Chapter Text
Leo is not looking for a conversation.
He is in the city because he had things to do in the city, demigod errands that had taken most of the afternoon and left him with nowhere particular to be for a few hours before heading back.
The bar is a bar, warm, not too loud, the kind of place that has been there long enough that it doesn't try too hard about anything.
He sits down, orders something, and is reasonably content to just exist for a while.
The guy who sits down next to him is around his age, maybe a year younger, Nico’s age, probably, and has the unguarded ease of someone who has had a couple of drinks prior to this and is comfortable with that.
He glances at Leo in the way of someone who is in a talking mood, checking whether the person next to them is also in a talking mood.
Leo is not particularly in one but he's also not not in one, so he nods.
The guy’s name is Liam, and he's in the city visiting someone, and, originally, he's from out of state, from a small town in the Pacific Northwest, and he mentions the name of it in the offhand way of someone who truly never expects anyone to actually know it.
Leo doesn't know it, he says so.
"Nothing ever happened over there," Liam says. "Until it did." He says as he takes a drink. "You ever go down rabbit holes? Online? True crime stuff?"
"Not really…" Leo says.
"There's this case," Liam says. "From my town. Few years back now. It was everywhere for a while, national coverage and all that." He sets his glass down. "Some chick named Natalie Ouellette."
Leo keeps his face where it is.
"Can't say I know it," Leo says, which is technically true in the sense that he has never looked it up online.
"She was sixteen when it happened," Liam says. "I was fourteen, it’s a small town, so you don't forget something like that, she ended up killing her whole family. In one night… and a doctor she'd been sent to, and two hospital guards before that." He shakes his head, not dramatically, but more like with the flatness of someone who has said this before and knows the weight of it. "She burned the house down, and walked away, they never ended up catching her."
"That's a lot," Leo says.
"She had it rough, back then," Liam says, and there's something in his voice that isn’t quite sympathy but not quite the opposite, more like the complicated residue of someone who has had years to sit with a story that doesn't resolve cleanly. "People said so afterwards. Her home life situation was bad, like, a bunch of shit came out about her parents, and then the thing with her brother too. Doesn't make it…" He stops himself. "I'm not saying it makes it okay, I'm not excusing it for fuck's sake." another pause. "It's just not a simple story. That's all, really."
"Most aren't," Leo says.
Liam glances at him sideways. "Yeah." He drinks. "She's still out there, the FBI's got a file on her, I bet, she goes by Clockwork now… because of the eye thing, the fucked up surgery, she ended up replacing one of her eyes with her dad's clock after killing him, it was insane." He pauses. "They're never catching her, the case has been cold for years. Wherever she is now, whoever and whatever she is now, she's long gone."
Leo knows about the eye, and he knows the full story of the eye, from Nat herself, on a night where it was just the two of them.
He knows what the clock face looks like up close.
"Weird thing to carry around," Liam says. "Knowing it happened in your town, knowing she's still out there somewhere."
"Yeah," Leo says. "I'd imagine that."
He stays at the bar for a while after Liam pays and leaves, slowly finishing his drink, not thinking about anything in particular, which is a lie he tells himself for about five minutes before he stops pretending.
He thinks about Nat.
Specifically Nat.
Not the name in Liam's mouth, not the wanted poster version, just… Nat.
The one who picks up when he calls at bad hours, who sends him pictures of things she finds funny that are never things Leo would’ve found funny before and now does, who draws everything and whose drawings are specific in a way that takes getting used to and that Leo has gotten used to.
He thinks about what it would be like to only have the version that Liam has.
He doesn't finish that thought, he pays his tab and goes.
Hey, you good? he ends up texting her that night.
define good…? she texts back eleven minutes later.
Leo smiles at his phone, a thing Nat makes him do more often than most people would believe.
Never mind, he texts back. Forget I asked.
dork <3 she replies back.
He puts his phone face-down and looks up at the ceiling for a while.