madness and ecstasy // leo valdez

-I can't even think of a funny chapter title for this [good luck]-

Leo spent the night wrestling with a forty-foot-tall Athena and his nightmares.

Ever since they'd brought the statue aboard, Leo had been obsessed with figuring out how it worked, anything to distract him from his own head. He was sure it had primo powers. There had to be a secret switch or a pressure plate or something, anything that could help them.

He was supposed to be sleeping, only he had given up that idea the night they left Rome, those twelve hours had been spent in the engine room, the only fire proof place on the ship. He couldn't sleep in his own bed, that felt wrong, it was cold and empty, nothing on the walls or the bookshelves. Just flammable wooden surroundings. 

Teqi's room was even worse.

Instead, He spent hours crawling over the statue, which took up most of the lower deck. Athena's feet stuck into sick bay, so you had to squeeze past her ivory toes if you wanted some Panadol or Oreos [he still didn't know who had put them there]. Her body ran the length of the port corridor, her outstretched hand jutting into the engine room, offering the life-sized figure of Nike that stood in her palm, like, here, have some Victory! Athena's serene face took up most of the pegasus stables, which were fortunately unoccupied.

The statue was wedged tight in the corridor, so Leo had to climb over the top and wriggle under her limbs, searching for levers and buttons. As usual, he found nothing.

He'd done some research on the statue. He knew it was made from a hollow wooden frame covered in ivory and gold, which explained why it was so light. It was in pretty good shape, considering it was more than two thousand years old, had been pillaged from Athens, toted to Rome, and secretly stored in a spider's cavern for most of the past two millennia. Magic must've kept it intact, Leo figured, combined with really good craftsmanship.

Annabeth had said...well, he tried not to think about Annabeth, because then he would think about the fact she wasn't here, and Percy wasn't here, and Teqi wasn't here, and then he would have to go back to the engine room. 

 Leo knew it was his fault. 

He should have gotten everyone safely on board the Argo II before he started securing the statue. He should have realised the cavern floor was unstable. And he definitely shouldn't have opened that fucking fortune cookie. Still, moping around wasn't going to get any of them back. Leo knew that, because if it did, he would be asleep in Teqi's arms right now.

He gulped and shook his head, but he was already imagining her and there was no way to stop the thoughts crashing in now. Her purple eyes that made his stomach flip, the way he knew when she was coming a few hallways away because of her chunky shoes, the patch of twisted skin on her cheek from the lasers, because she had chosen to stay with him until the end instead of save herself. Those stupid Marvel references she slipped into every conversation, even though nobody else understood them. How she ran her fingers through his hair to make it stick up all spiky, and never complained about him being too annoying.

Leo turned away from the statue and wobbled, pretending he wasn't picturing the way she would step in front of him and Piper and Jason without a second thought, hands out ready to protect them, no matter what.

He managed to get to the engine room, locking the door behind him, hands pressed against the cold fireproof metal that was surrounding him. That coloured neon drill she stole from Medea's mall just because he liked it. Sitting in the empty bathtub on New Year's Eve, when she tattooed those three words in morse code to the inside of his wrist, pausing after each dash or dot to make sure it didn't hurt too much.