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Jason was not having a very good day. He had gotten bitten by a bug in his sleep last night, a spider apparently according to Coach Hedge; not poisonous but irritating as hell, he could feel the bites rubbing against his shirt and it was driving him insane.
And speaking of his shirt, his awful wretched shirt, he had by accident grabbed the only shirt that didn't have the tag on the neck cut off, so not only was his shirt irritating the bug bites on his back he also had a tag on his neck driving him insane.
A part of him wished being skinned alive didn't hurt and wouldn't kill him because Gods what he wouldn't give to not have skin right now because he could feel all of his skin and he needed it off right now.
Leo, his dear beloved friend whom he loved very much and was not going to scream at or electrocute, would not stop tapping things with his utensils as they ate breakfast. It was already bad enough that there were the sounds of people eating breakfast and Leo was not helping.
Jason was not going to scream or pull his hair out or electrocute this boat. He's a Roman soldier. Roman soldiers are well behaved and Roman soldiers did not scream because they could feel shirt tags on the back of their neck and bug bites on their back.
He got up and simply just left the dining room, not even bothering to finish his breakfast or say anything, he needed to leave that room, he needed quiet.
He was zoned out for most of the walk to his room, trying to focus on anything but the fact that he could feel his skin and the bug bites and the tag on his neck.
The minute he was alone in his room he immediately took the shirt off and threw it at the wall. His whole body felt tense. He felt like he was hyperventilating, He might have been he wasn't sure, he felt like he couldn't breathe but was also breathing too much but also not breathing enough but also breathing too much.
Everything was too much and he needed to do something, he needed to do something to get this energy out,
everything was too much,
everything was too much,
everything was too much-
He didn't realize he was biting his arm until he felt his teeth start to sink deeper into his flesh and the bruise starting to form, he hadn't done that since he was a kid. Anytime this overwhelmed hit him before he would be able to train or attack things or just throw things but there wasn't anything to throw or attack or to train with like that on the Argo II. Nothing he could completely destroy without upsetting Leo, and potentially the others.
He carefully pried his mouth away from his own arm. There was a bruise already starting to form; red and ugly and angry, the indents of his own teeth deep in his arm, luckily he had managed to not break skin. Before, when he was little and used to do this used to do this more, he would just wear a long sleeve shirt after getting it bandaged up by the medics but the idea of putting on another shirt sounded like hell, the bug bites still itched but he was refusing to scratch at them, it seemed almost funny to him; he would bite his own arm till it bruised but he wouldn't scratch at bug bites. His logic seem to flawed even to himself but his brain still felt too overwhelmed to actually process anything.
He wanted to cry and curl up, he missed when he was small and could curl up on the older legionnaires. Being raised in the legion wasn't great, being branded at four definitely sucked, but he always had someone to turn to, someone to comfort him, he had been to legion's baby even when he was no longer the youngest kid.
He wanted to curl up in bed but he couldn't because his bug bites, he didn't want to have skin. He's flopped onto his bed on his stomach, he would have preferred to lay on his back but the bug bites, and this worked, it made the room dark, made him feel like he could think again.
There was a knock at his door and he made an embarrassingly canine-like whine. Leo took that as a ‘come in’.
“Heyyyy, J Grace, how you doing- why are you not wearing shi- oh! yeah, the bug bites, they were probably rubbing against your shirt weren’t th- what happened to your arm?” If Jason was in a slightly better mental state he would have laughed; Leo was scatterbrained and that did often come out when he talked but never to the extent it just had. That want to laugh died the minute Leo noticed what he had done to his arm.
“Bit,” he mumbled, keeping his face pressed against his pillow.
“By what?!” Leo asked, His voice is going a bit higher with panic obviously worried there was some monster or problem on board the ship.
“Me.”
“Why?” Jason had assumed telling Leo there was nothing dangerous on the ship and that the bite had come from him would not result in Leo's voice getting higher and more concerned.
“Too much.”
“So you bit yourself?!”
Jason just whined again, words felt too hard and it felt too complicated to explain why he had done it, hell he barely understood why, it just made his brain relax and he had needed his brain to relax.
“You want me to leave?” Leo offered, That was the exact opposite of what Jason wanted.
So he whined again, hoping that Leo would understand what it meant but of course he didn't, because how could he?
“Jase, I dunno what that means.”
Jason shook his head, ‘no’.
“You don't want me to leave?”
Jason nodded, ‘yes’, he could tell he was rumbling something against his pillow but he wasn't sure if the words were coming out in English or Latin and regardless they weren't loud enough for Leo to hear either way.
“You do want to leav- do you want me to leave Jason?” Leo asked, Jason shook his head, he wished he could make his brain function enough to get words out that would make this whole thing much easier but anytime he actually tried to say something loud enough for Leo to hear the words curled up in his throat and died.
“Okay, you want me to close your curtains?” Leo offered and Jason could hear him moving away from the door
Jason nodded frantically, “amabo te” he pleaded.
“There, all dark.” Jason glanced up, Unbearing his face from his pillow and the room was dark it made him feel like he could breathe again.
Leo set next to him on the bed, Jason could feel the warmth radiating off of him. So warm, he wished he could take Leo's warm and curl up around it, well he could, technically, but that would involve curling up around Leo and he wasn't sure how the other boy would feel about that.
“Better?”
Jason nodded.
“wait, what's ‘amabo te’ mean?”
“‘Please’, means please,” Jason mumbled and rolled onto his side to better face Leo, “well it literally means ‘I will love you’ but it's Latin for ‘please’”
“Huh, te means ‘you’ or that's what it means in Spanish at least.. soo amabo means ‘I will love’?”
“Kinda? ‘Te’ does mean ‘you’, but ‘amo’ it means ‘I love’ and ‘ama’ means ‘love’- well actually it's- it's more complicated but it's- I- it's-” the lights started to flicker as he got more overwhelmed trying to explain to Leo. it was hard he had known how the words worked, how that language worked, since he was so little that explaining how it worked to someone who didn't understand made his brain hurt, it was just something he knew.
“Whoa, whoa, hey, it's fine Jace I can learn Latin some other time,” Leo soothed, reaching out to touch Jason but hesitating and deciding against it.
Jason wiggled away from Leo and towards the wall on the bed.
“You want me to leave?” Leo offered suddenly worried he had overstepped by even trying to reach her for Jason.
“Lay down?” Jason asked, giving the biggest and bluest puppy dog eyes Leo had ever seen in his life.
“Oh!” Leo laid next to him, the two boys face to face, just laying in bed. Leo had memories of doing this before, laying with Jason when he was overwhelmed, staying with him to make sure he didn't do anything stupid and to make sure no one bothered him, though he figured those memories weren't actually real just Hera messing with his mind.
“Is this weird?” Jason asked and Leo got the most weird and fucked up sense of deja vu he had ever gotten in his life. That had been what Jason had said the first time Leo had laid with him after he had had a shutdown at the Wilderness School but it wasn't actually deja vu because that had never actually happened.
“Maybe.” Leo shrugged, I felt like a fucked up play where he know all of the lines parenting his former self who hadn't actually been his former self because the memories hadn't actually been real. Gods the fact those memories hadn't actually been real was fucking with his head right now, more than usual right now anyway.
“I'm used to it- well, I guess we didn't actually ever do this before but I have memories of us doing stuff like this at the Wilderness School, you’d get overwhelmed and I would come lay with you ‘cause Piper wasn't allowed to be alone with any of the boys none of the girls were.. ‘Cause ya know”
“What if two boys or two girls liked each other?”
“I don't think they really cared as much if you couldn't get pregnant or get someone pregnant from it.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“I think some of my friends from Camp Jupiter would do similar stuff, when I would get like this, I mean.. Reyna would sit with me, Dakota would bring me grapes to give me something to bite other than..” he trailed off then he nodded to his arm, the bruise was still red and ugly and the invents of his teeth still very visible.
Leo paused and stared at his arm, Jason got worried Leo was going to start asking questions about it that he wouldn't be able to answer but instead Leo looked back at Jason's face and simply said “I wish I could have gotten to talk with your friends more.”
“Me too, maybe after this is all over.”
“I dunno man, I doubt they'd be too fond of me.”
“You didn't blow up New Rome on purpose,” Jason argued.
“Yeah but still, probably better to not risk it,”
“I want them to be your friends too, you’re my best friend.” Jason mumbled the words so softly Leo almost missed them.
“I better be your best friend, ‘cause you are not getting rid of me once this is all over.” Leo teased.
Jason laughed, not his normal laughed, not the one that had self-control, not the polite one, not the one that said ‘I'm fit to be praetor of New Rome’, but his real one the one that belonged to Jason Grace, the little brother of Thalia Grace, , or Jason Grace, the best friend of Leo Valdez, not Jason Grace ‘son of Jupiter’.
“Why would I wanna get rid of you?” Jason asked as if he couldn't understand why that would possibly be something he would ever think of. Nemesis had warned Leo he was the seventh wheel, the one who didn't fit, the outcast, but here Jason was laughing and completely baffled at the idea he would ever want to get rid of Leo. Leo just laughed. He could list all the reasons Jason might want to get rid of him but it didn't feel like a good time for that and besides Jason had asked it so innocently like he really could never imagine a world where he didn't want to have Leo as his friend.