𝗪𝗔𝗜𝗧 𝗙𝗢𝗥 𝗠𝗘 ━━ l. valdez

xvi ━━ he said, 'i'm not a donor, but i'd give you my heart if you needed it'

03. chapter sixteen

━━━━━━━━ ( 💫 ) ━━━━━━━━

( leo's pov )

I HAD BEEN AT THE CONTROL PANNEL FOR hours. dinner must have ended approximately three hours ago.

the truth was, i was lost in thought. when my mind gets going, time could fly by without me even realizing. so when the sun sank below the horizon and the stars began to litter the sky, i hardly noticed.

everybody had gone off to their cabins for the night, so i was the only one on deck. i was conversing with festus about distances and routes. i wanted to make sure we would arrive in rome on time.

i didn't want to set camille or hazel off again with any suspicion that we wouldn't be able to save their brother in time.

there was another thing too... ever since coach hedge announced to the entire ship about hazel and i "staring into each other's eyes and holding hands" camille's been quiet. she did kiss me on the cheek when i popped up in the water, but i could tell she was just relieved i was alive. because after that, she said she was still mad at me.

i found out that she fell and hit her head pretty hard when shrimpzilla dropped her. i felt partially guilty because i was the reason shrimpzilla launched her onto the deck. then she leaped into the water when i got back from the underwater palace. all of that paired with the went she www berserk on those romans couldn't be good for her. it almost seemed like she had a death wish.

i mostly felt guilty about the moment i had with hazel.

look, it wasn't what you think. hazel's always said i remind her of sammy, so she brought me into a flashback to show me who sammy was. it wasn't romantic in the slightest. hazel has a boyfriend after all.

but the way coach hedge put it sounded really bad. when he said that in front of the whole crew, i looked straight to camille. her eyes darted to the floor and she muttered a quiet, "what?"

i knew camille wasn't my girlfriend, but i still felt like a betrayed her in a way. like i had crossed some invisible line that we never discussed. i guess that's what happens when you have a prophecy foretelling your fated love story. things get a little complicated.

camille's had a tough past twenty-four hours; between the romans and shrimpzilla, and i didn't want to contribute to that.

i was only snapped out of my night-time induced thoughts when i heard someone creaking up the stairs. for a moment, i worried coach hedge was coming to tell me to leave the helm and go to sleep, but the steps weren't as violent and they were much slower.

i turned around to see (you guessed it) camille coming onto the deck. her skin was still paler than usual. her head was wrapped in white bandage like a weird headband, but she made it work. it reminded me of when we crashed in detroit with the cyclops and i had to bandage her head while she was unconscious. her knees had purple band-aids on them like she was a kid who fell at the park, not a fourteen year old girl who summoned the black water of the river styx on a bunch of roman legionnaires. she looked at me with a distant gaze.

"oh," she said. "hi."

"hey," i said. "what's up."

she took a few steps further onto the deck. she was only a few feet from the helm where i was currently stationed. she leaned against the starboard rail. "i just... i can't sleep."