So... (1) Jason is Changed, (2) Piper is a self-declared weirdo, and (3) I promised Jasper soon. Anything that happens in any Blue or Pink chapters is because of one of those reasons.
Supernova Space: Thanks for the review and the compliments. :D
Guest: Don't worry, they will. I'm having too much fun writing awesome scenes for them!
Pink V.
Piper cursed Annabeth under her breath, shifted her stack of documents to her hip, and opened the door with the freed hand.
As always, Jason Grace was lying on her bed, sighing at the ceiling.
She frowned. "Again with the lazy philosopher routine? Do you do nothing else while I'm gone?"
He rolled over and stared at her. "Hey, it's very relaxing and peaceful, okay?"
"Sometimes I feel like you're my wife," she remarked.
He barked a laugh. "Yeah?"
"Yeah." Shutting the door, she began putting away her paperwork. Jason got up to help and took half the stack from her. As they stashed it, she explained. "You wait dutifully till I come back from work. You don't do much while I'm gone. You just lie there! Warming my bed!"
"Literally, yes. Figuratively, not yet." He winked. She shoved him away, grinning. "Also," he said, "in some ways at least, only you can protect me. That definitely makes me your subservient wife."
"But you don't do any housework! Bad wifey; Get your act together or I'll be filing for a divorce."
Jason did a horrible impression of a Victorian woman. "Oh no! What shall I ever do?"
They stared at each other for a moment, then cracked up in sync.
She'd grown closer to Jason in the few days of truthful interactions. It was strange, because Piper wasn't overly friendly, and the circumstances of their meeting weren't very conducive to amicability. But somehow they'd morphed to this weird state where they bantered and teased and wisecracked as if they'd known each other since preschool.
They finished with the papers and Piper jumped on the bed while Jason took the beanbag.
"That was more paperwork than yesterday," he said.
"Ms Queen Bitch basically dumped all her work on me. Apparently, she's got a few outings today. My turn: Are you sure you have nothing you'd rather do than scrutinise the ceiling? Do you want me to bring you something? Video games? Books? Songs? Movies?"
"Not really." He shrugged. "It's not as boring as you'd imagine. There's so much that's happened to me in these last few weeks that I need time to process it all. Question myself."
"And what was today's introspection worth?" Piper asked, amused and curious.
"You remember I told you that you smell like tulips yesterday? Well, today I found out exactly what kind of tulips you smell like. (Don't ask: it's a really complex name.) The sheet's smell was distracting me so I looked it up just to satisfy my curiosity. It's very difficult to explain a fragrance to a search engine, you know. Anyway, that's what I achieved today. Other than the smell of tulips, today was particularly unproductive."
She couldn't help but snort out a laugh. "I still maintain that your sense of smell is messed up. I pick my perfume, Jason. I know what I smell like, and my perfume says 'kiwi' not 'tulips' for Christ's sake."
"And I still maintain kiwis aren't supposed to be something you want to smell like." She glared at him playfully and he backtracked. "But I don't want to have my head chopped off, so I'll change the topic. How'd the talk with Mr D go?"
She smirked. "Successful! Well... mostly successful. Here's how it went—
Me: 'I wanna get out of here.'
Him: 'Pay off your debt.'
Me: 'How many more missions?'
Him: 'Fifteen, minimum. Or two years as a Fighter.'
Me: 'I also want to be able to quietly get weapons and ammo from here, after I'm out.'
Him: 'Twenty-five total missions. Now buzz off.'
And I buzzed off."
Jason whistled dramatically. "Two years' worth of Fighter-ing. That's a lot of debt."
"Yeah."
"And if with your high-end job you'll need to work so much, what about the others? And what about me, since, you know, I'm also with 'the others' now?"
"Best guess? Your debts are like those in books or movies, i.e. slavery under a better name. Mr D has absolute power over when you get to leave. In my case, though, just one year and three months and I am free! Ask me what I'm going to do as soon as I'm out of here.
Jason smiled. "What are you going to do when you get out of here, Piper?"
"Glad you asked! I'm gonna get a single red contact lens! Askmewhyaskmewhyaskmewhyaskme!"
He sighed in good-natured exasperation and obliged.
She answered right away, excitedly. "I'm gonna get a single red contact lens for my left eye so I look like Cyborg. You know, the Justice League half-human-half-robot guy?"
"I know who Cyborg is. But his eye is robotic, and so it's fully red, and not just the iris. So you won't look like Cyborg unless you cover your entire eye. Also, you'll need a really, really deep red contact so it hides your real eyecolor entirely. And if it is that deep a red, half your vision will be always red, always! You'll get a headache in like ten minutes!"
She waved him off. She'd already spent time thinking that through. "I'll get over it. It's bad enough that I can't do the entire eye red. I'll get through the headaches if it means I get just a little closer to that perfect robotic eye."
"And why do you want this? What will it get you?" he asked, sounding genuinely confused.
That too was a question Piper had asked and answered previously. "It's simple, really. All my life I've been the odd one. And maybe I'm messed up, but I don't wanna fight against that. I am the odd one, damn it! This eye will be my first signal that 'I'm not normal, stay away.' A personal rebel mark. Like a punk or something, you know."
"Piper—"
"Besides," she cut him off, "it'll be fun to scare kids! And everyone I meet will do a double take to make sure they're not seeing things!"
"It's going to be weird," he conceded, "I don't know how you're gonna look."
"I don't, either. But I'm gonna stick with it, even if it makes me look ugly..." she paused for effect, "And Jason, this is the part where you say nothing can make me look anything but perfect."
"Perfectly hideous, maybe," he said in a bored voice.
"Hey!" She threw a pillow at him which he caught and a reluctant grin which he returned. "Who's the one who gets paid for being beautiful, you ugly asshole? Me, that's who! While you're gonna be sticking your hideous face up some whore's ass, I'm gonna marry Benedict Cumberbatch and have three kids that'll freaking rule all the beauty pageants for at least a decade!"
"Dreamt a little too hard, did we? He's out of your league. Plus by the time you turn legally and morally okay for marriage, he'll be on his third set of teeth and fourth hair transplant."
"I'll throw a knife at you," she threatened, "Not kidding."
"Empty threats aside, why would he marry you? He's like ninety years older than you and is already married and just plain why?"
"Because he's a gentleman and I'll have him 'accidentally' impregnate me and pretend to be an ultraconservative orthodox who'll be killed for having kids while unmarried."
"What you mean is you're gonna blackmail the poor guy."
"Basically, yes. Him or Tom Hiddleston or Ryan Reynolds. Well, Deadpool's not a gentleman so I'll have to plan something else... but you get the idea."
"I was about to say 'I'm sensing a pattern here' but then you said Ryan Reynolds. Plus, no ladies? I thought you were bi."
Piper shook her head and clarified, "It's more complicated than that... I'm not— Well, the simplest way to say it is this: I'm bisexual, but heteroromantic. Does that make sense?"
"More than you probably think," Jason said.
"Still confusing, yes? For me too, even after all these years. I'm a particularly easy-to-miss color on the spectrum." She grabbed beers for the two of them from the day's privileges, popped hers open, tossed him his along with the opener. "What else? Anything other than tulips on your mind today?"
"Two things, actually," Jason said, "First, how was Annabeth today? Did she stumble in her act?"
"Dunno."
"What do you mean?"
"Just like last time, I tried to see through the fakeness, and didn't see anything. But unlike all the times, today I realised the real reason I could see the bitch inside her: I was too busy keeping to my act."
"What do you mean?" he repeated.
"Acting takes a lot of concentration. And focusing on keeping my facade up means I don't have time for deep observation. With you it was easier because you kinda gave up on trying to pretend after the second time. With Annabeth and me... Let's assume both of us are doing pretty good acting. I'm concentrating on mine and she's concentrating on hers. Now, if we were paying full attention to the other, we both could see through. But if X tries to look, she loses control of her act and it drops to below average, and Y can easily see through that bad an act and the resulting shock on X's face, and X can't have that, so she doesn't look."
"So you're saying if you weren't acting you could most possibly see inhumanAnnabeth, but you can't because that'll make her see spyPiper?"
"Yes," she nodded, "Both of us survive only because we can keep up our acts, and so that's way more important to us. I know she's a bitch because you told me and I trust you. So it's not that important to me to check if she slips. She's got absolute power over me, so she doesn't care whether I'm really Katherine Hill the handmaiden or not."
"You mean there's no point in tailing her around except to please her."
"Not for a few more weeks, at least. Maybe a month into her reign," Piper said. She downed the rest of her drink at once, mouth dry from the explanation. "What's the other thing on your mind?"
Jason hesitated. "Uh, it's a lot less... you. I wanna sort out things with my family, you know? The thing with Venus, the thing with Ares. Hell, even Hera if I can."
"Good idea. When are you planning on starting? I got nothing left to do today, so we can go now if you're ready."
"Woah, Piper!" He was taken aback. "This is my messed up family: You don't need to come. By some luck we didn't run into when you came to my house before, but this time they'll all be there."
Piper shrugged, unconcerned. "Humans don't scare me. I've got cutting barbs for every person, okay? And their insults are inconsequential. Besides, the knowledge that you've got me on your side is definitely enough incentive to act nice, 'cause Mom died recently and the media will tear Zeus to shreds if his kids and/or wife badmouth a grieving daughter. They're smart enough to realise that, yes?"
Jason still looked unconvinced, but he got up and stretched. "They're... We'll find out soon enough, I think."
"Family."
He turned to her. "What about family? Whose family?"
"No, not whose. Just the word, 'family'. You called them your family when only one of them is related to you and the others are low-key abusive. Why 'family'?"
"Just 'cuz. Got roughly three years left with them, better not waste energy on petty things."
She hummed as they came to a stop. They could see the mansion, yet, Piper estimated, not be seen. "What now?"
"First, Venus. I'll call her here and tell her about the videos. Give her a day or two to gather what she can and run off. I initially thought a little about directly telling Ares about her, but the idiot will go beserk and I don't want that."
"You got the recordings?" Piper asked him as he called Venus and put it on Speaker.
Jason nodded at his phone. "I was pretty wary of attacks back then. And I liked the idea of surprising Ares with them at the worst time possible. So I kept them on my phone, out in the open and unencrypted, but also copied to the cloud so she couldn't delete them if she found them. Really—"
The call connected and Piper heard Venus' voice say, "Jason? What's the matter, why're you calling me?"
"Um, hey, Venus. Are you home?"
"Yes, why?"
"I'm sitting on the curb in front of the Newlams'. Can you come here? I got something to show you, and I don't want Hera to be around," Jason said. To Piper he mouthed: "We bond over mutual hatred for Hera."
What a weird-ass family. This drama is better than most Netflixes.
One of the main reasons Piper had wanted to visit Jason's 'family' was because she was curious to see a dysfunctional one beside her own, and it was working.
"Oh, okay," Venus said somewhat reluctantly, "This isn't going to take long, right? I'm going shopping with Ares in half an hour."
He assured her it wouldn't take long, and hung up.
"What do you think her reaction will be?" Piper asked, "Except for the obvious, Please delete it, Jason! I'm begging you!"
"I don't know. I don't know if she's smart. Beyond just knowing which fashion trend will last the longest and crap like that, of course. If she's smart, she'll try to frame me as manipulating her... Piper, can you do me a favor? Can you, like, block her from getting to me? I don't want this to escalate."
"Of course."
"You wanna sit down? She can be a while."
She nodded. They sat down, a comfortable silence falling around them.
Over a week or so, Piper had formulated a patchwork-like interpretation of Jason in her head, a mosaic of moments. He was a pretty nice guy to have around. He had avoided asslicking from the start, which would've been a risky move if his handler had been anyone except Piper, but ended up working in his favor.
"How does she treat you in front of Ares? Invisible or trash?" she asked.
"Invisible, mostly. She couldn't do trash, she wants to seduce me, remember?"
"Oh, yes. Are the others gonna be home, too? I forgot their schedules. And will we be able to get all of them over with today itself?"
"I think so. Venus' coming right now, and after I'm done with her she'll focus on escaping. She won't go on that shopping trip with Ares, so he'll be home and free. Hera's a little more unpredictable, but she doesn't spend more than a few hours out of the house. Yeah, we'll get it over with today."
Satisfied, she retreated to her thoughts and they waited for Venus.
Piper's first impression of Venus was that despite being hot, she sucked at being hot. And seduction and gold-digging, for that matter. Venus' first impression of Piper was probably something along the lines of Who's that?
"Hey Venus," Jason greeted.
"What did you want to talk about, Jace?" Venus said un-cheerfully, "Who's this girl?" She narrowed her eyes at Piper.
Bitch, thought Piper at her.
Jason stood up and Piper followed him. As he spoke, she carefully positioned herself to easily jump between them. "The brief version is: I've got videos of you trying to seduce me. I'll give you three days to take what you can and leave the mansion before I show them to Ares."
Venus' response was comical. "You couldn't possibly—!"
"Sting cameras in my glasses. Almost two hours of videos. I'll grant you that he'll beat me up a little, idiot that he is. But you'll be black and blue."
Strangely, Venus didn't keep a level head and try to frame Jason as they'd feared. She just lunged at him, screaming, "YOU CAN'T—"
Piper slipped between them before Venus could reach him and smacked her hands away.
"Shoo," Piper said calmly. First an eye poke, then a jab in the neck. Finally, a slight push backwards. "Go on, scram."
Behind her, Jason had pulled up a video and started playing it. As pastVenus made pathetically amateur seductive noises onscreen, presentVenus' jaw dropped.
Piper gave her the evil eye. "Go back and start packing up. Find a place to live. Get clothes and jewellery that he's bought for you. I think you'll find three days are far too short to disappear."
As expected, the video finally made the threat real to Venus: she barely took the time to curse before hightailing it to the Goldwings'.
Piper pointed at Venus' hasty retreat. "And that's how the bear got snakes for hands."
Jason turned to her, putting his phone away. "What's that mean?"
"You don't know? It's a quote from this book I read."
"No it isn't."
"Uh, yes it is."
"No it isn't."
"I'm pretty sure I've read it."
"I've read all of the few books you have and more. I can declare pretty confidently that that particular quote is not from any book. Hell, it isn't from any piece of literature you could ever be exposed to."
Maybe she was mistaken, but— "Well, it is now."
"What do you mean?"
Piper smirked. "Nothing." She pointed over her shoulder. "Hot, that one."
"I know. Thoughts?"
"She'll go away peacefully. I think this is her first dig; she seemed so surprised anyone would try to kick her out. Most newbie diggers don't understand that what they're doing is, like thievery, easiest when you keep changing locations. The larger the haul, the further you distance yourself before starting again."
"You— How do you know all of that?"
Piper grinned. "I know I don't look and feel like it, but I did grow up in a playpen of vixens. I've heard and learned."
Jason shook his head in disbelief. "Well, it's Ares next, so prep your inner 'vixen' or whatever."
They started walking to his house. "What're we gonna do to him?" she asked, "I mean, what exactly?"
"I... haven't decided."
"And do you plan on having a plan? Or are we just going to get in his face and wing it?"
"A plan sounds better."
"You think?"
"I think," he agreed. They stopped at the gate. "I can tell you all about him in my room, and maybe you'll come up with something."
"Man, where did your Fighter/Alpha thing go?"
"I'm not just a one-dimensional blond, Piper."
She sighed dramatically. "I guess have to admit you're more than just a hot piece of ass."
Jason turned to her and pointed at his neck. "Eyes up here, lady."
"Mislabeling body parts isn't funny, Jace."
"Just being considerate, Piper. I don't want you to hurt your neck to look into my 'eyes', you know."
Piper headbutted his shoulder. Jason stumbled and laughed.
"Kidney punches coming up, Mr Fighter."
Stilling cackling, he put his hands up in surrender. "No more smol jokes, got it!"
"In a hurry, dickwad?"
Piper turned around. A twenty-five-something looking guy with sunglasses, a black leather jacket and terrible hair, was walking up to them. She assessed him.
Ares stopped three feet away. "Didn't hear me?"
Jason was silent. Piper took the lead. "Yes he did, and yes we are in a hurry."
Ares, predictably, looked her over, grinned cheekily, then said to Jason, "And who's this with you?"
"This," she started, "is Piper McLean, daughter of Tristan McLean who's a very influential celebrity, as you might know. So you'd better take care what to say to her and about her. The media is kissing my father's ass right about now, and so if I'm even displeased with you, there'll be nothing all your father's money will be able to do in way of damage control before I. Ruin. Him."
Ares didn't respond as much as stare slack-jawed.
Piper powered through with the rest. "Jason is my friend now, and he's under my protection. I'm willing to let slide what you've done to him in the past because I know children learn through trial-and-error. But now if you so much as look at him the wrong way—hell, if he even feels threatened by you, I'll pull up some contacts who'll make sure the courts freaking scramble to push red-hot pincers into you baby-soft derrière till it looks like an ancient wizard's beardless wrinkled double-chin and smells like hot dog water that somebody's pissed in."
"The courts can't do that," Jason reminded her, in a loud whisper.
She glared at him. Are you trying to break my momentum, Grace? "I'm sure they'll find some punishment just like it. Or the public will. Or, even better, the prisoners will. Either way, back off."
Having said her part, Piper took Jason's hand and, before Ares could recover, dragged him away at full speed. Thankfully, Jason kept up: it would've made for a pathetic walk-off otherwise.
A last insult popped up into her head when they were almost out of earshot. Still storming away, she shouted to Ares, "Do write that down, kid. I wouldn't trust your five-year-old brain to remember a deadly threat!"
It was another fifty feet before she slowed down. "You're bursting to say something," she said to Jason, "Come on, out with it."
All he said was, "Baby-soft derrière?"
She shrugged, smiling. "Quickest way to bring his 'masculinity' to zero. That and the wrinkled double chin."
"No, that— that one was cursed."
A beat of silence and then both of them burst into peals of laughter. We do that a lot— laugh together.
That either meant that they both had similar tastes in humor and an easy relationship... or that they were both idiots who just giggled when the other did. Piper took a risk and chose the first one.
Jason recovered first and complained, "You didn't let me talk at all! This was supposed to be me confronting him and staring him down, not you."
Piper bushed it off. "It's always stronger coming from a stranger. Besides, you're my friend; I can't half-ass this."
Friend. It had been a foreign concept before him. Every person she'd met, there was an act she had to put on. Except Emily and Mr D technically, but they didn't count. Jason... Jason already knew about her faking, and when she'd dropped all her acts, he'd accepted it without any problems.
And maybe she was crazy, but in Piper's eyes her debt to him was more than she owed Mr D: Jason was the first person with whom she could be herself.
I'm really hoping that Piper calling Venus hot a bunch of times wasn't too gross...
Note 7: Since the pairings have been... well, paired up... so, content-wise, each character's chapter may be more than a little about the other of the duo. This one and Green V, for example. You'll still only know what the PoV character is thinking and seeing, but the subject-matter and plot may contain their partner's stuff. This is just because the couples are always together. Well, at least at all important, plot-related moments.