The Boring Blurb

This fic is a collection of oneshots I've gathered together from scribblings on envelopes and cereal packets and PostIt notes and tissue boxes and, once, my forearm. Everything in Between refers to the things that happen in after and in between all of the serious events in demigod life, because people focus on the main events in demigod life, the battles lost and won, friendships made and broken, news that breaks hearts and causes them to soar, but these oneshots will be just kind of what happens after all of that. After the cameras have stopped rolling, almost.

Some events will be focusing on what happens after 'real' (i.e. canonical) events while some (probably most) will be what goes on after events of my own choosing. Many are sad, because I have a penchant for angst (if you don't know that then, well, you'll soon find out).

The oneshots will not be related and they will not happen chronologically; nor will they necessarily happen in the same timeline. They will be self-contained — if I kill a character in one chapter and they turn up in the next, that's why.

So I know it's been a while. Sorry for that. But I've been working on something really long/detailed and I've been trying to get it all written before I post it. Right now, its 15 chapters with two more started and I'm not even sure how many it could end up.

For now, if there's anyone still out there, this is a scene I've had in my head for a while and now felt like a good time to get it out there.

Marzipan.

Jason's foot gave a particularly violent jerk, yanking him awake.

His ears jangled with the screech of an approaching subway train clamping on its brakes in one unending reverberation. The taste of copper filled his mouth. Rubbing a hand across his face tore a rust red scab out from under his nose, reopening an ooze of blood from one nostril.

Yet more dirt crammed under fingernails already sporting filthy crescents as he pushed himself to a sitting position on the soft, dark earth. Every muscle felt like it had just gone ten rounds with a meat tenderiser but still come out tougher than shoe leather; every now and then a signal zapped along his nerves and sent a random body part into spasm.

He blinked around him. The air reeked of burning. He was at the centre of a wide circle, in which centuries-old trees had been reduced to stumps splintered into jagged teeth. Smoke coiled up from their charred remains, askew like old tombstones, and from the ashy dirt itself. Further out from where he was lying, the canopies of trees were still crackling with flames, boiling sap hissing to steam.

The elastic cuffs of his socks were all that remained of his footwear; his Converse smouldered about twenty feet in front of him, rubber soles ridged and dribbled like candlewax. Not much was left of his shirt, either; a few tatters of fabric clung to shiny burns across his torso. His belt buckle had branded its way into the leather of the belt; just below his navel, the button of his jeans had seared a perfectly round burn, like someone had pressed a cigarette lighter to his abdomen.

He groaned and slumped forwards onto his hands and knees. The shock of it jarred up into his shoulders. Orange sparks winked on the ground, outlining where his body had been like chalk at a crime scene. Crawling forwards felt like clawing his way through molasses; he couldn't lift his legs, so his knees left deep grooves behind him. The ground began to slope upwards and he frowned, squinting up at the ridge above him before looking back over his shoulder. He had been lying in the middle of a depression.

As far as he knew, there'd been no crater before he'd called down the lightning.

Shaking his head, he rose onto trembling legs and managed to scramble out of the hole he'd blasted in the earth, collapsing at the top. Here the air was clearer and he gulped it in, which sent him into a round of hacking coughing that choked up grey foam.

His tongue felt like it was swelling in his mouth, expanding like year-old Saltines to suck all the moisture out of his head. He swallowed past a raw throat and rubbed a hand across his face again, smearing ash over his cheeks and nose.

All he could see were trees, most of them damaged from lightning and fire. He pinballed from one tree to the other in a vague forward direction; at each impact blackened bark crackled, sloughing off the trunks. He focused trying to stay on his feet for long enough to maybe get some idea where he was and continued stumbling into the forest. After a while, the splashing of falling water broke through even the ringing in his ears and his tongue practically fell out of his mouth in desperation to move towards the sound.

Slithering down slimy rocks covered with leaf mould, he made his way down to a pool at the base of a meandering waterfall picking its way down a marginal incline in several stages. Wasting no time, he sloshed forward into the water, ignoring his burns hissing in protest, and stuck his head under the final fall, gulping water and then letting it sluice over his body. It was cold; his fingers and toes had throbbed into numbness before he opened his eyes.

Spitting water out of his mouth and scrubbing it out of his hair, he stepped out from under the waterfall for long enough to realise the spray it was creating was fracturing the sunlight into a rainbow. He grinned and scrabbled around in the pockets of what only the most generous of people would still call jeans, frowning when he drew out a golden blob.

What had been a pocketful of drachma had fused into knobbed nugget with shreds of pocket lining and skin from his thigh fused into it.

He hoped Iris wasn't fussy.

Grimacing, his tentatively touched the edge of the rainbow with the golden blob and closed his eyes. When he opened them, the gold was gone and his shoulders sagged down his back in relief.

"Nico di Angelo."

Goosebumps were puckering his flesh by the time Nico arrived. Jason was sat on a rock at the edge of the waterfall with his knees pulled to his chest in a vice grip. His chin was planted on top of his knees to stop his teeth chattering.

Nico appeared at the top of the slope leading down to the pool at the bottom of the waterfall. He had a backpack in one hand and Jason's sword in the other. "We've got to stop meeting like this," Nico said, a smirk quirking up one corner of his mouth. "There's only so many times you can call me to a location where you've had your shirt supposedly 'burned off' before I conclude you're hitting on me."

"In your dreams. Now get your ass down here before I tell Will you said that."

Nico wrinkled his nose. "Boo. You're cranky when you've been playing lightning rod, you know that, right?" He waved Jason's sword at him. "By the way, forgetting something?"

"Where'd you find that?"

"It's what I used to track you. Hazel's been teaching me the finer points of that prospecting thing she's got going on. Or trying to. I guess it worked though, so we must be doing something right. I don't know if I'm more surprised at that or she will be when she finds out. Anyway, you managed to vanquish a tree with it. Split it straight down the middle. On the edge of that big ass crater which I'm going to assume I can also pin on you in case some curious park rangers come knocking?"

"It probably got blown out of my hand. I kind of… overdid it."

Nico snorted and vanished into the shadows, reappearing next to Jason and thrusting the backpack at him. "You think? I've seen smaller meteorite craters. What the hell, man? You look like you nearly fried yourself as well this time."

Jason sighed and unzipped the backpack. He yanked out a hoodie and slipped it over his head, his body singing as it enveloped him in warmth. Next came a pair of socks. He shoved what remained of his last pair into the bag and put on the new pair. "Kind of didn't have a choice. I was minding my own business at the Jefferson Memorial and suddenly the Hydra came splashing out of the Tidal Basin heading for the Washington Monument. I managed to get enough control of the winds with the help of a storm spirit or two to fly us out to wherever the hell we are before it could, you know, lay waste to the entire seat of Western democracy. But then I had to try and kill it."

"What? That sucks."

"You have this incredible knack for understatement, has anyone told you that?" Jason said, jamming his hand inside a Ziploc bag of ambrosia he'd pulled out of the backpack and crumbling a square into his mouth.

"I'm not talking about the Hydra. I meant you're on vacation and you decided to visit the freaking Jefferson Memorial? What were you trying to do, relax so much you ended up in a coma from boredom? Between you and Annabeth, I'm calling bullshit on the whole blondes have more fun thing."

"That's what you took from the story? That my vacation plans suck? I've never been to D.C. before. I wanted to see the sights, check out all the memorials to the great leaders this country's had over the years. There's nothing wrong with it. Besides, how do you even know the Jefferson Memorial is boring? I bet you haven't even been."

Nico rolled his eyes. "Don't make that bet, dude. You're not going to win."

"Oh come on. You? You've been to the Jefferson Memorial? Bull. When?"

Nico smirked, leaned over and patted Jason on the head. "I swear, you guys never learn, do you? Fine, you want to take the bet? Diplomat for a grandpa, been hanging around since the early twentieth century, remember? So yeah, I've been to the Jefferson Memorial. It was no big deal, really. Only this little thing with a few hundred people, the Crown Prince Olav and Princess Martha of Norway and their kids and Eleanor Roosevelt. Oh, and FDR cutting the ribbon of course and then a small lunch buffet reception back at the White House. You know. Super low key."

Jason stared at him. "And Will finds this level of smugness… attractive?"

Nico grinned at him and extended a hand to help him up. "Yup. Apparently. I know, did I hit the jackpot or what?" He slung an arm around Jason's shoulders. "Seriously though, tell me about the Hydra. How the hell did you manage that singlehandedly?"

Jason blew air out through his lips and shook his head. "Gods. Dumb luck? I had to hack heads like a blender and then the second they were all gone call down bolts of lightning for each neck stump simultaneously to cauterise them. Probably more lightning than I ever tried to call down before. And splitting it like that? It felt like it was going to blow me to pieces. I don't want to be doing it again in a hurry."

"Nice job. But yeah, you probably don't want to be doing that again. We're in the Shenandoah National Park. Isn't destruction of government property like a federal crime?"

Jason narrowed his eyes at Nico. "Why do I sense this is quickly turning to blackmail?"

Nico held up his hands. "Hey, I never mentioned blackmail. What an ugly word. Although… if you buy me a beer for hauling myself out to the ass end of nowhere, I might be too drunk to remember to mention this to any park rangers?"

"Done. And… thanks. Again. I know having to come and get me could get old pretty quick."

Nico shrugged. "Hey, don't mention it. You've had my back since Croatia. A couple of lifts here and there? That's nothing. It's the least I can do." He smiled and reached out for Jason. "Come on. Let's get out of here. Your vacation sounds tragic. Time to fix that."

He whisked both of them into screaming darkness.