Jason feels the words more than he hears them.
“I’m retiring.”
“Hm?”
Percy shifts in his arms, his head resting on the edge of his shoulder rather than his collarbone. “I’m not going on any other quests if I can help it.”
“Okay. Did you tell the others?”
“Okay?” He moves again, now fully removing himself from their embrace and sitting next to Jason instead. Did he say something wrong?
“Yes? That’s your decision, Perce. I can’t really guarantee the gods will take it, but I know some of them will try to protect you from unnecessary missions,” Jason reassures.
A bout of silence stretches on as Percy tries to find his words. It happens once in a while, when everything is too much or too little and Percy would lose touch of his own train of thought. Like each time, Jason lets him take his time, instead moving to pause the movie on his laptop and fixing the pillows so they’d be more comfortable for sleep. It was getting late, the stars shining through the windows.
“That’s not what I’m worried about,” Percy begins. “I just..”
Jason moves closer to him, wrapping an arm around his shoulder. He doesn’t move more than that, keeping his grip light. If Percy needs to step away, he could– and if he wants to cuddle closer, the invitation is there. As much as Jason wants to hold his beloved as tight as he could, he restrains himself.
When the man gets silent again, Jason prompts, “What is it?” Patient, soft. There was no use forcing the words out of him.
“I just worry,” Percy whispers. “I’m not the hero I was two years ago. When my request gets through to the council, I’ll just be a damaged college student. Is that really what you want?”
Jason blinks in surprise. Damaged? There were so many things wrong with what he’d just said, but one of them had pained him more than the others. “What I want? Percy, it’s your decision, I have nothing to do with it except support you.”
“No, that’s not what I mean,” Percy says. His voice sounds choked up, and even with his face down Jason could tell he was close to crying– although he couldn’t fathom why. “I’ll never be the person you fell in love with, Jay. I haven’t been in years. I have nightmares, I choke up at the most random words, hell, I can’t even string a coherent sentence together without taking five minutes to do it mentally.”
He couldn’t believe it. Not the person he fell in love with? Jason couldn’t be more pathetic about another human being than he was about Percy. He’d come pick him up from class with whatever sugary treat he could get his hands on, he’d walk them both back home, hand in hand. He’d stay with him during bad days, hold him through nightmares. That isn’t to say Percy doesn’t put any effort in their relationship, either. Jason has his own bad days and Percy makes damn sure he isn’t alone to deal with them. Jason, with every fibre of his being, could not have it any other way. This was just the way they worked– part of each other’s support system. So this? This was beyond a stray thought.
“What are you..”
“Can you let me finish?” The look in Percy’s eyes, now that his head was raised, is nothing short of heartbreaking. Jason nods numbly, rubbing between his lover’s shoulder blades in the hopes it would help him. “I’m not that courageous sixteen year old anymore. And I worry, now that I can finally step away from it all and have a normal life, that you’ll..” he takes a deep breath, “that you’ll leave because this is too boring. We both have ADHD, it’s in our nature to seek out stimuli and stuff, but I’m just so tired of it– I don’t want to drag you down with me.”
Jason gives him an extra minute, to see if he had something else to say, before pressing a kiss to his forehead. When Percy’s shoulders begin to shake, Jason drags him back into his arms, pressing his nose into the dark hair and letting his beloved breathe. Letting himself breathe, as well.
“I love you,” he whispers into the raven locks, “I don’t care what you do, or what you don’t do, as long as you let me stay.”
Percy shakes his head against Jason’s chest, then sits up a little for their eyes to meet. “Everybody stayed because I was interesting.” Gods, his voice doesn’t even sound like his own. Jason knows this went way beyond being insecure– this was genuine fear that Jason would just leave him. “The gods only took interest in me because of my parentage, and so did Camp Jupiter. Camp Half-blood just thought I was cool because I was involved with both wars and managed to stop a fight between our dads. You know what they do- as soon as I stopped being useful, they just.. Dropped me. Forgot I existed. I don’t want you to force yourself to stay.” Then, twisting Jason’s heart and ripping it out of his chest, he mumbles through silent tears, “you fell in love with the idea of me, but I’m not that anymore. I don’t think I can handle being someone I’m not.”
The words come out before he can stop them.
“Oh, baby.” Despite the tears in his eyes, Jason cups Percy’s cheek with his hand, fingers skimming across the skin and gently caressing every raised scar, whether they be from glass or bronze. They're Percy’s, and therefore they are deserving of everything. “No,” he whispers. “You might not be that hero you were three years ago, but neither am I. I fell in love with you because we were so similar and yet so different at the same time. We still are. You’re still just as beautiful,” he presses a kiss on the edge of his lips, “and you’re still the selfless idiot you were when we met.”
“But I’m not.. I’m–”
“Percy, listen to me,” he says softly, “I’m sick of our lives being interesting. You're right- I would love for them to be boring.”
“You’re just saying that–”
Jason shakes his head with a smile. These things, he’s needed to say them for a long, long time. The word ‘want’ has been so thoroughly erased from his vocabulary by his military training, and then reintegrated so quickly– because of Percy and the oh so wonderful things Jason feels for him– that he can’t stop saying it anymore.
“I want to wake up in the morning and sigh because you drooled all over the pillow. I want to come home to nothing but you, oversleeping after an attempted nap gone wrong, and to have to order takeout because it’s too late for anything else. I want to get annoyed by the dishes not being done and I want you to get pissed at me for leaving socks all over the house. I want our lives to be normal, mundane. I want to see you smile and feel nothing, because the butterflies have gone off and died from how long they've been there. You know what? I don’t care about the butterflies, Perce. I don’t.”
Percy lets out a wet little laugh. “Okay,” he sniffs.
Their eyes meet again, tears tracks shining under the moonlight. “I don’t care about the sparks and the fireworks and the all-consuming burn in my heart. I don’t care about the metaphors, the divinity of it. I don't care if this is all an idea of what love is. I know it's real, because I feel it. That's enough for me. I don’t care if life with you is interesting, or exciting. I just want a life with you. All of you. Even the boring parts. Especially the boring parts.”
Percy lets a little sound at that, and ducks his head.
“I just want to be able to love you, in all the incredibly boring ways someone can love another. Is that okay with you?”
A soft noise escapes his lover, who returns to his rightful place against Jason’s chest, likely listening to his heartbeat.
“How do you just know exactly what to say every time?” is the mumbled response that makes it out of the fabric.
“I fell in love with you,” Jason says simply.
Percy’s hold tightens, and in turn Jason’s does too.
He wouldn’t mind being bored for the rest of his life if he could wake up to this every morning. If he could go to sleep with Percy’s arms wrapped around him, with his smile and laughter incrusted in every one of his pores. If someone were to take a scalpel to Jason’s organs, his liver would have Percy’s eyes, his temporal lobe filled with their tender gazes, his heart scarred from every scare and every kiss they’ve ever shared. When he dies, one day, it'll because his heart once skipped too many beats, or because his lungs got tired of having the wind kicked out of them. It's stopped happening, because he knows he gets to have this.
The pecks and the hugs and the 'I love you's are no longer surprises- they are routine. They're boring. It's perfect, that way.
“Boredom doesn’t sound so bad,” Percy echoes.
Jason presses a kiss to his forehead, and doesn’t dare say anything else. The future will take care of that for him.
