Chapter Text
Three days before she turns fifteen, on a nice December day, Hazel Levesque flexes her fingers. Then, she has a panic attack.
Some context might help.
Three days before she turns fifteen, on a nice December day, Hazel Levesque is permitted a day’s leave. This privilege is granted in recognition of her valuable service, of her rank. It is also granted because the junior centurion of the First Cohort drove a pilum through her sword hand a week ago in a war game; drove it through and then pulled up hard. It ripped up and out, out between her ring and pinky fingers, and the wound burned and boiled like all those from Imperial gold. The healers saved her hand, sewed it up with silvered thread and dusted it with unicorn shavings, but it still shakes, and they tell her it will for another month.
“Between you and me,” one of them had whispered in her ear, “you’re lucky we didn’t have to amputate.” If she had looked, she would not have seen who it was; they would already be tending to another patient, lost in the bustle of the medical tent. She did not look. The negativity broke protocol.
Without the grip strength to hold a sword, Hazel can’t run drills. That was fine before, because she could still shout and order and lead, but today they are working on individual swordsmanship. One of Jason’s reforms, or maybe Percy’s, or maybe Frank came up on it all on his own. Whoever’s idea it was, Hazel isn’t any use, and so: a day’s leave, to rest and recover. She’d more than earned it, Reyna had said, and then gave her something that might have been a smile or might have been a glare. Hazel had smiled back and said thank you very much.
Frank was still on duty, is still on duty, so she scraped together her money, the little leftovers from Nico’s gifts, mostly, and she went into town, and since she had more denarii than dollars that meant New Rome, and so she ended up here, at a little coffeehouse overlooking the Forum. It’s a quiet place. Piper took her here a few months ago when she’d been in town, and they didn’t really talk because what was there to talk about, but it was a good place for that sort of non-conversation. There were little vines growing all over the shop, outside and inside and over the windows and through the cracks in the floor, and Hazel had ignored how they’d seemed to curl towards Piper whenever she spoke, and so they’d had a nice time. Hazel wasn’t-isn’t sure if this place, with that memory, is what she wants right now, but she didn’t know anything else to do in the city, so she’d gone anyway. It was a pleasant day, a little warm, because it always was pleasant but a little warm on this side of the Little Tiber, but Hazel had seen the snow on the mountains around the camp and ached for the chill in her wrists and so she ordered an affogato, espresso poured over ice cream, and she lets each bite melt in her mouth, lets the cold soak in.
Then, on that nice December day, Hazel’s hand starts spasming again. She rubs at it, looking out over the city, the rolling hills, the statues, the townhouses all tucked together and the estates all sprawled out, the other statues, the fountains, the gleaming marble statues, the gleaming gold statues, the gleaming silver statues, the gleaming copper statues, old praetors, old augurs. And then, then, she flexes her fingers, just to flex them, to stretch them, to feel them move, and for a glimmer of a moment she feels that pull and, hand clawed, she freezes.
A thought comes to Hazel’s mind, unbidden. She could pull all this down.
With a flick of her wrist. A flutter of the fingers. That’s all it would take, and this city, all the glimmering gold, the shimmering silver, all the marble all the power all, all, all of it, she could end it all right now. She could.
She can feel it in her tongue pressed up at the roof of her mouth. She can feel it in her curled toes. She wants to be free of it all. She can be free of it all.
Then slowly, slowly, slowly, Hazel raises her other hand. She takes her fingers. One by one, careful like they might bite, she folds them down. One by one, she folds those thoughts away. Slowly, slowly, slowly, she lets that pull, that glorious, candy-in-her-mouth, is-it-a-smile-or-bared-teeth pull fall away.
Hazel lets out a breath, and then sucks in another one, and lets that one out too. Her head feels like it’s burning.
She takes her bowl and her cute little spoon, with a little laurel wreath carved into the tip of the handle, and she puts them in the dishes tub. She says thank you to the cashier as she leaves. She walks back through the streets and lets the summery winter air warm her core. She grabs her sword from Terminus. She strolls back to camp; she strolls back to her barrack. She sits on her bed, shoulders square. She does not cry.
She is exactly where she is meant to be. She is exactly who she is meant to be.
There is nothing to cry for.
If that were the end of it, everything would be fine. Everybody has bad thoughts sometimes; Hazel sees how Frank looks at fires a little hungrily on bad days, how Nico tilts his eyes at his friend Will. You’re allowed to want bad things, and it doesn’t make you bad – so long as you don’t want to want them.
That’s not the end of it.
Hazel sits in a white van with SPQR written neat on the sides and dangles her feet out the back and watches the road and the hills zoom by. There is a jumble of armor and weapons and children behind her, some crying, some still. A group of campers on a quest had gotten ambushed by a pack of hydras – who knew they came in packs now – and Reyna told Dakota to take a group and bail them out. They had gotten ambushed too, of course. Someone mutters an apology, and after a second there’s a crack and someone else screams, and Hazel thinks I could jump out of the back of this van right now, and nobody would notice.
But that’s just stress. She can ignore it.
Hazel stands on the Field of Mars in formation with her cohort. The Senate is inspecting the legion. She’s looking straight ahead, not flinching, not blinking, but she can see their delegation out of the corner of her eye, pacing through the legions like a tiger on the hunt, or maybe like a shopper in the supermarket, trying to get the best deal on a pack of ground beef. She’s meat to these people, is the point. One of them, an old, bearded man in a toga, is arguing with Frank and Reyna. His words float over to Hazel on the breeze, and he’s asking if they can really afford to contract for new onagers, when the ones over there (the ones with rotting frames) look perfectly adequate, and they’re so expensive to maintain and supply, you know. Frank gives a good response, about how rocks are cheaper than lives, and Reyna mutters to another Senator, a different man who keeps wiping his palms on his when he’s not insulting the first man’s manners, that if they’re expected to fight sieges they need the tools for the job, and he laughs. It’s a good twist of politics, getting the second man on their side even if they can’t get the first, but Hazel just thinks if I stomped my foot right now, the earth could swallow me up, and nobody could stop me.
But that’s just fatigue. She can ignore it.
Hazel lies on Frank’s bed, her head on his chest. Praetors have their own rooms, and his has a little television in the corner. They’re watching some terrible horror movie, one that’s far too proud of its cheesy, predictable jump scares, but she lost track of the plot ages ago. She thinks she’s rooting for the monster. It’s cute. Reminds her of Percy’s dog.
Hazel shifts a little to look up at Frank. He looks happy. His office looks good on him; he’s just wearing a sweatshirt, but he carries a sort of authority in his shoulders, a quiet confidence in his eyes. It’s been there since the Argo, since Venice, but it’s settled since then, gotten fuller, somehow, with experience. She’s proud of him. She loves him.
She looks at his lips and thinks about what it might be like to kiss them. The thought that comes is I think we should break up.
Her breath stills.
Frank glances down at her. “Everything okay?” he murmurs.
“Yeah,” she says.
His brows furrow, ever so slightly, but they smooth out in a moment. He nudges her, and then he looks back to the movie.
She can’t ignore this.
“No,” she says.
Frank’s eyes flick down again. They search her face: brows, eyes, lips, cheeks. Calm, steady, like he’s assessing a battle. He’s always so steady, these days. “…do you want to talk about it?” he offers after a moment.
“I don’t know,” she says.
He takes a breath. “’Kay,” he says.
She burrows her face into his side. She feels him take in a slow breath and let it out slower.
“You know I’ll always care about you,” he says, ten minutes later, while the monster on the screen is making some horrific yowling noise.
“Yeah,” Hazel says, and means it.
“Okay,” he says again, enunciated this time.
They fall asleep like that, pressed into together, feeling each other breathe, with the screams of the poor movie characters for a lullaby.
A week later, Hazel slips into Frank’s office and sits in the chair across his desk. Instead of breaking up with him, the words that come out are:
“I think I’m gonna desert.”
Frank, who’s mouth is wrapped around the straw of his coffee, some sickly-sweet iced thing with whipped cream on top, sputters. To his credit, he manages to keep everything in his mouth and swallow without making a mess. “Camp Jupiter?”
She appreciates that he’s taking her seriously. He’s always been good at that. “The legion, yeah.”
“Now?”
“Not – not like now-now, but yes, now. This week. Sooner.”
“I – why? You –” he closes his eyes. When he opens them, he says “You’ve thought about this.”
“Probably less than I should have.”
“Can I ask… why?”
Hazel sighs and leans back in her chair. “I’m not quite sure.”
“Right,” he says, and leans back in his own chair, and runs his hands through his hair.
They both sit for a moment. They’ve both always been good at that, just giving each other a moment to think, to process.
“I don’t think,” she says, and then the words start to rush out, “that I want to spend the next eight years of my life fighting and killing and maybe dying just so I can, just so I can live in New Rome and make a bunch of other kids fight and kill and die for me. I don’t want it. I don’t want this, not any of it, and I don’t know what I want but I –” and then all at once, her momentum vanishes and she screeches to a halt. “I just want to be happy, Frank.”
Frank looks at her across the table and it’s not revelatory. It’s not like he’s seeing her for the first time, and he doesn’t look tired, and he doesn’t look like he thought this was inevitable. He just looks at her, scans her face like he always has, and oh she loves him, she loves him not, she she she.
All he asks, then, is: “Am I coming with you?”
Quietly, Hazel says “I don’t think that’s what you want.” And Frank purses his lips, because they’re each other’s best friend in the world, and they both know she’s right.
Two days later, on a quiet February night after most of camp is asleep, Hazel grabs her backpack and her spatha and wraps the Mist around her and she walks out the front gate, right past the watch, who just see a hunchbacked faun scurrying along.
She finds Arion a mile down the road, shaking his mane, waiting for her. He whinnies. She just scritches his neck and pulls herself onto his back.
She looks back. She can see Camp Jupiter, still, and she can see the temples, and she can see New Rome on its rolling hills, streetlights glittering like stars and golden ornaments reflecting their light like they’re Venus herself, maybe the planet or maybe the goddess.
And she looks forward. The bridge over the Little Tiber is in front of her. Beyond it, the Caldecott Tunnel yawns open in front of her, dark and deep and scary. Beyond it?
Hazel presses her legs together, and Arion runs.