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Jason’s chest was on fire and he couldn’t breathe. Despite his rapidly fading consciousness, he could diagnose himself just fine. Pierced lung. The second strike went right through his heart, which at least meant things went black quickly after that.
Jason wasn’t alarmed that the next thing he felt was movement beneath his feet. He’d always known that Charon would one day take him across the Styx. From the moment he’d heard Herophile’s prophecy, he’d known that it was his time.
Jason thought faintly that he wouldn’t see Leo again for many, many years. He’d made peace with that fact at the beginning of this quest, and yet it still hurt. He was glad he’d gotten to have Piper beside him for this, but he felt guilty for all the pain he had caused her by dying. At least she’d have Leo back. At least she wouldn’t be alone with it.
Jason kept his eyes closed. His chest still hurt and he felt a little nauseous. Was that normal? He wasn’t sure. He’d never died before—not properly, at least.
The ride felt bumpy in a way that reminded him more of a bus ride than a boat trip, but that didn’t really alarm Jason. Percy and Annabeth had said part of their journey down had been on an elevator. A bus ride seemed no weirder than that
Except… shouldn’t Charon have asked him for payment? And why did it feel like someone was holding his hand?
“Jason, you okay?”
He startled at the familiar voice. “Piper?”
“Yeah? Who else would I be?” she sounded vaguely amused.
Jason finally opened his eyes, then.
He was sitting on a bus.
More specifically: he was sitting in the backseat of a bus, and Piper was sitting next to him, holding his hand.
“Where am I?” he asked, and now he was alarmed. “What happened?”
His first thought was that maybe Piper had died, too, but it didn’t feel like they were in the Underworld. Could Piper even have touched him if they’d both been shades?
“Field trip to the Grand Canyon,” Piper told him, voice tinged with concern. She reached up to cup his cheek in a way she hadn’t done since before they’d broken up. “Did you have a bad dream?”
“I died,” Jason choked out, heart hammering in his still-aching chest.
“I dunno. You seem pretty alive to me,” another voice chimed in, and Jason promptly felt like all the air had been sucked out of the bus. Leo—his Leo, who Jason hadn’t seen since he’d set the sky on fire almost eight months ago—was sitting in the row in front of them, alive and well, grinning like he didn’t have a care in the world.
Jason paid zero attention to the fact that the bus was still driving or that he was going to look like a crazy person for doing this. He all but flew off his seat, squeezed himself into the row next to Leo and held him so tightly that Leo let out a wheeze.
“I missed you so much.”
“Yeah, being separated by one whole row of bus seats all morning has truly been dire,” Leo said dryly, but then he looked Jason over and all the amusement vanished from his expression. “Dude, you look awful. I thought getting carsick was supposed to be my thing.”
Jason wasn’t sure when he’d started trembling, but he couldn’t seem to stop. He barely managed not to burst into tears.
“I don’t understand what’s happening to me,” he croaked, and Leo’s arms wrapped tightly around him, then. He was so, so warm. Jason wept quietly into his shoulder.
Piper had said they were on a field trip to the Grand Canyon. That was the day Jason had met Leo and Piper. But it couldn’t have been his life flashing before his eyes. This wasn’t how it had happened.
“Pipes, can you ask Hedge how much farther it is? I think Jase needs some air,” Leo asked, gently rubbing circles onto Jason’s back.
“On it.” Jason felt his hair being ruffled, then heard steps as Piper presumably made her way to the front.
No yelling at Hedge through the bus this time.
“Rough day, hm?” Leo asked him, nothing but sympathy in his voice now. “You haven’t had a nightmare this bad in weeks.”
Jason kind of realized what was happening here—not why he was back on this bus, exactly, but why Leo was acting the way he did. It was the Mist gently adjusting his memories. Making sure he not only knew Jason, but that Jason’s sudden breakdown on the bus made at least a modicum of sense to Leo.
It was more than that, though. Jason knew Leo, even if this version of Leo didn’t truly know him. He knew that Leo had trouble sleeping all the time because of what had happened to his mom. Of course his first instinct was to comfort Jason after what he assumed had been a nightmare, even if he didn’t fully understand the situation.
How in the world was Jason supposed to explain this? How could he be around Leo and Piper, knowing the things he did before they were even remotely ready to tell him about them?
“I’m sorry,” he said, expressing a million things that this Leo couldn’t understand yet. He could barely even look at his best friend without thinking about all the ways in which he’d failed his own version of Leo.
“Dude, we’ve talked about this. I’m not even sure what you’re apologizing for.”
Except they hadn’t talked about this. Whatever Leo was remembering, it wasn’t real.
Jason wondered if this was how Reyna had felt when she’d looked at him—holding all of their memories to her chest and knowing that he didn’t. Thinking of him as both her best friend and a stranger she had to get to know all over again.
A stranger who hadn’t even tried to get in contact with her for months because he hadn’t known where to start.
His heart ached.
“Hedge said five more minutes,” Piper reported back. “He also gave me a really weird look when I mentioned Jason.”
“Probably still mad about the prank we pulled on him last week,” Leo decided, squeezing Jason’s shoulders, because unlike Coach Hedge, he didn’t know Jason had just appeared on this field trip a few minutes ago. “Just breathe, okay? I know the air in here is shit, but I’ve opened the window and we’ll be out in a sec. We’ll find you a place to sit down, then. Try not to throw up on me in the meantime.”
“I won’t,” Jason promised.
He knew he wouldn’t get to sit down and properly relax. Not under these circumstances. Not when Hedge was about to corner him and Dylan and the other storm spirits were about to attack.
Not when Jason needed to be ready for a fight or Leo would get kidnapped by a ventus and Piper would fall to her death.
No pressure.
Things… didn’t go exactly the way they were supposed to. Considering Jason hadn’t made any claims that he had no idea who Leo and Piper were, they made no attempts to give him a run-down on things he already knew.
Jason wasn’t sure if that was bad. In most of the media Leo had made him watch, changing things when you were time traveling was usually a bad idea, but considering it was a consequence of something he hadn’t done, he wasn’t sure what to do about it. Besides, it wasn’t like he remembered the conversations they’d had at the time word for word. He’d been a little too busy being confused and terrified at the time to memorize a script.
Hedge still looked at Jason suspiciously, but he allowed Leo and Piper to stay outside with him so he could get some air. Piper made him take a few gulps of water from her bottle, and strangely enough, nobody joked about them sharing spit. Wasn’t she supposed to think they were dating? She hadn’t tried to hold his hand since they’d gotten off the bus.
“Better now, I think,” Jason lied after a while. His chest still felt weird, but the pain was no longer searing, and he was starting to get over the shock of this situation. He tried to tell himself he’d been through weirder shit in his time as a demigod, even if he wasn’t entirely sure that was accurate.
At least he had his memories. At least he was alive. At least he had some version of Leo and Piper around him, even if they weren’t his. Things could have been so much worse.
“You’re still really pale,” Piper told him. “Are you sure you’re alright?”
Jason nodded. “I’m fine. Let’s catch up with the others.”
He was more okay than he’d been for the last few months, separated from Leo and Piper and not sure who he was supposed to be. He was also way better than he’d been half an hour ago, when a Roman Emperor had run a spear through his chest.
The Piper he’d known—the one who had known him—would have raised an eyebrow at him and told him his bar for what was considered ‘okay’ was concerningly low.
This one gave him a mildly skeptical look but offered him a hand up.
Once they got inside, Dylan tried to do his spiel of partnering up with Piper.
Jason stopped in his tracks. If he was already changed things…
“No. You’re with me,” he decided, dragging Dylan away from Piper and Leo by the arm.
At least he knew what was going on this time. At least he could protect them.
They got back to the group to find Hedge cursing at his megaphone, so Leo messing with it evidently hadn’t changed.
Neither had Isabel and friends being assholes to Piper. Jason was pretty sure Piper hadn’t originally managed to clock Isabel before Hedge yelled at them to knock it off, but in the face of everything else, that seemed like a relatively minor change.
Strangely enough, Leo gave her an almost chiding look. Jason couldn’t hear what they were saying, though. Not with how far he’d dragged Dylan away from them.
Jason played Dylan’s game of them totally being classmates and Dylan totally being annoyed Jason had dragged him away from Piper for a while, though he spent most of that time longingly watching Leo and Piper. Leo was building his little pipe cleaner helicopter—business as usual—but he kept leaning over to Piper and whispering to her. They both glanced over in Jason’s direction several times.
He waved at them.
He longed to be back with his friends—to have Leo repeat stupid jokes at him that Jason had heard a million times by now and watch Piper fondly roll her eyes and hit his shoulder in retaliation.
But this was the best way he could think of to keep them safe.
If he could at least keep Leo and Piper from being knocked into the Grand Canyon, that would be worth something. Jason could figure out where to go from there.
From the way the storm picked up—much faster than Jason remembered—Dylan was clearly losing his patience. He apparently didn’t like being manhandled by Jason any more now than his storm form had liked it when he’d dragged him along into the ocean.
“My mistress said someone special was coming. That she’d reward me greatly for your death. But she didn’t mention you’d be this annoying,” he hissed. His arm lost its form and went right through Jason’s grip. “Who even are you?”
“Jason Grace,” Jason said through gritted teeth. “I’d say it’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance, but I’m told I’m kind of a terrible liar.”
He went into a fighting stance, reaching into his pocket for the coin he knew had been there at the time of this incident.
Dylan’s eyes went wide. “You’ve been trained.”
“I’m gonna tell you how this goes,” Jason said, his voice almost a growl. “You’re gonna try to blast me with lightning. It’s not going to have an effect on me. Save yourself the effort and just let me kill you, why don’t you?” he suggested.
Sharing this information maybe wasn’t his smartest move, but Jason was unnerved. At the other end of the bridge, Piper, Leo and Hedge were ushering the mortal kids inside. The other two storm spirits would be with them any second now, and except for Hedge, none of them had a weapon. Crap.
Jason reached into his pocket for his coin, and, to his displeasure, it decided to go spear form on him.
Great. Now he could re-impale himself if he wanted to.
He lunged at Dylan, who backed away in smoke-form, hissing when the spear went through one of his wings.
But he’d been preparing his own attack, too.
“Well, if I can’t hurt you, I’m just gonna fry one of your little friends,” he said with a malicious grin.
He sent a blast of electricity Leo’s way.
Jason moved like lightning, using his spear like a lightning rod. The lightning itself wasn’t a problem, but the spear grew so hot that he dropped it with a yelp.
“Not as resistant to lightning as you hoped?” Dylan grinned smugly. “Why don’t we test your resistance to falling to your death while we’re at it?”
He sent Jason over the railing of the bridge in a funnel cloud.
Someone screamed—Leo or Piper, probably.
It took Jason a moment longer than he expected to slow his fall. His brain knew ways of controlling the winds that his body hadn’t learned yet, and he spent a moment wrestling for balance, but then he was floating.
“Pretty resistant to falling to my death, too,” Jason concluded with a grin.
He shot towards the other end of the skywalk.
Like he’d feared, the two remaining venti had cornered Leo and Piper the second they’d gotten everyone else inside. Luckily, one of them had already been dusted—courtesy of, presumably, Piper, who was holding Hedge’s baseball bat in an iron grip.
The satyr himself was halfway across the bridge. He scowled up at Jason. “Kid, you could have told me you could fly. I wouldn’t have bothered trying to rescue you if you had.”
Jason rolled his eyes, biting back the remark that he’d been a little busy keeping the storm spirit that Hedge had failed to recognize at bay. He didn’t dislike Hedge, necessarily, but something about him had seriously irritated Jason those first few months, and these feelings were back with a vengeance right now.
He had bigger problems. Namely: the fact that a ventus was dragging Leo upwards.
Jason didn’t have his spear anymore, but throwing it with Leo so close to the ventus would have been too risky, anyway. He just needed a few more seconds to get to them. Seconds that he didn’t have.
Before he could do much of anything, Piper threw herself at Leo and the monster with a scream. All three of them went sprawling.
Just before Jason reached them, the ventus let loose a torrent that knocked them all back. Jason moved to catch Piper, barely preventing her from going over the railing.
“You okay?”
She nodded, then moved to check on Leo. He’d landed on the ground, but he was already starting to get back up. He appeared to be winded but mostly unhurt.
Good. That was good.
Jason was there before the ventus could try to return to its tornado-esque legs. Since he was a little short of a weapon right now, he just sort of punched it—which may have worked with Krios, but wasn’t especially effective when it came to a being made of wind. Neither was shooting electricity back at it.
In the end, Leo had to finish it off with the borrowed baseball bat.
“Two done, one to go.” Jason almost smiled.
This was going better than he’d hoped.
“Jason, what the fuck?” Leo asked, looking at him with wide eyes.
“I’ll explain later,” Jason promised, turning back towards Hedge and Dylan.
“The mistress calls me back. I guess I’m taking this one,” Dylan said, scowling as he made a grab for the satyr.
Hedge kicked and punched, but for a guy whose body was made up entirely of wind, Dylan seemed to have a surprisingly strong grip when he wanted to.
This was where Jason made the mistake of getting cocky.
“Oh no, you don’t.”
He shot after them.
Things had been going well so far. Neither Leo nor Piper had taken a tumble into the Grand Canyon and no one was hurt. Besides, Dylan was injured from their earlier fight. He wasn’t rising as fast as he could have been.
Most of what Jason had done so far had been minor changes. But if he could prevent Hedge from being captured by Medea… maybe he could take that as proof that he wasn’t wasting this chance he’d been given. That he could use the knowledge he wasn’t supposed to have to change something meaningful.
Dylan obviously wasn’t pleased with this idea.
The winds up here weren’t Jason’s to control. His mind remembered having the ability to wrangle the storm spirits, but this body hadn’t been trained for it yet.
He tried and tried and tried, almost reaching them, but then the storm spat him back out with a vengeance—so abruptly that Jason barely managed to slow his fall. He came down on the bridge hard, his head knocking into the railing.
The pain was immediate and blinding. Stars danced along his vision, and the back of his head felt distinctly wet in a way that made him pretty sure he was bleeding. That probably wasn’t good.
“No, no, no, no, no. Jason, can you hear me?” Leo sounded absolutely distraught. Jason thought he felt a hand in his hair, but his senses were growing too numb for him to say for sure. “Why did you do that? You weren’t supposed to be doing that!”
He was too blurry for Jason to make out very much, but he could tell from the sound that Leo was sobbing.
Jason wanted to answer—to tell him that he was okay—but his voice wasn’t working. Everything hurt.
“Jason? Jason, look at me. Don’t you dare black out on me right now,” Piper’s voice was infused with charmspeak. “Help’s gonna be here soon. You’re going to be okay.”
It sounded more like a command than a reassurance.
Jason blacked out regardless.
Leo wanted to scream, but instead, he just sat there, sobbing into Piper’s chest.
It felt unfair to make her comfort him right now—Leo wasn’t the one who’d had to watch Jason die over and over again. But Jason was way too still, bleeding heavily from a wound at the back of his head, and Leo was losing it.
“This is the first time we’ve managed to change anything, and we’ve only managed to get Jason killed sooner,” he choked out. He held one of Jason’s hands firmly in his own.
He didn’t have his tool belt for medical supplies, or any other way to staunch the bleeding. Even if he’d had one, he was too worried he would make things worse by moving Jason’s head.
“He’s breathing. Annabeth is going to be here any second now. Everything is going to be okay,” Piper told him, but she was trembling as she held him.
“I don’t get what happened. He’s never gone off-script like this before.”
In all the previous loops, that had been the root of the issue. Jason was too stubborn. Too set in his ways. No amount of gentle coaxing or desperate begging on Piper’s part had gotten him to leave Apollo to figure out his stupid quest on his own.
That was why, ultimately, they’d decided to try going back to an earlier point in time. To try and instill a bit of basic self-preservation instinct in Jason long-term in hopes of changing things that way. (To at least have some more time with him, if it didn’t work. To maybe live in this one year they’d had together forever if they couldn’t save him, just so they wouldn’t have to deal with the reality of losing him.)
But Leo had failed to account for the Mist memories. Sending them back to a point in time when he and Piper had just gotten their memories overwritten to convince them that Jason had always been a part of their class had fucked with them so much that neither Leo nor Piper had actually remembered what they were here for. They might have lived out the next two years exactly the way they’d already happened and not even realized it.
Except Jason had started to deviate more and more from what he was supposed to be doing. Good news: the cognitive dissonance of that had allowed them to shake off the Mist memories. Bad news: Jason was really, really hurt.
“I don’t know either.” Piper hugged him tightly. “But we’ll figure it out, okay? Together.”
Annabeth didn’t even have it in her to be mad at them under these circumstances. Any question she had about Percy got temporarily shelved when she realized just how badly Jason needed help.
Leo told her “he was trying to protect us,” in a quiet, strangled voice, and she gave them a grim nod, immediately moving to drizzle some nectar into Jason’s mouth and bandaging his head wound.
“He’s going to be alright,” she concluded after a few very bad moments, instructing Butch to pick him up.
Jason looked like a rag doll in his arms.
Leo went to collect the weapon Jason had dropped, holding it as tightly as he could in his shaking hands. He and Piper spent as much of their flight to camp holding each other as they did trying not to fall off the chariot without Jason to hold off the wind spirits.
They spent most of their first afternoon at camp sitting in the infirmary with Jason, waving off anyone who tried to offer them tours or basic information on Greek mythology.
They didn’t need those things. They’d already gotten both of them years ago. They just needed to be sure Jason was really going to be okay.
Even Chiron gave them time, given what had happened. The only person who wasn’t so easily dismissed was Annabeth, which Leo didn’t really blame her for. She’d come to the Grand Canyon looking for Percy, and instead of her boyfriend or any sort of answers, she had found two distraught kids and a third one in dire need of help from the Apollo cabin. Jason hadn’t even lost any shoes in this universe (neither Piper nor Leo had had the presence of mind to untie one considering how preoccupied they’d been with Jason almost dying again), which meant Hera’s prophecy for Annabeth was even more stupidly nonsensical than it had been originally.
“One of you has to know something. She has to have sent me to collect you for a reason,” she insisted.
Piper and Leo exchanged a look, trying to decide just how much they could tell her without completely fucking up the universe.
Piper finally settled on, “I can’t tell you much, but I can promise you that he’s okay, and that you will see him again. I’ve seen it in a vision.”
Some of the tension went out of Annabeth’s shoulders at that.
It was late afternoon by the time Jason woke up. He looked much better than he had on the bridge—whatever Will had done when he’d spent thirty minutes fussing over Jason earlier had obviously helped—but he still didn’t look good.
He was incredibly green around the gills, and pretty much the first thing he did after waking was lean over and throw up into the bucket Will had left for him.
Piper gently rubbed his back. “Let it out. It sucks now, but you’re gonna feel better afterwards.”
Jason whimpered quietly, which wasn’t at all like him.
“Sorry,” he finally said after he’d gotten it all out of his system. He ducked his head. “Ow.”
“Don’t apologize for throwing up. That’s stupid,” Piper said, giving him a concerned look. “How are you feeling?”
“Dizzy. My head hurts,” Jason muttered. “You guys are really blurry.”
“Yeah, and you are really concussed,” Leo told him, gently lowering him back down onto the mattress. “You can’t do shit like that, Jase. One of these days, you’re going to get yourself killed.”
“I did,” Jason said, his voice really quiet.
Piper and Leo exchanged a look, both of their eyes going wide. Jason had said something like that back on the bus, too, but they’d both been too lost in their Mist brain fog for it to really register.
“What do you mean, you did?” Piper asked. Her voice was trembling.
“I got a spear through my chest. You were there. Leo wasn’t. I wasn’t ever going to see Leo again.” He was tearing up.
“You remember?” Piper’s lip was wobbling.
It seemed like an impossible thought—that this Jason was theirs, rather than that version of him from two years ago who’d had no idea who they were. But Leo remembered being clung to on the bus like that was the only way Jason could think to save himself from drowning. He thought of Jason dragging Dylan away from them and moving to keep him and Piper safe on the bridge—not just in the instinctive way of a hero trying to protect other people, but like he knew what was coming and was determined not to let it happen.
“I-” Jason stared at them in disbelief. “It’s not just me?”
“Jason?” Leo’s eyes filled with tears. “Dude, you weren’t supposed to get your first concussion until Detroit. Why is that the thing you decided to get a head start on?”
“And how is it worse than the one you got from being hit by a brick? This is ridiculous,” Piper added.
“I don’t know. This is so stupid,” Jason agreed, sniffling. His whole body sagged with relief.
They were all crying now, huddled together by Jason’s infirmary cot.
Hugging was probably a little ill-advised, medically speaking—concussion aside, Jason had several bruised ribs from his fall that Will had told them would need a few more hours to heal, even with the nectar and ambrosia. They did it anyway. For a long, long while, they just sat there, curled up to each other. After everything they’d been through to get here, neither of them was even a little bit willing to separate.
Leo had no idea what would happen now. They’d already severely fucked up this timeline—Piper hadn’t met Rachel in Hera’s cabin and Jason didn’t look like he’d be in any state to attend the campfire, never mind leave the next morning. Could they skip a few of their monster encounters now that they knew where they were going? Could they keep Festus if they never crashed into Midas’ yard?
Or would trying to change things more than they already had have wider, hugely unpredictable consequences that would screw everyone over and cause the world to end?
Leo found that he wasn’t sure he cared at the moment. They had Jason back. They hadn’t saved him in the way they wanted to—not yet—and he was a lot more concussed than they would have liked him to be, but this was their Jason, and they both got to hold him again. That was more than they’d ever managed before.
For now, they were together. They could still figure out any global disasters they may or may not be causing tomorrow.