and we'll become silhouettes when our bodies finally go: Mark of Athena spoilers present. Dark!Reyna, as in, if she decides to screw over the whole "we can't let Gaea win" plan. Also, Jason's a douchebag, and I just wanted to make that clear. Not very happy with this one, but I needed to get it out before I moved on to more angst about Percy and Annabeth. And there will probably be more, so look out for it.

Collateral Damage

"Love and war always go together. They are the peaks of human emotion."
-Mark of Athena

There are plenty of spurned women in Roman mythology. They're practically the reason half of the stories exist. Some guy pledges his love to a girl, who falls desperately in love with him and gives him everything in order to help him win, and then what happens?

He dumps her.

Naturally.

Falls for the next pretty thing that moves, and then, it's the girl's fault for wreaking havoc afterward. Never mind that the hero was the one who made a promise he couldn't keep. Never mind any of the blame the guy should be getting.

Isn't that how it always is?

The way the stories were told, it was impossible to sympathize with the women. Medea killed her own two children because she got dumped. Reasonable? Definitely not. Those Greeks, Reyna thought when she was little, always overreacted to the littlest things. Roman women were expected to be stoic. To fight it out, instead of relying on cheap tricks. If she couldn't keep her man, then who did she have to blame but herself?

That was then. But Reyna never knew what it meant to be like Medea, until Jason came over the border, and he didn't even have the courtesy to look at her. Couldn't even meet her eyes as he lingered behind, half-hidden by that Aphrodite girl, a slip of a thing who probably couldn't last thirty seconds in a real fight. Charmspeak, Reyna thinks. What a cowardly power. The ability to seduce. To coerce. That's all it is. But put her in an arena with a couple of weapons, and she's as powerless as a jackrabbit in the wake of a hunter.

Jason is somewhere over the Atlantic with the gang of seven, trying to accomplish the impossible. No matter what the legends have said about Mare Nostrum, Reyna feels deep in her bones that they will come out of it alive. It brings her no relief.

The old Jason, the one she knew, put loyalty above all else. He understood, like she did, that duty was immovable. But then, he went to that Greek camp, and it changed him. Piper changed him. Like the old Jason of the myths, he succumbed to a new Glauce, and forgot the whole foundation he had built back home. So easy for him. So quick. And yet, he left a mess for Reyna to deal with. It was always the women who suffered the most in the aftermath of a breach of duty. Men were changeable as the wind. She thought, foolishly, that once he was back in Roman camp, he would remember all the times they had shared. He would remember planning the assault the night before the final battle in the Titan war, and he would remember all the things he said they would do after the war was over.

Was Hera so strong as to change his soul?

She wanted to believe that at first. That it wasn't his fault. That he couldn't help it. But as if the gods themselves had guided her toward the truth, she saw Annabeth leap off the ship and meet Percy halfway.

At last, she understood why Percy was so reluctant to take the praetorship. Watching them come together, she felt herself come apart. She never understood why Venus was a major god. Unlike the other ones, she couldn't fight. She couldn't plan a coherent strategy. Love was chaos, and it served no purpose. It was weak. But at long last, in that moment where she stood frozen, seeing Annabeth meet Percy after seven months, she realized that love could wreck the best-made plans. It could betray the strongest city. It was unpredictable, illogical, and absolutely inexplicable. Who fell in love with whom. Why it happened.

Why would Jason fall in love with that short charmspeaker with braids in her hair?

The hardest thing of all was that there was no reason for it. But it happened anyway.

And just like that, he was gone. He couldn't even say goodbye. It dawned on her that maybe that's how he always was. Hera didn't make him that way. Jason, for all the leader that he was, couldn't do that small thing. The brave thing. The honorable thing. He couldn't do it, and what's more, he didn't want to. He only wanted to be around Piper, and if he didn't think about Reyna, then all the better for him.

She couldn't help but stare at Percy and Annabeth, unable to look away. They were so bright when they were together. Shining. Drawing the envious gaze of the lonely. Or maybe it was only Reyna. Maybe only she could not see anything else when they were around. Why was it, that Percy remembered Annabeth, but Jason didn't remember her? What was different?

You couldn't measure love, how vast or how wide it was, but she tried, in those quiet, sleep-starved hours in the night. She tried to measure hers against Annabeth's. She wondered if Hera had a reason for separating one couple and keeping the other intact. And then one day, she couldn't anymore. She couldn't put the blame on Hera, because it was Jason — it was only Jason. There was nowhere else to search for a reason, because it was very simple.

Jason fell in love with someone else.

It had nothing to do with divine intervention or the grand schemings of fate. It was the smallest, quietest event, falling in love. So minor that you wouldn't know it unless it was happening to you. But in the way that Reyna found herself falling in love right before the Titan War when Jason made her that promise — the promise that everything would change after — Jason found himself falling in love while he was away.

He made his promises to someone else, and it didn't matter if he could keep them, because that wasn't part of Reyna's story. Or rather, she wasn't part of Jason's story. The love story, the one that everyone would remember, would be between Jason and Piper. It could be, it might be, the greatest love story ever told, but it wasn't hers. She was just a side character.

..o..

Reyna waits with her legion five hundred feet from Camp Half-Blood, where the Greek forces have assembled at the border to prevent the Roman assault. She looks back over her shoulder. Octavian is practically giddy. It gives her no pleasure to do something that makes him glad, but for once, they're on the same page. The soldiers, her soldiers, wait for her signal. She is praetor. So much power. They will follow her wherever she commands. This is her decision.

She thinks, it's possible she finally understands why Medea did what she did. The need to fight against the unfairness. The sheer anger she can't keep inside.

Mostly, though, she can't stand the thought of being forgotten. If she is going to be remembered for anything, she'd rather take the part of the villainess than the quietly suffering spurned woman of olden times.

She won't be a part of someone else's love story, shoved into some darkened corner of memory.

"Let's go," she says, and they plunge into battle against the Greeks.

Around her, she can hear her comrades falling, Greeks and Romans dying on both sides, and she can feel the war against Gaea creak toward its ruined conclusion, a sacrifice on the alter of vengeance, but she closes herself against all of it. She won't apologize for her choices. On the battlefield, she will shine, undimmed, until the very end.