Hearts
Before
Her heart beat out of her chest. Faster, faster, faster. It begged for relief, for love, for anything except from the cold loneliness and pain that was her constant companion.
Ogygia was magical, but a prison nonetheless.
Still, Calypso made the best of everything she could. She sang and gardened and cooked and waited. She always waited.
Then
Then after years and years, thousands and millions of years of heartbreaks and salty tears that she could not shed he arrived in a blaze of skinny limbs and quirky comments and fire.
So much fire.
Calypso could see it dance in his dreary brown eyes and it flickered from his fingertips, never still, always jumping and fidgeting.
At first it was just another one of the things she hated about him. Added to the list including, but not limited to: humming, talking, breathing and existing.
He laughed at her.
He laughed at her.
Calypso was stumped. Relaxing her clenched fists and releasing her gritted teeth she resolved build her defences higher and deeper and stronger.
Not that it mattered.
Somehow that silly, funny, immature son of Hephaestus wormed his way through her shields with his awful jokes and scattered nature. He reached her heart, and it beat through her dress, calling to him.
And then with his words, softer and somehow more heart wrenchingly clear.
"We could start out own shop," he said. "Leo and Calypso Garage: Auto and Repair Mechanical Monster."
His smile was wide, slightly off balanced with his pointed features and eyes that held flames in their rich chocolate depths and his front teeth crooked. There was a kind of hesitance hidden behind his jokey word that Calypso could sense.
"Fresh fruit and vegetables," said Calypso, smiling.
"Cider and stew," agreed Leo. "We could provide entertainment." His eyes… oh those eyes… as Calypso stared into those burning depths she wished on every star she had ever watched shoot across the sky that he would stay hers. "You could sing and I could, like, randomly burst into flames."
Calypso laughed, feeling her treacherous heartbeat jolt and jump all about her chest, battering her ribcage so loudly that she was sure Leo could hear it.
He watched her with a kind of far-away awe that Calypso knew all too well.
Leo was a hero. And that meant he would never be hers.
Calypso hated that she wanted to cry.
After
They sat beside a fire. Leo looked best in the flickering light of the campfire, it brought out the reddish huge of his skin and gave him a more reserved smouldering look than his usual open face.
And then Calypso's world shudders to a halt.
"You can't come back," she said. The moment the words left her lips she wanted to take them back. If she had left them unspoken then they could hold onto the hope that one day they would see each other again.
"Because I'm not welcome?"
"Because you can't," said Calypso, the venom seeping from mouth and poisoning the smoky air around them. "No man can find Ogygia twice. That is the rule."
The rule. That rule that kept her caged, kept her wings clipped.
That single rule had caused her so much unhappiness that Calypso had thought she would drown in the misery of those words.
She had never felt anything before. Not rage, not sadness, not despair and definitely not love.
And now Calypso felt everything. It raged through her blood and boiled in her veins.
Leo rolled his eyes, the sketchy angles of his face losing a hint of darkness. "Yeah, well you might have noticed I'm not good a following rules. I'm coming back here with my dragon, and we'll spring you. Take you wherever you want to go. It's only fair."
"Fair…" Calypso blinked tears from her eyes, staring at Leo with undisguised longing.
She wished it could be true.
And then her heartbeat settled into a pattern that Calypso recognized. She knew it so well, like a lullaby her mother once sang, like the flavour of the sweetest of fruits, like the briefest butterfly of kiss.
Love, love, love sang her heart to the melancholy rhythm of never mine.
"You didn't think I could start Leo and Calypso's Auto Repair without Calypso, did you?" asked Leo, his eyes were wide with a kind of searching disbelief. Calypso adverted her eyes to the sand, burn amber by the firelight. "I can't make lemonade and stew, and I sure can't sing."
Calypso tried to make herself forget her feelings, to rebuild her wrecked and broken barriers that Leo had twisted against her, but it was too late.
A startled gasp told Calypso that the raft has arrived.
Even as she felt her heart break, Calypso was sprinting towards the raft, snatching supplies on her way. "Hurry, I don't know how long it will stay!"
"But…" Leo stood frozen, his eyes were wide and confused. "That's the magic raft?"
"Duh! It might work like it's supposed to and take you where you want to go," shouted Calypso back, running her fingers over the slim, delicate woodwork of the raft. "But we can't be sure. The island's magic is obviously unstable."
Sure, girl hissed a cruel voice in her ear. Keep telling yourself that. Keep telling him that.
Calypso swallowed a lump in her throat. "You must rig up your guidance device to navigate," she said, grabbing the console Leo had been working on, they had been working on.
She heard the pounding footfalls of Leo's erratic running.
His nimble hands, shifted around hers as they fastened the machine to the raft. Then they ran wires to the rudder and Leo fitted the rigging as Calypso held it upright, draping it over the mast. Waves were lapping at her feet and the cuffs of her jeans, bathing her feet in its salty shallows.
Then Calypso stepped back and watched with enraptured fear as Leo pressed the console button. It worked; the raft came to life, scrabbling for the sea.
"Go," said Calypso.
Leo turned towards her.
His eyes, oh those eyes, blazed with vigour and loyalty. They flickered as he licked his lips nervously.
"The raft finally got here," he offered.
Calypso blinked, feeling that dreaded sensation of tears building up behind her eyes. "You just noticed?" she asked, throat dry.
"But," Leo looked as though he was holding back tears too. Calypso didn't know whether that should make her feel better or worse. "If it only shows up for guys you like…"
"Don't push your luck, Leo Valdez," said Calypso. "I still hate you."
Leo tried for a smile. "Okay."
No, not okay.
"And you are not coming back here," stressed Calypso against the begging of her laboured breathing as against their messed heartbeats, drumming in a hollow rhythm as their chests were pressed together. "So don't give me any empty promises."
"How about a full promise?" asked Leo. Calypso breathed in his familiar scent of sandalwood and burning, she could see the smattering of freckles across his pointed nose and the bags under his eyes. "Because I'm definitely -"
Those gorgeous, sensual eyes that had caught Calypso under their Latino spell.
And before either of them registered what she was doing, Calypso had lunged forwards, twisting her hands into his curly hair and feeling his nose bump against hers and his lips, softer that she had expected, enmeshed with hers.
Calypso pulled away, shoving into his chest with one hand. "That didn't happen," she said.
"Okay," he said.
Calypso felt the tears again, this time rising higher and stronger.
"Get out of here," her voice shook as did her hands.
Leo blinked. "Okay."
Calypso rushed up the beach, sobs building in her throat as she rubbed the salty water from her eyes. The wind caught her, blowing her hair to the side and slapping the sopping cuffs of her jeans against her shins.
Once she reached the sand dunes at the edge of the beach, Calypso turned to face the water. The fire was dying out and far, far away on a dark, stormy ocean Calypso could just make out the raft, and sitting hunched by the console, Leo Valdez.
The boy. The skinny, annoying, unwanted boy who had taken her heart with him. Calypso pressed one fist to the curve resting below her chest, but above her collarbone, and kissed the fingers of her left hand.
She raised her left palm into the air, letting her splayed hand face the water.
"Be safe," she whispered and it was lost amongst the silence.