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Jason had never really had a concept of family like what he had learned with the Greeks. He had grown up in a pack, which was a family structure, sure, but he didn’t have siblings or parents or children. He played with the younger wolves, but there was always an understanding that it was done with a purpose—they were training. They weren’t bonding. He was a temporary guest, and he never understood them enough to fully grasp the intricacies of the relationships that surrounded him. The legion was even more impersonal—his cohorts were his coworkers, and barely his friends at that. Reyna had been different. Reyna was his first real friend, and the closest thing he had to a family, a word he had hardly even known before he joined the Roman legion. She had loved him in a way she didn’t understand and he couldn’t reciprocate. He barely even knew the name for it. Again, he felt that gap in his knowledge, in his language, a space that he could never seem to fill.
Piper and Leo were different. He wished that it was just because they had a different bond, that they’d grown to be his family through the time they shared, but—it just wasn’t that natural. He wasn’t sure he’d ever have a family that naturally. He felt a connection with his sister and his cousins, but that was intellectual, mostly. He knew in his mind that they were family and he made an effort to make it so, and it worked. It was good. It felt nice. But it wasn’t a love like what he was pretty sure they had for him. Piper and Leo were different, in a way that was special, yes, but it was even more painful.
Piper and Leo were different because the love wasn’t natural. It was real, and he had to believe in his heart of hearts, a phrase he had learned at Camp Half-Blood, of course, that it was true love, but it hadn’t come to him naturally like he knew it was for other people. They understood that, too. The love he felt for them was forced upon the three of them. It had changed as they’d grown to know each other, but it had been there from the start through Juno’s gift, a built-up life with a make-believe girlfriend and a hope-it’s-real best friend. Jason never had to learn to love them. He never started to love them. And as much as it felt good to feel this way about someone, he could never stop the itching under his skin and the shudder in his breath when he told them he loved them. They were his best friends, his family, and they were all that he had. His step-mother had made sure of that.