Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Breakfast the next morning was a casual affair, which May guessed could be blamed on Leo's bare chest and Jason's stab wound.
The second part of the conundrum, Jason's injury, had improved a little bit over his night spent in the infirmary, and he kept trying to say it didn't hurt, but May knew it did. He winced every time she tried to change his bandages. Either way, she could barely look at the wound without her gut clenching in squeamish sympathy—that 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.
At breakfast, May sat next to him, his T-shirt rolled up to his ribcage as she inspected his bandages. Doctor Theo had affirmed that he would (at least hopefully) be fine, since they'd gotten ambrosia into him quickly enough, but of course that didn't stop May from worrying. Jason was her best friend—the only person on the entire crew who understood her. If he left her, she would have to follow him down to the Underworld and kill him all over again.
Across the table, Theo had her lip curled at the sight of Percy's breakfast of champions: He was eating a huge stack of blue pancakes, dousing them in maple syrup.
"You're drowning them," she said, disgusted.
"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 so much as a goshdarn, she would nearly faint.
As Jason murmured his third unconvincing "It doesn't even hurt", Leo burst through the threshold to the mess hall, wearing a pair of cargo pants and seemingly lost in the neck hole of his long-sleeved T-shirt. He stumbled around with flailing arms. Theo laughed loudly at the sight, which May thought probably didn't help Leo's ego very much. Then she decided his ego didn't exactly need helping.
"We're over here, man," Percy called, then broke into a grin as the figure of Leo's head buried deep in his shirt whipped toward the sound of Percy's voice.
"Leo.." Hazel sighed dejectedly and caught hold of his shirt as he stumbled blindly by her. She helped get him straightened out, then pulled his shoulder to seat him in the chair next to hers like he was a child who had gotten in trouble one too many times and had to sit next to the teacher now.
"Hey, what's up, guys?" he said, all casual as if he hadn't just made a fool of himself. "Aw, hells yes to brownies."
He grabbed the last one from the plate—a special sea salt recipe they'd picked up from Aphros the fish centaur at the bottom of the Atlantic.
