madness and ecstasy // leo valdez

-avalanche'd helicopter above a maximum security prison type shit-

⋆˖⁺‧₊🎧🧨🍷🎬🍓₊‧⁺˖⋆

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"You've earned some motor oil and Tabasco sauce."

Gears clicked and something like an engine rumbled underneath her. Warming her legs. The rest of her was cold and shivery. "I don't... I don't like motor oil. I don't want..."

"You're awake!"

Too perky for her condition. She swallowed a tumbleweed and some sand dunes, reaching up to rub her eyes. Wind whipped her face like it hadn't when she was riding Festus before. When she blinked, she realised why.

Stars and a darkening sky were spread out before her, the dragon's ears twitching a little. He turned his big gold head and looked at her with surprisingly hell hound puppy-like eyes. Sparkling.

Teqi waved at him.

"Aw," Leo laughed. "You're bonding!"

It was then that Teqi realised he was behind her, his arm wrapped around her waist to keep her from slipping out of the sky. She felt a surge of relief she wasn't accustomed to. He was okay. Everyone was okay. They'd escaped Medea's mall and the mismatched dragon-releasing tiles. She was still confused. Why did she care? The reflections were still burned into her corneas.

She turned around slightly, squinting when couldn't see past her windswept hair. Leo spluttered as she pulled it back and out of his face, stuffing it into the back of her hoodie.

They were watching her the way you look at a bucking Pegasus. Apprehension.

"Are you okay?" Piper asked, peeking over Jason's shoulder. "We didn't let the dragons near you, but I don't know, um, what happened to..." She looked to the boys for help they didn't supply.

"I'll be fine," Teqi said quickly, blinking away stars. Not the ones above her, those were pretty at night and filled with Greek heroes, the ones that felt like laser pointers directed at her eyes. "I've just got a headache. It'll go away.

There was no headache, but she couldn't be assed explaining the laser pointers and the ping pong ball bouncing around her skull. She didn't know what else to say to get them to stop looking.

"What did you do to that witch?" Leo asked with a grin. "Her eyes were flashing, she started smoking and everything-"

"I was just helping," she said. It only took a second to feel the sting of shutting him down and being snappy. But then it stretched into five seconds thinking about it, and then it was too late to fix it, so she just turned back to the front.

Everything would be so much easier if she was just laying on cabin 12's bathroom floor and not creaking through the sky towards the rest of a miserable quest.

Creaking being a key aspect. Festus was making some concerning sounds, he flew pretty normally, not that Teqi was an expert or anything, angling himself in the wind, but he was carrying a heavier load now they had the cages.

She didn't want to broach Leo's field, but he was already frowning at his dragon when she glanced back. "We're going to have to put down soon. Couple more hours maybe, to make sure Medea's not following us. I don't think Festus can fly much longer than that."

"Yeah," Piper agreed, yawning. "Coach Hedge probably wants to get out of his canary cage, too. Question is—where are we going?"

"The Bay Area," Leo guessed. "Didn't Medea say something about Oakland?"