Ok! Here it is: the final chapter. The whole necklace thing from the previous chapter also gets explained. Enjoy!
Afterwards he would simply like to be with her - just her - holding her in his arms and listening to her breathe. But the festival is not over, and he needs to face his reality. He needs to tell Piper the truth – he owes her that much.
They both dress quietly and quickly: her in a plum coloured halter dress, him in a pair of jeans and white t-shirt. She pulls her hair to the side clearly intending to braid it, but he stops her. "Don't. It looks beautiful this way."
She makes a face at him, but she lets her hair be.
"We should get back to the festival," she says quietly.
"Really? I'd rather stay here with you," he whispers in her ear. He pulls her into his arms, so that her forehead rests against his right shoulder. He feels her smile.
"But we can't. You have someone waiting for you." She kisses his neck and pulls away from him. "If you want me Jason, I will gladly have you. But I won't be with you if you're with someone else. I deserve better. And Piper deserves better. She cares about you. I refuse to be the person that ruins her happiness." She turns and walks away.
Jason smiles at her retreating back. His mind is made up, but she's right. Piper does deserve better, and he knows what he needs to do.
When he exits, Reyna is nowhere to be seen. He takes a step forward but someone steps quickly in front of him and he is suddenly confronted by a pair of angry kaleidoscopic eyes.
"Jason what is going on?" she demands.
He takes a deep breath trying to think how he's going to explain all this to her without hurting her. But he realizes that he can't avoid that. He's already hurt her, already been unfaithful to her. "Piper," he says with a pained expression.
Her eyes widen – she realizes the truth. Her face contorts into a disgusted expression and she backs away from him.
"Piper," he says again, reaching out for her. But she shakes her head, turns around, and walks away. He's about to follow her but suddenly Leo runs up to him.
"Hey man, the real show's about to start. Come on!" He looks around. "Have you seen Piper?"
"Yea. She just ran off. Towards the festival I think."
"Ok. Well let's catch up to her. You don't want to miss the show!"
Jason nods and together they head back towards the busy street.
They find her standing in the middle of the crowd, staring resolutely at the band playing on stage, arms crossed across her chest in a defensive position.
"Ok you two wait here. I gotta make sure no one blows themselves up!" Leo says and then runs off in the direction of the Vulcan forges.
"Piper we need to talk," Jason murmurs softly.
"There's nothing to talk about," she spits.
"I need to explain-"
"You made yourself loud and clear when you… you fucked her!" she yells angrily. Thankfully the place is too loud for anyone to take any notice of them. Her eyes are blazing with anger, but her slur angers him as well.
"No one fucked anyone. It's called making love. And it's completely different from fucking," he replies quietly but coldly. But he takes a deep breath – he is at fault and she has every right to be angry. "Piper nothing I say can excuse what happened and I'm not asking you to forgive and forget. The truth is we can't. We can't forget and that's the problem."
She looks carefully at him. Then she too takes a deep breath and uncrosses her arms. "We should probably go somewhere quiet."
He nods and leads her over to a park bench where they can still observe the crowd and festivities but can speak privately. The minute they sit he begins to speak, wanting to get everything out before he loses his nerve in the face of her questions. "I was happy with you Piper. So happy. Those months at Camp Half Blood have been so peaceful and spending the days with you was more than I could ask for. I felt free and it felt good being with you. I thought I loved you – felt I loved you. When my memories first started returning I remembered that there was someone named Reyna and that maybe she was something… something more to me. But being with you made me forget those feelings… made them go away and I thought if you could forget those kinds of feelings so easily then maybe they don't actually mean anything. So I stopped trying to remember that there might be someone waiting for me and just enjoyed being with you. Because you loved me and I loved being with you. When I came back here I still felt that way."
She opens her mouth to say something, at the same time reaching out for his hand, but he pulls away and silences her. "No let me finish, please." She pulls back and clamps her mouth shut.
After I visited her the first night, something started to feel wrong. I felt like I was missing something… something that only felt right when I was with Reyna. I can't explain it… there's this weird attraction between the two of us, and you could probably call it lust, but nothing feels right without her. Last night she told me she was letting me go and when I watched her walk away, Piper, I… I couldn't breathe. Up until that moment I hadn't realized how much she was a part of me. She came into my life and she made me part of her and some way along the way I made her a part of me and I can't… don't want to be… without that part. Mentally I don't remember why I feel this way… I don't remember being with her in this way… but something in here…" he says tapping the place on his chest where his heart would be, "something in here still knows. I can't…"
"Jason, enough," Piper whispers softly. He looks up to meet her gaze expecting to find hatred, but instead he's met with eyes full of pain, yes, but also, surprisingly, understanding.
"I can't pretend that doesn't hasn't hurt me. You've been so distant since we've come back and watching you with her…" She breaks off and sighs resignedly. "Well watching you with her, maybe I knew that there was something there, and I just didn't want to admit it. When you talked about her at camp I thought maybe she would have some kind of crush on you, but that day in the Senate… the way she talked about you… how she would follow you anywhere… well I realized then. She loves you. She loves you in a way that I don't. And the way you two fought over breakfast that morning…. I wished we'd had a fight like that. It's the people we love most that we let ourselves be angry with. They're the ones we fight with like that. You love her but you just couldn't realize it."
"Piper, you don't have to say all this. You shouldn't be understanding. You should be furious!" Jason says in frustration. He doesn't want people to tell him that he's doing the right thing when he's obviously hurting someone important him.
Instead she laughs, even though a tear trickles down her cheek. "Oh Jason. You're always so noble. You want me to hate you because you think you've done me some great injustice. Jason, I am the daughter of a goddess of love. I know true love when I see it, even if the people involved don't realize it. I can't hate you or Reyna for something both of you have felt long before I even came into the picture. Staying with me would be an injustice… to all three of us. I would hate myself to see you unhappy and know that I am the person standing in the way of your happiness."
He smiles grimly. "That's the second time someone has said that me in the past half-hour." He reaches over and pulls her into a hug. "Piper, I'm sorry."
"I know you are. But stop being noble and try to be happy for once."
He's about to reply when suddenly the whole boulevard goes dark. They are surprised and terrified shouts, but a moment later small twinkling lights pierce through the darkness like little fireflies. They begin swaying as if pushed by a breeze, but soon Jason realizes they're actually performing an old Roman dance routine and he relaxes. He looks over at Piper and grins. "Leo," they both say at the same time. She puts her head on his shoulder and together they watch the little mechanic fireflies perform. First they dance, then they re-enact Julius Caesar's great victories, then they ritualize a Roman triumph, and they finally come to rest on Jason's and Reyna's head as laurel wreaths to crown the city's Praetors before flying skyward where they explode into a million different colours. The lights come back on to a thunderous round of applause. The band thanks the mechanics for the show and begin the final song of the evening.
"What do you say? One last dance?" he asks standing up and offering his hand to Piper. She smiles and takes it. And so they dance their final dance, not as lovers, or exes looking hatefully on the past, but as friends looking promisingly to the future.
Reyna is exhausted. She said so many thank yous and accepted so many compliments on a job well done (to which she'd replied that it was all Dakota's, and to which everyone still insisted that she'd done an amazing job) that right now her mind couldn't even process the keys to her villa. After much fumbling, she finally manages to let herself in, switch on some lights and make it to her bed. She lies down for a minute, her eyes squeezed shut. She sees herself wrapped around Jason, and something warm fills her chest. But then she remembers him sitting on the park bench with Piper, her head on his shoulder, and the way he'd danced with her after, and the cold emptiness she's been carrying around for months now returns. She sighs, gets up, strips down, and heads into the shower. She lets the hot water run down her skin, washing off his scent, and the feel of him on her. She imagines the water washing away her memories of him, imagines them running down her body, pulled towards the drainage hole. She imagines them swirl violently for a minute and then visualizes the final drop out of sight. But it doesn't make her feel any better. The emptiness persists and she wonders if she'll ever feel whole without him. She sighs again, finishes her shower, and just pulls on some underwear. She robotically turns off the lights and then curls up under her blankets, her fingers curling over the spot where just months before he would sometimes lie next to her, and slowly she drifts off to sleep.
She's dreaming of him. At first it's just feelings: his lips on hers, his lips on her skin, him deep inside her. But soon the dream brightens and it's an old memory.
They're crouched behind a large rock just below the entrance to the palace on Mount Orthrys, armor dented, skin covered in dirt, blood, and soot, surrounded by several other demigods looking the worse for wear. Battle cries and shrieks of pain and the dying hem them in, but all that mattered to her in the moment was him. She was probably going to die out there and there were so many things she'd never had the chance to say to him. She looked out over the battle, strategically taking stock of how many enemies bore down upon them. Too many to count.
"Well Grace, it's been nice knowing you," she joked.
"Yea you too-" But seeing the look in her eyes, he stopped joking. "You're coming back."
She shrugged. "Statistically speaking, I have a higher chance of being skewered by the Erymantian Boar out there than I do of making it back to Camp…"
"Reyna. YOU. ARE. COMING. BACK," he had said simply and clearly, enunciating every word.
She rolled her eyes at him. "Listen Jason, before I go you should probably know that…" But she had trailed off when she noticed him pulling the necklace off from around his neck. He held it out to her. Her eyes widened and she shook her head.
"Take it," he said.
"I can't take that!" she glowered.
"Take it!" he said again, this time more forcefully.
"Jason that ring on that necklace is the only thing you have left of your mom. You can't give that me!" she replied motioning to the ring dangling at the bottom of the necklace.
He rolled his eyes and stretched out to clasp it around her neck. "I'm not giving it you. You're right, it's all I have left of her, so you better bring it back," he stated staring pointedly at her.
She understood: he was telling her to come back to him. He was making her swear that she would come back to him, that he needed her to come back to him. And that was it: the moment when she finally knew what she'd been feeling all those years. "Jason I-"
But a loud explosion disrupted any kind of discussion of sentiment, instead forcing them out from behind their hiding place and into the line of fire.
"Jason," she murmurs in her sleep.
"I'm here," someone whispers back. "Reyna, I'm here."
She's still dreaming she tells herself, and then the voice begins to hum their song and she knows that she's definitely dreaming. But then warm arms wrap around her, and she feels safe and warm, and she starts to wonder if she could dream something like that with all that emptiness in her. She's loathe to open her eyes, not wanting to let go of the dream.
"Reyna, I love you," the voice – his voice - murmurs into her ear, right into her soul, and her eyes shoot open. If this was a dream she didn't want to dream this. It sounded too good and she doesn't want to know how those words sound coming from him. She jumps up and looks around. The arms relinquish her – but only for a moment – and soon they're closing around her once again. Kisses are pressed to her head, the corner of her left eye, her left cheek, down to her left jaw, towards her lips, but she pulls back before they can reach them.
She sees him, his blue eyes clear and strong. He's looking at her, seeing right into her, and this can't be real – can it?
"Jason?"
"I'm here."
She reaches out and her fingertips brush against his jaw. She leans closer so she can breathe in his air, so she can breathe him in. "You're here."
He smirks at her. His fingers tap the necklace around her neck. "I told you to bring that back to me, but I also meant that I would always come back to it… to you. I love you Reyna."
She breathes out and that breath carries the coldness out of her. He loves her, he's here with her, and nothing else matters. She presses her lips to his, finally connecting them. She pulls away to say "I love you," and she's kissing him again, and saying it over and over and over because she can't say it enough, can't make him understand just how much she does. So she does what feels right. She pushes him flat on the bed and straddles him. He knows what's happening and he helps her out of her underwear even as she pulls his clothes off. She's kissing him deeply and roughly and he's kissing her just as deeply and she can't remember to breathe properly but it doesn't matter. He's here and she can feel that he wants her so she pulls him deep inside her, and feeling him fill her inside is all that matters. He's come back to her and she's whole and nothing else matters – nothing at all. And he's the one she's calling out for when she peaks – her world once again narrowed to him.
Later, they lie awake in each other's arms – both on their backs, his right arm winding under and around her waist, and her right hand fingers intertwined with his. Neither wants to waste time sleeping – preferring to spend every second with the other. He turns his head towards her and nuzzles her.
"We should sleep," he whispers.
She smiles – the slow, sex one, the one that drives him crazy, the one she reserves for him alone. "Mmmm-hmmmm," she murmurs.
The excitement from making love is wearing off and they're both drifting off, but she manages to say, "I love you," once more before he's lost to his dream world.
There is some love that transcends memory and mind – a great love that doesn't require the mind to remember every detail. The heart knows where it belongs, knows its home, and Reyna's last thought before she's lost in oblivion is that her great love lies in her arms and that he has come back to her – as he always will. And she finally sleeps – deeply and peacefully – the knowledge giving her lasting comfort.
Well there it is! Please leave your last reviews - those would be much appreciated! Thank you all for reading, liking, following, and leaving your reviews! I really really am grateful for it guys! :) :)