Pretty pretty pretty please review! I want to hit a new personal record! 3

Leo

Leo had cleaned his plate of food, but he was too lazy to bother calling for more. He sat back contentedly, his hands folded over his stomach and listening to the quiet buzz of conversation around the table.

"Lies," Jason said, "The Los Angeles Angels are way better."

"Um, no," Coach Hedge held up his hand. "DEFINITELY the Yankees."

"Did you know the Los Angeles Angels translates to 'The The Angels Angels'? That's just weird," Leo chipped in. "As far as names go, Yankees are waaay better."

"Thank you!" Coach Hedge said, throwing a hand up in the air. Adrian was watching them with a blank and somewhat confused expression. She still hadn't made eyeontact with Leo yet, and it was starting to weird him out.

"What are these 'Yankees' of whic you speak?" she asked, tilting her head slightly. Coach Hedge stared at her with his mouoth open and his eyes slightly lopsided in disbelief. Jason hid a triumphant smirk in his hands.

"Have you ever heard of the Angels before?" Jason asked her.

"Of course," she said, nodding confusedly.

"HA!" Jason said, pointing at Hedge. "Even someone who hasn't been alive for hundreds of years knows about the Angels."

"Yes, they are in the Bible," Adrian said, glancing back and forth between Hedge and Jason. Jedge roared with laughter, thumping his hands on the table.

"She doesn't mean YOUR Angels, Static Boy!" Hedge guffawed. The conversation deteriorated back into mindless blabber about sports, and after a while Adrian got up and padded out of the room and down the hallway. Leo was starting to get bored with the conversation, so he got up and followed her out.

He made it into the hallway, intending to follow her, but she had already disappeared. He shrugged and walked up the stairs, wondering where she could have gone so quickly. He saw her then, leaning against the railing, looking out over the landscape. The sun had set entirely, sending the world into a deep blue twilight. Lights from the stars twinkled above and their reflections bounced up from the waves below, creating a velvet night on all sides. The only sounds were the crashing waves below, the whispers on the wind, and Leo's own breath.

"Hullo," she said, without turning around.

"Hey," Leo said, and she stiffened slightly when she recognized the voice.

"Leo," she said evenly, still not turning around to look at him. Leo frowned and walked across the deck to the railing. He leaned on the bar about five feet down from her, watching her quietly. The moonlight made her face more eerie than usual, turning her skin a shade of blue and casting deep shadows along the side of her nose and cheekbones. She closed her eyes and, without her unsettling eyes to stare at, he realized she was pretty. He started slightly at the thought.

"Pretty weird conversation down there, huh?" Leo offered. Her eyes snapped open, and she spared him a fleeting glance.

"Yes," she agreed. "Perfectly odd. Never had I thought demigods would be so interested in the affairs of mortals with wooden clubs and white tights. Then again, I also never cared much for theatre..." Leo snorted at her description of baseball, and turned to look out at the horizon.

"Well, things have chanced," he said. Silence stretched out between them for several heartbeats before he continued. "It makes me wonder why you came back. You must've been in warrior's paradise for your accomplishments, right? So why would you come back through the doors?"

"No," she said. "I was not there. I am not a mortal, you see; neither demigod nor human. I was offered very little choice in whether I should come back or not. I do wish that perhaps not so much time had passed, but I cannot choose what time I get to live anymore than you, Leo Valdez." Her voice was halting over his name, as though it tripped over her tongue. She put too much emotion into his name for Leo's comfort, and he took a half step further away from her.

Leo thought about pushing her gently, in a friendly way, but decided that wouldn't be smart. So instead he pointed to the metal amulet with the lopsided glass beats. "What is that?" She looked down at it, rubbing her thumb over the metal.

"I've had it longer than I can remember. When Queen Elizabeth sent me away, she sent me with this necklace as a token of my bloodline. If you look closely, the outside is etched with a rose, and then there's lightning and waves. Waves, for Poseidon. Lightning, for Jupiter. And then the rose is for the House of Tudor," Adrian explained, dropping the necklace and letting it swing like a pendulum. "The beads are because I lived two years at Camp Half-Blood."

"What was it like?" he asked. "Camp Half-Blood. In the old days, I mean."

"It was... different than now," she said thoughtfully. "There was no lake of course." She smiled wryly. "There was no electricity, we used torches. We actually found a way of mixing Greek Fire with some sort of chemical, I don't remember what, to make a fire that burned blue. It was cool to the touch and we would put it in lanterns which we hung from trees. They turned the camp into a magical sort of faerie world. It was beautiful. The nymphs would sing and play instruments in the creek, and the air was always so clear that you could see the moonlight dancing on the ocean waters from all the way across camp. You could always smell the ocean there, along with the campfires and the oak trees. It smelled like home. Everyone always seemed to smile, and the cabins were only for sleeping arrangements and games; there was no war between the Athena and Poseidon's children. We didn't much care what our parents had to say about it, either. We were all the best of friends. The very best of friends...

"It's changed so much," she sighed. She reached absentmindedly for her necklace again.

"You sound like you knew someone who fell into that 'best friend' category," Leo said, changing position so he rested a single elbow on the railing, facing her. She was barefooted and he was in shoes, giving him just enough of an advantage to actually look down at her.

"Yes," she agreed. She didn't continue talking, and just when Leo was starting to think she wouldn't, she said, "His name was Tanner. He was the very first European I ever met, and I met him before I left America. We went our own separate ways at first, but I found him again some years later. It turned out he was the illegitimate son of a Spanish nobleman, and he wanted out of the country because of the Inquisition... Turned out his mum was Athena, and that's why he was illegitimate. Ironic, isn't it? I don't even know if his real name was Tanner, but it's what he told us."

"What was Tanner like?" Leo asked. He realized just how different this girl was from him, and he was sincerely curious about her past. She was like a piece of machinery from some place he'd never been to, with such strange stories to tell. He wanted to take her mind apart and sort through everything there was to see; he waned to see all these foreign thoughts, memories, dreams... He realized that was probably not a healthy way to be thinking, and clamped down on his thoughts.

"He was..." she trailed off, searching for the words. "Very soft voiced. Very strong, and he always had a smile to his eyes. He was very graceful, and dancing with him was like walking on air. He had this weird, lopsided sort of smile. He would come up behind me and try to startle me by wrapping his arms around me, but I always heard him coming. He was oblivious a lot of the time, but in a funny sort of way. When he got tired he'd laugh at everything, an he always had this upbeat manner about him. Very much a gentleman." She stopped talking, and he noticed a sad sort of smile on her lips. The moonlight reflected in her eyes, making them both blue-silver.

"What happened to him?" Leo asked.

"He died fighting monsters," she sighed, cursing under her breath. "Trying to protect the camp. If I had just been faster to make that barrier, then... But that's from a long, long time ago. It doesn't matter now."

Leo was speechless. He realized Tanner had died, of course. Duh, it had been like 500 years or something. But she watched him die? Leo's greatest worry was watching someone close to him die. If Percy or Jason or Piper or anyone on the ship died, it would haunt him. They were all he had left after his mum died.

"I watched my mum die," he offered after a moment of silence. "It's not the same, but I know what it's like."

She smiled at him gratefully, looking at him for the first time. He saw age written into her eyes, as though she was tired beyond belief.

"I saw that happen," she said, her face closing up again. "I wanted to do something, but I was a spirit... there wasn't much I could do. I didn't realize that..." she trailed off. He prompted her to finish, but she took her head.

"What did Tanner look like? Leo asked, trying to keep the conversation going.

"It's not important," she said, her tone suddenly clipped as she looked at him. Her eyes seemed to stab straight through him. But in her eyes he saw a deep sadness, and wordless pain. As he looked into her eyes, Leo had the very uncomfortable feeling that he knew what Tanner had looked like.

Feet thudded onto the deck, and an out of breath Hazel appeared between them. She looked back and forth between Adrian and Leo, panting slightly. "We just got an Iris Message from Chiron! Camp Half-Blood is being attacked by Romans, now! We have to do something!"