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Jason was late for class. Cursing under his breath, he tilted the shitty, hand-drawn map of the campus in the other direction and tried desperately to find his bearings, stack of books clutched in one arm and his huge water bottle balanced in the other. He hated being late, and he hated being lost, but Leo had insisted they get breakfast together in celebration of their first day, and now he couldn’t find his classroom.
He was seriously considering giving up and swooping into the air, trying to get his bearings that way, mortal witnesses be damned, when he felt his shoulder smack into someone hard enough to send them both sprawling.
“Watch it, tête de noeud!” someone spat, at the exact moment Jason yelped, “Sorry!”
He sprang to his feet, reaching out a hand to offer it to the stranger, and was met with a pretty, pale face drawn into an icy glare. He looked familiar, somehow, like Jason should have recognised him on sight, but he did not, and it felt like an itch he couldn’t reach.
There was a thin, polished stick clutched in his hand, pointed threateningly in Jason’s direction, and when he saw Jason looking at it, he tucked it into his sleeve with a scoff.
“Casse-toi!” The strange guy swatted Jason’s hand aside, pulling himself to a crouch to gather his books. “I do not need your help.”
His voice was as pretty as his face, a polished mix of English and French that set Jason’s stomach swooping, and he felt his own cheeks begin to heat. He ducked his head, hiding the flush he knew was spreading down towards his neck – a curse of being pale – and set about gathering his own books into a pile.
“I really am sorry for knocking you over. I wasn’t looking where I was going.”
“Clearly.”
There was so much disdain packed into those two syllables that Jason felt almost like he’d been smacked. Great, his first day at college and he’d already made an enemy.
“I’m Jason.” He tried, scooping up the last of his books and standing. “Jason Grace.”
“I do not care.” The pretty stranger pulled himself to his feet and turned on his heel without so much as making eye contact. Then he paused, tucking his curtain of dark hair behind his ear and half-turning so he could stab a finger at Jason’s shitty map. “Building M-13 is on the other side of the courtyard. Red roof.”
“Thank you!”
“N’importe quoi.”
Jason didn’t speak a word of French, but he could recognise a dismissal when he heard one. He sighed, watching as the pretty, prickly guy disappeared down the path. What a way to start his first day.
..
“That’s the guy who was a bitch to you?” Leo jabbed his fork in the direction of the strange guy, accidentally launching a piece of pasta across the cafeteria.
It had taken some finagling to arrange their schedules so that they could have lunch together, but Jason was glad they’d managed. Leo was the only person he knew on the entire college campus, and as far as Jason was aware, the only other demigod. Choosing to take these few years off to live as Mortals had raised some eyebrows from their friends and Chiron, but after everything, it was the kind of peace they both needed.
“Leo!” Mortified, Jason slapped his best friend’s hand down, giving an awkward wave when a couple of girls giggled in their direction. Leo shrugged, like his pasta projectile wasn’t embarrassing in the slightest, and Jason lowered his voice. “But yeah, that’s him. It was totally justified, though! I sent the poor guy flying!”
“Okay, but it wasn’t just that, was it? I don’t know why you’re defending him, you told me he’s a bitch in your classes, too.”
Jason could only sigh in response, because that was true. The stranger sniped at pretty much everyone unfortunate enough to try and interact, but when it came to Jason, he was downright hostile. He was in three of Jason’s classes, and despite Jason’s best efforts he had remained unpleasant, muttering to himself in a constant stream of irritated French. It got under Jason’s skin for reasons he couldn’t explain, and he had found himself picking little arguments just to hear more of it, to see those delicate features twist into something sour, full lips puckering and angular nose wrinkling, rendering him a little less painfully beautiful for the space of a moment.
It was a similar feeling to the one he’d had back on the Argo II, when he and Percy had had what Leo once referred to as their “pissing contest”, flinging sharp words and veiled threats as they jostled for leadership. It wasn’t exactly the same, but it was the closest thing to it that Jason had experienced. He was a thorn in Jason’s side, and he’d given up on trying to be friendly.
The guy, whose name Jason still had not learned, was sitting alone at a table now, fall of black ringlets forming a curtain in front of his face as he scribbled furiously in a black notebook, exuding such an intense “fuck off” aura that despite the crowded cafeteria, nobody had tried to sit with him. That black stick Jason had noticed the first day was resting on the table by his wrist, and Jason wondered if it were a pen, or if there was a piece of media that he liked enough to be carrying a replica wand around campus.
“You know,” Leo raised an eyebrow, talking with his mouth full. “He looks a bit like Nico, doesn’t he?”
“Does he?” Jason blinked, startled, but when he looked again, he had to admit that Leo was right, and he had to wonder how he didn’t see it before. He’d thought the guy looked familiar, but now that he was looking, the resemblance to their friend was uncanny.
He had the same delicate features, the same thin, almost gaunt frame, with hollowed cheeks and haunted eyes, and wrists so thin Jason could have wrapped them both in one hand with room to spare. His black hair hung in similar ringlets down to his shoulders, and he was far paler than Nico, but he was dressed in all black the same way Nico did, and his thin fingers fiddled with silver rings that looked like they had come right off Nico’s hands. At the realisation, Jason grimaced, remembering how often he had thought of this man as beautiful, before he had gotten to know him.
“You’re staring,” Leo bumped his shoulder, gathering up his books and standing. “Go talk to him.”
“Absolutely not. He’s a bitch.”
Also, Jason didn’t actually want to think about any of this right now. He could understand appreciating someone’s aesthetic beauty, but what did it mean when that person was a dead ringer for the one friend he had who was gay? The same friend that Percy used to joke about Jason having a man-crush on, even though Jason had never been anything other than straight. And besides, this guy acted like Jason was the literal scum on the bottom of his shoe.
For a moment, he wished Piper were here, and then remembered the reasons she was not, and missed her more than he had throughout their entire breakup. She would know what everything meant.
“Whatever, man.” Leo flicked him on the ear and stood, cramming a folded napkin of leftovers into his tool belt. Jason wrinkled his nose. “See you after class, yeah?”
“Of course, dude.”
..
“You cannot sit here.”
“Then where am I supposed to sit?” Jason slammed his books onto the desk, glaring around the rapidly-filling lecture hall. There were a few free seats left, but they were on the opposite side of the room, and Jason didn’t want to give up his good view of the projector screen. He was also, apparently, in the mood to pick a fight.
The guy shrugged without looking up, opening a textbook so that the pages deliberately covered Jason’s notebook.
“I do not care. You cannot sit here.”
The sight of him was starting to make Jason feel violent.
He was wearing an expensive-looking sweater today, black and loose-knit, the kind that’s ripped and chopped and moth-eaten but still manages to scream “I’m better than you.” His sleeves were rolled up to the elbow, and there was a black tattoo spilling along his forearm. A skull and a snake, exactly the kind of edgy bullshit Jason would expect from this off-brand Nico di Angelo.
The hairs on the back of Jason’s neck and along his arms began to rise, and in front of him, a few whisps of the guy’s black hair began to stand up straight, hovering in the air like they were being pulled up by tiny strings. Now he did turn, looking up at Jason with one delicate, manicured eyebrow raising, like he could feel the change in the air and knew, somehow, that Jason was causing it.
That wand-thing appeared in his hand – Jason was certain he wasn’t holding it before – and he twirled it lightly around his fingers the way Thalia did with her drumsticks, right before she delivered the loudest and most violent drum-fill known to man; like he was pretending to be casual, but he might actually use the thing if Jason tested him. Was he not a Mortal, then?
Gritting his teeth, Jason took a took a deep, ozone-tasting breath, consciously letting go of the power before he could accidentally call a lightening strike to obliterate his horrible classmate. Well, not that it would have been very accidental. This guy was like if Nico took every single one of his negative personality traits and multiplied them by infinity until they ate all of his good ones.
“If everyone’s ready?” The professor called from the front, and Jason ripped his eyes away from their standoff to see that everybody else in the room was seated.
With a huff and an apologetic wave at the professor, Jason snatched his books from the desk and marched to the front, throwing himself into one of the vacant, less-desirable desks with a huff.
Although he tried to focus, he could feel that cold, smug stare on the back of his head for the rest of the lecture.
..
“His name’s Regulus.” Leo plopped himself in front of Jason, ass on his desk and feet on the chair, toes tucked under the edge of Jason’s thigh. “Regulus Black.”
“Huh?” Jason slid his glasses to the top of his head, grateful for the intrusion. He’d been re-reading the same paragraph without absorbing anything for the last fifteen minutes; it was time for a break. Leo grinned down at him, completely unapologetic for squashing Jason’s homework with his butt.
“Mr Bitchy. His name is Regulus Black. He’s from a super rich family in England – I’m talking super fucking rich. They make Piper’s dad look like a poor person.”
“Maybe that’s why he’s such a prick. Thinks he’s better than everyone.” After the class they’d had this afternoon, Jason was feeling a little less than charitable toward the man. They had been paired up for a practical activity and this fucking guy – whose name was fucking Regulus of all things, apparently – had taken one look at him, muttered a curse in French, and excused himself to the bathroom. He hadn’t come back, leaving Jason to figure out the activity alone.
“I guess,” Leo bounced his knee excitedly, causing Jason’s entire shitty desk setup to vibrate. “Oh! Maybe he’s a criminal! Maybe he’s on the run from the law and he’s trying to blend in with society in America! Do you think he killed someone? Do you think he’s a vampire?”
“First,” Jason stood and stretched, yanking his books out from under Leo to stack them neatly away onto their shelf, trying to ignore Leo’s mess of odds and ends that had begun encroaching into his territory. “If he was on the run from the law, the last thing he would do to would be enrol himself anywhere under his legal name. And second, no, I absolutely do not think he is a vampire. I’ve seen him in direct sunlight.”
“Hmm,” put-out at having his theories shot down, Leo pouted. He pulled a complicated-looking ball of wires from his toolbelt and began twisting at them, teasing them into shape without taking his eyes off Jason. “You should try and make friends with him. Figure out his secrets. I need to know!”
“Honestly, Leo,” Jason pinched at the bridge of his nose. “I think I’m just going to start ignoring him.”
..
“Merlin’s beard, but you are annoying!” The fingers of Regulus’s left hand spasmed toward his head, where that black wand-thing was holding his hair back in an infuriating twist. “Why are you always in my way?”
Jason, who had absolutely not stopped directly in Regulus’s path to tie his shoe on purpose, felt his lip curl. He was beyond thinking of Regulus as pretty at this point; now, the sight of his sour, scrunched face made Jason want to punch something. A few loose ringlets bounced gently against his cheeks, and Jason had the sudden delirious urge to tug them.
“Well, maybe if you were looking where you were going, you wouldn’t have tripped over me.” Jason was aware he sounded like a child, but he couldn’t help it. He couldn’t stop digging. Regulus was like a scab he wanted to pick at until it bled.
“Or maybe you could not stop in the middle of the path, no?” His eyes were brilliant green where Nico’s were dark, but he narrowed them in exactly the same way. “Putain de merde! You are an imbecile!”
“Well, you’re a bitch!” Not his finest insult, but Jason could feel his blood starting to boil. Regulus, a head shorter than him, raised himself onto his toes to get right in Jason’s face. He smelled a little bit like citrus.
“Go to hell, Potter.”
As soon as the name left his mouth, Regulus froze. His lips pinched together and pink flushed his cheeks, startlingly bright on such a pale face. Jason stared.
“Potter?”
Regulus was a statue, horrified and embarrassed, but as always, Jason couldn’t resist prodding, poking at the sore spot like if he just made Regulus mad enough, he could make the itch under his own skin go away.
“You remind me of someone I used to know, that is all.” Regulus explained stiffly, taking a step back and drawing the wand-thing out of his hair, spilling the black strands around his face like ink. He twisted the wand between his fingers, like it might protect him from the conversation. “You do not look like him, but you are the same kind of stupid.”
“Gee, thanks.” For some reason, the knowledge that their feud was barely about Jason at all made him feel a little deflated. The way he had said Potter’s name was intimate somehow, like although it had been spat in vitriol, there were layers of emotion buried beneath the surface. “Glad I can be your stand-in for some other guy.”
“Get over yourself.” Regulus rolled his eyes, but he looked haunted. There was clearly something there, something deeply painful and unresolved.
But, before Jason could respond, Regulus spun on his heel and marched stiffly away.
..
Regulus was avoiding him.
Two weeks had gone by, and when Leo asked, Jason told him with venom that he appreciated the break from the constant sniping in that clipped French accent. But really, the silence made the itching under Jason’s skin worse. Without a way to scratch it, he felt like he might turn himself inside out just to relieve the sensation.
He had tried to pick fights, tried sitting next to him in class, tried intruding on his solitude in the cafeteria, even tried sticking his foot out to trip Regulus like a schoolkid, but Regulus always simply got up and walked away. More than once, Jason had followed, scathing insults loaded and ready to fire, but when he turned the corner, the man had simply vanished into thin air.
After the first week he resolved to ignore him, for real this time, but by the end of the second, he cracked.
“How did you find out Regulus’s name?” Jason put down the book he was trying (and failing) to read, sliding his glasses off his face and letting his arm dangle off the edge of the bed.
From his own bed across the tiny dorm room, Leo chuckled.
“Still obsessed with him, then?”
“I am not obsessed with him.”
“Sure you’re not, buddy. You definitely don’t spend every waking moment thinking of new ways to torment him just for existing.” Leo sat up, giving Jason his Serious Face. When Jason simply stared back, he shrugged. “But to answer your question, I Iris-Messaged Piper. She’s good with computers and stuff. Found him in like five seconds. Why?”
“No reason.”
“Whatever, man.” Leo stood, dropping the circuit board he was tinkering with onto the bed. “I’m going to take a shower.”
Jason glared at him the entire time he was gathering his clothes and towel, but the second the door swung shut behind him, Jason vaulted off the bed, scrambling for the pile of Drachmas they kept next to the little mist machine Leo had rigged in the corner.
Without giving himself time to think it through, he flicked the switch to start the spray, launching a coin into the little rainbow it created.
“O goddess, accept my offering! Piper McLean, please.”
Immediately, her face filled his vision, multicoloured eyes wide, mouth open in a surprised ‘o’.
“Jason?”
“Pipes! Can I ask a favour?” He bounced on the balls of his feet nervously, waiting for her reaction. She was silent for a moment, and then her face broke into a grin.
“Is this about that Regulus guy? Oooh, it so is! Leo said you have a little crush!” she teased in a lilting sing-song.
“I do not! He infuriates me!”
“Mmmm, sure, babes. Well, lucky for you, I am super duper bored right now, and I have my laptop here. Let me see what I can find.”
Jason paced anxiously while she settled onto the couch, pulling the computer into her lap. She had tried to teach Jason to use one at one point, but all he could manage was opening a word document to type out his essays. The internet was a completely untameable beast.
“Hmm,” she said after a few minutes, brows pinching together. “Well, I knew his family was, like, fuck-you levels of rich, but looking at these articles, I think they’re involved in some kind of cult. Hang on, I’m searching their names on Reddit.”
“Reddit?”
“An ancient and powerful god of cursed knowledge, also known as a website.” Piper grinned, typing furiously, and Jason was struck suddenly by just how deeply he missed her. Their romantic relationship had been all kinds of a disaster, but at the heart of it, she really had been his friend.
Before he had the chance to embarrass himself by voicing any of that out loud, Piper made a noise of triumph.
“Aha! Got something! So, according to a few people, the Blacks are high ranking members in some kind of racist, classist death cult. Oooh, fuck. Apparently they’ve been involved in the disappearance of more than one person, but they keep paying off the cops. Real nasty shit.
“Oh, and there are rumours that Regulus had a brother who seems to have disappeared off the face of the planet. Damn, Jase.” She looked up, mouth pressed into a thin line. “Maybe this isn’t the type of guy you want to be fucking around with. Maybe you should switch out of his classes. Really properly leave him alone.”
With every new piece of information, Jason’s stomach had been sinking further, but the mention of never interacting with the guy again, much as Jason hated him, felt like a knife right to his intestines. And, as someone who had been stabbed his fair share of times, Jason was familiar with the feeling.
Like she could see his internal struggle on his face, Piper’s expression turned sympathetic.
“I know you have some kind of weird, no-homo hate-crush on him, but this is really bad, Jase. They even have a ritual to become a fully-fledged member, and it involves killing people and mixing their blood in with a tattoo. The rumour was confirmed by this ex-member, who went by Padfoot in the interview for safety. He got out when he was sixteen without doing the initiation. That’s not the kind of shit you want to be involved with.”
She turned the screen so Jason could see, and if he thought his stomach had dipped before, now it dropped right out of his body and onto the floor. On her screen was an image that Jason had seen so often he could trace it with his eyes closed. A snake and a skull, twisted together in black ink. The tattoo on Regulus’s forearm.
“Fuck,” he breathed, feeling his knees give out and his ass plopping hard into the desk chair.
“He has it, then?” Piper’s lips were tight at the corners.
“Yeah. He has it.”
“Fuck.”
There was a long silence, every interaction they had ever had flashing through his head. The guy seemed scary, but a murderer? That brought everything to a whole new level. Jason had killed, of course, but those had been monsters. Not people. The death he had brought about saved lives.
Nico has killed a person, his brain supplied. A human, not a monster.
That’s different! He yelled back silently, but Reyna’s account of what happened to Bryce Lawrence still haunted him.
On the other side of the mist, Piper shifted awkwardly, forcing Jason back into the present moment. She was watching him with wide, sympathetic eyes, and he was filled with the sudden, uncomfortable realisation that before today, he hadn’t spoken to Piper properly in months.
“Hey, uh,” his voice sounded odd, like it was coming from far away. “Thanks for your help.”
“Piper’s Detective Agency, at your service,” she joked, and he loved her for trying to lighten the mood. “I charge by the minute, and my opening hours are whenever I can be bothered. You’ll receive your bill shortly.”
“I hope you accept payment in the form of jellybeans.” It was an old joke, just between the two of them, and Jason smiled when her eyes twinkled at the memory.
“For real, though,” her voice went soft, “Call me more often, yeah? Being your tragic star-crossed lesbian ex-girlfriend doesn’t mean I can’t be your friend. I miss you.”
“I miss you too, Pipes.”
“Just, be careful with Regulus, okay?” With another gentle smile, she reached out her hand as though to touch him, and as her fingers brushed the mist, her image dissolved in a shower of droplets.
Utterly hollowed out by the entire conversation, Jason turned off the mist machine, crossed the room in a daze, and curled in a ball on his bed.
..
He dreamed of Nico.
I would do it again, the son of Hades declared, eyes glowing black in hollow sockets as he raised an arm, dropping the temperature in their liminal dream-space to freezing. I enjoyed it. Killing him. Feeling him die.
The lightless ground beneath them trembled, skeletal hands clawing their way free, grasping at Jason’s ankles, dragging him down. Nico stood above him, face gaunt and impassive as Jason struggled against the fleshless limbs crawling their way up his body, constricting his chest.
Vous êtes moins que rien. There was something in his hands, now, something long, slender, and gleaming black. The wand. Suddenly, his skin was the colour of fresh snow, and the laugh he barked was sour and unforgiving.
You will never be good enough for me.
..
Jason woke with a start, confusion forcing him bolt upright in the empty room. If Leo had returned, he’d seen Jason sleeping and left him to it.
Nico had never said any of those things. Killing Bryce was his lowest moment, a shameful act that he had only revealed to Jason after five too many drinks on the roof of the Pluto temple last year. When he’d gone to Reyna about it later for confirmation, her eyes had turned sad rather than scared, and she explained with the knowledge that it would make Jason better able to protect his friend.
Because that was what he did. That was what he always did. He protected Nico, from anyone who so much as insinuated they had a problem with him. And, before Will, Jason had so often been the one protecting Nico from himself.
He was nothing like Regulus. They may have shared mannerisms and all but shared a face, but Nico was nothing like the angry, snarling boy that had worked his way under Jason’s skin. So why did it sometimes feel the same?
Why, sometimes, did Jason want to scream at Nico, too? Why, sometimes, when the light hit Nico’s hair just right and made it look like a halo, did Jason want to rip it out by the roots? And why, sometimes, when something Jason said startled out one of his rare, genuine laughs, did Jason wanted to take him by the shoulders and shake him until the sound died between his perfect, soft-looking lips?
What did it mean?
The blurred image of Nico-Regulus from his dreams made his head hurt, and suddenly, Jason was angry. He was angry at Regulus, for being a bratty little bitch in a murder-cult, angry at Nico, for making him so confused he wanted to scream, and most of all, he was furious with himself, for not understanding anything about anything inside his own head.
Without the chance to think it through, he slammed his feel into his shoes, grabbing his sword from its place under the bed and slamming his hand into the door, not so much as opening it but blowing it clean off its hinges. He would have to pay for that later, but right now, he didn’t care. Right now, he was the kind of mad that could face off a Titan singlehandedly, and win.
He couldn’t make sense of anything, but there was someone here that he could fight.
..
By the time he had stomped across the campus to the quiet little courtyard where Regulus often studied, tucked into a corner and hidden from view by a sprawling willow, Jason felt stupid.
For one thing, it was late evening. The campus lights were on, lighting the grounds with their pleasant orange glow, and there was nobody in sight. Regulus would be in his dorm, or more likely, in his fancy off-campus apartment his rich family paid for.
Also, there was the fact that he was carrying his sword. Sure, Mortals would see it as a baseball bat or maybe a length of pipe, but still. What had he been thinking? Even if Regulus was someone the sword was capable of harming, was he really about to challenge some guy with Imperial gold just because he had worked himself up into a mental frenzy? Was he sixteen again, facing down Percy Jackson in an endless field, driven by jealousy and the Eidolon possessing his skin? No. He was an adult, and he was capable of solving his problems with words.
With a sigh, he slumped to the ground, letting his sword drop beside him and his head thump back against the tree.
“Bordel de merde, is nowhere safe from you?”
With a start, Jason whipped around, body rigid once more. Not three yards away, Regulus was sprawled in the nook beside a statue, book held loosely in one pale hand. In his frenzied state, Jason hadn’t even noticed.
“At this point I might have to tell the college that I have a stalker. And why do you have a sword?”
“I’m just here to- wait.” Jason blinked, flicking his gaze from the sword at his feet to the boy in front of him. “You can see the sword?”
The look Regulus shot him was pure, acid-riddled derision.
“Of course I can see that you have a sword! Nom de dieu, are you stupid? I will ask again, why do you have it?”
“How can you see it? Can you see through the Mist?”
“The what?”
“The Mist, the weird thing that stops Mortals from being able to see the true world?” Jason pinched the bridge of his nose. He had been hit in the head with a flying brick more than once, but nothing compared to the whiplash of this conversation. “I mean, clearly you can, but did you know about it before today? Are you a demigod? Or something else?”
“I think that maybe you are insane.”
Regulus was watching him the way Reyna’s cat did, with wide, unblinking eyes, like he didn’t trust that Jason wasn’t about to do something crazy.
“Why do you have that stupid wand thing?” Jason shot back, pointing to the polished stick that laid across his lap. His fingers hovered over it, like he would snatch it up at any minute. He expected another insult, or for Regulus to flat out ignore the question, but instead, the other man shrugged.
“I am a wizard.”
“Oh, so now you’re making fun of me?”
“It is so easy to do. Tu es aussi épais qu'une brique! Completely stupid!” He leaned back, resting against the wall.
“Yeah, well, I’m not the one in a fucked-up racist death cult.” He could tell as soon as the words left his mouth that it was the wrong thing to say. Regulus’s eyes flared, and the wand flicked up into his hand of its own accord, so fast it could only be magic.
“What did you say?”
“I said,” here it was, something to dig at. Something to shove his hands into and peel away until one or both of them were bleeding. Jason sat up straight, pointing to the tattoo visible at the cuff of Regulus’s half-rolled sleeve. “At least I’m not the one in a fucking murder cult. No wonder that Potter guy wants nothing to do with you.”
“You have no idea what you are talking about.” Regulus was on his feet in an instant, arm outstretched with the wand pointed right in Jason’s face.
“Oh, really?” Jason sprang up, too, sword in his hand. “So you didn’t run away to America because some guy disapproved of your murdering ways and made you mad?”
“I am going to kill you.”
The angrier he got, the more French he sounded, and Jason was reminded once again of Nico, and the way he slipped into Italian any time he was irritated. That thought, in turn, made Jason’s own anger ignite.
“Do it, then!”
“Crucio!” A stream of light burst from the wand, and immediately, pain exploded along Jason’s entire body.
With a scream, he felt his muscles lock up, begging him to drop to the ground and surrender. His sword grew heavy in his hand and he tightened his grip, gritting his teeth against the onslaught. It felt like every cell in his body was revolting at once, like he had been thrown into a bucket of acid and was being held under. But, despite floating between the camps with nowhere to truly belong, Jason had been raised a Roman demigod. He had spent his entire life enduring pain.
Screaming again, he lunged forward, slashing at Regulus with his sword. His form was sloppy and easily side-stepped, but the shock made Regulus’s arm jerk to the side, and the spell fell off Jason with a horrifying shudder. He felt scraped raw, but now he was furious.
“Imperterubus!” Regulus aimed his wand again, but this time at the air surrounding them, and a shimmering film suddenly separated the two of them from the rest of the world. So, he truly hadn’t been making fun of Jason. He really was some type of wizard.
Jason used the opening to lunge again, the point of his blade at Regulus’s stomach, but Regulus jumped back, flicking another spell in Jason’s direction. This one made his sword fly out of his hand, pinning him between Regulus and the tree, weaponless.
“Bad move,” Jason snarled, feeling the cold chill of a fight settle over him. He had been in the mortal world for months, but that didn’t mean he and Leo weren’t keeping up with their training. He raised his hands, calling a blast of air to throw Regulus back, smashing him against the brick wall and making him cry out.
“Go on! You’ve killed before, right? Don’t hold back! Do it!” Lightning crackled along his palms, and wind swirled violently through the little courtyard. “I bet you can’t, can you? I remind you too much of him!”
“Shut up!” Regulus roared, launching himself off the wall, another spell opening bloody gashes along Jason’s chest and arms. “Ferme ta gueule! You know nothing!”
“See?” Jason launched the lightning, missing Regulus and exploding a chunk off the statue. The cuts stung, but they were nowhere near deep enough to be truly painful. “You can’t properly hurt me, can you, Nico?”
“Nico?” Regulus threw back his head and laughed, cruel and feral, and too late, Jason realised his mistake. Regulus advanced, forcing Jason backwards with slashes of his wand, counteracting the wind at every turn. “I knew it! I am somebody else to you, too, am I not?”
Jason’s back was against the tree. Regulus was a head shorter, but his eyes were wild, glittering with humourless mirth, hair a mess around his blood-flecked face, wand pressed into Jason’s neck. Jason could kill the man easily, he knew. Another lighting strike, this one aimed properly, and Regulus would bother him no longer.
He focused, trying to call the lightning, but his palms stayed empty. He couldn’t do it.
“Who is he, then? Nico?” Regulus spat the name like it was poison. “Do you hate him as much as you hate me, or is it that he is someone you want and cannot have?”
When Jason didn’t reply, the wand jabbed painfully into his pulse point.
“Like Potter?” he choked out, and was rewarded with a backhand across the face, inelegant and juvenile.
“You remind me of him far too much.” The snarl on his face was all Nico, delicate features twisted into hard angles, mouth pressed into a furious line. Jason couldn’t resist digging, scratching at that scab until he was raw, emotions caught under his nails like chunks of skin.
“Is this how you would treat him then? Potter? You would try to kill him?”
Despite the wand, he pushed forwards, getting right into Regulus’s face. The hair on the back of his neck stood up, electricity running across his skin.
“If I was truly trying to kill you,” Regulus’s voice dropped to a harsh whisper, deadly and terrifying, the accent all wrong but the tone far too familiar. He swayed forwards, so close Jason could feel his breath. “You would not still be breathing.”
There was a moment of silence – a handful of seconds, the space of a heartbeat, or maybe three. The tearing wind dropped, popping Jason’s ears with the change in air pressure. The air beyond the courtyard rippled, muffling any sound from the world beyond. Regulus’s breath puffed across his lips, those lips that were so like Nico’s that if Jason squinted, he could pretend. The wand pressed into his neck.
Jason wasn’t sure who moved first.
The bubble of stillness popped and their mouths crashed together, desperate and bruising, the wind picking back up to rip at their clothes and hair as Regulus pushed forwards, slamming Jason hard against the tree. He ripped at Nic- Regulus’s shirt, drawing it up to grab at his waist, pulling him impossibly closer as he dipped his head to bite a bruise into that smooth, perfect neck.
Regulus cried out and shoved his knee forwards, forcing Jason’s thighs apart and Jason moved willingly, bodies pressed together and pumped with adrenaline.
“Your dorm. Now.” Regulus commanded, and Jason groaned with the loss of his mouth as he pulled away, panting.
There was nothing in his head but static, and he dashed to retrieve his sword before grasping Regulus’s waist and yanking him into his side.
“Do you trust me?”
“Absolutely not.” Regulus splayed a hand across his jawline, closing his eyes and pulling Jason down for another bruising kiss. His mouth tasted of blood.
Power built in his gut, and Jason launched them into the air, swallowing Regulus’s surprised yelp with his mouth as he catapulted them towards the dorm, dropping inelegantly on the second-floor balcony. When he pulled away, Regulus was flushed a deep pink, windswept and staring at Jason in awe.
“You fly almost as fast as he does.”
“And you didn’t curse me for grabbing you.”
With hands linked in a frenzy, Jason led them through the student lounge, tearing up the stairs, pausing only to throw Regulus against the wall by his bedroom door – now back on its hinges, thank you, Leo – and kiss him until they were both breathless. Regulus kissed back hungrily, wrapping his legs around Jason’s waist, grinding his hips desperately against Jason’s own.
The hardness in his pants was startling; he had only ever kissed Piper like this, and for a moment he fumbled, unsure. He’d never been with a man, never even paused long enough to truly consider it, and he was out of his depth. But then Regulus made a noise of impatience in the back of his throat, winding his hands through Jason’s hair and tugging, gripping Jason’s waist with his thighs, rolling his body in a way that made Jason’s vision white out.
Scooping a hand under Regulus’s ass to hold him steady, he threw open the door and carried him inside, dropping him to the bed and pulling his own shirt off with one hand. Regulus rose to his knees, licking a stripe up Jason’s abs and through the blood on his chest, flicking his tongue over Jason’s nipple before biting down, causing a jolt of pleasure-pain that radiated down to Jason’s groin.
“Fuck,” he murmured, running a hand through Regulus’s tangled hair, and then scooping him up once more to lay him flat on his back, crawling onto the bed and hovering above him, suspended on his elbows.
“H-hm.” A throat clearing from the other side of the room made him jump, and he whipped his head around to see Leo cross-legged on his own bed, screwdriver in his hand and an eyebrow raised judgementally.
“Leo. Hi.” He stuttered, caught out and spooked. Until five minutes ago, he hadn’t even known he was into men, and now his best friend had just witnessed him well on his way to fucking one. He wasn’t ready for this. He still hadn’t discovered what all of it meant.
Beneath him, legs wrapped once more around his waist, Regulus was going through no such crisis. His face was schooled into an icy glare, Jason's blood smeared at the corner of his mouth, terrifying and so incredibly sexy that Jason’s already hardening cock filled all the way out just from looking at him. He arched an eyebrow right back at Leo, as though Jason’s roommate were the one unwelcome in their dorm.
“Out.” He said, voice low and threatening, and Leo squeaked.
“Uh, yup. Cool! No worries! Bye!”
As soon as he was gone, Regulus wasted no time, swiping his tongue across Jason’s lower lip and then sucking it into his mouth, all teeth and desperation. The intensity of it cracked Jason open, impending freak-out replaced by the burning heat of the body pressed against his own.
Clothes hit the floor piece by piece, teeth left marks on willing skin, and nails scraped lines of fire across arching backs and rolling hips. Regulus told him on a moan that he had never done this either, sentence devolving into unintelligible French as Jason pinched a nipple between his finger and sucked an earlobe into his mouth.
“I’m sure we’ll figure it out,” he rasped with more confidence than he possessed, and took the length of Regulus’s cock in his hand.
They moved together, trading pleasure and pain as they learned each other’s bodies, all hungry mouths and roaming hands, and the slap of skin on skin. Weeks of swearing and sniping and trying to hurt all narrowed down to this, bodies twisted around each other and slicked with sweat, and all at once it all made sense.
“James!” gasped Regulus, arching against him with closed eyes. Jason kept his open, watching the blissed-out expressions passing across a face that could have been Nico’s. He should have felt guilty but he couldn’t bring himself to manage, not with Regulus wrapped around him and moaning a stranger’s name.
A litany of French streamed from his mouth as his eyes rolled, and Jason angled himself to watch thick stripes of white splatter his chest and stomach, painting him in the most beautiful scene of debauchery.
He looked fucking ruined, and the sight tipped Jason off the edge, too. Nico’s name hung between his lips as he came, but he swallowed it down with his feelings, flopping forward with heavy breaths and a racing heart to hide his face in the hollow of Regulus’s neck.
..
Regulus lay on Jason’s chest, blanket pulled up to their waists and bare skin tacky with cooling sweat and the dried blood from the slashes across his chest.
“Well. That was a lot better than fighting, no?”
Jason chuckled, smoothing damp hair away from Regulus’s forehead.
“Definitely.”
“So, you are a wizard, too?”
“Demigod, actually. My father is Jupiter.” He stared at the peeling ceiling, trying not to tense as he waited for Regulus to process. After everything, he had no idea now the guy would react to this information. He could still freak out, or grab his wand and try killing Jason all over again.
“You mean like the planet?”
“Like the god.”
“Huh. Okay.”
There was a beat of comfortable silence, and when Regulus made no move to respond further, Jason let himself relax. Then, he caught sight of Regulus’s tattoo, black ink spilling across his skin like an accusation.
“So,” Jason lifted his head to look at Regulus, fingers still carding through his hair. There was no delicate way to start this conversation. “You really are a wizard?”
“Oui. I am a Pureblood, from one of the oldest and most powerful wizarding families in the world.” Then, his nose scrunched, and Jason finally gave himself permission to find it adorable. “Not that that is something of which I am proud. Being with my family felt like drowning, but it took a lot to be able to leave.”
“So, the cult thing…” he didn’t want to ask, but he needed to know. Regulus, boneless on top of him, sighed down at Jason with hollowed eyes.
“That is true. My brother and I were raised to believe that it was the right way to live. He got out in time. He ran away when he was sixteen, before the ritual. I should have gone with him.”
The haunted look in Regulus’s eyes answered his next question before Jason could summon the courage to ask; Piper’s information about the initiation was true, or at least true enough.
“Hey, it’s alright,” he smoothed Regulus’s hair away from his face, and for a split-second his mind superimposed the image of Nico on the Pluto temple roof, leaning into the touch instead of pulling away. He would never melt into Jason like this. He would never do any of the things Regulus had just done. “You were manipulated and abused your whole life, and you hurt some people because of it. The important thing is that you’re trying to make it better.”
There was a lot of guesswork in that statement, but the way Regulus’s eyes began blinking rapidly, damp gathering at the corners, told Jason that he was right.
“You really do remind me of him,” Regulus told him sadly, stretching up to press a kiss into the crook of Jason’s neck, and Jason didn’t need to ask to know that he was talking about James Potter.
This time, though, with Regulus on his chest, skin-to-skin and heart beating against his own, Jason couldn’t bring himself to be upset.
..
“You know what,” Leo mused later, once Regulus had left and the room was deemed safe for Leo’s return, with many apologies from Jason. He stretched out on his back, splaying his arms above his head and squinting his eyes shut against the light. “I’ve been thinking about it, and I’ve decided that I’m not going to comment on the fact that Nico’s boyfriend could get away with using your ID, either.”
“Good.” Jason sighed, hollowed out but satisfied. He didn’t need another layer of uncertainty, and there was no point wondering just how deep this tangled this web of feelings truly went. “Don’t.”
.
here is my crackship roulette post on tumblr if you want to participate!