A/N: mild Jasper bashing and swearing is about to occur. Avert your gaze if that's not your thing.

Slight Leyna. Mostly Reyna-centric.

I don't like Piper. I don't even like Jason. But I like them together, because it means they're both off the market. Also, Reyna may be a bit OOC, but I imagine her to be incredibly bitter in regards to Jason and Piper and, really, who can blame her?

Not Fire and Ice or Begin Again compliant. Completely different universe. But Leyna anyway :)

Disclaimer: I no own. Mr Riordan own all.

For those people who have this story on their alerts and got a notification or however that thing works, nothing changed. I simply proofread and realised I wrote 'complaint' above when I meant 'compliant'. And I call myself an English major.

Fuck her, you think. Fuck him. Fuck them. They deserve each other.

She's a pathetic bitch whose whole life has been a walk in the park, and he's an arrogant tool who doesn't know a good thing when he's got it.

Namely, you. And the rest of Camp Jupiter, but mostly you. You used to think your friendship would stand the test of time, become the stuff of legends – everyone would want to be like Reyna and Jason.

Now, no one wants to be like Reyna and Jason; everyone's too busy wanting to be like Jason and Piper, or Percy and Annabeth. No one wants to be like you. You are the perfect example of how not to turn out. A warning to everyone: drop your guard, even once, and a goddess will ruin your friendship with your best friend.

So they can be together for all eternity. You don't care. You couldn't care less. If there were another realm in which you could care less, you would know, because you would be there.

So why does it hurt so much?

You wonder why you aren't used to it yet. Everyone leaves you eventually – that's a fact of life. Even when you think they'll stay around, they won't. You mother didn't hang around to watch you grow up. You don't remember who your father is. Your home – in the middle of nowhere, hardly any visitors – got blown up by Greek demigods. Your sister left you to have a better life without you. Jason left (not willingly, but you can see it in the smug bastard's face that he's as happy as can be that it happened). Percy rejected you, although you can see the justification behind it. Your home – in the middle of nowhere, hardly any visitors – got blown up by Greek demigods. Again. Two of them were repeat offenders.

You have serious commitment issues.

Maybe you shouldn't be Praetor.

You take another swig of the bottle in your hand and are surprised to taste the alcohol underneath the wild berry flavour. You check the label on the bottle for alcohol content (21.5%, all praise to Bacchus) and for a moment you're surprised at your behaviour. Since when did you drink vodka? Since when did you drink alcohol full stop? It goes searing down your throat, and you forget to breathe for a second or two. It clears up, and you can feel a strange warmth spread from your oesophagus, behind your sternum, and it feels fucking amazing.

You're not so drunk that you forget the names of major bones and body parts. Go figure.

Where were you? Ah, commitment issues. Wrongful employment. Surprising alcohol intake.

But at the same time, it makes perfect sense. Only the gods know you can't control everything in your life, particularly the people that you let close to you that eventually leave, but this – this you can control. You're in a position of power where people have to listen to you even if they hate your guts, because you can make life difficult for them if they say no. This, you can shape and influence and use.

Show the fuckers how they like it then when someone screws them over. Smirk in their face and watch them collapse when they realise they were just a pawn in your grand design.

Sometimes, though, it pisses you off, having to clean up after people, and yet you know that it would never get done if you didn't do it. Have you let them become too dependent on you? You never liked needy people. Have you let your head get swelled in the thought that you call the shots for everything because you're just that important? You always hated egocentric nutcases.

Watching them – hugging and holdings hands and being in close proximity to each other in front of the campfire – actually makes you nauseous, and you make the not so wise decision to drink more. Maybe, if you drink enough alcohol, you'll reach the wonderful oblivion where you remember nothing.

Because at this point, really, you want to forget. You want to forget how it feels to be the most important person in his life; you want to forget the way he stares at her like she's the most perfect thing in the world; you want to forget how everyone seems so keen on them remaining a couple; you want to forget how it feels to hate all three of you – him, her and you, because you are all at fault in this situation – so irrationally and so completely; you want to forget what it feels like to be needed.

Nobody really needs you, do they? What they need is a leader, and theoretically, anyone can do it. You're just filling in. What you are, really, is the Interim Praetor of New Rome, until they can find someone who is a bit more together than you are. You are filling the gap where someone greater than you once stood, and the gap where someone greater than you will soon stand. They need a shepherd, and you happened to find the staff on the ground. They mistook you for someone who knew what they were doing.

It takes you a moment to realise you've already finished the bottle and you've got another one in your hand – you're not too sure when you picked it up, but you're not complaining – and that there's someone else with you. You're sitting on the edge of the woods against a tree, watching everyone else have the time of their lives and dancing to the music, at the Greek Camp at a victory party, and you struggle for a moment to remember if this is a Roman-Greek joint victory party or if this is a Roman victory party before it hits you.

No more Gaia. No more Prophecy of the Seven. No more Doors of Death and people coming back to life. For the first time in a long time, you know peace. This is a victory party celebrating the peace that Romans and Greeks combined have managed to bring to the world without killing each other. Certainly an appropriate thing to celebrate.

All the emotional crap with him and her, as you've come to refer them to in your mind, has totally eclipsed the existence of their friend. The only member of the Seven you don't really know. The one who spontaneously combusts. The one who blew up half of your second home.

He knows all about disappointments and displacement and people leaving you. He did the whole foster-home scene – even though he ran away from most of them, you learn – and thought he killed his mother. Not even you can imagine what that must have been like, and you've got a pretty good imagination for the daughter of a war goddess. You have the comfort of not knowing your human parent at all. You don't really know what you're missing.

You realise he must be your drinking-slash-bitching buddy for the night. You've only ever had alcohol once before, and that was purely accidental at Circe's Island when you picked up a glass of champagne and downed the whole thing without realising what it was. The only thing you learned from the whole experience was that you are a miserable drunk, and you're clearly giving an encore performance. You just have more to be miserable about.

Go figure.

Either he recognises the signs of a miserable drunk or he just knows, because he's suddenly guiding you to into this place in the woods (you don't fear for your life or safety, because he knows the peace between them is new and fragile and any harm done to either of them will start another war) that he can't stop talking about. He touches a rock and it's not a rock anymore, but the entrance to a bunker. He shows you around for about a second before you both slump onto the ground and one of you starts talking.

You don't remember if you were even talking or what he's being bitter about, but it must be similar to your reason, because you suddenly feel very sympathetic. You like feeling sympathetic, you think, if only to him. He gets you, and not in that weird lovey-dovey stuff the Venus kids go on about. He knows why you feel the way you feel. He's not just sympathetic, he's empathetic. He understands bitterness and guilt and feeling alone and wanting to just run away and never look back.

He hasn't seen you at your worst. He doesn't need to; he experienced the same thing.

You decide you like that about him. Sometimes you can't tell with people if they really like you or if they're using you because you're the Praetor of New Rome and they have to like you. He knows what that's like.

And, with a movie-like moment of realisation where your mouth drops open in surprise, so do they.

Do people actually like either of them? Do people just like her because her dad's famous and she's rich and she can steal things for them and because she's a daughter of Venus? Do people just like him because his dad's Jupiter and he used to be Praetor and he has that sort of authoritative aura and he has the killer good looks of a god?

Your epiphany continues. Does anyone like anyone? Has everyone got some secret agenda and selectively choose their friends based on how much they can get from them?

You think about that for a moment. You like Annabeth, you think. You like that she's smart and brave and did something you never could in coming to find Percy in the full knowledge he might not remember who she is. Speaking of Percy, you like him, too. He's one of those rare, genuinely good guys, and even when he didn't remember Annabeth fully, he didn't really want to leave her. You like Frank, who knew the difficulties in coming to Camp with his family history, but came anyway. You like Hazel, brave enough to come back into the world when it had changed so much. You like Gwen, with her cheerful optimism and her desire to continue her life as normally as possible by going to college.

You like Leo, you decide. He doesn't make any sense half the time, and he seems like your polar opposite personality-wise, but you like him. You like that he tries to make people laugh, even in the most awkward situation imaginable. You like that, even though he talks himself up all the time, he has some humility and seems even embarrassed by the way he bursts into flame. You like that he gets so excited about people like Archimedes the same way you get excited about the War Games. You like his blatant disregard for decorum and the way he runs around like a little kid, even if you wouldn't be caught dead doing it. You like that he is all movement because if he stops, he'll just start thinking about things he doesn't want to think about, the same way you force yourself to be still so that you don't get up and sprint away from your problems. And you're not entirely sure, but you think you mention all of this to him.

And suddenly he's very close to you or you're very close to him but it doesn't even matter anyway because you're practically on top of each other and there is no beginning and there is no end because there is only Leo and Reyna and the machinery around you and the smell of vodka and oil and you find that you're ok with that and it doesn't bother you in the slightest.

You go from doing...whatever it is you're doing...and start talking about anything and everything. You tell him stories about coming to New Rome for the first time, training under Lupa, and rising up the ranks to Praetor. You tell him about your tattoos, the one time you met your mother, and your reunion with your sister last summer at the Feast of Fortuna. You tell him how you love and hate your job at the same time, how you referee the War Games, how much you hate Octavian and how you named your pegasus after peanut butter. You tell him that you have the biggest sweet tooth, that you never start the day without coffee and three sugars, that you love sunrises and sunsets and winter and summer equally, and that you actually like wearing your toga.

In return, he tells you his own stories: his surprise when he found out he was a demigod, the one time he met his father, his tool-belt that gives him whatever he needs and the different gods he's met, because he's met a lot more than you have even though you've been in this life longer than he has. He tells you about his life with his mother, his difficulties with foster homes, and coming to the Wilderness School. He tells you how he loved building the Argo II, how he loved the dragon Festus – Happy the dragon, you say, is an extremely unusual name for a dragon, to which he laughs – and being able to re-use his head, how he changed the gears to accommodate his extra-ADHD nature and how he flew it to Rome and Greece. He tells you about the war against Gaia and the giants, which is both enthralling and terrifying, and closing the Doors of Death and coming home to New York to stop the invasion.

In that whole time, which lasts you well into the morning, you forget about Jason and Piper, even though they feature so prevalently in his stories. In those stories, they are so unlike the people you know. They seem like strangers.

Maybe the Jason and Piper you know seem like strangers to him.

It's not too long after this that you succumb to your subconscious telling you to stop doing whatever it is you're doing and go to sleep, and you find that you're grateful for the stagnation that accompanies sleep. Your head drops onto something about shoulder height that's really, very comfortable, and you sleep.

Hangovers are a bitch. It's something you've heard several times, and something you fully expected to feel.

When you wake up several hours later, your head on his shoulder – how in Jupiter's name did it get there? And when? – however, you notice something. Nada. Zip. Nought. Your brain is in full working capacity, even if it's still trying to process the strangeness of this new camp, and you can remember everything that happened last night. Bits and pieces have blurred together, but you still know what happened. A single look from him and you can tell that he remembers everything, too.

Perhaps you'll get drunk with Leo again, and you'll both be able to remember how you made each other forget again.