Bandages and Salt (PJO X BSD AU)

Chapter twenty-nine

Shitty Dazai.

A certain amount of grogginess from jet lag weighted down my body, but I knew that it was only lunch and the chances of us going back to sleep were slim to none, so I decided to try my luck with magic made coffee, pleasantly surprised to find that it was exactly the way that I liked mine made, right down to the temperature.

My plate filled with a healthy serving of tea on rice the moment that I touched it, something I haven't really had since leaving the Sheep. It tasted exactly the way that we used to make it. I got a few bites in before I noticed something.

"Mackerel," I chided lightly, feeling like I was mothering the younger teen, "you've got to eat something."

The other boy hadn't so much as touched his plate since we sat down, the magical entity still laying there empty of anything. It will take me a long time to forget just how light the teen was this morning, the definition of his ribs. It wasn't something that I was planning on letting continue.

"Sorry," the other teen apologized in a tone that told me just how little he meant it, "just waiting for someone to smite you. Or would that be sacrilegious?"

My face scrunched up, my eyebrows pinching together at the other teen's statement. The boy simply just pointed to the small fire burning in the pavilion and the kids throwing a portion of their food into it like that was something you're supposed to do. Dazai stood, holding a small plate of what looked to be canned crab in his bandaged hands. The teen walked over to the fire, scraping more than he probably should've into the flames. I followed the other boy's lead, half expecting lightning to strike me down on the way there, but I made it there and back without a scratch.

We ate our food quickly, the younger teen seemingly picking at his more than eating it, though I did notice him take a few bites here and there. When we left the pavilion, I took a hopeful step in the direction of the Poseidon cabin, but a hand waving in front of my face stopped from walking any farther.

"I have a training idea," the taller teen said, his voice tinted with something close to excitement that made me decidedly against anything that was about to come out of his mouth.

This might've been one of the strangest things that the other teen has said to me since I've known me, that includes the conversation this morning at the bottom of Half-Blood Hill and a very weird cover story that he came up with one time to get the cops off our asses during a mission. The boy that I know is someone that had a tendency of throwing himself into work when he needed a distraction, but never seemed to actively create it. Training definitely counts as work, the only type of work that I've seen the other teen avoid as much as possible.

The boy pointed at the archery range, ignoring the headache that he must've known was growing in my mind.

"We don't really use bullets all that often here," the teen explained emotionlessly, "but we do have arrows."

The other boy's logic was impeccable in a way that made me want to shove the teen into a wall if only to kill some of those brain cells that come up with shit like this.

I sighed heavily, following the teen to the range.

—-

Dazai POV

We made our way to the range where Michael Yew was instructing the older campers on the archery lesson. I waved the teen down as we got closer, getting his attention while the others were retrieving their arrows for the targets they'd been using. The boy's head tilted to the side as he walked over, his eyes slightly glazed over as if he was lost in a memory that the rest of us didn't seem to quite share.

"Hey Michael," I greeted, making my voice purposefully soft to put the teen at ease.

The boy blinked a few times, the haziness slowly fading from his gaze as he did before he smiled at me warmly. "Heya, Percy," the other demigod started, his voice tented with a poorly concealed awkwardness, "I thought I heard a rumor that you were back."