#< HAUNTING THE NARRATIVE YAYYYY

[malrie]

for: @jasipereo, who told me i should what: in the burning maze, apparently they fly off together after jason dies and nothing happens at all. this is the nothing. wc: 1700

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Piper had grown out her hair since Leo saw her last. He touched the ends of it, feeling the familiar softness between his fingers.

“Did you get taller?” she asked, voice strained from having cried so much. He didn’t see her expression; she was sitting in front of him on Festus, facing only the white sky. 

“I dunno,” he said, because he didn’t. Time was strange in that other place. To him, he’d been gone for only a moment. As if he hadn’t been lost at all.

She leaned backwards. Without having to ask, Leo let the internal heat from his body migrate to her. They were just below plane altitude, maybe four or five miles in the air. It was cold, but he wouldn’t let her be.

Had Piper not been there, Leo would have pried the casket open and crawled inside to lie beside him. He was sure of it. The instinct was nonsensical, even desperate, and still it pulled him like water down a drain. He wanted to see him again. He wanted to see him with his eyes closed, as though he were only asleep. And Jason had always been a peaceful sleeper. 

Back then, Piper’s iron grip on his forearm had anchored him. Maybe she felt the urge, too. Maybe they could have all fit inside. There, they could have dreamt as one, having found peace in a place where nothing could tear them apart. Together again.

“You did,” she replied. “Get taller, I mean. Just a little.”

*

Piper had a room in her grandpa’s ranch house that she hadn’t used since she was eleven. Leo inspected the off-white lace curtains, the stuffed animals on the bookshelves. She had a pink CD player and a Hello Kitty pillowcase. It was strange to be confronted with the idea that she had lived a life before him.

He helped her unpack what little she brought with her. Downstairs, Leo heard Coach’s booming timbre, comforting in its own way. He and Mellie would stay in the guest room with Chuck, leaving Leo to fend for himself in the den.

“What’re you gonna do now?” asked Piper, folding shirts and sorting them in a dresser.

Leo laid on her carpet, eyeing the glow-in-the-dark stars stuck on the ceiling. “Calypso wants to enroll in school. I tried telling her secondary education was a shithole, but she wanted to experience it herself. As for me, I’m never going back. S’one of the conditions I made for living at the Waystation.”

Piper paused in her folding. Then she started up again on a pile of sweaters. She lingered on a blue one that read: Edgarton Day and Boarding School. 

“I’m starting Tahlequah High next week,” she said. 

“I’ll be sure to make your grad party, beauty queen.”

He figured. Piper liked school enough; he knew she never missed an assignment at Wilderness. Meanwhile, Leo turned every packet he got into paper planes, letting them ride the Nevada gust out his dormitory window.

“If you’re not finishing school,” she continued, “what’ll you do? Help Hemithea and Josephine?”

“That’s sorta the plan.” Leo rubbed his eyes. The stars were too old to hold any glow. “I guess… I guess I just want something to keep busy. Maybe teach shop for the kids for however long. After that, I don’t know. Being in one place too long… I’m not real good at that.”

“So no camp?”

He couldn’t help but laugh. “No, no camp. You?”

“No,” Piper said, then laughed along with him.

He knew she didn’t mean she hated either camp, their friends, or their community—they only needed distance, measured and in moderation. Jason was everywhere, after all. His lifeblood was camp legacy. In a way, that was what had taken him from them. The gods had owed Jason ten times over and this was how he was repaid. There was nothing for Leo there, least of all loyalty. It seemed Piper felt the same, even if only mirroring an inch of his resentment. 

They ate dinner. Tristan still had some lost pallor, but his charisma was hard to chip at, especially when his daughter needed him. Toothless Chuck gummed around a piece of squash while the rest of them ate a meal cooked by a friend of the family. People had been in and out of the house all day; their fridge was stocked for the entire week. The McLeans had roots here. They were loved and welcomed. Leo and Piper had stayed inside her room like homebodies until the visitors had all left.

While Mellie put Chuck down for bed, Tristan and Coach cleared the table and washed the dishes. Piper told Leo that they’d probably go out on the porch and smoke some of her grandad’s tobacco pipes once they were done, a vice her dad failed to keep secret from her.

Snickering, they imagined Coach hacking a lung while ambling upstairs to her grandpa’s study. Her grandfather kept books on topics that ranged from Indigenous history to psychology to science fiction. Aside from the collection, there was a desk with a swivel chair and a large claw-footed single-seater sofa in the corner of the room, just by the window.

Leo grabbed a book off the shelf just for the fun of it and plopped down on the sofa. The words swam around on the pages. Even if he could read it, he doubted he could parse analytical biochemistry jargon.

“I used to come up here when Grandpa was doing his lesson plans,” said Piper. Tom McLean was a structural biology professor. “I’d beg for him to play with me, but he’d just say, ‘My love, you cannot have what you want the instant you desire it.’ I liked that. Not even then was it easy for people to say no to me. He was the only one.”

Looking out the window, Leo saw the shine of Festus’s wings in the darkness. The dragon was hunkered down in the yard, closest to sleep as automatons could get.

“I’ll leave in the morning,” Leo said. He rested his gaze on the horizon, which bled into the night. “Calypso’s waiting for me.”

“I know.” Piper came over to him, gently pulling the textbook away from his grasp. It forced him to look at her.

A beat passed. “I’m sorry, Piper. About Jason.”

She smiled wryly, placing Clinical Biochemistry: Techniques and Instrumentation onto the side table. She asked, “Why are you saying sorry to me?”

He wasn’t sure what she meant by that. She stood over him, the moonlight from outside overlaying her skin like a filter, the image of an aching spector. Her face was unreadable, but tonight her eyes were one color. It was borrowed, and it was the color of his own heart: Electric blue, as vibrant as the sky once a storm had cleared. Jason.

Still standing, she raised a hand, placing it over his arm in an innocuous touch. “You loved him, too,” she said. Leo’s hackles rose, but it was true and—now that Jason was dead—harmless. “Leo, we weren’t together anymore. I broke up with him. After you died, I couldn’t… I couldn’t work it out. Work us out. Because without you, it was like… Like the lights had gone out.”

His hand grabbed her wrist, wanting to rip it away, but he couldn’t. “Wait. I-I don’t want to hear this,” he said.

If only she had never brought it up. Mellie had told him earlier in the day, with Chuck on her hip and wearing a worried frown. Piper and Jason had split some months ago. They never explained further than what they had told everyone.

“I thought,” she kept going, “that if you had come back, maybe Jason and I could have—with you… But we never got a chance.”

“Piper,” he said firmly, getting up from the seat to grab her shoulders. “You have to stop.”

“It isn’t fair. Don’t you think it isn’t fair?” Jason’s eyes watched him shake.

“I’m leaving tomorrow, at dawn. I’m moving to Indiana. I’ll come for birthdays, special days. We’ll see each other at reunions. I’ll Iris you—every day if you want! It’ll be good. Like we always were. Like we were before everything. Don’t do this, Piper.”

“You can’t stay,” she whispered. “I know because it happened to me, too. It hurt to be with him because you weren’t there. And I know what you see when you look at me. What color are my eyes, Leo? Whose are they? He used to see yours.”

It had to happen, just once, even if never again for the rest of their lives. It wasn’t even their first kiss, which had happened a lifetime ago, on some forgettable rooftop in a place that never loved them. He shivered a little as her hands came up to his neck. There was salt in his mouth from her tears. Piper made small noises, gasping in increments when they could bear parting. They tumbled back to a bookshelf, hard edges jutting against Leo’s spine.

It was important that he was the one to speak first. Not because he didn’t trust her not to compel him, but to prove that he knew she wouldn’t. Not for this.

“I’ll leave in the morning,” repeated Leo, thumb rolling down her jaw. “That’s hours away.”

*

Leo got up before the sun did. Oklahoma mornings were crisp and new, almost impossibly so. The fog in the distance cleared around the McLean property, grass dewing with small beads of fresh water. Standing on the porch now, Leo knew this could be a good home, one filled with love.

Tristan McLean saw him come out of Piper’s room. He didn’t react much, only telling him to be safe on his journey back. He’d also shaken his hand like a real man and said, “She’s stronger than I’d ever hoped.”

“Stronger than me,” Leo replied, smiling.

Seeing him, Festus crooned in happy creaks, shaking out his stiffness. As Leo took off, he saw the curtains in Piper’s window move, almost nothing. Just in case, he brought up his hand to wave goodbye.