Chapter Text
Sunday, July 3rd, 2011
Jason doesn’t know what to think about Nico.
Before they rescued him, Jason had a very detached, logical way of thinking about Nico, only knowing what Hazel, Percy, and Annabeth told him. Now things are different.
Nico looked gaunt after saving him. He was almost dead. They saved him at the exact moment before he died from being trapped by giants in the jar. Jason hadn’t gotten a good look at him before Hazel carted him off to take care of him.
Today, the day after Nico was saved, he looks better. He joins them for dinner and picks at a cheeseburger and fries from his Camp Half-Blood plate. Jason can tell everyone’s looking at him a little differently, especially since he’s here and Percy and Annabeth aren’t.
Frank and Hazel knew him (at least a little bit, in Frank’s case); Jason, Piper, Leo, and Coach Hedge didn’t know him at all. Jason had a feeling Piper and Leo were creeped out, offput. Jason wasn’t feeling that same way, not in the slightest.
Overnight Nico had gotten some color back into his face but still didn’t look like anything Jason would consider healthy. His long dark hair hung over his eyes as he looked at his place and when he spoke it sounded sure and deep in a way Jason had never heard from someone their age before. They ate dinner and tried not to talk about the two elephants missing from the room. Jason glanced in between his conversation with Leo and Frank, trying to figure out why somewhere in his chest, or his gut, or his instinct, he felt like Nico was more than just Hazel’s brother, more than a connection to the Doors of Death.
Jason’s had this feeling since he lost his memories and would happen upon something familiar. It’s the same feeling Nico gave him. Sometimes it felt like Jason’s mind was trying to tell him, You knew this before! Pay attention! Sometimes he figures it out why and sometimes he doesn’t. He was jealous of Percy, having gotten his memories back with no issue. Jason is left with vague feelings and the idea that maybe he knew Nico before.
When they finish dinner, Jason takes Hazel by the elbow and keeps her back.
She had been talking with Frank, who eyes Jason a little bit, but Hazel nods at him and he goes on down the ship to the lower decks. Jason and Hazel stay in the dining room. Hazel looks up at him with her golden eyes.
“What’s up, Jason?”
Jason didn’t know Hazel before all of this. Or, actually, he did know her at Camp Jupiter, but he lost those memories. He didn’t know her before getting on the Argo II and Jason knows that even in those couple of weeks, he didn’t know her well. Still, being on the ship for the past couple weeks let Jason get to know her enough to know she hopefully won’t bite when he asks, “Can I ask you something about Nico?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
However, if Hazel were to get a little aggressive, it would definitely be about her brother (and Frank, Jason guessed, but that’s another story). Jason knows the gist of Hazel and Nico’s story. He’s glad they have each other, but the story of two children of Pluto (or Pluto and Hades, Jason amends in his head) plucked from their time to now finding each other is amazing.
“Did Nico and I know each other at Camp Jupiter?”
“Oh,” she hadn’t expected him to ask that. Maybe she was expecting something about Nico’s demeanor, or maybe something crass Leo would ask about, “I mean, yeah. He wanted to drop me off at camp, but he knew it would be too suspicious, so he came as an Ambassador to Pluto to recommend I join the legion. He had to negotiate with you and Reyna about me being allowed to go to Lupa. While I was gone, he stayed at camp. I don’t think he made any other friends there.”
“So, we were friends?” Maybe that’s why Nico seemed so familiar, why something about seeing Nico in person made Jason pause and take note.
“I don’t know, really. I was gone training with Lupa for a couple of weeks. I wasn’t there, but when I got back, he spoke to you two and the senators more than anyone else. I assumed it was an ambassador thing.”
Jason nods. It’s not exactly what he was hoping for.
“Can I ask why?”
It’s fair, a question for a question. He explains to Hazel, “I don’t have all my memories back. Actually, I barely have any memories from before Juno took me,” Hazel’s eyes soften. Pity, “I get these feelings sometimes though, when things are familiar. Nico just seems familiar, I guess.”
“You could ask him?” Hazel suggests. “I think he could use something else to focus on, if I’m being honest. After the giants, then Percy and Annabeth…” She trails off but Jason understands what she means. To Nico, his memories of Jason were nothing compared to Tartarus. He could use something trivial to focus on outside of traveling through the Mediterranean to stop Mother Earth from destroying the world.
“You think that would be fine?” He asks, just to make sure, “I don’t want to bother him.”
“I think you’ll be fine. Who knows? Maybe Nico could jog your memory.”
At night, when he’s supposed to be sleeping, Jason can’t help but think of Nico.
It’s the strongest pull Jason has felt to his past self since he was actually at Camp Jupiter. Jason tries to wrap his head around it. Nico, a boy around his age who wasn’t even a community member of New Rome, not even Roman, could remind Jason of the life he had and dedicated to Camp Jupiter and New Rome. What sense does it make for a Greek Jason knew for maybe one month almost a year ago to remind Jason he used to be someone else?
Jason hasn’t admitted it to anyone, even Piper and Leo, that it kills him inside that he doesn’t know who he used to be. He heard he was committed to duty, committed to help New Rome, Camp Jupiter, and their inhabitants to be better than before. He made the Fifth Cohort into something to be proud of, became praetor in the smoldering embers of battle. Now, lying in bed, Jason doesn’t know who that person is. He doesn’t know if that version of him, Praetor Grace, is still inside him somewhere hidden, or if when Juno wiped away Jason’s memory, she also wiped away any pretense he held from the way he was raised.
When he first realized what happened to him, Jason was terrified he would never get his memories back. It’s been almost eight months since then and every day Jason settles more into the inevitability that he will never get them back all the way. The closest thing he’ll have are other people’s memories of himself told as stories. Jason will never remember what he thought back then, how he felt, or anything close to his own perception of his life.
How many people begged to start over and Jason’s whining that he was given a second chance?
Jason likes Camp Half-Blood. He loved getting to know the Greeks, how they fought, and how it seemed everyone wanted to be there. They were kids who happened to be demigods, and they went to camp alongside school or year-round. Camp Jupiter raised soldiers, who listened to orders and became life-long citizens. If nothing had happened to him, Jason might have never left New Rome.
Does he miss it? He doesn’t know. He can’t remember enough to figure out where he wants to stay— where he wants to place his loyalties.
The Argo II: Leo, Percy, Piper, Annabeth, Frank, Hazel, Nico, Coach Hedge, they’re the people Jason wants to be loyal to. They’re the people he would miss when they’re gone, but all of them are in the middle of war waged between the Greeks and the Romans. For now, Jason can’t be caught in his head, begging for a semblance of his past self. He needs to focus on getting Percy and Annabeth back alive, finding out a way to close the Doors of Death without any of their friends dying along the way.
Maybe Nico isn’t the only one who needs a trivial distraction from the larger goings-on. Maybe if Jason was nice enough, clever enough, Nico would actually tell him any stories from when he stayed at Camp Jupiter. It could be nothing. It could fuel the fire that Jason was a soldier with a one-track mind like other people seemed to think he was, or maybe Jason would be surprised.
What if Nico had a funny story like he saw Jason choke on his food once or something equally embarrassing? Jason lets himself smile into his pillow at the thought. He relaxes into his bunk a little easier. Maybe Nico had a happy memory Jason could use to prove himself he and his old self are the same person at the core.
The last thoughts of the day are his game plan for asking Nico tomorrow. He can’t come off too strong because he’s sure it would scare him away or anger him and shut Jason out—
(He doesn’t know why he knows Nico would react that way. He could say it’s years of reading people working overtime but another part of him thinks he knows Nico like that because he knows Nico.)
Jason just needs to be upfront and honest, but casual. If Jason gets stories about himself, he already knows or even nothing at all then at least he will have gotten to know Nico a little better, and maybe Nico will feel a little more comfortable on the ship. Either way it shakes out Jason’s mind settles on the net positive.
Finally at peace enough to sleep, Jason falls, knowing the ship is being taken care of by the night watch crew of Leo, Hazel, and Nico, and having a plan to settle his own nagging thoughts.