“Damn,” Reyna says. “I’m… really sorry.”

“…Thanks, Rey–”

“Sorry,” she interrupts, “I’m still catching up. Hazel Levesque, your g – your it’s-complicated, the rising star of the legion, the most dedicated, sweet person–”

“– deserted camp?”

“–deserted from Camp Jupiter, yeah? What the fuck?”

Frank sighs. “She seemed antsy.”

“Antsy doesn’t mean deserter.”

“I think this was her way of pulling a Leo,” Frank says, and then winces, because that was harsher than he meant.

He doesn’t get it. Not really. But he does get it.

Reyna rubs her eyes with her palms. “You’ve been covering for her.”

No use denying it. “Yes.”

“That’s a crime.”

“For sure.”

Reyna sucks in a breath through her teeth. “Jason wouldn’t have done this to me.” Then she bites her lip. “No, he totally would have.” And then: “And I’m sorry. That’s… not fair to you. I thought I was –”

Frank smiles softly. “It’s okay.”

“We’ll end the search parties tomorrow,” Reyna says, “and when we do, we’ll declare her missing. I won’t report her as a deserter unless she’s sighted.”

“Thanks, Reyna.”

“But I’m telling Nico.”

“She hasn’t talked to him?”

“Non-negotiable, Zhang.”

“All right,” he says.

“This is so fucked,” she hisses. “Hazel, of all people.” She stares into space for a moment. Something dances behind her eyes, something hot and cold and desperate. It might be fear, or it might be pride. It might be the same look Hazel had when she looked up at him that night a week ago.

Then it passes. Reyna furrows her brow and glares at him. “Look sadder. You aren’t selling it.”

Frank tries on his best frown. Reyna sighs at the sight.

Chapter Text

Piper gave Hazel two weeks. Two weeks without hearing from her, only a vague assurance from Frank and Reyna, relayed through Nico, that yes she’s alive and yes that’s all they know and please keep it quiet.

Two weeks seemed fair.

After that, she started digging.

She’s not sure she could charmspeak Reyna, and she’d feel bad doing it to Frank or Nico – but, well, the two of them tend to say a little more than they mean to once you get them talking, no nudges required. It was enough to get a lead.

From there? Her mother has always liked her, and Katoptris filled in the rest.

Piper finds Hazel underneath a bridge in Dallas, sitting in a pool of ichor and golden dust. “Hey Hazel!” she says, trotting over and putting on her best grin.

Hazel starts and jerks her head up. Her eyes are just a little bloodshot. “Piper?!” She moves to get up.

“Thaaaat’s me!” Piper says. She gestures next to Hazel. “Can I sit?”

Hazel, half risen, narrows her eyes. But then she sinks back down. “Yeah,” she says.

So Piper sits. She leans back, casual as can be, and puts her hands behind her to steady herself, and doesn’t wince when it turns out that means soaking them in the ichor.

Hazel, next to her, has her head on her knees. She’s watching Piper.

“So,” Piper says.

“So,” Hazel says.

“How are you dooooing?” Piper says, rolling the vowel around in her mouth.

“I’m fine.”

“That’s good!”

“Yes.”

Quiet.

“You and Frank broke up,” Piper says, and then immediately wants to stab herself because what is wrong with her, who is she, Drew Tanaka? Her friend, because they are friends, even if they’re not as star-crossed close as some of the group, is sitting under a bridge in unwashed clothes covered in dirt and godblood, and she wants to talk about boys.

“Technically –”

“I mean, nobody told me that, I guessed. Actually, never mind.”

“Technically,” Hazel says anyway, “we didn’t break up.”

“That’s… good? Unless it’s bad.”

“We probably will when we see each other again, though.”

“Mm,” Piper says. “I’m going to stop trying to make you feel better.” She said when! That’s good.

Hazel giggles, tired but surprisingly unforced. “You’re fine.” She swallows. “I just…”

She doesn’t finish the thought.

“Is this a friend breakup?” Piper asks. “With all of us? Because I came to find you ‘cause –”

“No!” Hazel says.

“So you’re coming back.”

Hazel pauses.

“Because I don’t want to lose another friend.”

Hazel flinches, and Di Immortales Piper is such an asshole, of course Hazel would – “I didn’t realize you… that you were still mad about that.”

“Not at you, Haze. I promise.”

“Okay.”

“Really,” Piper says. “I just miss him, and I wish he would – have cared about me more, I guess. Not cut me out of his life. But that’s his fault. He’s the one who didn’t tell me anything and he’s the one who still hasn’t reached out. You didn’t do anything wrong by helping him ki – by helping him.”

“Okay,” Hazel says, a little more sure.

Piper shifts around. Her hands are getting cold in the ichor.

“I don’t exactly know what I’m doing,” Hazel says, her eyes downcast. “And I’m not sure I’m going back to camp.”

Piper holds her breath.

“No, I’m – I’m not going back to the legion. Not to stay, anyway.” She looks up. “But I’ll come back to you all. I swear it on the River Styx.”

Voices on the wind. A prickle on the neck. Chains, chains, as real and as binding as the physical.

“You didn’t have to do that,” Piper says, and finds herself crying.

“I know,” Hazel says, and smiles. She’s misty-eyed, too.

“You’ll IM if you need anything?”

“I will. And – once I figure out what I’m figuring out, I guess.”

“That’s all I could want,” Piper says, and gives Hazel a long, long hug.

“Thanks for understanding,” Hazel says when they pull apart.

“Good luck,” Piper says back, and then she smiles again, this time real, and turns and leaves without looking back.

Hazel will find the burner phone and wad of cash Piper slipped in her backpack eventually. She can’t return the gift if Piper’s already on a plane back to LA.

Piper gets a text three hours later, from an anonymous number:

>:-(

She leans back in her seat. Looks out at the sea of clouds below.

She sends back:

<3

Hazel runs into Leo at a Starbucks outside of Indianapolis.

She wonders if she’s hallucinating when he walks in the door; although it’s hidden under her new jacket, puffy in a way that tickles her, she got a nasty bite from some slavering monster a few days ago. It could have been venomous. But she squints, and he’s still there, and then he notices her and goes wide-eyed and she decides to treat him like he’s real.

She waves.

He waves back, hesitantly. The woman by his side, who’s tall and a little too solid, like she’d stay clear even if Hazel unfocused her eyes, looks at him curiously, then at her.

They both stare at each other for another second.

She’s in no position to judge Leo for anything, she figures, especially not now. As long as he’s happy.

The barista calls “Hazel!”

She picks up her mocha and leaves. He doesn’t follow.

Jason sees Hazel touching up her makeup in a unisex bathroom three miles under Iowa.

Actually, he saw Hazel a half hour earlier, laughing politely at some joke Triptolemus was making, but she looked different then. A little too tall, maybe, or too short? Something to do with the Mist, obviously. He didn’t realize it was her then; he wouldn’t have made the connection if he weren’t seeing her right now, and he’s still not sure of it – but she looks like herself now, albeit like a version of herself he’s never seen. She’s wearing a wide-sleeved jacket that looks like it might be a size too big for her, but in a sort of intentional way, with a zipped up collar that nearly covers her mouth. Jason is reminded of a pufferfish, or maybe a cobra spreading its hood.

“Hazel, is that you?” he says.

Hazel looks at his reflection in the mirror, then blinks and – “Jason?” – looks at him proper.

“What are you doing here? Uh, I mean, hi, Hazel. How’ve you been?”

Here was a club, in the Labyrinth of all places, that was apparently frequented by a number of minor gods. Ganymede had given Jason an invitation and (semi-voluntary) free transport. It had live music; an electric lyre/electric harp duet playing some sort of techno. Thalia would love it, if she didn’t have to talk to anyone.

“Mercury gave me a job as a courier,” Hazel says. “Apparently the Labyrinth has ‘the least organized postal code system he’s ever had to deal with.’ But the monsters and gods down here still want mail, and he still has to make sure it gets delivered.”

“And you’re good with the mist, so you can do it for him.”

“Yeah. Not the safest, but it pays surprisingly well.”

“Do you get denarii, or what?”

“I take a mix of those and drachmas. Anyway, point is, I was delivering mail, and this is a good place to find people.” She yawns. “Not that drunk gods are the easiest to deal with. They’re all so chatty, and you have to make small talk or they’ll smite you. But, actually, what are you doing here?”

“Schmoozing,” Jason says. “Like you said, it’s a good place to meet gods. And I’m a pontifex now, so.”

“Huh,” Hazel says. She gives him a once-over; her eyes focus on his hands. “What…” She curls her hand into an almost-fist, then uncurls it and starts to tap her leg. “Your nails look pretty.”

“Huh?” Jason brings up his hand. His nails are painted orange and gold, shimmery like a sunset. Piper had done it; she’d been bored, apparently, and she’d asked. He asked why. It didn’t seem like her thing. She said it’s fun when it’s you. So he let her. “Oh, right. I forgot about that,” he lies. “Piper did them.”

“Cute.”

They both squirm for a moment.

“Want to sit outside for a moment?” Hazel says. “It’s kind of loud in here.”

They head out the back entrance. Arion’s out there, pacing in circles. He runs over to Hazel when they come out. She scritches his mane and, with a flick of her other wrist, pulls a nugget of gold out of the ground. She waves it back and forth in front of Arion’s face a few times – he tracks it with his eyes – and throws it down one of the halls. He bolts after it.

“I didn’t know you played fetch with horses.”

“I don’t know if you do. He seems to like it.”

They sit on a bench, not quite touching, and don’t talk. Eventually, Arion trots back and stands in front of them.

Jason sighs.

Hazel looks at Jason, and then shifts her weight and looks at him.

“What’s up?” he asks.

“Nothing,” she says, still focused on something he can’t see.

He takes her word for it, and looks back at the wall in front of him.

A few minutes later, Hazel gets up and walks over to Arion. She rustles around in a saddlebag.

“Let me do your hair,” she says.

“Okay?”

Hazel pulls out some tube, squirts something into her palm, and drops the container back in the bag. She comes back to the bench and starts raking her fingers through his hair, slicking it in. It’s gentler than he expected. When she hits a tangle, she doesn’t rip through. She just wiggles her finger and works it out.

“I’ve been meaning to buzz it,” he says.

“You shouldn’t,” she says.

After another minute, she’s apparently satisfied. His hair feels smoother, anyway. She gathers his hair up, her thumbs just brushing the back of his jaw, underneath his ears. Then she mutters a curse. Jason hears something unzip. “What’re you doing?” he asks.

“Don’t have ties,” she says. He hears something rip, and then she gathers his hair a little tighter. He feels her maneuvering it around. It pulls a little, but doesn’t quite sting.

“Done,” she says, and drops it.

It gets awkward after that. They both make their excuses at the same time; he says “I’d better get back in there,” and she says “Well, I’ve got a delivery to make,” and then they both laugh, a little false.

“It was nice to see you, Jason,” she says as she’s getting on Arion’s back.

“Stay safe out there,” he says, and then she’s gone.

On his way back into the club, he stops by the bathroom, since he did actually need to use it and never got to. He catches his reflection in the mirror.

His hair is tied up in a loose ponytail. There’s a little scrap of purple fabric tying it up, ragged on one edge. It’s a neat little bow, large enough to draw attention but not enough to be a hassle.

It does make him look… pretty.

He stares at the reflection for a moment, and then goes to pee.

A week later, back in LA, Piper asks him about the bow. The ponytail is ragged by now. The bow is askew. He did his best to tighten it and push it back up, but he was kind of clumsy about it.

He tells her the story.

She looks at his hair, and then at his nails with the paint chipping away, and then she smiles, and shows him how to re-tie the bow.

“Hey,” Annabeth says, and Hazel yelps and whips her head around to look at her.

“Why do people keep sneaking up on me!” she cries.

Annabeth laughs. “I was in the area,” she says, with the area being a courtyard outside of Hades’s Palace, in the Underworld. “Had a meeting with your dad. Or, not your dad? Hades.”

“Same difference,” Hazel says. She leans back on the railing behind her, the one she was looking over. Behind it, after a drop, there’s a meadow, long and long and longer still, never falling behind a horizon but eventually fading into a sort of staticky fog. Asphodel. “What for?”

“Olympus,” Annabeth says. “The redesign. He has requirements – stuff like his throne, which is one thing, but also, you know. Whenever he goes to Olympus it’s not just him, it’s him and all his attendants and honor guards and staff. Not that he really needs them.”

“But he brings them.”

“It’s a power thing, yeah. Or a respect thing. Poseidon does it too. And they need accommodations, and they have all these special requirements, and – well. Just needed to iron all that out.”

“And how’d that go?”

“Really well, actually,” Annabeth says, and grins. “If Poseidon smote me, Percy would be sad, so I don’t mind saying that Hades is much more organized. Kind of a dream client, actually.”

Hazel smiles. Her eyes glitter in the light, soft and strange and shining in defiance of the sun’s memory. It makes Annabeth want to tousle her hair, weirdly, but she’s not sure they have a tousling sort of relationship and this feels a little too liminal to experiment with.

But… she does want to have that sort of relationship. It’s strange to have a goal like that. To realize that she wants something and to realize that, terrifyingly, she might not be doing what she needs to get it. That she might not have done what she needed to get it. That in those few whirlwind months on the Argo II she might have clicked with most of the crew, but that Hazel was always just a little too distant. That in this quiet year where they all drifted just a little apart from each other, each their own points in an ever-expanding spacetime, she might not have made the effort to keep the gap bridged. That it might be too late.

She has felt that way in the two-ish years since Manhattan, since she and Percy finally, well, everything – but only rarely.

“How’ve you been?” Annabeth asks. That seems like a safe way to do it, leaning into the you – not, we’re all worried about you, unless Hazel wants it to be that, but just hey, I told you about my meeting, now you tell me about your thing, like we’re coworkers at the water cooler.

“Well enough,” Hazel says, and tilts her head back and forth, almost like she’s a horse shaking her mane but slower. “Got into a scrap with some Amazons back in Philly.”

“Oh?” Annabeth starts drafting a nasty letter to send with Reyna, later. The camps are big customers; if getting chewed out by her sister doesn’t dissuade Hylla, surely the threat to her bottom line will.

Hazel grins, all teeth. “If you can call it that. They tried to shoot me. Turns out Arion can outrun bullets.”

“He’s a regular super-horse.” Bullets? Bullets?? Those don’t work on monsters. She’ll kill that fucking queen. She knew she should have from the moment Percy told her about Seattle. “Why… were they trying to shoot you, exactly?”

Hazel shrugs. “Didn’t ask.” A lie, or rather an obvious deflection. Fine, she can respect a boundary. Fine. She’ll drop it, for now.

“Mm. Well,” she says, and then stops while she’s behind.

“Well,” Hazel says, a little quiet. She turns around and leans her arms on the railing.

Give it up for Annabeth Chase, everybody. She rocks on her heels, back and forth, and then walks up and leans next to Hazel.

“Nico and Will finally kissed,” she says.

“Mm. So they are dating.”

Annabeth blinks. “He didn’t tell you?”

Hazel glances at her, then looks back to the false horizon. “No. He didn’t. Kind of obvious in retrospect, though.”

In retrospect of what, she doesn’t say. Everything, Annabeth supposes. “Is everything... all right with you two?” But no, that wasn’t the right question. They’ve been dating for six months, before Hazel left camp. This isn’t a short-term thing.

“I’m just kind of a shitty sister, I suppose. Still stuck in the thirties.”

That could mean a lot of things… but it definitely doesn’t. “I think he feels the same way about… it all, kind of. He doesn’t think you’re a bad sister.” He doesn’t. Anyone with ears can hear how he talks about her.

“Nico gives me a little more grace than I deserve.” She pushes off the railing and rolls her shoulders. “But I’ll do better.”

Annabeth thinks, for just a split second, about her dad, and then she shoots Hazel her most confident smile. “That’ll be enough.”

At four in the morning, Hazel texts Percy:

in nyc today can i crash on your couch later

Fifteen seconds later, he texts back:

sur

and then an address, and a:

come by whenever

So at four in the evening, she knocks on his apartment door.

“I think this might have been a mistake,” she says, curled up on Percy’s bed after Ms. Jackson greets her with a smile and a plate of blue cookies. He’s sitting at his desk, squinting at a laptop, typing some essay.

Five minutes later, after Percy sighs, highlights a whole paragraph and slams delete, she continues “I visited my mom and she didn’t recognize me. Which I knew would happen.”

Percy opens a web browser and searches something.

“I don’t know why I went. I didn’t hate her and I still don’t hate her. I didn’t get anything out of it at all.”

Percy clicks on a link, Wikipedia, Hazel thinks, and starts scrolling.

“Percy, what if I never go back to camp?”

“Then you never go back to camp.”

Hazel sighs. “But you think I should.” For her future. For her safety. For her cohort. So the Senate calls off the Amazons they contracted to capture her for desertion and she doesn’t have to gallop up and down the East Coast for six days straight again. (She hopes to all the gods that she was just careless; that Leo didn’t snitch. She wishes that were still something she wouldn’t even consider.)

Percy glances back at her.  “I didn’t say that?”

“But you were thinking it.”

“No? I – do you want to go back to Camp Jupiter?”

“No,” Hazel says.

Percy looks back at his laptop.

Later that night, while he’s chopping bell peppers for a stir-fry, he says “When I was twelve, I helped kill my stepdad."

Hazel raises her eyebrows.

“He was an abusive freak. So I sent Mom Medusa’s head in the mail, and she killed him with it and sold the statue to a museum.”

Hazel thinks about Ms. Jackson’s smile, the light in her eyes when she’d answered the door. Her easy hip-check when Mr. Blofis was standing in front of the fridge, and his laugh. “Good for you,” she says.

Percy smiles. “Oh, for sure. What I’m saying is that sometimes –” he stills his knife and jerks his head southwest, towards, Hazel realizes, Olympus – “you can rethink things. Sometimes you hate people and then later you realize you miss them, and you actually kind of love them, and you want them back in your life.” And then he turns, and looks her in the eye, and shrugs. “But sometimes they’re Gabe Ugliano.”

Hazel gets up early in the morning, but Percy is up earlier to send her off with breakfast. Blue scrambled eggs, which look disgusting but taste delicious.

“You make it seem so simple,” Hazel says as she's standing in the doorway.

“You make it seem so complicated,” Percy says, and shoots her a shit-eating grin.

She rolls her eyes. “Next time, just tell me to stop overthinking.”

“Stop overthinking,” Percy says. “You’re doing fine.”

She grins back at him, and pulls the door shut.