Octavian drove the chariot.

Laoise tucked her knees to her chest in the mimicking stance of a child, holding herself together emotionally by way of her body. The only way she knew how.

She held the compass in a shaky hand, occasionally giving Octavian directions. Brigid would be met sooner rather than later, she understood, and perhaps that was a good thing. They'd been short on time before her negotiations with the Mayans ended as it was, and at least with Vulcan's chariot, they weren't pressed for it.

It was all Laoise could do — watch the compass and hold back tears threatening to swallow her whole. She had nothing left to do, nothing to throw up, nothing to say. Everything that needed being said had already been, leaving her and Octavian in a horrible sort of silence that neither of them desired breaking.

"Left," she muttered, and he turned the wheel ever so slightly.

The Mist would conceal them from the view of any mortals that might have otherwise spotted them in the sky, but they kept their aim high in the sky anyways. Octavian seemed to revel in it, the way the air smashed into his skin, sighing whenever a particularly rough gust of wind would slap him like a mother's scolding hand.

"We should rest," he said after several hours of silence.

She shook her head, exhaling a breath. "I want to get to Brigid. I want to kill her. Now."

"We're getting closer," Octavian argued, though his voice was soft as he opposed her. "Even if we rest, we'll get to her tomorrow at the latest. She won't survive to next week."

"She doesn't deserve to survive the night."

"I know." He paused, a shuddering breath running through him, then said, "But we can't fight her if we're exhausted. We have to be on our best game if we have any chance of defeating her. Vulcan was right about one thing — it'll be a tough fight."

"We'll win," Laoise said with a confident lift of her chin.

Octavian moved the steering wheel so they were slowly descending towards the forest floor, somewhere deep within Mexico, then frowned. "What makes you so sure of that?"

She gave him the saddest of smiles, the wind blowing her hair about just enough to make her look insane as she answered, "We have nothing left to lose."

When they touched the ground minutes later, Octavian held out a hand to help her out of the chariot, which she accepted. She hadn't a single ounce of resistance in her, no fight left to tell Octavian off for such actions. Their rivalry was at a standstill, if not gone entirely. With Logan reduced to nothing but blood and ash, fighting with her lifelong nuisance felt impossibly trivial.

They pitched the tent they had stuffed in their bag in silence, Octavian doing most of the work while Laoise held back, mind aching as she struggled to retain any coherent thoughts. Nothing seemed of value anymore, with only one thought glued to her brain — the need to destroy Brigid from the inside out. She'd gut her like Logan was, rip her entrails out, spit on her corpse, she'd...she'd...

"Laoise," Octavian snapped, and she jumped.

"Yeah?"

"I've been saying your name over and over for the past three minutes," he said, then frowned. "Are you...is..."

She sucked in a breath. "I'm fine. Just lost in my thoughts."

He exhaled a breath, nodding. "I understand."

For a moment, there was silence between them.

Only when they were clambered into the tent and tucked into their individual sleeping bags, Laoise spoke, voice just above a whisper. "Octavian?"

"Yeah?"

"Was it our fault?"

He thought for a moment, then shook his head. "We shouldn't have left him, that was irresponsible, but it wouldn't have made any difference at the end of the day. That creature...whatever it was...it was brutal. It was massive, and strong, and it would've ripped through us with ease trying to get to him. We couldn't have stopped it."

"Useless," she muttered, more to herself than to him, eyes pricking with tears once again. Raising her voice, she demanded, once again not to Octavian, but in general, "What good is being a demigod, if we can't do anything of actual value? What good is any of this?"

"I don't know," he admitted. "Truly, I don't have a clue. We aren't children of Jupiter, or Vulcan, or anyone else of actual power. We...we're powerful, yes, but only to our mortal limitations. Fuck, all I can do is sing people to sleep, how pathetic is that?"

"It's not pathetic. It...it helped Logan. He was in pain, and you took it away."

"Maybe." His lips pursed together. "But I'd rather be able to sing someone to life, than sing them to death."

She couldn't argue with that, instead, turning her thoughts in on herself. "We shouldn't go back."

"What?"

"We shouldn't go back," she repeated, then clarified at his evident confusion, "To Camp Jupiter. I'm sick of this. I'm sick of fighting wars for Gods who don't give a damn about us."

"It's unsafe," Octavian argued. "We stay at Camp Jupiter because of the wards to protect us from monsters."

"Yeah, until they send us on another quest, and we're on our own again! Why are we dying for them, Octavian? What has Apollo ever done for you? What has Cupid ever done for me? They don't give a damn about us, you know this as well as I do."

He gulped. "I don't know how I'd make it on my own. I've never known a life outside of Camp Jupiter."

"I have." She shrugged. "I lived with my mother and siblings for years. I know the real world. I know how to navigate it at least somewhat."

"Would you want to move back in with your mom, then?"

She let out a dry, brittle laugh that caused her throat to burn. "No. No, she was awful to me. Treated me like shit. I think she resented me, because my father left her after knocking her up. Vanished into the night. Of course she had no idea she'd fucked a God."

Octavian winced. "I'm sorry."

"It's not your fault. Camp Jupiter was a haven for me, for a while. I'd gotten away from her, even if I miss my half siblings. But now...I feel sick just thinking about returning. Sick thinking about fighting their battles."

His eyebrows shot up. "You don't want to kill Brigid, then?"

"I never said that. I'll kill her, and make her suffer as I do. But not out of loyalty to the Gods. Logan was right when he called them a bunch of bastards."

She expected Octavian to be horrified. She expected him to insist she take it back before Jupiter smited them where they lay. She certainly hadn't expected for him to tilt his head back and laugh.

"That was great, wasn't it?" He said. "Logan, he...he was so insightful, for being so young."

She nodded in agreement. "He was. He saw straight through those fuckers. I wish we had too. I wish we'd taken the quest and abandoned it. Fled the country, stayed in Mexico, and spent the rest of our days as just us."

"We still can." Octavian's eyes met hers, a longing in them she had never noticed. Was it always there, she wondered, something she'd been blissfully unaware of? Or had he been masking it all this time, and only just revealing it to her now that she knew the depths of his feelings?

When she lifted her eyebrows, he pressed further, "I mean...we can't how we'd want to. Logan is gone. But, we're still here. We can kill Brigid, and just...not leave. Who's going to stop us? I doubt Reyna will send anyone to come and force us back. We can fake our deaths, even. Live off the grid, eat pineapples and sunbathe."

"Pineapples?" Laoise let out a laugh. It felt wrong to laugh, just hours after Logan's desecration, but she knew she needed it. Needed a hint of light in the dark tunnel she was lost within.

"They're native to Mexico, aren't they?"

She shrugged. "I'm no pineapple expert."

"They're my favorite fruit." Octavian moved to lean down on the ground, head pressing against the clothes he'd bundled up to create a makeshift pillow.

Laoise did the same, pressing against something that felt like her bra, but she didn't bother turning to check. "I feel like we'd get sick of each other after a while. You'd go crazy and go back to Camp Jupiter."

"You're the one who can't stand me," he pointed out with a smirk. "If anyone's going to go crazy, it's you."

Her lips gave a small twitch.

"I almost forgot," Octavian began, sitting back up and reaching for his backpack, digging through it until he settled on the object he was searching for. "Do you...do you want this?"

She blinked as Logan's teddy bear came into view, any smile she'd been wearing dying.

"I grabbed it on the beach, right before we left. It felt wrong to leave it."

"I...sure." She reached over, grabbing the teddy bear and setting it in between the two. "We can just...pretend it's Logan. Pretend he's here right now."

"If he was, wouldn't he go on my other side?" Octavian asked.

She sniffed, her smile returning with an ever so gentle raise of her lips. "I can't believe he thought I had cooties."

"I think it was his sly way of forcing us to interact. Thinking if we slept next to each other, we'd get along or something."

Her eyes rolled, and she shifted herself back into a laying position. "Of course he did."

The pair drifted off to sleep minutes later, the only thing heavier than the grief they shared being their mutual affection, and a mutual vow to destroy the person who'd ripped Logan Ledger away from them.

When she dreamed, she dreamed of a life with Octavian. She dreamed of a world where it was just them, as it was now, their bodies inches from each other and their hearts beating as one. She dreamed that through a soft kiss and eyes swimming with emotions, he said he loved her, and this time, she said it back.