LABYRINTH ↬ leo valdez x reader, book three

1. SOLDIER, POET, KING

The last thing I wanted to see when coming to get my boyfriend to socialize was his waist downwards sticking out from the wall.

"Leo! We need you." Piper called. She glanced my way at the sight of just his backside and snorted. I grimaced.
"Talk to the pants, Piper! 'Cause the hands are busy!"
"I am not talking to the pants." I groaned. A large smacking sound came as I spoke, indicating Leo wasn't aware of my presence.
"Hey Y/N!" He squeaked.
"Meeting in the mess hall. We're almost at Olympia." Piper yawned.

"Yeah, fine. I'll be there in a sec."
"What are you doing, anyway? You've been poking around inside the hull for days." I asked.
"Routine maintenance."
Piper curled her lip and gave me a headshake. I sighed as quietly as I could manage.
"Leo–"
"Hey Y/N, since you're my girlfriend and all of that, do me a favor. I got this itch right below my–"
"We're leaving!" I yelled, blocking my ears.

Piper chortled and wrapped an arm across my shoulders, continuing to whisper to me.
"Girlfriend?" She hummed.
"I specifically told him that he was ahead of himself."
She swatted me and pouted. "Ugh, you're ruining my Aphrodite tingles."
"Excuse me?"

"There's this feeling I get around people. I just know." I tilt my head away from her and knit my brows. She pats my shoulder, her palm still laying on it. "Hazel and Frank, Percy and Annabeth, Y/N and Leo especially. Mom tells me these things."
Deja vu punches me right in the gut. Resisting the urge to double over, I nod.
"My best friend, Valentina, told me the exact same thing ages ago."
"You were on her radar way before you were on mine?" She whined. "Whatever, you guys are my OTP. No arguments, Hazel and Annabeth both agree."
"Annabeth is in on this too?"
"Mhm. And she's the daughter of Athena, so she's–"
"Always right." I mumbled incoherently.

We beat Leo to the mess hall by a landslide.
Eventually, he appeared stood in the doorway, watching all of us intricately. When our eyes meet, his twinkle with a hint of something undetectable. His chocolate brown irises zoomed around, occasionally meeting mine as he finished his observing. I had extra fries on my plate ready for him to take my food, despite his habit of eating too much of a variety that he got sick of the unique palette and headed straight for my plate. He seemed fixated on Percy's stack of blue pancakes while Annabeth chided him for pouring on too much syrup.

"You're drowning them!" she complained.
"Hey, I'm a Poseidon kid," he said. "I can't drown. And neither can my pancakes."
To their left, Frank and Hazel used their cereal bowls to flatten out a map of Greece. They looked over it, their heads close together. Every once in a while Frank's hand would cover Hazel's, just sweet and natural like they were an old married couple, and Hazel didn't even look flustered, which was real progress for a girl from the 1940s. Until recently, if somebody said gosh darn, she would nearly faint.

At the head of the table, Jason sat uncomfortably with his T-shirt rolled up to his ribcage as Nurse Piper changed his bandages. I was secretly very proud of how she was doing, even though it wasn't at the highest level of expertise.

"Hold still," she said. "I know it hurts."
"It's just cold," he said. Some stupid gladius blade had pierced him all the way through. The entrance wound on his back was an ugly shade of purple and it steamed. I knew it wasn't a good sign and even though Piper tried to stay positive as a front, she had told me how worried she was on the way to get Leo. Ambrosia, nectar and mortal medicine could only help so much. A deep cut from Celestial bronze or Imperial gold could literally dissolve a demigod's essence from the inside out. Jason might get better. He claimed he felt better.

"What's up, guys?" Leo strolled into the mess hall. "Aw, yes to brownies!" He grabbed the last one – from a special sea-salt recipe we'd picked up from Aphros the fish centaur at the bottom of the Atlantic – and slumped on the seat next to me, stretching his arm across the back of my chair. The thing is, only Piper and Hazel were directly told about the whole thing. Annabeth (being Annabeth) figured it out easily and confronted me. The three of them have been obsessing over Leo and I since he confessed his love to me and made me his girlfriend. Yes, I said he made me, because even I wasn't confirming the title.