no matter how many times a snake shed its skin, it would always be a snake. no matter how hard kit dempsey tried to prove he was no longer a traitor, camp half-blood would always view him as the boy who betrayed them for kronos. but not leo valdez...
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CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: NINE LIVES
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THE FIRST TIME KIT kissed Leo, they ignored each other for three days. Kit hadn't planned for it to happen. In the days after their quest, Kit and Leo, in a surprising twist of fate, were inseparable. It was Leo's arms Kit had woken up in, burning burning burning — but not from pain. He'd looked up into Leo's face — his tear-stained, war-beaten face — and smiled. Leo had fought for him when Hera insisted he was gone, bought him back from Death's returning claws with Piper's charmspeak.
That counted for something.
(Everything.)
So Kit could no longer deny that things had changed.
They faced Camp Half-Blood's questions together; their surprise, scepticism and suspicion. One morning, while Clarisse and Kit exchanged verbal hits across the ping pong table in the Big House, Leo reached for his hand and refused to let go. It was nice, like a great icy wave of water at the beach. And so the next time Kit raged, the inferno trapped within him blazing, he reached for Leo, their calloused fingers slotted together, and held on for dear life. The wave soon came and doused the fire to mere embers.
Kit couldn't make much sense of it. Leo was his confidante, a calming force when the going got tough. But he also made Kit feel. When Leo bled, Kit wept. When Leo laughed, Kit's heart forgot how to beat. And when he kissed him...
It wasn't planned, but Kit could not lie and say he hadn't thought about what Leo's lips would feel like against his. In fact, he thought about it so much that Kit had to wonder if he was on the brink of insanity. If something had happened to his brain when his heart stopped beating. Leo was... Leo. And Kit was not even half the man that Leo deserved.
But Kit Dempsey was also selfish. That hadn't changed.
And he didn't stop to think when Leo caught his eyes one day, hair wind-swept and skin sun-kissed from long days spent organising the construction of the Argo II. Kit closed the gap between them, hands bone-white around the sleeves of Leo's new army jacket — Kit still had his old old; it no longer smelled like him — and crushed his mouth to his. Leo froze, but the shock was quick to fade into delight. Liquid bones as he sunk into Kit's touch. Warm mouths and hammering hearts and lungs burning from a lack of oxygen.
Kissing Leo was like participating in a fight that Kit knew he would lose. Each press of Leo's mouth was hot but not uncomfortable, kind of like dipping your toes into a warm bath and learning over time to appreciate the sting. When Leo's hands came up to lace through his hair, Kit didn't pull back, despite the sharpening of his senses as realisation settled in.
Kit Dempsey was kissing Leo Valdez. Their mouths were touching. Leo had pressed him up against the skeletal structure of their ship. In that moment, there was nowhere else he wanted to be, no one else he wanted as much as Leo. He liked everything about kissing him — the familiar buzz of fear, the knowledge that Kit may be condemning him, that Leo yearned for him anyways.
