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Empty. The only way to describe how Piper was feeling is completely, utterly empty. It felt like a part of was missing, as if her heart got ripped straight out of her chest.
But wasn’t he after all, pretty much a part of her?
Gods she missed her best friend.
She’d cried the whole afternoon, she tried hiding it at first, choking down the tears, as she pushed and searched through the rubble with her shaking hands.
Though eventually her muffled sobs got so bad Chiron sent her back to cabin 10.
She couldn’t even help look for him.
She was pathetic. Utterly pathetic. While her friends were trying to search for Leo, she was sobbing alone in her bunk.
But was there really any use in trying to find him? They all saw the explosion. She saw it up close.
She wasn’t sure she could believe there were much left of the boy who once was Leo Valdez.
____________________________________
Jason was sitting alone in the rubble of the war that had taken place just mere hours ago. He was panting in exhaustion, sweaty and filthy. His face in his hands, tears prickling from his eyes.
He had searched through the ruins of what used to be with his bare hands for hours on end with no luck. What did he even expect to find? A burnt hand? Gods he can’t think like that.
Everyone else had scrambled back to their cabins, with a sad and apologetic look at Jason a long time ago, knowing they wouldn’t find anything. Knowing Jason would refuse to leave. Knowing he’d refuse to accept the death of his best friend.
He saw leo in that explosion with his own eyes, as he had let Jason and Piper go,
and the explosion swallowed him whole. There was no way he could’ve survived that - no matter how fire resistant he was.
He eventually wiped the tears that had fallen down his grimy face away, letting out a muffled, broken sob. Fuck, he can’t remember when he last cried, nonetheless downright sobbed.
The son of Zeus was so lost in his head he hadn’t noticed the faint steps approaching behind him, by a boy who seemed to have become a little too translucent after he came back to camp with Reyna, coach hedge and a huge statue on his back.
“Jason”
Jason flinched and snapped his head up, only for his bloodshot eyes to meet a pair of black ones staring right back at him.
“Nico. Shouldn’t you be at the infirmary?”
His voice was raspy and you didn’t have to be observant to know Jason had cried.
“I said I’d look for you. People were wondering if you’d ever stop searching, and I wanted to see how you were doing.”
There was a drawn out moment of silence. A silence that told everything he already knew but didn’t want to confirm.
After a few more aching moments, he finally croaked out the obvious; “He’s gone, right?”
Another pause filled the air. A tense moment before the younger boy softly sat down next to Jason. He let another moment pass before answering in a quiet tone. “Yeah. I’m sorry Jason, he sacrificed himself for us - for you.”
Jason didn’t answer at first. The words of his friend crashed over him like an angry tidal wave, trying to drown him. His shoulders slumped and he let out something close to a pained whimper.
“To storm or fire the world must fall”
That sentence was possibly one of the worst things that had ever happened to him.