Archive of Our Own

It didn’t occur to Piper until Jason almost stabbed her by accident that maybe she hadn’t thought this through properly.

Considering Jason had been trained to fight monsters since he’d been two years old, as well as everything that had gone wrong on this particular quest, the fact that knocking on his cabin door yelling “emergency!” in the middle of the night would result in him jumping out with his sword drawn maybe should have been obvious in retrospect. Well, hindsight was 20/20.

Piper yelped, staring at the tip of Jason’s gladius, which was barely a hair’s breadth away from her chest. She backed up a step, jokingly holding up her hands in surrender as she tried to get her racing heart to still.

“I know you’ve had a rough few days, but please don’t stab me,” she commented, trying to lighten the mood.

Jason immediately pulled the weapon back, looking horrified. “I didn’t hurt you, did I?”

Piper waved him off. 

“Nah.” She smiled teasingly at her friend. “Your aim needs work. You didn’t even graze me.”

“Sorry. I didn’t think- I wasn’t sure what we were dealing with, but a weapon felt like a good idea from the way you were yelling,” Jason muttered, shaking his head. He looked Piper over with obvious confusion on his face, probably taking in the fact that she was in casual clothes rather than dressed for battle, and that she wasn’t holding a weapon. “I’m… still not sure what we’re dealing with, actually. What happened? Are we in danger? Is anyone hurt?”

“It’s not that kind of emergency,” Piper said sheepishly, taking in her friend as he cautiously lowered his weapon. 

Jason’s whole body was tense. He looked as alert as she’d ever seen anyone look at three in the morning, but between the chest plate that had been hastily thrown over his pajamas, his sleep-mussed hair and the bags under his eyes, it was still obvious she’d woken him up.

Piper felt a little bad—she knew that between the disaster in Rome and his sexuality crisis, Jason hadn’t been getting a ton of sleep, and him unsuccessfully trying to sort out their problem with Notus wasn’t helping—but the current situation didn’t allow her to be as considerate of this as she would have been any other time.

“Waking you up like that maybe wasn’t my best idea. I was just on watch, so I’m admittedly not running on a whole lot of sleep right now,” she explained, yawning. “But this is important.”

“What’s going on?” Suddenly, his eyes went wide. Briefly, Piper wondered if he’d just realized the same thing that had occurred to her in cold sweat half an hour ago. “Wait, am I supposed to be on watch? Gods, I could have sworn that wasn’t until tomorrow.” He rubbed at his face like he had a headache.

“What? No. It’s technically sort of still my turn, but I asked Frank to take over for me.” She put a finger to her lips. “Don’t tell Hedge. He’s gonna freak if he finds out I left Hazel and Frank to their premarital hand-holding unsupervised.”

Jason laughed, some of the tension going out of his shoulders.

“So what is it?”

“We screwed up.” Piper bunched her hands in the hem of her shirt. “It’s the tenth of July as of three hours ago.”

“I- what?” Jason blinked at her. He was back to just looking confused. “Is there something happening on the tenth of July that I don’t know about?”

“No! Nothing’s happening on the tenth. That’s the problem!” Piper said, exasperated. She couldn’t believe the penny still hadn’t dropped. “Leo’s birthday was on the seventh.”

“Shit.” Jason’s expression cycled through the same series of emotions she’d gone through when she’d realized it earlier—surprise, then shock, then guilt. “He didn’t say anything.”

“Like you’re one to talk,” Piper commented, raising an eyebrow at him. If it hadn’t been for the cornucopia spitting out baked goods in Rome, she’d have missed Jason’s birthday, too. She wanted to curse at the stupid horn for not giving Leo the same treatment, but it wasn’t like that would fix much of anything now. “Besides, why should Leo have to say anything? After he told us when his birthday was, it was on us to remember. That’s how that works.”

“I didn’t know. I never even asked him about his birthday,” Jason mumbled, guilt clear in his voice. He stared at the floorboards. “Gods, I’m awful. He’s my best friend, and somehow I had no idea.”

“Of course you knew,” Piper immediately protested. “He told us all the way back in Wilderness School, remember?”

“Piper…” Jason said quietly, the guilt in his voice even stronger now.

“It was a few weeks after you two became roommates. Right after Isabel pulled that awful stunt in gym class-” Piper went on, then stopped. It felt like someone had dumped a bucket of ice water over her head when she realized her mistake. “You can’t remember because you weren’t there. That was the Mist version. It was just Leo and me,” she said, her voice quavering.

Jason hesitated—neither of them were entirely sure how these things worked now that they were broken up—but then he reached out to squeeze her shoulder, rubbing her arm comfortingly. “I’m sorry.”

Piper cursed. She should have known this. 

When she consciously thought about it, she did know her hazy Wilderness School memories weren’t real. 

But when they were just background noise, well… it was a little harder than she would have liked to make her brain comprehend that the things she remembered hadn’t actually happened that way.

It frustrated Piper to no end—how much trying to reach those early memories of her friendship with Leo was like navigating a room she only vaguely remembered in the dark. If she got close enough, she could touch the furniture around her—recall the feel of it—but she could rarely make out more than vague shapes, and sometimes she couldn’t even manage that. 

The few scenes she did remember semi-clearly came in flashes—moving boxes she hadn’t seen until she was already tripping over them, contents spilling all over the floor.

That was what had happened when Hazel, anxious about their upcoming world-ending deadline, had mentioned the date during their watch earlier. 

The memory had come unbidden, striking her like one of Jason’s lightning bolts. 

“I don’t do birthdays. Tragic orphan, remember?” Leo had said, smirking at her and Jason. “Besides, you know I ended up here for being a serial runaway, right? No way in hell I’m sticking around until my next birthday.”

“Then there’s no harm in telling us.”

And he had. He’d told her.

Just her.

Because Jason hadn’t actually been around at the time. It had just been the two of them. 

Piper could feel the weight of the memory—could tell it was significant—but most of the details still escaped her. It made her want to scream. It also made her really long to fist-fight Jason’s godly stepmom.

Piper buried her face in her hands. She kind of wanted to cry. She wished she could reach three days into the past and shake herself for being too caught up in everything else that was going on to pay attention to the date.

“I’m pretty sure I was the first person Leo told about his birthday in years. I can’t believe I forgot. I’m a horrible friend.”

“It’s not really your fault Juno messed with your memories,” Jason said gently. He was right, technically, but that didn’t make Piper feel much better. “Besides, at least you asked. Leo’s been my best friend for the better part of a year. He’s my favorite person. And somehow I never even thought to ask.” Jason’s voice had grown very quiet. He was still staring intently at the floor.

Piper knew him well enough to be able to tell he was spiraling, even without any more words spoken between them. 

They’d both been struggling with their roles as heroes with how much had gone wrong lately, but failing as friends felt worse in some fundamental way Piper couldn’t quite put into words.

“In your defense, you didn’t know when your own birthday was until last month. Are birthdays even a thing at Camp Jupiter?”

Jason blinked at her. “…yes? What kind of question is that?”

“I don’t know.” Piper gestured vaguely. “You guys are weird.”

“No, I’m pretty sure that’s just me,” Jason told her, casually enough that she almost started laughing. For a brief moment, he smiled, but his expression dimmed again almost immediately. “I can’t believe mine and Leo’s birthdays are only a week apart and we didn’t get to celebrate either one of them together.” He sounded absolutely devastated. “If this is the only chance we had-”

That knocked Piper right back into business mode immediately. “Shut up. None of that. No doomsday talk,” she interrupted him, glaring at Jason. She hadn’t woken Jason up so they could stand around and feel miserable about being bad friends to Leo. She definitely hadn’t woken Jason up so she could think about the fact that she might be losing one of her best friends by the end of all this. They couldn’t solve the prophecy or fix the fact that they hadn’t celebrated Leo’s birthday when they should have. But there was still something they could do. “We’re going to fix this. Leo’s done so much for us. He deserves to have a birthday party, even if it’s a little late. Help me bake him a cake?”

“That’s a great idea,” Jason said, lighting up just a little. “You know how to bake?”

“I mean… not really,” Piper admitted. “But I thought it’d be nice. We can probably figure it out. Can’t be harder than fighting Giants, right? Besides, Leo did it for my birthday.”

Remembering her own birthday made Piper feel even worse. Leo had been in the middle of making sure the Argo II was ready to set sail, and he’d been stressed out of his mind, but he’d still gone out of his way to bake her a cake. Strawberry shortcake—her favorite—made using the camp’s vast quantities of fresh strawberries. He’d left it beside her bed with a note to have a nice birthday and maybe share it with Jason. Instead, the three of them had sat on the floor of Bunker Nine together, sharing cake and the sandwiches Jason had brought because Leo had missed lunch again. 

“I remember,” Jason said. He suddenly seemed a million miles away. “Leo had whipped cream stuck in the corner of his mouth all afternoon. He could have just wiped it off, but he insisted he could get it with his tongue when he really couldn’t. Not for lack of trying, though.”

“So glad your most vivid memory of my birthday is what Leo was doing with his tongue,” Piper teased him, raising an eyebrow. “I can’t believe you didn’t consider that you might be into guys until a week ago.”

“It’s not...” Jason looked away, but Piper could tell he was blushing. “He smiled so much that afternoon. Leo’s been really hard on himself lately, and I just… I miss how it felt before we left on this quest. I want to see him smile like that again. It isn’t the same when I can tell he doesn’t mean it.”

Jason was right. The quest had been hard on all of them, but Leo had been drawing back from everyone lately, and it worried her, too. She cursed herself for being too caught up in her own problems to pick up on it sooner.

“Well, a birthday cake is as good a point as any to start cheering him up,” Piper said, forcing herself to focus. She couldn’t fixate on all the things she hadn’t done. There wasn’t much she could do to change the past. She had to focus on what she could still do. “If you’re down to sneak out of your room after curfew, that is,” she teased Jason. 

Piper knew how he was about sticking to the rules. For all the Wilderness School memories she couldn’t immediately identify as fake, she didn’t have to think very hard to remember Jason sneaking up onto the roof with her had never happened. Both because she was becoming increasingly sure she wasn’t actually interested in making out with guys on roofs, and because the Jason she’d met seven months ago would have perished at the mere suggestion that he may have broken a rule. There had been times he’d balked at the concept of jaywalking, despite the fact that they’d been chased by a monster.

Jason wasn’t quite as bad now—Leo and Piper had eased him into the whole rule breaking thing as gently as they could—but he was still stupid about it sometimes.

To her surprise, Jason nodded, straightening a little.

“It’s for Leo,” he said decisively. “Of course I’m down. Let’s do this.”

Piper could have pushed the issue. Kept on teasing him about the way his eyes lit up when he talked about Leo, and how he laughed at all of Leo’s terrible jokes. 

But she figured Jason would get there eventually. Besides, they had a cake to bake. So instead, she just grinned at him and said “we’ll make you into a troublemaker yet.”

“What even goes in a cake?” Jason asked as they spread out baking utensils across the kitchen counters fifteen minutes later.

He’d gotten dressed and traded his armor for an apron, which Piper was not entirely sure had been smart. It was becoming increasingly obvious that neither of them had the slightest idea what they were doing. She figured the chances of them blowing something up were about 50/50.  

“Flour and sugar, probably!” she decided, trying to remember the last time she’d baked muffins with her dad. She’d been maybe six years old at the time. Definitely not tall enough to reach the counters without standing on a stool. Somehow, that still made her a more experienced baker than Jason, who’d apparently never done it in his life.

She searched the cupboards. The plates could conjure up food out of thin air, sure, but she knew Leo cooked with ingredients sometimes, and they had to be somewhere.

“Aha!” she said triumphantly as she pulled a bag of flour from one of the upper cabinets that she could just barely reach.

She couldn’t quite grip the bag right, and since it wasn’t closed, about half of it exploded down the front of her shirt and all over the counter before Jason managed to catch the rest with his powers. “…oops.”

“Are we sure we shouldn’t just ask one of the plates for a cake?” Jason asked, cringing at the mess they’d already made before they’d even properly started. 

“Jason. Buddy. Rule number one: when you mess up this badly, you do not apologize with the demigod equivalent of store-bought cake,” Piper tutted, looking at her baking partner disapprovingly.

“Even if you don’t know what you’re doing?”

Piper nodded solemnly. “Especially then. We owe Leo a cake that’s made with love.”

“Okay.” Jason opened up another one of the cupboards. That one just held dishware. “Flour, sugar, love. Anything else you can think of for ingredients? Because I don’t think that’s enough.”

“I’m not sure.” Piper eyed the mixing bowl. “Let’s just pour it in and see what happens?”

“I’m assuming we’ll end up with ingredients in a mixing bowl?” Jason guessed, looking increasingly unsure about this entire operation. “Are you sure this is a good idea? We don’t even know how much of each ingredient we need.”

“Relax, Super Chef.” She poked him in the chest, leaving behind flour prints with her fingers. “We’ll figure it out. Besides, Leo knows we’re not professional bakers or anything. He’ll probably forgive us if we don’t end up with a perfect cake.”

Jason didn’t look very pleased at that thought—apparently he was really concerned that he’d fail his cake exams, or something—but he complied with a sigh.

They poured the remaining bag of flour that wasn’t all over the counter into the mixing bowl, since there wasn’t that much left, anyway. 

“Do we use more flour or more sugar?” Jason asked, unsure. “I mean, I know sugar makes things sweeter, but what does flour even taste like?”

He’d found the sugar and was pulling it out of the cabinet, much more careful than Piper had been with the flour. He didn’t spill any of it, but it wasn’t really a fair comparison—both because the bag was full and therefore closed, and because Jason was taller than her.

“I’m not sure, but-” Piper started, then stopped when she saw Jason scoop a bit of the spilled flour up off the counter and put it in his mouth. “What are you doing?”

“Figuring out what flour tastes like.” He looked thoughtful for a moment, then grimaced. “Dry. Kind of like chalk. Are we sure this is supposed to go in food?”

“Yeah. That and sugar are the two ingredients I actually feel sure about.” She blinked. “Why do you know what chalk tastes like?”

“The rock climbing wall back at camp,” Jason said with a shrug, like that explained anything.

“I- are you saying you licked the rock climbing wall while I wasn’t looking?” Piper stared at him, horrified. “What the fuck?”

“What?” Jason burst out laughing. “No! You chalk your hands before climbing for a better grip. One time I apparently didn’t get the chalk off properly before dinner. Why was me licking the wall your first thought?”

“You just ate flour off the counter,” she commented, an eyebrow raised.

“For taste testing!” Jason protested. “Because apparently this goes in food. I don’t go around eating chalk!”

“Whatever you say, Wolf Boy,” Piper teased, grinning at him. They were still figuring out this whole post-breakup friendship, but so far, she thought they weren’t doing too badly. “So? What did your flour taste test reveal to you?”

“That if we’re sure this goes in the cake at all, we definitely need more sugar than flour,” Jason decided, still looking at the flour uncertainly.

Piper obediently dumped the entire bag of sugar into the bowl. 

“Alright!” She looked at the mixture—which, as Jason had predicted, was just flour and sugar in a bowl now. They were definitely missing something. “Oh, wait. I think there’s supposed to be eggs in this.”

“I don’t know if we even have eggs. I haven’t spotted any so far.” Jason hovered himself upwards so he could get a better look at the back of the upper cabinets. “There’s frosting in here. Considering it’s got a cake on the box, that’s probably for cakes, right?”

“Oh, yeah, we can use that later! Good job finding that!” Piper grinned. She was starting to wonder how Leo even reached half of these cabinets when he was cooking. The answer was probably him precariously balancing on chairs and/or climbing onto the counters. “Any luck finding eggs?”

“Nope.” Jason landed back on his feet, frosting in hand. “Now what?”

“Hmm. Maybe we could just ask the magic plates for some?” Piper suggested. “I don’t think it counts as cheating if we just ask for the ingredients instead of an actual cake.”

“Sure, that should work.” Jason took one of the plates out and placed it on the counter. “Can we have eggs, please?” 

A few seconds later, the plate provided them with a nice, warm serving of scrambled eggs.

Piper paused, thinking back to her very limited past baking experience. “I’m pretty sure they’re supposed to be raw?” She poked the plate. “Can you do raw eggs?”

The plate remained unmoved. Not a common breakfast food, then.

“Does that make a difference?”

“No idea.” Piper eyed the eggs, which smelled delicious, then shrugged. “I mean, eggs are eggs, right? It’s probably fine.”

“Alright.” Jason obediently dumped the eggs into the bowl. He still looked unsure. “How exactly is any of this supposed to mix? It looks really solid.”

Piper snapped her fingers. “Right! Liquid! We need some sort of liquid.” She was feeling way better about this whole thing now that she remembered more of the ingredients. “Water or milk should do.”

Jason’s face lit up. “Wait, would cocoa work? Leo loves hot cocoa.”

“That’s a great idea!” Piper patted his shoulder enthusiastically, leaving flour on his shirt in the process. “We should make it a chocolate cake! We can definitely ask the plates for chocolate.” 

The cocoa was a little more impractical to add than the other ingredients had been, but they just used one of the magic cups and had it fill up repeatedly until the liquidity of the batter looked vaguely right to Piper.

Then Jason chopped up two bars of chocolate to add it into the bowl. Miraculously, he kept all of his fingers.

Piper was the one in charge of properly mixing the ingredients—mostly because when Jason had tried, he’d held the mixer wrong and splattered a whole bunch of batter all over the counter, the walls and himself. At least they both looked like a mess now.

“Aw, look at us! We’re matching!” she joked, gesturing down at her own flour-covered clothes.

Jason snorted.

When Piper was done, she discovered that the mixture could pass as cake batter now. She stuck her finger in, trying a little of it. 

“Yeah, that definitely tastes like chocolate cake. It’s very sweet, but I don’t think Leo will mind that.” She grinned at Jason. “See? This wasn’t so bad!”

“Yeah, I guess not.” Jason smiled tentatively. He tried a bit of the batter himself, eyes widening in surprise. “You’re right, this actually tastes okay.”

“Told you so! Wasn’t this fun?” She bumped his shoulder with hers. “I think we’re finally getting the hang of this whole friendship thing. Only took us seven months and a whole failed relationship.”

That got a proper laugh out of Jason.

Leo was startled out of the nap he’d been taking in the engine room by the fire alarm going off.

He’d been dreaming about Nemesis and the stupid fortune cookie again, so it wasn’t a nap he’d usually have minded being interrupted, but considering all the memories the thought of uncontrolled fire brought back to him, he wasn’t sure this was an improvement.

He untangled himself from his blanket heap, nearly tripping over his own feet in his haste to get out of the engine room. 

“Festus, damage report?” he asked, ignoring the way his heart was hammering.

It wasn’t bad enough that there’d been any kind of ship-wide alarm—Festus had just woken him up, specifically—so the chances that they would fall out of the sky in a blaze of deadly fire didn’t seem that high, but he had to make sure.

‘Kitchen. Minor damage. No injuries,’ Festus replied immediately through the ship’s internal systems, though Leo thought his clicks sounded… almost amused?

Leo wasn’t sure what to make of that. It was a relief that no one was hurt, but he wasn’t thrilled at the thought of more damage to the ship that he might not be able to fix at the moment.

He glared down at his arm cast.

Stupid Khione and her stupid wind bomb. It had been a few days since the incident, but despite the ambrosia Leo had taken, his broken wrist still screamed and gave out every time he tried to lift anything heavy. Unfortunately, engine repairs required him to lift a bunch of heavy things. 

Leo hadn’t let that stop him at first, which was how he’d ended up with a re-fractured wrist and a very stern talking-to from Jason. 

So, for the past two days, Leo had just kind of been sitting around uselessly, doing minor repairs around the ship that wouldn't get them back up in the air as their deadline drew closer. 

‘Another grand performance by Leo Valdez,’ he thought, gritting his teeth. ‘You’ve got one job around here, and you can’t even do that right.’

He’d landed Percy and Annabeth in Tartarus, and now they wouldn’t even make it to Epirus to meet them because he couldn’t fix the fucking ship.

No wonder Jason and Piper would rather hang out with each other than with him.

Leo shook himself when he reached the kitchen door. That was enough feeling sorry for himself for one night. He had a fire to put out.

He pushed open the door and promptly froze.

The kitchen was a complete disaster zone. There wasn’t a fire anymore, but from the smell it was obvious that there had been one not too long ago. It looked like a flour tornado had moved through the kitchen, and dried batter was splattered over the counter, the wall and both of Leo’s best friends, who were standing in the middle of the mess.

Jason was directing smoke out of the kitchen window with his powers while Piper was busy dumping unholy amounts of frosting over… Leo actually couldn’t identify what it was she was putting them on. As best as he could tell from this distance, it might have been a large block of charcoal.

”Guys, what the fuck?”

“Leo? It’s four am. Why are you up?” Jason asked, startled.

He and Piper both looked up from their respective tasks. In Jason’s case, this wasn’t too bad. In Piper’s case, it meant she splattered frosting all over the already disastrous counter.

“Uh, Pipes, maybe put the bowl down?” Leo suggested, an eyebrow raised. She cursed, placing the bowl right in the middle of the mess she’d just made. That wasn’t what Leo had meant, but it was also the least of his worries right now. “Look. No shade to your couples’ night of… whatever the fuck it is you two are doing, but you set off Festus’ smoke detectors.”

”We weren’t…” Piper exchanged an unsure look with Jason. Then she took a deep breath and looked right at Leo. “Listen. I know we’re three days late, but… happy birthday. I’m really sorry I forgot.”

“I’m sorry, too.” Jason rubbed the back of his neck awkwardly. “We were trying to surprise you, but a fire alarm in the middle of the night wasn’t the surprise we were going for.”

Leo froze. The kitchen disaster in front of him rearranged itself into a completely different scene. He hadn’t picked up on it when he’d walked in—he’d admittedly been a little preoccupied with his friends trying to burn down the kitchen—but the small kitchen table that mainly existed for when Leo needed extra space to prep ingredients had been covered in a nice cloth and set with plates. There were what looked like hand-crafted streamers and tiny origami figurines sitting on top of it, like they’d started making decorations and not been able to put them up or arrange them nicely before they’d gotten into a fight with the oven.

Which meant the charcoal bits Piper had drowned in frosting... They’d been trying to bake him a cake.

Leo was trying so hard to keep it together. But then his friends started singing happy birthday—Piper’s incredible voice mixing disastrously with Jason’s best attempt at caterwauling—and he just started sobbing. 

Leo had been in an awful headspace lately. He’d barely even remembered his birthday himself. He hadn’t properly celebrated it in years—not since he’d been eight years old, getting chided by his laughing mom for sticking his hands in the frosting before he'd even bothered to blow out the candles.

A part of Leo had been relieved when the seventh had passed and no one had said a word about it. He’d fucked everything up. It was his fault they were stuck here, and his fault Percy and Annabeth were gone. He didn’t deserve to have a birthday party.

All of this… it was too much.

“Guys, I… I don’t even know what to say.”

Within a moment’s notice, the singing stopped, and then his friends were hugging him, getting him covered in all of their baking ingredients.

“I don’t think our singing was that bad,” Piper commented, and Leo laughed through his tears.

“No, it totally was,” he declared, enjoying the way he was tucked against his friends for a moment longer before he pulled back. “I’m also crying for the poor cake ingredients you guys used. What did you do to them?”

He took another look at the charcoal block drowned in frosting that was apparently supposed to be a cake. It was somehow even worse than it had seemed at first glance. It was burnt on the outside and drooping towards the middle, and the smell was absolutely horrendous.

“You haven’t even tried it yet,” Jason said, sounding seriously bummed out and giving Leo a look like a kicked puppy. “Sure, it’s a little burnt, but we tried our best.”

“It’s burnt enough to set off Festus’ smoke detectors,” Leo pointed out. “You guys know you could have saved yourselves the effort and just used the magic plates to make me a cake, right?”

“We didn’t want to save ourselves the effort!” Piper immediately protested. “We forgot your birthday! That called for something more meaningful than a summoned cake!” 

“Aw, so you decided to get me food poisoning instead? That’s so thoughtful!” Leo smiled at them. “No fucking thanks, though.”

“Can we at least cut it? I’ll try a piece if you won’t,” Jason told him, pouting a little.

“We can cut it, but you’re absolutely not eating any of that,” Leo told him immediately. 

He was genuinely both curious and terrified to find out how the cake looked on the inside, but nothing he could see right now suggested this thing was even slightly edible.

He got a sharp knife out of one of the drawers and cautiously cut off the end piece of the cake—which was difficult considering the outer layer had the consistency of a brick. Leo briefly wondered if he needed to get a saw (or maybe a hammer and chisel) out of his tool belt, but then the cake gave way with a gross squelching noise, and the knife slid through with worrying ease almost to the bottom, where it turned back into brick texture.

“What kind of monstrosity did you two create?”

Leo transferred the piece onto one of the plates with the care he would have handled a dangerous explosive with, poking at it cautiously. The outer layer was rock-solid, but the middle part was still visibly horrendously undercooked batter. He looked back at the rest of the cake, which looked much the same way. 

“Oh gods. How did we even manage that?” Piper asked, baffled. She didn’t look annoyed that Leo had teased them anymore. Honestly, she looked like she was struggling not to burst out laughing herself.

“I’m gonna try it,” Jason announced. “I think we should give it a fair shot.”

Leo and Piper exchanged an amused look, convinced Jason was kidding, which meant neither of them managed to stop him from biting off the edge of the piece that Leo had cut.

“Jason, what the hell?” Piper shrieked. “Don’t eat that!”

“Jase. Jase, spit that out this instant,” Leo said immediately. “I’m serious. You’re gonna make yourself so sick, and we can’t afford to have you out of commission for three weeks.”

“It actually tastes pretty decent,” Jason told them, still chewing. Something made an awful crunching noise. “Ow.”

“Spit it out,” Leo repeated, pointing towards the trash can. 

This time, Jason listened. 

“I think I chipped a tooth,” he said afterwards, wincing. “Maybe don’t try the cake.”

“Wasn’t going to. We may be fighting giants on a bi-weekly basis, but I don’t have that much of a death wish,” Leo told him. He gestured for Jason to sit down on one of the chairs and took his friend’s jaw into his good hand, gently tilting his head back and forth and inspecting his mouth. “Yeah, you chipped one of your molars pretty badly. Maybe avoid chewing on your right side until we can find you a dentist.” Leo winced in sympathy. “Also, I know you worry your lip a lot when you’re nervous, so try not to do that—unless you want to look like a vampire really likes drinking specifically from your lips. In which case, you know. You do you.”

“Thanks for checking.” Jason was blushing furiously. He looked mortified. “You can, uh. You can let go now.”

Leo nodded, dropping Jason’s jaw. He rummaged in his tool belt and took out a small vial of nectar. 

“Take a sip. It’s not gonna fix the tooth, but it should at least get the taste of cake and blood out, and if you did ingest any of the cake we should probably try to combat that early.”

Jason took the vial obediently, but he made a face when he drank from it. “It tastes weird.”

“Can’t taste any weirder than the cake,” Leo pointed out. 

“I genuinely thought it tasted okay,” Jason insisted. “Chipping my tooth was definitely bad, but I’m pretty sure I ate weirder things when I was living with Lupa as a toddler. It mostly tasted like very sweet, burnt chocolate with a bit of scrambled egg.”

“Even your description of that makes me want to throw up,” Piper told him. She looked a little green. 

Leo agreed with Piper’s sentiment, but he was also stuck on one specific part of what Jason had said. “What do you mean, it kind of tastes like scrambled egg? Why would it taste like scrambled egg?”

“Because we put scrambled egg in the cake,” Jason said casually, like this was a completely normal sentence and not one of the most cursed things Leo had ever heard in his life. “Wouldn’t it be weirder if it didn’t taste like it at all?”

Leo absolutely lost it.

“You put scrambled egg into the-” He was regretting his broken wrist again, mostly because this was the type of situation that, at minimum, required a two-handed face-palm. That did explain the weird yellow pieces Leo had seen in the undercooked batter, but he also desperately wished he could go back to not knowing that. He sighed, resigned. “Why do I even ask?”

“Why is that wrong?” Piper looked genuinely confused. “I know pretty much for sure that eggs are a common cake ingredient!”

“Yeah, but not scrambled eggs!” Leo burst out laughing and couldn’t get himself to stop. This was absolutely hysterical. “Forget celestial bronze and imperial gold. We should just weaponize this cake next time we fight a giant. Even if they do regenerate eventually, they’re never gonna dare to come near us again.”

He had to pause to wipe tears from the corners of his eyes—partially because he was genuinely really touched by the gesture, but mostly because the mental image of Jason and Piper dumping scrambled egg into a bowl of cake batter with completely straight faces was absolutely killing him. 

“The plates couldn’t do raw eggs. We tried,” Jason explained with a shrug. “We figured it wouldn’t make that much of a difference.”

“Yes, it does. What is wrong with you two?” Leo buried his face in his hand again, trying his hardest to catch his breath between bouts of laughter and failing miserably. “Also, we have raw eggs in the fridge. Why didn’t you just use those?”

Piper and Jason exchanged a look.

“Eggs go in the fridge?” Jason asked, dumbfounded.

“You people are hopeless.” 

“At this rate you’re not getting a cake at all next year,” Piper told him, crossing her arms.

“Thank the gods,” Leo said. He was shaking with laughter. “Do I even want to know the other ingredients if one of them was scrambled egg?”

“Sugar, flour, cocoa to add some liquid and two bars of chocolate,” Jason listed.

Huh. Unlike the scrambled egg, those seemed like pretty basic chocolate cake ingredients, and could actually have made for a decent cake, even though that sounded like way too much chocolate and Leo wouldn’t have put frosting on it. They’d probably gotten the ratios all wrong if they hadn’t had a recipe—and considering how the cake had turned out, they couldn’t have had one—but that didn’t explain why the outer layer of the cake had turned out hard enough to chip a tooth. Burnt cake didn’t usually do that.

Leo waited for Jason to continue listing ingredients. He didn’t. He just stood there, looking at him expectantly.

“…that’s it? No butter? No baking powder? No egg that wasn’t scrambled?” Leo was equal parts horrified and amused when his friends shook their heads. Ah. That would do it. “How did you guys manage to forget all of the ingredients that are supposed to make the cake less dense and somehow still end up with a liquid batter core? This whole thing should be a brick, not just the outer layer. I’m honestly almost impressed.”

“We didn’t know what temperature to put the oven on, but we figured just turning it all the way up and keeping an eye on it would work,” Piper explained. “Apparently it could have used a few more minutes.”

“Holy fuck. Yeah, that explains it. It also explains the fire.” Leo had been in the process of calming down at least a little, but now he doubled over laughing again. If being in the general proximity of this cake wasn’t going to kill him, his friends recounting their baking misadventures definitely would. “Whose idea was this?”

“I messed up the thing with the oven,” Jason admitted sheepishly. “The cake in general was Piper’s idea, though.”

“It was?”

Piper rubbed the back of her neck, looking somewhere between embarrassed and amused at just how badly this whole baking thing had turned out. “Evidently not my best call.”

Leo hugged her again.

“Thanks. You know, for remembering, even if it was a little late.”

Jason got pulled into the hug, too—for fairness’ sake, and because Leo knew it must have taken a lot out of him to break the rules and leave his room after curfew. 

As much fun as he made of the cake—which, in his defense, really did deserve it—Leo wanted his friends to know how much he appreciated that they’d tried. 

He felt warm all throughout his body.

“We’ll do it properly next time,” Piper promised when they broke apart. “Correct date and all. No cake, though,” she amended. “Not even cake mix. I will not stand for you laughing at our efforts.”

“And all the cake mixes in the world will thank you for it,” Leo teased.

It was hard to put into words what it meant to him to know that they were thinking of him, with how much he’d worried they would inevitably end up not caring anymore. That was the way it had always gone, even with the nicer foster families—inevitably, they’d all figured out he just wasn’t worth the effort. Eventually, he’d started running before it got to that point. 

It was a thought he’d been toying with a lot lately—ever since Nemesis had told him that he’d never belong with his friends. 

But something had shifted. 

Next year, Piper had said, and Leo believed her. 

He wanted a next year with her and Jason. And the year after, and the year after that one, until they were all old and gray. Until Gaia was nothing but a ridiculous story they told to their grandkids. 

‘Oh yeah, when we were teenagers the earth tried to kill us all. We kicked her ass. It was a whole thing. Now, have you seen my glasses?’

The thought of losing them scared Leo a whole lot more than the thought of staying did.

He didn’t put any of that into words, though. Instead, he decided he desperately needed to go back to teasing his friends, because all of these ridiculous emotions were too hard for him to deal with. 

“If nothing else, your ridiculous baking disaster did cheer me up a lot. I’m so gonna tell the others about this. They’re gonna lose it.” Leo smiled gleefully. “Also, please never set foot into my kitchen again. That goes for both of you. No more couples’ baking nights on the Argo, okay? The ship is wrecked enough as-is, and we can’t save the world if we’re all sleep deprived because you guys keep setting off the fire alarm.”

“You have nothing to worry about in that regard,” Piper told him. Leo didn’t really get why, but she was smiling.

“First baking experience was too traumatizing for you to ever try again?” he guessed, still struggling to keep a straight face.

“It’s not that. Despite the results, we actually had a pretty great time. It’s…” Piper gave Jason a questioning look. Whatever it was she’d asked, Jason nodded. “We’re just sort of done doing couples’ anything.”

“What does that even mean?” Leo looked from Piper to Jason in confusion. “Not sure if this is just me being sleep deprived, but is Pipes making any sense to you?”

“Yes,” Jason said, pausing for a moment before apparently figuring out that he should probably elaborate. “We broke up.”

That startled Leo so badly he almost caused a kitchen fire. “What? When? Guys, the cake may be awful, but it’s not bad enough to warrant a whole breakup.”

“A few days ago?” Piper shrugged. “It was mutual and we didn’t want to make a whole thing out of it. We’ve got more important problems right now.”

“Not the cake, then,” Leo concluded, too stunned to say anything else. 

His mind was whirring. What the hell had he missed? 

And why in the world was the main thing he felt relief? 

“Definitely not the cake,” Jason confirmed. “Don’t worry, we’re still friends. It’s a little weird, but we'll figure it out. You’re probably right that we should be banned from being baking buddies, though.”

He laughed.

They both seemed completely unbothered by the breakup. 

No, it was even weirder than that. Leo thought they genuinely looked happy about it. He had no idea what to make of that. 

Thankfully, Leo didn't have to know what to make of it. He could always just make jokes about it now and ask questions later.

“Oh, good. I’d hate to pick sides in the divorce. It’d suck if I only got to see Piper on the weekends.”

“Hang on, why am I the one who only gets weekends?” Piper whined, giving him an offended, deeply betrayed look. “You were my friend first!” 

”Jason genuinely thinks I’m funny, and he sat through all of the Transformers movies with me without complaining once. Sorry, Pipes,” Leo explained, grinning at her. “Besides, you admitted to this whole cake business being your idea, so that’s clearly child endangerment. You should be glad it’s not just supervised visitation.”

“You’re so lucky today is your make-up birthday, because otherwise I’d have some choice words for you, Mister,” Piper told him, pouting. “Anyway!” She clapped her hands. “Tonight is about you, not about our relationship status. I just wanted to make sure you don’t get the wrong idea. We were burning down the kitchen in a completely platonic manner.” 

“Right.” Leo snorted. “If today is my make-up birthday, does that mean I get to make a wish? And if so, can that wish be that we throw out your awful cake and eat magic plate cake instead?”

Piper and Jason were both pouting now, but Leo wouldn’t budge on this. They did not need to add food poisoning to their steadily growing list of problems.

Leo put the hazard of a cake into a box and stored it safely in his tool belt—getting rid of it at Notus’ palace might be considered a war declaration, which would not help their situation, but since they kept running into obstacles Leo was sure there’d be a monster they could kill with it in the future.

Then he made his friends clean up after themselves, because as much as his mom had been in favor of organized chaos in other spaces, she’d been very insistent when it came to tidying up after yourself in the kitchen.

Once that was done, Jason and Piper put up the decorations—streamers and tiny colorful origami dragons and all—and they all had a piece of unburnt cake without scrambled eggs, courtesy of the golden plates.

Afterwards, Leo voted they go hang out in Jason’s room, because Piper’s room was usually a disaster and his own was basically a workshop, neither of which was very cozy.

They collapsed onto Jason’s mattress, Leo tucked between his best friends, his injured arm resting on top of Jason so no one could roll onto it by accident. Jason didn't mind.

Leo picked out a movie—a new science fiction film neither of them had seen before, which turned out to be a mistake because the world-building was really complex and they were all sleepy as hell. None of them actually managed to follow the plot, and Piper barely made it half an hour into the movie before she dozed off.

“Last chance to throw us both out,” Leo said when realized Jason was starting to fall asleep, too. He didn’t have to bother with whispering. Piper slept like a log. 

“I won’t,” Jason told him, pulling Leo even closer for emphasis. “You’re so warm. This is nice.”

“You sure about this, Superman?” Leo teased, though he wasn’t complaining. “We’re gonna be in a lot of trouble if Hedge finds us like this. You really ready to deal with that?”

“It’s your birthday. Hedge can bite me,” Jason announced with a yawn. He pulled his blanket over all of them and wrapped an arm around Leo’s shoulder.

“Not how the wolf-goat food chain typically works, buddy,” Leo told him, letting his head drop onto Jason’s chest. He was halfway on top of his friend now, but Jason didn't seem to mind. Not like Leo had much of a choice, either—Piper kept moving closer to him, so moving to the other side was all Leo could do not to get squashed between them.

Jason laughed. The noise rumbled against Leo’s ear. It felt nice.

“How’s your tooth, by the way?”

“Would be a lot better if I could stop forgetting I’m not supposed to chew on that side,” Jason sighed, yawning again, “And before you ask, no, I’m not feeling sick. I told you, I’ve eaten weirder things than burnt cake before.”

“Somehow, this does not reassure me,” Leo commented. “We really need to talk to Lupa about appropriate toddler diets when we get back.”

Jason laughed again, but it was more subdued this time. This might have offended Leo—he was hilarious, thank you very much—but Jason was forgiven based on the fact that he was obviously completely beat.

A moment later, he was out like a light, snoring quietly.

There, tucked between his two best friends, Leo felt… happy. Despite his stupid broken wrist, the last few hours had been the best Leo had felt in weeks.

As much as he preferred sleeping in the engine room over the quiet of his own room, there was something to be said about the comfort of an actual bed. He could still hear the machinery of the Argo II whirring around him here if he really focused on it, but his friends’ breaths and the other noises they made in their sleep were more than enough to combat the quiet even when he didn’t.

When sleep found him, Leo was vision- and nightmare-free for the first time in ages.