The next time Leo awoke, Will was setting a plate with a piece of buttered toast and a small cup of gold liquid on the table beside his bed. Leo had only just begun learning about the world of the Greeks, but he was pretty sure that drinking liquid metal was bad for a growing boy in every reality. Will smiled upon seeing him awake, and answered his unasked question.
"The liquid in the cup is called Nectar, the drink of the gods. It will accelerate your healing so that you can leave here faster, but too much is harmful," Will said. "And I'm starting you off with easy foods until your stomach is used to breaking down nutrients again."
Leo wasn't sure why a piece of toast could possibly be better than a heaping pile of eggs and bacon, but his mouth was too parched to argue. He was positive that if he said a word his voice would sound like a rusted hinge, so he chose to grab the glass of gold liquid rather than comment.
Upon the first sip, he was shocked by the taste of his mother's tacos that he had been craving since his fight with the hydra, and his eyes widened as he chugged the drink.
"Nectar tastes like your favorite food or drink," Will said, chuckling softly. "Do you mind if I ask a few questions while you eat?" He asked, picking up a clipboard and pen from a small table nearby, causing Leo to freeze with the piece of toast halfway to his mouth.
Questions were very rarely a positive thing when you were a homeless kid, and wanted to stay that way. Normally, doctors who would check him over after being caught on the streets would ask him about his parents or his home, and it always ended up with him back in the system before he could blink.
But so far, this place has been everything except normal.
"What kind of questions, and do you have magical powers that will tell you if I lie?" Leo responded, taking a bite of his toast as Will laughed.
"Some kids of Apollo can do a little of that, but not me!" Will assured him. "And you don't have to tell me anything you don't want to, I just need to know a couple general things."
Leo stayed quiet for a moment, chewing his bite of toast and trying to gauge how honest Will was being, but in the end, simply shrugged and responded after swallowing.
"Alright, fire away!" Leo said with only one finger gun, as the other hand was occupied by bread. Or was toast no longer bread once it became toasted? Was toast bread but bread not toast, or the other way around? Leo then realized that Will was speaking again, and cursed his ADHD brain, forcing himself to focus.
"-kay, when is your birthdate, age, and do you have any emergency contacts who should know where you are?"
Will asked the question with a professional attitude, and Leo was grateful, because it made everything a little bit easier to talk about.
"July 7th, I'm twelve, and I have no idea what CPS has my emergency contact as. Although I'd love to see their faces if I told them they could list it as 'Greek god,'" Leo joked, trying to wipe away the sad expression that briefly flitted across Will's face as he jotted down notes.
"And are you on any prescription medicines?" Will said, thankfully moving on and not questioning Leo's time with CPS. "We have the normal painkillers and pills like ibuprofen and zyrtec, but if you've been prescribed something else, we'll have to get it from outside of camp."
"N-no, but wait," Leo interjected, his heart speeding up, "like, long-term? As in, I could stay?"
He hadn't seen anything of the camp except for the same three walls and curtain, but just the thought that this place where everything made a little more sense could become his home was exhilarating.
At this, Will's soft smile made a reappearance. "Yes, Camp Half-Blood is a home for however long you need it. Most campers just come for training during the summer, but some of us stay year-round."
For the first time in months, Leo felt a spark of hope, lighting up his body like a fireplace on a cold winter night. A longing for a place that only existed in gentle dreams of his mother; a home.
"So, I can stay? I won't have to leave?" Leo reiterated, knowing he sounded dumb for asking the same question twice, but he needed to be certain before he allowed the spark of hope to fan into a flame.
"You can stay," Will confirmed, seeming to understand Leo's need for validation. "If you're comfortable, I'd like to introduce you to a camp veteran who can tell you what it's really like here."
That made Leo the tiniest bit nervous, and his fingers began drumming out a pattern on his thigh the way they always did when he had to face a new person.
Three fast taps, three long, and then three fast. SOS.
It was a running joke he had shared with past foster siblings; signaling for help when they were forced to endure social interaction. Leo could remember them asking where he had learned morse code, but he always said that he had just picked it up.
They didn't need to know that it was his mother who taught him at age six, as their way of communicating from different rooms. And they definitely didn't need to know that he still tapped out messages to her, as if she could hear them from the afterlife.
Refocusing on the present, Leo shoved his thoughts to the back of his mind and nodded cheerfully. "Sure, bring 'em in!"
"His name is Percy Jackson, and I'll be right back with him!" Will said—making no comment on Leo's delayed response, which Leo was eternally grateful for—as he stood up from his chair and stepped behind the curtain. Leo swallowed nervously.
In all honesty, he was not the best with people.
Sure, other people tended to like being around him, but it wasn't the real Leo they liked, just the happy-go-lucky mask he wore. When it was necessary to keep a wannabe-gang from beating him up, or convince a bully to leave him alone for the laughs, he could make due, but Leo really preferred the easy company of a machine over a human being any day.
Or maybe you just don't know what it's like to have real friends, a traitorous part of his brain whispered, but Leo pushed the voice aside just in time for Will to come back, another teenager trailing behind him.
Will had retrieved the other boy—Percy Jackson, Leo reminded his brain—fairly quickly, and Leo wondered if Will had planned the interaction and told him to wait nearby beforehand. If that was the case, Leo didn't know whether to be annoyed or grateful, and settled on having no reaction at all.
Percy approached the bed and Leo thought that he looked like an older teenager, maybe around sixteen, with messy black hair and sea-green eyes. He was also fairly tall, with a lean yet muscular build, like the kind of guy Leo would get to know for street-cred. But the whole look was thrown off by the warm smile he wore on his face, like sun-warmed sand on the beach.
"Hi Leo, I'm Percy, although I guess Will already told you that," Percy said somewhat awkwardly, spinning around slowly in place and looking around the room. "Dude, this is giving me some serious deja vu from when I first came to camp."
"Really? Just how often do new… Half-bloods, end up in the infirmary?" Leo asked warily, trying out the new word. "Because no offense to you, Will, but I don't like to make a habit of keeping doctors on the job."
Percy snorted, and Will shook his head with a laugh. "Trust me, I'd happily be out of the job if it meant no one was hurt!"
Will had moved to sit in the chair he had been occupying previously, and Percy remained standing, pulling a ball point pen out of his pocket to fidget with.
"Usually they have a couple scrapes from fighting monsters, but only the really lucky demigods like you and I end up unconscious in the infirmary for days," Percy said sarcastically, but with a large grin pasted on his face.
"You too, huh?" Leo asked wryly. "What happened when you came to camp?"
Percy's grin shifted to more of a melancholy smile, and he said, "I was the same age as you, and while I had been experiencing weird things my whole life, everything came to a tipping point after I might have, accidentally, shoved the resident bully into a water fountain on a school trip, and then, may have, vaporized my math teacher after she tried to kill me."
Leo stared at him with his jaw hanging open, manually shut it using his hand, and then elegantly said, " what? Can you rewind just a tiny bit? Why did your math teacher try to kill you? I mean, I know they can be grumpy if they skip their morning coffee, but that's a whole other level!"
"Well, turns out Mrs. Dodds was actually a fury from the underworld, sent by Hades to retrieve his Helm of Darkness, which they thought I had, but I didn't," Percy replied casually, uncapping his pen, and nearly giving Leo a heart attack when it transformed into a three-foot sword. "I managed to kill her instead with this ball point pen Chiron gave me which was actually my sword named Riptide."
Leo just nodded as if any of that made sense whatsoever. He then glanced at Will to check if the son of Apollo had any reaction, only to see him half-listening while flipping through a file, as if he had heard all this before.
"Yeah, um, so, what happened after that?" Leo asked, deciding to just go with it.
"Yancy Academy kicked me out, which was my sixth school, and I went back home to my mom and Smelly Gabe, my step-dad at the time," Percy responded, a dark look flashing over his face like the shadow of a shark under the ocean's surface. He had taken to capping and uncapping his pen-sword-thing, and was currently gripping it like he wanted to run someone through.
Leo had his fair share of terrible stand-in dads in the past—who should really stop trying to be family people and just accept that they're dying as bachelors—so he changed the subject quickly, attempting to spare Percy the discomfort of dwelling on the past.
"No way! I'm at six schools too!" Leo joked. "They just can't handle our pure awesomeness."
Percy's face brightened again, the goofy grin returning. "Man, you keep going at that rate, and you'll beat my standing record!"
Leo may not be great at heart-to-hearts, or talking about feelings, or most things that involve other people, but if there was one thing Leo could always be counted on for, it was lightening the mood.
"So was Mrs. Dodds the only monster you faced before camp?" Leo asked, genuinely curious about how Leo's own journey to camp compared to others.
"Nope! Kind of like you, I had one big monster to fight at the bottom of Half-blood Hill," Percy replied. "Me, my mom, and Grover—my satyr protector and best friend—were all there together. It's kind of a long story, but I had to defeat the minotaur by myself because Grover passed out and my mom was taken by Hades."
Leo immediately thought of his own mom, and had to fight to keep the cheerful expression on his face. Percy came to camp with a family member and a best friend, and even if they had their own bumps in the road, at least he had someone. Leo had been alone since he was eight, struggling to survive in a world where both the monsters and the people wanted to hurt him. He hoped that Percy wouldn't have to face the same reality.
"But she was okay, we got her back!" Percy said quickly, and he must have seen something in Leo's face, however much Leo tried to keep his expression even. "But before that, I was stuck in the infirmary for days, bored out of my mind."
At this point, Will had put down his folder and was listening closely. Leo got the feeling that the healer had sensed his chance to ask his own questions, and wasn't about to let the opportunity slip by.
"So, Leo, how did you find your way to camp?" Will asked, his tone level, but his eyes betraying his quiet curiosity.
Leo did not like the change in topic, but he figured that if he refused to say anything, Will would just worry more and try harder. So Leo decided to only share the surface of his story, skimming over the depressing bits, in the hopes that it would satisfy both Will and Percy.
"Um, I had just… left, my last foster home, and was sleeping in an abandoned house in Texas when this little mechanical red spider appeared on the wall in front of me," Leo said carefully, watching for any signs of suspicion or disbelief from the listening pair.
Percy's jaw tightened slightly at the mention of foster homes, and Will wore his mask of blank expression again, but neither of them said anything, so Leo quickly carried on.
"At that point I was kind of too tired to question how it was there, but then it crawled away, so I decided to follow it."
Leo remembered packing up his meager belongings, and suddenly realized that he didn't know where they were. His backpack held the only photo he had of his mother, and he would be devastated if he lost it. Glancing around, he saw the bag leaning against the wall on his right, slightly scratched up, but for the most part, undamaged.
Leo slowly let out the breath he hadn't realized he was holding, and continued on with the story before the others could question his pause. "I named him Firebug—because you can't willingly trust your entire life to something and not name it—and he led me out of Texas and into Arkansas. At that point, I still hadn't used my fire powers for years, but while we were there, a snowstorm hit. I had to use my fire to stay warm."
Percy sucked in a breath, and Will sighed heavily, the two sharing a look. Leo glanced back and forth between the two, frowning slightly. "What? What is it?"
"Using your powers is like a beacon to monsters," Percy explained. "When I pulled Nancy Bobofit into the water fountain, I used mine, and that's when Alecto the Fury decided to attack me."
"And you're still weeks away from reaching camp if you're walking, and that means plenty of time for monsters to attack you," Will added worriedly, tapping his pen against the palm of his hand.
" That's why they started attacking?! Barely a day passed before these ugly babies in a field of wheat tried to shred me," Leo exclaimed, remembering the horror—caused equally by the sharp teeth and the ugliness—when he woke up to one on his chest.
"Those would be karpoi, better known as grain spirits," Will explained, his eyes still filled with concern.
"Great, now I know what to scream in terror the next time those things try to kill me," Leo replied wryly, before gulping down the last of the Nectar.
"How did you defeat them?" Percy asked, his expression troubled. "Did you have a sword, or a dagger?"
"Ha! I wish!" Leo said. A sword would have really come in handy while fighting for his life. "All I had was my fire, but it was enough."
Leo left that story there. He didn't want to see their faces when they heard the destruction he had caused, although depending on how bad the damage was from his fight with the hydra, they might already know.
"There were a ton more monsters before I reached camp, like these seven foot cannibals who wanted to eat me, and an absolutely terrifying massive black dog with glowing red eyes," Leo said with a shiver, remembering the night he had woken to growling, piercing blood-colored eyes sparking brightly in the darkness.
"Canadians?!" Percy cried out in horror. "Canadians and Hellhounds can't even be hurt by fire! How did you survive them?!"
Will had an equally alarmed look on his face, and he listened raptly for Leo's answer, his folder lying forgotten beside him. But Leo was stuck on Percy's shout of 'Canadians." Is that seriously what those monsters were called? Because if so, that was ridiculous. Leo looked up from his thoughts to see the two still staring at him on the edge of their seats, and he quickly hurried on with his explanation.
"It really wasn't that bad!" Leo assured them. "The cannibals were when I was in a city, so I just hopped on a bus before they could catch up to me. The Hellhound—you said it was called—was a little harder to defeat, but it just required a bit of Sovereign Mechanic Valdez to shine through! I set an abandoned truck on a timer to start using a few wires, a watch, and a brick, and then led the Hellhound in front of the car at the perfect time, and Splat! Bye bye monster!" Leo exclaimed, clapping his hands together to really drive the point in.
Percy and Will were sharing another of their increasingly annoying looks, and Will mouthed a word that looked like 'Hairy Fences,' if Leo was lip reading correctly. Percy nodded gravely, and Leo waited impatiently for them to speak, his fingers tapping out a subconscious rhythm on the fabric of his blanket.
"Dude, that's seriously impressive," Percy said abruptly, deigning to act as if their silent conversation had never happened. "It took me months to get a hold of my powers, and you're over there defeating some of the scariest monsters."
Leo was momentarily stumped by the shift of topic, but once he caught up with the conversation, he grabbed hold of the subject change like a lifeline. Anything was better than talking about his fire or his past.
"You keep mentioning your powers, but you haven't told me what they are," Leo said, trying to sound genuinely curious—which wasn't hard, because he was. "Will said that you're a son of Poseidon? That's the Greek god of the sea, right?"
Will seemed to catch the deflection, and a small frown overtook his face, but Percy thankfully barreled on with an explanation before the son of Apollo could call Leo out.
"Yep, that's right! I can control water and sometimes the weather, and water also heals me," Percy answered, spinning his pen between his fingers. "Which would have been really useful to know when I was stuck in the infirmary for three days," he added grumpily.
"Aww man," Leo sighed. "I wish fire healed me! I can't wait to take a tour of this place, and being stuck in bed is going to get seriously annoying."
He caught Will's fond eye roll, and Leo stuck out his tongue at him.
"Yeah, magical healing has been really helpful these past few years," Percy said, his eyes growing saddened for a moment, before he swiftly changed the topic. "And speaking of fire and camp, Chiron asked me to help you train with your fire powers!" He said enthusiastically.
Unfortunately, Leo didn't exactly share his excitement. Having the guy with the power to put out fires—and instantly heal accidental injuries—as his trainer was a sure sign that at least one person at camp didn't trust him. But Leo made sure to smile crookedly instead of letting his face fall, and replied without missing a beat.
"Dude, that's awesome! But wouldn't it make more sense to have another fire-user train me?" Leo asked, wondering if other demigods with fire powers were given the same distrust.
"Well, that's the thing," Percy replied awkwardly. "There isn't another fire-user."
But," Will interjected quickly, seeing the look overtaking Leo's face, "there also isn't another demigod who can control water. So that's why you and Percy, the elemental half-bloods, are perfect for training with each other."
Hearing that, Leo perked up. Sure, maybe there wasn't another person exactly like him, but he and Percy were in a similar boat, and at the moment, that was enough for Leo.
"Alright! Aqua-boy and The Human Flamethrower, partners in crime!" Leo declared cheerfully. "When do we start?"
"Now hold on a minute," Percy interjected. "Why am I Aqua- boy ?! I'm literally like, four years older than you."
"Because Aqua- man is copyrighted, duh, keep up!"
"I hate to interrupt this riveting banter, but I do need to check Leo's injuries to find out when he's ready to train," Will interjected amusedly, standing up from his seat and approaching Leo's bedside.
Leo expected an annoying amount of prodding or poking at bandages, but all Will did was take his hand and close his eyes to focus.
"Um… what're ya doin'?" Leo questioned awkwardly.
Will looked up with a little laugh. "I can sense injuries by touching someone, it's another Apollo power," he said, letting go of Leo's hand and standing.
"Well how's it lookin' Doc, am I gonna make it?" Leo asked, adding an appropriate dose of trepidation to his tone and covering his heart with his hands as if it would stop at any second.
Percy smirked at his antics, and Will couldn't wipe the grin off his face.
"With the nectar, your healing has made a lot more progress than I thought it would," Will began, his tone switching to professional once more, although a slight smile remained. "Most of the smaller cuts and bruises are gone, but the laceration on your shoulder is still tender, and your ribs are still fragile. You also need to put on a lot more weight before you can be considered completely healthy again."
"Okay, but how long until I can at least leave this bed?" Leo implored, hoping that it would be soon soon, and not in a few days soon.
"If you promise to come back here and get a check-up daily, and not overexert yourself, then you can leave tomorrow morning," Will replied, and then seeing Percy immediately light up, barreled on. "But! No training of any kind for at least three days," he said, ignoring the loud groans from both Leo and Percy. "After that, you can start with easy exercises involving your powers."
Leo somewhat understood why Will was being so careful, but seriously? Leo had spent the last few weeks with worse injuries, and he never took time for even a day of bed rest. This was just overkill, especially since there was magical golden healing liquid in the picture as well.
Percy seemed to agree as he gave Leo a sympathetic look, yet even he was too afraid to say anything against Will's firm orders.
"Finneee…" Percy sighed. "But I'll come get you for a tour bright and early tomorrow!" He said cheerfully, and Leo just hoped it wouldn't be too early.
"Alright, it's time for lunch at the dining pavilion, and I promised Kayla and Austin I'd be there on time," Will said, straightening from his spot beside the bed and picking up the empty dishes from Leo's breakfast.
"I'll be back with a plate of leftovers and entertainment," Will continued on as Percy capped his sword. Despite watching the transformation for the past however long they had been talking, Leo was still fascinated as he watched it shrink back down into a pen.
Will and Percy said their goodbyes, leaving Leo with nothing to do but stew in his thoughts. Despite Leo's earlier nerves when it came to meeting him, Percy Jackson was actually a pretty cool dude. He had been mildly intimidating, standing there with his glowing bronze sword, but Leo could surprisingly see a lot of himself in Percy. Their banter was witty, their humor similar, and Leo was quite looking forward to training with him.
The past four weeks had been some of the loneliest in his entire life, and before that, he could hardly say he'd ever had a true friend. Part of it was because the foster system had moved Leo around so often that he didn't have time to make lasting connections, and part of it was because he had thought that no one else could relate to him.
But now he was in a camp full of others who had gone through similar experiences, had dealt with the same struggles, and just maybe, Leo could finally find a family.
AN-
The adventures of the Human Flamethrower and Akuaboi!And their sidekick,Da Hooman Lamp!
Enjoyyyy!