AN: Ayeee! Second fic in one day. I'm doing rockin', for someone who still hasn't managed to write the fifth chapter of Holy Ground or a paragraph for English...
Alright, so, this is part of my Shattered Glass AU series. This serves as the first, chronologically, but it doubles as a standalone. The series, chronologically, lines up like this: Damaged Goods, Rum Romance, Bright Eyes, Six Months, and Midnight Kisses. Hopefully I'll get around to fully expanding the universe later, but for now, these stories focus mainly on Leo, Nico, Luke, Ethan, and Rachel.
Warnings: Language, brief mentions of sex
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Onwards and Enjoy!
~halestorm
The pencil bag snags on the tree limb, tearing open and spilling the colored pencils out onto the dirt, but Rachel doesn't stop running to pick them up. If she stops, they'll catch her.
Distantly, she wonders if her ratty old sneakers will survive the traipse through the woods, or if it even matters if they do. She'll run barefoot if she has to-there's no way in hell they're gonna take her back.
As she runs, she stuffs her sketchpad into her backpack, and tosses aside the torn pencil case. If she'd just packed it into her backpack before she left... No. There wasn't enough time.
Rachel's been running for days, but she doesn't know where she's running to. But it's late, and she has to find somewhere to stay for the night soon.
She bursts out into the road, gasping for air. Across the street, the town shines like a beacon in the dark night. Rachel pauses to catch her breath, making sure that there aren't any cars on the road, before pushing on, charging down the hill and into the little, bright town.
Rachel ducks into the first alley she finds, feeling the stench swallow her form the moment she does. It's grimy and slick in the alley, but it will do for the night.
She drops her backpack to the ground against the brick wall, and sits down. In a small puddle of cold grease. Rachel's face crumples, and she leans back on her backpack, drawing her knees to her chest as she sobs.
When she wakes up, the sunshine is grazing her cheeks, and Rachel can almost pretend that she's lying amidst the silken sheets back home. But there's something slick under her arm, and flies are buzzing around her face. Rachel almost cries again, because she must smell something awful if even the bugs are mistaking her for garbage, and Rachel isn't used to living like this.
"Morning, sunshine."
The voice startles Rachel into an upright position, and she glares at the boy who spoke to her as she presses her back against the brick wall.
"What do you want?" she snaps. He looks harmless enough, but Rachel doesn't trust him.
"Nothing," the boy says, shrugging. "It looks like we were alley mates last night, though. Thought I'd introduce myself."
Rachel stares at him, taking in his grimy cargo pants, ratty sneakers, grungy T-shirt, and messy, dirty curls. Rachel's own attire consists of torn skinny jeans, old sneakers, and an oversized Hoover Dam sweatshirt that she bought when she visited last year.
The boy looks as bad as she does. He's probably been out on his own for just as long.
"I'm Rachel Elizabeth Dare," she says finally, raising an eyebrow at the boy. His eyes light up.
"R-E-D," he says, grinning. "Red! Like your hair! That's cute."
Rachel blushes, forcing herself to her feet. She's taller than the boy, but he looks like he's close to her age. Maybe a year younger, fourteen or so.
"I'm Leo Valdez," the boy says, and offers Rachel his hand. "It's nice to meet you."
Rachel shakes his hand and snorts. "We slept in an alley last night. This is hardly nice."
Leo gives her a toothy grin. "Maybe not by normal standards. But hey, you're already better company than the Johnsons."
"The who?"
Leo shrugs. "Doesn't matter. We should get out of here before the garbage guys come for the dumpster and see us."
Rachel nods, reaching down to grab her backpack and pull it over her shoulders. Leo smiles at her.
"Wanna get breakfast?"
Rachel arches an eyebrow. "I don't have any money, and you smell like a zoo."
"Hate to break it to you, sweetcheeks, but you don't exactly smell like a fucking flowery meadow yourself." Leo rolls his eyes. "I've got almost a hundred bucks on me. There was more before, but, you know, shit happens. Breakfast is on me, if you're up for it."
Rachel's stomach growls, and there's no way in hell that she's passing up a free meal.
"I'm up for it."
"What are you running from?" Leo asks, and for some reason, Rachel likes the way he puts it. It sounds less pathetic than what it is.
Rachel looks down at her lap. "Everything."
"Me, too," Leo says, and gives her a sad smile. "I hated my foster family, the Johnsons, so I just...left. I leave, a lot."
"I escaped from a mental hospital," Rachel says bluntly. "I'm clinically insane."
"Hey, we're all a little crazy, right?" Leo shrugs like it's no big deal, and gives Rachel an impish grin. "Besides, I can dig crazy."
Rachel rolls her eyes. "I'm not interested in a relationship, Leo." She pokes at what's left of her sandwich. "I have to find someone. He promised he'd always help me, so. I have to find him."
Leo looks down at his plate. "That's okay," he mutters. "I never expected you to stay."
Rachel stands, walking around the cafe table to kiss his cheek. "It was nice meeting you, Leo. I hope we meet again sometime."
The house at the end of the street terrifies Rachel. She thinks it's probably because she still imagines the ratty old dolls that used to sit in the garden, even though the dolls are gone now. Rachel wonders who's keeping up with the yard, because she knows Luke doesn't give two shits about it. Except Rachel can't remember if the dolls are from this universe or the other one-she can't even remember if she's ever been to Luke's house before.
Rachel is walking a tightrope of frayed universes, and she doesn't know which one to trust.
Luke answers the door a few minutes after Rachel knocks, sporting bandages underneath and on his right eye.
"Rachel?" Luke asks, sounding confused.
Rachel smiles at him, tears welling up in her eyes. "You said I could always come to you."
Luke steps aside, letting Rachel into the house.
"Did you run away from the hospital?" he asks, voice low. Rachel nods.
"I couldn't stand it in there anymore," she says. "I'm-I'm crazy, Luke. But that doesn't mean I should be shut up away from everyone, right? Being stuck in that hellhole is only making me crazier."
Luke pressed his lips together in a tight line, staring down at Rachel. She knows how uncomfortable she makes him, and she feels awful about it, but he promised she'd always be welcome at his house, and she doesn't have anywhere else to go.
"I'm sorry," she whispers, and Luke's face softens.
"It's all right," he says soothingly. He wrinkles his nose a little. "You reek, though. There's a shower upstairs you should take advantage of, and then we'll see what we can do about dinner."
"What happened to your face?" Rachel asks later, sitting on top of the counter in the bathroom as she watches Luke redress the scar on his cheek.
Luke grimaces. "Had a run in with a mugger a couple of days ago."
Rachel frowns. She remembers it differently, with dragons and quests and golden apples, and she remembers a boy with green eyes that Rachel is constantly searching for a color to match them telling her about how Luke got the scar.
But she just got here today, and Luke didn't have that scar last time she saw him...except that he did, and she threw a blue hairbrush at him.
"Rachel." Luke places a soft hand on her knee, the bandages he was working on abandoned. Now that Rachel can see it, the scar is puffy and pink, and drags all the way down Luke's cheek. Rachel wants to kiss the skin next to it, but she also wants to get as far away from Luke as she can. He's going to kill her, isn't he? They're on opposing sides in a war.
"Hey," Luke whispers, his hand sliding up and down Rachel's arm, grounding her to whatever miserable universe she's in now. "You're slipping."
Rachel wants to die, because she hates being the reason that uncomfortable look is on Luke's face. She knows how much he hates that she's as insane as his mother is, and she knows he'll never truly trust her because of it. But that's okay, because Rachel doesn't trust him, either. She can't when she knows two different versions of him, and she doesn't know which is real.
"I know," Rachel mutters, "I'm sorry."
Luke studies her, his fingers slipping underneath the hem of her shirt, lightly teasing the skin on her arm. It's not supposed to be a seductive gesture, and it isn't. Luke is gay, and Rachel isn't into him, anyways. "Was the medication working?"
Rachel shakes her head. "It didn't help. I was still...you know, hallucinating. Or something. I was convinced the world was ending at one point." She doesn't say that Luke was at the very thread of the collapse of the world in this other universe she lives in, because she knows it'll upset him.
Luke sighs, stepping away from her. His jaw is set tight. "Rachel, I put my own mother in a mental hospital. Why wouldn't I call them to take you back?"
Rachel looks down at her lap, feeling the sting in her nose that means she's about to start crying. She shrugs. "I guess you wouldn't want me around," she says around the lump in her throat, scowling. "No one else ever has."
Luke doesn't say anything for a moment, and when he does, it's off-topic-they're dropping the matter for now. "I have school tomorrow. I'm leaving at eight. You probably shouldn't leave the house, since I'm sure the hospital is already scouring the state for you."
Rachel nods, then; "You're technically emancipated. Why do you go to school if you don't have to?"
Luke snorts. "It makes shit feel normal. Reminds me I have a life outside of conning fat, rich bastards out of their money just to support my mom's hospital bills."
Rachel's correspondence with Luke was secluded to the mental hospital until now, but even she knew he had to be getting his money somehow. The hospital is expensive, and it's not something a seventeen year old could afford on an after-school-shift paycheck.
"I guess you should sleep, then," she mutters, and Luke smiles at her ruefully, kisses her cheek, and leaves the bathroom. Rachel watches him go without a word.
She knows she can't stay with him forever, but she'll have to until she can figure out what else to do with her life.
She won't go back to the hospital.
Green eyes haunt Rachel's dreams.
In both of her lives, she met the boy who owns them at Hoover Dam, the winter before her freshman year of high school.
The eyes were what triggered the lapse, Rachel thinks. They split her life right down the middle, and she guess that one life-the one with the magic and the gods-must have been her mind recreating a fantastic scenario in which she met the boy with the eyes again, but it could just as easily have been the other way around. Rachel could actually be living the universe where she's an oracle and she's needed, and her mind simply built up this universe where none of it is real and she'll never have to watch the boy with green eyes-Percy Jackson, she remembers-love another woman.
Green eyes haunt Rachel's dreams, but in neither universe will she ever be allowed to love the boy they belong to.
When Rachel wakes, she's in an unfamiliar room. The last thing she remembers is falling into bed at Clarion's Ladies' Academy, praying to the gods that Percy would be found.
She's not in her dorm at Clarion's right now, and her roommate isn't anywhere in sight.
Rachel's heart beats faster as she climbs out of the bed. She's in a pair of men's boxers and a man's old white t-shirt (definitely not the tank top and flannel pants she went to bed in), and the room smells like dust mites. Rachel shivers, crossing the room and stepping out into the hallway.
In a flash, a different version of last night rushes into her memory, hitting her like a punch to the gut. Rachel tries not to scream, because this has been happening to her since the day she met Percy, and it's getting increasingly hard to pretend that everything is fine.
"Rachel?"
Rachel jumps, letting out a yelp as her eyes light on Luke at the end of the hallway, wearing nothing but jeans, a t-shirt held between his fingers. Rachel tries to remember how to breathe.
"But you're dead!" she yells, backing up against the wall of the hallway. Tears sting her eyes. He is dead, right?
Luke purses his lips, yanking his t-shirt over his head. "Calm down, Rachel. You're lapsing again. You're okay."
"No!" Rachel snaps, shaking her head. She's pressed as tightly up against the wall as she can be, and the sheet rock digs into her shoulder blades as she shakes. "No, you're not real! This is all in my head! I'm still back at Clarion's, Percy is still missing, you're still dead-none of this is happening!"
Rachel's voice rises continuously higher as she yells, until she breaks off with a sob. Across the hallway, Luke looks exasperated, and maybe a little bitter. Rachel doesn't care. He's just a hallucination-just like this gods damned house in this gods damned universe.
"I can't stay here," Rachel sobs, and pushes past Luke, running down the stairs.
"Rachel, wait!" he calls after her, and she can hear him chasing her, but Rachel has the advantage of a head start. She's out the front door and down the street in a matter of seconds, running as quickly as her bare feet allow.
The early morning sun lights her way as she tears into the forest and keeps running, and it's only later, as she collapses against a tree, that she remembers that she left her bag at Luke's house. Her bag that has her sketchpad and clean clothes.
Rachel comes to shivering. It's late November, of course, and Rachel should've remembered to grab a jacket.
Rachel lifts her head, looking around the forest. Late afternoon sunlight filters through the trees, but it's not warm enough to chase away the chill that has seeped into Rachel's bones.
Rachel's memory is sketchy, but she remembers running away from Luke, and she kind of remembers lapsing. Her throat closes up, but she can't cry. She has to find clothes suitable to November in Connecticut, and she has to find her way out of the woods.
Rachel won't go back to Luke's house. She doesn't want to have another meltdown.
She finds her way out of the forest and onto the highway, pulling her boxers down her thighs. She only makes it a few feet before a beat up old pickup truck comes bouncing down the road, slowing down to drive alongside her.
"Hey," a voice from within the car calls out as he rolls down the window, "need a ride?"
Rachel turns to look at the boy who made the offer, stopping in her tracks. The truck stops beside her.
"Pardon?"
He grins at her, letting his eyes run down her body unashamedly, and she rolls her eyes.
"Need a ride?" he asks, patting the side of the truck. "It's November, and you're in boxers and a t-shirt. You look pretty cold for someone so hot."
Rachel bites back the sarcastic remark that sits on her tongue in favor of pulling the door open.
"Budge over," she orders, and he grins at the man in the driver's seat as he hops out of the car and motions for her to slide into the middle seat.
The boy in the driver's seat looks exactly like the other one, only maybe a little older, and they both look around Rachel's age.
Rachel climbs into the seat, and she can feel the other guy checking out her ass before he climbs in after her.
"I'm not a hooker," Rachel snaps as she catches the driver ogling her breasts through her sheer t-shirt.
He laughs. "Pity. You're real cute, though." He puts the car in gear, pulling back out onto the road again.
"I'm Travis," the driver says, "and that's my little brother Connor."
"I'm Rachel."
Travis smiles at her. "Where are we taking you?"
Travis and Connor go into Old Navy and come out with a whole new wardrobe for Rachel, and she raises her eyebrows.
"You bought all of this for a stranger?"
Connor snorts. "Nah. We stole it."
Rachel blanches, and Travis gives her a winning smile.
"Don't worry, we know what we're doing." He looks over his shoulder at the store, wincing. "We should go before they realize we stole anything, though."
And with that, they're off again, and Rachel shimmies out of the boxers and t-shirt, thankful for wearing a bra and panties beneath them, and manages to pull on the new pair of jeans and the flannel shirt without bumping her head on the ceiling but one time and punching Connor and Travis on the arm for peeking several times.
"So you don't have anywhere to stay?" Travis asks, and Rachel shakes her head. She hasn't told them much, just enough to get food and clothes from them.
"Nope," Rachel says, shaking her head and tying her hair up in a messy bun.
Travis and Connor exchange a look. "Apollo," they say simultaneously.
"What?" Rachel asks, feeling a chill settle over her body at the mention of the god.
Travis grins. "Oh, you'll like him," he laughs.
"All the ladies do," Connor agrees, grinning.
"But not his haikus," Travis adds.
"His haikus are awful," Connor chimes in.
Rachel glances back and forth between them.
"Are you sure you're not twins?"
They laugh. "Ethan asks us that daily," they say in unison.
Rachel narrows her eyes at them, and for some reason, she remembers whipped cream and screaming at the two brothers until her throat is sore.
Rachel closes her eyes. She's slipping again.
The man who answers the door is hardly a man at all-he's barely eighteen, with perfectly messy blond hair, tan skin, day old scruff, and a sharp jaw line. He's not wearing a shirt, showing off the sculpted planes of his torso. Rachel have trouble keeping her eyes off of his chest if she wasn't worried about throwing up from the dizzying half memory of this man owning her in another life, sort of.
He rubs his eyes, barely taking his gaze off of her breasts to glance at the two brothers behind her.
"What's going on?" he asks, yawning and stretching his arms above his head.
Connor grins. "Rachel, this is Apollo."
"Apollo, this is Rachel," Travis finishes.
Rachel looks Apollo up and down, trying not to ogle his chest for too long, even though he clearly has no problem staring at hers.
"Apollo? That's your name?" Rachel asks incredulously, arching an eyebrow. "Do you sell drugs or something?"
"Of course not!" Apollo gasps, scandalized. "I'm a respectable businessman, thank you very much!"
Rachel scoffs, trying to ignore how easy bantering with this boy is. "You're maybe eighteen. How successful can you be?"
"Successful enough to live in my own apartment and take in strays like you," Apollo sniffs, turning and stalking into his apartment. "She can stay," he hollers over his shoulder, and Connor and Travis nudge her inside.
Rachel follows after Apollo hesitantly, and the two brothers take off for the elevator. "So you're a drug dealer?" she asks, stepping into the kitchen behind him.
"No! I'm a psychic!" Apollo snaps.
Rachel snorts. "Right. Very respectable."
Apollo turns to look at her, eyes narrowed, hands on his hips. "You're like, twelve. Isn't it your bedtime?"
Rachel pokes her tongue out at him. "Fuck you."
Apollo smirks. "Frankly, sweetheart, I'm not sure you're old enough for it to be legal."
Rachel groans and shakes her head. "So, what, you take teenagers into your care a lot?"
"Only the ones escaped from mental hospitals."
Rachel stiffens, and Apollo smiles at her.
"They don't call me Apollo for nothing." He considers, looking her up and down. "Did it ever occur to you that you're not crazy?"
"What do you mean?" Rachel asks, wrinkling her brow.
Apollo shrugs. "I had a vision a couple of days ago about you. From this universe and the other one."
Rachel's heart stops in her chest.
"And I realized," Apollo continues, "that maybe the timelines are aligned. Maybe both are real, and most people don't even realize it. And those who do-people like you and me-we're the ones who are considered crazy, but we're really just the only ones who knows what the hell is going on. Maybe, Rachel, both universes coexist, and you've just been blessed with the rare ability to live in both."
Rachel stares at him for a moment, taking in what he's saying, and then she scowls. "You're mocking me," she complains, and he grins.
"Yeah, okay, I am," he concedes. Rachel glares at him.
"This from the psychic."
He gives her a cheeky grin. "Not a real psychic. People just buy whatever bullshit I'm feeding them. Like you, for instance. You totally thought I actually knew all that shit about you from a vision. Au contraire-your picture is all over the news, saying you've escaped from a mental hospital and warning that you could think you're in any number of alternate universes. You, miss, are a certifiably insane mental hospital escapee."
Rachel huffs. "You're an ass."
Apollo shrugs, turning to the refrigerator and pulling out eggs. "Maybe, but we're all damaged goods, Rachel, and you're no worse than me or anyone else. You're just a different brand of crazy. You hungry?"
Rachel isn't, but she's decided she likes Apollo.
"Always," Rachel says, hopping up on the bar stool and watching him cook.
It takes two weeks of constant bickering and general appreciation of each other's forms before they sleep together, and after they do, Rachel never falls into the confusion of knowing two universes again, because she never revisits the other one, and slowly, even the memory of green eyes starts to fade.
They find Rachel three months later, because Apollo gets into an argument with a client over whether or not he's actually a psychic, it gets physical, and the cops are called.
They take Rachel away kicking and screaming, but she's only in the hospital again for a month before they let her go back to her parents' house.
Apollo visits frequently, even though her parents hate him. He likes climbing in through Rachel's window late at night and fucking her in the room across from her parents', just loud enough to be heard if anyone's awake. Rachel hates it, but she wouldn't trade it for anything in the world.
Rachel's life isn't quite perfect, but she's no longer drifting between two universes. Some day she'll call Luke and apologize for everything and ask how his mother is, but for now, she's still finding herself in this life where things aren't quite so jumbled up anymore.