Leo heard footsteps behind him as Kate walked up to the railing.
"Hey," she said as she leaned in to drop a kiss on his cheek.
"Hey," Leo replied, moving his mouth to meet hers. Kate blinked in surprise but wrapped her arms around him anyway. She pulled back after a little while and started, "After I eneded up on the street…"
Leo glanced at her, his "major-revelation-coming" radar starting to ding. "Yeah?"
"I thought no one would ever love me again, not like Mom loved me. I thought I'd always be alone," she confessed quietly. "I never thought love could be this easy."
Leo smiled up at her. "Who said love was easy?"
~line break~
On Black Friday, Leo snuck himself and Calypso out of camp so he could show her just what she'd missed over the last three thousand years. "And this," he said in his best tour-guide voice, sweeping his arm at the New York Mall, "is called a shopping mall."
"Wow…" Calypso murmured in awe. "How many people are there in the world?"
"Seven billion, five million, eight hundred eighty nine thousand," Leo recited off the top of his head. At Calypso's sharp are-you-joking look, Leo shrugged. "Jake, Nyssa, and Malcolm are working with some people from an online organization on the fact that Earth's going to be overpopulated in about thirty years. Since sterilizing half the population is out of the question, this one guy at NASA suggested orbital habitats, and a kid from Washington suggesting that while we were at it why don't we discover out-of-system space travel? So since she's some bigwig in the Pacific Norwest science fiction community, she got a few authors who write a lot about space travel to help her and a few other people out on designing interstellar spacecraft while the people Jake and Nyssa keep talking with work out the engineering side of it and Malcolm and the NASA people and a bunch of other astrophysicists- shoot, did he tell anyone outside the Athena and Hephaestus cabins that he's already really good at astrophysics? 'Cause if he didn't then forget I just said that- are trying to a) discover if wormholes and hyperspace do in fact exist and b) isolate bits of space that might have wormholes and figure out where the wormholes go to so they'll be that much more prepared when the first interstellar ships have their test runs out to Sirius and Alpha Centauri- Jake's already volunteered for that- and there's yet another team figuring out how to keep the human race alive while that's going on and another deciding how to colonize Mars, and Annabeth and Nyssa are doing both. So there's a lot of statistics getting thrown around Six and Nine because we've all gotten into this, some more than others obviously, and that's how I know exactly how many people there are on planet Earth."
Calypso looked at him strangely, then sighed and said, "I didn't catch half of that, but it doesn't really matter. What are you getting your siblings?"
Leo looked at her blankly, trying to extricate his mind from the depths of space and back to the New York Mall and his conversation with Calypso, but a set of golden arches caught his eye. "Look! I see a McDonald's!" he cried, dragging his girlfriend along with him.
~Line break~
"…and a fish tie and stuffed Nemo doll for Percy, and we got that necklace for Lou Ellen… am I forgetting anyone?" Leo glanced down at his list. Everything was checked off, so he pushed the cart to a checkout stand and glared at the numbers on the screen once they'd rung all the presents up. "We do have enough money, right?" he asked Calypso. Calypso rolled her eyes and reached around him, swiping the credit card he'd begged Annabeth to make for him once he found out about the international card she'd made in Rome. "I should never have taught you how to pick pockets," Leo grumbled to his girlfriend, who shrugged.
On the way out, Leo looked at the little toy-dispensers in the exit area. He looked at the one with the plastic rings, smiled, fed a quarter in, and popped open the container that came out. He strung the ring onto his necklace and mouthed, I miss you, Kate, wondering if his words could reach the Underworld.
He and Calypso left Wal-Mart hand in hand.
~LINE BREAK OF AWESOMENESS~
A/N: Whew! I'm glad that's done! So you'll need to read Fire and Water now.
I have barely enough time to post this before I'm logged out. Bye.
-Beth M