madness and ecstasy // leo valdez

- the jungle book -

The sun was going down as they flew north over the Richmond Bridge, and Teqi was surprised at how quickly the day had gone. Her emotions were in overdrive as she tried to push back all the information from the last ten hours. Her brain was making a little list of everything she had to think about, so then she could just focus on the next fight.                                                                                                                                                            

She had a crush on Leo, Percy was at Jason's old camp/home, her mum had been driven insane by a monster and then killed herself, she had defeated a giant, and had some weird mind cloud she could access when she was unconscious. You know, just the usual stuff.

Jason the mother hen had forced a water bottle into her hands, trying to sober up her up for the next few hours. The water was nice, clearing her head a little bit, and organising her thoughts more. It was odd though, her powers side effects were lessening, the impact of draining herself was becoming weaker. Comparing the state she was in from the whole grand canyon episode to the few hours of giggling and something about children's shows she was recovering from right now, it was like she was building immunity. Weird.

Teqi zoned back in from her mental checklist of odd events, she could feel Leo stressing out beside her. He was flicking the switches and buttons naturally, but then he would start panicking again. Piper was talking to Jason about something she couldn't hear from the co-pilots seat, but she looked a bit better than before, with her dad.

"Going okay?" Piper asked nervously, poking her head from between the seats. "Aces," Leo said, obviously faking a cocky smile. "So what's the Wolf House?"

Jason knelt beside Piper, poking his head out behind her. "An abandoned mansion in the Sonoma Valley. A demigod built it—Jack London."

Leo frowned. "He an actor?"

"Writer," Teqi said, excited. "Call of the Wild, White Fang, he protested animal rights as well. He died of illnesses but cause he did drugs as well, people aren't sure if its suicide or not."

"Book nerd."

"Maths geek."

"Yeah," Jason said, interrupting their insults. "He was a son of Mercury—I mean, Hermes. He was an adventurer, travelled the world. He was even a hobo for a while. Then he made a fortune writing. He bought a big ranch in the country and decided to build this huge mansion—the Wolf House."

"Named that 'cause he wrote about wolves?" Leo guessed, ignoring Teqi's number related insults.

"Obviously, he started clubs to stop animal cruelty. Have you read white fang? There's a bit where the wolf is in a dog pit, the fighting one's people bet on, and the guy who ran it was killed because of the cruelty. I thought I got you to watch the movie?"                                                                        Teqi asked her friends, sure that in the multiple movie nights she had directed they had watched white fang, it was one of Tony's favourites and the only reason she knew all this stuff was because of one of his hyper fixations on the subject, she hadn't even read the book. Literally, she couldn't.

She didn't notice the soft smile on Leo's face as he watched her ramble about dog fights, his fingers still flipping switches.

"Partially," Jason said. "But the site, and the reason he wrote about wolves—he was dropping hints about his personal experience, not just liking them. There're a lot of holes in his life story—how he was born, who his dad was, why he wandered around so much —stuff you can only explain if you know he was a demigod."