Day 8: AU
Suspended high in the velvet night sky, the Argo II rocked like a cradle. The hull creaked and groaned a soothing lullaby, interspersed only with the gentle tinkling of metal coming from the engine room. Ethan had a feeling he knew exactly what the origin of such sounds was and let his feet carry him to the door; the occasional taps from his walking stick accompanying the rest of the ship’s orchestra. He knocked once on the glossy bronze surface and heard no pause to the tinkering going on within so he pushed his way inside and slid the door closed behind.
“Leo?” he asked, picking his way through the chunks of metal and out-spilled guts of machines littering the floor. “Can we talk?” The musical racket continued without a hitch or break to the established beat. Ethan followed the sound until he found the man himself, Leo Valdez, sitting cross-legged on the floor amidst a blast zone of scattered ship guts that probably made more sense to him than to Ethan. He was hunched over something shiny and golden with ear defenders and a visor protecting him as he blowtorched a line down the metal sheet. He made no acknowledgement of Ethan’s presence.
He leaned back against the nearest wall and hefted his walking stick up to tap Leo’s shoulder with its tip. He had to prod him three times before the metal sheet went flying and Leo whipped his head around so fast Ethan was sure he heard a snap. The blowtorch was shut off and dropped into a toolbox and the visor clanged up. “Uh.” Leo looked up at him with bleary eyes as he picked the ear defenders off. “Can I help you?”
“Not likely.” Ethan eased himself down on a sturdy-looking box in the corner and stretched out his bad leg, ignoring the several glances Leo cast its way. “I wanted to talk to you about something.”
“Frank.” Leo pursed his lips tight as if he’d just been made to squeeze lemon juice into his mouth. “What’s going on between you two?”
Leo looked away from him, reaching for the discarded metal sheet. “There’s nothing ‘going on between us’. It’s not like I like the guy or anything.” He made a huff that could have been an attempt at a laugh but there was clearly no mirth backing it up. Just something to soften his words.
“That’s the problem,” Ethan said. “You guys just seem very . . . antagonistic, at the moment.”
Leo grabbed a cloth with dark stains, poured some liquid out of a bottle on it and started wiping down his metal sheet. “So? We just don’t like each other that much.”
“Need I remind you that we’re on a life or death quest to save all our lives, two camps and possibly the entire world?”
Leo huffed, blowing a lock of hair out of his eyes. “No pressure or anything.”
“Leo.” His tone was sharp enough to snag Leo’s immediate attention. There wasn’t an ounce of humour on his face. The last thing Ethan wanted to do was scold his quest mates but this issue had to be put to rest before it got worse. “This is serious. If you can’t be trusted to interact without being petty or without intentionally causing problems for the other, that will genuinely put your safety, the safety of the rest of the team, and the success of the quest at risk.”
A squeak sounded as Leo slowly but vigorously ground his cloth against the metal sheet. “We’re not that bad,” he muttered. “It’s just . . .”
Ethan waited for him to find his words for almost a minute before realising he was barely even looking. “Does this have anything to do with Hazel?”
“What?” The metal sheet fumbled halfway to the floor before being snatched up by Leo’s flailing hands.
Leaning his head back against the wall, Ethan sighed as the cool metal bled into him. “I understand the two of you have some interest in one another. Hazel looks . . .” He searched for the right word to accurately describe what he saw without offending the kid in front of him. Hazel looked at him like a scientist looking at some undiscovered fungus spore down a microscope. “Intrigued, shall we say, with you. And you, I’ve noticed, have been revelling in the attention.” He leaned forward, bracing his elbows on his knees. “And I’m sure Frank has noticed too.”
Leo’s light brown face, ashy after working tirelessly into the early morning, burned several shades darker as he lowered his eyes to his work. “Well, it’s not like that. Not on my part, but if Hazel is that interested–” He aimed a smirk Ethan’s way that quickly dropped off his face when he was met with the indifferent wall of his unbothered frown. “Anyway, she’s not really my type, so Frank has nothing to worry about on that side of things.”
“Your type?” Yeah, Ethan had been semi-employed at Camp Half-Blood to help out with the influx of new campers for almost a year now, but he always managed to forget how much he disliked ‘girl talks’ with the younger teenage boys. Even those less than half a decade younger than him.
“I’m a man of taste.” Leo summoned a crooked grin on his face. “I mean, have you seen Thalia?”
Yeah, these kids were like fucking aliens to him. “You’d get stuck in her teeth.” While Ethan had only met Thalia vanishingly few times over the past year, he heard plenty about her from Annabeth, Percy, Luke (when he was still Luke) and some of the older campers who were there when she woke up from being a tree. What he heard did not bode well for Leo’s prospects.
“I know. She’s a firecracker, right? She could probably break my spine over her knee!”
That’s not saying much, Ethan thought, but elected to keep that one to himself. “She wouldn’t give you the time of day.” Even if she hadn’t been a Hunter of Artemis, and thus vowed to romantic and sexual celibacy, Ethan couldn’t see her wasting much time on this kid.
Leo grinned and blazed some finger guns at him. “Exactly.”
Ethan raised a brow. “Your type is girls who aren’t interested in you at all?” And here it was. It was always hard to look at younger, less experienced demigods and not see at least the vague outline of your former self but with Leo? He reminded Ethan of a much dumber him in a way that had nothing to do with the divinity running through them both.
“So you’re drawn to girls you know are out of your league and you just throw bad sitcom attempts and flirty one-liners at them until something else comes up or they leave?” he asked, probing for more data before he could estimate his results.
“Pretty much,” Leo said, picking up a small hammer to bang some indents in the sheet of bronze with a rhythmic chime. “It’s never gonna happen but it’s nice to imagine.”
“You do realise that if the goal is to actually get a girlfriend, your flirting attempts are probably very counterproductive?”
The next strike from the hammer fell with a discordant clang. “Might as well let them know what they’re in for right out of the gate,” he said, focusing intently on regaining his lost rhythm with the hammer.
Ethan fought the urge to cringe. Leo’s self-sabotaging habits could be a number of things but when Ethan had a hunch like this, he was rarely wrong. “Do you like girls?” he asked. “Or do you just like the idea of being in a relationship with one?”
Leo paused and glanced up at him. His brow was so furrowed that his two thin eyebrows became one squiggly line sloping across his forehead. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
With how laid back and in control Leo normally was, it was rather comical seeing him so lost. “It’s like when an idea looks good on paper so you say you like it and want it to happen, but don’t actually take any steps towards that end because deep down you don’t actually want it.”
Leo scoffed and rubbed down a spot on his project but Ethan could see the tension still knotting his shoulders together. “That’s ridiculous. Why wouldn’t I want a girlfriend?”
“Why would you?” Ethan countered. Leo fell silent again. He stopped midway through getting back to work with his hammer poised and suspended midair. Ethan let out a small chuckle. “I know how you feel, kid,” he said. “I remember way back in elementary school whenever the girls wanted to talk about crushes, I never really had one so I just picked the guy I hated the least because I thought I was supposed to.”
“Wait.” Leo blinked at him. “You’re gay?”
Gods, he forgot what it was like to have these talks. Smiling, Ethan shook his head. “People used to know me as a girl,” he explained. “So it was assumed that I’d want to acquire myself a boyfriend.”
Leo still looked confused. “Uh–”
“The point is,” Ethan said before Leo could divert his attention any more, “Sometimes we only want something because we’re led to believe that’s what we’re supposed to want.”
“Like relationships. Romantic ones, sexual ones. Conventional ones.” He shrugged, leaning back on the metal box. “They’re not for everyone.”
Leo shifted in his debris-free circle on the floor so he was facing Ethan more directly. “And you think they’re not for me.” He assessed Ethan with a heavy-lidded gaze and a tight frown.
“It’s not that I think you shouldn’t be in a relationship,” Ethan assured him, holding a hand up in mock surrender. “Nor am I trying to tell you what you are. I just noticed a familiar pattern and wanted to share my thoughts on it.”
“A familiar pattern,” Leo echoed, raising an eyebrow at him.
“Yes,” Ethan said. Trying to ease him into this clearly wasn’t doing much. Probably about time to just be blunt. “I’m aroace and I’m starting to think you might fall somewhere on that spectrum too.”
Leo scrunched his nose up and blinked. “Aroace?”
“Is there an echo in here?”
A pink flush darkened Leo’s face and his cheeks puffed up. “I know, I know,” he grumbled. “I’m just . . . not following very well.”
“Okay, let me pedal back a bit,” Ethan said. “When you say you want to be in a relationship, what does that entail for you?”
Leo’s eyes scanned the floor. He clutched his metal sheet close to him like a child holding a teddy. “What do you mean?”
“What do you want out of a relationship? How do you imagine interacting with your hypothetical partner?”
Leo just shrugged. “We’d, I dunno, hang out and stuff.”
“Okay,” Ethan said. “And how would that differ from your friendships?”
He perked up at that. “Well, in a romantic relationship, I’d be my partner’s priority in a way that wouldn’t be possible in my friendships.”
Ethan kept his cringe from showing on his face. “Is that the only difference you can envision between a romantic relationship and a platonic one?”
“I guess.” Leo held his hands out on either side of him, palms turned out. “What’s it matter?” His voice was squeaky but sharp. He was getting defensive.
“Take a moment to listen to yourself,” Ethan said, making sure to keep his tone soft and light. “Is your desire to be someone’s priority the only reason you keep shoving yourself into relationships that won’t happen?”
Leo’s face became tight and pinched. “So? Everyone wants to be someone’s number one.”
“That may be true,” Ethan said with a solemn nod. “But that doesn’t inherently translate into romance.”
Leo opened his mouth to fumble some response, then closed it, then opened it again. “Aren’t you lonely?” he asked. “Or scared of being lonely?”
Ethan eased himself off the box he was sitting on to join Leo on the floor. “I think everyone has that fear,” he said quietly to him. “Part of me wonders if that’s why everyone keeps trying to push themselves and others into relationships. There’s this underlying anxiety to it. We all get told that marrying someone and growing old with them is the only official happy ending, and we’re all scared of not being able to achieve that. Of withering away in solitude. So people try to get it sorted as fast as possible, even talking about crushes around the elementary school lunch table.” He gave Leo a knowing smile. “Which even bleeds into pestering friends about who they’re going to spend the rest of their lives with. Your life isn’t going to be any less complete without a ring involved.”
Leo stared down at the mess in his lap, his lower lip quivering. “I know, I just–” His tools clanged to the ground as Leo brought his hands up to grab fistfuls of his hair. “Someday all of my friends are going to have someone in their lives that they like more than me and I’ll just be floating around on the periphery of their lives.” His voice broke into heavy static. He sounded almost like Festus after a bad attack on the ship.
Ethan slid up next to him and leaned into his side. “I know,” he murmured under his breath. “That’s the thing that gets you, isn’t it? Watching everyone around you move on to the supposed next level of their lives, leaving you to lag behind.” An old melancholy ache bloomed in his chest, one he was well acquainted with. He let it run its course and burn through him, before dying away on its own and leaving him awash in ashen embers. “But you’re not missing out on anything. Relationships aren’t a hierarchy. Friendships are no less important than families or romantic and sexual relationships.”
Leo glanced up at him with bright, misty eyes. “You don’t really believe that, do you?”
“I do,” he said with a resolute firmness he’d more than earned. “Trust me. I wasted years of my life scavenging for my mother’s love and letting her use me to her own ends. I thought I owed it to her because we were related, and you know what dragged me kicking and screaming out of that mindset?” He looked down at Leo, who gave a minuscule shrug. “It wasn’t a partner or a relative or someone I was romantically obsessed with. It was a handful of friendly acquaintances I barely gave half a shit about and I owe them my life for that.”
At his side, Leo was shaking. Glistening tears welled up in his eyes and he took deep, shuddering breaths to keep them from falling. “I–” His voice strained and broke. “I don’t–”
“It’s okay.” Ethan threw his arm around Leo’s shoulder and squeezed him tight. “You don’t have to figure it out tonight. Or tomorrow night, or next year or next decade. You have all the time in the world.”
Leo sniffled, pressing the heel of his palm to his eyes to brush away the tears. “Do I?” he managed, forcing the words out of his pained chest.
“I’ll make sure you do,” Ethan said. He wasn’t very good at keeping promises, but for this, he would damn sure he did.
