For Tumblr user Bronnie/missionfabulous, whose idea spawned this. Takes place a while after Gaea's been defeated and the Greek and Roman camps have become friends.

Leo and Jason sat on top of a picnic table, enjoying the mild weather and lack of save-the-world wars. Demigods both Greek and Roman wandered the grounds of Camp Half-Blood in clusters of two or three, but most of them were hitting up the lake, so for all intents and purposes they were alone there on the lawn. What had started out as Doing Nothing had just become potentially Doing Something: Jason had confessed he wanted to learn a little Spanish.

"Why Spanish?" Not that Leo was complaining; he was just curious why the former praetor and current head counselor of the (granted, one-person) Zeus cabin had suddenly developed an interest in linguistics.

Jason shrugged, a hint of pink creeping onto his face. "I dunno, man, I just thought it might be fun." This might have been convincing, at a stretch, but then his attention slipped and Leo followed his gaze up the hillside to where Piper and Annabeth were lying in the grass, braiding each other's hair and chattering in a blend of English, Greek, and French.

Leo grinned. "I see. The mighty Superman wants to chat up his lady en una lengua diferente."

Jason jerked his gaze back to his friend and immediately protested, "No! No, most of you guys know another language—Frank can speak Chinese, Hazel knows Cajun French, Annabeth can speak Ancient Greek and the French Piper's taught her, Percy can speak—well, fish and horse—"

"And Piper can speak French, and the Spanish I've taught her," Leo completed, waggling his eyebrows.

Jason made a slightly strangled noise at the back of his throat that meant he wanted to deny it but couldn't bring himself to lie.

Leo's grin widened. "Not to worry, old chap," he said as he patted his friend's obscenely wide shoulders. "I can help you impress the Piper friend. But wouldn't it be better to learn French? She's fluent and you guys could actually hold a conversation, eventually."

"My French accent made a tree catch fire once," Jason admitted, with such a rueful look at a nearby poplar that Leo made a mental note to ask about that story later.

"Well, she's not as good at Spanish, so you'll be less likely to incite wildfire, at least." Leo stroked his chin, trying to think of the best way to go about this. He hated grammar, so probably some basic phrases would be fine—oh. Oh, yes. He suppressed one of his more impish grins and snapped his suspenders against his shoulders. "Okay, how much do you know?"

"Uh, hola and adios and gracias and dónde está el baño."

Hehehe. Perfect. "Bien. If you want to ask Piper how she is, you say, ¿Como estás?"

"Como estás," Jason echoed, concentration creasing his brow. "That doesn't mean, like, 'I'm stupid' or something, does it?"

"No," Leo scoffed with a wave of one hand. "It means 'how are you.' I'm personally offended."

"Oh. Okay." Jason looked slightly ashamed but mostly just relieved.

"But only say it like that to people you're close to," the repair boy warned, "or else you'll offend them. Say como está usted to most people."

"Got it. What else?"

"Well," Leo said in a carefully casual tone, "if she asks you how you are, 'I'm doing good today' is tengo uno pito chiquito."

"Tengo un pito chiquito," he repeated carefully.

"Yep, perfect." He ran through a few more (accurate) phrases before tossing in another mistranslation: "And 'you look nice today' is tu madre es—"

"What's going on here?" said a new voice, regal and female and with a touch of Spanish lilt, and Leo froze.

"Oh, hey, Reyna," Jason said with a smile. "Leo's teaching me some Spanish."

Leo turned slowly to see Reyna sweep her braid over her shoulder and plant her hands on her hips, subtly challenging. La cagaste, la cagaste, he told himself furiously. She was Puerto Rican, she'd notice and call him out and then he would be fed to her reputedly evil dogs—

"Like what?" she asked.

Jason cleared his throat. "¿Como estás?" he asked, enunciating precisely.

His accent was overly formal, but he hadn't butchered it. Her eyebrows raised infinitesimally. "Bien. ¿Y como estás?"

"Tengo un pito chiquito," he responded with the same formal exactness, and Reyna's eyebrows jumped sky-high, because she hadn't been expecting to hear her friend declare I have a small dick.

"What?"

Jason noticed her reaction and backtracked. "Did I say that wrong?"

Leo, angled slightly out of Jason's line of vision, began to vigorously shake his head no. Reyna's dark eyes bored into the son of Hephaestus, the pieces immediately falling into place. Leo waited for her to tear into him, but she was quiet.

"No," she said finally, her voice a little tighter and higher-pitched than before. "I think that's . . . a Mexican variant. You could also say estoy bien; it's quicker." She blinked a few times and then rubbed at something in her eye with the heel of her hand. "Sorry—pollen."

"Oh. Okay," the blond said, glancing between the two of them suspiciously, but his trust in Reyna won out over his well-earned suspicion of Leo. He gestured toward Piper and Annabeth: "So I'm okay to maybe go over there and practice?"

"Flawless," Leo commended as Reyna gave a more pragmatic, though still high-pitched, "Yes, you're fine."

Jason slid off the tabletop and trotted out of earshot, and Reyna turned the full force of her gaze onto Leo.

"'Teaching him some Spanish,'" she enunciated, raising one eyebrow."Really."

Unable to pretend he wasn't totally proud of having pulled that off, Leo grinned at her. "Come on. If you thought it was so bad, you would have told him what he said."

Reyna blinked again and swallowed, and this time Leo was pretty sure he saw her fighting to keep a straight face. "I hardly think clarifying thatparticular translation would have been enjoyable for any of us."

"It might make Piper feel better if we did," he considered.

She ignored this innuendo, though her cheeks darkened a little. "Did you give him any correct translations, other than 'how are you'?" she asked.

"Yes!" he protested, puffing his scrawny chest out at the insult to his pride. "'I'm hungry' was right, and 'Clarisse is chasing me,' and—"

"Okay, fine. Were there any other mistranslations I should warn him about?"

Leo pretended to pout. "No. You interrupted us before I could teach him that 'you look nice today' is tu madre es gorda y fea." Your mother is fat and ugly.

In surprise Reyna let out a strange hiccup snort, but she recovered quickly, pressing her knuckles to her lips as she pretended she didn't just totally laugh. A grin spread across his face.

"You really can't mislead him like that," she insisted. "And I don't have time to go over everything with him to make sure you don't tell him something like tu puta madre means 'I love you.'"

Ooh. Good idea. She had a trickster side to her, he just knew it. He put that mistranslation away for later. "We could co-teach him Spanish," he offered.

"Right. Because I have time for that."

"Well," he reconsidered with a sideways glance, "if you don't have time for teaching, we could just practice together. I mean, tu lengua es mi lengua, querida."

"No me llama 'querida,'" she corrected him with a sigh, for the millionth time. "—O 'tu.'"

But there was a pause. And that pause was enough to suggest that ten minutes of intentional misteaching had been enough to bring him one step closer to officially becoming on tu terms with her.