Organic, After All
A/N: Ok, so I think I'm gonna do a round 10-chaptered story and I have some ideas but please, do offer things. I'm not sure I wanna go for weddings or babies, so let's try some normal couply things like braiding her hair or watching cartoons. Well, a little more elaborated than that, I guess. Though I could write one about braiding hair. By the way, you should go check the song I mention in this chapter. It's on my Leyna fanmix and everything but if you haven't seen that - go for it!
Organic After All
Am I only dreaming
Or is this burning an eternal flame?
I'm the Bleeding Volcano
Once upon a time there was a very unsettling moment in Reyna's life. It was back when she first started going into the engine room of the Argo II to spend her time.
Before that time, she'd been unhappy, yes, but she had had answers. She knew what she wanted, what she shouldn't want and how those two were basically the same thing. However, that was the past and now it was like she was someone else and this new person had very conflicting, uncomfortable ideas about what she wanted.
For some reason, she had started a harmless friendship with the Greek blacksmith. A boy would quite possibly be the only polite way to describe him and yet she found herself surrounded by his bubbly yet surprisingly bitter personality more often than she should.
She liked being around his machines as well, they made her feel calm – maybe because they didn't ask anything or her, because their future didn't depend on her decisions. Reyna didn't know the real reason but she was quite sure it had something to do with the the fact that the praetor job was getting very old and exhausting.
And then, eventually, it came an even more unsettling time, when the New Person took over and, without thinking at all, placed a kiss on the boy's lips. His hair was on fire, she didn't know how to react, so she walked away to freak out by herself.
Fact was, Reyna had no experience with boys whatsoever. Well, she hardly had any experience with people in general. Besides brushing people's hair, fighting pirates and ruling a small, fake country she didn't have that many people skills. It sounds like a lot sometimes, but intimacy wasn't her strongest suit.
She had being really intimate with a person once but then the gods decided they needed a hero, erased his memories of her and threw him on the arms of a daughter of Venus.
Even that thought was making her less and less bitter everyday now and she had no idea why.
The real problem was, since the kiss, she couldn't really manage to look in Leo's face. She had no idea where things were going – she liked to pretend to be calm and collected but only because she was expecting him to go on a rant and spill it out for her.
He never did though, so she wasn't aware of anything.
And, even if she did know exactly where to go, she was pretty sure she hadn't been there before and Reyna hated not being in control.
So, all in all, she'd ruined everything with that kiss.
She had lost a companion, a place to run away from her problems and her dignity all at once. She considered just acting like the kiss was a "Roman thing, you know? We do it all the time in parties. Haha, very European" but she just knew she couldn't pull it off.
Besides, did she even feel anything like that? She shook off those thoughts, it wasn't her place to think about that right now. It only made things worse.
She got up, brushed her teeth, put on her armor (both physical and metaphorical) and braided her hair. She squint her eyes at the reflection in the mirror and judged herself.
"Honestly, Reyna, you're a warrior, you should be able to face things like these upfront. Besides, if anything, you're a diplomat. Solve things!"
On her bedroom floor, Aurum and Argentum made funny noises as they played with each other.
"Oh, what do the two of you know? You're just highly technological automatic pets!" She yelled at them even though she knew it made no sense.
She sighed again and decided to pay the engine room one last visit just to make sure she had destroyed things before they started one more time.
She was used to the mayhem, that didn't surprise her in the least. However, this time, there was music and dancing. Automatons dancing, by the way, which only made everything weird.
The music was loud and, though she couldn't recognize the song, the voice was very familiar: The Rolling Stones. She walked through machines and wires and the further she got into the room, the louder the music got.
Leo's face popped all of a sudden from behind a huge scrap of metal. He was wearing security goggles and looked messy and sweaty. He smiled as soon as he saw her which she assumed would've been considered a nice thing by most girl but most girls hadn't seen Leo's unnerving smirk. He always looked as if he was about to turn you into one of his jokes.
All things considered, Reyna wasn't excited about it.
"Aha! I thought I'd never see you again." He lifted his goggles to his forehead and, for a second, she could swear his nostrils were on fire. Reyna didn't know whether or not to run. She could feel the song's beat on her heart and it made her queasy.
Leo climbed through the scraps of metal he'd been working on and approached her, smirking from ear to ear. One of his automatons rushed and offered her a chair. She hesitated before sitting down but decided it was the safest option, considering she was about to pass out from humiliation.
He stopped midway and he and some of his machines did a little play back of the song. He reached for Reyna as if to touch her and then pretend to get hurt and retreated as the lyrics went "And when I touched her, my hand just froze".
Reyna was starting to believe he was a little inebriated. And that was before she realized he was wearing a shirt that said "Team Leo".
With a single hand wave, Leo dropped the volume of the music. He stared down confidently at Reyna as she sat on her chair coyly and that, to her, summed up the whole new arrangement on their friendship.
"I found a radio on my belt today." Yes, he was definitely inebriated, Reyna thought. "It was the oldest radio I had ever seen in ages and I had no idea why it'd ever be there in the first place." He put two fingers in his mouth and whistled. An automaton brought him a chair of his own. He sat down so they were eye to eye.
Reyna looked down at her knees, feeling very unlike a diplomat at the moment.
"And I thought: well, this thing is broken without repair, I don't know how it got here but it's so old fashioned, I get nothing from fixing it." He shrugged and gestured as if throwing something away. "Then, it hit a wall. And it started blasting out music."
Reyna didn't know how to respond to that either but she decided that maybe he was going for "pretending it never happened" and offered the most she could produce with what she had:
"That's interesting." He waved her off:
"No, it's not. I'm still getting to the good part." He looked around the shop nervously, as if waiting for someone to come in at any moment and then proceeded. "It started blasting out The Rolling Stone's "She's so Cold"."
It made no sense to Reyna whatsoever but she nodded anyway.
"I grabbed the broken radio and, you won't believe this, it's the same one my mom used to have in her old work shop."
Reyna finally felt like she could understand something:
"Oh, Leo, I guess that's…That's wonderful." He waved her off again:
"Still not the best part." He smirked. She felt uncomfortable again. "I have to say I was starting to get worried about you disappearing for two days…" She opened her mouth to say something but words didn't come out. Either that or Leo didn't let her speak, she couldn't be sure which one exactly. "And I kept thinking about how my mom had always told me to be more confident and how ashamed she'd be if she saw me like that."
Reyna wanted to ask what "that" meant. She wanted answers; she wanted to be in the known. She knew nothing about anything these days. She didn't open her mouth though.
"And then, all of a sudden, this radio shows up and it plays her favorite band and the song," he stopped for a second. "Well, never mind about the song. I just thought today was a good day to be a little more courageous."
She didn't feel really courageous so she didn't say anything for a long time. Leo stood up she followed suit. The chairs vanished as if they could walk on their own (which, Reyna reminded herself, was a possibility).
"Well," She sighed. "I'm delighted to hear you are feeling so well, I personally find it very – " she never got to finish her sentence, Leo had grabbed her face and pressed his lips against hers. It was harsh and awkward and their teeth crashed a little but she could swear her own hair was on fire this time.
She opened her eyes again to find his dangerous smirk playing on his face. She could swear she was another joke to him but he laughed a little nervously and said:
"The kissing thing, I think we should try and do it more often."
She really had no idea what to say so she just stood there and watched him get back to work, the song still on repeat. She could read his lips as he hummed the words.
I'm the burning bush, I'm the burning fire
I'm the bleeding volcano
The Goddess of Leyna blesses those who believe in leaving reviews.~
