The two doors

Side A, part 3 (final)

And, two snippets of what things would've been like if there hadn't been a choice. As a treat!

This one was, surprisingly cathartic. Don't know what feeling I worked through here, but hell if I didn't work through it.

Waking up feels heavy and disorienting, there's a tight pressure on his head, and his entire body aches. It takes him a while to recognize where he is, and less time to recognize when he is.

He forces himself to sit, and then forces himself to stand and walk, dragging his feet along the halls of Bunker 9 until he finds the main area, where he can hear Leo working.

The moment he crosses into the studio proper, the sound stops and Leo turns towards him, a tight sort of expression on his face, as he leaves the table he's been working at and approaches him.

"Hey, you with me fantasmin?"

Immediately, he knows what Leo's asking, but the more he thinks about it the less it concerns him. It's not actually the first time he's done it.

"Yeah, I'm fine"

Leo leans back, posture loosening just so, still alert, still tense, but less so.

"Good, it's around lunch, do you feel like eating?"

Something about the way he asks soothes him, like it's truly and wholly up to him, when Will asked, there was always an underlying right answer. Leo, though, expects nothing of him.

And, well, if he misses anything about the time in the Argo II, it's definitely the food.

"You're cooking?"

Leo hums in ascent, moving back to the studio, but picking a different corner, where there's an actual stove top and a stone oven.

"Probably a bad idea to show up at camp for a while, they probably found the leftovers by now"

It should be odd, how nonchalant Leo is about it, if it wasn't how he feels himself.

A strange sense of peace.

"I could do with some food"

Leo gives him a pleased grin, a shadow of the smiles he remembers, but still making something inside him turn warm.

"Perfect"

The peace doesn't last.

He gets to spend a whole three more days in the safety of Bunker 9, before someone comes looking for Leo and finds him there. Leo, quick witted as always, gives an easy lie that he appeared recently, from the labyrinth entrance deeper in the woods when asked.

When the camper, someone from Will's cabin he can't remember the name of, turns to ask him how long he's been gone, he lies and says he left the night he found out Will was leaving for Jupiter, because they had a fight.

This prompts Leo further, and he mentions hearing the fight from the distance while he was getting food at dinner. Which seems to be the right thing to say because the camper slumps into a nearby chair, face paling by the second, and brokenly tells them that they found Will's body in the woods, torn to shreds and barely recognizable.

Those two words ring in his head, and he looks up, meeting amber tainted eyes. Leo moves quickly, crossing the room and getting to him in a second, coaxing him slowly to sit in the ground, and posing himself in between him and the camper.

"You should go, we'll join everyone in a bit"

"I-" the camper tries to say

"GO!" Leo roars at them.

He hears rushing footsteps, feels the unique sensation of a human soul getting further and further from reach. He looks up at Leo, once again tightly coiled, ready to act.

"He's gone"

It's like a crack, a facture, like those words are what he needed to realize this was real. And then a laugh, climbing up his throat and breaking through his lips.

"He's gone!"

Leo stumbles back, falling into his ass and staring wide eyed at him, a cross between pure stupefaction, and something akin to awe. It makes him laugh harder.

It should be numbing, terrible, consuming.

Instead, it's relief.

Freedom.

"Fuck, fuck"

Leo smiles, soft and bright and so very much like him, just as it is completely wrong.

"Yeah, can't be laughing in front of camp"

Nodding at those words he takes a deep breath, and lets it out softly, pushing the laughter back, the smile back.

"Ok, we can go"

Something in Leo's eyes glimmers, and he licks his lips.

"After you"

The funeral is hard, not for who it is for, but because now he knows every word to be a lie. Even seeing the others again has a bitter undertone to it, because they expect him to be something he isn't.

His anger is miss-constructed as grief, only making him angrier, by everyone except the one person that knows the full truth of that night. Even Hazel and Reyna, who are capable of acknowledging the relationship for what it was, still think him to be mourning.

As a result, he sticks to Leo, the only person who's still making sense, the only one who doesn't treat him like something broken. If the others notice his new favoritism, they say nothing about it.

Later, when they're left alone again, the only ones still rooted to this camp, Leo invites him to stay in Bunker 9 whenever he's not in the Underworld. So he doesn't have to be alone in cabin 13.

The fact that he asks like that, as though it's just a different option instead of an expectation, makes accepting it easier than anything. And if he gets a feeling like a tether being tied into place as he joins Leo for the night, then that's his to keep for now.