Reflection
A Heroes of Olympus fanfic by Aisling Yinyr Ngaio

Girls didn't notice Leo Valdez before he noticed them.

It was a fact of life that Leo had accepted, like the fact that his mom was dead, his aunt hated him, his psychotic babysitter was the goddess Hera, and oh yeah, he was part of a Great Prophecy fighting against his mother's true murderer.

Leo never let that bother him though, even during his seven foster homes, social security offices, orphanages, and the streets he lived off until an adult found him again. Girls didn't notice him before he noticed them, and then sometimes not even after. It was the reason he felt safe when projecting his flirty appearance, especially to the seemingly unattainable. If there was no expectation of success, the only possible results were status quo, or upgrade. He could live with either, he really didn't mind. It made the inevitable goodbyes less painful too. He was never in a place for long after all. Somehow he'd always known he didn't belong, that there was somewhere waiting for him to discover. Perhaps somewhere his dad was.

He had almost staged his eighth running away from Wilderness School (it wasn't really hard, when he seemed to be able to do anything he wanted to mechanicals) when he met Piper. Weird now that he was drawn to her, when at first they seemed to have nothing in common. But Piper was one of the first people who reciprocated his attempts at reaching out (though she was at first too depressed about her father's indifference to make more effort), and he had to admit that his stay at the School became more bearable when Piper showed the same inclination to make mischief as he did. He didn't know now if he ever thought of her as more than platonic before Jason's arrival and Tia Callida's messing his mind, but more than six months had passed, and he had yet to get jealous over their new relationship as a possible rival to Piper's affection, or felt for Piper more than he felt for his new half-sisters or cousins around camp.

(He did get jealous that they had each other though. Sometimes he wished there was someone out there for him too.)

But the moment the Romans and the Greeks met, he was startled. The girl he now knew as Hazel Levesque was frowning in concentration at him so hard that he didn't know what to do. Because girls didn't notice Leo Valdez before he noticed them. It was a fact of life that Leo had accepted.

It was a fact of life that was now being challenged.

He was used to girls being supercilious, haughty, arrogant, confused, amused, and in their big demigod family's cases, exasperatedly sisterly. But Hazel's nonchalantly focused eyes on him were putting him in a position he had no idea how to handle. Her careful steps around him made it hard for him to befriend her the way he normally did others, and the big guy who was always around her - Frank Zhang - sometimes stared at him with the same intensity that almost made him think that they knew more about him than he knew about himself. Or the more ludicrous explanation - that Hazel was interested in him in ways she couldn't understand herself, and that Frank was jealous.

Weird, right?

Not so much, it seemed, when they finally figured out their connection to one another. For there was one. It was one that astounded him as much as her, because if he thought about it hard enough, Hazel could have been his great-grandmother.

It was strange, as he tried to get over the guilt of forgetting to switch sky-to-sea sensors while in the underwater lair of the ichthyocentaurs, that he was in the extremely novel position of assuring another guy that, "No, I'm not stealing your girl. I barely know her. She's really not that interested in me in that way despite certain recent highly misunderstood events, and that your true rival is a dead man - I just happen to look like him."

Sometimes he wished, as he tried to find a way fruitlessly around the Italian mountain range, that Hazel would forget about his great-grandfather though. He was tired of being confused with a man he didn't know, or being liked just because Hazel still had tender feelings for his bisabuelo, knowing that she would always have difficulty separating them both, what was past and what was present. Ironic that the first girl to look at him in his life saw him not, but the ghost of his great-grandfather, and what could have been.

Girls didn't notice Leo Valdez before he noticed them. Perhaps he was more like his father than he first thought.

- Finis -