a/n: written for Yew and for the PJ and the Land of Writing Monsterrific Competition.
monster: sirens
|détente|
the look in your eyes
break our bones into half!
scream and shout and do laugh!
-jonsi / sticks and stones
day 1
When he falls from the sky in a heap of fire and tattered clothing and sprawling limbs, onto her dinner table, and breaks it into fifty-seven irreparable pieces, she's not sure whether to laugh or to cry or to do both.
day 2
His name is Leo Valdez, he is a demigod, he is a boy of around her physical age, he is a mechanic and he is surly and uncouth and he fixes things.
She regards him with bitterness, because he is a boy and for once, she does not love the apparent hero that flings himself desperately onto her shores. His eyes are rimmed with soot, his bony, knobby, too-sharp hands are forever playing with clinking screws and fiddling with ratchets and springs and gods be damned if she denies that it is an unpleasant noise; gods be damned a second time for sending him to her, their newest obscene jest, and he's bundled up in his shipwrecked cargo and he doesn't even seem to appreciate that he's in her company and she's doing to best the cater to his needs, all he does is seclude himself in his makeshift tent and fiddle with his useless mechanisms and his eyes, they are dark and brimming with fire and she doesn't like him.
And, he is a demigod, and she has had too many of those in all her years, and she has grown to give them a wide berth, draped in apprehension and promises of returning and broken promises of returning.
Leo Valdez, however, she can be sure about. Leo Valdez, to put it bluntly, is a bit of a jackass.
day 3
When they begin working together, it is done so out of a sense of need. She recognizes that, for all the fervent wishes that he might drown himself in the surf or that the gods might be generous enough to pluck him away from her home and toss him back to the world from which he came, they are dependent upon each other for survival. Rather, he is. He is a foreigner, a shipwrecked boy in unfamiliar terrain, and as guardian of Ogygia (its only guardian, she thinks with the taste of spite on her tongue) it is her duty to care for the wayward passengers that wash up on the white sand beaches, be they Leo Valdezes or not.
He tinkers with the (Archimedes Sphere, he calls it) device he brought, but he also performs a few odd jobs on the grounds. He fixes leaky pipes, broken cabinets, rearranges everything in a neat, orderly fashion. Disheveled and raggedy he may be, Leo Valdez is thorough. He says that it's in his nature, being a son of Hephaestus and all, and that he does it so he doesn't have to look at the chaos that is her home with all its untamed vines and bushes, but really, he's lying. She sees it sometimes, in his mocha gaze, in the way he plays with a strand of his messy black-brown hair or teases strands of fabric from his fraying shirts, or the way he stands on Ogygia's cliffs, looking out at the sea and entreating Poseidon to rescue him, probably. She will pass him by with a basket of laundry in her arms and glare at him sourly, muttering Greek curses under her breath, until eventually, he will turn around and she will walk away with an unexplained thrumming in her chest and her cheeks tinged a light apple-red.
She serves them simple lunches of fruit and bread and vegetables; first, at a distance, and then gradually, they begin drawing closer, and then they dine underneath the full moon, pale like a wedge of cheese, feasting on dates, pomegranates, cold cucumbers, ripened tomatoes, strawberries and pineapples with honey and flatbread topped with grilled mushrooms and browned onions. A ceramic jar sits between them, and absently, they fish around it for the black olives inside, their fingers coming away wet with oil and the tang of spices, and sometimes, they brush against each other and he looks at her and she looks at him and the wind stops, just for a second.
Her lips open in a silent plea, there is a cool summery breeze wafting through the midnight sky, and the stars, the stars, they are oh-so bright and in that nighttime splendor, his eyes are lit up with every constellation imaginable and she maps an unseen universe in the lines of his cheekbones, the heavy lashes, the shock of chocolate-brown over cotton shirts.
The moment passes, as it always will, because he cannot read the longing in her stardust braids, cannot perceive the yearning to be free on her marble arms, and they drift apart, that gravity dissipating with a silent hiss, and she runs her fingernails over chinks in the pottery and observes every flaw with immaculate sensory detail and wonders if Leo Valdez makes mistakes in his orderly world of machines.
day 4
Their first kiss is laden with the taste of a spring afternoon, her tongue scrapes along the inside of his cheek and his calloused, warm hands are wrapped around her waist. His hair tickles her forehead and she grins against his mouth, her eyes downcast, her fingers tracing infinity along his shoulderblades.
The skies are ashen and gray, she smells rain and thunder in the atmosphere, but neither of them care. She breathes one thousand ohgods through her mouth and one hundred loveme's through her nose and her eyes flit around until they lock onto him, caramel skin and warm smile and flannel, and he enfolds her in the most wonderful embrace she's ever felt and he smells like gasoline and metal but he's Leo Valdez, demigod, mechanic, absolutely crazy (but in a good way).
There is one thing she withholds, tucking it in her crumpled origami heart like a gem, and it is a scrap of paper that whispers, in its tiny, fragile, faerie voice, I love you, and this phrase is only said once during the storm but already it prophesizes driftwood rafts and lightning and tropical paradises, and so, she keeps the scrap in a box and lets it fade until the letters are indecipherable.
A thousand, a million I love you's go unsaid and she knows why she swallows the key to the chest, why she refuses to part with that single precious flutter of hope; she's known Pandora, she knows what will happen when she opens the lid.
day 5
"We need to stop pretending, Leo."
He tries to ignore her but she kneels beside him and cups him chin and forces him to look her in the eye, but he flinches.
"I-"
The words, they are so close, they are clawing at the base of her throat in their vitriolic desire to fly from her traitorous silvertongue and fool her for the ninety-ninth time. She forces the bile back down; the butterflies subside.
"Leo."
"I know," he says, and he says it with the weariness of an old man, not a boy. "I know, but I just-"
Neither of them can explain it because words were never made to handle these kinds of intangible things, so instead he pulls and she pushes and she falls back into him, and there are more ohgods mixed in with please and saveme and she's not sure how or why they ended up like this; she's beginning to think that the joke might be two degrees more twisted than she thought.
day 6
Leaving, she finds, is the ugliest word in her vocabulary.
They work side by side, knees smarting, fingers crusty with dried-up salt, skin wrinkled from the seawater. Perspiration clings to her neck, the creases under her eyes, but still, she persists in this fool's enterprise. Leo works with a sort of detached languor, a smear of charcoal on his collar.
She wants to tell him that the power of the gods is something not to be trifled with; she wonders if he'll understand. Maybe this is all a misunderstanding.
But then she remembers that there are no misunderstandings, not between them.
The Archimedes Sphere needs to be redesigned to bypass Ogygia's navigational aura of misdirection (amnesia, really), to be able to pierce through the thick drapes of Mist encircling their island habitat. She doesn't doubt Leo's abilities; children of Hephaestus are some of the most intelligent, creative people she's ever met, and she wouldn't be surprised if somehow, he managed to alter the Sphere's functions to counteract magic. It's never been done before.
Then again, they haven't ever done this before, so they're both in the same boat.
She hammers nails in through chipped gaps, tightens loose screws, and inserts a supposedly Magical Nullification Generator chip into one of the Sphere's control slots. Sand dunes crest, subside. The whole island is a living, breathing creature, a being born of her own will. Suddenly, she looks out at the palm fronds, the grapevines and beechwood limbs, and feels a pang of anguish twisting through her gut.
Leo's gaze flickers over to her, and quickly, she hides her torment through a mask of discretion, gnawing anxiously on her lower lip. She asks him to tell her a story.
So he does. He tells her a story, one she's heard in part before, but his version is more fleshed out. It's a chronicle of heroes, children of the gods. Of a boy named Jason Grace, praetor and lionheart, a girl named Piper, charming and kind and his surrogate sister, and a mechanical dragon named Festus, whose head is now attached to the prow of Leo's ship, the Argo II. He tells her about their misadventures together, about dangerous prophecies and memories lost and allegiances swapped and the uniting of the Greek and Roman camps and, most of all, he tells her about good friends, sitting around the Argo's hearth, exchanging stories of their own.
"More than I could ever tell," he murmurs, wistfully.
"Perhaps you could try," she suggests.
He inhales, exhales, and starts again, spinning tales to the sound of pounding steel and breaking tides.
day 7
They run, dashing across stones and weeds and feeling the cold sand underneath their feet. The waves rise, like fingers of some massive titan, and sweep over the beach with hungry, searching claws. Dust churns underneath their feet, motes swarming around centers of gravity, clustered into miniature universes.
She has to stop to catch her breath, and he waits. She shoves him, tells him to go, damn it, can't you see you're running out of time? and he does, but he pulls her along. His face is set in a determined expression, his brow furrowed in what is either tenacity or idiocy.
She feels her dress flapping around her heels, her sandals slapping against her soles. She is a little bit here, a little bit there, the essence of her being clinging, in small fragments, to Ogygia. The island beckons, and she knows it is not the call of her home but of something other.
Gaea, the earth whispered.
Something stirrs beneath her toes, a shifting of the soil that latches onto her ankle and will not let go. She stumbles, falls, and lets out a cry of alarm. Leo's eyes widen, and with a single flick of the wrist, he sends a flickering stream of flame at the land. The sand heats, turns glassy, and he strikesat the tendril with a wrench, shattering it. Glass shards dig into her calves, but she pays them no mind; the raft, it is a mere five feet away, she could practically reach out and grab it.
"Leo!" she yells. "Go!"
He dashes for the raft, bobbing as it is like a faithful horse, but at the last second he turns around and holds out a hand.
"Come with me," he pleads. "Please, Calypso, you don't have to stay here anymore."
She can see all of him, then; his composition, it is made of hopes and half-thought out dreams, of lumbering aspirations and the fantasies of a boy. She is a girl, but she is old beyond her years, and she knows now, truer than ever, that they were never destined to meet, to be together; it was an error on the parts of the Fates, she surmises, or how else could all of this have happened?
"I can't," she murmurs. "You know why."
Dust ripples around them both, flecks of sand swirling and reforming, morphing into a myriad of impossible shapes. Constellations of seafoam hang suspended in time; her perception narrows to a single point, and it is all LeoLeoLeo and I love you I love you I love you. She cannot say it enough, for the life of her; she wishes, desperately and vainly, that the words might slip free.
But they do not.
"Then I'll stay with you."
She gapes at him, then glowers, eyes stinging with tears.
"Don't be an ass," she mutters. "Go now, while you have the chance. The raft-" She sucks in a shuddery breath. "It only comes for the ones I love." She looks at him, all awkward angles and loose clothing, and lets out a dry chuckle. "Even now, after I thought it couldn't get any worse, my heart has to break one more time. But that only shows how much I care, doesn't it?"
She turns away. "Please. Leave, Leo, and go back to your friends. You have a war to win."
Starting back to her house, she is shocked to find his fingers intertwined around hers, shocked to find herself staring into the sun.
"Wars are fought for love," he says, "and Calypso, I love you. So I guess I've got a war to win here, as well, if I stay."
"Leo." She's crying now, freely, but she doesn't bring a hand up to wipe away the moisture from her lashes. "Stop."
"I'm not letting you stay here all alone." His grip tightens. "Whatever it takes, I'm going to save you. I'm going to break the curse."
"No one's ever done that before," she rasps.
He smiles wanly. "And no one ever thought that machines could defeat magic, but they have. See?" He holds up the Archmides Sphere for her to see. Displayed in holographic imaging is a three-dimensional rendering of the sea, Leo's location, and Ogygia, rendered in blue pixels. Not a single bit of static shoots through the display. She is speechless.
"How-"
"Demigods," he murmurs, "were made to defy the odds. We were made to make the impossible possible. That's just what I'm going to do, Calypso. I'm going to set you free."
She knows, then, what she will do.
Straining every ounce of her will, she finally chokes the words out, "I love you, Leo."
They hold hands, the Sphere balanced between their legs, sitting above the sea as the waves churn and the sand rises and their battle begins.