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Jason really wanted to pass out, but considering he and Piper were currently free falling, that would have been seriously inconvenient.
It took almost everything out of him to get them back to the ground in one piece. He felt completely unbalanced, worn out in a way he had never been before.
He should have been focusing on where he was trying to land, but he couldn’t tear his gaze from the inferno in the sky.
The earth didn’t try to swallow them upon impact, which was a good sign. Jason’s knees buckled regardless. His body tried to shut off in its entirety, darkness coating the edge of his vision. He couldn’t afford that right now. Leo couldn’t afford that right now. That thought was the only thing that kept him on his feet.
“I’m going to kill him,” Piper breathed, wiping at her face. She looked about as ready to faint as Jason felt. “We’re going to find him and bring him back to life and then I’m going to strangle him.”
“That seems like a lot of effort for no real gain, but I understand the sentiment.” Reyna’s pegasus had landed next to them, and she reached down to offer Piper a hand up. “Let’s find your friend.”
Jason almost smiled. A modicum of strength seeped back into his body. He was relieved that Reyna was okay, and relieved that he wouldn’t have to figure out how to get airborne again. Standing without his body giving out was enough of a struggle. He had a distinct feeling that even if he did somehow manage to get back in the air, he’d be coming down the hard way.
They didn’t have much time. Jason wasn’t sure how long they had to administer the physician’s cure, and he really didn’t want to find out it hadn’t worked because they were a moment too late.
Thankfully, finding Leo didn’t take long. Even in the chaos of the ending battle, a large smoking dragon-shaped crater in the side of a hill would have been hard to overlook.
Festus creaked in alarm. Some of his legs were obviously stuck in the muddy, charred hillside, others parts of him partially melted, but he looked surprisingly intact considering the explosion he’d just been caught in.
Leo was lying prone on Festus’ neck, covered head to toe in soot. He was completely motionless, the supposedly fireproof fabric of his clothes singed and black as coal. His skin was burnt in a way Jason had previously thought impossible for Leo. That wasn’t the worst of it. One of Leo’s legs was partially gone, severed messily in the middle of his shin.
The fire had seared the wound shut, so at least he wasn’t bleeding out, but it felt like a cruel joke. The Fates did not take kindly to being cheated, and if they could not permanently take his life, maybe they’d decided to take however much of him they could.
‘Lose your life and your leg!’ Leo’s voice said at the back of Jason’s head. ‘Shittiest two-for-one deal I’ve ever invested in. Do not recommend.’
Piper choked out a sob. Jason’s heart felt so hollow he wasn’t sure it was even still sitting in his chest. Where it had been, there was a piece of red-hot rage, unlike anything Jason had ever felt before.
Leo had been losing everything to this idiotic war since he’d been a child—since before he could even comprehend what he was, or what any of it meant, or why it was happening to him. He’d done everything right, but it didn’t matter in the end. Not for him. Leo hadn’t been a person. He’d been a means to an end. Just a thread, woven in whichever way the Fates saw fit and ripped in an instant.
You did everything for the gods in life, and this was your reward, in the end. You got to die for them, too.
Where was the justice in any of this?
It took all three of them to lay Leo down in the grass, with how hard Piper and Jason were both trembling. Festus made an awful, agonized noise and shot a column of fire into the sky.
“I know, buddy. I know,” Piper said, gently running her hands over his metal scales. “We’re gonna make him better, I promise.”
Jason moved Leo’s head into his lap to cushion it. He was immediately struck by how cold Leo’s skin felt—impossibly cold for someone who’d been burning a moment ago. It was like the explosion had drained every bit of warmth out of him.
The wrongness of it all nearly killed Jason. Leo wasn’t supposed to feel cold. He never had. He always felt just slightly too warm, like the flames he controlled lived inside his chest at all times, flickering gently. In fights, Leo was a forest fire, red-hot, blasting heat and smoke at anything that opposed him. Outside of fights, he was a hearth fire. He was the campfire at Camp Half-Blood at the end of the day, the one constant that never failed to lift everyone’s spirits, no matter how terribly the day had gone.
It didn’t feel right for it to be this easy to snuff that fire out.
Jason’s vision blurred with tears that wouldn’t stop no matter how many of them he wiped away. He wasn’t sure what he would do if this didn’t work.
Piper unwrapped the vial with the Physician’s Cure with shaking fingers, slowly uncapping it. She drizzled the dark red liquid into Leo’s mouth, careful not to spill a single drop. Reyna had a hand on her arm like she was trying to steady her.
For a long, terrible moment, nothing happened. Maybe they had taken too long. Jason felt completely numb with grief. He didn’t think he’d ever get this image out of his mind again—Leo singed and motionless and cold as ice.
Then Piper reached out to clasp one of Leo’s hands in both of hers.
“You can do this.” It took Jason a moment to register what she was doing—that she was charmspeaking Leo, helping to coax his soul back into his body, the way she’d done with him after he’d looked at Hera’s true form. “You can do this,” she repeated, more forcefully this time. “Get back up here, or I’ll march down into the Underworld and kick your ass.”
Leo’s chest heaved. A splash of color returned to his face, barely visible beneath all the grime that was covering him.
The first few breaths were shallow, like one of Leo’s machines shuddering on for the first time. Then they slowly evened out. His face twisted into a pained grimace and his eyes wouldn’t open, but Leo was breathing. He had a steady pulse.
Jason was glad he was already sitting down, because his knees surely would have buckled now. The tears still wouldn’t stop, but they were mostly relief now. Fear released its vice grip on his heart.
Piper’s expression softened, the worry lines etched into her face melting into a smile, and then she fainted, body going limp like a puppet with all of its strings cut. Reyna caught her easily.
“You fought well. Rest now,” she said, though Jason wasn’t sure Piper’s unconscious form needed anyone’s permission. “Even with my help… I can’t believe she had the strength for this, after everything.“
“It wasn’t her first time,” Jason mumbled absently. Leo’s breaths still came ragged. He’d be okay. He had to be okay.
“That’s just something she does. Put a primordial goddess to sleep. Pull people back from the afterlife.” Reyna shook her head in disbelief. She shifted her hold on Piper so she could support her head. “You’re lucky. Your girlfriend is incredible.”
“Not my girlfriend,” Jason corrected absentmindedly. “But yeah, Piper’s amazing.”
Something in Reyna’s posture shifted at his words, and for a moment Jason was afraid he’d have to explain himself before he made an even bigger mess of this friendship than he already had. He’d always planned to talk to her about his sexuality crisis eventually—Reyna had been his best friend for years, and he still loved her, even if his memories of their time together were all over the place—but right now he was exhausted and his nerves were frayed and his worry for Leo was taking up all available space in his head. He just wasn’t feeling up for a conversation like that in the slightest.
But when he lifted his head to meet Reyna’s eyes, he found she wasn’t looking at him at all. She was looking down at Piper.
Oh. Oh.
Despite everything, Jason almost managed to smile.
What happened after Jason only remembered foggily. He was somewhere on the edge of consciousness, not quite allowing himself to pass out regardless of how much his body wanted to.
The infirmary was full of wounded demigods, with Will and the other Apollo children flitting between them, struggling to keep up.
Jason couldn’t remember how they’d gotten there. His arms and clothes were covered in soot now, but he didn’t really mind. He wasn’t sure when he’d taken Leo’s hand, but he hadn’t let go since. Because there were so many wounded, the ones who were at an immediate risk of death took priority, and thankfully Leo hadn’t made that list. He’d been put on a nectar drip, his stump bandaged, and there was a blanket wrapped around him to prevent more heat from escaping his body. For now, that would have to be enough.
At some point, one of the Apollo kids started cursing at Jason, maybe picking up on how badly his body wanted to give out. Jason should have known her name, but through the fog in his brain he couldn’t seem to remember it. She muttered something about blood loss and broken ribs, which did explain the painful stinging in his side. She looked like she wanted to murder Jason when he refused to lie down, but then reluctantly committed to just bandaging him up and shoving ambrosia in his face.
“Too many patients to argue with each one individually,” she grumbled as she stalked off to deal with the next emergency.
Jason wasn’t sure the ambrosia would work, after his last attempt at using it had failed so miserably. But it seemed less upset with him now that he’d chosen his role. He wasn’t sure what he expected it to taste like—maybe a combination of his favorite foods from Camp Half-Blood and Camp Jupiter. Instead, home tasted like Leo’s tacos, and that, more than anything, finally pushed him over the edge.
The world blinked out of existence.
Jason’s hand was cold when he woke up, which was enough to startle him awake in an instant. He was frantic at first, but relaxed when he realized he was still in the same chair he’d passed out in and Leo was still there, chest rising and falling with each breath. He looked a little less like death now—dressed in fresh clothes and no longer covered in grime—though he was still just as unconscious.
There were less people in the infirmary than there had been when he’d passed out. The first wave of kids had apparently been cleared to leave.
Hazel and Piper were sitting on the opposite side of Leo’s bed. One of Hazel’s hands was on Leo’s arm.
“He’s stable, as far as I can tell. His soul is anchored. But it will take him a bit to wake up. I don’t know as much about this stuff as Nico, but from my own experience, death is pretty confusing.”
Piper squeezed her shoulder. “Thank you.”
“Is Nico okay?” Jason asked, alarmed. He knew Nico would have helped if he could have. He felt guilty for not asking about him sooner. He’d completely lost track of everyone that wasn’t Leo and Piper during the last part of the battle.
“He’s fine,” Hazel reassured him immediately, and Jason’s shoulders relaxed. “Just having a very long nap right now.”
“He offered to help, but Will looked about ready to stab him with a scalpel, so he didn’t.” Piper laughed. The worry lines around her eyes weren’t quite as pronounced anymore. Not like she was seconds away from breaking.
“How long was I out?”
“Not long enough. You should probably lie down. Kayla said you’ve maybe been unconscious for three hours, but she couldn’t move you because she was convinced you’d insist on staying in that chair and staying awake the second you regained consciousness.”
“No, that’s okay, I don’t need to lie down,” Jason said immediately, ignoring the sluggishness of his thoughts and the way his chest hurt when he breathed. They seemed like minor issues. “I want to stay with Leo. He can’t be alone when he wakes up.”
“He wouldn’t be alone,” Hazel tried. “We can take shifts. Someone would come get you if anything changed.”
Jason shook his head vehemently. “I need to be here,” he insisted. “If- if he gets worse and I’m not here-”
His voice cracked. The thought was unbearable.
He took Leo’s calloused hand back into his own, trying not to squeeze too tightly in an attempt to reassure himself he was still alive. Leo still felt terribly cold.
“He’s going to be okay,” Hazel said gently.
“You don’t know that!” Jason immediately felt awful for snapping at her, but he couldn’t help it. His nerves were frayed. There was an angry desperation in his chest he didn’t know what to do with. “I don’t know what I’d do with myself if-”
Then Piper was next to him, her arms wrapping around him.
“Sparky. Hey. Breathe.”
“I can’t. I can’t lose him,” Jason repeated, trying and failing to breathe past his aching chest and his broken ribs and the fact that Leo might still die.
“We’re not going to lose him,” Piper said gently. “Jason, look at me. Breathe.”
Jason’s brain grew even foggier, pushing out everything except for Piper’s voice, like it usually did when she used her charmspeak on him. It helped. His body remembered how to suck in air.
“There you go. You’re doing amazing.”
“Not really. That was all you,” Jason countered, and he finally brought himself to return her embrace. He clung to her desperately.
In all of his grief and his anxiety and this awful world where nothing felt right, the only thing that made sense was the way Piper fit into his arms.
“I just helped.” She squeezed him gently. “We’re going to be okay. Everything is going to be okay.”
He so, so desperately wanted to believe her.
For a while, they just stayed that way, holding onto each other like that was the only way for them to both keep their head above water.
When Piper slowly untangled herself from Jason so she could move back to Leo’s bedside, one of her hands stayed firmly in his. He clung to it like it was a lifeline.
“I don’t understand why he’d do this. I-” I wanted it to be me, Jason didn’t say. I was the other half of that prophecy, and it should have been me in that infirmary bed. “He could have died. Permanently. If we hadn’t found him in time…”
“He was protecting you.” Hazel said, wiping at her eyes which were already red from crying. “After he made that stupid oath, there was nothing we could have done to stop him.”
“What oath?” Jason’s mouth felt dry. “I thought we’d agreed not to swear any to avoid the final breath line.”
“Leo was scared.” Hazel’s voice was thick with grief. “The thought of something happening to either of you…” She looked away. “He swore on the Styx he’d make sure you’d come out of this alive. He just decided that part of the prophecy had to be his because he couldn’t stand the thought of it being yours.”
“Damn it, Leo,” Piper cursed—a statement that may have seemed slightly at odds with the gentle way she ran a finger over Leo’s cheek if she’d been anyone else. “Why are you incapable of talking to us about this kind of stuff? Why won’t you just let us be there for you?”
“There’s something I think you two should know,” Hazel said suddenly, like she wanted to give an answer to the rhetorical question Piper had asked Leo’s unconscious form. She couldn’t look at either of them. “About Leo.”
Jason’s heart dropped. “What is it?” He tried hard to keep his voice steady. No matter how frayed his nerves were, he didn’t want to snap at her again.
“Remember how Leo and I met Nemesis? We told you part of what happened afterwards, but not all of it.” Hazel choked out. “She said some really awful stuff. Telling Leo he’ll always be an outsider. A seventh wheel. That he’ll never have a place with us. I tried to reassure him, but I don’t think it helped.”
Piper balled her hands into fists.
“I’m going to find her, and I’m going to punch her in the face,” she gritted out between clenched teeth. “Between this and what Reyna told me, I’ve had it with deities giving my friends vague, shitty one-liners just to screw with them.”
Jason wished he had the capacity to feel angry at anyone but himself. The only thing his own brain could think of fixating on was the fact that Leo must have been hurting so much and he hadn’t picked up on it the way he should have. Hadn’t comforted him the way he should have. And now he wasn’t sure he’d ever get the chance.
“I’m sorry!” Hazel was fully sobbing now. “I didn’t want to betray his trust, but if I’d just said something sooner-”
“Hazel, no.” Piper pulled her into a fierce hug. “It wasn’t your fault.”
“Piper’s right.” Jason cursed himself for how much his voice trembled. He looked at Leo, who was peacefully snoring away on the bed. He felt the same way he had when Khione had frozen him to the deck of the Argo—ice cold all over. “I wish he had told us. I hate thinking that I may have done something to make him feel like he couldn’t.”
“I thought maybe he just needed time.” Hazel looked so, so small where she was curled up in Piper’s arms. “I didn’t talk to anyone but Nico about what happened to me in my last life for months. But now-”
“I’ll talk to him when he wakes up. Make sure he’s okay. None of this is your fault,” Piper reassured her. She turned back to Leo and shook her head slightly. “Did you really think we’d leave you? That we’d just let you die alone? No way in Tartarus. You’re stuck with us now. For good. You’d do well to remember that.”
Jason took Leo’s hand back in his. He couldn’t get his voice to work, but he hoped he got it across that his sentiment was the same.
‘We aren’t going anywhere, so you’d better stay right here with us.’
“Lunch,” Reyna announced when she stepped into the infirmary a while later. She handed out a handful of the self-serving plates and cups. “I already made the required sacrifices for you. I hope that was alright.”
Piper raised an eyebrow at her. “I thought I’d asked you to rest.”
“There is work to be done.”
Even with his memories all messed up, Jason knew that one was a losing battle. It didn’t matter that Hazel and Frank probably had things handled. When you’d spent so much of your life with people depending on you to do your duties, laying them down and taking breaks wasn’t easy, especially not during times like this.
Even as he sat there, Jason felt the urge to help with the rebuilding efforts and help smooth over the conflicts between camps that were sure to remain. Besides, he had made promises to the gods that he needed to fulfill—if not for the gods, who he wasn’t feeling very amicable towards at the moment, then for the demigods who would suffer the consequences if he broke his promise.
But he couldn’t bring himself to leave Leo’s side. Not even for a moment.
He’d make up for it later. Right now, his best friend needed him. That was the most important thing.
“Reyna’s been keeping me company since yesterday,” Piper explained. “I think she’s the only reason I was able to sleep at all. But she was so busy watching over me that she didn’t get a ton of sleep, and now she’s probably spent all morning putting out fires.”
“I’m used to it.”
Piper quirked an eyebrow at her. “You’re doing the opposite of helping your case right now. You do realize that, right?“
“I’m a praetor. Managing camp relations is sort of my job, and there’s a lot of that to be done at the moment.”
“It’s okay to not be a praetor every second of the day, you know. Besides, I’m a cabin counselor. I’m also supposed to help with these things.” Piper smiled at her. “Tell you what: you join us for lunch, because I’m willing to bet you also haven’t eaten yet, and then I’ll help you with managing camper conflicts afterwards.”
“I suppose that sounds acceptable. You can probably help Festus better than the rest of us can, anyway. Some of the other campers have been trying to fix him up a little but he’s very upset about Leo, and… well, some of the fires I’ve been putting out haven’t been figurative, let’s put it that way.”
“I’ll talk to him,” Piper promised.
Reyna let herself sink into a chair next to Piper, eyes lingering on her just a moment too long before she looked away.
Jason almost managed a smile.
It was nice, seeing them like this. Seeing them talk to each other in such a familiar way and even tease each other a little.
Jason was glad for that bright spot considering he could barely remember how to breathe half the time.
But then he thought about all the ways Leo would have teased Piper if he’d been awake for this, and his heart sank again. He hadn’t known, up until that point, how painfully you could miss someone even if they were right in front of you.
Jason didn’t feel like eating, but it was hard not to at least try when Piper kept looking at him with worry written all over her face, so he unenthusiastically chewed on a piece of plain toast that tasted like sawdust.
Over the next few hours, people came and went. By the end of the day, all of the Seven had come by to pay Leo a visit at least once.
Jason was glad not to be alone with his thoughts for too long. Was glad for the surrounding noises of the infirmary when no one else was there. He was even glad Kayla continued to pester him. It was hardest to silence the worst of his thoughts in the quiet.
Leo was going to be okay. He had to be.
Leo was adrift. He was a child sleeping in a furnace, except the flames actually hurt him this time, and they did nothing to warm his trembling limbs.
He was freezing—how was he freezing? Leo didn’t get cold.
Was this how other people felt all the time? Man, that sucked.
He tried to get his internal heater to come back on, but it didn’t cooperate. Neither did his limbs.
Nothing made sense. He heard noises sometimes, but he couldn’t see anything. He was half-delirious with cold and exhaustion—could you even be delirious with cold? Wasn’t that a fever thing? Leo had no idea. Something had rattled most of the screws in his brain loose, and the few that were left in place weren’t doing a great job with the concept of coherent thought.
He felt things. Vague shifts in the air around him. Something warm wrapping around his body. Clammy hands in his. Fingers brushing through his hair.
He heard someone cry and wondered if he’d somehow managed to croak a second time. Then again, being dead probably wouldn’t hurt this much.
He heard voices, sometimes. Many were at least vaguely familiar—his aching head couldn’t categorize most of them beyond ‘friend.’ He only caught snippets. People moved around him like specters—which was weird, considering Leo was the one whose soul was struggling to reattach itself to his body. Ghostly behaviors should have been his thing.
He heard Jason and Piper the most. As scrambled as his wires were, he could still recognize his best friends’ voices. At least one of them always seemed to be there, like a very pleasant (if slightly overbearing) shadow.
Being trapped in this weird in-between-stage might have freaked Leo out really badly under different circumstances, but as long as they were there, he felt almost… safe, despite everything.
Wow, yeah, if he was having thoughts like that, he was definitely delirious.
There was one conversation Leo tried to hold onto more urgently than the rest. He couldn’t make sense of the snippets he heard, but a part of his loopy brain decided it was important.
Jason and Piper were talking. Leo could hear that at least one of them was crying again, and he felt like the worst person in existence for being the cause of those tears.
“He’s my best friend, and I-” Jason’s voice tapered off. Leo couldn’t even tell if he’d paused or if his own ears had just lost their connection to his brain again. “Piper, I think I’m-”
“I know. I’ve known for a while, actually. Hate to break it to you, Sparky, but you’re not exactly subtle.” Shuffling sounds that Leo couldn’t place. Hands pulled out of his. “If it helps, I’m pretty sure he feels the same way.”
Leo lost the rest. He wouldn’t remember this, later.
When Leo properly woke up, he felt like a zombie. This made a lot of sense, considering he’d died and all.
Everything hurt.
His eyelids were heavy and his limbs ached like he’d been charbroiled—which was, unfortunately, also accurate—but when he experimentally moved his fingers (ow), they actually responded. As awful as he felt, this was a definite improvement over the weird out-of-body experience he’d been having before.
“Leo? Leo, can you hear me?” someone asked, voice small and hopeful. A warm hand touched his cheek.
“Five more minutes, mom,” Leo groaned. He tried to roll over to his side, but his leg screamed at the movement. He let out an agonized whimper, which would have been mortifying if he hadn’t been so busy being in pain.
“Hey, no, don’t do that,” the same voice—Jason?—said, and a moment later a hand was gently pushing him back onto the mattress. “He’s awake. Someone get Piper.”
Leo forced his leaden eyelids to open. He was in the infirmary—no surprise there—and his best friend was sitting next to his bed, his blue eyes like storm clouds.
“Jason?” Jason’s whole face lit up, but it did little to combat the fact how absolutely awful he looked. He had huge rings under his eyes, his shoulders were hunched and his posture was making Leo’s back hurt in sympathy for whatever Jason was doing to his spine. “You look like death.”
“You died,” Jason pointed out, and there was something so desperate and awful in his voice that it made Leo want to frantically apologize. “You’ve been out for four days. I- I was so afraid I’d-” Jason’s voice died in his throat. His eyes sparkled with tears.
“Shit, Superman, don’t cry. You’ll make your stupidly perfect face look blotchy and make the mood all weird. I’m fine,” Leo said immediately. He couldn’t help the jokes. He’d never seen Jason cry before. The thought that he might be the reason his friend finally broke down… Leo couldn’t take it.
“You’re not,” Jason told him, placing a hand on Leo’s cheek. It still felt a little warm—which was weird, seeing as being warm was Leo’s whole gig, and Jason usually felt cold to him.
Something about the touch made him shiver.
“I feel grand. 10/10 resurrection,” Leo insisted. He tried to sit up to stress his point, but his whole body screamed at him in retaliation. He breathed in sharply through his teeth and stayed down. “Ow. Fuck.”
“Don’t!” Jason looked frantic. “You’re going to hurt yourself.”
“I think I already hurt myself. I did sort of die. Not that that kept me down for very long,” Leo replied. He’d been trying to go for a joking tone, but this was made a tad more difficult by the fact that he was trying not to cry. The whole left side of his body felt like it was on fire—or what Leo assumed being on fire had to feel like for someone who wasn’t fireproof. “Shit. I know I saved the world and all, but I could have done without heroically breaking my leg. I’ll go nuts being stuck in the infirmary. The whole camp is gonna end up with Leo deprivation,” he complained, hoping to at least get a small smile out of Jason, even if he couldn’t manage a laugh.
Jason didn’t smile. He grew even paler, which was honestly impressive.
“Leo-”
Whatever he’d been meaning to say was interrupted by the infirmary door flying open with so much force that it banged into the wall.
“Is he really-” Piper looked like a disaster, but at least like the kind of disaster who’d just rolled out of bed instead of going through whatever torture Jason had been subjected to. She met Leo’s eyes and her whole body sagged with relief, like someone had taken the weight of the world off her shoulders—an experience that Annabeth and Percy hadn’t exactly recommended. “You’re awake.”
“Don’t sound so surprised. I told you guys I had a plan,” Leo chided her—which would have been way more impactful if he hadn’t been so choked up from seeing her.
“Your plan was exploding yourself!” Piper protested. She sounded angry, but then she burst into tears, grabbing Leo’s hand so hard that his joints popped. He was sure she would have thrown herself around his neck to hug him if she hadn’t been so worried about hurting him. “You were just laying there missing half of your leg and you weren’t breathing and I thought- Fuck, Leo.”
She wiped at her face with the hand she wasn’t using to slowly cut off all circulation in his fingers.
“Yeah, well, I bounced back, didn’t I?” Leo said cheerfully—then paused abruptly as the rest of her sentence slammed into him. “Hang on, what do you mean I was missing half of my leg?”
Piper clapped a hand over her mouth. “You don’t remember?”
“There was-” Jason paused, obviously struggling to find the right words—or any words at all. He put a hand on Leo’s shoulder, but he wouldn’t meet his eyes. “Octavian fired one of the onagers at Gaia. Will says it was probably the shrapnel. If your fire powers hadn’t seared the wound shut, you might have bled out.”
Leo looked from Jason to Piper and back to Jason.
“Yeah, very funny, guys. I think I’d know if I-” Leo froze. He’d pulled the blanket back, and… yeah. Yeah, he was definitely missing the lower half of his left leg. There was a small chunk left below his knee, which had been neatly wrapped in bandages, and that was it. “Oh.” He blinked. “Well, that explains why it hurts so much,” he said lamely.
He put the blanket back over his legs. He’d deal with that later.
…or never. Never sounded good, too.
“I’m sorry,” Jason said, squeezing his shoulder. He still wouldn’t look at Leo. “I should have-”
“You shouldn’t have done shit!” Leo immediately protested. He was feeling a little hysterical. “That was the whole point of me sacrificing myself! You already nearly got your brain melted out of your skull by Hera, and then you got yourself stabbed. That’s enough heroism for one quest. Sure, I’m short a leg, and that sucks, but considering your track record, you’d have gotten yourself permanently killed. I couldn’t let that happen.”
Jason met his eyes, then, and yep, he was crying. Fantastic job in the comforting department, Valdez.
“I didn’t want you to take that risk,” he said, taking Leo’s free hand in his. Piper was still holding the other in a vice grip. “You’re too important.”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m a gift to the universe,” Leo joked, but his heart was in his throat.
He was back in the sewer, at his absolute lowest, and Jason was looking at him earnestly, telling him that he mattered, and that his mother’s death hadn’t been his fault. That maybe people with special gifts showed up when things were bad, rather than the other way around.
Leo wasn’t feeling especially heroic at the moment—stuck in the infirmary and down a leg because he’d failed to consider that the Physician’s Cure had only promised to make him alive again, and not that he’d come back with all his limbs still attached. That was what he got for never reading the fine print.
Despite this, Jason was looking at Leo the exact same way he had back in the sewer, and Leo thought he might dissolve on the spot.
“Neither of you should have had to take that risk,” Piper said, crossing her arms. Her eyes were puffy. “I don’t like that you’re both totally cool with the fact that you were prophesied to die. But we’re all here now.” She said this like it was something she kept having to repeat to herself. “That’s the most important thing.”
At that moment, Leo decided he’d had it. Missing leg or not, that was about all the emotional sincerity he could take for the day.
“Wow, I fully just went all Hiccup from How To Train Your Dragon on you guys, huh? Like, jeez, if I was gonna lose a limb, I could have at least been a little more creative about it.” Piper gave a half-hearted laugh, raising an eyebrow at him. Jason just stared uncomprehendingly. “Gods, we really need to bully you into watching some more movies,” Leo muttered, shaking his head.
“Glad you’re back to joking.” Piper pinched his cheek. “It’s a little annoying, but at least that means you’ll probably live.”
“Fuck you, I’m hilarious.” Leo grinned at her. “Hey, at least this means I’ll get to make myself a new and improved leg. Maybe I can make it shoot lasers. Oh, or it could have a soda can dispenser. That would be a great party trick.”
Okay. Okay, he could joke about this. That was fine. There was no need to seriously consider the implications of the fact that he was missing half of his leg.
“I think maybe that idea needs to go back to the drawing board. That sounds really impractical,” Piper snorted. She’d made herself at home on a chair next to Leo’s bed. “Speaking of a soda can dispenser, though, is there anything we can get you? Soda is probably an option.”
“I-” Leo paused. Now that he stopped to think about it, he was absolutely parched. His mouth felt dry and tasted really weird. “Soda sounds great, actually.”
“I’ll go,” Jason offered immediately, struggling to his feet and nearly falling over in the process.
Piper moved to steady him. “I’ve got it. The only place you’re going is to bed,” she informed Jason, glaring daggers at him.
“But-” Jason started to protest.
“Dude, she’s right. You look like shit,” Leo informed him bluntly. Jason looked like he was two seconds away from passing out. “And if the guy in the hospital bed is telling you that, it probably isn’t a great sign.”
“I just want to stay with you for a bit longer,” Jason said, his voice shaky.
”Superman, don’t look at me like that. I’m not some faulty machine that’s gonna explode into bits when you’re not looking. Honestly, you look like you’re more at risk of that than I am at the moment.” Leo reached out and squeezed his hand. “I’ll still be here when you get back. I’m not going anywhere. Promise.”
After how many years he’d spent running, it was strange how easy it was, suddenly, to make that promise and mean it. And not just because running wasn’t really an option at the moment.
Jason and Piper wanting to be here—even though Leo was really out of it and not the most fun to be around at the moment—made it so much easier to breathe. Especially back when the two of them had been dating, it had been so easy to tell himself that they didn’t need him anymore. But they were here for him now, and the least Leo could do in return was stay here for them.
After he and Piper had successfully bullied Jason into going to bed, she sat with Leo for a long, long time, catching him up on everything that had happened while he’d been out. He was glad. They hadn’t spent much time together, just the two of them lately—or, well, just the two of them and an entire infirmary of demigods, if he wanted to be precise.
There was still a lot of hurt that Leo was currently categorically refusing to acknowledge. The voice of Nemesis still played on loop in his mind, telling him he’d never belong. It was hard to not be afraid of that.
But the memory of his friends smiling widely at him for waking up—an extremely unimpressive feat that he’d done pretty much every morning for his entire life—was one he got to keep, no matter what would happen later. He’d shelve it next to the memories of horrendous four am birthday cake and midday pillow fights from their Argo misadventures.
Maybe he’d get a next year with Piper and Jason. Maybe things would go to hell tomorrow. But he’d saved the world, and they were all alive. Piper and Jason were still by his side, despite everything.
At least for now, Leo could let himself have this.