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Chapter Text

2006

It's raining. He can hear it hitting the window. He's not sure this apartment is better than the storm outside.

"I have to get up early tomorrow morning. You can sleep in if you want, but I'd like you to be up by nine—nah, let's make it nine-thirty. Is that all right?" Mr. Coulson asks.

Leo's not sure why he keeps asking questions, but it's not like Leo has to answer, right? "That's okay."

"Do you want to shower now, or in the morning?"

"I can shower now." He keeps his voice soft and unassuming.

Mr. Coulson is still working on his shoes. "Then in that case, I'll change into night clothes now—" the shoe finally slips off his foot "—and then you can have the shower."

"Okay."

Once he's alone under the hot water, Leo has a chance to contemplate just how bad this situation is. Sure, Mr. Coulson is nice to him now, but what about tomorrow morning? What about the days after that?

How many ways can I escape?

"—no way I'm making him go back!" Leo pulls the covers up over his head instinctively, heart suddenly pounding.

He can't hear the response, so he chances climbing out of bed and creeping to the kitchen door. Mr. Coulson is pacing the floor, probably on the phone with someone. He's definitely angry, but as long as he's not mad at Leo, Leo is sort of okay with that.

"My apartment, where else?" He sighs. "Yes, I have an apartment. Where did you think I lived?" Pause. He shouts, "I'm not a robot!" and his tone is just so scandalized that Leo stifles a giggle. "Look, sir, no matter what the baby—junior agents say, I'm not actually a robot."

Leo is just starting to relax when Mr. Coulson starts yelling. "Sir, I don't care what you think! He deserves a chance!" His voice goes quiet and hard. "If you can't understand that, then consider this my resignation." The phone slams into the receiver, making Leo jump and race back to the guest room he's sleeping in.

"I probably shouldn't have done that," Mr. Coulson mutters to himself before calling, "Hey, Leo, are you up?"

Leo burrows into the covers.

He hears the door creak as Mr. Coulson peers into his bedroom. "It's time to get up, kiddo."

He considers pretending to be asleep, until Mr. Coulson comes in and sits down at the end of the bed. "Hey, I have to head into work for a few hours today, so I need you to get up, okay?"

"Okay."

In the kitchen, Leo claims the chair closest to the door, in case he needs to bolt, but Mr. Coulson is between him and the door, blocking his path. "Do you want cereal or oatmeal?"

"Oatmeal."

A steaming bowl of sludge is slid in front of him. "Here's some brown sugar, if you want." A pair of thumps tell him that Mr. Coulson is putting his shoes on. "Are you doing okay?"

Mr. Coulson tightens his tie for what seems like the fiftieth time. Leo mumbles something—he's not sure what—and scoots his chair further away, still sitting on its edge.

"Well, if you need anything, let me know."

Leo nods numbly, waiting for Mr. Coulson to do anything but smile and nod and look calm. So far, he hasn't, but it's a matter of time in Leo's experience.

Once the door clicks shut behind him, Leo stops trying to keep his hands from moving. First it's twist ties pulled from the pockets of the too-large army jacket he got from a dumpster, then it's a pencil he found on the ground. Emboldened by the adult's absence, he finds pipe cleaners in a drawer and rubber bands under a desk, and uses them to make a helicopter that keeps flying into the walls, like the nice lady agent who kind of looked like Mom showed him on the plane ride here.

"Having fun?"

Leo jumps and tries to hide his helicopter under the desk and still his body at the same time. Neither quite works.

"I just forgot a few things." Mr. Coulson nods toward the kitchen. "If you need something to fidget with, I have a few bouncy balls in the junk drawer. What's your diagnosis?"

Leo hesitates. "ADHD."

Mr. Coulson nods. "Got it. Do you take meds for it?" His only answer is a headshake. "Okay, so I don't need to worry about that. Oh, and by the way—can I see what you made?" Leo shakes his head again. "That's fine. Is there anything you'll need for the next few hours that you haven't already mentioned?"

Another headshake.

"In that case, I will be home in—" he checks his watch "—about three hours."

"Okay," Leo says softly.

2007

The first few weeks pass quickly.

Mr. Coulson spends most of his time at the apartment. Leo doesn't know how he can afford to take this much time off work, but Mr. Coulson says he has "a lot of leave built up," whatever that means. Sometimes, when he has to go to work, he sends people to babysit—like Clint, who has calluses up and down his forearms and makes the best snickerdoodles, and Natasha, who a) is a total dork and b) says she can kill someone with her pinkie. (One time a man named Lance comes over, and the two of them successfully prank half the people on Mr. Coulson's floor. That's the last time Lance gets to babysit him alone.)

The ground rules change over time—"don't leave the apartment without telling me" eventually becomes "don't leave the building without telling me," and "check in every half hour" stretches to one hour, then two, then three and four and stays there.

It's been four weeks, and Mr. Coulson finally has custody. They go out for ice cream to celebrate, and it becomes a tradition, just for the two of them, getting ice cream every Tuesday.

It's been eight weeks, and the partial hours that Mr. Coulson's been working come to an end, so Leo has to go to school, even though the school year's halfway over.

The teacher won't let him get up and walk around in class (though that changes after the first set of parent-teacher conferences), not that he was expecting it. His classmates tease him for starting late, for wearing an Army jacket with someone else's last name, for his height and his ADHD and the way he holds a pencil. His first day of school is a long one, and it's a relief when Bobbi comes to pick him up and take him home.

(It's the first time he really thinks of the apartment as "home.")

The first time he meets Director Fury, he nearly runs from the room. It's only Mr. Coulson's hand at his back that keeps him in place.

Fury's gaze is cool over his steepled hands. "You're probably not a spy," he decides, and Mr. Coulson laughs out loud.

It's been almost three months, and Agent Coulson takes Leo out for dinner for his birthday. "I have something for you," he says, pulling a folder out of his briefcase.

"What is it?" Leo asks.

"Take a look." Agent Coulson slides the folder across the table. Leo opens it, and his breath catches.

"What—"

"Happy birthday, Leo."

The adoption paperwork almost gets knocked to the floor as Leo tries to hug Agent Coulson from across the table.

It's been over half a year, and they're back in Houston. It's a sweltering hot day, and they duck into a small ice-cream shop, relaxing in the blast of cool air.

A girl about Leo's age slams her way in soon after them, asking to try a flavor before she orders. She starts in one corner and works her way through the tubs, slowly and methodically.

"Are you really going to try every single flavor of ice cream?" Leo asks in amusement.

"Yupperdoodles!" she replies cheerfully, licking the spoon clean.

"If you keep this up, we're going to run out of try-it spoons," the woman behind the counter tells her.

Her name is Piper, and they spend the weekend playing video games (she blue-shells him twice), shooting hoops (he wins, surprisingly), and trading life stories. She was born just outside of Tulsa, he learns, and she grew up on a Cherokee reservation with her father and grandfather until her dad got his first big role. She doesn't know who her bio-mom is.

He tells her about his mom, and foster care, and living on the streets, and shows her the scars from when he lived with the Bensons and then the Garcias, and the places where his fat deposits are still growing back after his body ate them trying to stay alive, and tells her that he doesn't know who his bio-dad is. (On Sunday, they take the city bus a few streets over and several miles away, and Leo brings her to the literal hole-in-the-wall where Mama Tiger and her kids live, where he lived for a while before he met A. C. After Leo makes the introductions, Mama inspects Piper from head to toe and says she approves of Leo's new best friend. Leo barely manages not to fist-pump).

And he tells her about his powers. About the Dirt Lady, and how they got his mother killed.

She tells him to go fill up a glass of water and dump it on his head.

Minutes later, as Leo is toweling off his hair and sneaking awed glances at her, she tells him that she's been able to make people do things for as long as she can remember. She's just as terrified of her own powers as he is.

(They decide, right then and there, that they're going to teach themselves how not to be afraid.)

After a few weeks, when filming's wrapped up, Piper and her father go home. Leo and A.C. go home as well, because while Leo isn't tired of visiting his cousins, he is tired of trying to avoid the rest of his bio-family at the same time, and that thing that A.C.'s working on that Leo isn't supposed to know about is almost done anyway, so they might as well go back to D. C. Piper doesn't get to visit them that often, because she lives in California with her dad. (He sounds kind of neglectful, and Leo is really glad that A. C. isn't like that.)

"Hey, elf-boy, watch where you're walking."

"Watch where you're walking," Leo almost retorts, but he decides spending the energy isn't worth it. Instead, he gathers up his books quietly, until a blonde with a visitor's pass slams the bully up against the wall.

Well aware that everyone's watching, Leo quickly complains, "Come on, Aunt Bobbi, I was just going to let him go."

Bobbi steps back and lets the bully drop to the ground, quietly saying, "If you touch my nephew again..." She lets the threat hang in the air, unfinished, before stooping down and picking up Leo's water bottle.

She hands it to him, loudly admonishing, "Shouldn't you be carrying all this in your backpack? I know the instructor's covered how not to give yourself scoliosis."

"He might've. I probably wasn't paying attention," Leo admits. He dodges easily when Bobbi pretends to cuff him upside the head. "Why are you here?" he asks under his breath. "I though Lance was picking me up today."

"The Director wants to see you," Bobbi mutters back.

Leo nearly stops walking. "You know if you hit me every time I'm impertinent, I won't have any brain cells left," he complains out loud. "Why?"

"Something about your new friend," Bobbi says equally quietly. Out loud, she says, "You're always impertinent."

"Exactly." This isn't the first time he's held two conversations at the same time with the same person—one for the passersby, and one for themselves alone—but it's the first one that's dropped two bombshells so close together. "What does he want with Piper?" he whispers.

"I don't know," Bobbi replies, and that's the last of that.

"Piper Quinn McLean, ten years old," Fury says, spreading files out on his desk. "Father is an actor, mother is unknown. Born March twenty-third, 1997, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Lives in Malibu, California, with her father. Most recent level of education: fourth grade. Current level: fifth grade, which she is completing at a boarding school in Los Angeles. She has been expelled from both of her previous schools, one for 'assaulting' an older student, the other for theft, which, interestingly, wasn't reported until two weeks after the fact." Fury flips the paper over. "Looks like you've got a miniature Steve Rogers, here; the fight apparently started when the student in question made multiple offensive remarks about one of Miss McLean's classmates. Miss McLean took exception to this and broke the student's nose."

Leo opens his mouth, but Fury cuts him off. "Most recent vacation—if you can call it a vacation—was accompanying her father to Houston, where he was filming on location. She gets bored, she wanders off, she decides to get ice cream, then she meets you." The director stacks the papers, sets them aside, and steeples his fingers, staring at Leo. "Normally, SHIELD doesn't care who its agents' kids become friends with. You're a different story, considering how high up Coulson is. Now. Do you trust her?"

The question catches Leo off guard. "What?"

"Do. You. Trust. Her."

He says without thinking, "Yeah, of course," and realizes that it's true.

"Do you think she'll want to join SHIELD?"

"I can't say, sir."

"Then ask her, kid." Fury's good eye is twinkling. "Fifth grade is a bit young for that kind of decision, but tell her we've got a spot for her right next to yours, if she wants it." He looks Leo up and down. "If she's anything like you? She'll make a damn fine agent one day."

2008

Tony Stark is missing, and there's a monster stalking orchestral concerts all over the Tri-State area.

"I may be gone for a few days," A. C. tells him, and he is. When he comes home, as usual, there's not much he can talk about, but he accidentally lets slip that the woman who was being stalked is rather attractive, and, well, Leo just can't let a comment like that slide by.

"So she's cute?" he asks, sitting on the counter while A. C. assembles a sandwich on the cuttingboard.

"She is," says A. C. mildly, scooping mayonnaise onto the bread and spreading it with a spoon.

"Do you think she's pretty?"

A. C. doesn't look up. The glare from the window reflects off the sink on his other side and straight into Leo's eyes, so he can't lean closer. "I do," he agrees.

"How old is she?"

A. C. does look up, now. "Why the twenty-one questions?" he inquires. His hands are still moving, layering lettuce on top of the mayonnaise and cheese on top of the lettuce.

Leo leans as far forward and sideways as he can without falling off, finding an angle where the glare isn't as bright, so he can look right into A. C.'s face and grin at him.

"D'you like her?" he whispers conspiratorially.

A. C. swats at him—thankfully with the hand that isn't holding the knife—and tells him to get off the counter. "Isn't it about time for you to leave for school?"

Leo twists around to look at the clock on the stove. "Shit you're right!" he realizes, and leaps to the ground.

"Language!" A. C. calls as he dashes down the hall to the front door, jamming his feet into his shoes after his toes run into them.

"I know!" he calls backs. His coat isn't on the hook where it should be—it's behind a few others, and seriously, a mostly-two-person apartment should not have this many coats.

"Study group is tonight?"

"Yep!"

"It's at the Sununus, right?"

"Yeah, it is!" Backpack, backpack, where is his backpack... Bingo! It's lying on the floor; the closet door had blocked it from view.

"Say hi to John and Catherine Grace for me!"

"I will!"

There's his binder! Leo stuffs it and the papers falling out of it back into the canvas bag he carries it in, before slinging the bag over his arm and running back into the kitchen.

"Have fun, study hard, don't kiss anyone who has their own security detail..."

"That was one time and we were playing Spin the Bottle."

"Aren't you supposed to be studying at these things? Hey. You." A. C. pulls him into a hug as he slides past, ruffling his hair and releasing him so Leo can grab his lunch before he dashes back to the door.

"It was getting late and we were bored!" He glances at the time. "Gotta go! Bye!"

"Don't blow anything up!" A. C. calls after him.

"I know that, Dad!"

It's not until Leo's sprinted out the door of the apartment building and is running down the sidewalk that he realizes that a) he just called A. C. "Dad" for the first time, and b) he grabbed the wrong lunch.

Oh, well. If he didn't hit me for breaking that vase that one time, he probably won't hit me for stealing his sandwich.

Bahrain... Bahrain is bad.

Leo isn't allowed to know what happened.

He's barely allowed to know that Agent May—Aunt May—is coping badly.

But he does know a bit about trauma, and a bit about PTSD, and a lot about pain, so three or four times a week he bikes, and takes the subway, and takes the city bus to her house with a box full of everything that he and A. C. and A. C.'s girlfriend Audrey and Miranda-across-the-hall have baked for her in the last couple days, and he stays with her while she shops for groceries and goes for her run in the park.

And later, after they get back, after the groceries are put away, he sits next to her on the couch while she watches TV, while she lets herself break, and he talks.

It starts off easy. Weather ("It's been a really nice month." "Mm-hmm." "Want to go to the park? See if I'm small enough for the little-kid equipment? I bet you I'm not." "Mm-nmm."), the election ("I'm thinking Obama is going to win, but I'm hoping for either him or Clinton. Who are you rooting for?" "Clinton." "Cool."), and school ("I got an A on my geography test!" "That's nice."). Simple stuff like that.

Then Leo starts bringing up the stuff A. C.'s told him about work—how Uncle Clint and Aunt Natasha are doing, that Aunt Bobbi and Uncle Lance are getting a divorce, the mob of stuffed animals that's beginning to take over Sitwell's office and sanity. (The updates on that always get her to smile.)

He calls her Aunt May, most of the time, and calls her Aunt Melinda once before she tells him to never call her that again. He counts that as a win.

Eventually she starts talking, too. Leo's monologues become full, two sided conversations.

A lot of times, they talk about scars: the scar on May's knee from when she jumped out of a tree at age five, the line on Leo's finger from when he got too close to one of his mom's tools at age four, the bullet wound in May's thigh, the dent in the back of Leo's head. Aunt May looks downright murderous when he tells her about that and starts muttering about finding and strangling that particular foster dad. Leo reassures her that he's fine, now, and that said foster dad is in jail and will be for a long time. (He's still scared, a little, of A. C. May squeezes his shoulder. She doesn't need to tell him that that reflex will fade. He already knows that; he's just scared that he'll need it again someday, long after it's gone.)

And then she tells him about Bahrain.

As much as she can, at least.

She can't talk about much.

But what she can talk about—what Leo is allowed to know about—is bad.

It's not much.

But it helps.

(Soon enough, she's back at work, this time in Administration. Leo stops visiting quite as much afterwards. When she and Andrew start the divorce process, though, he comes back. He always will, for family.)

SHIELD brings Tony Stark home, with all the fanfare associated. With A. C. in California, Leo is stuck staying with Miranda-across-the-hall—not that's she a bad babysitter, or a bad person, but she smells way too much like oranges for some reason for Leo's liking. (For Saturday and Sunday, her old college roommate comes down from New York, bringing her son with her, but not her husband. Percy is seven months older than Leo, kicks everyone's butts on the Mario Kart Wii that Leo's neighbors down the hall just bought, and takes an incredibly long shower on Saturday night—apparently he always does. He's ADHD, like Leo is, and dyslexic as well. It seems like a really crappy combination, and Leo says as much.)

(Leo also shows Percy better ways to cover up his bruises with his mom's makeup, just like one of his foster-sisters taught him, once. Neither of them bring it up later. Percy's mom doesn't know anything about it.)

Sunday evening, all four of them cram onto Miranda's couch for Tony Stark's press conference—his second since coming home, and the first since whatever-it-was happened at the main Stark Industries building.

Because it's Stark, the press conference eventually turns into an utter train wreck. By the time the questions start, Stark has dug himself quite the hole; Leo is popping popcorn into his mouth like there's no tomorrow.

(He can just see A. C. face-palming off camera. It's hilarious.)

"The truth is... I am Iron Man."

Leo and Percy whoop and holler, Miranda cheers, and Sally laughs. Leo think that he just might have found a new favorite superhero.

(Well. Second-favorite. Captain America is still better. Don't tell Coulson, but Leo's love of the Captain? It's all A. C.'s fault.)

2009

The first time A. C. brings his girlfriend home, Leo is in his room with Piper, trying to build a scale model of a nuclear reactor out of Legos and Tinker Toys. (Leo isn't sure where the grease is coming from, but it's coming from somewhere, and he's had to wash his hands five times now.)

He can hear Ms. Nathan—not quite Audrey, yet—comment that the apartment seems a bit too big for a bachelor living alone, and A. C.'s awkward non-attempt to explain. Leo and Piper are listening at the door to the living room, so they're ready when A. C. says that they can come in.

"Leo, this is Audrey, my girlfriend. Audrey, meet Leo, my son."

Leo ignores the thrill of pleasure and fear that races through him at "my son"—no way out now—and gives Ms. Nathan an awkward smile, telling her he's adopted as he walks into the room.

She's not his mom, she's never going to replace his mom, and it makes things a bit awkward, though only for him, it seems, as A. C. and Ms. Nathan keep making heart eyes at each other and Piper looks on with a smile. But Ms. Nathan turns out to be a pretty good cook, and a lot better at algebra than he is, and when he stuffs himself into a dress shirt and tie for his middle school's spring concert, she's there in the third row, camera in hand and a big smile on her face. She's not even trying too hard—she doesn't seem to be trying at all, as if she took one look at him and decided, Yes, this small child is mine now, but it takes the end-of-year science fair for him to decide that she's his, just as much as Piper and A. C. are.

(He has to admit, her facing down those bullies for him is kind of an epic moment, especially since she holds them off long enough for A. C. to arrive and put the fear of Phil Coulson into them. His project is a bit damaged, but it never really measured up to last year's robot chicken anyway. And, even better, he'll never have to see those bullies again starting next year, because next year he'll be in training to become a SHIELD agent and they'll still be stuck in the black hole of middle school.)

The low, hulking building of D. C. Junior takes Leo's breath away. As the group of new students walks through the halls (their guide seems to be a little awestruck by A. C.), it's more because of the history that they'll soon be a part of than anything else.

They meet Ms. Weaver, their head-of-year; Donnie, a quiet nerd headed for Sci-Tech; Kelly, a cheerleader at her old school, headed straight for Ops; Angie from Richmond, Terrence from Derry, Clara from Baltimore, Janelle from Gander. There are twenty students in their grade, and more at campuses in Seattle, Atlanta, and San Francisco.

(Somehow, Piper uses her Jedi mind trick to snag them a dorm room together. "These aren't the droids you're looking for!" Leo yells after Ms. Weaver, laughing hysterically. Piper hits him with a pillow.)

After they get their schedules, and A. C. heads home, and they get the standard warning of it only gets harder from here, Leo flops back into the bed that's going to be home for the next four years. “This is where it all begins,” he tells Piper, happily.

“It all starts here,” Piper replies, grinning. “We’ve almost made it!”

The weeks start slow and pass quickly, in a blur of history, hand-to-hand combat, weapons theory, politics, and foreign languages, mixed in with normal middle-school subjects like English and Math and Science.

A small class like theirs makes for fast friends. One-off quips become running jokes faster than Kelly can sneeze at cat hair: that Angie is secretly a werewolf, that Leo and Piper are secretly twins who were separated at birth, that one of these days someone is going to fall out of one of those wobbly English-classroom chairs. Wednesday nights find all of them crowded around the TV in the common room watching movies and singing along to the soundtrack—whoever forgets the most lines has to vacuum up the popcorn. (One Friday in October, Piper actually does fall out of her chair. Leo never lets her live it down.)

What started out as hints and hunches starts to shift into something bigger, when Piper hits her knee on her desk and Leo feels the pain, when Leo's happiness at an experiment turning out right carries over to Piper on the other side of campus. On Wednesday Night Movie Night, they sprawl half on top of each other, like whatever concept of personal space they had has disappeared.

Something's changing between them, Leo knows, knows it in his bones. He and Piper start staying as close together as possible, like it's them against the world, worried that whatever-this-is will break them; she even comes with him to church on Sundays, as Father Mazzare tells them, week after week, that he still can't find anything, any modern references to this thing. There's no way to measure it, no way to quantify it, no validation or confirmation to be found for what Leo and Piper know in their bones. The only guide there is seems to be what they can figure out themselves.

Then January comes, and their link becomes the least of their worries.

2010

Piper's words are terrifying.

"HYDRA still exists. It's inside SHIELD. And I know Sitwell is Hydra too."—and sometimes he's Uncle Sitwell, and that hurts almost as bad as any foster-parent's blow.

Almost as bad as the knowledge that no one is going to listen to them.

They're twelve, going on thirteen, and they're too young for anyone to take seriously.

Then the Stark Expo happens—then the proposal and Oaxaca and the wedding happen—and it's almost driven out of their minds, and sheer denial blocks it off, never to be thought of again.

Then Lena happens, his baby sister comes into their lives, and everything come rushing back.

The Stark Expo comes first.

It's May.

Not too cold, not too warm as the four of them stand in the crowd, watching Stark himself on one of the big screens, since they can't see the stage.

Leo's half keeping an eye on the festivities and half on the program he's got running on his laptop, scanning through internal memos and stored security recordings so he can piece together just how deep the rot inside SHIELD goes. That means that he's not paying attention when Stark's Law ("If it's possible for anything to go wrong, it will, usually in the most spectacular possible way") goes into full effect.

Everything happens fast after that. Aunt Natasha goes undercover. Leo is ordered to spend his afternoons after school at the R&D labs, fetching and carrying for the Nerd Squad he'll someday be one of. He's not told what they're working on that's so important. Overheard discussions indicate that they're looking for a cure for something, so Leo keeps an eye on the news, waiting for mention of a new pandemic. (There's nothing. The only reference to any epidemic that he hears about is all about the swine flu from last year. It must be something else, then.)

Stark's birthday party, he hears, is explosive—pun intended. A. C. goes back to babysitting Stark—apparently Aunt Natasha's done her job. Then the bombs go off at Stark Expo, and suddenly Leo and Piper are literally in Tony Stark's mansion, and for the first time in four months they're not thinking about HYDRA and its tentacled grip, because this, this is so much easier to think about.

Tony is delighted when he learns about Leo's fire powers. He insists immediately on testing everything he can ("You're not allowed to become a supervillain, Tony." "But Pepper!")—blood, skin, DNA, everything.

Leo's muscle and epithelial tissue are resistant to fire and all forms of heat; his connective tissue is not: a blood sample boils readily, and when Tony tests one of Leo's baby teeth, it chars just the same way as a normal person's bone would. ("Hey, A. C., did you give Tony one of my baby teeth?" "No, why would I? Why would he need it?" "All right, Tony, spill. Where did you get the tooth from?" "Oh! I, uh, I asked your grandfather. Hope you don't mind.")

When they get around to testing his DNA, they get... a big fat load of nothing.

More than that, they find out that Leo is an almost exact genetic copy of his mother.

("Where did you get a sample of my mom's DNA?" "Asked your grandfather." "What.")

(On the bright side, this puts Leo back in contact with the older members—with one obvious exception—of his bio-family, as two days later he gets a letter from Sammy Valdez, Jr., asking why Tony Stark wants to know if he knows who his grandson's father is.)

Except then Tony wants to test Piper, too, and it gets the same result, that she and her father have almost identical DNA. Tony gets that spark in his eye, the one that means that he has An Idea, but then Pepper arrives and tells him that a product that's in beta testing is malfunctioning, which distracts him long enough that he loses his train of thought. Then, weirdly, she turns around and winks at them, and then leaves with Tony without another word.

By the time June rolls around, he's gotten used to having JARVIS's voice in his ear. Piper is quietly learning how to fly the suit Tony made for her, which her nerdy butt has named the Silver Dragon. ("Like the restaurant in Hell's Kitchen?" "That's the Royal Dragon, Leo.") Rumors start buzzing about Stark's young protégé, quickly and efficiently shut down by Stark Industries' PR department.

Back home, in Washington, A. C. sits down next to Leo on his bed with a serious expression. "You like Audrey, right?" he asks, acting like he's worried for some reason.

Leo shrugs. "Yeah, she's awesome."

Suddenly shy, A. C. pulls a box out of his jacket; Leo's eyes bug out. "I, uh, I may have asked Pepper for advice on this."

"Dude, is that what I think it is?"

"It is, and don't call me 'dude'." He puts it in his lap; opens it, and shows Leo. "And yes, it's an engagement ring."

"So? When are you going to ask her?"

"Well, that all depends on you."

"What do you..." The penny drops. "You're asking me for permission to marry your girlfriend?"

A. C. looks at him, a puzzled expression on his face. "Well, yes, this does directly affect you. And you are the most important person in my life; don't be surprised if..."

He's cut off by Leo throwing his arms around his neck, with what feels like it has to be the biggest grin of Leo's life stretching across his face. "Marry her," he says into A. C.'s shoulder, then pulls back and repeats, "Marry her," slightly louder.

A. C. is smiling too. "So I take I have permission?"

"You definitely have my permission."

"Want to go do it now?"

"What—like, now-now? Jeez, you're impatient, lemme just find the camera..."

A. C. pauses in the doorway before he heads to the living room, where Audrey is sitting on the couch. "Oh, and by the way, I want you to be my best man."

"Wait a minute, I thought Uncle Nick had dibs!"

Leo and Piper get out of wedding planning, just for a week, when his grandfather invites them to go visit some of Leo's more distant relatives—his third cousins or something—in Oaxaca.

Everything changes in Oaxaca.

Chapter Text

2010

Everything changes in Oaxaca.

Once the shaking has stopped, Leo curls closer into Piper, praying that their shelter won't collapse around them. He tries to ask, "Are you okay?" and "What do you think is happening?" but the choking dust cuts him off and the words get lost in the silence.

A hand grabs his; he nearly yelps until he realizes that it's Piper, turning his hand over so the palm faces up. U OK? she taps out with her finger. Y, U? he replies, and they take turns tapping out short messages on each other's palms, letting it distract them from the sort of silence that only creaking wood, and broken stone, and distant screaming can create.

F-I-R-E? she spells out at one point. Leo concentrates until a small flame appears on the tip of his finger. The dancing shadows make the small shelter that the collapsed ceiling has created around them all the more terrifying. He extinguishes the flame.

They've curled into each other as much as possible. "I'm so scared," Piper says, and Leo tries to speak until he realizes that he still can't, and that Piper didn't speak out loud at all.

He sends a wave of amazement, with love pouring right behind it, because that's the first time they've ever heard each other thinking.

The floor jolts, and their own fear stenches up the air around them. Another part of the building has given way. They hold onto each other tighter.

Something snuffles outside, somewhere in the room surrounding them, sounding exactly like one of the creatures that had been prowling around before the roof collapsed. A low, inhuman growl follows.

I-L-Y, Leo taps into Piper's palm; they're both trembling hard.

I-L-Y-2, Piper taps back, and then they stay frozen until long after the pack's moved on.

The floor jolts again, breaking a chunk off the stone above them, and Leo only knows because it hits his arm, hard, and he nearly screams. The stonework around them shifts, and shifts again, and settles, and it takes a second for both of them to realize that there’s fresh air and a little light coming in.

Piper sits up and scoots forward—stay back, she sends, your arm might be broken—and starts poking around the spot where the air is trickling in from. Then the stonework shifts again, and they swap places, so that Leo can go after the weakened area with his good arm while Piper holds everything up with her own body.

Another jolt hits just as Leo breaks through, and the entire shelter collapses. Piper screams as she's buried; Leo screams too, looking for her, until he spies her hand sticking out. He pulls her up until they can both pull themselves to their feet and into cleaner air, standing in what's now a pile of rubble.

The small amount of moonlight and starlight, filtered through the cloud cover, that comes in from the now-open roof makes things a little brighter. Just as Leo looks up, a raindrop hits him right in the eye. With his eyes screwed shut, Leo takes a cautious step forward, and another, until his foot collides with something soft.

"Is that...?" Piper whispers behind him, sounding horrified.

Leo reaches down and feels for the man's face, finding glasses and the feathered pen that his cousin always tucked behind his ear. "It's Diego," he confirms, choking back tears. Piper cuts off her own sob, in case the pack comes back.

The pile of rubble shifts around as Piper pulls her feet free and limps forward, coming to stand at Leo's side. "Leo. Look around," she whispers, and it all makes horrible sense.

The dead lay everywhere; the copper smell of blood fills the air. Some of Leo's own cousins are among them. "They were supposed to get to safety," Leo whispers. "Before the attack came. We were all supposed to go to the city, where we'd all be safe."

Piper grabs his hand. "There'll be time to grieve later." Her voice is rough. "But for right now—"

"We have to keep ourselves alive."

Piper nods in agreement. "Let's get out of the building. Can you help me walk?" Before he can wrap his arm around her, she stops him. "Wait. Doesn't Diego carry a gun?"

Leo crouches down again and pulls the gun out of its holster. He checks the safety and the magazine, just like they've learned in school, in the dim light. "I don't know how many rounds we have left," he warns as he passes her the gun.

"That's okay," she whispers, sliding it into her waistband, safety on. She wraps an arm around his shoulders; he wraps his good arm around her waist, and they set off, picking their way around dead bodies and piles of ruined building material. At the door, Piper takes point until she's cleared the hallway; they get about two steps before they have to squeeze around a gaping hole in the floor.

Two flights of mostly-clear stairs and one near run-in with the creatures later, the building jolts again. This time, the collapse is on the top floor, directly above them; a falling piece of debris nearly beans Piper in the head. Seconds later, someone starts yelling.

"¿Hola? ¿Hay alguien allí?"

"¡Estamos aquí!" Leo calls back. "¿Dónde está? ¿Necesita ayuda?"

"¡Sí!" the man calls weakly. "Mi pierna es atrapado."

"Nosotros se encontraremos," Leo promises. "Y se ayudaremos."

When they find him, the man's leg is trapped, as he'd said it was. "Podemos mover esta," Leo assures him.

"Gracias," the man murmurs. His head lolls back against the wall.

"No se duerme," Leo orders. "Nosotros tenemos que salir. Me llamo Leo. ¿Y su?"

"Me llamo Ricardo," he rasps out. "¿Y quién está?"

"Está es mi hermana, Piper," Leo tells him. "Ella no habla Español."

"Está bien. Yo no hablo inglés."

Leo chuckles. "Soy el primo de Diego, Ana, y Julia," he adds.

Ricardo's face lights up. "¡Julia!" he says enthusiastically. "¡La mujer más bonita en Mexíco!"

"Lo siento, pero ella es casada."

Ricardo sighs. "Yo sé. Ahora yo puedo sólo soñar."

Something howls nearby. "¿Puede andar?" Leo asks urgently.

Ricardo nods and tries to get up. "Sí, sí... no." He sits back down, groaning. Leo and Piper haul him back up, throwing each of his arms around their shoulders. Piper bites back a shout of pain as her weight falls on her sprained ankle. "¿Está bien?" Ricardo asks.

"I'm fine," she mutters curtly.

Ricardo guides them back to the stairwell in an odd rendition of a three-legged race. "Estamos en el octavo piso," he tells them.

"The... eighth floor?" Piper guesses. "Well that sucks."

The creatures arrive just before they reach the door to the stairwell. Piper spins around, letting Leo hold Ricardo up, and covers them with Diego's gun. In the dark, there's no way to know how many—if any—of her shots land.

"Leo, I need a light," she says urgently once they're safe in the stairwell. Leo, obligingly, lights up a finger on his left hand, so Piper can reload with a magazine she found somewhere.

"No pensé tus parientes tienen—tuvieron—poderes," Ricardo says, looking at him carefully.

"No, ellos no tuvieron poderes. Pero yo hago," Leo replies.

Then Piper re-holsters the gun, ducks back under Ricardo's right arm, and lets Leo lead the way downstairs.

On the second-floor landing, five minutes, three packs of creatures—nahuals, Ricardo calls them—and one emptied magazine later, the ceiling groans ominously.

"We have to get out," Piper mutters.

Ricardo may not understand her words, but he definitely understands her tone. "Sí, por supuesto," he agrees.

Then a creaking comes, a sound that Leo knows, that comes straight out of a five-year-old memory that he never wants to remember again. "Run!" and "¡Corre!", he yells, starting to run, hauling his sister and their new friend with him. They make it down the last two flights of stairs, through the stairwell door, and into the hundred-foot-stretch to freedom, and then...

...The building shatters.

After that, it's all a blur of exhaustion, and fear, and screaming.

He doesn't even notice the ground shaking, bringing the building down around them—six-point-two on the Richter Scale, he finds out later—as he and Piper and Ricardo fight their way out.

He lets himself be pulled along as the few adults still standing herd the four dozens or so survivors—mostly children—into the packed wagon, the only transport the tiny town seems to have left.

He and Piper, wrapped around each other, mostly sleep through the ride to the nearest big town, where they have a hospital, and the Internet, and working electricity.

He barely registers the people who come to meet them, the shouting exchanges, the person yelling something about Americanos, the steady hands wrapping a bandage around his wrist and arm, telling him, tú eres muy valiente, nene; ahora flexiona tu muñeca para mi.

As light begins to bleed into the sky, Leo stands in the street, talking to his cousin Julia and his Great-Aunt Zyanya. (She's actually some kind of cousin—after a few generations' separation, everyone is.) Everything is still a bit hazy until a commotion starts.

Leo and his cousins move toward it; Piper appears next to them, and Julia starts translating for her as they join the crowd flowing toward a patch of the empty land outside of town.

A crack of thunder tolls. The crowd sees, and understands.

Some kind of army that makes Leo's head hurt just looking at it is approaching the town.

With adrenaline's clarity, the world snaps back into some sort of focus. The real battle begins.

Diego's gun barks one-two-three in Piper's hands, knocking one of the nahuals back. Leo ducks and rolls, barely missing a dog-like creature's fangs, and leaves scorch marks on its chin. Behind him, Ricardo's voice shouts something that sounds like a battle cry.

"¡Lanceros! ¡Dispara!" a woman's voice yells, and Leo hits the ground as a dozen spears find their targets. "¡Arqueros!", and a rain of arrows follows.

Someone yells at him to get off the battlefield, but Leo barely hears them, too busy trying to fight the creatures. He trips, falls, gets back up, and tries not to get in anyone's way. At Piper's shout, he looks up, and realizes there isn't an ally in sight. And the monsters around him are all turning to look at him.

Some of them are drooling.

One launches itself at him.

Leo reacts on instinct and the bare bones of SHIELD training. He ducks down and pushes, sending the creature flying over his back.

Two more roar and lunge, sending Leo scrambling back on his hands and knees. They land on his back, their claws digging through his shirt. This is it, this is how I die, he thinks, bucking and yelling until he can roll over on his back, exposing his stomach but also freeing his hands to fight. He claws at the creatures' stomachs, until some lost instinct catches his hands on fire.

A moment of clarity follows.

Dimly, he hears Piper leap into action to defend him, as the creatures yowl and scramble away and he scrambles to his feet.

He sees the next monster stomping (the Dirt Woman gliding) towards him, hears his sister (his mother) screaming behind him, feels the ground shaking (the floor trembling) under him...

Stop being scared, mijo.

"Mama?" he whispers.

Then the entire world catches on fire.

Hours later, after his injuries are rebandaged and his coughing has stopped, he's gotten tired of the awed looks being sent his way.

He sits in a hard plastic chair, wearing borrowed clothes, staring at his hands. There's not a single burn on his body. Next to him, Piper reverentially cleans the dagger she'd found and used during the battle, now officially hers.

She nudges him. "Hey," she says, "we'll be okay."

Leo nods, but doesn't look up.

In the end, not a single member of the Valdez family had survived both attacks.

Second and third cousins he'd barely even known, gone in a matter of hours.

"Our ride's here."

In a daze, he follows her and the man who will drive them to the airport out the door and into the car. He doesn't answer his questions, listening to Piper answer him instead.

It's two hours of bumpy road from Santiago Ixtayutla to Oaxaca de Juárez and a three-hour wait before their flight boards, but finally, more than half a day after the ceiling collapsed around them, the wheels lift off and they're finally going home.

It's seven and a half hours and one layover (in Houston, of all places) to Washington, D. C. Leo drinks some ginger ale, eats some airplane food, goes through some of the belongings that were recovered from the rubble, and settles into the book of puzzles the person across the aisle gives him, as well as being Piper's pillow. He wakes her up in Houston, so they can explore the airport until Leo's family arrives, then collapse in Great-Grandma Carmen's arms and grieve for half and hour until it's time to re-embark.

Then they're back in the air, and Piper becomes Leo's pillow until he wakes up somewhere over Tennessee. After that, it's a countdown until they reach Washington, until they pull their bags (that are just a bit too light now) out of the overhead compartment and disembark with all the other passengers, until they can get through Customs, and get up the stairs and into the baggage claim, and reclaim their suitcases (that are just a bit too empty), and then shake off the flight attendant who's been babysitting them since they disembarked like they didn't just go through a war...

Until they start looking around the waiting area, and see a tall man with a eyepatch, and a short, stern woman, and a man in a vest, and a woman with bright red hair. And there, in the middle of them all, are a man with a receding hairline and a woman with long brown hair, and suddenly they're dropping their bags and suitcases on the floor and launching themselves into their parents' arms, and then suddenly they're finally, finally home, and they are finally, finally, safe.

Lila Barton has to be the cutest toddler Leo's ever seen, he decides, with her polka-dot dress and ribbons in her hair. She's babbling contentedly at her father and older brother, while Clint redoes her hair and seven-year-old Cooper watches in fascination, fidgeting with his tie and dress shirt. (Leo can sympathize; his own outfit is just as itchy.)

Piper is not only wearing a dress, but she's managed to force herself into makeup as well, which looks decidedly uncomfortable. Nevertheless, she's grinning ear-to-ear, trading jokes with Aunt Tasha while the six of them wait for the organ music to start. When it does, Leo and Piper push open the doors, holding them open for Cooper and Lila to pass through. Cooper grips Lila's hand tightly, as if afraid she'll dump the basket of petals all over the place as soon as she has the chance. (About halfway down the aisle, the two-year-old manages to pull half of them out at once, which makes her squeal in delight. Cooper has to pick her up so she'll stop stomping around on them.)

Leo and Piper are next, as the best man and maid of honor. A. C. (who's currently doing his level best to avoid being drooled on by a toddler, while the toddler in question does her level best to undo his tie) watches them approach with no small measure of relief; Piper takes charge of Lila as soon as they make it to the whatever-it's-called at the front of the room, while Leo stands next to Cooper.

Uncle Clint and Aunt Natasha follow right behind them; Tasha has to step carefully to avoid catching her high heels on the flower petals. Once they reach the front, it's simply a matter of waiting, until the organ music swells and Audrey and her mother appear.

Leo sneaks a glance at A. C.; he looks completely starstruck and hopelessly in love. It's an utterly hilarious expression on his normally stoic face. Piper rolls her eyes at him in mutual exasperation. You do realize that they’re going to be ten times worse now, right? she sends.

Leo grins. Yes. Yes I do.

"—so then, Phil goes, 'Are you looking for this?', throws his coffee, cup and all, into that poor man's face, and then he runs straight out of the coffee shop and into the street, right into the path of a streetcar." Aunt Maria waves her arms expansively, as if trying to convey the ridiculousness of A. C.'s first mission—or as she's telling it, a visit to Sausalito that had quickly gone haywire.

"And where was May in all this?" one of Audrey's friends—a violinist, Leo thinks—asks, his eyebrows nearly up to his hairline.

"San Francisco Bay," Aunt May says, taking another sip of her almost-definitely-spiked punch. She adds, "It was another three hours before Phil got around to fishing me out."

Several people whistle in disbelief.

"All right, all right—all right!" A. C.'s voice quiets the room. "Enough making fun of me. I'm pretty sure it's time for the best man speech. Leo?"

Leo stands up and looks at A. C. "Why are you making me do this, again?" he asks loudly, making a few people chuckle.

"Because your Uncle Nick knows too many embarrassing stories about me, and I'd rather not risk it."

"Fiiiiiiine," he draws out, acting every inch the annoyed teenager.

Leo raises his glass.

"When I first met Phil Coulson," he says, "I was nine years old and homeless..."

"Leo?"

He props himself up on his elbow, looking at the small figure in the doorway. "Yeah, kid?"

"Can I... talk to you?"

"Sure thing, kiddo." He climbs out of bed, careful not to disturb Piper on the bottom bunk. (It took moving to a new apartment, but they finally have bunk beds after two years of begging.) "What's up?"

Helena picks at her nightshirt. "You're... like me, right?"

It takes a second before it clicks. "You mean, a foster kid?"

She nods, illuminated by the nightlight in the hallway.

"Yeah, I was."

"What was it like? When you got adopted?"

He chuckles lightly. "Come on, chula. Let's talk about this in the living room, where we won't wake anyone up, okay?

"It all started with a scared little boy in an alleyway..."

Come morning, Audrey walks into the living room, coffee in hand, only to stop and blink her eyes at the sight of her son and brand-new younger daughter laying on the couch.

"We had a few things to talk about," Leo tells his brand-new mom, absentmindedly carding his fingers through his sleeping sister's curly hair.

After Lena, they shift their focus, from gathering evidence to protecting SHIELD kids. Leo hacks into database after database, finding names and addresses and connections, while Piper works on building a network of safehouses for the kids, in case worst comes to worst and they have to be evacuated.

They have their first breakthrough when their classmate, Angie, invites them to her birthday party.

She lives on a sprawling compound outside Richmond, with not just her parents and siblings but her aunts and uncles and cousins as well. One such cousin joins Leo in the kitchen when he's getting more water for Angie's mom ("Call me Gina, kid."), and they make small talk until Angie's cousin drops his cup and growls.

Leo's first thought is of the nahuals they fought against in Oaxaca; his second is of the ones that fought alongside them; his third is wrong place, wrong country, wrong nationality.

His panic attack doesn't respond to logic, or anything, really, besides Piper wrapping her arms around him. "You're okay, you're okay," she mutters in his ear. "We're safe. You're having a panic attack. We learned how to deal with this in class. Take a deep breath. What's your name?"

"My name is Leonardo Tesla Valdez," Leo recites.

"How old are you?"

"Thirteen."

"Come on. You're doing great. Let's try grounding now, okay? Your name is Leonardo Tesla Valdez..."

"My name is Leonardo Tesla Valdez. I am thirteen years old. I'm from Houston, Texas. I live in Washington, D. C.," he recites frantically. "My birthdate is March twenty-fifth, nineteen ninety-seven. I am thirteen years old. My best friend is Piper Quinn McLean. My name is Leonardo Tesla Valdez..."

She gets him to the couch in the living room, where everyone but Angie's family has cleared out to go do... something else. Leo doesn't know; he's too busy breathing.

Gina waits until his breathing has steadied before telling Piper, "As you might have guessed, we're a family of werewolves."

Leo looks up, letting it register. "Like... the nahuals in Oaxaca?"

Gina looks at him in confusion. "Nahuals?"

"They're a kind of shape-shifter? I don't what mythology they're from, but they're from Latin America. We ran into some when I was visiting family in Mexico, down in Oaxaca."

Gina's grandfather—whose name Leo hasn't quite gotten—raises an eyebrow at him.

Piper interjects, "We didn't really get to talk to them, though. We were sent home almost right after the battle."

"Battle?"

"Uh, yeah." Leo gets the feeling that Gina's grandfather is cheerfully watching him dig a verbal hole. "No one would really tell us what was happening, but there was an attack and it took... pretty much everyone in town who could fight to fend it off." Bile wells up in Leo's throat at the memory.

Gina's grandfather—Angie's great-grandfather—takes a drag from his cigarette and finally speaks up. "So the Isolation—" and Leo can hear the capital I "—is over, then?"

Piper holds up her hands in a t, signaling for a stop. "Wait, what? What Isolation?"

The man starts to speak, stops, stares, and nearly drops his cigarette in shock. "You don't even know, do you?"

Leo stares at him, waiting for answers. "Know... what, exactly?"

"Jesus," he mutters. He rubs his face. "You kids are lucky you—Wait, this was in Oaxaca? Was it near Santiago Ixtayutla?"

"Uh, yeah, how'd you—"

"I haven't heard from Nayeli in weeks," he interrupts.

Leo vaguely remembers a small, plump, cheerful woman, who wore colorful clothes, her long hair loose, and power like a cloak. "Nayeli Díaz?"

The man's mouth drops open. "Jesus Christ, you're those kids."

"I... wasn't aware we had a reputation," Piper says carefully.

"Wasn't aware... You two blew up half an army!"

“...It was an accident?” Leo offers.

Piper snickers.

"Accident or not, it was still impressive," the old man mutters.

"Grandpa," Gina interjects, "what on Earth are you talking about?"

"Ask these two." He nods at them. "They were there."

Under the weight of everyone's stares, Leo squirms. "I don't even know what really happened," he mutters.

"I do," Piper interrupts. Leo looks at her, slightly surprised, as she begins talking. She weaves a story about what really happened that day: seeing Leo by himself on the enemy's side of the battlefield, leaping in to defend him ("Watching my six, as always," Leo mutters fondly; Piper punches his shoulder, grinning); finding herself surrounded, and then getting herself un-surrounded while Leo did his best impression of the Human Torch, wiping out the army and saving the town in the process.

Angie interrupts them then, wondering why most of her family members and two of her guests have been ensconced in one room for so long. Sometime during dinner, Piper hits on the idea of using Angie's family home, and other places like it, as safehouses for kids like Lena, if they ever have to be evacuated because of HYDRA. (When they very carefully bring it up with Angie's great-grandfather, whose name is Alexander and who's apparently the alpha, he agrees without a second's thought. "If it's to keep Angela and her friends safe," he explains, "I'd do just about anything—depending, of course, on whatever it is you two aren't telling me.")

(Under Director Fury's one good eye, the Exodus Protocol is established as the highly-classified evacuation plan for any minor, sixteen years old or younger, associated with SHIELD, in the event that its roster of agents is compromised and the agents' families are targeted. The Wallace property and the buildings on it becomes the first official safehouse of Exodus. Three more are added to the list within the week, all belonging to werewolf packs on the East Coast, as a personal favor to Alpha Wallace.)

Alexander starts putting out feelers to the rest of the American and Canadian packs. Twice a month, like clockwork, Ricardo and his colleagues send them all the information that's come their way, especially where it concerns the ongoing fight for Central America. A carefully-worded letter to a Mozambican actor Mr. McLean worked with once garners a twenty-page treasure trove of a reply, disguised as ramblings about a planned fantasy novel.

Leo and Piper buy a map, the big kind that takes up the largest section of wall in their dorm room that isn't occupied by furniture. Green tacks mark enclaves, starting with the compound in Richmond and the still-rebuilding tract of land in Oaxaca. News of battles like the one in Oaxaca introduces red tacks to the map, color-coded with a cheap marker to denote the when and the who. Pieces of string sketch out alliances and shared history, until it's practically taken over their room. (By that point, Angie's the only classmate who doesn't think they've lost it.)

"More information for you," Angie announces, dropping a bunch of file folders on the table in the corner and nearly knocking Leo's cause-and-effect dominoes over. "Sorry, Leo."

"'S fine," Leo grunts.

“Why is it so clean in here?” Angie wonders, walking over to the map on the wall. She folds her arms and stares at him, smiling. “All right, who are you and what have you done with the real Leo Valdez?”

“Because Día de los Muertos is coming up and I don’t want Mom to think that I’m not keeping my room clean?” He look up at Angie and shrugs. “I’ve got the cleaning part done; I’m just procrastinating on setting up the ofrenda.”

Explanations done, Leo rolls his chair over to the table and picks up the folder on top. "San Francisco, huh?" He opens it. "I feel like this would be so much easier if we could ask Ms. Weaver to ask..."

"Don't even think about that," Angie orders, pointing her marker at him like a wand. "You know Rule One, Leo."

"Stay hidden, stay quiet, stay safe," he recites like he's Pavlov's dog. He sighs "Which means we can't talk about this with any norms..."

"...unless we trust them implicitly," Piper finishes with them from the bathroom. "Am I required?" she yells.

"Put some clothes on; Angie's here," Leo yells back without looking.

"Just because you're a stumble-in, that's no excuse not to learn the Rules," Angie tells him as Piper joins her, helping compare the newest list to the map. "That goes for you, too, Missy," she says to Piper, mock-severely.

"Mm-hmm." She nods. "Oh, crap."

"What? What's up?" Leo quickly rolls over to them; they're both staring at the pieces of paper they're using to track the number of casualties.

"The death toll we know about just hit one million."

They forward whatever information they can, pass along warnings and intelligence, establish contact between the enclaves that haven't yet been forced into it. They talk to anyone who's willing talk to them, while the Wars rage on.

Everything that happened in Oaxaca? It wasn't just a one-off event.

The information they gather paints a dismal picture: Humanity's oldest enemies are coming out of the shadows, each time turned back mostly by luck, costing thousands of lives at a time. The Wars have been going on for six years, one right after another, in almost every part of the world. When people start sitting down and comparing notes, the list of the dead stretches quickly into the millions; the Wars caught most of them by surprise.

"The Isolation was supposed to save lives," an old woman tells them, "and it did, for three hundred years. But when the Wars started... it became our death sentence."

Very few of the people that Leo and Piper meet are even aware that those like them aren't the only things supernatural in the world. None of the various communities and networks have worked together in centuries, until the Wars forced them to.

Kids with powers rarely make it to adulthood; adults like Gina and Ricardo are the exception, not the rule, and from what Leo and Piper and their people can piece together, things were worse before the Isolation.

(Alexander gets his throat torn out during a fight in New Mexico. Ricardo dies in a battle on the Yucatán Peninsula; Leo and Piper don't find out for another two weeks. The actor in Mozambique and his entire family go down when the enclave they're living in falls. Not a single person survives.)

(Angie's surviving cousins take over forwarding the information that Leo and Piper gather. Ricardo's replacement, a bubbly young woman who Piper vaguely remembers meeting, introduces herself as Nayeli's niece over Skype. A nephew of Mr. McLean's actor friend, who lives in Angoche, contacts them after reading through his uncle's correspondence.)

People ask them to help fight, then to help with the support staff once word of their age gets around. ("We try not to let kids fight," a teenage girl tells them, handing them both knives. "Fourteen's the minimum age. But with the grown-ups almost gone, well..." She shrugs. "We don't exactly have a choice.")

The entire supernatural world is at war, and there's nothing they can do about it.

"Textbooks," Piper announces, dropping a pile of them on the table next to Leo's bed.

"Fifteen pages ahead of you," Leo says, holding up his own textbook before turning to page sixteen.

"Great minds, huh?" Piper picks up a history textbook from the top of the pile. "Scoot over."

Leo does.

She climbs in next to him. "Mm, you're warm," she mumbles, flipping it open to a section on Greek mythology. "Wow, look at this ugly face," she remarks, leaning into him.

"Hephaestus," Leo reads aloud. "Who's that, the god of cowboys?"

Piper knocks her elbow into his ribcage. "Have some respect," she laughs. "This says he's the god of the forge, god of fire... hey, that sounds like someone I know..."

"Who? Aaron from down the hall?" Leo teases. She elbows him again. "At least it sounds interesting. I'm stuck with Friedrich Hayek, whoever that is."

"Twentieth-century economist, won the 1974 Nobel Prize," Piper says idly, turning to the next page.

"Show-off," Leo mutters. He wriggles in place, forcing her a little closer to the edge.

"You know you love me." Piper shifts around, making Leo scoot back.

"'Course I do," he retorts. "You have a perfectly loveable face."

She laughs, bright and clear, at him.

2011

The first week of 2011 finds them on a battlefield in Oklahoma. None of their parents know where, exactly, they are. Supposedly, Piper is visiting her Great-Aunt Naomi for the last part of winter break, dragging Leo along as always. He helps out in the med tents, cauterizing wounds and cheering patients up, while she volunteers with what's now called the Bucket Brigade, putting out fires on the battlefield and carrying the wounded away.

(Great-Aunt Naomi is there, too; that part's not a lie. They're both working in the med tents, but where Leo is putting his classroom first-aid lessons to the test, she's got going-on-seven-decades of living on and then running a ranch to put to good use, going from stitching up cattle and horses and sheepdogs to stitching up humans as easy as breathing. Leo thinks he's found a new favorite person.)

A camp has sprung up around the battle, like they’ve seen in other places under siege, offering food, medical help, and spare weapons to the fighters.

"May I sit here?" the white-haired man standing over Leo asks, as Leo is taking a break and nibbling on some of the food the locals have cooked and brought to the camp. He shrugs. The man sits down next to him, sighing as his bones creak. "Oof! Not as young as I used to be." He quirks an eyebrow at Leo. "If you don't mind me asking, you're Maya, aren't you?"

"Got it in one." Leo downs another gulp of water. "Maya, Spanish, healthy amount of Aztec, some Zapotec, some Mixtec, some West African, maybe some East Asian, don't really know what else."

"I wasn't aware we had reinforcements from south of the border."

Leo furrows his forehead, a little offended. "Actually, I'm from Houston. I'm Mexican-American, not Mexican. I'm fourth- or fifth-generation."

The man holds up his hands. "My apologies." He reaches for the salt shaker, douses his baked potato in salt, and then returns it to the center of the table before he speaks again. "Why are you here, then?"

"My sister's Cherokee—honorary sister. She was asked to come; she brought me with her."

The man's face lights up. "OH! You're Mr. Valdez, then? Piper's brother, the pyrokinetic?" He sticks out a hand. "Chad Smith, Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation."

Leo shakes it. "Leo Valdez, no impressive titles."

"Give it time, kid, I've heard about your work in Virginia. And Oaxaca, of course, though I haven't heard much. It seems no one knows what actually happened there."

Leo pushes back the memory of screaming and ignores the implied question.

"That reminds me, did you meet a woman named Nayeli while you were there? Nayeli Díaz? I haven't heard from her in months!"

"Nayeli's dead," Leo tells him bluntly. "Her and the entire enclave in Santiago Ixtayutla. The entire area was destroyed. We were some of the only survivors.”

Smith rears back in shock. "I'm so sorry for your loss," he says when he regains his voice.

Leo looks down and find a rock to kick at. "I didn't know them that well."

"Yes, but—"

Great-Aunt Naomi saves him then, poking her head into the food tent. "Valdez, we need you back on cauterizing," she orders. Leo scrambles up, nodding to Chief Smith before following her to the med tent. As soon as his hands are scrubbed, he's back in the new-patient section, using his powers to cauterize wounds and joking with the patients who are still awake.

The mayor of Tulsa gives as good as he gets, in between complaining about the tourniquet on his leg. A woman whose ranch borders Great-Aunt Naomi's rolls her eyes and huffs while Leo stitches up her hand. An author from San Antonio and a Catholic priest from Bixby get into a debate on the differences between Classical and Biblical mythology, which starts the priest talking about the history of the Bible; Leo gets a very entertaining lesson about the very bad job that King James's lackeys did while translating the Bible into English.

The rancher dies on the battlefield the very next day. Two days later, the priest comes back, once again as a patient; Leo nearly throws up at the sight of blood and pus oozing out of his clawed-up back.

"I don't think the Lord will mind," the priest rasps out with a smile,"that I died fighting someone else’s demons." Handing Leo a pocket-sized Bible, he says, "And you are Catholic... will you help me with my last rites?"

He walks Leo through the parts he can do as a lay person, even as his voice gets fainter and fainter. Once it's done, and his voice has given out entirely, Leo opens the Bible to a random page and reads out loud, until the old man's life silently slips out of his body.

Leo reaches over and closes his eyes.

2011 turns into a blur of battles and blood, of working in the med tents and hiding in basements, mixed with the utter normalcy of school and family and classwork.

They turn fourteen on a class field trip somewhere in Canada, the one where Aaron takes a bullet to the hip and Terrence nearly punches one of the doctors, trying to see his boyfriend. (Ms. Weaver grumps for a week, partly out of worry and partly because of the sheer amount of paperwork she has to do as a result.) Come spring break, they’re caught up in another war, this time as soldiers now that they’re old enough. They come out of that one with a bullet in Leo's shoulder and two more safe houses for Exodus; Leo counts that as a win. (Even if said bullet results in the two them finally having to face the music with their parents about their little extracurricular field trips.)

The reputation that Mr. Smith predicted grows into something they can't control, and they're called more and more to fight for people that they don't even know, everywhere in the world. The Wars take their blood, and their friends, and their innocence; the battlefield grinds them up and spits them out, as soldiers, as heroes, as members of a generation at war.

(Unfortunately, that reputation is no help at all when A. C. and Uncle Clint get called out to middle-of-nowhere New Mexico to deal with an 0-8-4; no matter how much they beg ask politely, Fury still won't let them go.)

"Leo? Good, you came." Ms. Weaver gestures for him to sit down. He does, carefully—even with attention from a battlefield biokinetic and some of SHIELD's best doctors, his arm is still in a sling and needs careful handling. "How's the shoulder?"

"Healing." He shrugs with his right arm, as if to say, "What can you do?"

She smiles at him. “My sister, Anne, told me that you’re interested in going to the Academy of Science and Technology once you’ve graduated. Is that right?”

Grinning, he nods. “Yes, ma’am!”

“Sci-Tech will be lucky to have you.” She opens the file folder on the table. “Now, your grades in Math and Basic Engineering are excellent, but your overall grade in Chemistry needs to be brought up just a bit by the end of senior year if you want to get in. You also have a lot of absences—Cadet McLean does, as well—but Agent Coulson has informed me that that’s because of trouble with your biological family. Is that correct, Cadet Valdez?”

He forces himself to stay relaxed and nods again. “Yes, ma’am.”

"Leo?" Her voice is soft. "Is there anything you want to talk about?"

Stay hidden, stay quiet, stay safe, he thinks. He swallows. "No, ma'am."

By the end of June—one year since Oaxaca—they have almost the complete picture.

There have been thirty-nine wars, covering over a hundred mythological traditions; five more are ongoing, and a sixth seems to be looming.

Leo can't even look at the list of the dead, now—it's far too depressing. It's not even a list anymore, really: when the list of names got too long for their dorm-room wall, Leo set up a database of names and dates and cause-of-death, so others could visit it and add to it as needed. All that's left on the piece of paper on the wall is a number that changes every day.

Thirty million confirmed dead, as of July 2011.

Possibly twice as many.

Sixty fucking million people dead, over the course of seven years.

Two-thirds of them lived in enclaves that no longer exist. The rest—norms and preters alike—died in battle or in the crossfire, most of them adults or in their late teens. The ones who survive go to fight for others; most of them aren't quite as lucky a second time.

Even with better communication, even with better intel, even with the death rate tapering off—by the time July rolls into August, most of the grown-ups are gone.

In the first week of August, as the temperature in Washington finally starts to cool off from July's hundred-degree highs, someone shows up at the apartment's front door, looking for Piper.

"She's not here," Leo tells the young woman. He lets her in anyway, and makes her a cup of ice water, because she really looks like she needs it.

"Thanks," she says, once she's cooled off. "Sorry to show up like this, but I was kind of... told to come here." She pulls a light blue envelope out of her pocket and sets it on the table, so that Leo can read the name (Mary Poser), address, and DO NOT OPEN until July 30th, 2011, mid-afternoon written on the back in carefully neat handwriting. (The handwriting rings a bell in Leo's head; he ignores it.)

Inside the envelope is another envelope, reading, Deliver to Piper McLean on August 3rd, 2011, along with A. C.'s address. The note inside is addressed to him, though, as if the sender know he’d be the one to read it.

Leo—Please contact these people. They and their associates will be able to help with the remaining wars.

By the way—good luck. With everything.

After Mary leaves and before Audrey and A. C. get home from their date, Leo calls Piper at her dad’s house in California. They divvy up the list of names and telephone numbers and start calling them.

The people on the list are random, run-of-the-mill psychics and magic-users—genetic lottery winners with no ties to mythology or folklore, who’ve spent the last decade or so quietly networking with the help of the Internet. Best of all, most of them are untouched by the Wars.

By mid-August, not only has their fighting force tripled, but the Wars seem to be coming to some sort of close. The only sectors that haven’t gone to war yet are the ones that are the farthest away from where the Wars started—most of the U. S. and Canada, and the southern half of South America—and the ones that are the strongest and the deepest-embedded in the modern world—the Hindu, Shinto, Greco-Roman, and Egyptian pantheons, mostly.

(By the end of the year, that’s changed: the Hindu and Shinto Wars have run their course, the Greeks and Romans are getting closer to the end of theirs, and sometime around Christmas the Egyptian pantheon gets a rude awakening of the proto-apocalyptic variety with Set's attempt at world domination.)

By the end of the year, the average death toll in each war has dropped from the hundreds of thousands to the hundreds. The fallen enclaves start to rebuild, and the preters themselves start to recover. Just a year and a half after Oaxaca, the supernatural world has gone from thousands of disconnected, disorganized individual groups to a loose network that criss-crosses the world, regardless of oceans and national borders.

Not only that, but Leo, Piper and Helena are probably going to be getting a new baby sibling soon; not even a possible move to Portland and A. C. and Uncle Clint getting stuck babysitting scientists in New Mexico can put a damper on that.

2012

It's March, and A. C. gets enough time off from the babysitting job in New Mexico to make a short visit to D. C., and he comes home yelling about how they found Captain America—alive— and of course Leo and Piper tease him about being a fanboy, and tease him even more when he trips over one of the boxes in the front hallway because he's distracted.

(Leo and Piper may or may not be just as excited as he is. Don't tell anyone.)

It's April, and for the second time in two years, Leo is packing up everything he owns, this time to be shipped across the country to effing Oregon, and seriously, what's a desert kid like him doing in the Pacific Northwest? (He looks it up. Portland actually gets less annual rainfall than Houston does. Less than D. C., even. He chooses to ignore this fact.)

Leo meets the new neighbors—Robin-across-the-street, Mrs. Watson next door, the MacReady family, the Yung twins. Most of them are renters, and a lot of them are college students going to Portland State.

(On Wednesday, Lena insists on going to the Washington Park playground with him and Piper, even though it's a twenty- or thirty-minute walk. It's worth it, though, watching her laugh as she runs around. They even run into Lena's soon-to-be fourth-grade teacher, who does a visible double-take when Leo introduces the three of them with three different last names.)

It's the kind of neighborhood Leo can see himself settling down in, someday, especially now that his family is here.

Someday.

Then it's May, and the world is ending.

Chapter Text

2012

It's May, and the world is ending.

Clint's no longer under mind control, but they have no idea where Thor and Banner are, and Leo and Piper aren't even supposed to be here, and all Leo can think of is Nick Fury telling them that A. C. just came this close to dying.

Beside him, Piper scrubs at her hands with a wet wipe, trying to get the blood off. She still has tear stains on her cheeks. Leo know he does, too. A. C.—his dad almost died, without a damn thing either of his kids could do to stop it.

Director Fury gives the order for the grown-ups to get ready to fight; Leo and Piper get up to follow them. "McLean, Valdez, you stay here." He levels his gaze at them. "And don't you even think about slipping off. You are staying here, on the bridge of the helicarrier, where it's safe, until the battle is over. Do you understand me?"

They try to stare him down; unsuccessfully, judging by the smirk he quickly erases. "I need a yes, Cadets."

Leo speaks first. "What makes you think the Helicarrier is any safer?"

Piper picks up his train of thought immediately. "This thing's dead in the air. We don't know how long we have until it crashes. A crashing ship is no place for a pair of fifteen-year-olds."

The Director—not their Uncle Nick, not now—stares them down. "Neither is a battlefield."

"With all due respect, sir—" Leo starts.

"No, Cadet Valdez. That is final."

"With all due respect, sir," Piper emphasizes. "Kids like us? Preter kids?"

"We're fighting for our lives from the day we're born," Leo finishes.

"The entire supernatural world has been trying to stave off the end of the world for eight years," Piper hisses. "We walked right into the middle of it." They're keeping their voices down, well aware of the ones nearby who don't—can't know.

"This isn't our first battle."

"It isn't even our second, or our third."

"We know what we're getting into."

Fury steeples his fingers. "Do you?"

Piper hesitates; nods. "Yes."

"You know exactly what we're capable of. Do you really want to keep us on the bench?"

"We're combat-capable, and we both already have PTSD."

He leans forward. "If the World Security Council finds out—"

Piper shrugs. "Then they don't find out."

"We'll keep our identities secret until we're older—"

"—and by the time we're adults, it won't matter anymore. And if anyone tries to bring the heat down on you—"

"Then we disobeyed orders."

"It's hardly your fault."

"Besides, you're our uncle."

"You'd want your niece and nephew to stay as far away from the battle as possible. Right?"

"Yeah, exactly."

The Director looks both of them in the eye, and whispers, "Barton, Romanoff, and Rogers are taking a Quinjet to New York. If you hurry, you'll be able to catch them. When you get there, stay hidden, until you're in the air. Pretend you stowed away. Understand that?"

They both nod.

"Now go." He raises his voice, back to a normal tone. "That's final, kids, now get out of my sight. Go—make yourselves useful, or something. Okay?"

Leo and Piper hurry off, hand in hand.

At Stark Tower, while Tony distracts Loki (and seriously, there are Norse gods now, what the fuck), Piper suits up as Silver Dragon and tosses Leo the flame-patterned Spandex monstrosity that Tony made for him. Once they're dressed as respectable superheroes, Piper gives him a ride to street level—because Loki apparently threw Tony through a window (does Tony have a single bone of self-preservation in his entire body?) and flying through the broken penthouse window and down to the ground is much faster than taking the elevator—and she jokes that she's lucky he's scrawny. Leo tries not to take offense. Instead, she deposits him in the street, and he grabs her (armored) hand and squeezes it for what might be the last time, and she gently squeezes back before launching herself into the sky.

And then the battle starts, and he doesn't have time to be offended. The world is ending, and New York is fighting back.

Even as SHIELD agents herd civilians into stairwells and basements and the subway system, some take up arms against the invaders. Leo can't process half the things he sees, but there's women in silver with bows and arrows holding the line around the Empire State Building, students in bright orange shirts wielding swords and daggers and students in bathrobes carrying staffs and wands just pouring in from Long Island, teenagers and young adults in street clothes drawing diagrams and speaking words that stop the aliens in their tracks. In Central Park and along the riverbanks, young women melt out of trees and haul themselves dripping from the river to join the fight. Centaurs in Carmen Miranda hats smash aliens under their hooves. Somewhere near Rockefeller Center, he sees an old man leap off the ground as a human and land as a mountain lion, trapping an invader between its paws. At one point, Leo finds himself back-to-back with a young woman with glowing red eyes who swipes at an alien with a wolf's claws one second before punching it with a very human hand the next. Leo aims a blast of fire at the alien's eyes, and she finishes it off with her claws. She nods at Leo, her inhuman features melting into human, and she and her brother go looking for more monsters.

"Fight now, think later," an elderly man with a sword tells Leo when he pauses a second too long. The soccer mom nearby nods in agreement, otherwise a whirling dervish of flashing blades and Chitauri blood.

A white man in impressive Viking armor carrying a battle-ax stalks Hell's Kitchen. A black college student mows down aliens with a sawed-off shotgun before mowing them over—literally—with her wheelchair. A middle-aged Hispanic matron checks the safety on a rifle that cannot be legal before unloading the magazine into the Chitauri surrounding her, eyes and arms always steady. Leo shares a nod with one of her cohorts, a Japanese man whose wife, he explains, is holding the containment line to the north with a group of other shape-shifters. He's human, but there are plenty of humans in this fight, whether they fight with guns or knives or their own bodies, whether they wear street clothes or superhero costumes, whether they're in the thick of battle or on the edge or manning tables a block away from the combat zone, passing out water bottles and fiber bars and weaponry to weary fighters.

As the battle wears on, more and more civilians come out of hiding. Hawaiian-shirted tourists use whatever they can get their hands on to fight. Students from NYU and Columbia University bash heads in with their textbooks. (Leo thinks that they're enjoying it a bit too much, destroying textbooks that they'll just have to replace, but it seems to be very cathartic.) Whenever a child runs into the battle, a human chain forms to get them through the line and over to one of the supply areas, although that one kindergartner with the bathrobe people who's screaming "DIE!" and hitting aliens on the butt with her staff apparently gets a pass. Medical personnel—EMTs, med students, civilian volunteers—mark themselves by tying whatever they can find around their wrist. They weave between spells and weapons and alien attacks to carry the wounded and exhausted off the battlefield, and Leo has never been prouder of his country.

Whenever Leo needs to catch his breath, he fades back through the containment line to do his time at one of the supply tables. Here, outside of the battle, members of the National Guard chat with young men who have goat legs instead of pants. A blonde teenager—who Leo recognizes as one of the people Piper called in—stands with her face upturned as a centaur in an "I Heart New York" shirt dumps a water bottle on her head, and he notices that she's controlling the water so it doesn't splash anyone else or get wasted on the ground. It looks like the deal-with-it-later acceptance of the combat zone's weirdness extends to the civilian side of things.

Most of the tables are manned by children, whose parents and older siblings are busy fighting, or by the injured and exhausted, with people from the med tents to keep them there so they won't try to slip back into the battle. Leo passes out weapons and bullets and reclaimed arrows to anyone who's run out, chats up a few pretty girls, and heads back into the fray when he's got his breath back.

"Guys, we got incoming," Tony says over the Avengers comm channel, and Leo jolts, because he's gotten used to getting his news from word-of-mouth or from Hank running the radio broadcast and his small army of grandchildren.

"What do you mean?" Leo looks up, expecting one of those space-whales to appear through the portal. He's ended up near Stark Tower, so he has a decent view, but before he can get a good look, a member of the group he's fighting with now yells a warning and he's back to fighting aliens.

"I mean," Tony says testily, "that Fury's just informed me that we have a nuclear missile heading for Manhattan."

"You've got it, right?" Cap asks over the line. Tony barely has time to grunt in assurance before Piper cuts in with a, "You won't make it in time."

"What?! What do you mean, I won't—"

"If you're thinking what I'm thinking, then you're too far away. You don't have enough time to get it through and get back before Tasha closes it."

Leo has no idea what they're talking about, but Natasha says, "Guys, I've got the scepter. Should I close it?"

"No!" Tony and Piper both yell, and go back to arguing.

"I've got the missile," Piper says, "and I know just where to put it."

All at once, Leo sees what she's planning. "Piper," he croaks and it comes out half-dead and already heavy with grief, because it's been a long hard day and it seems to be catching up to him all at once.

"I know what I have to do," she says, and her voice is cracking.

He has to ask. "Are you sure?"

"Yeah. I'm sure." She doesn't sound sure, not by a long shot, but Leo accepts her answer and starts calculating her timing, letting the fighters around him keep him from being attacked. He stands stock-still, rattling off numbers, eyes trained on the sky even after JARVIS informs them that Piper's turned off her comms.

Two minutes pass before Piper flies into view, heading for the portal, and seconds pass before she vanishes forever.

Leo falls to his knees.

He starts counting the seconds, helplessly (his soul feels like it's tearing itself in two), as if he's five years old again (the rest of the Avengers are filling his comm with their yells) and his mom is teaching him how to tell how far away a storm is (the aliens are all collapsing and he doesn't bother to notice) but he doesn't know why (Tasha says that she's closing the gate) he's remembering that now—

Sunlight glints off silver paint, and she's falling.

"Why isn't he slowing down?" someone demands to know, and Leo's joy turns to lead and he doesn't bother to correct them when he takes off running for where he thinks she's going to land—

Hulk beats him there, leaping up and catching her, using the side of a building (the owners are going to be pissed) to slow their fall.

They land hard, Hulk still cradling Piper in his arms, and Leo rolls her to the ground and tries to give her CPR through the suit. He's not thinking straight, he knows he's not thinking straight, but it's worth a shot, right?

JARVIS tells Leo that her heart stopped while she was in the portal.

Leo tells JARVIS to fuck off.

JARVIS tells Leo that her heart has been stopped for forty-one seconds.

Leo tells JARVIS, once again, to fuck off.

Then Hulk roars, and Piper's eyes fly open with a gasping breath, and the lead in Leo's stomach turns back into joy. "What the hell?" she gasps out. "What just happened?" Her tone turns into a warning. "Please tell me nobody kissed me."

"We won," Captain America says, looking up into the sky.

"Your heart stopped beating, Piper, you were dead." Tears are running down Leo's face as he tells her, and she brings a hand up to cup his cheek.

He laughs when Tony asks if anyone's up for shawarma, and they troop off, exhausted but happy, to meet up with the other three at the shawarma place Tony saw. (They stop off at a med table, though, to get Piper checked over, at Leo's insistence. Piper flips him off. The blonde boy in an orange shirt waves them away, too swamped with berating the fighters who didn't get their injuries checked out earlier for another new patient.)

(They make a stop at the Tower, too, so Tony and Piper can get out of their suits and a de-Hulked Bruce Banner can borrow clothes from Tony.)

They're quickly hustled off to Walter Reed.

The TV in Piper's hospital room is showing endless coverage of the invasion. The Battle of New York, they're calling it, and while Leo notices that everyone is talking about the Avengers, no one mentions the civilians who fought back with superpowers, as if by some unspoken agreement. He's glad for it, even as the newscasters speculate about his and Piper's identities. (At one news conference, some talk-radio jackass keeps insisting that Silver Dragon is male. Cap nearly punches him on national television. Tony actually does.)

"You earned them," Director Fury says. Leo stares down the badge in his hand, unable to look away from the black letters spelling out Valdez, Leonardo T.

"Thank you, Sir," Piper says softly. "We're honored."

Fury rises from his seat. "Normally, it's the handler who administers the oath," he tells them. "But under the circumstances..."

Leo closes his eyes, letting the words wash over him, as he takes the oath he memorized years ago.

It's July, and Leo and Piper are staying with Tony and Pepper while they help rebuild New York. The days are a long blur of hammering, dust, and trying to keep the civilians from taking the bits and pieces of alien stuff they find home because jeez, Martin, the CDC said that we're supposed to treat all the alien stuff like it's a toddler covered in germs because do you want to get sick with the alien stomach flu or something? (Leo personally thinks that it was a really good idea to declare anything that came from the Chitauri as potentially infectious; some people don't care, though, and steal the stuff anyway. Idiots.)

It's almost August, and it's already been a long day when Piper's phone starts ringing. She ignores the glares, though, and tells the volunteer coordinator, "We have to go, our mom's in labor!"

"Wait, what?" Leo nearly drops the board he's just picked up, and it's a good thing he doesn't because someone's foot is directly underneath it. "What was that?"

Piper looks over at him, eyes wide. "Mom just went into labor!"

"Oh, shit!", he exclaims, garnering cries of "Language!" from half a dozen volunteers.

They're on the next plane out, courtesy of Aunt Pepper, and six hours later, Robin-across-the-street meets them at the gate. Audrey has long since been checked into the maternity ward at OHSU; Helena is asleep on a couch and Mrs. Watson is nose-deep in her tenth magazine of the day, judging by the pile beside her, by the time Leo and Piper scramble into the waiting room.

"Family only," the nurse tries to tell them; "I'm her son; she's my sister," Leo snaps habitually, scrubbing his hands, "and no, our father won't make it in time." The nurse, silenced, passes them gloves and hospital gowns and lets them into the delivery room.

Leo spends ten minutes whisper-yelling at Uncle Nick and then at the doctors until they let them Skype A. C. on a big monitor on the wall (and Leo sees enough of A. C.'s hospital room to wonder where he really is, because that doesn't look like Bethesda, and definitely isn't Tahiti.) He doesn't have time to dwell on it, though, because the doctors are telling Mom to push and suddenly he's holding six pounds and fourteen ounces of bloody, squalling baby.

Her name is Adelaide, for Audrey's great-grandmother; Esperanza, for Leo's mother (and if he wipes a few tears from his eyes, no one has to know); and Philippa, for Addy's own father, stuck on the other side of the country. The surname that goes on her birth certificate is Nathan, just like her mother and older sister, so she'll be just that much safer.

Said older sister is bouncing in her seat by the time she’s allowed into the recovery room, and Leo has to remind her three times to stay seated and support the baby's head (Audrey is out cold at this point, and Piper is napping, having hogged Addy for almost half an hour). "She's so tiny," Lena breathes.

"I know, right?" Leo whispers, tracing his thumb over Addy's downy hair. She snuffles in her sleep, now clean and swaddled and happily fed. "Shh, it's okay, it's okay..." Addy quiets, mouthing at air, and Lena gives her to him and scoots over so Leo can sit down next to her. In this quiet, stolen moment, Leo can't take his eyes off of either of his sisters. With one arm carefully cradling Adelaide, and the other wrapped protectively around Helena's shoulders, he drifts off to sleep, ever-so-slightly snoring.

Three months after the Battle of New York, Fury calls them into his office for a briefing. "We've got a black-market ring running Chitauri tech out of an alternative school in Nevada. Congratulations. You just landed your first undercover job."

It’s pretty much just a milk run. It should be easy. Should being the operative word, here.

Sitwell is their handler, which fucking sucks because he's HYDRA, but he's also oblivious as shit when he isn't running point, which is helpful when they sneak off to go negotiate with the local werewolf pack about Exodus, but not so helpful when they get kidnapped by the smuggling ring and he doesn't notice until they've missed two check-ins and are about to miss a third.

They have to rescue themselves, using Piper's Jedi mind trick and Leo's tendency towards mad engineering ("Uh, dude? I don't know what you're thinking, but I'm pretty sure it's impossible to build an incendiary device out of wires and pocket lint... Oh. Huh. I guess it isn't."). Leo's got deep-tissue bruising in both wrists and Piper's starting to limp badly by the time they stumble into Sitwell's safehouse (the two of them have to stay in the Wilderness School's dorms, which, dorm food, yuck), and thankfully he’s already raised the alarm and several nearby agents have arrived to help plan a rescue, which is quickly diverted into providing medical attention and getting the investigation back on track, helped in no small part by the files they stole on their way out of the compound.

After the mission wraps up and they've turned in their (first!) mission reports, Leo and Piper are ordered to stay at Wilderness School for a few more weeks, so that no one connects them to the takedown of a black-market dealer that's been dominating the local gossip. Some of the pressure eases off, and they take the chance to push aside the college textbooks and work through a curriculum that they learned years ago, doing something easy for once.

Sometimes, it's nice just to take a breath. (Even if that means ignoring all the homework that their teachers at Junior keep emailing them.)

Tuesday, December eighteenth, three days before Winter Break starts and the two of them head back to D. C. The tenth graders are on their way to the Grand Canyon, and apparently their teachers have no sense of distance, because what they claimed would be a one-hour drive is quickly shaping up to be three. (Leo may or may not be silently squeeing at the sheer cuteness of Piper and Jason holding hands while Jason sleeps. He ships them hard, okay?)

Somewhere near the border, Jason wakes up, and it quickly becomes apparent that something's wrong. For one thing, he doesn't recognize them, not even when Leo jokes about making Jason do all of his homework, or when he launches a makeshift helicopter off the side of the Skywalk. For another, the memories of Jason that Leo calls up seem... Off. Shiny, like the tracker-jacker memories in The Hunger Games.

Someone's messed with their minds.

"Who are you, really?" he asks Jason, softly.

Jason shakes his head. "I don't know."

After that there's no time to process, no time to do anything but fight, because the Skywalk is cracking apart and Leo is falling off the edge of the Grand Canyon (and Piper is never going to let him live that down) only to be rescued by Coach Hedge, who's apparently a satyr (so that's what those goat-legged guys are called!). They're stupid enough to let Coach Hedge get kidnapped right before Rainbow Tattoo Guy and the young woman who looks eerily like a blonde teenage version of Aunt Tasha show up, and then, like something straight out of a fairy tale, they're whisked them off to some place called Camp Half-Blood (and yeah, that's the curl to Piper's lip that means that she's pissed).

After they get a good dunking in the lake (Leo reminds himself to never be in a car with Scary-Blonde-Lady-Also-Known-As-Annabeth driving) and Piper's surreptitiously turned her earbud back on and let JARVIS know they're okay, Annabeth splits them up for the grand tour of camp.

The two of them glance at each other, not entirely willing to be split up. Leo presses his index and middle fingers together and taps them once on the outside of his thigh before clenching his hand, as if holding a spoon. See you at the next meal?

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Piper shape her fingers into a sign-language K, tapping it twice on her own leg. Okay. Still in their own private sign language, she adds, I'll check in with Fury as soon as I can. She pauses before adding, Jane, too.

For a second the only Jane Leo can think of is Dr. Jane Foster, one of the physicists Bruce wants to work with, now that he's not on the run. (She's also Thor's girlfriend, but no one else on the team has met her—she and her intern were knee-deep in research in Norway during the attack, Thor told them, and the U.S. airspace was closed by the time they found out.) Except that Jane is also the name of Piper's Dad's current PA, who's lasted a whopping three months (and who's nowhere near as competent as a PA as Aunt Pepper was, but that's beside the point); Piper must be calling her for news about her missing dad. Good luck, he taps out, completely sincere. Then the blonde boy, Will, pulls him away.

Thursday night, somewhere in Colorado—a day and a half into the quest—Leo wakes up sweating. Piper's memory of the Chitauri ship, stretching out above her and backlit by an orange glow, fades from his mind's eye as he scrambles to sit up.

Stone? Cool and solid, check. Sleeping bag—smooth, a bit cold, a little restricting. Check.

Piper?

... Not there.

He feels around for her mind-glow and latches on, following it to the front of the cave, where Piper is curled into Jason's side. Jason looks up at him. "You too, huh?" he says.

Leo nods, forgetting that he's barely visible to Jason in the dark. "Yeah." He sits down next to Piper. "You gave me your nightmare," he informs her. Piper mumbles at him with a hint of a growl.

When he takes her hand, her fear floods into him: she's still in the grips of a flashback. In an endless loop, the ceiling is collapsing around them, burying them under stone and cutting them off from the grownups so they can't even shout for help. Leo has to remind himself over and over to gulp in air—clean air, not air choked with dust. He has to stay grounded: he's useless to Piper if her flashback drags him under.

Leo's hand in hers breaks the loop, it seems, and the scene starts playing out the way it did in reality: the nahuals, the gun, Ricardo, the collapse; Piper seeing Leo go down under a pile of monsters, and finding herself in a losing battle with her own opponents, with no one who can come back her up. Then Leo, through Piper's eyes, sees himself go up in flames, and Piper redoubles her defense and presses it into an attack, unknowingly weaponizing her 'pathic powers just as much as her knife. When they're in the clear, as if by some unspoken agreement, they launch themselves into the main battle. The tide turns, and Piper's fear ebbs enough to let her go.

Piper whimpers, burying her face in Jason's chest. Leo cards his fingers through her sleep-tangled hair and murmurs to her, until she's relaxed enough to go back to sleep.

It's a while after her breathing evens out, before Jason breaks the silence. "So... you and Piper?"

Leo knows what he's asking. "We're siblings," he says automatically, then chuckles. "Honorary siblings, I mean—not biologically, or legally, but in every way that matters... she's my sister."

"That sounds... kind of nice." Jason takes a breath. "What about the rest of your family?"

"My bio-mom's dead. She died when I was eight." Leo pauses to let the familiar wave of grief roll past. "My adoptive family's great, though, and they're just as much Piper's family as they are mine. Audrey—our mom—she's a cellist, plays with the Portland Symphonic Orchestra—that's where we live right now. A. C. is our dad; he's a—" Leo cuts himself off. "He works for the government. He got... hurt... during the Battle of New York. He's still recovering, from that." Leo swallows back the memory of A. C. in his hospital bed at Walter Reed, surrounded by tubes and wires. "We have two little sisters, too—Lena's ten and Addy's four months old. I have pictures, if you want to see," he offers, spur of the moment.

Jason opens his mouth to speak, then frowns. "But wait... weren't you at Wilderness School because you ran away? You sound like you really miss them."

Leo stares out into the night. "I do. And I didn't. Run away from them, I mean—I ran away from foster care six times, when I was eight. We just—fudged the truth a bit." He shrugs.

"But—why?" Jason is definitely frowning, now. "Why were you at Wilderness School, if you didn't have to be there?"

Leo starts to answer, then shuts his mouth and silently curses himself. That was stupid. He casts around for a believable answer until Jason shakes his head. "Never mind," he says. "I probably don't need to know." He hesitates, then: "Will you tell me about your sisters? Please?"

The next day is the solstice, and it's the day they defeat a giant and several Earthborn, rescue Piper's dad, knock a second giant down a few pegs, and jailbreak the Queen of the Gods. It's also the day that the world doesn't end, no matter what Porphyrion, the Mayan Calendar, or the Wars (now winding to a close) might say.

Only one day after they get back from the quest, Leo is sitting at the Hephaestus table, sketching out ideas for the Argo II while JARVIS runs calculations in his ear. The dining pavillion is mostly empty, since all but the last few stragglers have gone to get ready for bed, and their table is missing one person anyway—while they were gone, Harley had gone home to Tennessee to visit his mother and little sister for Christmas.

He doesn't want to say anything out loud—doesn't want to draw attention to his earbud—so all his acknowledgements and questions are murmured, disguised as him talking to himself while he works. JARVIS understands him well enough, and is keeping up a running monologue on the tension strengths of various type of wood, when suddenly, mid-sentence, he cuts himself off, and the earbud is instead filled with the horrible buzzing noise of static.

Tapping the earbud to disconnect the call and then calling JARVIS back doesn't work. Neither does turning it off and on again. Leo takes it out to check for damage, then puts it back in, and then lets himself panic.

"Piper, can you call JARVIS?" he asks. Piper taps her own earbud, turning it on and then placing the call. "Nothing but static," she reports.

"Fuck," Leo curses, glad that Harley isn't there. "Can you... Fuck. No. My laptop's in my go-bag, it's right here. Where's a power outlet? Chiron, are there any power outlets over here? Okay, good, there's one on the outside of the porch, that's real convenient. Don't worry, I just need to check on a friend." His laptop takes its own sweet time booting up. "What's the Wi-Fi password? Okay. I got it, and that works, so let me just check... Oh. Oh, fuck." He pauses, staring at the screen until it sinks in. "Oh, fuck." This is bad. "PIPER!"

There's no time to worry about Tony, about Aunt Pepper, about what the hell just happened as his hands fly across the keyboard. He can't do anything to help them from here. A fingerprint, an eye scan, three passwords and he's in, accessing JARVIS's main server farm at the Malibu mansion and staring in horror at the damage (thank God most of the farm is underground). Data packets fill one half of his screen while he accesses the Stark Tower servers with the other, and thank God they were built into the Tower, just not entirely activated yet.

He's about to activate them.

"You really shouldn't be doing that."

He doesn't care who's talking. "Fuck you," he snaps, "I'm doing the equivalent of open-heart surgery on a goddamned AI, so fuck off."

The data starts transferring; he's not ready, he has to stop it. He sets up a program to scan for damaged or corrupted coding while it transfers, then lets the transfer program start running again, and it does, faster than before so that he's scrambling to keep up, to repair and rewrite each bit of code before the data settles fully into JARVIS's new brain at Stark Tower.

Piper holds a water to his mouth. He drinks.

Eventually rerouting the transfer through his laptop becomes too much for it; there's too much data to process, more than it can handle. Leo closes his eyes, breathes, and lets himself drop.

He knows what technopathy is; this is something bigger. When Leo opens his eyes, he's standing in the data itself, letting his own brain be the processing power that he needs. There's no room; he makes room, bundling up everything that makes him him and gives it all to Piper, whose hands are on his shoulders, bare skin on bare skin, while the spark of connection and what we never talk about bridges the gap, letting them store his mind inside hers.

Somewhere inside this Gestalt of minds, of Jarvis's mind flowing through Leo-and-Piper on the way to its new home, he's vaguely aware of Jason kneeling next to them, anchoring them like he will forever...

...And Leo reaches out.

The patchwork frame that will soon be JARVIS again—we're all just metaphors here—stands before him, every packet of data rushing past him flaring and vanishing into the framework when it hits or turning brown and dead because something's wrong. He touches it, and it flexes and feels slimy like a membrane, shuddering under his fingers until it pushes out the nearest packet of damaged data, waiting for repair.

Leo gets to work.

It's almost too easy to lose track of time.

Why would Tony use multiple languages? he wonders distantly, but his mind has already made the switch the moment it recognizes the change, as easy as switching between English and Spanish and ASL, because he started learning how to code and how to hack when he was nine, and never mind that Tony is one of the best hackers in the world, so is he.

JARVIS has built-in tripwires, for anyone but Tony who tries to mess with his programming, but Leo knows how Tony gets around them, and here in the space where metaphors are more than metaphors it's as easy as stepping over actual tripwires as he walks around the frame. The membrane is shuddering under his hands, and he realizes that that's JARVIS breathing, and it does make a little bit of sense, because the only frame of reference Tony has for an independent mind is one that's intrinsically tied to a body (Piper sends him a wave of thought that translates to psychics know better, eh?), so of course JARVIS would have a simulacrum of one, with rhythms resembling a heartbeat and pulse and the diaphragm's contractions.

"Shh, you're all right, you'll all right," he soothes as one code packet is kept from slotting in correctly, snagged on one of the veinlike threads that's appeared in his weaving. It frees itself as the weft lines shift and slide around the warp (and when did the metaphor switch to weaving? He doesn't know how to weave. He's probably been reading too much Tamora Pierce. Sandry's always been his favorite, though that one scene always reminds him way too much of Oaxaca.)

Outside, in his real body, he can hear Harley talking to JARVIS, which means he's talking to Leo because JARVIS isn't back online yet, and why is Harley talking to JARVIS anyway? Leo's body is running on autopilot, listening to Harley talking through the static and guiding him through repairing the Iron Man suit (and he thinks Iron Man and Tony Stark are two different people and if Leo were himself he'd find that hilarious).

His hands, neurons, his mind itself are firing all at once, finding and fixing and freeing every single line of code as he/they rebuild JARVIS's mind until the patchwork framework is a shining mosaic of light, healthy and whole and running perfectly. The second when it gets up and running is the same second that Leo's brain gives out and the metaphors collapse, unceremoniously shoving Leo's conscious thoughts back into his body and pulling his memories back from Piper's until his mind is whole and anchored in the nervous tissue it belongs to. For just a second Leo's eyes flash open, then they roll back in his head and he collapses back into Piper's arms, blood streaming from both their noses, and the last thing he feels is Jason, wrapping his arms around them both.

Leo's a day late for Christmas, he finds out when he wakes up. But it's okay, because the pile of presents in the corner of the infirmary have to be for him and Piper, which means he didn't miss the best part. Then the real best part happens, when Piper leans over from the chair next to his bed and turns his earbud on, and JARVIS's voice crackles to life.

Not only did he save JARVIS's life and by extension Tony's, he finds out, but Pepper, and Harley, and President flipping Obama are alive because of him, as well. His laptop's a very crispy piece of toast now, but it's okay, because his Christmas present from Tony is a brand-new one with all of his old data saved, because apparently Tony is an effing stalker who keeps all of their personal data backed up.

At lunch the next day, Piper's phone rings. She breaks into a grin.

"What? What is it?" Leo asks, jumping up and speed walking over. Piper smiles, puts the phone on speaker, and answers the call.

"PIPER QUINN MCLEAN, YOU ARE GROUNDED FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE!"

Chapter Text

2013

Harley comes back to Camp Half-Blood—little sister in tow—at the start of the year, to a massive group hug from his older siblings and three separate lectures from Jake, Nyssa, and Leo on the subject of not scaring us like that again.

A couple of weeks later, in mid-January, Leo’s eating lunch with his siblings—in the dining pavilion, for once!—with five-year-old Zoe on his lap and this week’s homework packet sitting in front of him. He’s in the middle of helping Zoe cut up a piece of chicken when his pocket buzzes and Black Sabbath starts blaring across the pavilion.

Really? Piper shoots at him as he digs out his phone, jostling Zoe and making her huff in annoyance. He hits "accept call," cutting off "Iron Man" mid-verse. "Hey, Uncle Tony. What's up?"

"Hey, kid. How would you feel about not inheriting Stark Industries?" Tony asks lazily.

Leo nearly jumps out of his seat. "I was in the running?" he yelps incredulously.

"In the running for what?" Nyssa asks.

Leo waves her off as Tony keeps talking.

"Well, since I don't have kids—Pepper and I don't have kids, so you two are the only kids I know, and you're good with machines and Piper's good with people, so who else was I going to leave SI to?"

Leo adjusts Zoe on his lap, absentmindedly dropping a kiss to the top of her head. "So why are you calling me about this now?"

"Remember that thing with the Mandarin? Of course you remember that. Remember how I crash-landed in Tennessee? Met this kid, helped me fix the suit, helped me get JARVIS back online. Small town, single mom, kind of poor. Kid's an absolute genius, he'd be wasted there. So, I figured I'll give him SI. Thoughts?"

Leo's honestly not sure if Tony had paused to take a breath even once in that entire rambling monologue. He pinches his nose, wondering if this is how Aunt Pepper feels. "Okay, first I've got a few basic questions. One. Are you currently drunk?"

"Absolutely not."

"Were you drunk when you made this decision?"

"No, I was not."

"Are you currently sleep deprived?"

"Nope!"

"Were you sleep deprived when you made this decision?"

"Again, no."

"How much sleep have you been getting lately?"

"Enough to satisfy Pepper."

"Has Aunt Pepper approved this decision?"

"Yes."

"Has JARVIS approved this decision?"

"Yes."

"Is the kid's mom okay with this?"

"Yes."

Leo slumps back on the bench. "Okay, consider me no longer worried." He bounces Zoe a little, trying to get some feeling back into his legs, before asking, "So, what's this kid's name? How old is he?"

"His name's Harley Keener. He's... eight, I think? He may be ten."

Leo can't help it—he starts laughing hysterically. "You know what? I'm just going to pass the phone over to him. Tony, try not to break his brain; Harley, try not to squeal too loudly."

"Wait, what?"

Transferring the inheritance of Stark Industries goes smoothly, especially since Uncle Tony and Aunt Pepper aren’t making a public announcement yet. So does building the ship, until two months have flown by. They’ve now been at Camp Half-Blood for three months, and Leo is about ready to burst with excitement.

Nyssa is eyeing him like he's a machine about to explode. Jason is looking at him like he understands why he's excited, but still thinks he's lost it. Everyone else is just looking at him like he's crazy. Well. Crazier than usual.

"She's two minute late, why is she two minutes late..." Leo mutters, looking at his watch.

"Leo." Jason's expression is fully amused now. "I get that you're excited. But you really need to calm down."

"I can't, I'm too excited... Finally!" He leans over and hits play. The dulcet, and slightly creepy, tones of their traditional birthday song ring out over the pavilion. Piper's face, when she comes into view, bears an annoyed grin.

"Breakfast first, then presents!" he half-shouts at her, grinning.

"Dang, you beat me to it!"

They scarf down breakfast almost fast enough to choke and then launch themselves towards the small pile of presents under the main table. First, though, are the presents they got for each other. "Ready?" Piper asks, holding a small package that just screams that Lacy wrapped it.

"Always."

They shove the presents at each other and then race to see who unwraps theirs first. Leo wins, shoving the World's Okayest Brother t-shirt on over his Camp Half-Blood shirt just before Piper follows suit, laughing at the I'm the Hot Twin that's written on hers.

Then it's time to sort out the rest of the presents: something expensive from Piper's dad for her, something small from Mama Tiger for Leo, packages from their classmates and the Avengers addressed to both of them, individual presents from A. C. and Audrey (with YOU'RE STILL GROUNDED scribbled on Piper's in A. C.'s handwriting), and various gifts from the other friends and relatives who thought to send them something.

In the end, Leo ends up with seven bows in his hair, Piper ends up with nine, and Jason ends up with two when he gets a bit too close to the crazy.

"What on Earth?" someone asks, sounding both intrigued and horrified, and—"It's our birthday today," Piper explains cheerfully. "Well, actually, mine was yesterday and his is tomorrow, so we celebrate on the day in between."

"Well, if it's your birthday today, can we have the day off?" Nyssa asks.

"Nope!" He stops and reconsiders. "Actually, yes. We're ahead of schedule by a week or so, aren't we?"

"Yes!" Malcolm calls from the Athena table, before anyone else says anything. Leo raises an eyebrow at him. Malcolm shrugs. "I have the schedule memorized."

Leo nods once, decisively. "Okay, then. Day off for everyone!"

The next day—Leo's actual birthday—it's back to work. When Leo grumbles, Malcolm nods at him in commiseration. "It's a birthday, not a break," he says sagely. "You'll get used to it."

Leo grumbles some more, choosing not to mention that he's already used to it, since he and Piper have already gone through the whole "By the way, we're secret agents in training and also we already know about the supernatural" talk with Chiron. Telling Malcolm that would hardly be helpful, anyway—they have a spanking-hot war machine to build, after all. (Piper vetoes the idea of naming the ship after Rhodey, no matter how flattered he would be. Killjoy.)

And life goes on.

April and May come and go, with funny stories from home, far too many weekly homework packets, even funnier stories from school, and generally good news from the front lines of the Wars. (The average death toll each month is down below two hundred, and they’re talking about upping the fighting age back to fourteen, and by the time June rolls around there’s only two Wars still going on, and one of them is the fight against Gaea.)

Construction of the Argo II slows down in the first week of June, mostly due to a certain somebody (read: Queen Dirt Face) interfering. Leo and Piper still manage to skive off long enough to graduate from high school, where they finally get to see their friends for the first time in a year and their family for the first time in almost as long. A. C. is up and about and complaining about his physical therapy; Helena is begging their classmates for embarrassing stories; Adelaide, wisely, stays in Audrey’s arms, taking a good look around at the world.

Once their diplomas are in hand—or, rather, in Audrey’s hands—Leo and Piper (quietly) tell Ms. Weaver and their classmates what’s been going on. Their classmates hug them tightly and refuse to say goodbye, so they won’t jinx it. Ms. Weaver hugs them even tighter—just another teacher, sending too-young soldiers off to war.

They get back to camp in the early evening, just in time for dinner; Leo, loudly and proudly, tells everyone exactly where they were all day. (He regrets nothing.)

In the morning, it’s back to work, with a six a.m. wake-up call, the same as it will be for the next two weeks.

Those two weeks, unlike the preceding months, seem to slog by. Leo and his siblings spend every waking hour solving each new crisis, just in time for the next one to pop up. He and Piper send a diplomatic message to Camp Jupiter. Annabeth nixes his idea of painting WASSUP, ROMANS? with a smiley face on the bottom of the Argo II. Nyssa finally gets the plumbing system up and running; Leo tests out the new shower with rousing renditions of the Potter Puppet Pals, Toby Turner, and Taylor Swift, among others.

Finally, on June twenty-second, the Argo II is ready to set sail.

Even before they land in Camp Jupiter, Leo can feel something cold prickling at the back of his neck. He sets up some extra mental shields has uses the breathing exercises Angie’s mom Gina taught him—inhaling for a count of seven, holding it for four, exhaling for eight—and ignores the feeling as much as he can.

The weird statue guy who demands all their weapons doesn’t help. (Leo honestly doesn’t think he’s been this thoroughly unarmed since that one time with the robot squirrels.)

But then they have to introduce themselves to the Romans (minus their last names—Leo never knows who’ll recognize their names, nowadays) and avoid offending them (his and Piper’s experience with diplomacy is really coming in handy) and the weird feeling slips out of his mind—both literally and figuratively—for the next few hours. Except then he has to show Blond Scarecrow Guy (what was his name? Octavio?) around the ship, and suddenly he’s wrestling the guy to the floor while the guy tries to get at the controls for the ballistae.

He yells for Piper in his head, needing backup, right before he manages to knock the guy unconscious. Thankfully, Praetor Reyna is understanding when he hauls Scarecrow Guy down off the ship and explains what happened. After that, though, they’re very politely asked to leave, albeit with three new passengers: Frank, who clearly doesn’t like him; Hazel, who always looks at him like she’s seeing a ghost; and the famous Percy Jackson, who’s a lot sassier than Leo was expecting and seems way too familiar. (He chalks it up to Annabeth's stories.)

Since they’ve (somehow) managed to not start a war with the Romans, they’re able to keep to Leo’s carefully timed schedule. It still takes far too long to fly back over the United States, if you ask Leo.

First, it’s a stop in Salt Lake City for supplies that Leo somehow managed to forget to pack and a frankly terrifying run-in with Nemesis (and a much more embarrassing run-in with Narcissus that Leo would honestly rather not think about, like, ever). Then there’s three more stops—one in Kansas, where Percy and Jason somehow end up knocking each other out; one in Atlanta, where Frank gets utterly (and hilariously) confused by Chinese handcuffs; and one in Charleston because of the sidequest Annabeth’s mom gave her, and Leo’s schedule has officially gone out the window.

After that—finally!—they’re flying over the Atlantic, on track to reach Rome on July first, and Leo feels himself start to relax, even though the seven of them haven’t quite found their groove yet. They just keep grating each other the wrong way, and it’s certainly not helped by the elephant in the room the size and shape of SHIELD. He says as much one day during dinner, making Piper nestle her head on his shoulder and everyone else look at them in concern.

Jason already knows some of the story, of course. Not all of it. Neither of them trust him that much, yet. But as Percy sets his fork down and asks him what else they've been through, Leo can't bring himself to bite his tongue.

It strikes him that they're probably going to be friends with these kids for the rest of their lives (however long that is) and if they don't survive this summer—he wants them to know, at least most of it.

Piper straightens in her seat. "What we’re about to tell you has to stay completely, totally secret, okay?"

The others nod in assent and confusion.

"Leo." She nudges his side until he looks back up from his food. "You want to start off?"

Leo chews and swallows and organizes his thoughts. "So you guys know how I was a street kid for like a year, right?"

He and Piper take turns telling the story, starting with Leo meeting A. C. on a warm evening right after Christmas and then meeting Piper in an ice cream shop in Houston. They tell the truth, as well, about being SHIELD cadets and Avengers. (Piper has to show them the watch on her wrist, and how it will turn into Silver Dragon's hand gauntlet—complete with repulsor—if she taps it right in order to get everyone to believe them.)

After he and Piper have told their story, there’s a moment of quiet. Then Hazel—hesitantly—speaks up, and tells them about her own elephant in the room—about growing up in New Orleans in the 1930s and 40s, the curse she supposedly had, and the boy she’d liked before she died. That jogs a memory in Leo’s head, about a story his Abuelo had told him once, and he has to ask.

"This boy you liked... he wouldn’t happen to be named Sammy Valdez, would he?"

Frank starts to scowl, but Hazel nods, just a little. "Yes. How did you know?"

"I think you’re talking about my great-grandfather," Leo tells her, and Hazel’s face lights up.

"Is he still alive?" she asks him, just a bit too hopeful.

Leo shakes his head. "He died when I was little." Hazel’s face falls, and he quickly adds, "My grandpa—his son—is still alive though, if you want to talk to him?"

"Oh, I am all for hearing embarrassing Baby Leo stories," Percy says; Annabeth jabs him with her elbow and tells him it’s Hazel’s choice.

Hazel nods, cautiously. Leo pulls out his phone, and sees her eyes widen, so he tells her, "It’s just like a normal telephone, except it fits in my pocket and I can carry it around with me. I can text people—that’s sending short, written messages—if I want, too." He decides not to explain the Internet, or pocket calculators and cameras, or computer games right now.

Abuelito’s name is near the end of the contacts list of his personal phone, under Samuel Valdez. Thankfully, he picks up right away.

"Hello?"

"Hi, Abuelito Sammy. It’s Leo," he adds, probably unnecessarily.

"Leo! You have good timing; your Abuela and I just got out of church."

Leo does the math and frowns. "Didn’t church get out a couple of hours ago?"

"No, it’s only noon here. Church just got out."

Leo checks his watch, realizing that Abuelito and Abuelita must have gone to the later sermon. At least he figured the time difference right. "Okay, that makes sense. Sorry, I must have done my math wrong."

"It’s fine, it’s fine. So why are you calling?"

Leo takes a deep breath. "There’s... someone you should probably talk to. Just... don’t ask questions, okay?"

Whatever Abuelito says next gets lost as Leo hands the phone to Hazel. She takes it from him gingerly, like it’s going to explode on her. "Hello?"

She pauses. "Um... this is Hazel Levesque. Is this Sammy Valdez? Junior?"

Abuelito’s next comment is loud enough that Leo can hear him talking from across the table. Hazel jerks the phone away from her ear and looks at Leo in a panic; Leo motions for her to keep going. She swallows. "Yes, sir. I was... friends. With your father."

Abuelito responds much more quietly. Hazel moves the phone away again and tells Leo, quizzically, "He wants to... face-time?"

Leo moves around to the other side of the table and shows her how to switch the call to FaceTime. A second later, Abuelito’s face fills the screen. "If this is a prank," he says, "it’s in very..."

He stops talking mid-sentence, staring at Hazel. After what seems like forever, he says quietly, "You look just like the picture my father had of you."

"Thank you," Hazel says, because there’s not much else she can say.

Abuelito looks at Leo. "Where did you find her?" he asks softly.

"No questions, Abuelito," Leo reminds him.

Abuelito shakes his head. "That’s right. I forgot." He looks up. "Is Piper there?"

"Why, do you like me more?" Piper says, suddenly right behind Leo. Leo rolls his eyes.

Abuelito looks at her dryly. "No; you’re just as annoying as the rest of my grandchildren." He pauses and asks, quietly, "Can I talk to Hazel? By herself?"

Hazel takes the phone off FaceTime and puts it back to her ear. As she wanders over to the other side of the room, promising to ask if she needs any technical help, Piper quirks a smile at Leo.

"What?" he asks, ready for some teasing.

Piper shakes her head. "Nothing! I’m just laughing because you’ve suddenly gained a family member." Leo rolls his eyes at her.

"Um... Leo?" Hazel calls, making him look up.

"What’s up?"

"Uh, is it okay with you if your grandfather starts calling me Aunt Hazel?"

Piper, the traitor, starts snickering.

Of course, the next day, everything goes to shit.

It starts out well enough, of course. It’s a nice, sunny day in Rome. Percy and Annabeth leave for her sidequest; Piper and Jason decide to have a nice, romantic picnic at the park. Meanwhile, Hazel and Frank have to drag Leo along with them on their quest to find Hazel’s brother.

There are a lot of tunnels involved.

Leo decides he hates tunnels.

He hates Nemesis even more.

The eidolons—the same ones that possessed Scarecrow Guy back at Camp Jupiter and possessed Percy and Jason in Kansas—catch up to them a few hours in and trap them in someone's ancient underground workshop. The upside is, the workshop they're trapped in is a place Leo would happily spend the rest of his life in; the downside is, they're trapped, they still haven't found Nico, and the eidolons have decided to possess some goddamn manikins that Leo had honestly thought weren't operable, and they're closing in fast.

Leo's first reaction is to laugh, because trying to attack him in a place that's like all his Christmases come at once is one of the worst strategic decisions he can think of. Laughter doesn't last, though, not when the eidolons have knocked Frank and Hazel unconscious and Leo's best impression of MacGyver only works for so long. His last chance to beat them is the freshly-reassembled Archimedes sphere—the one Leo doesn't have the access code to.

Leo's officially out of options.

He pulls out that damn fortune cookie, the one Nemesis gave him in Salt Lake City. A problem you cannot solve, she'd said, and warned that there'd be a price.

He opens it anyway.

(He'll regret that choice, later.)

He gets the code. He saves his friends. He's also fucking exhausted, but the day's not over yet—they still have to head back to the Argo II, make sure Coach Hedge hasn’t fired the ballistae on any unsuspecting tourists, and then go rendezvous with the others. (The four of them get to save Jason and Percy’s asses from a pair of giants in dorky outfits. Leo’s never going to let them live it down.)

Then it's time to pick Annabeth up from her sidequest, and that's when things go wrong.

It honestly happens faster than Leo can process. One second, he’s securing the Athena Parthenos in the Argo II; the next, the floor of the cavern where the Athena Parthenos was hidden—a good twenty feet underground—cracks opens.

The others scramble up the rope ladder to the surface and onto the Argo II until only Percy and Annabeth are left. Leo goes back to his work, relieved that everyone will make it up in time, especially since—according to Nico—that hole leads straight to Tartarus.

But suddenly people start screaming, and Leo looks up to see that the hole has—doubled? Tripled?—quadrupled in size, and he can’t see Annabeth anywhere, and all he can see of Percy is his fingers, holding onto a ledge and then—

Percy lets go of the ledge.

The cavern walls collapse, hiding the chasm from sight.

The parking lot on the surface collapses into the cavern.

Percy and Annabeth are gone.

The sun is just barely starting to set. It seems a lot darker than that.

Leo rolls up the rope ladder. Hazel makes tea for everyone. Jason goes to look for any trace of the two of them, but he reports back that there’s nothing.

Leo gets the ship ready for liftoff.

Nico paces. Coach Hedge mutters. Frank drinks his tea.

The Argo II lifts off. Piper wraps her arms around him from behind.

Leo sets a course, headed east.

With the way the quest has been going, Leo shouldn't be this surprised that the scary ice lady from Quebec has turned out to be evil. He is surprised when she drop-kicks him off of his own ship. Even more surprised when he lands on a seemingly-deserted island in the middle of nowhere.

Except the island isn’t deserted, judging by the young woman yelling at him about her dinner table—and really, who puts a dinner table on a beach?

Leo says as much. It doesn’t help. (His budding headache doesn't help much, either.)

She clearly doesn't want him there, and he doesn't want to be around her if she's angry at him, and the raft that's supposed to take him off the island isn't showing up, so they avoid each other. Perfect plan, right?

It works.

Mostly.

For a few days, at least.

But then he fixes her fountain and sharpens her gardening shears, and the young woman—Calypso—keeps bringing him food and non-burned-up clothes and asking about his work with the Celestial Bronze he’d found, and things start to become... comfortable. Almost... homey.

But he doesn’t want to call this place home, not when there’s still a world to save and his parents and sisters are waiting at home and besides, Piper’s not there, he can’t call anywhere home if it means he’ll never see Piper again.

"Who’s Piper?"

Leo jumps and swears. "I told you, don’t sneak up on me like that!"

Calypso rolls her eyes. "I wasn’t sneaking," she says. "I was bringing you these."

She had clothes draped over her arm: a white T-shirt, jeans... and his old army jacket, the one he’d found in a dumpster when he was nine.

"How?" he asks, pointing at the jacket.

Calypso shrugs. "I do have a little magic, you know. You keep burning through the clothes I give you, so I thought I would weave something less flammable."

"These won’t burn?" Leo picks up the jeans, wondering if they’re made from the same material as his Flamethrower suit, but they feel like normal denim.

"They are completely fireproof," Calypso promises. "They’ll stay clean and expand to fit you, should you ever become less scrawny."

"Gee, thanks," Leo says. It doesn’t come out nearly as sarcastically as he meant it to.

Calypso sits down on the ground; Leo plops down next to her. "So who’s Piper?" she asks.

Leo sighs. "My sister." He cocks his head. "Well, technically she isn’t—we aren’t biologically or legally related—but she’s my best friend and I know my parents consider her their kid, so she might as well be my sister."

Calypso hums in response. A short silence comfortably stretches out between them. "I had sisters, once," she says finally.

Leo glances at her; her eyes are fixed on the middle distance. "Tell me about them," he invites.

She shakes her head, smiling softly. "You tell me about yours."

He snorts. "You want me to tell you about all my siblings? Do you want them in alphabetical order, or from oldest to youngest?"

That earns a small laugh. "Oldest to youngest, please."

Leo sighs again and starts counting on his fingers. "Okay, so I’m not going to mention all of my siblings, because I have a lot of half-siblings. Jake is the oldest—he’s eighteen, I think. Then Nyssa, who’s one of the only other people in our cabin who speaks Spanish. Piper’s two days older than me. Anya’s twelve, and she loves everything to do with dogs. Her mom won’t let her have one though, because her uncle is a really crappy person—"

"How...'crappy' is he?" Calypso asks, trying out the word.

"Crappy enough that he tried to kill his daughter’s boyfriend a few years ago," Leo tells her. "Anya calls him her 'Evil Uncle Teddy'."

Calypso laughs, again. Leo decides he likes her laugh.

"Okay, so after Anya, there’s Helena, who’s eleven. She isn’t one of my half-siblings; Audrey and A. C.—my adoptive parents—adopted her a few years ago. Harley’s another half-brother. He’s probably turned nine, by now, and his full sister, Zoe, is six. Adelaide is my youngest sister. She’s Audrey and A. C.’s bio-kid. She’ll be one at the end of the month." Leo smiles sadly at the thought of his baby sister.

Calypso moves her elbows and lies all the way down. "I’d like to meet them," she says wistfully.

"I’ll introduce you," Leo assures her.

Calypso looks at him weirdly. "I can’t leave Ogygia," she points out.

Leo shrugs—not an easy thing to do while lying down. "Then I’ll just bring you with me when I leave. Or if you don’t want to leave quite yet, I’ll come back when the War's over and pick you up. If you want to leave, I mean," he adds hastily.

The weird look gets weirder. "No man can find Ogygia twice in one lifetime." It sounds like something she’s said a lot of times before.

Leo turns his head towards her and smirks. "Good thing I’m not a man yet, huh?"

Calypso rolls her eyes at him.

"But seriously, I’ll figure something out. It’s not like—"

Leo realizes, very abruptly, that his hand is touching something.

He realizes immediately afterwards that that something is Calypso’s hand.

She looks at their hands, then looks at him, suddenly shy. "Is—is this okay?" she asks nervously.

Leo nods rapidly. "It’s more than okay." Tentatively, he moves his hand so it’s laying on the ground, palm up. After a second, Calypso’s hand covers his.

Leo is holding hands with a girl.

Leo is holding hands with a girl who isn’t Piper.

Leo is holding hands with a girl, who isn’t Piper, who’s smart and competent and looks really good in red. (Which totally isn’t relevant, now shut up, teenaged brain!)

It’s a sunny day, and he’s holding hands with a girl, and Leo kind of wants to live in this stolen moment forever—

...But there's a war on.

Calypso lets go of his hand and stands up. "We need to get you back to your ship."

Leo scrambles to his feet.

"You have people waiting for you, and a world to save," she continues. "It’s time to get to work."

Leo had thought he’d been busy before; it turns out Calypso is a machine when she puts her mind to something. By the second day, she’s got so much work done that she’s asking Leo if he needs help with his own work. He happily gives her the job of twisting the bronze coils.

"So besides your family, what else is waiting for you back in the world?" she asks, her hands flying over the coils.

Leo’s own hands freeze.

"Is that not a good question?"

"No, no, it’s fine," he manages. "It’s just..." He hesitates, trying to figure out how much to tell her.

He lets out a breath.

"It's called SHIELD," he tells Calypso. "The Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division. It's one of the U. S.'s intelligence agencies. I’ve wanted to work for them since I was nine. I start at their training academy in September."

"And why, exactly, are you looking forward to it?"

Leo sits back and remembers all the reasons he'd put forth at age eleven. "Family tradition, first off—my dad and most of my aunts and uncles work for SHIELD. Partly because at that age, I thought Captain America and Carol Danvers were the coolest people ever, and both of them were involved with SHIELD—because Captain Rogers worked for the early version of SHIELD and Captain Danvers worked with Dad and Uncle Nick back in the nineties—and I wanted to be just like them. But mostly..."

He sighs.

"It's mostly because SHIELD is supposed to be the one big force for good in the world, along with Stark Industries and the Hammond Foundation. I want to help people, just like I got helped when I was a street kid. I was a battlefield medic for about nine months after Piper and I found out about the Wars," he says flatly. "I watched people die, including some of my own patients. And there are a lot of people who've been through a lot worse. Working for SHIELD means I can find ways to help the veterans after this is over, the same way I helped the injured back then."

Calypso has the kind of calculating look on her face that Leo is more used to seeing on Piper. (It's a bit disconcerting on someone who isn't his sister.) "What are you thinking?" he asks nervously.

She smiles at him. "I'm thinking," she says slowly, "that I might want to join SHIELD."

Hope sparks up in Leo's chest. "Does that mean you're coming with me?"

She shakes her head. "I still can't leave Ogygia."

"But—" Leo looks out over the water and finds his attention caught by something bobbing on the waves. With the tide behind it, a large wooden raft slides to a stop on the beach.

He's suddenly very, very glad they decided to work on the beach today.

Calypso springs to her feet and runs to grab the supply bags. Leo drags the raft further onto the shore and starts hooking up his newly-finished navigation device. They worked together to raise the sail.

"Go," Calypso tells him.

"I'll be back," Leo says.

"No empty promises."

"How about a full promise?" he asks. "Because I'm definitely—"

She kisses him.

He shuts up.

Holy shit, he's kissing a girl.

(She smells like cinnamon and wood smoke. Definitely not relevant.)

He's never kissed anyone before, aside from the one time they played Spin the Bottle at study group.

(Am I even doing this right? Are my hands too low? Shit, are her hands too low?)

All too soon she's pulling away and telling him this never happened, and all he's capable of saying is okay (and he's never telling Piper that part—she'll tease him forever for it) and before he can try saying anything else she's speed-walking away up the beach and the wind has caught the raft's sail, pushing him out to sea. By the time he can finally look back, Ogygia is nothing more than a dark line in the distance, marked by the light of their campfire.

"I'm coming back for you, Calypso," he says, looking forward again. "I swear it on the River Styx."

Leo’s decided he really, really likes this little café.

He can see the entire port from here. He can people-watch to his heart’s content. The waitress doesn’t speak English, but she does speak Spanish, and sooner than later he has a nice cup of coffee and a pity-sandwich sitting in front on him. (He’s really glad he thought to put some euros in his tool belt as well as in his go-bag.) And—best of all—his phone actually has reception and they have free WiFi.

He checks in with the local enclave, and lets them know the War is going relatively okay. He checks email and the news—he’s only missed five days, woohoo!—and plays a couple of computer games. Leo’s just finished replying to Audrey’s latest email, lying through his teeth that they’re all fine and they just didn’t have internet access for a few days, when he sees the Argo II pull into port. He shoots a quick text to Piper, letting her know where he is, and then goes back to people-watching.

The waitress has just given him some painkillers for that damn headache when the others finally reach him. Piper straight-up glomps him, nearly knocking him out of his chair; he’s too preoccupied with his world suddenly being turned right-side up to notice when his headache disappears.

Jason decides to hug him as well, which isn’t quite as pleasant, but he’ll take it. Frank pounds him on the back, nearly knocking the wind out of him.

Within minutes they’re all chowing down on sandwiches of their own (or the salt and pepper shakers, in Coach Hedge’s case). The nice waitress stops by two more times and tells Leo she’s glad his friends found him. She doesn’t seem to notice that Leo and Piper have shoved their chairs together and are trying to break physics so they can cuddle more effectively. (Leo doesn’t think he’s ever truly appreciated Piper being four inches taller than him.)

Cuddle time is interrupted, however, when Hazel notices black lightning in the distance to the east. "The House of Hades," Nico says, and Leo knows it’s time to get back to work—no matter how comfortable his chair is.

Leo had honestly started wondering if he'd gotten used to war.

He should have known that 'used to' and 'war' never belong in the same sentence.

But really, after everything he and Piper have been through—after everything they've survived—it's hard to realize that they might not survive this time, because this time they're the front line of the war, not behind the lines or support staff or safely ensconced in a metal suit and fucking Spandex.

Here in the darkness of the House of Hades, they don’t even have that.

The walls press in around them, and Leo suddenly feels like he's thirteen years old again, hiding in some near-stranger's tornado shelter while a battle raged on aboveground. Somehow tunnel dirt in Epirus smells the same as basement dirt in Arizona (and Georgia, and Virginia, and Nebraska and North Dakota and Nunavut), and it's just as dark in here as it was back then, when the flashlights sputtered out and the candles burned down. (At least here, there aren't any crying children to keep calm.)

He keeps his hand tucked in Piper’s, daring the darkness to separate them. In his other hand, fire dances, lighting up the tunnel in front of them. Hazel leads them into a large cavern with many, many more tunnels branching off it. Leo lets go of Piper's hand so he can help Hazel find a safe way across the room.

They're less than halfway there when the floor starts to crumble.

Frank tackles Leo and Hazel to the ground, sending the three of them almost to the other side of the room.

Suddenly Leo’s back in Oaxaca, and the air is filled with the snarling of creatures he doesn't know, and the ceiling and the walls are creaking in a way he knows all too well. There's an arm around his shoulder, and the building is about to collapse, and Piper is surrounded by monsters—but Hazel is pulling him away down a tunnel, and Frank is left to cover their six and help the others. The tunnel collapses behind them, and cuts the two of them off from the others.

At this point, Leo is honestly wondering how his day could get any worse, so of course an evil sorceress shows up.

Pasiphaë, queen of Crete, daughter of Helios and Perse—Leo doesn't care about the titles she holds, because she looks at him like he's not even there and looks at Hazel like she's a smudge of dirt on a just-cleaned pair of glasses. He's seen that look before—mostly from teachers and strangers on the street, but from cops and foster parents, too.

Leo hates her immediately.

The Doors of Death looming behind her (and why do they look like a set of elevator doors?) ding with the news that someone's on their way up—someone unauthorized, Pasiphaë says, and it has to be Percy and Annabeth, finding their way back from Tartarus, but there's a sorceress and a giant (Clyde? Cletus? Something like that) standing between him and Hazel and the Doors. Then Pasiphaë spreads her hands and tells them they have less than twelve minutes before it's time to save Percy and Annabeth, and the world goes dark.

(The lights go out as the building starts shaking, and someone screams.)

"She's remaking the Labyrinth," Hazel says.

("I'm out of bullets," Piper says.)

Spikes shoot up from the floor; one catches on his pants. 

(The growling is right behind them and there's hot breath on the back of his legs.)

There's a giant pit in front of them.

(Ricardo stumbles and nearly falls into a gaping hole in the floor.)

The ceiling cracks open above them; the floor collapses underneath them.

(An aftershock starts shaking the stairwell apart.)

Hazel opens a tunnel filled with some kind of toxic gas.

(The air is choked with dust (and falling dirt and smoke and fire) until none of them can breathe.)

The walls of the tunnel are closing in, faster and faster.

(Leo was never scared of small spaces before this.)

There's another pit ahead. Hazel grabs his hand and jumps in.

(The ceiling gives way and Ricardo shoves them under a table and the floor is buckling underneath them and—)

They land on something soft.

A second later, Leo realizes that he's sitting on Pasiphaë's chest.

They're back in the chamber of the Doors of Death. Leo, Hazel, and Pasiphaë scramble to their feet. The giant (Clive? Clayton?) is still standing in front of the Doors.

Hazel starts taunting Pasiphaë, telling her she'll always fall in the end. Leo keeps his eyes on the Doors of Death. There's less than a minute before Percy and Annabeth arrive, Leo thinks.

The button that will open the doors is approximately thirty-one feet away. The giant is approximately thirty feet away, in the same direction. Leo is almost certainly not fast enough to slip past the giant, hit the button, and make it back to relative safety without being injured or killed.

Leo pulls a screwdriver out of his tool belt.

He sets his right foot forward and adjusts his grip on the screwdriver.

"Two fingers on top, thumb on the bottom," Uncle Clint says in his memory.

He raises it to eye level, pointed away from his face, and lines the tip up with the button.

("Your eye, the dart, and your target all have to be in a line—otherwise you'll miss," Uncle Clint tells him, adjusting ten-year-old Leo's stance.

"Are you going to tell him about that one time the dart bounced off the target and smacked you in the face?" Auntie Nat asks with a smirk, sipping her coffee.

"Aww, Tasha, no," Uncle Clint whines. Leo pretends not to notice him flipping her the bird.)

With half an ear, he listens to Hazel convincing Pasiphaë there's nothing under her feet; Pasiphaë vanishes through a trapdoor that isn't really there. Seconds later, the elevator dings. The giant refuses to push the button. Leo makes one last adjustment to his stance.

Just like throwing darts, he thinks.

He throws the screwdriver.

It flies across the room, straight past the giant (and he still doesn't know what that guy's name is—was it Clifford?) and smacks, point first, into the button and clatters to the floor.

The Doors hiss open.

Percy and Annabeth spill out onto the floor.

Jesus Christ, they look like hell.

The giant—Clytius, that's his name—speaks for the first time, using Annabeth's voice to threaten them. Leo threatens him right back, lighting up his hands and his arms. Clytius sends black smoke boiling towards him, and he can't fucking breathe, and—

He wakes up at Hazel's feet, what seems like just a few minutes later (and where the hell did Hecate come from?) and she orders him to stay behind her and protect Percy and Annabeth. Her death glare is almost as scary as Uncle Nick's; he hastily agrees.

Hazel stabs Clytius's leg and lunges for the Doors. She cuts through one of the chains holding them in place; Clytius backhands her into the wall; Hazel throws her sword, cutting through the second chain. The Doors of Death vanish; Clytius advances.

Then Leo hears the best damn thing he's ever heard in his life.

"Sorry we're late," Jason says. "Is this the guy who needs killing?"

Now that Nico and Coach Hedge are gone, off accompanying Praetor Reyna and the Athena Parthenos back to Camp Half-Blood, the Argo II has only the seven of them on board. In the next days, they settle into some kind of routine.

Frank joins Piper and Hazel's sparring practices. Annabeth, Percy, and Jason—still recovering from their injuries from Tartarus and Ithaca, respectively—choose to sit on the sidelines, cheering them on. Leo spends most of his time repairing the ship and rebuilding Festus inside its framework.

They capture Nike in Olympus, where she lets slip that there's a way to bring people back from the dead. Piper leaves her cornucopia in Sparta, in exchange for a favor from the makhai. The enclaves of Greece, Turkey, and the Balkan states lend as much aid as they can spare.

A week has slipped past since the House of Hades. One week left until the Feast of Spes.

The weight of the prophecy—the fact that one of them will die—hangs over them like a shroud.

They spend that last week tracking down the physician's cure Nike mentioned (with some distractions—mostly monster attacks and that storm Percy's half-sister set on them, the one that did so much damage to his ship). When they finally have the cure, before they get to Athens, Leo makes his choice.

He brings Hazel in on it; she's the only one who can help him pull this off. He doesn't tell Piper. He probably should.

(They can keep secrets from each other, they've found out over the years. They've done it before, with things like Christmas presents and funny surprises. It's difficult, and they can't hide that they're keeping something a secret, but it's doable.)

Leo hands the fake, trick-of-the-Mist vial Hazel made to Piper, looks her in the eye, and lies to her face. He keeps the real vial of the physician's cure in his tool belt. When he gets back to the engine room where he's been sleeping for weeks, he pulls out his phone and brings up his email.

The emails he wrote weeks ago—before the Argo II ever set sail—are sitting in his Drafts folder, looking perfectly innocuous.

Most just cover the basics—I love you. I'm sorry. Good luck with everything. One, addressed to Uncle Tony, is full of designs for inventions he won't get to build. Some have instructions, for the people he and Piper have recruited in the fight against HYDRA, for what to do after he's gone. A few, no more than a dozen, are running on a dead man's switch, with information instead of a bomb—if he and Piper both die, every bit of corruption and greed they've ever uncovered will become public.

If this goes right, he'll be back—with Calypso—in a matter of days. He'll see Piper again. He'll hug his parents and his little sisters. He'll cancel the emails before they're ever sent. He'll join SHIELD, help take down HYDRA, and someday get married and have kids. Life will go on.

If this goes wrong, well...

Helena and Adelaide will still grow up safe and loved. Audrey and A. C. will bring home more kids who need them, the same way they did for him. Piper will still change the world.

They'll just be doing it without him.

Leo pushes the vial into the engine's ventilator line.

"Too late to turn back now," he says to himself.

He sets the timer on his emails for forty-eight hours; they'll send automatically if he doesn't cancel them. He pulls out the navigation device that will bring him back to Calypso, and he sets its timer for twenty-four hours.

Then he curls up on the floor, and closes his eyes, and does his best to get one last good night of sleep.

The first thing Leo notices about Athens is the sheer number of cruise ships moored in the harbor.

The second in the heat.

The third is the snake people who want to come on board. For some reason, they've also brought cake.

(Leo was not expecting snake people to have the same hospitality rules as humans, but here they are.)

It's not even nine in the morning yet, and it's already pushing eighty-five degrees Fahrenheit, so Leo is very happy that they're having this meeting in the dining room, below deck, where it's about ten degrees cooler.

(Seriously, what are the rules of hospitality for snake people? When King Kekrops says he doesn't want to sit, should they all stay standing? Are they screwing up on anything else?)

Not to mention, the cake is delicious—too bad King Kekrops turns out to be working for Gaea. (Leo's pretty sure he should've seen that coming. Aunt Natasha would be disappointed.)

Fortunately, that's where Piper's Jedi mind trick comes in handy. She talks King Kekrops into not leading them into a trap, first off, and then into leading her, Percy, and Annabeth to the Acropolis once Annabeth has talked the strategy over with Leo, Frank, and Hazel. Soon after, Frank and Hazel leave with Jason, leaving Leo to fly the ship to the Acropolis himself and handle the aerial assault alone.

It’s a lot more fun than he’d thought it would be.

He gets to make fun of Enceladus (who apparently still remembers him from last December) and vaporize the monsters outside the Parthenon with sheets of Greek fire. His coding skills get a really good workout, programming each salvo with surgical precision; the Argo II’s defenses take out every counterassault the giants send his way.

The other six demigods seem to be holding their own. King Kekrops tries to join the fight, clearly back on Gaea’s side, but the ground starts collapsing and he retreats—probably Hazel’s work. Piper’s exhilaration at defeating an opponent carries over to him through their link.

It almost looks like they’re going to win.

But the tide starts to turn as the giants lose their confusion. Slowly the six fighters on the ground are forced into a defensive ring. Leo does his best to provide backup from above, until someone gets a lucky shot past the Argo II’s defenses, rocking the ship and nearly knocking him to the floor of the deck. The ship starts to sink.

Leo misses the next few seconds, scrambling to keep his ship in the air. He misses Percy’s nosebleed, and the drop of blood landing on the ground.

It’s impossible to miss Gaea’s awakening.

By sheer chance, Leo looks up just as the sky over the Acropolis splits open, like the portal that brought the Chitauri to New York. But there’s no aliens, this time. Instead, the gods of Ancient Greece are pouring through.

Zeus and Hera ride in on their respective war chariots. Ares charges through the portal on a fire-breathing horse. Leo looks for Hephaestus, but doesn’t see him.

A voice speaks up behind him.

"What do you need me to do, son?"

Leo very resolutely Does Not Jump at Hephaestus's voice. "Keep the ship in the air," he says without looking at his biological father. "Let me know if someone needs more backup."

"I will."

Leo just about jumps out of his skin—again—the second time Hephaestus speaks.

"So what do you do for fun?"

"What do you m..." He nearly pauses in prepping his next salvo as his ears catch up with his brain. "Are you trying to get to know me in the middle of a battle?" Leo asks incredulously.

"...I might be," Hephaestus admits.

Leo rains fire down on one of the giants. "You should meet my parents," he says abruptly.

"Parents?" Hephaestus asks, sounding a bit surprised.

"What, you didn’t know I was adopted?" Leo snarks, launching a ballista at a knot of Earthborn.

"Oh, no, I knew you’d been adopted. I’m just... surprised you want me to meet them."

"I can introduce you to them, after the War's over," Leo offers. They're running a bit low on enemies, now.

Only if the physician's cure works, a dark little voice reminds him. Leo shoves it aside.

A bright flash of light from down below catches his eye. A moment later, he realizes that there aren't any giants left, and that the flash of light must have been Jason—or possibly Zeus—vaporizing Porphyrion.

The fight against the giants is over; the fight against Gaea is just beginning.

Zeus is exactly as much of a dick as Leo had thought he'd be.

He yells at Hera for her plan for bringing the two camps together—What, like the Isolation was still a good idea after the Wars started? Leo thinks—and even if Hera's plan was kind of weird, it still worked. Athena, on the other hand, is a lot more chill—and focused, too, setting everyone's priorities straight by pointing out that Gaea is probably trying to destroy Camp Half-Blood and they should probably get their butts over there.

Zeus tells the seven of them that he'll slap them back to Camp Half-Blood; Leo's really hoping that's a joke.

It isn't.

Getting slapped across the world: 0/10. Would definitely not recommend.

Leo's probably more disoriented than he's ever been in his life, including waking up in the hospital after Mr. Benson broke his skull. It's a very good thing he's tied himself to the control console—he wouldn't be upright, otherwise. The forces involved put more stress on his beloved warship than it can handle; Leo can feel the deck cracking apart under his feet.

As his ears clear, Leo can hear the others evacuating the ship. Frank shapeshifts into a dragon and takes Hazel, Percy, and Annabeth with him. Jason grabs Piper, and Leo can vaguely hear both of them telling him to come with them. He waves them off—after all, he does have a plan.

(He really, really hopes Piper doesn't figure out that the vial she has is fake.)

Less than a minute after the others get clear of the ship, Part One of his plan unfolds.

The Argo II starts to crumble under his feet, sending chunks of wood tumbling to the ground below. Festus creaks and groans at him from his current position as the masthead, then wiggles his head like he's cracking his neck.

Underneath Leo's feet, the ship shudders.

In the bowels of the ship, Festus wriggles around, just a little bit, testing out the new body Leo had built for him inside the Argo II's framework.

Then Festus spreads his wings, and the Argo II breaks apart completely.

From his new vantage point on the automaton dragon's back, Leo can see that Camp Half-Blood is a warzone, both literally and figuratively. It looks like it's complete chaos on the ground.

It so doesn't help when Gaea appears on Half-Blood Hill.

When he was eight years old, seeing Queen Dirt Face again would’ve been his worst nightmare.

But Leo isn’t eight anymore.

Festus scoops Gaea up off the hillside, and Leo knows it’s time.

Time for Jason to fly Piper up to to him and Festus and start a storm that wil keep Gaea from escaping, and for Festus to catch them in his claws when they start to fall.

Time for Piper to use her Jedi mind trick on Gaea, talking her back to sleep.

Time for Leo to start the countdown on the incendiary charges on his dragon's underbelly.

I'm coming, Calypso, he thinks.

"And by the way—I love you guys," he tells Piper and Jason, and then Festus opens his claws and lets them tumble down, trusting that Jason will slow their fall, and all he can hear is Piper screaming...

And then all he can feel is pain.

And then he knows nothing at all.

Chapter Text

2013

"And by the way—I love you guys," he tells Piper and Jason, and then Festus opens his claws and lets them tumble down, trusting that Jason will slow their fall, and all he can hear is Piper screaming...

And then all he can feel is pain.

And then he knows nothing at all.

He wakes up in midair, on Festus's back, hurtling toward the sea. Every cubic inch of his body aches, even after... "Okay, yeah, that was a bad idea," Leo says out loud. "No moving. Got it." There's a piece of shrapnel sticking out of his arm, and two more sticking out of his side, and it feels like there are even more embedded under his skin, so moving is definitely a bad idea.

But then he realizes that Festus's navigation readings are completely messed up, which means that Ogygia has to be nearby, and it is—it's directly ahead of them when they break through the clouds.

Calypso is waiting on the beach, arms crossed, pretending to scowl. "You're late," she says, looking down at him, after he's crash-landed onto his stomach (and from the sounds Festus is making, he probably needs more repairs than Leo does).

"Sorry, Sunshine." He grins up at her. "Traffic was murder."

She's already packed up and ready to go, so after Leo repairs Festus and Festus has forgiven him (and he and Calypso have kissed a few times), Leo helps her up onto Festus's back, wraps his arms around her, and tells Festus to set a course for New York City.

All too soon, they're standing in the throne room of Olympus, and Leo has to clamp his hand over his mouth to keep from calling out to Audrey and A. C. (and what are they doing here?). Then he sees Piper, who looks to his eyes like she's backlit by a beacon, and all that caution goes right out the window.

"Hey, Princess, did'ja miss me?"

She whirls around to face him, her face lighting up like the sun, and Leo practically launches himself at her—she's had the same idea, so she meets him halfway and they land in each other's arms, like there's no one else in the room. She wraps her arms around him and buries her face in his shoulder, and he wraps his arms around her and it feels like coming home.

You are never, ever doing that again, you got that? she thinks at him fiercely.

He nods into her shoulder. Never, ever, he agrees. Then he catches sight of A. C. over her shoulder, and the wild hope on Audrey's face, and then he's letting go of her and barrelling into his mom and dad, careful of the scar tissue on A. C.'s chest and Adelaide in Audrey's arms, because he hasn't seen his parents since early June and it's really started to grate at him.

Leo coos at one-year-old Adelaide (who reaches up to him and squeaks something that sounds like his name—"She's been talking for a few weeks now," Audrey says), bear-hugs Helena until she squawks in protest, and resigns himself to the massive bear hug the rest of the Seven decide to inflict on him. "Glad to have you back, man," Percy says, clapping him on the shoulder; Leo winces as the movement shifts some of the shrapnel around and reminds him that oh yeah, he needs medical attention.

Thankfully Apollo is just as good as any surgeon, and a hell of a lot cheaper. In just a few minutes, Leo's been X-rayed, wheeled into an operating room that may have been summoned out of thin air (he's not entirely sure), and put under anesthesia so Apollo can remove all of this shrapnel without him screaming in pain.

When he wakes up, he internally panics, thinking he's still in surgery before he recognizes Mom and Dad leaning over him. "You gave us quite a scare, there," A. C. says mildly.

"Dude." Piper appears in his field of vision, grinning. "Apollo pulled out, like, half a pound of shrapnel out of you."

"It wasn't that much—maybe a quarter of a pound," Apollo's voice says. He replaces Piper, Audrey, and A. C. in Leo's line of sight. "How are you feeling?"

"Fine," Leo croaks. He tries to sit up but stops, peering at the maze of white bandages covering his arms, shins, and upper torso.

"You're a lucky man, Leo Valdez," Apollo says, flipping through something. "No perforation in your digestive tract, your rib cage stopped anything from entering your heart or lungs—though there is a piece lodged in between your third and fourth ribs, just above the superior lobe of your left lung; you may want to keep an eye on that—and your neck and head are mostly fine; the only pieces embedded there were small and easily removed. Several pieces are embedded in deep tissue, however, or are too close to a nerve or blood vessel for safe removal, so you've got quite a bit of shrapnel left in you. I'd advise not going through a metal detector anytime soon."

"What, you mean I’m part cyborg now?" Leo cracks.

Piper, the nerd, rolls her eyes at him.

They don't immediately go back to Camp Half-Blood.

Instead, Piper calls Aunt Pepper, who talks Tony into letting Jason and Calypso up to the residential floors, where Leo introduces Calypso to the Internet, Mario Kart, and three thousand years of history. He also introduces her to the Avengers, and she and Steve hit it off immediately, talking about art and music up until Tony pops A New Hope—a team favorite—into the DVD player. (Leo may or may not spend a few hours feeling jealous, until Calypso pecks him on the lips and snuggles into him during the Battle of Yavin.)

The next day, with JARVIS's help, Leo puts his hacking skills to work, convincing the state of Oregon and the federal government that one Calypso Amarantha Metaxas (it had taken six hours and what felt like a hundred baby-name sites for her to settle on one. Worth it.) is a sixteen-year-old Greek-born American citizen, newly recruited by one of the alphabet-soup agencies—SHIELD, to be precise—as part of their Communications department. Leo and Piper's dorm room for two is now a dorm room for three, with half the people at Ops Academy seemingly bound and determined to act as Leo and Calypso's chaperones. (They'd both be more upset, but all they're really interested in right now is kissing and cuddling, and their would-be chaperones don't really care about that.)

In early November, the world is invaded by aliens again—only this time it's in London, and Thor comes by, fights it off, and leaves again, without so much as a by-your-leave. It's A. C.'s new team that gets called out to help with the cleanup, with Leo, Piper, and Calypso along as SHIELD's resident "mythology experts" (which would be hilarious if Leo wasn't so nervous about this being only his second field mission ever).

"I’m afraid we don’t have much room to accommodate you three. McLean, Valdez, I assume you don’t mind sharing a bunk. Metaxas, you’re down at the other end; you’ll be sharing with Skye," A. C. says as they board the Bus.

"The three of us can share one bunk. It’s not much smaller than our dorm room at Ops," Piper interrupts smoothly.

"No, I think this arrangement will be better for everyone." Leo raises an eyebrow at his dad; A. C. smiles placidly in response.

Calypso pegs Elliot Randolph as non-mortal within minutes of meeting him—something about his speech patterns, she says. Within fifteen minutes of the rest of the team finding out, she’s the one in the holding cell-slash-interrogation room with him, probably swapping stories of Earth a thousand years ago. She gets more out of him in half an hour than the rest of the team was able to combined.

"Looks like it’s a good thing that you’re here," Agent Ward says when she emerges from the holding cell-slash-interrogation room. Leo bristles; something in the man’s tone isn’t quite sincere. Piper’s expression of distaste says she picked up on it as well.

"Thank you," Calypso says, smoothing down her skirt, giving no sign that she noticed the last couple of seconds.

"So what all do we have?" A. C. asks, hiding his impatience well. "Where's the third part of the staff?"

"Ireland," she tells them. "He hid it in a church."

"May?" A. C. says.

"Putting in the coordinates now," Aunt May says, and they're off.

Randolph manages to direct them to the right church, which is thankfully still standing. The third part of the staff is there, but so is the hate group chasing it. Before Leo or Piper can react in time, they've already stabbed Randolph, and A. C., Calypso, and FitzSimmons are out of the fight and trying to save his life. With Skye, Piper, and Aunt May keeping the assholes in the rest of the church occupied, it's up to Leo and Agent Ward to fight off the ones in the room with them. Agent Ward manages to get the second piece of the staff from them, and he immediately tosses it to Leo.

As soon as the staff hits his hand, he’s battered by memories.

Mr. Benson leans over him, furious. Leo presses his back to the door, constantly looking for an escape, but Mr. Benson shoves Leo’s head backwards, straight into the doorknob, and the sound of breaking bone fills his ears.

Teresa glares at him from the table, her full plate in front of her. "If you wanted dinner," she drawls, "you should’ve done what I told you."

He huddles against a brick wall, trying not to puke from hunger. A man in a suit stops to look at him, shakes his head in disgust, and walks on.

He’s nine years old, and the soup kitchen doesn’t have enough food.

He’s eleven years old, and a man catcalls Piper on the street.

He’s thirteen years old, and he’s teaching kids younger than him how to use a gun.

He’s fifteen years old, and there’s a nuke headed for Manhattan.

He’s sixteen going on seventeen, and people who hate him for his skin tone are trying to kill his friends.

And he is so fucking angry.

Part of that, Leo knows, is the influence of the staff. It’s hard to bring himself to care as he sweeps his opponent’s feet out from under him, knocking him to the ground. He whirls around, looking for his next opponent, but Piper is right there, holding out her hand, and Leo gives both the staff and his anger to her.

He fades back to where the others are, watching Piper as she connects the two pieces of the staff and gets to work. Her fighting style with the staff is almost like a dance, capping off with her throwing the staff to Aunt May, who has the third piece and the best control of her anger.

The last few members of the hate group don't stand a chance.

The team drops Leo, Piper, and Calypso off at Ops Academy the next day, with the promise that Aunt May will call if they're needed again. Calypso weasels Randolph's e-mail address out of him, along with—somehow—a promise that he'll take it easy until his chest is fully healed. A. C. surreptitiously hugs all three of them when no one else is looking. "Don't break too many bones," he reminds them; Leo rolls his eyes.

2014

"Cadet Valdez."

Agent Weaver's voice stops him in his tracks.

"Yes, ma'am?" He turns, hitching his backpack higher up on his shoulder.

"In the wake of the... attack..." She seems to be picking her words carefully. "...I'd rather the students who bunk off-campus stay at Sci-Tech until the matter is resolved."

"Yes, ma'am." Leo nods. "Do you mind if I ask Piper to bring me a few extra changes of clothes?"

"That won't be necessary; I'm sure Cadet Gill will have a few outfits in your size. You'll be bunking with him. I believe you were classmates at Junior, weren't you?"

"Yeah, we were." Leo frowns. "Wasn't he at the pool when the incident happened?"

"Yes. He was."

Leo raises an eyebrow. "D'you want me to keep an eye on him?"

Agent Weaver arches an eyebrow in return. "I'd prefer that you just give him a shoulder to lean on, Mr. Valdez."

"I understand, ma'am." Leo flashes a smile at her, then turns and jogs off to the hall Donnie had mentioned his room was in.

A. C.'s team—though not A. C. himself, or Aunt May—arrives the next day. Leo and Skye exchange nods when they take their seats in the auditorium, waiting for Fitz and Simmons to address the students. Ward is nowhere in sight—probably off investigating.

While Agent Simmons speaks, Leo leans over and whispers to Donnie. "And you're sure your okay?"

He whispers back, "Yes, I'm fine. Now stop—Oh God!"

Ice starts crawling up his body; Leo jumps back and then forward again, trying to subtly melt the ice off while Fitz and Simmons work to expose bare skin on the other side. Agent Ward arrives loudly, and Skye points the icing device out to him; Leo smashes it, and the ice crumbles away like it was never there.

Leo sits next to Donnie while Skye questions him, until Agent Weaver says, "Leo, could you escort Donnie back to his room? Make sure he gets some rest, and stays warm."

When Agent Fitz comes in to talk to Donnie, Leo makes himself scarce and heads for the Boiler Room. He's there as Ward and Simmons figure out the collusion, and follows Skye and the scientists back to the BUS.

"What on Earth is he doing here?" Aunt May asks, cocking her eyebrow at him.

"Apparently he's known Donnie for years," Skye says. "He followed us home, can we keep him?"

"Maybe," A. C. says.

He spies on A. C. and Skye talking (and it looks like he'll be getting a big sister soon—A. C. is in total Dad Mode) until Fitz and Simmons yell that they have to get the briefing room, now.

Then they're flying into the storm, and Seth is dead on the parking bay's floor, and all Leo can think is that he's so undertrained for this. That’s a thought for later, though—they still have to figure out how to shut down the storm-making machine, how to save everyone in the path of the storm. It seems impossible, but they work for SHIELD—"impossible" is something that happens every day. More importantly, they work for Phil Coulson, quite possibly one of the best agents in SHIELD history, and if anyone can fix this, it’s the nine of them. And they do.

After everything's done and the storm has passed, after he’s found Piper and Calypso in the Boiler Room and hugged them hard, after A. C. has invited them to officially join the team, Ward takes Skye to see the Wall of Valor and Leo follows.

"So... you and Agent Coulson?" he asks, fingering the plate that reads James Buchanan Barnes.

"What about me and A. C.?" Skye asks, still staring at Agent L. Avery.

"Sorry, it's just... um..." He stands up. "You know how A. C. likes to adopt strays?"

"Well, he's pretty much adopted me, sooo..."

"I was just thinking, he acts like you're his kid, and it would be nice to have an older sister who isn't Piper—because Piper is annoying," he covers, "and I was talking to someone else who has a say in this and she cleared it, and May said you don't have a bio-family, so I was hoping... maybe you'd like to join the family?"

Skye stares at him.

"So in other words, Coulson wants to legally adopt me, and he asked you to ask me about it?"

"Pretty much, yeah."

She shrugs. "Hey, as long he'll pay for my college tuition if I ever go to college, I'm in."

Not two weeks later, Skye is dying.

Leo numbly scrolls through Oregon adoption law on his phone, curled up on the waiting-room couch. "We're her family," A. C. tells the doctor, and oh, how Leo wishes that were legally true.

"In that case, I'm very sorry," the doctor says. Leo's heart breaks, just a little, watching the look of devastation on A. C.'s face.

Aunt May told them to keep an eye on A. C., and they do, even as A. C. starts acting weirder and weirder. They get Skye back, in the end, though it’s a close call—too close.

Then it seems like everything goes wrong at once. Uncle Nick is (probably) dying, SHIELD is falling, the entire world is crumbling down around them, even as the Exodus Protocol spirits children away to safety and all of Leo and Piper's recruits spring into action, doing their level best to cut HYDRA's heads off and burn down the stumps.

Then Marcus goddamn Daniels escapes from the Fridge and makes a beeline for Portland, with A. C. hot on his heels and Leo, Calypso, FitzSimmons, and Trip backing him up; Piper, Aunt May, Ward, and Agent Koenig stay behind to hold down the fort at Providence.

When they catch up to Daniels, he’s already found Mom, and Leo’s heart stops and doesn’t start again until Mom is safely in the car with them.

They get her to a safehouse, and thank God that Lena and Addy have already been moved with the rest of the Exodus kids, so Leo doesn't have to worry about them too.

"Phil never lied to me," Mom says, making Simmons and Trip freeze up while Leo and Calypso hide grins.

"Phil?" Simmons asks, trying to sound casual.

"Agent Phillip Coulson," she says. "In fact..."

She makes a show of looking around. A. C. sighs over the comm in Leo's ear. "Just give her the comm," he orders. Leo hands it over, smiling, making Trip and Simmons squeak in protest. Audrey fits the comm into her ear and says, "Hello, Agent Handsome."

Leo can’t hear what A. C. says in response to that, but less than a minute later he’s walking into the room (with Fitz right behind him) and kissing Audrey full on the lips and—eww, parents. Leo covers his eyes. He covers Calypso’s, too, for good measure.

"What," says Trip, flatly.

Audrey starts talking again, so Leo uncovers his eyes. "And, of course, I’ve met Leo and Calypso before," she’s saying. "You haven’t broken too many bones, right?" she asks him.

"Audrey, you’re no fun," he whines.

She smirks. "Of course not, I’m never any fun."

A. C. shakes his head at them. "Fitz, Simmons, Trip. Meet my wife, Audrey Nathan, mother of my four children." He cocks his head. "Three children? Nah, let’s go with four, Piper counts as much as our legal kids do."

Audrey rolls her eyes. "Phil, you’re ruining the moment."

It turns out that if they want to catch Daniels, Audrey has to be the bait, which means that Leo is stuck watching his mom sitting in a darkened auditorium, seemingly without any backup, with her worst nightmare walking up to her.

Daniels looks every bit as creepy as Leo’s ever imagined, with pale skin and cliché lines. Thankfully the Darkforce weapons do their work, and Daniels is left deader than dead, but Mom is knocked out and they have to get her back home and ask Robin-across-the-street to look after her.

Then—of course—when they get back to Providence it turns out that Aunt May’s left to find out more about whatever was used to bring Skye and A. C. back, and Ward is HYDRA, and Koenig nearly got killed, and Ward is HYDRA and he took Skye.

The next days are terrifying—not the scariest of Leo’s life, but scary enough to give the Battle of Santiago Ixtayutla (and Piper flying a nuke into a wormhole, and the entire Second Giant War) a run for its money. In between scrambling to get Skye back, the stress of suddenly being on the run, and dealing with the fallout from Aunt Tasha dumping the SHIELD files onto the Internet, there’s tracking down HYDRA agents and making sure Leo and Piper’s people—and the rest of the SHIELD loyalists—are safe.

(Not to mention being emergency-promoted to higher and higher clearance levels almost daily over the next week or so. That would be just plain hilarious, if it wasn't because most of his superiors are Nazis, retired, or dead.)

In late April, there’s a meeting.

It’s set in an auditorium in midtown Manhattan, a few blocks away from the Tower. Leo and Piper drag Audrey and A. C. (and Helena and Adelaide, of course) with them. Angie and her mom come. Percy brings his mom and stepdad; Paul ends up sitting right next to Audrey.

Leo recognizes some of the people who’ve come; others he’s e-mailed with, but never met in person. Piper points out the handful of people she knows that he doesn’t.

He isn’t scheduled to speak, but Piper is; she’s about the eleventh or twelfth speaker. When she walks onto the stage, it seems like a hush falls over the room.

She's nervous—wringing her hands and tapping her foot—but in her voice is the same steel Leo's heard a thousand times before.

"In late June of 2010," Piper says, "when I was thirteen years old, my brother and I went to visit his extended family in Oaxaca, Mexico, just outside of Villa Nueva." She takes a deep breath. "You know what happened next."

Leo sits in silence as she spins the story: how the Isolation fell apart in the face of children who didn't know better; how those same children built the network of communication that saved so many lives during the Wars.

She tells them about watching as the ages of the front-line fighters got progressively younger and younger, until almost all of the people who could fight were teenagers.

She tells them about the lives that were lost and the lives that were nearly lost, and all the people who willingly gave everything they had.

(Piper has tears in her eyes. Leo doesn't think anyone else notices.)

When she finishes, she turns away from the podium and starts to walk backstage before stopping to talk to Chiron, sitting in his wheelchair upstage. Leo can't hear what they're saying, but Chiron shakes his head and gently pushes Piper back to the mike. The next second, someone puts their hand on Leo's shoulder and tells him to get up onstage.

When he slips his hand into Piper's, the crowd goes wild.

"I... I guess I can take a few questions," she says into the mike, voice quavering. Over a dozen people yell out questions at once.

Piper waves for quiet, giving everyone time to settle down a bit. She points at a young adult sitting on the right, about two-thirds of the way back, who—nervously—offers up a question about the rebuilding efforts in the Pacific Northwest. Piper answers it with ease (Leo can still hear a slight tremor in her voice) before moving onto someone near the middle with a question on the treaty between the enclaves in Southern California. The questions start flying—Now what? Now that the Wars are over, what do we do? How do we rebuild?—and that's what this meeting is about, finding a way to move forward without the end of the world looming.

Finally, the mike moves to someone who doesn't have a question, but a suggestion. "What if," the older woman asks, "now that the Isolation is over, there was some kind of government that covers all the enclaves and all the preters in the world?"

"That might be a good idea," Piper says, and it seems to be some kind of catalysts spurring people to pull out their phones. The enclave heads in the room call home, seeing if the people in their enclaves support the idea of a unified government. Conversations spark up around the room about dozens of topics, particularly how the existing treaties between various enclaves would fit into a new legal system. Leo has a very fun conversation with a middle-aged man about what the Framers—the people who put the Isolation into effect, who passed down the Rules and put most of their shared culture in place—would think about their generation so firmly ending the Isolation.

Chiron bring the meeting back to some kind of order, as the oldest enclave head present. "Nominations for the proposed interim council are now open," he says.

Recommendations bounce around the room. Sadie Kane gleefully shoves her brother forward, to his visible chagrin. Percy loudly declines when his name is put forth. A little old lady from Nzara in South Sudan accepts a position; the fifteen-year-old head of an enclave on the island of Mindanao turns it down.

Not long before the nominations close, someone says, "I'd like to nominate Piper McLean as the chair of that council."

Both Leo and Piper are startled. They know they have a reputation of course; they hadn't known it was good enough to justify that kind of nomination. It's... unexpected, to say the least; but the motion carries, and Piper accepts.

"I'd like to nominate Leo Valdez as the vice-chair of that council!" Percy yells; Leo decides to get him back for that later.

Piper nudges him. "I accept," Leo says, maybe a bit too loudly. He sneaks a glance at Audrey and A. C. and his sisters, and the pride on their faces cancels out most of his dread.

Piper is talking again, giving a short speech. Leo relaxes, just a bit more, as he listens.

"This is our world," she says, "and we are damned if we let it fall."

In the aftermath, Leo and Piper throw themselves into organizing the new government. Piper recruits preters with who've studied law to write the new legal code; thousands of people, including Annabeth and Nico, volunteer for translation work. People with some of expertise or another, in subjects that range from math to history to (for some reason) costume jewelry—including people who (formerly) worked for SHIELD's science and R&D division—start networking (and calling themselves the Nerd Squad).

The Exodus Protocol is lifted in mid-May, and the evacuated kids come home. A. C. rebuilds SHIELD—minus the tentacles, this time—and he and his new recruits start methodically clearing out HYDRA's nests. The engineers and techies of the Nerd Squad bring Internet access to the more rural enclaves, then hand their equipment over to the Hammond Foundation, whose volunteers are working on expanding access in the surrounding communities.

The Wars are over, and far too many people are dead—but they still have to rebuild, and life still goes it on.

Leo knows it'll take years—maybe even a decade or two—for the world to recover from the Wars. But like Piper said: They're still alive. They still have each other and they still have their families. The world is still turning, and hope is running rampant.

Percy's parents name their baby daughter Estelle. A. C., Audrey, and Skye go to Family Court and come home with the brand-new Skye Nathan. Adelaide turns two years old, and Leo is there to see it.

When the clocks in Kiribati's Line Islands tick over from July 31st to August 1st, the voting to elect the member of the first Governing Council of the Supernatural World (which is more of mouthful than Leo would've chosen, but he was overruled) begins. The last of the polls close fifty (well, technically forty-nine) hours later, as the clocks in Niue and American Samoa tick over to August 2nd, and somehow—even though they're seventeen—Piper and Leo are confirmed as the President and Vice-President of the Council. (Leo barely stops eating long enough to vote—they're celebrating the first anniversary of the end of the Wars with a buttload of food.)

(They have to have bodyguards now. Tom and Becca are cool, and Jared and Kiera get along with Helena and Adelaide pretty well, but now they have thirteen people crammed into one house and Leo is done.)

It's been a year since the Wars ended and Leo (technically) died. It's been over ten years since the Wars started. Almost seventy million people are dead.

Seven billion people are still alive.

Leo's come a long, long way from the streets of Houston. He has parents, and a girlfriend, and a best friend (sister) he never wants to lose, and he has work to do. He has a home, and a family, and a future, now—one he's chosen for himself, not as the result of someone else's meddling.

The Wars are over. The world is still turning. Hope is running rampant.

And life goes on.