Piper can see her soulthreads. It's something that doesn't really register as strange until she goes to school, just like her skin color, and the feathers she likes to weave into her braid. The counselors in fifth grade tell her she's probably just confused because no one can see their threads for more than a few seconds after they come in. She stops talking soon after that, but the stories follow her no matter how hard she tries to get rid of them. (Her mother is a psychopath or a drug addict or dead, her father is a klepto or a deadbeat, but he probably doesn't exist, the girls say, giggling, because nothing that crawls out of the dumpster has parents.)
She has a lot of threads. She knows that she has a navy blue thread for her dad, a thread for Grandpa Tom that's shriveled up since he died, and a pink thread that stretches off into the distance for her soulmate. But there's a few on her thumb that she has no explanation for- a lime green thread that loops around her thumb, four threads one on top of the other banded around her middle finger, a gold one on her pinky.
The kids at school think she's crazy when she tells them. They call her an attention whore from across the cafetorium and whisper about her mother when they think she can't hear. It only gets worse after the stunt she pulls with at the BMW lot. The whispers get louder, and on her bad days she believes them.
Reyna sees her soulthread once, briefly, after she and Hylla escape from Blackbeard. It's glowing a bright cherry pink. She looks away so she can fend of a pirate that's followed them from the ship and when she looks back at her hand the thread has seemingly disappeared. Hylla doesn't like to talk about hers, but sometimes when she gets scared or angry or lonely, she twists the ring finger on her left hand- where her soulmate thread is supposed to be. Reyna wonders sometimes if her sister imagines the same things she does late at night when she's left alone with her thoughts: warm hands and soft words and bright smiles.
She's never really believed in soulmates so she usually tries to ignore her loneliness but it isn't until she meets Lupa and her wolves that she can really forget. Camp Jupiter is amazing. There are people here who understand her, people here who can help her because they actually do know what she's been through, an entire city of them. There is order here, routines and training and rules that she can lose herself in. Camp Jupiter is perfect, even if Hylla doesn't think so.
Piper thinks Jason might be her soulmate- and why wouldn't he be? He's handsome and smart and considerate, like a blond Superman, and he really likes her. (or he did, before the amnesia thing.) It's perfect, he's perfect, except for the fact that she doesn't like him that way. (She doesn't like boys that way, and even if she did and he was her soulmate, she'd never know- her threads disappeared as soon as she walked into the Wilderness School, and Jason can barely remember his own name, much less her.)
Reyna thinks Jason might be her soulmate. He's her best friend, her right hand man- he's the only who's really cared about her since Hylla. He's everything she imagined, all those lonely nights ago.
Dakota says all best friends fall in love with each other at some point. Of course, Reyna knows better than to trust Dakota, but she wants it to be true more than she'd care to admit. (She's so lonely.)
Piper is fourteen when she realizes that she might not be as normal as she's convinced herself she is. She's looking at Isabel Gonzalez when it hits her, the realization that she's never felt anything that she's supposed to for a boy, but she's loved before (or at lease she thinks she has). She's loved little Sally from daycare with her blond curls and baby blues and strange affinity for tripping on air, Anjali from grade school with wide inquisitive brown eyes and henna patterns swirling up her arms who sat inside with her and colored, who helped her forget the taunts about her heritage, her parents. When Isabel flips her long black locks and turns those hazel eyes on her, she picks up her stuff and runs out, heading straight for her father's favorite stretch of beach.
Jane finds her crying into her hands an hour later. In a rare display of concern, her father's assistant sits down in the sand next to her and places a hand on her shoulder. "Piper?" she asks slowly. "What's wrong?" Piper shakes her head still crying.
Jane tries another approach. "If you don't tell me, I'll be forced to call your father and tell him that you were skipping school." She looks up then, shaking her head panickedly. "Okay," Jane says, soothingly. "I won't tell your dad if you tell what's going on."
Piper sniffs. "I like girls the way I'm supposed to like boys."
Jane blinks. "Oh," she says softly.
"There's something wrong with me, isn't there?"
Jane's eyes flash, and she grabs Piper's shoulder. "No. There is nothing wrong with you. Don't you ever, let anyone tell you that you're broken. You understand?" Piper nods. Jane gives her a small smiles and pushes her glasses up the bridge of her nose. "Don't tell anyone, but...I think girls are better than boys too."
Jason comes back six months after he vanishes, hand-in-hand with another girl (Venus' daughter). Reyna is so livid she can barely see straight, and the fact that Percy is nearly jumping out his skin next to her doesn't help either. She doesn't know how she manages to stay calm enough to watch Percy and Annabeth reunite without crying.
She also doesn't know why she's so mad- she didn't have any claim to him whatsoever, and even if she did, he probably wouldn't have remembered her, but. But Percy remembered Annabeth; Percy remembered his best friend, and she should have been able to hope that he'd come back to her without getting it thrown back in her face again, dammit.
It only gets worse after the girl (Jason's girl is named Piper, she learns later) tries to charmspeak them into compliance, then blows up half of New Rome with her vaguely elfin friend. When she closes her eyelids at the end of the day, all she can she is Annabeth Chase's face, apologetic on behalf of the other boy, resigned to the fact that something is going to go wrong. It reminds her of what she feels everyday when she thinks of the rest of Circe's girls- resigned, but so so sorry for their deaths, for her own loss.
The first thing Piper thinks when she sees Reyna is holy shit. But not in the 'how the fuck am I supposed to compete with that' sort of way, but in the 'hot damn' sort of way. Which is admittedly not how you're supposed to think about your kind of boyfriend's ex-something, but even Annabeth is sort of checking her out so. Reyna is beautiful.
Piper swallows hard, studying the way Reyna's hand flexes over her bicep and Jason squeezes her hand comfortingly mistaking her awe for nervousness. A pit opens up in her stomach when she realizes that if she doesn't tell someone she will force herself into living a live with a man she cannot ever truly love.
Reyna finds herself thinking more and more about Piper McLean in the weeks that follow the bombing. At first her thoughts are mainly about how much she resents the other girl for doing in six months what she hadn't managed to do in over six years. And then it turns to speculation- how is Jason around her? What is she like? And after that Reyna starts to imagine Piper with her, starts to imagine taking Piper for a walk around the temples, drinking hot chocolate with her in New Rome, waking up next to her, and she immediately sits up.
It's not so much the fact that she's imagining herself with another girl that bothers her- she's used to it by now, knowing a girl, falling for a girl, wanting to be with her, and then realizing you can't have her -it's the fact that the girl she is imagining is Piper fucking McLean, daughter of Venus, who is currently dating Jason, Jason Grace who was her's at one point, Jason Grace who is Piper's now.
She finds herself mimicking Hylla sometimes when she thinks of Piper, twisting the phantom soulthread band around her ring finger. One day, instead of feeling calloused skin like she usually does, she feels thread warpped around her finger. She stops cold and when she looks at her hand-
-there's nothing there. She exhales slowly.
Piper thinks about Reyna a lot, to the point where she sometimes imagines Reyna in Jason's place. It happens once at night when they're alone, and she freezes, pulling away so fast she almost smacks her head against the wall of his room on the Argo II. "Did I do something?" Jason asks, tentatively smoothing the newly formed wrinkles in his t-shirt.
Piper nearly laughs. "No," she says. It's me not you, she thinks and for some reason that only makes her want to laugh harder.
Jason frowns. "Then what..?"
Piper shakes her head. "It's nothing." I just won't ever love you the way you want me to. "I'm just super tired," she says, offering him a weak smile. She kisses him on the cheek. "See you tomorrow."
Annabeth Chase calls Reyna in the middle of the night to see if she can come to their Grecian warship that is currently floating above an ocean. She doesn't know why she agrees, but she finds herself on the Argo II almost a couple days later. Her judgement could be blamed on a lot of things- her sleep addled brain, her dissatisfaction with life as a Praetor, the fact that the fate of the world rests on the Seven and by extension her acceptance of Annabeth's invitation. Piper McLean.
Even though she takes rather drastic measures to avoid her, she always seems to run into Piper. One night, she finds herself face to face with Piper in the pegasi stables. "Hey!" Piper says awkwardly. Reyna smiles just as awkwardly in return and goes back to petting Scipio. "Thank you for coming over," Piper continues, sounding a little more confident.
Reyna snorts. "It wasn't like I had a choice."
Piper laughs a little too shortly. "Look, since we're going to be working together to save the world...and stuff, I don't want this stuff between you and Jason and I to be make things weird."
"It wasn't weird until you mentioned Jason," Reyna says, smiling. Piper gives her a look that she doesn't have the energy to try and understand. "How is that going by the way?" Reyna asks, tucking a loose lock of hair behind her ear.
Piper's expression turns a little regretful as she plops down on top of a hay bale. "I...It's not."
"Oh?"
Piper backtracks. "Well, he thinks it is, but I can't...I'm lesbian and I haven't told him yet."
Reyna blinks, surprised, and coughs. "Okay. I think I'm stating the obvious when I say this, but you have to tell him. As soon as possible."
"I can't tell him now, he-"
"Jason will be fine. He always is. We have an obligation to live our lives the way we want to, and if that means being with a girl, then that's the way it goes."
Piper scowls. "We don't have to do anything, I-" She stops suddenly and there's a moment of silence before she slumps against one of the walls in the stables. "Oh," she says softly, staring wide eyed at Reyna.
Reyna frowns, steeping forward, and then it hits her, a shock wave almost like an explosion. She hits the floor like a sack of flour, panting for breath. "What-" She looks down at her hand to see a thread on her ring finger, glowing so bright that it almost blinds her, leading to...Piper. Her eyes widen to the size of dinner plates and she clenches her other hand. She looks at Scipio who's pacing around, whinnying worriedly, and this time when she looks back at her hand, the thread is still there. "Okay," she says dazed. "Okay," she repeats, trying to talk herself down.
Piper stands up weakly without really looking at anything, looking about the same as Reyna feels, scared and confused. "I have to..." she grabs the wall for support as the dizziness hits her. "I have to go."
And Reyna...Reyna curls up on the floor and cries like she hasn't in years.
notes: i am aroace, not lesbian so if i wrote anything that was inaccurate or offensive let me know and i will fix it; this is my first time writing lgbt+ material so i'm still trying to figure this out. other than that, please please read and review because that's the only payment fic writers receive. i also haven't read blood of olymous in a while so i probably messed up a lot of details about how reyna got to the argo ii, but just go with it i guess. i may come back and fix it.