[3] 𝐋𝐎𝐕𝐄𝐑𝐁𝐎𝐘𝐒 ― p.jackson, l.valdez

003.

「003. val misses his girlfriend (and wants to make out with her)」

VALENTINO GARCIA misses his girlfriend (and wants to make out with her).

.... let me explain.

see, val had in fact agreed to do this (with all his own free will and that bullshit). but he'd agreed to a certain level. he'd agreed to saving camp, to travelling with nico and reyna and a homicidal satyr back to camp with moderate levels of shadow travel. he'd agreed to the idea of having a safe journey, of them occasionally fighting monsters. he'd agreed to danger, because that's what comes with three demigods and a satyr, that's just the icky bonus that is stuck on.

he had not, however, agreed to whatever the fuck this was.

see, his first view of southern italy was from five thousand feet in the air. to you, dear reader, this may sound exotic, lovely, adventurous, a thrilling trip.

oh, hold up-

did he forget to mention he was dive-bombing into a fucking volcano?

oh, he didn't?

sorry about that.

the poor and unfortunate thing val had not realised when he had agreed to this quest of sorts was the fact that there was a variable he hadn't taken into account properly. and that variable was nico di angelo. he had not taken into the account that nico didn't know his limits, that he didn't know when he should stop. selfishly, val had assumed nico was 'normal', and that he'd know when to stop and when he should rest.

but the guy just kept pushing himself more and more to the breaking point, so much so that val felt like he needed to put some sort of intervention up where he and reyna acted as therapists and coach hedge supplied them (unwillingly) with a calm herbal tea with the ingredients being collected by foraging.

it was a shame these things couldn't really happen when you might fall to your doom via sky-diving into a volcano.

to the west, along the crescent of the gulf of naples, the lights of sleeping cities glittered in the predawn gloom. a thousand feet below her, a half-mile-wide caldera yawned at the top of a mountain, white steam pluming from the centre. what didn't help with any of this was the disorientation val felt. shadow travel left him generally groggy and nauseous, as if he'd been slammed into ice cold water and then shoved into a boiling hot bath.

too many things were happening at the same time.

"nico!" yelled reyna, being the first to regian a sense of what the literal fuck was going on.

"pan's pipes!" yelped gleeson hedge.

"what the fuck is going on!" was the only thing val could actually manage to get out- in english, that is. the rest of it was blurred spanish and french- his mind was still not really... into the mode of a second language yet. "hijo de puta-! qu'est-ce que-? make it stop!"

and suddenly he was being grabbed by the back of his shirt by reyna as they continued to plummet towards the volcano as their largest piece of luggage – the forty-foot-tall athena parthenos – trailed after them, leashed to a harness on nico's back like a very ineffective parachute.

"that's vesuvius below us!" reyna shouted over the wind. ""fuck- look nico, teleport us out of here!"

nico, apparently still awake enough to have a strong comeback-game, shrieked back, "if i could do you not think i'd have done it already?!"