I just got back from Stratford, Ontario at, like, midnight. My friends and I went down for the theater festival and I saw Hamlet, Oedipus Rex and The Sound of Music. I can't. Even. Deal. with how amazing everything was. Oedipus was splendid, and I am so emotionally engaged in the Theban Cycle plays that if I don't stop know, this author's note will be longer than the chapter. Anyways, enjoy this chapter!

Disclaimer: I don't own the characters portrayed below.

What about Angels

Chapter XIII

Home

Once every two years, legionnaires were given a week's leave for the winter holidays. Though most of the masses disappeared after the solstice from December 23rd to New Year's Eve, it could technically be shifted around to squeeze in any particular holiday. Jason was used to being alone with around fifteen people and a retired pair of praetors who'd come back and substitute. But everyone who was still at Camp Jupiter was moody and upset and solitary. Even those with poor relationships with their families always found a place to go- they went home with friends, traveled, couples tended to rent hotels in New Rome, that sort of thing.

Jason used to spend the holidays with Joelle's family in Sacramento. She'd basically raised him, and now she was the praetor. Now that she brought her boyfriend Raj with her and that Jason had come to realise how much of a family treat the holidays were, he felt uncomfortable tagging along- with Joelle and anybody else, for that matter. So he was staying at camp.

He was the only one in his barrack. The fifth cohort's legionnaires wanted to get out of the fort as often as possible, as a rule of thumb. It didn't work out well for him: he couldn't sleep alone, he was too used to hearing other people breathe, snore, grunt, mumble, thrash and wheeze during the night. The ghost-town feel of the fort itself was disheartening and unsettling to him, but he tried to tell himself it didn't matter. His friends must be having a blast back home. Gwen was in New Rome with her family and it was her niece's first Christmas, Dakota had gone all the way down to New Mexico, Bobby was getting a white Christmas in Washington DC and Jason prayed every day that his father would be able to wiggle out of congress while he was there…

As a result of tradition, he was kind of stunned when he saw someone else in line for coffee at Camilla's Coffee Haven.

"Hey," he said. It was Reyna, and they weren't necessarily on the best terms, but she deserved a hey.

She turned around and nodded curtly to Jason before taking her coffee from the stand.

"Can I get a half-half cocoa and coffee please," Jason asked Camilla. She nodded and went ahead.

"What are you doing here?" Jason asked. "Don't you have a dad or siblings or something?"

"I could ask you the same thing," Reyna said.

Touché, and Jason recognised the testy quality in her voice that meant that he'd asked the wrong thing.

"I never knew my mom, and it's doubtful that I have siblings that weren't brought to the Legion like me," Jason said in penance.

"I'm sorry," Reyna said emptying a pack of sugar into her hot chocolate as she listened to him. She rested her hand on a little spoon in a dish of marshmallows. "My father is… dead. I have a sister, but we're not on good terms right now."

She started scooping the marshmallows in her hot chocolate.

"I'm sorry," Jason said. "The first Christmas away from home is always the hardest."

Reyna looked at him and raised an eyebrow. She took another pack of sugar.

"Really? How would you know? I thought you'd been born and raised and genetically programmed to live here," Reyna said. "Doesn't a chip in your head go off every time you leave the fort?"

"Funny," Jason said. Camilla gave him his drink and Jason dumped a bit of change in her tip jar before whispering a 'merry Christmas'. "And I wouldn't know. I don't remember Christmases with my family. But whenever other kids are here for their first, it's always them who take it the hardest."

Reyna looked at Jason curiously.

"I'm not saying… I mean, you're fine, at least, you look like you're doing fine," Jason said. "But it's… it's Christmas Eve. And no one should be alone."

Reyna looked at him some more and stuffed a few packets of sugar into her pocket. "I suppose that's true for you too. What do you suggest?"

Jason knew exactly where to go.

When he was little and could still get away with it, Jason used to sneak away from his centurions and climb trees and booths and training walls too big for him and yes, rooftops too. (He wasn't ready to say that he'd completely stopped now that he was older and should know better, but he didn't get caught as often, that was for sure). He still remembered the view from the roof of the principia (the most forbidden thing to scale) on Christmas Eve. It was just as wonderful as he remembered it, and Reyna looked stunned as well.

"New Rome," Reyna said. "All wrapped up in lights."

"Yeah," Jason said. "See, usually at this hour it's all shop lights and that carousel over there. But there are Christmas lights everywhere, people love them in New Rome. The trees lining Main Street are decorated, people go insane on their houses, shops have special set-ups in their windows, the fountain is lit up, even the swings and slides in the park are covered. Every year the children of Mercury put Santa hats and fairy lights on the statues. Augustus was wearing Antler ears last year and it took a week for the city to find a solvent for the glue they used."

"It's lovely," Reyna said.

"Yeah," Jason said. "When I was a kid I used to pretend that that tree, the one over there, was my Christmas tree. Because I never had one, or at least I don't remember ever celebrating Christmas. And I used to pretend that if I got to New Rome quickly enough, there would be presents there for me too, and that the only reason that the legacy kids I talked to got presents and I didn't was that I never checked my tree."

He blushed immediately. How could he go from "tour guide" to "deep personal revelation"? With Reyna out of all people? How could she make him do that and be that stupid?

"When I was little, my sister told me that the Three Wise Men, Los Reyes Magos, came to give us presents," Reyna said. "Every year she'd send me outside with scissors and a shoe box. If I didn't fill it up with grass for their camels to eat, they wouldn't be able to fill the box with presents. I know Hylla was spending every penny she had to fill my box every year. And then she'd hope that it would keep me busy while she made dinner. This is my first Christmas without her cooking. We used to have all this delicious Puerto Rican food- plantain fritters, léchon asado, pasteles, tembleque…"

"The nymphs could probably make it for you if you asked," Jason asked. "They can make anything."

"No," Reyna said. "I don't want them to."

They were quiet for a while, sipping their drinks and looking at the lights.

"So you're from Puerto Rico," Jason asked.

"Yeah," Reyna said. "I grew up in San Juan before the apprenticeship with Circe and before this."

"Do you still have relatives there?" Jason asked.

Reyna flinched. "Sort of. Nobody I can stay with, anyways. Nobody who wants to see much of me."

"I'm sorry," Jason said. "I shouldn't have asked."

"It's okay, you couldn't know. Especially if you don't have one. Family's messy," Reyna said.

"So I hear," Jason said.

"I don't know if it would be worst not knowing anything than knowing too much," Reyna said.

"I don't know," Jason said. "I don't even know my mother's name, or what she does and where she lives… But I know way too much about my father. Nobody will let me forget about him. But they only talk about the good things. Fulminata, heroism, born leadership, powerand so on. They don't… talk about what he did in the myths or how he broke an oath by having me or anything like that. They just talk about the good things, out of respect. But I know. I found a mythology book in the principia when I was ten, it was the first time I read something uncensored. And since then, my worst fear is that my mother never wanted me or never loved Jupiter and I was born because of some kind of trick or attack, and that's why she got rid of me so soon."

What he liked about Reyna is that she didn't try to tell him that it wasn't true or that it couldn't be. She nodded and offered him a packet of sugar from her stash.

"My worst fear is that Bellona will never claim me," Reyna said. "That I'm too shameful for her. I only have a reference letter from the Amazons and a surprising innate ability to hand Octavian his ass to vouch for me, after all. But she could easily pretend I'm not her daughter, and it's not that important to be claimed since I'm already in the legion, but it would be nice that at least some of my family acknowledges me."

Jason didn't have any sugar to offer her, so he substituted with: "You're not shameful. I actually heard that there was a Nobel Peace Prize coming, for that time you whapped Octavian in the jaw and pinned him to the floor while he was asking for a clarification on the rules of combat and your rank."

Reyna laughed, like, really laughed, and then proceeded to smile at him.

"Thanks. And whoever your mother is and how you got here, I'm glad you are," Reyna said.

"I hope she would be too," Jason said. "It always baffles me how people have kids and then proceed to mess them up."

"There should be a test, like for a driver's license," Reyna said. "I know it's impossible, but I wish someone told our parents what to do and how to take care of us. That way when we'd talk about home we'd be happier."

"Or we wouldn't even have to talk about home because we'd be there, stuffing our faces and checking our trees," Jason said.

"Even better," Reyna said.

"If I ever have kids I'm going to do better than my father did," Jason said. "I have to. It's too important. I'd rather die than mess up a kid's life."

"I would do the opposite of what my father did," Reyna said. "And that kid would be so happy."

"Like, I don't care if they're a boy or a girl or anything in between, if they're big or small or sick or healthy or anything like that," Jason said. "I would just love them. To the ends of the earth and back, every single day. That's it, that's all parents need to do."

"That's where people go wrong, I think," Reyna said. "If I ever have kids I would listen to them. If they told me to stop or start doing something, or that I was doing something wrong or hurting them, or that they needed something, I would be there in a heartbeat."

"And I'd spend time with them," Jason nodded. "So they knew that I loved them for sure, you know? So they didn't have to guess or look at fancy gifts and deduce it or play nasty guessing games. I'd want them to know who I was and that way they could trust me."

"I would do anything for any kids I'd ever have," Reyna said. "It wouldn't be about me anymore. I wouldn't be selfish, I wouldn't get lost in what I wanted or in my little life and forget them, I wouldn't hesitate to put food on their plates first or stay up all night checking for monsters under the bed. These kids would be my world, and if they couldn't be, I wouldn't have any."

"I agree," Jason said. "I wouldn't be a dad if there was a chance I'd be a bad one. I'd be careful, I wouldn't let it happen, it's too…"

"Dangerous," Reyna said.

Jason nodded.

"It's funny how bad parents make good parents, sometimes," Jason said.

Reyna smiled and took a sip of coffee.

They sat on the roof for so long that they saw the street lights shut one by one and the houses grew dark.

"My friend Bobby's a nature god's kid," Jason said. "Total animal nut. Anyways, apparently there are camels at the San Francisco zoo."

Reyna shot him the most judgemental look he'd ever gotten.

"We can't have Christmas here like we'd get in actual homes," Jason said. "But maybe it's okay to… you know… put a spin on it? Bring the camels some grass instead of having them come to you."

For a second Jason thought she'd push him off the roof but Reyna smiled. They stopped talking about home and started talking about camels and what the difference between a camel and a dromedary really was. It was a silly, pointless conversation that made Jason laugh. He said that he had a friend who'd moved to San Francisco and that he could send a messenger bird out tomorrow to see how he could get tickets for them. It was kind of exiting. Making plans with someone for the first time… Jason went to sleep happy that night, and he slept well despite the barrack's silence.

The next day, when Jason woke up, he saw a note in his shoe in unfamiliar writing. "Go check your tree."

And when he did, he saw that someone who was very good at climbing had gone to a lot of trouble to tie a package wrapped up with string in the tree's branches. There was even a note: "Sorry for all the knots, I didn't want anyone to take your present this year. Merry Christmas Jason. –Reyna."