True Blue ✷ Leo Valdez.

03: Cursed Kin Of Magic?

"THE BLONDE IS CUTE," Marlowe Mason's voice was one of the many that rung over the commotion of the dining pavilion, driving an exasperated Blaire to the very brink of sanity.

It had been merely five minutes since dinner began, yet Blaire was already teetering on the thin line between sane...and insane. The voices of her peers, overlapping each other at a rapid pace, weaseld their way into the most personal crevices of her brain, distorting the horrid memories she couldn't help but ponder upon.

Blaire's chin was resting upon the palm of her hand, while her elbow was pressed flush against the picnic table, no doubt plank-shaped indents were evident on her flesh. Her dark, soil-colored-eyes were trained upon the very unappetizing meatloaf that occupied the porcelain surface of her plate. Yet, the food below her was not what danced within her vision. Instead, the sight of her own bruised knuckles, metaphorically and literally stained with the blood of Olivia Kingsley, were the victim of her cruel glower.

Blaire saw the curl of her fists, her kuckles wrapped taut around the leather hilt of a blood soaked dagger. The slight, guilty and exhausted tremble of her hands, as her joints grew tired of fighting for a cause she hardly believed in. She saw concrete proof that she was a cold blooded murderer. She saw the curse that tarnished her youth.

"Blaireee," Marlowe snapped her brightly painted fingers infront of her aforementioned sisters face, pulling her from the terrible vortex of dark thoughts she'd been lost in. "Did you hear me?"

Blaire did not hear her, she was too busy subliminally warding off the further truama ridden flashbacks that begged to taunt her. So, she didn't try to pretend she heard the younger demigod, she only shook her head, before letting it hang low.

Meatloaf: that's all she was capable of spotting within the confines of her perephial. Not her blood soaked hands, not Olivia's dagger-wounded corpse, not Sunny's limp body. Just meatloaf.

"I said that the new blonde boy is cute," Marlowe informed Blaire, twirling her fork around in a mound of what seemed to be... green beans? "Too bad you couldn't give him a tour."

   Blaire furrowed her eyebrows, awed that those around her had such minisule struggles. If only she worried about touring Leo instead of his cute friend.

"Instead you were lumped with the Hephaestus kid," Marlowe cringed, recalling the moment her sister was instructed to help acquaint him with the camp, "How'd that go, anyway?"

Blaire shrugged, the canvas material of her denim jacket scratched the dimpled surface of her chin, her heart not truly in her actions. "Fine."

Marlowe wasn't finished with the impossibly long course of questions she'd prepared. "What's his name? Where'd he come from?"

"Leo," Blaire told the girl simply.

  Marlowe raised an eyebrow, "His name is Leo? Or did he come from somewhere called Leo?"

  "His name," Blaire told her sister, pushing her untouched plate away from herself, her appetite non-exsistent as always.

  "He could be cute," Marlowe told the girl, glancing over her shoulder at the Hephaestus table, "If only he shed the steampunk-esque-look. And did something with his hair."

Blaire narrowed her eyes and bit back the terrible urge to say, maybe if you're into overly-entergetic losers who've nothing better to do than pry into the personal details of a strangers life, he'd be just oh so cute.

   "He's looking over here, B," Marlowe snapped her gaze from the table of blacksmiths to her sister in a matter of mere seconds, her cheeks stained with a near hot-pink hue, "He caught me looking! I'm so embarrassed."