Archive of Our Own ^beta

~

And I can wish all that I want, but it won't bring us together

Plus, I know whatever happens to me

I know it's for the better

~

Leo’s life is fucking over.

He is all of a few hours off the post-panic-attack high that gets him and Festus all the way to Piper in Oklahoma. The crisp winter air and the adrenaline dump the only thing keeping him together enough to steer. He's grabbed his go-bag, because he's probably not coming back. So what is home number whatever in the long list of places that don't want him, it doesn't matter if it was the closest he's ever gotten to family since his mom, he's the one that ruined it after all.

He ends up nearly crashing Festus into the front yard, leaving long claw marks in the gravel of the driveway. It's the weird hour of the morning that normal people think of as after breakfast, that foggy part of starting the day between half awake and a functional part of society.

He goes in through Piper’s bedroom window, climbing up Festus’s head to get to the second story. He's been here a few times, but he got the most familiar with the place in the week he spent here after Jason’s death.

After all the screaming about first scaring the shit out of Piper when he overbalanced on the windowsill and fell super gracefully into a bookshelf knocking over her custom Monster Highs, and then how he can't just barge into a girl's room when they are changing (like it's anything he hasn't seen before) he's finally able to get out “Calypso broke up with me” 

“Oh Leo,” Piper softens. Then she's extracting him from the mess he made of her room and pulling him into a hug. He crumples into his best friend's embrace, letting her lower them to sit on the edge of her bed. He's shaking, the way he gets when he should be crying but isn't because his stockpile of tears dried up long ago somewhere in Texas, and Piper just holds him throughout until the tremors fade away.

“Do you wanna talk about it?” Piper asks into his hair.

He doesn't, but he needs to.

“She said I'm in love with Jason,” Leo confesses

Piper rolls her eyes “I mean, you are in love with Jason.”

“I'm not in love with Jason!” he snaps defensively, pulling away fast and abrupt. “And even if I was, which I'm not, it's not like it matters, it's not like he's here!”

Piper takes pity on him and circles back, “I mean you and Cal have been fighting for months, what happened?”

Leo takes a deep breath and looks away, scrubbing the heel of his hand from his cheek into his rat nest of curls. He can't meet Piper's eyes while he tells her this “She may have found my current project.”

“Which is?”

“A sculpture, or no more of an automation” How does he even describe it, he's never done anything like this before, “It's got clockwork so it's gotta be an automation,” he mumbles mostly to himself 

Piper squints at him, it feels like she's looking right through him, that microscope sensation that comes with her powers, “Are you telling me you're Pygmalioning Jason?”

“No?”

“You fucking liar!”

“I don't know,” Leo has both hands in his hair now, fingers dug deep into the tangles and pulling “Mabey, sorta, I mean guess that's what it is?”

Piper looks flabbergasted, her jaw is on the floor “What the hell do you mean you ‘guess’ that's what you're doing!? How do you not know?!”

“I don't know!” his volume is going up, and so are his hands, he can't help it “I didn't sit down and decide I'm going to build Jason fucking Grace, it just fucking happened!”

“How does that just happen?”

“I don't know!” he yells back, suddenly on his feet and pacing “It just happened! And now everything is fucked beyond repair and I had to go!”

“Shit” is all Piper says in return.

They stare at each other for a second, Leo trying his best not to break down again. Maybe coming here was a bad idea, he's feeling the urge to bolt creeping up inside him once more

“Just, stay here,” she eventually tells him “I need to go tell my Dad I'm not going to school today."

Right, school, that is a thing. He had tried that, mostly because Calypso wanted to attempt to be a normal teenager, whatever that means, it did not go well. Homeschooling with the Moms has been a lot better.

Except they are not his Moms, because Leo is probably running away. 

The McCleans force Leo into eating, pulling the frozen waffles back out. That's probably a good thing, Leo is pretty sure he missed dinner last night with how he had been wrapped up in his, uh, project. 

Wrapped up enough he hadn't heard his now ex-girlfriend coming into the Kiln Room. Wrapped up enough it was physically painful to stop when she had started yelling at him, cutting off what must have been mid-enchantment.

Everything feels numb as he's sat at the table, over-chewing eggos because everything tastes like sawdust at the moment. He's not really aware of his surroundings as Mr. McClean leaves for the day, a kind of dissociation from suddenly being in Piper's safe presence compounded with his emotional and physical exhaustion. He's pretty ready to seep through the floorboards and rot in the insolation for the rest of eternity, being buried alive sounds really good at the moment.

“Are we gonna talk about it or are you just gonna keep trying to explode the table with your mind?” Piper starts after he's sat unmoving for who knows how long staring into space.

“What? Like the forehead guy from Avatar?” he deflects. “Do you think my powers could work like that?”

“I can give you a face tattoo and we can try?”

“Pass,” he says as he stands to put his dish in the sink.

“Leo, I mean it,” she huffs, “You're worrying me.”

“It's fine,” he tells the facet, “I'm fine.”

“Bullshit”

“Piper can we not -”

“Youre fucking building Jason,” she snaps “We. Are. Talking about it!”

Leo turns back to her, propping his hip on the counter and crossing his arms, folding into himself. They have a very nice woven rug under the kitchen table, Leo likes the colors.

“What about it?” he spits to the floor, “Are you gonna get on me again about how I'm apparently ‘in love’ with him or something?”

“You are in love with him,” she exclaims, “You're Pygmalioning him.”

“That's not how that myth works” he snaps, looking at her again “I didn't fall in love with a sculpture or whatever the fuck, I started building something that just happens to be turning into Jason”

“Who you are loving real,” Piper insists, gesturing to all of him with her hands, “You can't turn something real without love.”

“Like you're one to talk,” he bites back for something to sink his teeth into. “You sure do know a bunch about love.”

“Oh, so we're going there?”

“We can if you want to.”

“Like being her kid is my fault,” Piper pushes back, “Like the comp-het brainwashing was my fault.”

“You're not the only one who got their head fucked with Piper” he being unfair and he knows it “And neither of us dropped anyone to chase a fake relationship.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“What do you think it means?” this is an old wound, one that they have bandaged and kissed better together but Leo can't help but pick at anyway “You think I didn't notice that I got put on the back burner so you two could go off and suck face.”

“We didn't suck face,” Piper scoffs “It was always wrong, I don't know why we tried. I think we both just wanted a connection, to make something make sense. At least he did, when we broke up it's like he pulled away from me.”

He feels himself crumple a little on the inside “I don't know how that makes anything better.” 

“It doesn't,” she spits out “There's nothing that makes Jason and I better, especially not him dying.”

“At least you were there. At least you got to see him, you got to say goodbye,” he sags, ready to apologize, “I never got that.”

“And whose fault is that?” she lashes out

“Fuck off Piper” he snaps, hackles immediately back up “I had to go get Cal you know that.”

“And look what that got you” Piper scoffs “She treated you like shit”

“I know you don't like her-”

“That's an understatement.”

“-but I couldn't just leave her there”

“But you could have,” she insists, arms going wide “You totally could have, and then Jason could be-”

“Are you blaming me for it?!”

“We looked for you!” she cries “He looked for you, he never gave up! And you were off making out with some bitch-”

“Piper Shut UP ” Leo shouts, distraught “Fucking stop!”

They glare at each other, Piper looks away first.

“Sorry,” she says to the floor

“Where did that come from? Have you really been thinking all that?”

“Kinda,” she folds into herself, arms crossed and shoulders inching towards her ears, “I don't think I ever stopped being mad at you for leaving.”

“You don't need to take it out on Cal.”

“Well I can't take it out on you,” she looks at him again eyes full of venom “And she did treat you like shit.”

“I don't think I was so good to her either.”

Piper scoffs and rolls her eyes, “Shut up you're a catch.”

“No,” he sighs defeatedly, “I was annoying and inattentive and distracted and-”

“Do you think that or did she say that?”

It's Leo’s turn to stare at the floor, shoving his hands in the pockets of his hoodie so she can't see him rip at his nail beds.

“We looked for you,” Piper starts again “Fucking everywhere. You didn't see him like that, he never gave up on you. Not when Nico said you were gone, or when we couldn't find you, or even when he was in that stupid school. He never gave up.”

“And you don't think I wasn't trying to get back” he cracks defensively “Get back to you and Jason? It was the only thing on my mind! I didn't go through all that just so Jason can still die in the end, it's wrong!” he takes a step towards her “It's wrong Piper, how can you not see it's wrong!?”

“Of course it's wrong asshole” she yells, tearing up “I was there!”

“Piper-”

“He didn't deserve that.” he hates it when Piper cries, especially like this all angry and broken, “To be stabbed in the back and be left behind. But him out of anyone, he fucking gave up!”

Leo jerks, it makes him feel like he's been slapped even as he takes another step forward, reaching for her. “How can you say that!?”

“Because he did!” She shoves him away. “Noble sacrifices right until the end, he had a martyr complex to rival yours and he let it kill him. I think he wanted it to kill him!”

“What the FUCK Piper"

“What, do you think you're the only one allowed to make that kind of sacrifice?” she steams on, “You think you're the only one who can kill themselves for the ‘greater good’!? It's still suicide!”

“So what if it is!” he explodes, “Would it have been such a big deal if it had stuck, maybe then Jason would still be here?”

“It's not a him or you-”

“Yes it is!” he shouts, tearing up. “It was storm OR fire, and if it was gonna be one of us it should have been me !”

“Leo!” Piper cries horrified 

He can't do this, and now he's wrecked everything here too, Leo turns on his heel and books it out of the house.

“Leo! Where are you going?!” Piper calls after him as the screen door slams, but it doesn't matter.

He just runs, and keeps running, just mindless sprinting as fast and as far as he can go. He's going to keep going, just like always, until he collapses in a new place with a new start like all the times before. Or he would if he didn't hear Piper call after him

“Leo Stop!”

Its charms speak, magic the only thing able to push past the need to get the fuck out of there. His legs lock mid-stride, momentum overbalancing him as he careens ass over tea kettle into the dead switchgrass. He still feels the need to run, the need to go, but he can't move his limbs with the spell on him. He ends up just lying on his back, looking up at the gray winter sky and screaming himself raw into the empty air 

“Jesus Christ” Piper pants when she finally catches up to him, hands on her knees as she sucks wind “How are you so fast with those short little legs”

“Fuck you” he yells back trying to kick to no avail “Lemme go!”

“Are you gonna run if I do?”

“You don't need me here,” he continues to yell, but he's sounding more choked than he would ever admit. “I'm just making everything worse like always, lemme go!”

“Of course I don't need you dumb ass, but I sure as shit want you, get back in the goddamn house”

“You can't make me,” he screams like a tantruming child

“Yes I fucking can!” Piper yells back, one hand still on her knee as she continues to try and catch her breath, the other pointing back the way they came, “Get Back In The House!”

Leo goes, she can make him after all, he purposely ignores Festus laughing at him from the driveway

“Never run off on me like that again,” Piper berates him once they are both back inside, pushing him down onto the couch with both hands. “You didn't even grab a coat!”

“A coat!?” he shouts, still steaming and firing vitriol at anything that moves. “That's all you care about?”

“Shut the fuck up,” she scolds, finger in his face “Stop being an asshole I know what you're doing”

“What!? What am I doing?”

“You're trying to pick a fight to make me push you away,” she reprimands “It's not gonna work dickhead all you are doing is scaring the shit out of me!”

“Exactly,” he cries, half needing the fight, half wanting to curl up in a corner and die “I'm just making everything worse, I brought the shit here with me, I need to go !”

“No,” Piper cuts him off “No, shut up, I'm done doing this we’re watching Moana.”

“What?!”

Piper beelines for the remote “SHUT UP WE’RE WATCHING MOANA”

They watch Moana, it's as good as the last three times Leo has seen it, one of the ones Georgie always requests for movie night and Lit pretends he's not excited to see again. At the Way Station they have an old but reliable projector that's been tinkered into near sentience, casting its light on the wall that holds the building's liminal space. It makes Leo a little homesick, too bad he can never go back.

They end up with Leo curled up against one arm of the couch with Piper lying out across the rest, her head on Leo’s shoulder and her arms around his waist like she's trying to hold him down. It's nice, to be held, it feels like a long time since he's been held. Even when he and Cal cuddled, alone or during the movie nights, it was mostly Leo doing the holding. And it felt stiff, awkward. He would get hugs from Georgie and Jo and Emmi, but they never held him, he never let them.

Piper was probably the last person to hold him like this, the week he stayed here after Jason died they had been joined at the hip. It made Leo miss him more in a way, the big guy was always fighting against his own need for physical affection. If Jason had a love language it was most definitely touch, even if it always looked like it had been beaten out of him.

“I lied,” Piper murmurs eventually into the still.

“Hmm?”

“Earlier, when I said I didn't need you,” she confesses, eyes on the singing crab. “I lied. I do need you.”

Leo heaves a huge sigh and rests his head on top of hers, wrapping his arm around her shoulders to hold her back. “I need you too Beauty Queen.”

They watch Ponyo next, and then Thumbelina, and then somewhere in the middle of The Princess Bride Mr. McClean comes home. Leo gets roped into helping with dinner, it feels good to do something with his hands, he's starting to feel the prickling itchy sensation in his fingers as his creation calls to him asking to be finished. He pointedly ignores the feeling.

Piper insists he sleeps in her bed with her. She says its because the couch sucks (a lie the couch rocks) and her bed is big enough (another lie, it's a full and Piper is a bed hog who snores like she's on the Olympic team for grinding gravel), but Leo knows that it's really because she doesn't want to let him out of her sight after he tried to run like he did.

It's the first time anyone has caught him when he ran like that, at least the first mid-elopement since he’d gotten too big to be grabbed by a resource officer. He's not sure how he feels about it, but it kinda makes him not want to let Piper out of his sight too. So he takes her offering of spare pajamas and climbs in next to her.

“Hey,” Piper starts into the dark.

“Hmm?” he answers.

“We still haven't really talked about the - uh - thing you're making”

Leo heaves a sigh. “What's there to talk about?”

“What's there not to talk about?” she stage whispers back, “Like what did you even make him out of?”

“Bronze, I have a celestial bronze and carbon steel alloy that I used for the clockwork and frame, and pure celestial bronze for the shell and details,” he rattles off, only half paying attention to what he's saying. He's always done better talking through big projects with people, even if they don't understand half of what he's saying. 

Jason had been really good for that, during the whole process of building the Argo II he had been there making sure he ate and listening to Leo problem-solve. He never looked bored of Leo talking, never got that glazed-over expression people get when Leo info-dumps. He even asked follow-up questions and everything. 

“Okay, sure should have guessed.” Piper rolls her eyes. “I guess it's more I don't get how you can do it all on accident.”

“I don't really know either,” he confesses, “It’s not like with the Argo II.”

Piper rolls on her side to look at him. “How so?”

“Past like, the collaboration,” he starts, trying to put magical instinct into words, “It feels more, alive. It pulls harder.”

“Things you make pull?”

“Kinda, not always” he stares up at the glow stars on Piper’s ceiling and tries a not to pay attention to the thing states away asking for him, he scratches at his palm “but when it's big magic shit, when it wants to be made, there is like this call in my body. The Argo II was the worst before - before him.”

“Do you think it's working?” Piper asks, “Bringing him back?”

“Yeah,” Leo turns his head to look at her then, “Yeah I think so.”

“Because you're in love with Jason-

“I'm not in love with Jason!” he huffs, “Everyone keeps saying it, Calypso and you and -”

“Because you are in love with him!” Piper glares from the other pillow. “You're gonna look at me and tell me that I'm wrong?!”

Leo grins, “That I'm wrong!?” he starts the meme, “She wore a crown and she came down in a bubble dawg!”

Piper snorts, “And who was her sister?”

“The Wicked Witch of the East bro!” they recite together, then break out into snickers

“Shut up,” Piper relents with a smile in her voice, rolling over and taking most of the covers with her. “You're impossible I'm going to bed.”

Piper plans to play hooky the next day too, and her saying it's Friday does nothing to soothe the guilt Leo feels in the burden of his mere presence. 

It doesn't help that Leo wakes up uncharacteristically early. Or more he never fully went to sleep, stuck in that half-doze half-sleep that never gets deep enough to be restful because he's in a different place and his body is certain he needs to be able to get up and book it at a moment's notice. Mr. McClean sneaking out to go to work is what finally does him in, unable to sit still in Piper’s bed with her sawing logs.

Leo is also starting to really feel the call from his creation, no project has felt this powerful this all-consuming since the Argo II. Itchy is the best way to describe it; he feels like a lizard stuck in its shedding skin, he feels like his bones have a coating of nail polish on them making them stiff and weighted, he feels like his stillness is causing his electrons not to fire properly. His fingers are twitchy, picking at any little thing in the most destructive way, everything from his cuticles to his clothes.

He's never gone this long without working on it; he only just started but still. Instead of answering the thing he's making Leo goes in search of anything in the McClean house to fix. He ends up under the kitchen sink when Piper finds him, lying on his back with all the cleaning supplies that are stored in the cabinet spread out around him.

“Watch’ya doing?” Piper asks, leaning over him in her Hello Kitty pajamas and fuzzy slippers with her arm braced on the counter above him. 

“Your catch was getting clogged,” he mumbles, only half paying attention to her as he works. “You can't put this much gunk down the drain you don't have a garbage disposal.”

“Huh,” she answers like it's new news “Stinks though.”

“Rotting food will do that, yes,” he replies, tightening the last cupping nut with a wrench from his belt. “I also re-caulked your faucet it shouldn't be so wiggly now.”

“The facet was wiggly?”

“Yeah the caulk was old.”

“You fix anything else?”

“I resealed all the windows in the living room and fixed the attachment to the flute in your fireplace so you can close it properly now and set all the clocks in the house right.”

“Did you eat breakfast?”

Leo pauses mid-wrench turn, he did not eat breakfast. 

“That's what I thought,” Piper snorts a laugh at him “Finish up I'll get it started.”

They work in silence for a moment, the air a little lighter after their movie make up. Just a little.

“So your Moms called,” Piper says into where she's scrambling eggs. “Woke me up and everything worried about where you've been.” 

“Uh-huh,” he replies, trying to keep his tone neutral 

“I told them you were here,” she continues voice even, “And that you’d be home when you've cooled off.”

Leo huffs, “I'm not going back.”

Piper side eyes him in disbelief “Fucking why?”

“Because I blew it,” he snaps, slamming down the bottle of bleach harder than he meant to. “Cal has to have told them what I've done by now; they can't want me after that.”

“People who don't want you don't sound that worried when they call your friends asking if you're there when you go missing.”

“It doesn't matter,” he barks, trying not to get riled up. “Now they know what I’ve done they won't want me.”

“I don't think Calypso has told them,” Piper tells him kindly, “And even if she has, that's not what they were worried about. They were just worried about you.”

Leo glares into the cabinet he's refilling with cleaning chemicals. He loves Piper, he considers her a sister maybe even more than a sister, but she will never get how easy it is to fuck up like this. Piper has had her own shit, but at the end of the day she's always had a home to go back to. Leo knows that everything is temporary for him. No matter what people say, no matter how much they are convinced they want him and they love him, there is always a line. And he always finds some way to somersault across it. 

“It doesn't matter,” he tells her, shutting the cabinet with more force than intended. “Their still gonna find out in the end.”

“Georgie was there,” Piper says instead of entertaining that line of conversation. “She was really happy to know you were okay.”

That's a low blow, Piper knows of the aching soft spot he has for his youngest sibling.

There was a foster home, somewhere around placement two or three, where he had a little foster sister. Her name was Amelia, and for a little while she had been everything . She was just so small and sweet, all chubby cheeks and dark wavy pigtails. She thought the world of Leo, and Leo thought the world of her . They were basically inseparable, always holding hands, anywhere one of them went so did the other.

But Amelia got adopted, and Leo kept setting the bed on fire during his nightmares, so she got to stay while he was passed on. Leo never saw her again, he didn't let himself get attached to any foster siblings after that.

That is until Georgie.

Leo has always been weak to little kids, they are just so fun. In the brief time he's spent at Camp he had immediately felt connected to Harley and his boundless energy. It was like having a minnie-me, a reflection of himself in a little dude.

But Leo had always wanted a little sister, and Georgie clings, elated to have new siblings in the form of him and Lit and Calypso. Leo can't help but melt into her, it's Amelia all over again. Just so sweet and cute, a kindness and joy only little kids can have. Leo wants to give her everything in the world, all the things all the attention anything she asks for. But all she wants is his time, something he found himself gifting out in earnest. For the first time since Amelia he can't hold himself back from getting attached.

He hadn't thought about Georgie when he ran, and that makes him crumple a little on the inside. He knows if she asks he would go straight back to the Way Station, no matter how bad he's fucked this, he wouldn't be able to stand her feeling like she's been left behind.

He finds himself grateful he wasn't in the room for that call.

“It's whatever,” he says instead. “You're burning the eggs.”

They eat breakfast; Leo teases Piper about eggs not being vegan, and Piper takes the bait on purpose and rants about how she's vegetarian and why vegans are ridiculous especially when it comes to sustainable symbiotic farming practices like eggs and honey. It's nice, normal, and because she cooked Leo offers to do the dishes so she can take a shower.

He kinda drifts off staring out the window over the sink, the thing that is becoming Jason calling to him in his head. It's like a dissociation, but instead of a loose float he's reeled in, caught hard on a fish hook, the creation’s claws sunk in so deep it draws blood. He can see it in his mind's eye, the Jason parts that are done, the parts that he is in now. The hard-angled S-shape of his brow, the way it's trying to twitch a quirk the way it would when Jason would ask a question. The glass eyes he used, blankly focusing in and out without the light of life behind them, searching for something to see. The bit of his soul that's already in there, almost like it's sleeping like it's dreaming.

It reminds Leo of the time Jason fell asleep on watch on the Argo II, sitting on the ground leaning back against the controls as Leo steered them through the craggy expanse of a mountain range. It had been foggy and quiet, and Jason had been so tired and stressed after Percy and Annabeth had fallen Leo couldn't bear to wake him up. He dreamed then, Leo had watched him, his head lulling against his shoulder and face directed at Leo like a flower looking for the sun. 

Stressed in sleep, they were all stressed in sleep, but it had been so apparent on Jason watching him. The furrow of his brow, the way his fingers twitched, and then the little sound he made. A whine, small and childlike. It reminded Leo of the puppy at one of his foster homes, left outside on the above-ground line rain or shine. Some Pitbull Shepard something meant to be scary and nothing else. But it had been starved for affection, and when his Foster Dad wasn't looking Leo would sneak off to pet it. It would whine, a soft sad sound just like Jason, when he had to creep back again. So Leo knew what it meant when Jason made that noise, it meant ‘Please don't leave me’

Then, on the Argo II, Leo had touched Jason’s hair. Ran his fingers against the grain from front to back front to back. Traced the texture of the new little lighting bolt-shaped scar on the side of his head with his finger tip, smooth surrounded by the prickly close shave of the hair around it; and Jason had settled into an easier sleep. Now, miles and miles away from the tether, Leo feels more than hears that call again. 

‘Please don't leave me’

‘Please come back’

It itches  

“Leo?”

Leo drops the plate he is washing, it hits the edge of the sink and shatters. Shards go everywhere, into the soapy water and across the counter and onto the floor. The abruptness makes Leo gasp out, the taunt cord of the thing that is becoming Jason goes suddenly slack, the blurred edges of reality about him snap back into focus. Its disorientating, Leo wobbles a little like he's been standing too long with his knees locked and his blood flow is getting all fucked. He puts a hand down on the edge of the counter to stabilize himself, palm cutting on a fragment of ceramic and drawing blood. The pain is grounding.

“Jesus Leo,” Piper hisses, worried. She leads him away from the sink and the broken plate by the elbow, how she keeps him from stepping on more of it in his bare feet is beyond him. “Are you okay?”

“S-sorry im - sorry” Leo stammers, coming back to reality in fits “Sorry I didn't mean, I broke it I'm sorry I can go”

“It's okay,” Piper reassures, it's not. “It's just a plate.”

“No its-” it's never just a plate, never just an accident “Sorry I'll clean it I'm sorry.”

“It's okay” Piper tries again even though it's not, it's not okay. She makes him sit at one of the chairs at the kitchen table anyway. “Are you okay?”

Is he okay? No, no he's not okay. 

“I'm fine,” he says instead, “I’m - I’m fine I can clean it”

“Uh, no,” Piper tells him, “Just stay there, im gonna get the first aid kit,” and then she leaves him in the kitchen with the wreckage.

At the Way Station when you break a dish you make the new one. There is a huge collection of ceramic slip molds in the Kiln Room, at least one for each kind of bake and tableware they have. Leo has broken two plates and a mug so far. 

Emmi had been the one to teach him how to cast the molds, how to trim the rough edges of the clay and smooth the sharp lines left over from casting. Showed him where all the little handmade ceramic stamps are stored, how to add masonry dye to the slip, made sure he waxed the bottom so the glaze didn't make it stick to the kiln shelf during firing. She had also been the one to help him through the panic attacks when it happened too, so ready to be yelled at or beaten for destroying things like the useless waste of space he is. She was gentle and kind, but firm and steady, and each time she had taken him by the hand to the Kiln Room and helped him find the correct mold to make the replacement. Gave him the tools to fix it.

Leo can't fix it this time, there is no mold to fill with clay. Its broken, just like him.

Piper comes back with the first-aid kit.

He doesn't hear her come back, he's making the plate in his head. Pour the slip, wait for it to dry, take off the mold, cut the excess, smooth the edges. The little stamps around the rim when it's leather hard, underglaze when it's bone dry, then into the kiln for the bisque fire. He can't hear anything, but he does feel it when Piper puts a hand on his shoulder. He's suddenly in his body again, and he's so certain he's going to get his ass kicked he finches. Flinches hard enough he jerks off the chair and onto the floor as he covers his head with his arms.

“ Jesus Leo,” Piper sounds worried, scared, but it's hard to understand with the blood rushing in his ears.

“Sorry,” he stifles out “Sorry - sorry ‘m sorry , sorry”

“It’s okay,” Piper tries softly, crouching down next to him.

“It’s - I didn't mean” he chokes, still hiding under his arms “I can't, I can't fix it I can't-” it feels like his throat is closing, hello panic attack.

“Shh, just breathe,” Piper tells him, just like when they were back in Wilderness School together, or building the Argo II, or on the quest with The Seven, or after Jason died, “Breathe with me Leo.”

She breathes, exaggerating the inhale and letting her exhale ghost over him. In, then out, then in, and Leo matches her on the out. The slip dries in the mood, shiny liquid going matte and solid as the moisture is absorbed through the plaster. Breath in. Cut the excess. Breath out. Smooth the edges. 

They have a stamp that reminds Leo of Piper. A little geometric diamond with a texture like the Peyote Stitch she uses to make her beaded earrings. He will use that to decorate Piper’s new plate. 

“Let me see your hand,” she tells him, Leo had forgotten he was bleeding. 

She picks the shard of ceramic out of his palm with the tweezers from the first aid kit, the same way Leo taught her after she put her hand through a window when they were running after getting caught playing hooky at Wilderness School. They had nabbed the first aid kit from Coach Hedge’s office in the gym, and then hidden under the field’s bleachers where Leo had shown her how to sterilize the tweezers with a lighter and pick out all the little slivers of glass without wiggling the bits too much. It's a memory from that time that Jason isn’t in, no anxious mothering implanted there. She wraps his hand after, in the way she picked up from Will after Leo put a nail through his palm building the Argo II. Jason had been there for that one, worried and hovering. But Piper has always been a quick learner. 

“You wanna tell me what that was about?” Piper asks as she finishes.

“Jason was calling me,” he says without thinking, unable to meet her eyes. “The parts- the parts he is in, we're calling me.”

Piper sighs and pulls him into a hug by the back of his head, Leo rests his cheek on her clavicle and does his best to keep his breathing even so he doesn't melt down again.

“Is it always like this?” she asks, lips in his hair.

“No,” he confesses, “It's never like this.”

They breathe together on the floor of the kitchen for a long moment, and then they get up and clean up the mess. Making sure the catch is in the sink when they drain it, sweeping the floor of broken shards, putting the clean dishes on the drying rack, tossing the whole trash in the outside bin so no one else gets cut.

Leo sees Piper through the window resting her forehead on Festus’s when she takes the trash out, just a moment of his best friend and his dragon finding solace in each other. He knows they miss one another, seeking any little connection to everything they have lost. 

It itches again, the something calling him. He scratches at his uninjured palm, then over his bandage, then the other palm again, skin feeling like it should be dry and cracked. Or like when you spend too long in water, hands getting swollen and pruney and uncomfortable, dead skin sloughing off under his nails. Itchy

Jason pulls at him again, incomplete, asking where he's gone and when he will finish. He wants to run his hands back through Jason’s hair, fingertips across the smooth line of the jagged lightning-shaped scar and ease him back to sleep. There is plating to hammer into shape, and gears to etch, and wires to solder. He feels it twitch asking for him, he twitches in return.

He sees him, almost overlaid over the thing that is becoming him. His eyes, and the scar on his lip, the profile of his shoulders that Leo had spent far too long pretending not to admire when Jason and Percy had sparred on the deck of the Argo II. The jut of his hip, the line of his jaw, the shape of his caff. How he always smelled like heat lightning, like ozone and petrichor especially after flying, how he ran cooler than someone his size should ever run. 

Jason's hands, rough and scarred from weapons training, how is Leo ever supposed to build them right? Does he make them new, unblemished and soft, or should he make them like he remembers them with unknown stories in every callous? Jason’s left ring finger is a bit crooked, probably from a break Leo never got to ask him about, should he make the armature bent or just the outer plating?

If he made him a ring would it ever fit right? That's an important finger, the left ring finger, that's where wedding bands go.

“I need to finish it,” he tells Piper when she comes back in, huddled on the floor with his back to the kitchen counter, his knees up by his chest and face in his hands. “I can't leave him half done.”

“Something's gonna happen if you do this.” Piper takes his shoulders in both of her hands as she crouches down in front of him on the floor “You feel it right, you have to feel it?”

“Of course I feel it.” Leo can't meet her eyes, he can still sense the thing that is becoming Jason, still pulled by its call, “I just don't think I can stop now that I've started.”

“Leo-”

“It has his face now,” he's looking down at his hands, they are shaking, “And the start of his shoulders. I feel him behind it, like something that's waking up. He's in it now, even just a little bit, I can't stop.”

“It's doing something to you too,” Piper says, she sounds so worried, scared. “Please tell me you know that?”

“Pipes, I have too.” he meets her eyes then, they are as uneasy as her voice and filled with tears. “I have to, I think I'm in love with him”

“Oh Leo,” and then Piper is pulling him into a hug

They sit there for a while, sobbing in each other's arms on the floor of Piper’s kitchen. Piper has always been Leo’s rock in the emotional storm of life, he doesn't think that's going to change any time soon. But he knows that the aching hole he feels is mirrored in her chest. It's wrong to be here without Jason.

“Are you mad at me?” Leo eventually asks into Piper's damp shirt.

“Yes,” she says sniffily into his hair, “But not about being in love with Jason.”

“Why?” Leo sobs “You should be!”

“You idiot.” Piper pulls away the fraction to make Leo look at her. “Why would I be mad about that?”

“Because it's Jason,” he continues to cry, even if Piper's face doesn't match the disgust he thinks she should be feeling “Your ex-boyfriend! It's like against bro code or something and it's me and I'm doing this awful unnatural thing because I'm in love with your ex-fucking-boyfriend like a Frankenstein creep!”

“It's because you're my best friend you stupid idiot, I love you!” she declares, “How could I be anything but happy for you for being in love?”

“Even though it's Jason?!” 

“Especially because it's Jason,” she swears, tugging Leo back into her and tucking him under her chin, “And especially because it's you! ”

That just makes Leo cry even harder. He hasn't cried this hard since he was a child. Part of it is relief; this huge secret he has been keeping is out on the table in all the gory bloody filth of it. And also that Piper didn't run screaming at this ugly inside of him, this unnatural thing he's doing and why. And part of it is that he's just so sorry, he's hurt people with what he's making, what he's trying to do. He's hurt Calypso, and he's hurt Piper, and in a way he was probably hurting himself. And it's going to hurt more people, everyone this touches, and he's going to do it anyway. But most of all, deep down, part of it is that for the first time in his life Leo is chasing something instead of running

Leo is in love with Jason Grace

And he might just be bringing him back to life

~

And when broken bodies are washed ashore

Who am I to ask for more, more, more?

~