Leo didn't mean to fume. Literally.

When Piper and Nico opened the doors to the car, the first thing they did was cough and complain about the smell of smoke. Well, that was what happened when Leo was left fuming in a closed-off place. He lit up-and not in a fun way.

Piper hopped up in the driver's seat, studying her map for the way to the Canal, while Nico hopped into the back with Leo.

"Why aren't you in shotgun?" Leo asked, frowning slightly. He'd realized as soon as he got in the car that his anger was misplaced. Yeah, Nico shouldn't have gone off like that, but if it were Leo outed against his will like that...he couldn't imagine how he'd react. It was strangely melancholy, thinking of how Nico probably hadn't been that supported when it came to this sort of thing. If he had been, he might have been more open with them-so it was up to Leo and Piper to make him feel safe.

"I wanted to be back here," Nico replied, his voice small, expression purposefully reserved. "Is that okay?"

Leo nodded. "Yeah, of course, man. Nothing's changed, you know? You're still the same to me. We're still...friends. Or at least, I agree to be minimally annoying, and you agree not to tear my soul out of my body, things like that."

Nico seemed unable to help but laugh, a small sound like the coo of a bird. Something rare, but nice. "I don't think I'm able to tear someone's soul out of their body. I've never tried." He frowned, and Leo supposed he'd messed up again, making Nico genuinely propose such a horrific concept. He then glanced up at Leo again. "I'm sorry for earlier, for...blowing up at you. That whole experience was...so awful, I just..." his hand was trembling where it rested on the middle seat. It was trembling, and Leo could reach out and be there. He could place a warm hand on top of his cold one. He could.

He swallowed. He refrained.

"It's no excuse," Nico continued. "It's my quest, and I'd be foolish to assume the challenges are only physical rather than physical and emotional. So. Yeah. I'm really sorry, Leo..."

Piper turned onto the highway, and the car was silent for a good few seconds. That tension that remained even after Aphrodite had seemed to dissipate behind them like a slow, uncoiling wire.

"You have nothing to apologize for. I...I'm sorry, too," Leo replied, noticing just how intensely Nico's eyes focused on his hands. He wasn't sure what else to say, perhaps other than to ask for his knife and watch back. He hadn't really meant to give it to Nico--if he'd even managed to figure out the secret to getting it opened, he wouldn't understand what it meant. And Leo wasn't sure he'd ever be ready to explain it. But then again...Nico wasn't ready to be outed, either.

Nico passed over the knife he'd given Leo and pulled Leo's watch out of his pocket, entirely opened, the note stuffed back in its compartment awkwardly.

"Who's Maia and Katana?" He asked, meeting Leo's eyes then, his own catching a light from the window for a split second that made them look truly brown rather than black. It was a wonder, really, because the daylight outside of the car looked...odd. Like...dim and silvery. Leo half-wondered what the mortals would tell themselves about what had happened to the sun.

Leo swallowed, gently taking his watch back and pulling the little switch that closed it. He'd modified the watch himself, the method of which he could talk about for ages. Nico's real question, however...how could he begin to explain the answer?

"To be honest..." Leo started faintly. "It's kinda stupid, but I don't know. Fully, anyway." He could feel his heart pounding in his chest, so loud and intense he could even feel it in his ever-twitching fingers. "My...sister. My foster sister..." He cleared his throat. "Her name was-is-Sarah. I've had a lot of foster siblings over the years. Couldn't even tell you most of their names, to be honest. They were always more like distant acquaintances. But Sarah was different. She was in the home I was in before this most recent one. I was fifteen, and she was twelve. When I first met her..."

Leo blinked as his eyes started to water, which he felt bad for in the face of Nico's situation. But he could feel Nico's gaze on him, attentive and enveloping.

"When I first met her, I couldn't stand her. How...loud and rambunctious she was, you know? Stealing my thunder...but somehow, she got under my skin." Leo continued. "She wouldn't shut up about this nerdy card game she liked...Myths and Magic, or something like that--?"

"Mythomagic?" Nico asked softly, an incredulous smile on his face. It was an odd look for him, as if his face wasn't made for such a look--but Leo liked it. It was like seeing a cute bat eat some fruit at the zoo, something like that.

"Yeah!" Leo replied, smiling himself despite the trembling. He could remember the hours long (more often than not one-sided) discussions Sarah would have about cards, attack bonuses, and spell combos.

"Anyways, she..." Leo searched for the right words. "Sarah was always different. Our foster parents, the other kids in the house...they didn't seem to get her, but I did. I actually...became friends with her, I actually thought of her as a sister. And when she told me...when she told me she liked girls, I was there to support her. One hundred percent."

Leo could hear a slightly staggered breath from the front seat, and he looked to see Piper had tensed at the wheel. "Sorry," he said. "Getting too heavy back here?"

"No," Piper said, voice a little higher than usual. "No. I was just gonna say...if Nico was forced out, and you're telling some of your angsty backstory, I might as well come clean, too. I...I'm a generally unlabeled sexuality mess up here. I just like girls a lot..."

Leo snickered, raising a brow. "Unlabeled sexuality mess? I'll keep that in mind in case I meet any girls that feel the same. Thanks for telling me, Beauty Queen."

Piper nodded, some of the tension leaving her shoulders, and Leo frowned at the thought of having to add his own sad story. He was never good at that kind of thing; he'd cried a lot as a kid, after his mom died. But then people got inpatient with him and all his behavior issues, the ADHD, the dyslexia, the maybe-on-the-autism-spectrum-but-let's-not-bother-testing-for-it. People had put so much work into shutting him up that he just...turned it around. If he was nothing but jokes, he'd still be allowed to speak. People would even like him, maybe. It'd make up for the fact that it's him.

"Um," Leo continued. "So...Sarah told me she liked this girl in her class. Cassie. They were best friends, and she was also into all the, you know...Greek myth stuff. If they ever got to see Camp Half-Blood, they'd absolutely flip...but anyways. She wrote this story for Cassie, The Legend of Maia and Katana. She was..." Leo laughed softy, opening up the watch again to see the tiny note. "She was so embarrassed, she only let me read a little bit of it. How she thought I had any game with girls, I don't know. But...she gave Cassie the story, stapled and nice in its little folder. And Cassie loved it, how could she not? Sarah is a brilliant writer, even if her hand-writing could use a little work..."

Leo was rambling, but he could for hours. He could talk forever about every detail; how he took her out to the movies when their foster parents were having another screaming match. How she talked him into staying in one night, then another, then another when Leo felt the urge to go out and drink with his shitty so-called "friends". How she was there for him as much as he was there for her, if not more.

"But then," Leo breathed heavily. "One day, she was talking to me about Cassie, and one of our foster siblings overheard, and he went to tell on her. A part of me doesn't want to be too mad at him, because he was only ten, and he didn't seem to be malicious about it. But still," his voice cracked, and for once he didn't care. "He ruined her life, I mean...I can still remember it like it was yesterday. How our foster mom just...contained her anger for a moment before dragging Sarah out by her hair. And that...that monster husband of hers, how he yelled and threw things, just on the edge of beating her. It was...outside of the day my mom died, it'd have to be the worst day of my life."

The tears finally came, hot and heavy and Leo couldn't seem to stop them, and it felt so unnatural. The last time he'd cried in front of people was that day, though his tears meant nothing to his so-called foster "parents". They had just insisted he was probably "a goddamn queer" as well, and that was why they were so close.

"Cassie still has her story, that I know of," Leo managed. "Sarah just told me about this note, hidden in a book in her bag, and this is all I have." He opened the watch once more, pulling the note out carefully as if it were an important historical document. "They...they shipped her off to some boarding school, one of those strict Catholic places ran by nuns where they're still allowed to beat students with a belt for misbehavior. I...I never even got to say goodbye."

"The funny thing is..." Leo paused, wiping his eyes. "I was actually considering staying. I had ran away from five foster homes before that, and I was already making a plan for number six when Sarah just...she made me stay. The other kids and the parents sucked, the school sucked, it all sucked, but...she made it worth it. And then when she got taken away...the next day I was gone. I'd give anything to see her again..."

Leo swallowed, glancing over at Nico, whose eyes were watering. His hand was still in the middle seat. Leo reached over, heart pounding as his pinky finger touched Nico's. He then intertwined their fingers, as if they were two kids on the playground making a promise.

"I was found a few weeks later in Scranton, this boring town in Pennsylvania." Leo concluded. "I was really trying to get to New York. I figured it'd be a good place for me because people might pay to see me do fire tricks on the sidewalks, and you'd be surprised what perfectly good food people toss out, but..." he sighed. "I got my wish, only my new foster mom was a total dick. She made me get this job where I had to give her a lot of my money, and...everything sucked. For a while...until I walked into camp and a dog the size of a school bus tried to kill me. Then I figured, 'hey, don't think things can't get worse, because they totally can'!"

Leo pulled away from Nico then, immediately embarrassed by just how much he'd revealed. Really, all Aphrodite had said was that Nico had a thing for dudes, namely Percy Jackson (which, if what everyone had said about him at camp was true, who could blame him?). That was completely normal. Then Leo had to turn around and be...not normal.

"Sorry," he said, closing the watch once more. "Sorry, that was a lot. I didn't mean to vent or anything, I mean...it's really not that bad, I just...didn't want to seem like this token ignorant straight guy--" he faltered, the words feeling foreign in his mouth. Straight. Of course he was, he knew that, but sometimes...when people made jokes at his expense, it made his heart leap with anxiety. It was as if someone had pulled a curtain back that Leo himself had not wanted to go near. Because so what if he was open to opportunity? If this Percy Jackson guy-(which, now that Leo was thinking about, he could only think of Nico's look of awe when he saw Aphrodite-Percy walk into the hotel earlier)-had asked Leo out tomorrow, Hades, Leo might just say yes to see what would happen! Was that a crime?

In several states in some ways, yeah. But.

"It's okay," Piper said shakily. "I'm really sorry all that happened to you, Leo. I kinda felt the same, with no one I could really be comfortable with until I found camp. My dad...you might have heard of him, he's Tristan McLean--"

"Tristan McLean?" Leo demanded, almost immediately shocked out of his depressed state. "Your dad is that hot guy from King of Sparta?"

Piper sighed, glancing back in the mirror at Nico, exasperated. "Well, I'm not gonna comment on my dad's looks, but yeah. He starred in King of Sparta. The poster for it was kinda stupid, if you ask me."

"You kidding?" Leo asked. "They should have hung it up in the gym for motivation-well, I guess I shouldn't be talking about how hot your dad is, either..." his face flushed. "But I don't understand. Your dad seemed cool in those bloopers and interviews and stuff. Was he...I mean...why did you run away?"

Piper hesitated, shifting uncomfortably in her seat, as if it were made for a more qualified adult. "It wasn't because of my dad. He is great, and I love him, but...he was always too far away. He wanted to keep me away from all that...celebrity lifestyle he had to deal with. The tabloids, the paparazzi. I was set up with everything I could ever want, private chefs and resort vacations...but all I ever wanted was to have him around. The worst part of it all is...I feel like if I told him how I felt, he'd drop everything, and I'd feel horrible..."

"So," Leo started. "So you decided to run away?"

"No," Leo could see through the mirror that Piper's lips had formed a thin line. She sighed. "I stole. I found stuff I didn't need, didn't even want, and I'd just ask for it. With my Charmspeak. It worked...temporarily. But once they realized what I'd done, they'd come after me. Get my dad involved. The only time I got to see him was when he was upset with me."

She paused, tapping the steering wheel nervously. "The biggest thing I stole was a BMW. That was apparently too big. The guy at the lot wanted to get me tried as an adult, but with my dad's lawyer, they arranged to have me sent to this Wilderness School in Nevada. I was trying to think of any way to get out of it--I didn't want to use my Charmspeak anymore, but something."

"Then, when my driver stopped for gas, I only got out of the car for a moment when I got attacked." Piper continued. "It was a storm spirit--like the one you told me about, your old manager? Only I didn't have a weapon. That's when I found my knife, laying out behind a gas station. Mom had laid it out for me. After that...she sent a dove. She didn't leave any indication it was from her, but...I mean, I just knew. I knew that what I could do, if I liked it or not, it came from her. So, I followed the dove. Sometimes it'd lead me to safe areas, sometimes monsters attacked. A monster even killed the dove, once...and mom just sent another. It lead me all the way to Half-Blood Hill, injured and exhausted...and that's when Nico found me."

Leo looked over at Nico then, who was so silent he might as well have been dead. He was leaning against the car window, breath fogging up the glass. Leo checked his watch-9:07 AM, and yet it still looked like dawn was just breaking out the window.

"Guys," Nico started, and Leo jolted a little at his voice, as small as it was. "What's the point of this? Of sharing? What good is it going to do when we're down there?"

Leo felt his leg start to bounce-whether it was anxiety or ADHD or both, he wasn't sure. He bit his lip, unsure of what to say, the guilt he'd had previously doubling in his stomach.

"I..." Piper started. "I don't know. I was just thinking about what my mom said...about honesty and love helping us out, or whatever. I thought it'd be easier to talk about this stuff, and then maybe...maybe it'll be easier to work our way through the tomb."

Nico sighed, expression purposely tight and reserved, as if he were holding back. "Well, it's better than nothing. The prophecy did say you were the key, after all, Piper. I have nothing to share, though." With that, he leaned back against the car door, closing his eyes as if that were some grand conclusion.

On the contrary, as Leo thought back on what he did know about Nico, the list wasn't long. A Son of Hades, has been in and out of camp for a few years, had a sister who died. Had (has?) a big-whooping-crush on Percy Jackson, the never-before-seen but famed King of Camp. He knew more about his trauma than anything else, than anything "normal".

Leo opened his mouth, the words on the tip of his tongue. He could ask Nico's favorite school subject, if he went to school outside of camp. He could ask if he'd played any cool video games recently, or what his favorite color was.

Or he could keep his mouth shut. He frowned, resolute that that was what Nico wanted. He'd shared enough for multiple lifetimes.

The van drove on through the barely-emerging dawn.