Bandages and Salt (PJO X BSD AU)

Chapter thirty-four

Chuuya POV

I thought that the bandage waste and I were going to crash into the nearest tree as Mrs. O'Leary bounded forward towards it. Bracing my body for the inevitable impact that was to come, I mentally cursed the boy holding my hips knowing that I wouldn't be in this situation if it wasn't for him. My mind raced through all of the possibilities of ways to get back at the scarred teen, using it as a way to distract myself from just how much this was bound to hurt, but the impact never came.

A cold feeling swept over my body as the word warmth seemed to lose all meaning in the darkness that we'd filled into. The fur beneath my fingers felt like ice, the hands on my hips felt like a phantom's touch. It only lasted a few moments until the shadows melted into a warm evening light, thawing out the cold that had settled in my bones.

I felt something shifting behind me as the younger teen quickly slid off of the hellhound as if the dog was made of acid seeping into his skin. I followed the boy down at a more leisurely pace, taking the time to glance around us before giving up the vantage point that I had.

We were close to the edge of a cliff near the woods behind us. The area wasn't like anything that I'd seen in Yokohama before, the number of trees being more than I've ever seen in my life, a highway cutting through the ravine on one side of the cliff, as the other side of the cliff led directly into someone's backyard. It felt like looking at Camp Half-Blood again for the first time, like stepping into another world outside of the cities and slums that I could remember from mine.

The house at the base of the ravine was a two-story home, painted white with a colonial style to it. The only thing that made the picture more unsettling than it had any right to be was all of the weeds and tall grass growing around it that made the place seem like more of a jungle than a home.

Following the taller teen down, I got off of Mrs. O'Leary just before the hellhound began to stagger from bearing the burden of the travel on her own. I felt Dazai pull me back and away from the being as the hellhound opened its maw, but all the mythological creature did was yawn before turning in a circle and collapsing on the ground with enough force to shake the earth.

Looking down, I saw that the hand that had been holding my arm had already let go before I had to yell at him to do so, as the body that it belonged to surged forward to catch something. When I looked at the younger teen fully, I saw that he was holding the son of Hades in a manner that one would have mistaken as protective if they didn't know the teen as I did. Dazai let the boy go once he was sure that the other demigod wouldn't kneel over at the first step that he took on his own.

"I'm okay," the son of Hades managed as he rubbed his eyes harshly in a manner that I had seen the other ability user doing time and time again as the days without sleep started to get to him.

"Are you going to crash too?" I asked, jerking an accusatory thumb at the sleeping hellhound loudly snoring behind us.

The boy only shook his head no. "The first few times that I shadow traveled," the youngest teen explained, "I passed out for a week, but now I have a better grasp on it. I can't do more than two jumps a night though, but Mrs. O'Leary won't be going anywhere for a while either."

"Okay, we're here, so now what?" I asked, looking expectantly between the pair of demigods standing beside one another.

Nico only smiled in a tired way that somehow looked like it belonged on an American carved pumpkin for Halloween despite that obviously not being the younger boy's intention. "We ring the doorbell," he answered simply.

—-

Maybe I just didn't understand American customs all that well, because I couldn't figure out why this woman was letting three strange teenage boy's into her home at night. Maybe I could envision this being a more normal thing in a small town in the south where people are said to be more hospitable, but this was Coneticut.