Bandages and Salt (PJO X BSD AU)

Chapter thirty-three

Chuuya POV

It wasn't that long before the bandage waste came stumbling into the Poseidon cabin for the night. The other boy had his usual emotionless look on his face, but I could see a tiredness there that told me that the other teen might actually sleep through the night if he were to go to sleep right now. It was such a rare sight for the teen that I almost forgot to ask the two questions that have been plaguing my mind for the past hour.

"Welcome back, crab for brains," I greeted, sitting up on the top bunk from how I'd been laying a moment before. The other boy only grunted as he went to his book bag and pulled out a set of pajamas from beneath the bandages. "How did the meeting go?"

I watched the other boy shrug as he piled fresh bandages on top of the clothes in his arms. "Everyone thinks that I'm going to die before this whole ordeal is over."

"Must be Tuesday."

The boy titled his head to the side in a way that seemed to suggest that he was agreeing with me as he made a move to start walking to the bathroom.

I don't really know what came over me, maybe it was the fact that I'd been worried all through the day that something had gone wrong when the mackerel didn't come back when he should've, or maybe it was the fact that almost the minute that I did get the other boy back, he was whisked away to a place that I couldn't follow, but I found myself calling out to the other teen. "Do you," I started, feeling the awkwardness of the question before it had even completely formed on my lips, "do you want me to do that for you?"

The poorly bandaged teen froze at my words, holding himself still for long enough that I almost thought that the boy would just continue to walk forward any moment now, pretending that he'd never heard me at all, but he didn't. Instead, the boy turned towards me, something of a look just below emotionless coloring the teen's face as he walked forward and layed the bandages and clothes down beside me.

I looked away, busying myself with opening one of the boxes of bandages while the other boy took off his shirt and changed into the pajama bottoms he'd brought, throwing the old clothes on the bottom bunk below me. The younger teen crawled up onto the top bunk beside me, letting me take off the ruined bandages from the explosion and replace them with new ones while he went over the details of the war council. My expression soured at the lines of the Great Prophecy, something that I was sure that the other teen noticed. He even went into minor detail about the discovery he'd made about the daughter of Aphrodite.

Are any prophecies ever just, I don't know, straight forward? What the fuck is with this endless sleep, hero's soul shit?

"What do you want me to do about your eye?" I asked, making a vague motion to the normally covered area on the other teen's face.

The younger boy's features scrunched into a look of genuine confusion that I was not at all used to seeing on the face of the Demon Prodigy of all people. "What do you mean?" He asked, the barest bit of confusion tainting the younger teen's tone, making him sound closer to his age than he had in months.

"Your eye," I started, "it looks normal." I leaned closer to the teen, noticing the way that the other boy's breathing hitched lightly but ignored it. "It just looks a little hazy up close is all, nothing like how it was before."

The other teen hummed lightly in thought, taking the new information in. He muttered something under his breath that sounded 'demigod healing', but I chose not to question it. Everything was complicated enough before finding out that other mythologies were real, some not even requiring vessels for the gods, while the ones that do go about a very different method then the one I was forced into, I didn't need anymore information.