Halcyon [Leo Valdez x Reader]

He's Back to Ruin My Life

I often have a dream where I re-do the worst night of my life. The issue is, I don’t know if this event happened to me in real life or not. Like all dreams, I can’t remember the beginning. It always picks up somewhere in the middle, like this:

I was running down the street barefoot, cutting the soles of my feet on the harsh terrain. I needed to bleed. If I didn’t get the excess water out of me before it diluted into my blood then I would die.

My body felt weak as I ran; from what, I wasn’t sure. I felt sick to my stomach, but as I lurched forward to clear my gut, my nose gushed blood like a fountain. The iron-tasting liquid dripped to the back of my throat and rolled off my tongue with the vomit. Gross.

I picked myself back up and ran some more. I felt my head becoming fuzzy and my vision began to spot. I would begin to seize soon. Panicking, I dropped to my knees and began scouring the street for something sharp. With all the trash laying around in Southern California, there had to be something.

Like a blessing from the gods, a shard of broken glass seemed to appear before me. I desperately took it with vibrating hands. Whatever disease you get from cutting yourself on broken glass didn’t seem as terrible as dying from water intoxication, so I took the shard and squeezed my eyes shut.

The pain that went up my wrist was searing hot, but once I had finished, I opened my eyes and saw pure water bursting out of my arm like a fountain. This was not normal; nothing that happened to me was normal. I watched as the excess water burst out of my body and began to slow down, filling the clear liquid with my dark red blood.

Stupidly, I hadn’t thought about how much my wound would actually bleed, and now I had nothing to help me. My gash would eventually soak the black street red and I would die. There was honestly no way out of my situation. This dream forced me to feel myself die every time I had it.

The saving grace was that I always fainted before I bled to death.

I expected to awake, but instead I was brought to a familiar house. I remember waking here after I left my dead mom, but I usually never dreamed about it. The broken down house had just served as my training place before that wolf kicked me out. It was a tough time living there, but I feel it made me stronger.

The Wolf House stood before me, though more broken than before. The snow on the ground began to freeze my feet through my boots. I shivered and wrapped my arms around myself, looking around for any sign of Lupa and her pack. Strangely, I couldn’t move around. I felt glued in place.

I opened my mouth to call out, but a woman’s voice answered before I could ask anything.

She said my name with such grace I knew she had to be a goddess, but I picked up a hint of hostility, which told me she wasn’t mine. I didn’t know that was possible, considering I was a Roman demigod. No other types of gods would want to speak to me, right?

“Aid me,” she said. Her voice came from all around me, yet I saw nobody in the snow or the house. “I need your saving. You must come with the other three. I have delivered the boy to gather you all. Now, come to me.”

I tried to speak again, but my dream abruptly ended, whisking me back to my reality.

I felt rumbling underneath me, and a bright ray of sun fell upon my eyelids. I squinted and looked away from the blinding light, trying to see where I actually was.

I sat on the leather seats of a bus. Other teenagers were talking to each other in front of me, saying something about winter break after a field trip. My brain felt weird and fuzzy, like I had forgotten a large chunk of my memories. I felt something squeeze my hand, and quickly my brain fog dissipated.