Bandages and Salt (PJO X BSD AU)

Chapter thirty-seven

A/N: This was my first week back at school, something that I had forgotten to mention last week would be happening, so updates will now be 12 am on Saturdays (New York time zone, adjust as needed) because it was Fridays at the same time but now that I'm back at school a normal sleep schedule is something that I apparently need to have. Plus I don't really fancy falling  asleep in my classes, so yeah. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Chuuya POV

Time passed slowly as the sun started to rise from where it had been hidden in the night. Passively I couldn't help but wonder if the star really was being pulled by a golden chariot as the myths suggested, but I brushed the thought aside. There were enough things to worry about without having to think about occurrences as inconsequential as this.

It wasn't much longer before a thin figure and a much larger one emerged from the cracks in the stone that had been created when the trio had first descended into the Earth. The only notable difference was that only two were emerging whereas three had gone in.

Dazai looked at me with a tired gaze as he stepped aside quickly to let Mrs. O'Leary out from behind him, seeming to want to get away from the hellhound as fast as he possibly could despite how tame she appeared to be. When he did, I was finally able to get a good look at the younger teen in the early morning light. There were bullet holes littering his clothes and slashes from blades everywhere else. I met the taller teen half way between us and gave the younger boy a careful once over, looking for any sign of injury that I could think of, but all I found was a tired look on the demigod's face.

"It worked then?" I asked, forcing my mind to shut down and focus on the task at hand.

All I could see everytime that I closed my eyes was a bloodied corpse laying alone in the dark. It's all I could see most times that I thought of what the other teen was doing when he went off on his own, but this time it seemed to affect me more somehow as I could see the evidence of what could've been right before my eyes.

I lifted my hand to the younger teen, hooking my fingers through the holes that the bullets had created with a sickening tug. I pulled away when I felt the way that the other boy went still beneath my touch as he tried to cover it up with a nod of his head.

"It worked," he confirmed, angling his body to where we were side by side as we always were. "Now all that's left is to kill a titan."

We hopped on the back of the hellhound as we had done to get here, but the bandage waste had us make the large dog run half of the distance before making the smaller jump to camp as to not put as much of a strain on Mrs. O'Leary. I didn't commit on the Mackerel's strange choice, knowing that the other teen would immediately shut down, so I settled for something safer instead.

"Where's Nico?" I asked, turning my head to look back at the boy lightly holding onto my waist from behind me.

The teen was looking out at the blurry scene around us with a faraway gaze of a child on their first rollercoaster ride, as the wind swept his hair and his eyes took in everything around us. A small pang went through my chest at the sight that I never thought that I would see, of how young the boy looked as he finally truly appeared his age for the first time since I've met him. There was a slight reddish tint to the bandage waste's ears from the wind that also seemed to dust his cheeks, but I pushed the observations aside and waited the younger teen out.

"I told him to stay with his father," the other teen answered. I knew that I was imagining the soft dissatisfaction in the younger boy's voice as he spoke, but I held onto it anyways as if I wasn't.

"You think he can get Hades to help." It wasn't a question but an observation, but the boy still treated it as such.

He sighed lightly, the action sending a small thorium through my chest from where he'd leaned closer so that both of us could be heard over the wind that the running hellhound was creating. "Hades hid that boy and his sister away to keep them safe from the other gods that would have seen them dead before they could even come close to being sixteen," the demigod explained. "If he can't bring the god around then I don't know who can."