SANITY; heroes of olympus

03.2

Because he was going to make one thing clear: he and his sister are two different people.

They may share the same nose and have some variation of their fathers eyes and have similar senses of humour, but they were different. Andromeda liked things he didn't and vice versa. Adonis liked things she didn't and vice versa. They were not the same, no, they were incredibly different, which meant their love would be different, too.

Donnie pulled away from his sister, her amethyst eyes darting to him with a wide, frantic look. He smiled at her, "Go. Be with Percy."

"But I want to be with you—"

"Dromeda, I'm fine." He pulled her towards him, hugging her tightly. "I'm not leaving you ever again, I'm right here. But you need to go be with Percy now, okay?"

Reluctantly, and with much hesitance, Andy let herself be pulled away by Percy. The son of Poseidon shared a look with Donnie, a silent promise to keep an eye on her. Besides, the two of them had a lot to talk about.

As he looked around, Donnie couldn't help but feel overwhelmed by everything. Sure, he had been here before, in this very room, but now there was so much more weight behind it. He knew the truth about his bloodline—being both Greek and Roman—and how that would cause a lot more tension than before between the two groups of demigods. But not only that, his sister was here, too. His sister with her anger and her hate and her power, his sister with her past as praetor, coming back to a place where she had been, in some way, replaced.

Now, Donnie wasn't a fool, nor was he oblivious. He knew that at some point, there had been something a little more than friendship between Reyna and his sister. He had noticed it when they were younger, right after they had reunited when they were thirteen. The two girls would look at each other a little too long to be just friends, but that was when everything began to spiral. Donnie had left and hadn't come back until now, but he knew that his sister had left periodically ever since then, disappearing with no cause or reason, well, not one that was known amongst Camp Jupiter and people of New Rome.

Sets of couches and low tables were carted into the forum until it resembled a furniture showroom. Romans lounged in groups of ten or twenty, talking and laughing while wind spirits—aurae—swirled overhead, bringing an endless assortment of pizzas, sandwiches, chips, cold drinks, and fresh-baked cookies. Drifting through the crowd were purple ghosts—Lares—in togas and legionnaire armour. Around the edges of the feast, satyrs/fauns trotted from table to table, panhandling for food and spare change. In the nearby fields, the war elephant frolicked with Mrs. O'Leary, and children played tag around the statues of Terminus that lined the city limits.

The whole scene was so familiar yet so completely alien that it gave Donnie vertigo.

All he really wanted right now was to be with his family, but especially his sister. He wanted to be able to sit in a room and talk to her, ask her questions, even just be in her presence. He wanted to be with his aunt and hear her voice because it was so strikingly motherly and familiar to his own mothers. Not only that, but she was one of the only family members he had left. He wanted to be with them, he wanted to be with his family, but there were other things to do, other problems to deal with. If their quest was going to succeed, they needed the Romans, which meant the others getting to know them and building some goodwill.

Reyna and a few of her officers (including the most annoying kid Donnie ever met, Octavian, freshly back from burning a teddy bear for the gods) sat with them and their crew. Percy joined them with Frank and Hazel.

As a tornado of food platters settled onto the table, Percy leaned his mouth towards Andy and whispered, "We'll talk later, right?"

She nodded. Leaning forward, Andy pressed a kiss to his nose before murmuring, "Yeah, of course. I've got some stuff I have to tell you anyway."