Can't Pretend ─── Heroes of Olympus

xiii. i'm in pain, time to sleep

chapter thirteen

─── i'm in pain, time to sleep

          𝔄s soon as the lights faded, the pain hit me. Groaning, I leant forward, huffing slightly as I tried not to alert Piper and Leo to the fact. The pins and needles from that spark had left, and I rubbed at my shoulders and back as they throbbed with pain.

I'd deal with that later.

"You were amazing, Piper." I patted the girl in front of me's shoulders, wanting to keep this on the down low. Me being injured would hurt our moral.

"I only talked to Boreas, and you did too, it wasn't that amazing." Piper muttered, followed by a sentence that I couldn't quite here.

"Considering you've had no proper training, you held your own in front of two gods and whatever Zethes and Cal were." I grinned. "If that's not amazing then I don't know what is."

"He only let us go because of your past, something to do with those tattoos. I think he thought you were some sort of Roman." Piper mused as my head throbbed. I rubbed it, not needing pain from two areas of my body. "But I thought Romans and Greeks didn't mix, what with them being from different time periods and different godly forms."

"I wish I could answer your questions, but I'm still an amnesiac." I pointed out with a shrug. "Look, it doesn't matter at the end of the day."

Piper looked like she wanted to say something else, but Leo put a pause on the conversation to hand the pair sandwiches. As they ate, I explained what happened in the throne room. By the end, Leo let out a whistle, shaking his head.

"Damn." He huffed. "That's all a bit mad."

We hummed in agreement and fell silent.

I was starting to feel like these two were hiding something from me, each a different thing, but I couldn't work out what. Then again, I was also hiding something from them, the fact that I had a sister, and that I could remember parts of where I was from, in a sense.

But, all of that felt too personal and in reality, as bad as it sounded, I still did not know the pair all that well. They had their fake memories of me, but I had no memories of them, nothing to look back on and think, oh we're all such good friends.

Piper's head hit my shoulder, and she was fast asleep in an instance as I looked down at the younger teenager. She was so comfortable with me, yet part of me felt like I needed to push her away, like all of this was wrong. We were supposedly best friends, but did I have close friends waiting for me elsewhere?

"Hey, Cress, go to sleep." I glanced up at Leo, who was grinning. "You look like shit."

"Thanks." I rolled my eyes.