A/N: This update gave me some trouble, between being kind of interim-y and following up a double-chapter day, which is why it took so long. I lack the ability to write without putting effort into it. But I love y'all, so have an update. And kindly remember that I am a human being, so updating every 24 hours is not normal and exhausts me. Hang in there, troopers; I'm still in this.
Shoutout to thein273, whose long and analytical reviews warm my Ravenclaw heart. I legitimately scrutinize my books/movies like that, so it makes me feel special to be on the receiving end.
Reyna lay stretched out on a towel on the lakeshore, the sun warming her sunscreened-up skin even through her swimsuit cover-up and sunglasses. The lake water pulsed gently on the sand, and though the sky was clear, there was only one other person on the beach with her. She slid her sunglasses down her nose and propped herself up on her elbows so she could look over at the other beachgoer properly.
He lay on his own towel a few feet away, facing away from her. Curly black hair, scrawny but swarthy. She was surprised by the powerful fondness that swelled in her gut.
But as she opened her mouth to call him over, he glanced her way. It wasn't Leo. She didn't know who he was—just that he didn't have the pointed ears, upturned nose, intensely dark eyes that she'd spent the last two weeks staring at. He smiled at her, and no devilish dimples appeared. She slid her sunglasses back up to the bridge of her nose and looked away, disoriented and disappointed.
Reyna jerked awake, blinking blearily as she peeled her face away from the edge of Leo's bed. She wasn't sure how long she'd been asleep, but based on the darkness outside, she suspected it had been a while. Someone had set a fresh set of clothes for her at the corner of the mattress, a subtle reminder that she was still in her nasty outfit from earlier that afternoon. With one last look at her sedated, unconscious love interest, she stood up, quietly brushed past the curtain, and ducked into the ladies' room to wash up and change.
When she came back out, she realized that the guard had been dismissed for the night, and the people she had thought were the guard were actually Annabeth and Piper, playing a silent version of the card game Kings in the Corner. Based on the miming going on, Annabeth was trying very hard not to be a rude winner. When they looked up at her, Piper seemed glad for the distraction.
"What time is it?" Reyna asked, unsure why they were up so late, and here of all places, without their male counterparts.
Annabeth checked her watch. "Twenty after midnight," she reported. "And your fellow praetors noticed you hadn't been to your villa since the incident"—meaning Leo being gutted by a power-hungry augur—"and they asked us to hang out here and keep an eye on you."
Piper nodded.
Reyna wavered somewhere between impressed and offended. "They noticed?"
"Well, we asked them about it," Piper admitted. "And the answer was a generally negative guess."
Well, that was comforting. "Thanks, but you both are welcome to go to bed. I can take care of myself."
Annabeth slid all the cards back into a stack and shuffled them into form, and then she stood, pulling Piper to her feet as well. "You probably should go home too. Leo's not waking up in the next twelve hours, and you need sleep that won't land you in a chiropractor's office." The architect's brow creased sympathetically, but she spoke logic. Reluctantly, Reyna followed the two Greek girls out of the hospital and back down the road to the barracks and Principia.
Reyna returned to the hospital at six a.m. sharp, after a long night of staring at the ceiling (although, yes, granted, her spine didn't feel like it was going to cave in on itself), and she stayed in her folding chair beside Leo's bed until Percy came by at noon and dragged her to the lake for the picnic. The weather was nice today, at least, but she wasn't hungry and she would rather have been back in the makeshift hospital room keeping watch over an unconscious boy.
That sounded less creepy in my head, she decided. Maybe half an hour in the sun for lunch wouldn't be amiss.
So she kept pace with Percy as they made their way through the blankets laid out on the sand. It didn't take long before she noticed that she was getting looks. Not mean looks, exactly, but strange ones, anywhere on the spectrum from curious to confused to discomfited. She kept her head high and refused to react, but her stomach was sinking. Octavian might be taken care of, but it wasn't exactly going to be smooth sailing from here on out.
When the two praetors reached the rest of the Seven (the Six?) on a full-size Finding Nemo blanket, Percy dropped beside Annabeth with a grin, and Reyna folded herself down carefully into the corner between him and Hazel. She planned to eat her steak and grilled asparagus, maybe briefly pretend to join in conversation, and then leave. These plans, unfortunately, didn't make it past the first stage of execution. She was cutting her third asparagus stalk into equal bite-size pieces when Percy said in a forced casual tone, "You know, I was wondering the same thing. Reyna, care to elaborate?"
She looked up in surprise; she hadn't been following the topics. "Sorry?"
"Piper here was just commenting that as a daughter of Aphrodite, she felt a little at loss for your newly declared relationship status."
Reyna speared a piece of asparagus with her fork. "What about it." It wasn't a question. She had hoped to save this talk for another time, maybe when the other half of the relationship wasn't comatose.
"How come you never said anything?" Hazel blurted, hurt flashing through her eyes.
Reyna chewed slowly. "Like I said yesterday, I didn't want people talking."
"We're your friends, Reyna," Piper reprimanded her. "We wouldn't have talked about it if you asked us not to."
The Puerto Rican praetor wanted to point out that she didn't really consider Piper her friend, that most of the Seven (with perhaps the exceptions of Percy, Jason, and Annabeth) were more like neutral-to-slightly-pleasant acquaintances, people with whom she chose to spend her little free time and who neither feared nor irritated her. She liked them, certainly, but trust was harder to come by than liking, especially when a daughter of Aphrodite (and former rival) was involved. But she only said, "I didn't know it would offend you," which was true.
"How long has it been going on?" Piper persisted, leaning against Jason, who appeared very interested in his cheeseburger. "You and Leo, I mean."
Reyna took another bite of asparagus and steak, hoping her face didn't look as warm as it felt. "Not long."
The corners of Annabeth's mouth twitched, a movement the blonde covered up with a big forkful of salad. Reyna eyed her suspiciously. It wouldn't surprise her if the blonde had known all along and had orchestrated half of it, but now wasn't the time to call her out on it.
"Half an hour not long, or the last two weeks not long?" Hazel seemed not to notice the strange shade of pink Frank's face was turning.
Reyna rolled her shoulders in a noncommittal shrug. "Does it matter?"
"Of course!"
She was trying to decide if "Leo and she" had started when they kissed, or the first time she got butterflies from his calling her reina, or after he'd accepted closed doors, when someone tapped her on the shoulder. She turned to see a Roman from the Second Cohort, a twelve-year-old girl whose name might have been Callie, staring down at her.
"Yes?" the praetor asked politely.
Callie dug the toes of her flip-flops into the sand. "Is it true you're dating a Greek boy?" she squeaked.
Reyna pressed her lips together so she wouldn't sigh. "Yes, it's true," she said with a regal nod.
A few other girls, who had been pretending to conveniently walk by, giggled behind their hands.
Dios mio. Where was the respect, the deference, the fear? Reyna clenched her jaw. She wouldn't rise to a few children's taunts. Maybe her grace about it would be contagious.
Leaning in closer, Callie's whisper went up an octave with suppressed laughter. "Are Greeks as good of kissers as Romans?" The younger girl looked deliberately at Jason.
"Excuse me?" Piper blurted.
Her expression hardening, Reyna refused to appear as flustered as she felt. "That is an entirely inappropriate question," she said sharply, but the girls were already fleeing, shrieking with laughter. When she turned back around to the group, Piper's face had gone a little pale, jaw clenched, and even oblivious Jason looked a little stunned by the encounter.
"I think I'll finish eating in the hospital," she said, and no one argued. She picked up her plate and headed back for the city, and the last thing she saw was Piper whispering something in Jason's ear, looking hurt.
At two o'clock, Annabeth came to visit Leo, or Reyna, or both. The blonde made herself comfortable in Will Solace's chair and looked over the still-unconscious Leo like one might a sick younger brother.
"I know what you're feeling," she said with no preamble, making Reyna's head jerk up. "It sucks more than anyone knows, and I'm sorry."
Reyna nodded once, shortly, in acknowledgement. If anyone understood this and more, it was the girl sitting across from her. "How long have you known?"
Annabeth smiled faintly. "I began to make educated guesses about halfway through last week."
"And you said nothing because . . .?"
"Because you would tell us when you were ready. Or when you were forced to reveal your hand, but I didn't want to be that person." She smoothed her bright orange shirt. "Piper's still upset, by the way. You might need to talk to her."
Reyna uncrossed her legs. "Talking to people isn't exactly a talent of mine. Besides, there's not really anything to talk about."
Annabeth gave her a look, and Reyna held it, a locking of gazes and wills. It probably would have gone on for quite a while had Will not walked in. They both looked over at him and nodded, letting it dissolve.
"Afternoon, ladies," he said amiably, pretending he hadn't just witnessed the beginnings of a my willpower is bigger than your willpower contest. "I'm here to check out our favorite patient, so if you want to leave, now's your chance."
Annabeth graciously stood to give the healer his chair back, but instead of leaving, she walked around the bed to stand by Reyna. Will shrugged and leaned over the bed to peel the sheets back and roll Leo's shirt up to his diaphragm.
Up til now, Reyna hadn't really looked at Leo's wound, because at the time of wounding she'd been too busy feeling like she was breaking in half, and since then he'd been wrapped in bandages and hospital sheets, so she hadn't really wanted to go poking around. But now she looked, really looked, and she had to breathe deeply as Will unwrapped the ace bandages around Leo's torso.
The scar was stitched up and clearly further along in the healing process than it should have been—it looked a few weeks old rather than a day. But even so, the scar tore from just above his waistline to his bottom rib, ugly and painful, no matter who cleaned it up and hurried it along. She wondered how long it would be with him. A reminder of her own stupidity.
Will checked the stitching carefully, probed lightly, took a few doctorly measurements; and his expression lightened. "He's healing great," he said to Reyna, who almost smiled. "I'm going to rewrap him and take him off sedation, and he should be waking up in the next few hours."
"Great," Annabeth said. "Thanks, Will."
He nodded and grinned at them both before getting back to business.
"I'll stay until he wakes," Reyna said in an undertone to Annabeth, which they both knew was another way of saying I'm not going to talk to Piper right now and you can't make me.
"You have to have dinner."
"I've survived on less."
Annabeth gave her a hard look, which she returned. It could have lasted longer, but a silent compromise passed between them: later. She went back to watching Will work, and the blonde squeezed her shoulder as she left.
Reyna had a number of things to remember to do: handle the last few days of the celebration, have a girl talk with Piper, probably finish the lunch conversation with the Seven, make sure Octavian found his way out of the legion quickly and quietly. Nothing that she was looking forward to. But for now she would just sit and wait, another thing she wasn't very good at, because she was looking forward to having her repair boy back.
She took his hand with one of hers and rested her chin on her other, determined to stay awake, but after Will left she made the mistake of resting her eyes. The relaxation turned into a catnap.
Soft conversation outside Leo's partitioned-off "room" stirred Reyna from sleep. It took her a moment to realize that she had actually been . . . resting. She hadn't even been dreaming. Surprised, she rolled back up into a sitting position and prepared to get up to very curtly instruct the talkers to shut up or leave.
"There must be something wrong with my eyes," mumbled a faint voice from the bed. "I can't . . . take them off you."
