#but vd is past cause ya know time travel and vg is one sided

[witchhazelevesque]

A snippet of a time travel fix it fic I’m working on:

As Leo cautiously moves to the upper deck, he recalls that Nico had mentioned that he'd been having more nightmares than usual about Jason. 

But his nightmares about Jason didn't normally take place on the Argo anymore. Aside from the stab wound Michael Varus had inflicted and the fucking turtle incident, his memories aboard the ship with his friend were mostly pleasant. 

It was the dreams his mind conjured up at Camp Jupiter and in California that were the trouble. 

He sees sunlight spilling in on the staircase leading to the deck, and the sound of voices, and Leo takes the steps one by one, the voices getting clearer. 

It feels like his heart is expanding too large for his ribcage as he steps into the light, blinking until his vision adjusts and-

There's Jason. 

Jason.

Leo feels his face break into a wild grin, his eyes fill with tears and he launches himself at his lost friend. 

Jason is surprised, catching him but stumbling back a step before regaining his balance. 

"Hey," Jason says, laughter in his voice. "What's with you?"

Leo tightens his arms around Jason's shoulders and murmurs something about a bad dream. 

He hears footsteps approach them and turns his head to find a fifteen-year-old Piper looking at them with a confused smile on her face. 

"Piper!" Leo exclaims, reaching an arm out to pull her into the embrace. She comes willingly, but repeats some version of Jason's earlier question. But he hasn't seen her in person in months, and will take any chance to hug her, even if this is just a dream.  He revels in having his best friends close, feeling them warm and breathing. 

He doesn't know why he was granted such a sweet reprieve from his usual dreams, but he sends a silent thank you to whoever might be listening.

Jason lets out another laugh, and damn, Leo's missed the sound so much, and begins to extract himself from their arms, but Leo doesn't loosen his grip. "Come on, I have to go check the lines."

"Nope," Leo says, pressing his cheek against Jason's shoulder. "It can wait."

He feels Jason's hand run over his arm and hears him say softly, "That must have been one hell of a dream."

"You have no idea," Leo murmurs.

"Is it something we should worry about?" Piper asks. 

Leo shakes his head, because this isn't the time or place to worry about anything. They may just be images his brain created, but he can't bring himself to unload his grief and pain on them when they could have this moment in the sun with each other. 

Besides, he's already been to Jason's memorial and told him so many times how much he misses him. Leo blinks to clear the tears threatening to spill over. 

"Okay," Jason says, not sounding convinced. "But I really should get back to work."

"It doesn't matter," Leo tells him. 

"Leo Valdez, saying that the state of his ship doesn't matter?" Piper asks in mock incredulity. "The world might end, but I wasn't expecting this horseman of the apocalypse."

"Shut up," Leo says, with absolutely no heat in his voice as he bumps her shoulder then pulls her closer. 

Jason pulls away eventually, letting Piper take over the hugging before she too has to get back to work and Leo relents, and watches the two of them, working together, in such vivid detail. His dreams, unless prophetic or traumatic, are never this clear, but he can think about that later. From what Piper has told him, she and Jason's friendship was strained at best when he died. Leo never thought he'd get to see them joking and laughing and easy with each other again. Maybe his mind is giving him what he wants to see most. 

Which doesn't make sense. Maybe he's in some kind of dream prison, designed to make him want to stay, like the one Gaea offered Hazel once. 

He gets more support for this theory when a dark shape comes through the corner of his vision, and it doesn't really matter if this is a trap, because Jesus Christ, there's the younger version of Nico, before his growth spurt when they were still the same height, with his sweetly curling hair and oversized jacket. As if sensing eyes on him, Nico's face turns to Leo, whose own breaks out into a probably stupid looking grin, because this little Nico looks so cute, which he really shouldn't because he's underweight and sleep deprived, but love is blind, isn't it?

Leo bounds down from the helm and over to him, and it's only the frozen expression of confusion and near fear on Nico's face that makes Leo skid to a stop in front of him instead of crashing into him with a hug like he wanted to. 

"Sorry!" Leo exclaims breathlessly. "I forgot you didn't like to be touched."

If possible, Nico's eyes get wider, and they begin to dart around as if he's looking for an escape route. Leo feels a pang of guilt, because dream or not, the last thing Leo wants is to make him uncomfortable. He takes a big step back and raises his hands to show he means no harm. "Sorry, I just got carried away."

Nico stares at him uncomprehendingly. 

Leo takes another step back in the hopes that will help. "Sorry, I just- had a really weird dream?" Leo says, thinking that might work via dream logic, because he is in a dream, and compared to this time in space, reality would seem like a really fucking weird dream. "I think I'm still recalibrating."

Nico's still frozen.

"Shit," Leo sighs, rubbing a hand over his face. "I really am sorry, I will- uh, I'll just sit here, several yards away, and look in a different direction, if that helps."

Leo does as he says, plopping onto the staircase leading to the helm and glancing out at the water. 

After a moment of very pain-stakingly not darting his gaze back to see if Nico's face has regained what little color it normally has, he hears the other boy say, "Okay." very quietly and then the shadow in the corner of his eye gets darker for a moment, a sign that Nico's slipped into it. 

"Not your best call, Valdez," Leo tells himself, rubbing the back of his neck.