✥ ✥ ✥

Leo blinked, having just woken from another nightmare. Or had it just been him hallucinating? Or had his mother's ghost actually just disowned him? He knew that he'd probably been dreaming, but if ever actually in a confrontation with his mother, would she do the same thing? Maybe she would.

You are no child of mine! Yo nunca hubiera dado a luz a un diablo!

A sob built up in his throat. He didn't let it out. It was all his fault: several people, including himself, had told him that. He shouldn't have tried going to Ogygia, he shouldn't have tried bringing Calypso away with him, he shouldn't have assumed that they'd won the war, and in his darkest times, which were quite often, he'd realise that he shouldn't have even been born.

His eyes drifted across the cell. It was small, barely enough space to sit in, and an even tinier bathroom. The stone wall was grainy, the main rock used being mixed with other types of the material. It had been carved to give a brick-wall effect, and in the corner of the wall, there were scratches of different diagrams and blueprints: for inventions, escape ideas, and other things along those lines.

That was from when Leo had hope.

Then, he noticed something making his body go cold with dread, though it had happened so many times before. Jason wasn't there. Clenching his fists– more as a habit than a choice– he stared at the rusty door, waiting for him to come back in.

It had been a long time since he'd entered the cell, and it was like a daily routine, but that didn't mean he was used to the way he felt like he was suffocating, the way he felt like he was being crushed by the fear and the dread. He still wasn't used to the enormity of emotions that would crash down on him, the way his heart dropped when he realised 'I'm next', along with the sadistic anticipation of it which was quickly to die with anxiety overruling it. But it happened, it happened every time he realised he was alone. And he hated it.

He wasn't sure how long it was until the door creaked open, and Jason stumbled in, his blond hair hanging over his face, the only colour on him other than red.

That's how the torture was. Brutal. By the time he or Jason would come out, they would be covered in their own blood.

Leo got to his feet and rushed towards Jason, who gripped the wall for balance, almost falling on top of him.

"Es peor que de costumbre... ¿Quién fue esta vez?" Leo asked, not realising that he'd slipped into spanish.

"English?" Jason asked, his voice hoarse.

"Think you should sit down first."

He nodded, slowly lowering himself to the ground.

"Who was it?" Leo asked again, consciously speaking in English.

Jason lifted his head– so that the hair hanging over his face shifted to the side– looking at Leo dead in the eye. But he had a different look than usual. He didn't look hopeless, or broken, or in grief. His eyes shimmered with a flurry of emotions: rage, disbelief, and hope.

Something had happened, Leo realised, something that, in Jason's eyes, could change everything.

✥ ✥ ✥

"I saw her." He said again, and Leo realised what he meant.

He didn't believe it for a second. "Jason, I know you miss her. I miss her too. But she's not here. And that's good, you know that."

Jason shook his head, "I'm serious. I saw Piper. I saw her with my own eyes. She was there, in this cell, like our one, but she was alone, and I saw her there, I swear I saw her. I didn't get a clear look but I just know it's her..." Realising that he was rambling, he stopped.

Leo said, "No, you might have seen someone with brown hair and mistaken her–"

He froze mid-sentence as he heard a click, and the door swung open, thudding against the wall. The cell descended into an eerie silence, and the guard just crossed his arms around his chest.

It happened every time. He'd hear his heartbeat speeding up until it was the only thing he could hear. He'd feel like he was stabbed before he actually was. Fear would grip his throat and twist his gut and freeze him to the bone before someone could utter a syllable. Then he'd have two and a half seconds. Two and a half seconds to compose himself, two and a half seconds to follow the guard, two and a half seconds to obey. If he didn't, they'd drag him, and he wouldn't come back to the cell until three days later. And nothing that happened outside the cell was ever good.

One. The count began in his head. He swallowed, temporarily shoving his emotions down with it, and glanced at Jason. His hair had once again fallen in front of his face, blocking his eyes and half of his face, which probably still had that intensity. That was for the better. If the guards thought that he'd started to have hope, even if it was false, they would drag him out and return with him up to a week later, making sure to crush every minuscule bit of emotion other than pain.

Two. He got to his feet, and started following the guard out of the room.

Half a beat passed, and the guard looked back to make sure that Leo was following him. They made eye contact, and it pained for him to see those blue eyes which had once been full of life, so many tricks up their sleeve. It hurt Leo even more to think of what had happened to the younger duplicate of him.

He had seen it happen. Travis Stoll had agreed to lose his mind– his soul, in fact– so that his brother would be safe. He remembered the way Percy had smirked, before murmuring a chant under his breath, and Leo had watched the life wither out of Travis. The way his eyes dulled until they had no life, the way his expression morphed into a blank one. And, in a cruel, twisted way, Percy kept his word. Connor had been safe, but it was his soul that was safe, not his body.

How many other demigods suffered the same fate, Leo didn't know. It made his skin tingle to think about it, and anxiety pooled up in him, for dozens of reasons, one of them being thinking about other demigods. What would have happened to them? Leo knew the answer. They were dead, or slaved, or tortured.

Or... Or they're not under Percy's radar. Safe.

Dammit, Leo thought. Jason's hope was getting contagious. No one was left. They were either dead, like Connor Stoll, or tortured, like himself, or mindless, like Travis, or slaved, like Harley–

He stopped walking. Something was caught in his throat, and he suddenly couldn't breathe. Someone had attached a weight to his knees maybe, he felt it pulling on his legs, making it harder to stand straight. He couldn't think.

Actually, he could think.

Jake, Nyssa, Shane, Harley...

Were they okay? Of course not. Because of him.

His hands reached his throat. He couldn't breathe, he couldn't breathe, he couldn't breathe. He fell to his knees, and Travis finally turned around, to see him kneeling on the floor, on the verge of tears.

When Leo looked at him in the eye, he didn't see a prankster, or a friend, or a human, even. He saw nothing. He saw a body, but no soul. Not for the first time, it hit him that this person had been his friend. They'd played pranks together, bet together, pissed off Katie Gardner together... She was dead too, for all he knew, or slaved.

Taking strides, the demigod who'd lost his soul walked towards him, and grabbed him roughly by the hand. His expression was cruel, but blank, like he had no emotions inside to show on the outside. Maybe that was true. It couldn't be true.

"Travis, you're there, aren't you?" Leo's voice was small, shaky. "Somewhere inside, you're there aren't you? I know you are. Right?"

When he stared into those once lively eyes, he didn't find any life. He saw nothing, just a colour.

"Connor wasn't safe," Leo continued, hoping to evoke any bit of human inside of him. "Percy– he killed him."

"And you- you know what happened to Katie? Remember, you used to say how you liked her as a victim but as a person even more, remember? Katie– she was murdered too. By him, Percy."

Leo wasn't getting anything from this. As every word escaped his mouth, it got harder to speak, but he continued. He knew that there was something inside of him; Travis Stoll was still there, and Leo had to bring him out.

"Remember when– once, that time we stole Clarisse's electric spear, I know you remember. We replaced it with a fake one– the one that shot out toothpaste, remember? And then– and she was so pissed. Remember, Travis? Remember before this– before this hell? Before all this, Stoll? Remember... a part of you remembers, wishes that we went back to those days, right? Right? "

A weird sound escaped his throat, in between a harsh laugh and a sob. Memories crashed down on him, and he felt like he was being crushed, carrying a weight too heavy to carry, but no one would ever know what that weight was. He himself didn't know, but what he did know was that he wanted to go back in time. Back to the way things were. 

And when he looked at Travis, he would've been less hurt if he saw some emotion. He saw nothing. Looking into those blue eyes, he saw a dead person's eyes.

Behind that, he saw another set of eyes, but they weren't any more human than a dead person's. Sea-green, the darkest shade of the sea, filled with pure venom, filled with hate and bloodlust, the eyes of a person who finally overcame his fatal flaw at the cost of every demigod's life, every mortal's life, every life.

"It's your fault Valdez. It's always your fault."

He remembered Percy saying that. And Leo knew that he'd meant every single bit of it.

It was hard. It was hard being hit by so many waves of emotions so many times. He wanted to scream, he wanted to cry, he wanted to fade away from the world, disappear. But he stood silent, his lip quivering, his eyes blinking rapidly.

People said that when going through emotional pain, material pain had no effect. They were wrong. It hurt a hundred times worse.

✥ ✥ ✥

Leo was dragged back to his cell, barely able to stay on his feet. After the torture, he'd been thrown in a pitch black room for his little 'outburst'. He hated being alone. The time he'd spent in there had been worse than the living hell he was in. His wounds tormented him non-stop, but it didn't manage to drown out the emotional pain, the cuts across his heart. On top of that, if he cried or made any noise, he was tormented more, which shouldn't have been possible. By the time he'd gotten out, he was in a state of hysteria. His skin was covered in a coat of brown–dried blood– which darkened to an almost-black shade in some places, like in between his fingers. There were a few spots of bare skin on his left hand where he had scratched some of it off.

He didn't try saying anything to Travis when he'd come to take him back to the cell, and was silent, barely managing to control his hysteria. He was shoved inside the cell, and the door slammed shut. His legs held his weight only for a few seconds, and he collapsed onto the floor. Jason opened his mouth to say something, but the words didn't come out. Or maybe he just didn't hear them.

He sat with his knees up to his chest, and before anything else could happen, he cried. His whole body wracked with sobs, and all the pent-up emotions from the last few days wriggled out of his grip, escaping in the form of cries and sobs.

✥ ✥ ✥

Jason Grace hated his life. He really did. He wanted it to end. The only solace he had was that there was someone with him. And the only reason he didn't want to die was because he didn't want to die like this: tortured, locked up, and worst of all, silenced.

He hated the fact that his cries were ignored, he was silenced or punished for being hopeful, he was forced to become a shell of a human. And when he'd seen the wisp of brown hair, and made contact with those eyes, he knew it was her.

He'd guess that she'd been there for maybe a year, or sometime around there. She'd still had her head held high, still had hope, and if someone stayed longer than a year, it wasn't possible. He himself had lasted just eleven months, Leo lasting half a month longer.

It had been painful to watch the life drain away from his best friend. Once upon a time, Leo had been the one who always cut the tension, brought smiles to peoples faces– or eye rolls at times– and was an impish person in general. As time passed by in the cell, his jokes stopped, his grin faded, and what was left of him was only pain.

And when just some time back, he'd come into the cell and collapsed into sobs, Jason felt his hate towards Percy–and Annabeth, of course– more than ever. Both of them had joined Gaia, Percy overcoming his fatal flaw, and Annabeth because of hers. Still, Jason hadn't expected him to become so... He hadn't expected Percy to become so heartless. But he became so. And so did Annabeth.

And while Leo sobbed, murmuring things in a mix of English and Spanish, the only thing Jason could think to do was wrap his hands around him– the same way Piper had done to the small children in camp, when they'd started crying in fear of the coming war– and... He didn't know what exactly was happened, so he didn't try consoling him. He just stayed there, because he knew that sometimes just staying there could make a huge difference.

If people had ever tried to stay with him, his life might've turned out better.

"What happened?" Jason asked after a while, trying to keep his voice as gentle as possible. He cringed, realising that it still sounded rough, not even close to consoling.

"Traté de ..." Leo murmured, his voice cracking. "Hice mi mejor esfuerzo. Él no está ahí. Hay un cuerpo pero no hay alma."

"No soul," he whispered again, like he was reading out a text. "There is a body, but there is no soul."

"Who?" But Jason knew the answer.

"I tried..." He murmured, lifting up his head to stare at the wall. "Tried to remind him. He didn't..."

"It hurts," Leo finally settled on two words. Two words that expressed everything he couldn't say.

"It does, doesn't it?" Jason said, his voice a little too bitter.

"And then you realise that you're the only one alive, even though you're not, and it's just..."

"And it hurts more. And then you're thinking when you're gonna break, but you can't, because, well..." Jason paused, looking for the words, and a silence settled over the two of them, a long silence, eventually broken by Leo. 

"Wish the person who invented words had actually invented enough."

Jason stared at him. It had been a long time, a very long time since he'd said anything close to a joke. Leo turned his head slightly so that the two of them were facing each other.

"Whatcha starin' at?" Leo said, trying for his sarcastic tone. His voice came a little different, but Jason didn't really care about that. "It's true."

"Well, I think the inventor of words should've come up with a word for..." He shook his head, "I suck at this."

Leo let out a laugh, flinching at how it had accustomed to his general way of laughter– harsh and bitter. People said that a person's voice showed their emotions. That was only half-true. Because when you lived for two years with no hope, the only laughs harsh and bitter, the only words scared and eerily silent, the only smiles by the people who laugh at bloodshed, and the only people bodies without souls, it was hard to express happiness. But for the first time, they tried.

Jason nestled his chin in the crook of Leo's neck, and the two of them sat like that for a while. The first comforting silence in a long time, too long of a time.

"You know what?" Leo said, breaking the silence, "I believe you."

Jason, confused, asked, "You... what?"

Leo probably intended for his voice to drop to a dramatic and low whisper, though it sounded more like the small voice they generally talked in, "She's here. And we're going to find her."

Jason might have smiled, but hope was a dangerous thing. They might as well be playing with fire. It could grant them light, or burn them all.

"Can you still manage pyrokinesis?"

"I guess we'll see, superman."

But lucky for him, his best friend was immune to flames.

----

far far away, once lied hope in protection of hearth,
but no one told the giving flames how much it was worth,
hope, worth so much; hope, a raging flame;
while it can light up the path, it can lead to your bane.