Leo was babbling about thirty miles a minute, and Jason could see Nico starting to get scared. They'd ran and gotten coffee, and Leo, after sucking down a twenty-four ounce mocha in about twenty seconds, had decided that he wanted to help Jason take his cousin back to the car. So there he was, bounding and babbling and grinning wildly.

But nobody died on the way to Jules and the car, which Jason was almost absurdly glad of. He'd seen Nico's face the entire walk. He'd seen how close he'd been to shoving Leo into the middle of the road.

Nico didn't even say good-bye; he just slid right into the car and put in his headphones. Leo waved wildly at the car, and Jules, looking a bit confused himself, tipped a half-wave back. Leo turned to Jason, still bouncing on the balls of his feet and grinning like a madman.

"So," he said. "So, so so. Will and Ethan, huh? You think Will has a thing for your cousin, because I think he does."

"Did the cute comment tip you off?" Jason asked, shoving his hands in his pockets. "What are you planning on doing to Ethan's Xbox, anyway? What can you do with an Xbox?"

"Oh, you can do so much with an Xbox," Leo said. He sighed, tapped his fingers on the brick side of the science building as they walked past, and changed the subject. "So, what do you have? I mean, did you take AP classes and stuff, or are you in normal classes? I'm in an advanced computer class and math and stuff like that, but I really suck at English, like, really badly, and same with History – I mean, I'm dyslexic, and it's a lot of work, right?"

"I'm just taking normal freshman classes," Jason said, shrugging. "Oh, but Latin 201 instead of 101."

"Latin? Who takes Latin? I'm not doing a foreign language, because I totally just took Spanish in high school even though I already knew it, but Latin? Isn't that language dead?"

"My high school taught it," Jason said. "I like it. Are you in any sports?"

"God, no," Leo said. "What about you? You look like the basketball type. Or the swimmer type. Football type. Baseball type. Any sort of athletic type."

"Yeah… no," Jason said. "I, ah, I have a bad habit of letting hard things collide with my head, and we decided… we decided that maybe sports aren't the best idea for me anymore. I like sports. I just usually end up with something whacking me in the temple. Intramural sports, though, I might do that."

Leo nodded a few times, and then pointed at Jason's coffee. Jason had taken the top off to let it cool down – it was plain, black coffee, because he hadn't felt like getting anything sweet or fancy that day. "Can I have that?"

"No," Jason said. He took a drink and, satisfied with the level of not-burning-off-his-tongue, capped it again and stared off across the campus. They were right across from the library – Jason wondered how extensive the library was, he'd only gotten a brief glimpse into it on his few campus tours, and he wondered if Leo would object to him checking it out. He glanced back at Leo, who had stepped right in front of a girl with dark hair and eyes nearly as dark, and decided that Leo would probably be fine on his own.

He crossed the street after a cursory look for cars, and finished off his coffee before sliding into the library. There was a small lounge area outside of the library itself, but Jason had seen all of it before and went straight into the library itself. He nodded and smiled to the woman at the front desk and walked up and down the rows of books, shoving his glasses back up his nose with his thumb. They were loose again.

Side effect of getting hit in the face with things.

He'd found his way to the reference books when he finally saw another living soul. She looked like she could be a freshman, too, but he could never be sure – he'd worked at Wal-Mart for a time, because he wanted the independence a job gave him, and he'd ended up carding a 35-year-old woman for cough medicine. To be fair, this had been before he'd gotten his glasses, but if there was one thing that Jason Grace was ridiculously bad at, it was telling people's ages.

The girl glanced over at him and smiled, and Jason smiled back. The spines on her books were architectural things, mainly. Architectural things that spilled out of her hands when she reached for another one.

He automatically dropped to one knee and caught them. She looked down at him, blue eyes framed by curly blonde hair, and he stood again. "Do you want help carrying these?" he asked, and she eyed the pile of books.

"Sure," she said, and proceeded to pile about ten more books in his arms. He staggered after her, and by the time the two got up to the front desk, Leo was there. He wasn't in the library – Jason suspected that he'd been kicked out, he was standing at the edge of the lounge and bouncing from foot-to-foot, and when he saw Jason his grin widened to the extent that it looked like it was splitting his face in two.

Jason sighed, and the girl glanced at Leo.

"Who's that?" she asked.

"My roommate," Jason said. He dropped the books on the desk. "Well, one of them."

"Honor's dorm?" the girl guessed, and Jason nodded. She held out a hand. "Annabeth Chase."

"Jason Grace," Jason said, shaking her hand. "And that's Leo."

Leo waved.

Annabeth gave him a doubtful look, and then turned back to Jason. "I've got to go, but it was nice meeting you. Maybe I'll see you in some classes tomorrow."

With that, she gathered up her books and left the library. Jason headed over to Leo, who was watching her with an excited look on his face. "So, all of the girls here are cute, then," he said. "Hey, do you think Ethan will be mad if I mess with his Xbox when he's gone-"

"Yes," Jason said. He rubbed his temples and pushed his glasses back up on his nose. He needed to go in and get them fixed soon, or they'd be falling off of his face every time he looked down.

Leo pulled a tiny screwdriver from one of his pockets and snatched the glasses off of Jason's face.

"Um-"

"Calm down, dude, I'm fixing them," Leo said. "Tightening up the screws, you know. Just give me a second, and then maybe you can go three seconds without having to shove them back up your nose."

After a few moments of tinkering, Leo presented Jason with his glasses. Jason took them gingerly, unsure if they were going to fall apart or explode or something, but when he put them on his face they felt much like they did when he got back from the eye doctor, so he nodded to Leo, who grinned back and threw an arm around Jason's shoulders. Leo was about four inches shorter than Jason, so it was awkward and dragged Jason down, but Leo didn't seem bothered.

Then again, he wasn't the one crouching so that he could breathe.

"C'mon, man," Leo said. "I want to do something fun before tomorrow."

I really… don't know what I'm doing with this? So I'm just going to go with it until I figure it's cool for me to end it.