Title: Disruption
Prompt: Random word; Spa
Word Count: 485
It turned out that there had been a very good reason for the Greeks and Romans being kept separate and uninformed of each other. Tensions were high, ancestories were insulted and people simply did not get along with each other. The only things that had prevented outright chaos were the Chase girl visibly reigning in her obviously volatile temper at every potential explosion point and Reyna being her usual infuriatingly levelheaded and diplomatic self.
Until now, anyway.
Because while Jackson was almost as infuriatingly heroic as Jason, his tact was far below second-grade level. And for Reyna, already facing the prospects of having lost her longtime friend and crush to a new Aphrodite girl (that must sting, for a war-child) and losing her Praetorship to the newly returned Jason, an offhand comment about some Spa had been the last straw.
"Do you know what you did to us?" Reyna snarled at Jackson (snarled- Jupiter's Beard, little-miss-stoic snarled- oh this was brilliant), her automatons growling behind her.
"I didn't-"
"You were thoughtless, yes," Reyna snapped back, "I realized that about the same time you let out the most bloodthirsty monsters in naval history. You were ignorant. But that does not give you the right to dismiss your mistakes."
Oh, it wouldn't last, of course. Everyone loved Jackson and Reyna was a rock and the fact that she had even let her temper get the better of her for a moment proved that underworld contacts for the Nemesis Essence (TM) (because if they could bring in Greek help, it was fair game for him too) had been legit. A little more sprinkled over the Senate and he could start his own little localized bloody revolution. He really needed to plan that out one of these days.
He couldn't quite keep the entire grin from his face, and a chastised Jackson shot him a highly suspicious look from the corner of his eye. But Chase would never let him do something quite that foolhardy, not with the tensions as high as they were in Camp right now. Not when one disagreement between the Greeks and the Romans could completely destroy the flimsy truce that was barely holding up between them now. And with tensions this high, with Reyna's outburst, the cauldron was going to be bubbling over any day now.
Octavian did not readily admit it when he went wrong. With enough words and gestures and smiles applied just at the right junctures, you made sure that people thought they had misunderstood your original interpretations and predictions. He rarely had the need to do such a thing.
But this one he could happily admit- him being wary of the Greeks had been massively shortsighted. It turned out that he actually loved the Greeks. He couldn't remember a time he'd had this much fun in his entire life.