ONE LAST TIME . . . heroes of olympus

90

BREAKFAST WAS AS domestic as it could be.

Percy was eating a huge stack of blue pancakes ( what was his deal with blue food, seriously? Then again, Kat's obsessed with avocado toast, she couldn't talk ) 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. She wasn't the best with PDA, which was unacceptable to Kat but alright.

At the head of the table, Jason sat uncomfortably with his T-shirt rolled up to his ribcage as Kat changed his bandages.

"Hey, milaya, can you hold still for me?" she asked. "I know it hurts."

"It's just cold," he said.

Even if he tried to hide it, Kat could hear the pain in his voice. That 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. Probably not a good sign.

Kat wished she had been there when Jason, Piper, and Annabeth had gone down to Odysseus's palace. Maybe then she could've prevented Jason's wound, maybe taken it herself. 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. But Kat wasn't so sure. She's literally a human lie detector.

She felt a hand on her shoulder and looked up to see Piper. Kat smiled and accepted a kiss.

"Keep him still for me?" she asked, sticking out her bottom lip. "Gotta live up to my legacy of Apollo-ness."

"Is that even a thing?" Piper let out a laugh, walking over to sit on Jason's lap. "Hey, handsome."

"Hey, you," he said back, smiling at her. "It's not a thing."

Kat scoffed. "Bullshit," she said, but the banter was nice. The past few days have been a lot of serious conversation between them.

After they'd gotten out of the House of Hades, Leo had told her that she could tell Jason and Piper about the whole Calypso situation. Especially since he'd told Hazel about Calypso. When? Kat didn't know, considering they'd spent most of that time together, but whatever.

So on a gloomy morning, Kat had given them the rundown of what happened. Not everything, because some things would stay between Kat and Leo until their ends. But she'd given Piper and Jason a lot to work with. So now they understood why Leo and Kat were sometimes ( okay, maybe most of the time ) really clingy.

They were fine for a little bit, but then Jason had gotten stabbed. And it was really hard to have funny conversations when worried about your boyfriend's survival.

The past day or so felt like a whirlwind. Kat had been a bundle of worry — hell, she still was, but that didn't matter right now — as she'd dashed around, trying to help somewhere and trying not to have a mental breakdown. She'd administered more nectar than Jason could've probably handled, but he's still here. She'd gotten Piper out of a panic attack while having a mental breakdown. Not even Frank could get Kat out of it, and Piper had been busy with Jason at that time, so Leo had had to ditch working on his special project that he'd told Kat about while they'd been completely inseparable to get her out of it.