True Blue ✷ Leo Valdez.

05: Blaire Is Self Absorbed.

     
BLAIRE SULLIVAN WAS not afraid of heights, she wasn't afraid of robotic mammals who somehow wielded the ability to fly, nor was she afraid of the trio of strange teenagers she'd been lumped on this stupid quest with. However, she was quite afraid of her current predicament. Not the fact she was surely flying into impending doom, (although that factor did subconsciously stir up a funnel of dread within her), but the fact that she was pressed nearly flush against Leo Valdez, the odd son of Hephaestus who hallucinated old ladies and talked at lightning speed.

  Blaire sat directly behind Leo, her joints stiff as to keep herself rooted in place and as far away from Leo as she could get on the scarce space of the dragon's hide. Every now and then she would unconsciously lean away from Leo and the strange aroma of...tobasco sauce...(?) that surrounded him. When she did that though, she was scarily close to Piper, the newfound daughter of Aphrodite. So really, Blaire, being completely opposed to physical touch and proximity, just could not win.

    As the quartet flew over the cloudy Connecticut sky, soaring over snowy rooftops, Blaire contemplated throwing herself from the dragon and saving herself the trouble of spending a dozen more hours sandwiched between Piper and Leo.

  "Cool, right?" Leo grinned back at his friends and Blaire, accidentally leaning further into the aforementioned daughter of Hecate as he did so.

Leo, somehow, emmited a bout of warmth that felt entirely misplaced at such a high longitude, the chill of the December winds had absolutey nothing on the boy. And they had nothing on Blaire either for she was sitting so close to the boy, his artificial heat warmed her too. It seeped through the folds of her thick winter coat and graced her bear frozen joints. She hated it.

  Blaire dug her fingernails into the palm of her hand, leaving crescent-like indents on the flesh. She shot Leo a steely warning glare, advising him to stray further away from her, catching a glimpse of his proud smile as she did so.

  Leo was odd, and not only because of the previously listed reasons concerning his hyperactive speaking pace and his tendency to hallucinate elderly women but for reasons rooted much deeper than that. For example;  Leo seemed to hold an infinite amount of enthusiasm and joy within his scrawny frame. He managed to plaster on an almost maniac smile while flying towards mythological beings who had a personal vendetta against him.

Though his life was quite literally unfurling at the seams, he seemed elated to be alive and able to fly on Festus despite the circumstances.

   And when he smiled, all of his teeth were on display. The emote lit up his entire face, coloring it with a type of joy Blaire had never even imagined experiencing. Even his eyes seemed to glow with an obscene amount of grattitude and mental wealth.

  He was weird.

  "What if we get spotted?" Piper asked wearily from behind Blaire.

  "The mist," Jason cut in. "It keeps mortals from seeing magic things. If they spot us they'll probably mistake us for a small plane or something."

  Piper looked back at Jason, "You sure about that?"

  "No," Jason said, and then the two shared an odd sort of silence brimming with akward electricity.

   "We're making good time," Jason told the crew, apparently fed up with the silence. "Probably be there by tonight."

  "Where are we heading?" Piper sucked in a breath.

  Blaire didn't have to be a daughter of Aphrodite to sense the obvious tension.

  "To find the God of the north wind. And chase some storm spirits."