A/N: I have to get this Leyna out of my system. It's getting debilitating, really.

Disclaimer: I am still not Rick Riordan.

The first time Reyna met Leo, she didn't even technically meet him; she met his warship shooting at her home. That was when she made up her mind not to like him, whether or not he was possessed by ghosts.

However, she still didn't actually meet him until after Gaea had been defeated and the Greek and Roman demigods came together for a celebration, hopefully one untainted by trivialities like bombings and murder. Because this time, if one came, so would the other. Reyna didn't take kindly to Greeks who shot at her camp and then didn't even have the decency to come and take the consequences.

The celebration was to last two weeks, with the first week at Camp Half-Blood and the second at Camp Jupiter. Reyna almost chose not to go, but someone needed to set a good example for her Romans. So she found herself on board a Greek warship—the same warship that had fired on New Rome a few months ago, in fact, which burned her to no end—sailing over the continental United States, heading for a bunch of Greeks on Long Island. Oh, goody. She surreptitiously slipped a handful of jelly beans into her mouth.

She did have a small windfall, though. The camp-bomber wasn't driving the ship this time. He (Leo Valdez, Annabeth had said his name was, but Reyna didn't feel that was malicious enough) had apparently taken an engine explosion to the everything, so some other Vulcan—no, Hephaestus—kids were covering for him as best they could. Annabeth swore up and down that camp-bomber would be better by the time they got there, that Reyna could meet him, that she was sure they wouldn't have any problems.

"Of course," the blonde had added, "it might help if you stopped calling him 'camp-bomber.'"

So Reyna had started verbally referring to him as "Valdez," but in her head he was still and would always be "camp-bomber."

Within forty-eight hours the Argo II started to descend, and Reyna had never been so happy to see land. As soon as they were within landing distance of the strawberry fields, Reyna began to assemble her legion, getting them together and into something like formation. She had a firm grip on the side when the ship banged onto the grass, but it was the best awful landing of her life. This trip had revealed she wasn't much for sky travel outside of Pegasus riding. Or perhaps she just didn't like being a passenger instead of the driver.

Reyna led her Romans off the ship just as an elfin Latino guy ran up to meet them—or maybe not them. She watched as he threw himself at the side of the ship, talking a mile a minute to the Hephaestus pilots (and, it seemed, the dragon masthead). She sighed, shook her head, and was prepared to write it off as a Greek Thing. But then Annabeth and Percy came out to meet them too, and Percy gestured to the talkative guy and said, "Don't mind Leo, he just missed Festus."

Then Reyna, ever controlled, broke rank to stride stone-faced up to him. Annabeth called out something, but she didn't hear it. She was too busy shoving Valdez, camp-bomber, out of his conversation. He looked straight at her (he was short for a guy, but still a smidge taller than she, which made her dislike him more), his hair looking like it hadn't been brushed in a week. And he must not have realized what was happening, because he tried to smooth his curls like that would save him.

"Hey, lovely," he said with a grin.

Somehow Reyna's knife appeared under Valdez's chin. She called him a few unflattering names in Latin and Spanish.

"Please don't break him, Reyna," Percy said, coming up behind her. "We like him. Plus he's the best repair boy we have."

Annabeth muttered to him, "I told you not to introduce them like that."

Reyna glowered at the camp-bomber for a moment, but finally she stowed her knife, and the entire group of Greeks and Romans let out a relieved sigh. She would talk to her legionnaires about that later. Head held high, she strode back to her Romans.

"Is she insane?" Leo asked Annabeth in awe, rubbing his chin. He didn't seem as, say, terrified for his life as Reyna would have liked, but she could always scare him into it later.

"Welcome to Camp Half-Blood," Percy said, smiling though his tone was uncertain.

"Thank you for hosting the Twelfth Legion Fulminata," Reyna said neutrally. They hadn't brought the golden eagle, but she was beginning to wish they had. Being out of her armor and far from home, she wished for an emblem of her strength. She was out of her element.

No, you're not, she said to herself suddenly, firmly. You're praetor and you have to be the most in your element of all the legion. So she straightened her back and lifted her chin and spread her feet. Sure, she still didn't feel quite at ease, but she looked confident, and she did feel a little better.

"Please show us your camp," she said.

Reyna liked Annabeth, but not very much right now. The daughter of Athena had made an executive decision to keep Leo around, as if she enjoyed watching the two of them interact. Interact, of course, here meant that Leo jittered and blabbered inanely and Reyna tried to look pleasantly in control while also plotting his death.

It was an interesting tour.

She was torn about the camp itself. It was certainly . . . nice. It was no New Rome, to be sure. She did like the looks of the arena and the climbing wall, and the pegasus stables might be nice while she was there. It just all seemed . . . less organized than her home. Was that the point of bringing the two camps together? To learn to appreciate the other? She wasn't sure she wouldn't rather just have a big battle and be done with it.

The demigods seemed like reasonably good people. Chiron was capable of handling them. Dionysus (they called him Mr. D, which seemed incredibly disrespectful, yet the god preferred it for some reason) didn't contribute much that Reyna saw, but having a god on hand might be useful. Jason and Piper were gone, and Percy wouldn't define why, but Reyna didn't complain. Honestly, she didn't feel like spending much time around the two. Other than that, all was fine. One week wasn't that long, right?

Oh, gods. She was going to die.

Dinner was quite an event, given the strange way Camp Half-Blood arranged seating. As a daughter of Bellona, who had no Greek counterpart, Reyna presented a problem, but Chiron eventually decided she could sit with Ares or Athena or at the big table with him and Mr. D. As much fun as those options sounded, she took one look at the Ares table and decided to sit with the children of Athena. It might help override some of her Minerva-Athena prejudice. Probably not, but she was willing to try.

She swept into the seat beside Annabeth, looking over the others coolly. A few nodded and muttered, "Praetor," but the rest either kept their eyes to their plates or went back to their (now slightly hushed) conversations. Annabeth forced an encouraging smile, but Reyna shrugged it off. She ruled mostly by fear at home; not having friends was normal.

"So how are things at Camp Jupiter?" Annabeth asked, obviously trying to set an example for the others.

"Well enough," Reyna said shortly. "It didn't take more than a few days to rebuild what was damaged in the war."

"Good." The blonde floundered for a topic.

"You know, I'm not really hungry," Reyna said, and it was true. She'd had almost an entire bag of jelly beans over the course of the day, plus a cup and a half of hot chocolate.

"Oh," Annabeth said. "Well, you don't have to stay if you don't want to."

"All right." Reyna considered adding see you around but decided against it; obviously they would run into each other again. So she simply stood, scraped her uneaten mound of mashed potatoes into the fire (she didn't know who to address it to, but hey), and strode out of the place like she had somewhere to be. She didn't, but there was no reason to bring up technicalities.

The camp was quiet once she got out of the dining pavilion; everyone was busy eating as much as they could before the official end-of-war celebrations began tomorrow. Reyna walked down the main path, committing the layout of camp to memory as best she could, and eventually she sat down behind a metal shed on the far side of the strawberry fields. It was a quiet, solitary place, out of the way of anyone leaving dinner, and it kind of reminded her of the Garden of Bacchus at home.

Ugh. She missed home already, not that anyone would ever hear her say it. Coming to Camp Half-Blood, while probably a good move in the long run, right now just left her feeling out of place. The Greek system had no use for praetors, and Reyna had nothing else to do otherwise. She was left to cling to the front of the legion and pretend she was useful. She leaned back onto the shed and banged the back of her head on the metal. It didn't help.

Actually, it hurt, in more ways than one. The noise attracted someone's attention—a guy from the other side called out, "Hey, is someone there?"

Suppressing a groan, Reyna pushed herself to her feet and stepped around the shed just in time to come nose-to-nose with an orange-shirted camper. Valdez. Her eyes narrowed, but he held up his hands and backed away before she could pull out her knife.

"Whoa there, pretty lady," he said hastily. "No need for violence. I'm not here to talk to you, sad to say."

Clenching her hands into fists, she didn't attempt to slit his throat, which she felt was a noble improvement on her part. "Why aren't you at dinner?" she asked coldly.

"Not hungry," he said like it should have been obvious. "Not that they're likely to notice whether I'm there or not."

She doubted that. Surely no one else caused the same level of chaos as he did.

"But anyway," he continued, a forced pleasantness to his tone, "I'm just, you know, hanging out over here on this side of the shed. You can sit on that side of the shed, and that way neither of us has to leave, and you don't even have to look at me."

Not having to look at him did sound nice. She looked him over, checking for any plots or tricks or dangerous weapons, but he seemed to mean it. Against her will, she moved back between the strawberry fields and the metal wall, and the thick grass rustled as they both sat back down. She stared out into the fields, her mind whirring though her lips remained clamped together. She was certainly not going to instigate conversation with this person.

Actually, now that she thought about it, Valdez was remaining pretty quiet himself. She had expected loud, obnoxious ADHD antics, or at the least, pathetically doomed attempts to flirt. But no, he didn't address her at all, and she couldn't hear anything from his side of the shed except the occasional heavy breath.

This was when Reyna's mouth went against all her better judgment: she found herself leaning toward the corner of the wall and calling around it, "Are you usually this accommodating?"

Valdez laughed a little; it sounded tinny through the shed. "No," he called back. "Normally I try my best to be as unaccommodating as possible. It's part of my ability to simultaneously charm and annoy the infierno out of people."

"That I believe. The annoying part, anyway."

She had been serious, but he laughed again, and she could just picture that huge grin splitting his face. "I told Jason once, don't insult my ability to annoy. I'm glad you can appreciate it."

"I don't think 'appreciate' is the word I would use," she said.

"I know." He was quiet again, and Reyna began to wonder if she ought to say something else, but then he said, "I don't think anyone would use the word 'appreciate,' actually."

He didn't sound excited, but she had to agree, "Probably not."

Leo banged something against the metal shed—maybe his shoe, or his head, she couldn't tell. "You want to know why I'm actually out here?" he asked, sounding tired. She didn't think he was smiling anymore.

"Why?" Reyna asked. She meant to come off coolly polite, but actual concern somehow got in there too.

"For the next two weeks we're going to celebrate a war that almost killed us all, me included." She knew this, obviously. He continued, "But if I'm not the most enthusiastically insane person there, it will be all, What's wrong, Leo? Aren't you happy, Leo? Here, do you want to fix my iPod, Leo? Because Dios forbid I ever be upset about anything." Something hit the other side of the shed again.

Reyna was surprised by the turn in the conversation. "Have you mentioned this to any of your friends? The rest of the Seven, or the Vul—Hephaestus cabin?"

Leo snorted. "The other six are so happily paired off, Gaea could start to wake again and they probably wouldn't even notice. And the other Hephaestus campers . . . I don't know. I've never really fit with them. They all think I'm a scary freak."

Reyna opened her mouth, but he hurried to say, "Not because of the eidolon. Because—" Suddenly he cut himself off, like he'd reconsidered what he was about to say. "Never mind."

She didn't ask. She probably didn't want to know. Instead she rolled her jeans up to her knees, pulled off her socks and tennis shoes, and dug her toes into the cool dirt, thinking. Back to the topic at hand: "You could just not show up at the celebration," she said, even though she knew it was a long shot.

"That's not an option, and you know it," Leo called her out. "They'll want to have me there with the Seven."

"I don't know, I was considering not going," Reyna offered.

"Praetor of New Rome? Yeah, no chance. They'll want you there too." He paused. "Why don't you want to go? Too undignified?"

Too undignified. She scrunched up her toes in the dirt and actually almost smiled. "Not quite. I'm just aware that I don't have much of a place there."

Leo was quiet. She guessed that he wasn't sure whether to agree or lie.

"It's not a problem," she lied. "I'm perfectly used to it. I just usually have duties as a praetor that make it inconspicuous."

Leo mumbled something to himself; Reyna couldn't quite make it out, but she did hear "a praetor and a repair boy" and "same problem." And it occurred to her then, quite as a surprise, that Leo's happy-go-lucky, flirtatious, obnoxious presence as a jokester might be as much of a mask as her own stoic, courageous presence as praetor. Another false public face. Did his friends even realize it?

Reyna realized that, although this was the third time she'd "met" Leo Valdez, it was only the first time she'd truly met him.

"If you want somewhere out of the way to hang out," Leo offered, sounding both eager and hesitant, "you can come watch me work in Bunker Nine. Nobody else really goes there."

She leaned back against the shed, looking up at the sinking sun. "I might," she said, and she meant it.