Girl on Fire (Leo Valdez x reader)

Metropolitan Museum of Art

      "Time for yet another day," you grumble as you got up. It was the middle of winter, nearly Christmas in fact, and you had pretty much nothing to wear. Not only that, but you also didn't have any home to go back to. Your mom died a couple years ago when you were 13, and you never knew your father. Your mom had always told you that he died before you were born, but you could always tell she was lying and wanted to find out the truth.

      As you tied your hair back with an elastic you found in the ally you were staying at for the night (if your hair is long enough. If it's not, then you can ignore that), you got up and headed out. It's not like you didn't like winter, but only wearing a tank top and sweat pants didn't make you feel that warm.

      You walked down the road trying not to look as cold as you felt. You felt this uneasiness, but just ignored the feeling as you saw a bird with what looked to be a hurt wing just up ahead. You ran to its side to try and help, but as you were running you felt a sharp pain in your upper arm. You looked and saw a feather. You took it out and put pressure on it.

      "What the hell?" You asked yourself quietly, and looked back at the bird who's eyes shone red. You slowly walked around the strange animal and ran as fast as you could.

      "Manhattan..." You muttered, "Such a strange place..." You continued on your way not wanting anymore weird things to happen.

      After another two hours of walking through the twisting streets, you decided to take a break. You sat down on a fountain edge, and looked at the building behind you.

      "Metropolitan Museum of Art," you stated. 'Should I check it out?' You then ask yourself. You decided you'd sneak in with the next group of people, look around, and exit with a different group of people.. Or maybe stay even until it closes. You could already tell, just by looking at it, that there would be really good places to hide, and, of course, you were great at that.

      After about half an hour of waiting, and you freezing, a group of 5 showed up, and was headed inside. You went with them, but went your own way once inside.

      The place was huge. When you walked in, there was a reseption desk, but no one there. To the left was a bug exibit, and to the right was a dinosaur exibit. You went to the dinosaur exibit, hoping you'd see something you hadn't already learned about yet.

      In your time, you've been to lots of libraries, and read lots of books. It wasn't your favorite thing to do due to you ADHD and dyslexia, but there was always comfortable chairs you could sleep on for the night.

      Only one dinosaur in the exibit really caught your eye. The Elasmosaurus. It has a wicked long neck like the Brachiosaurus, but instead of it being a land dinosaur, it had fins on each side of its body and underneath right by the tail, indicating that it was a water Dino. (It's the picture above)

      You stared at it for a solid, like, 5 minutes, ignoring everyone that passed by. Another 5 minutes. You didn't care if anyone was there or if anyone tried to get your attention. All you could focus on was the dinosaur skeleton and its description.

      Elasmosaurus is a genus of plesiosaur that lived in North America during the Campanian stage of the Late Cretaceous period, about 80.5 million years ago. Read the plaque in front of the dinosaur. It was 10 meters long, and lived for approximately 23.3 million years before they went extinct. Elasmosaurus means thin plate lizard. It was, obviously, a dinosaur that lived in the water. It went on sorta like that for a bit.

      (I got half of those facts from Wikipedia. Another bit was just what I got from the facts altogether.)

      You didn't understand why you were so attached to this dinosaur in particular. There was lots of water dinosaurs, but it just drew you in.