i had a few people ask me on my most recent chapter of silver screen if they'd ever find out what happened between thalia and jason in the kitchen. this is it.

(i'd suggest you read silver screen for this to make sense [plug plug plugggg] but if you can't be bothered the run-down: thalia is in a famous band, and she hasn't seen her brother jason since he was eight. they reunite for the first time in ten years.)

title is from nothing left to lose by kari kimmel. i hope you enjoy xx

nothing left to lose

"I thought this was dinner," Nico says, and Thalia kind of agrees.

She's so tense she can't say anything, though, so she doesn't, and just remains silent. She watches as Piper slightly guiltily looks up from her food and swallows.

"As if I'm going to cook dinner for six people."

Six. Six six six.

Percy, Annabeth. One, two. They're huddled on the couch like affectionate puppies, nuzzling each other, so hopelessly in love. Nico, herself, sitting down, waiting. Three, four. Piper, the only one with a meal. Five.

Jason, like a time-bomb.

Six.

"I offered," says Annabeth, and Thalia only half-hears it.

"Shut up, Annabeth."

It's getting too stifling in here. Out of the corner of her eye she can see Percy giving her these looks, with the puppy-dog sympathy eyes, like he knows, and of course he knows, because Jason's his cousin, and he hasn't seen him for years either, but Thalia feels so sticky and overwhelmed that she has to get up and get out.

She stands up, and heads out the room. Moments later, she hears footsteps behind her.

Thump thump thump. Tick tick tick.

She knows it's Jason, and she can feel the bomb in her chest slowly curl inwards as it counts down closer and closer to its detonation.

She makes sure not to look at him.

She opens the freezer, and starts to sort through it, trying to find any more frozen meals she can put in the oven for the rest of them. She can feel Jason's presence like a red-hot iron, just waiting, behind her, looming like a shadow, and it's unnerving her like nothing before, but the number one mistake is showing weakness, and she will be damned if she lets herself cry in front of her brother.

"Hey," Jason says from behind her softly.

She doesn't turn around. "Hey."

There's a pause. "Are you mad at me?"

Thalia huffs out a laugh, and slams the freezer, staring at the fridge. "Mad?" she asks rhetorically, her tone vicious. "Now, where would you get that idea?"

Jason sighs. "Thalia."

"Just leave it, Jason." She opens the fridge, probably too aggressively, and starts sorting through it, trying to find something. "It doesn't matter."

"Of course it matters, Thalia. I haven't seen you for ten years."

"I thought you were dead, Jason." She turns on him and meets his eyes. He's changed, from back then. Of course he has, it's been ten years, but something about the way he stands, about the way he moves, is still so like the scared eight-year-old, that something deep down starts to ache. "We all did. You didn't try to contact us once."

"I didn't think you'd want to see me."

"You're my brother, Jason. You know if you just reached out, even once, I would have dropped everything." She shrugs, with one shoulder. "I don't even know who you are now."

He recoils, like she had physically hit him. She supposes she may as well have. It was a low blow, and she'd meant for it to be. "That's not fair."

"The last time I saw you, you were eight. I think that's pretty fair."

"You think I wanted this, Thalia?" Jason leans against the side, his eyes burning. "You think I wanted to leave you alone for so long?"

"Why else? We were everywhere. It wasn't hard."

"Dad had me under an iron fist. They were so mad at Sally, Thalia. You three weren't meant to find each other."

Thalia's jaw twitches. "They can blame their secretaries for that."

"They did. They were all fired the moment your first EP dropped."

Thalia doesn't move.

"I wasn't allowed to contact any of you. None of us were."

Thalia scoffs. "Zeus may be mad, but he isn't irrational. That makes no sense."

"They all hate each other, Thalia. All of them. You were there, you saw how disastrous that Greece holiday was. They were afraid that if we all found each other we were going to end up like them."

"So, in heaps of debt to each other."

"They thought it'd be easier if we were all strangers."

"Piper told me you left that house at sixteen. You're nearly twenty, Jason."

He sighs. His eyes are still electric. That's the one thing that they have in common, aside from lots of tangled history and a set of crappy parents. They're opposites in almost every other way. "I was scared."

"Of what? What could you possibly be scared of?"

"I was afraid you'd hate me."

Thalia properly does laugh then. "Oh, pull the other one, Jase, it's got bells on. Don't talk crap."

"I was."

"Why? Why would we hate you?"

"I know Dad pulled the plug on every tie he had on you the moment he found out you'd all formed a band. I thought you were resentful I got all the money."

"I could care less, Jason. I've made my money."

"You were on top of the world. I thought I could slip under the radar."

"Of your own sister? You'd have to try a lot harder."

"I found you on Facebook."

"Oh, Facebook."

"I did what I could, Thalia. I was a broke seventeen-year-old in the middle of Canada, what did you expect me to do? Get a plane over to LA? What then?"

"A hell of a lot more then just find me on Facebook. You had all of Dad's money, what happened to that?"

"I spent it all on the plane ticket out of New York, and an apartment in Winnipeg. I just couldn't get to you, Thalia. I tried."

She can feel her resolve crumple. "We didn't even properly talk."

"It was enough."

"Enough for me to realise that you were still alive. Did you ever think about me? About how much I worried? I managed to escape that hellhole, and I had left you all behind, and then for the next ten years I didn't hear a word from you. I thought he'd killed you, Jason. I was a wreck."

"He wouldn't have killed me."

"He sent me to a boarding school across the country because I didn't look like Mom enough, Jason. I wouldn't put anything behind him."

They're both ragged, run dry. They've been going a hundred miles an hour on weary feet and they've rubbed themselves both down to the bone, and now here they are, two dusty puzzle pieces, that have been bent out of shape too much to be put back together. Jason holds out his arms, hopelessly.

"Well," he says. "I'm here now."

That's when she throws the first plate.

It's sitting on the counter, within her reach, and she's just blinded by so many emotions, so much internalized anger, so much sadness, fear, desperation, that on impulse she reaches forward and throws it as hard as she can.

It hits the wall next to him and shatters immediately. Jason doesn't even look surprised. He holds out his arms wider. "Break them all," he says. "Come on."

She doesn't need any more encouraging. She grabs a bowl and throws it, and then another plate, and another, and then another bowl, and none of them hit him, but he just stands there with his arms stretched out, clouded by a fog of china chips. There's broken glass all over the floor, and Thalia's chest is heaving and her eyes are stinging with tears, but he's still there, still steady as a rock, and that's when she breaks down.

She bursts into tears and he steps over the glass and hugs her, and that enough makes her cry even more. It used to be the other way around, Jason so skinny and small that she could curl him in her arms, hide him under her blankets with his ear against her heartbeat whilst their dysfunctional parents screamed downstairs, but he's grown into a man now, and he can cradle her. He's her baby brother and somehow behind her back he grew from a shrimpy boy with a bad haircut and a scar above his lip to a man with soft arms and a firm chest and a steady pulse, and she cries and cries and cries against him, because this body feels like a stranger but the heartbeat keeping it alive doesn't.

"I'm so sorry," she sobs. "I missed you so much."

She thinks he's crying too.

"I missed you, too."

They stay like that for what feels like hours. Her tears dry up quickly, because she's never been one for endless crying and snotting, but she stays in Jason's arms as long as she can. This is new to her, being vulnerable. Percy and Nico may as well be her brothers, from how much time she spends around them, and she loves them to the end of the world, and she's cried in front of them lots, but that's almost different, because they're familiar, and they're home, and she's seen them through acne and knobbly knees and Nico's godawful obsession with layering shirts when he was thirteen and thought he was the bee's knees, but Jason is not. She wants to get to know him like that. She wants her third brother, her proper brother, back to her, and she wants to know him as much as she knows Nico and Percy. She knows that may not happen, because Nico and Percy are her job, and she spends almost every waking moment with them, and Jason lives in Canada, in Canada, but she's not giving this up. She's going to hold onto this while she can.

"Don't you ever do that to me ever again," she mumbles. "Never."

"I won't," Jason promises.

They don't let go of each other.

"It was hard, sometimes," Thalia confesses quietly into his shoulder. She stares at the wall behind him, and she can feel him tense around her. "I'd have good days and bad days. The good days were okay. Sometimes I'd forget about you. But on the bad days I sometimes couldn't even look at myself in the mirror, because all I'd ever see is you."

Jason makes a wounded noise at the back of his throat, but Thalia can't stop now. She's glad she's not looking at his face.

"Percy and Nico suspected, of course. We've all gone through some crap. When it comes to it, we don't pry. Nico's got Bianca, Percy's got Poseidon, and I– I had you. We don't mention them."

"Thalia–"

"I really thought you were dead, Jason," she says quickly, her eyes burning. "When Nico started recovering after Bianca died, when we sat down and wrote the song Bianca, you were just– unspoken in the room. We wrote that song for me just as much as we did Nico. Because even though we weren't sure if you'd really died or not, you may as well have. You'd died to us."

Jason sniffs. "I'm so sorry."

His voice is watery. So is hers. She doesn't mention it.

"It was hard for me, too." He pulls back and looks at her straight in the eyes. His eyes are just so blue, exactly like hers. That was the worst part – the eyes. They haunted her, in her own skull, and sometimes, on the bad days, she would want to claw them out. Because every time she would look at herself, she would just see a terrified eight-year-old boy on top. "You said it yourself. You were everywhere. I couldn't escape you. The girl next door played your music so loud, every day. I'd past posters, advertisements. I'd get your music videos and acoustic sets recommended to me on YouTube. Everyone I followed on Twitter would always retweet stuff from you. Everywhere I looked it was just you, and it felt like you were following me everywhere."

"Did you ever listen to our stuff?"

Jason lets out a weak half-laugh. "Of course I did. I downloaded every album I could. I'd preorder, even. I wanted to hear everything I'd been missing out on."

"I wrote songs about you, you know. Midnight was for you."

"I know." Jason sighs. "It was awful. I couldn't stand it. I think that's why Dad went mad. He practically disowned you but you were absolutely everywhere, so it was like you were still living under his roof. It was the same with me."

"I'm sorry."

"It's not your fault."

"Still." Thalia nods, resolutely. "We've found each other. We're not going to let this happen ever again."

"Never."

"Do you permanently live in Canada?"

"I'm attending uni there."

"How long are you staying here?"

"Just a month."

Thalia nods.

"I want your phone number."

Jason manages a smile. "I can do that."

"I'll call and text you every day. I lost you once, I can't do it again."

"Okay."

Jason smiles at her, and somehow, it feels like a promise.

It's going to take a while, and it's going to take a lot because ten minutes can't make up ten years, but Thalia just knows that they're going to be okay.

thanks for reading! xx