Tumblr Stories, Headcannons, and AUs{PJO/HoO}

The museum

Museum

"You've got to be kidding me." Leo stared at his best friends, thoroughly annoyed. They were the ones that forced him to come with them to the stupid museum, and now they were making out and completely ignoring the Roman display (not to mention him).

Bloody hypocrites. Was he watching too much Harry Potter, saying 'bloody' instead of something else? Nah, no such thing as too much Harry Potter, it was all in his head.

He heaved a great sigh, but Piper and Jason made no sign that they heard him. In fact, they seemed to be making out more. Ugh. Well, no way was he just gonna stay here and be a third wheel, nope, not today.

Leo wandered off, paying no particular attention to where he was going 'cause he didn't care anyway.

Somehow, he ended up in the dinosaur section. He raised his eyebrows approvingly at the centrepiece- one of those long-necked, long-tailed behemoths that stretched at least 20m from one end of the room to the other. Dinosaurs sure knew how to grow. He wondered if there would be a hint as to how on the little plaques; he needed all the help he could get.

"Can I help you?"

Startled, Leo spun around to see a guy maybe a couple of years younger than him dressed neatly (aside from a battered old aviator jacket that looked really comfy) with one of those staff ID cards around his neck. He had dark hair stuck up like baby bat wings and his eyes were deep- they were also sunken in, like he hadn't slept in a week. Leo knew the feeling.

"Huh?" he asked intelligently, then shook his head. "Uh, not really, I was just, kinda..." he gestured around, as if to say 'looking', but he felt kind of hopeless. Dammit, the guy was attractive and it was kind of short circuiting his brain. He never had been good with 'organic life forms', as his father said, who was also bad with social situations.

The museum worker sighed. "Great. No one ever wants to know, the museum won't fund any expeditions and there's hardly anything interesting to study in the archives that I've found so far."

Leo blinked in confusion. "You mean you're not just a tour guide?"

The guy- let's call him Bat until we know his name- looked resigned. "I'm a little younger than most, but I'm a fully-qualified paleontologist- I study dinosaurs for a living." He spat out the words 'fully-qualified' as if they were poison. Leo figured that people probably didn't take him seriously at such a young age.

There was silence for a long moment before Leo, deciding the museum was way too creepy when it was so quiet, blurted out, "So why don't you tell me some facts? Short ones so I don't get distracted."

Bat seemed stumped at that, staring Leo as if he was crazy. Maybe he was, but dammit the guy was cute and he seemed kind of upset that no one ever wanted to know.

"You know, if you want to," Leo muttered, looking down and suddenly feeling awkward. What was he thinking, he didn't know the guy, this was a bad idea...

"U-um, okay. Sure. Why not? Try this one on for size: there's a dinosaur that is actually named Drinker. I'm not kidding."

"Drinker? Was the guy who named it drunk?" Leo gaped at the slightly taller guy. Dammit. Even Bat was taller than him.

"No, it was named after a famous paleontologist, Edward Drinker Cope, who got into what was basically a huge dinosaur war with Othniel Charles Marsh called the Bone Wars. They kept trying to one-up each other with paleontological finds. It basically ruined their social lives and made them broke, but it brought some really big fossils into the paleontological field." Bat's eyes were glittering, and Leo was glad that the guy was happy (and he had a cute smile to boot), even if he didn't quite understand some of the things he was talking about.

Leo wondered if the guy would do the same for him if he started babbling about machinery. He hoped so. Then he mentally shook his head to clear the thoughts. 'Bad Leo,' he scolded himself. 'Don't do this to yourself again. Remember Khione? Calypso? Thought so.'

Bat carried on, seemingly not noticing Leo's inner argument. "And there's a dinosaur known as Sarcolestes, 'flesh robber', that was identified by the left half of the lower jaw, but it turns out it was a type of ankylosaur, and they're all herbivores!"

Leo managed to choke on nothing. "Seriously?"

"Seriously," he confirmed.

Leo's phone buzzed, and he pulled it out of his jean pockets self-consciously. It was Jason.

'We kinda got kicked out so let's go.'

"They got kicked out?" Leo asked flatly.

"Your friends?"

"Last I saw, they were making out by Roman weapons."

Bat nodded slowly. "That's Reyna's section. If she caught them, she definitely would have kicked them out."

"I gotta go then," Leo said, kind of disappointed. He couldn't make head nor tails of half of it but what he did get was interesting and the guy was so cute it should have been illegal.

Dammit, he'd gotten it bad.

He made to leave, but Bat suddenly thrust a piece of paper into his hands and said, "See you again maybe?"

"Sounds good," Leo grinned, then, after hesitating a moment, lurched forward and kissed the taller guy's cheek, then ran off, blushing.

His hand reached up to where Leo had kissed him, feeling rather flustered and not just a little flattered.

"Don't run in the museum...?"

//

So I ended up writing the museum one. One down, seventeen to go! The Valdangelo tag needs cheering up so here we go. Maybe I'll write a sequel to this at some point.