Asphodels (Valdangelo)

Difficulty breathing

Corinnamariedrawsstuff made a drawing of a Valdangelo Hanahaki au, and I was instantly KO'd with the need to create.

The first contact he had with the demi world was during a cloudy night, while on the road, and he's not sure if it actually happened until much later. He remembers fear first, instincts pushing him to run as fast as his feet would carry, and faster yet; he also remembers the smell of greasy food, and neon yellow, and actual cold.

Leo wakes up panting on a dark room in what his mind thinks is the Wilderness school, and he swears there's a moment of static, where the fact that he knows this information confuses him, but the moment is gone in his next breath; he finds himself at a loss for why he woke up in the middle of the night, but is too tired to really give it much thought.

It is in the middle of the quest to save Piper's dad that Leo remembers, somewhere between monster fights, and planning, and reading maps, and cooking, and fighting again. He's unsure what causes it, but he's suddenly attacked with a vivid image, pale skin bathed in moonlight, impossibly dark eyes, an accented voice, and a stubborn but unmistakable feeling of safety.

The first petals are hard to make out, wrinkly and dyed red with his blood as they are, he theorizes, a while after, when the situation finally clicks, that the reason is that he doesn't remember enough like to really think about him.

Sometimes the powers holding his mind hostage make the memory fizzle, and Leo's left with an odd feeling of detachment, almost like an aftertaste; other times the thought is so persistent, Leo has to pull every trick in the book to hold it down until he's out of sight. He might not yet know what the disease is, or why it comes only when he remembers that one instance; but it feels personal, something almost possessive, bitter like an expected defeat.

Leo comes to the realization that he doesn't actually know anything about mystery boy other than the general impression their past encounter left him, and he doesn't dare try to make the memory clearer because the current state of his little curse is already making things complicated. He does make that discovery though, that it is a curse, and not some sort of weird disease from his ichor tainted blood.

He learns that from a child of Hecate whose name he isn't told and doesn't ask, one who only knows there's a curse on his body but not the details, this they clarify to Leo before agreeing to keep it quiet, because they too see the curse as something private.

Eventually, inevitably, he meets him, and is almost instantly caught in a tug-of-war between actual memory and what Juno wanted him to think real; he knows he isn't the only one affected by the disparity, but in order to talk about it he'd have to tell them about the curse. He gets a name carved into his brain, familiar and not in tandem, and with that contradiction, he gets his first whole flower; less bloodied that its predecessors, or the ones that'll come next, it's easier to make out.

Leo isn't a flower expert, so he still has to sneak the question around, if only to get some sort of direction; and he thinks them incredibly fitting even before he learns about their place in mythology, the flower's very real connection to him.

He thinks he goes investigate something, possibly about the roman camp, but disappears into thin air without a word; people claim this to be normal, Leo, despite himself, still worries.

He throws himself into building the Argo II, and allows himself to ponder about his place in the prophecy, because even that is safer than thinking about him. Though Leo does believe the last line to have been specifically about him, 'a promise kept with a dying breath', with flowers blooming on his lungs, it's only a matter of what the promise will be.