Chapter Text
The world has changed since Hazel was a little girl. This is just a fact Hazel has struggled to accept. Some changes have been pleasant to find out. Others, not so much, but truthfully, Hazel doesn’t mind change. In fact, the only thing that will ever be consistent is change. Life is always going to happen, whether you’re there or not, that’s just also another fact. Life goes on.
Hazel died, and life went on without her, just not her own life. And now she’s back, and life is still going on, and sometimes, she just doesn't know how to handle that. Her friends often forget that she’s not from their time. They talk about obscure internet or pop culture references, and when she asks, they usually say, “Oh, it’s a meme.” Except, Hazel also doesn’t know what a meme is, other than the fact that it’s used to explain something else she also doesn’t get.
Sometimes, she even forgets she’s not from their time, too. It’s easy in New Rome. New Rome has mapped out her entire new life for her. She knows what her job will be, and she knows what her future looks like, and there’s no reason she would ever really leave New Rome. They also don’t use much technology, and they act like Ancient Rome, and it’s just very easy to forget they’re actually in the twenty-first century.
Until she’s reminded that she's not. Hazel doesn’t get pulled into visions of the past anymore, not since sharing her past life with Percy and Frank. On the rare occasion though, when she’s reminded of how much the world has changed, it still feels like she’s being roughly yanked from her current life and forced to relive the past.
Frank tells her she’ll adjust eventually and she knows he’s right. But it’s hard to explain that it’s not just change. It’s this overwhelming sense of not belonging. She doesn’t tell anyone this part. She doesn’t think anyone wants to hear how when she wakes up, and it’s dark, and she doesn’t know where she is, her hands will get sweaty and her chest tightens and then her throat closes up. Or how at night, when she’s getting ready for bed and she’s so tired, she’ll catch glimpses of herself in the mirror and have to hold back a scream because a corpse is staring back at her. And then she’ll blink and it’s gone and she’s just staring at her normal, breathing face.
She knows enough to keep those kinds of things to herself. Maybe if she was Greek, she may say something. She’s not Greek though. Hazel is Roman, and the Romans have always been less forgiving when it came to stuff like that.
Besides, the only two people in charge who might not have thought differently of her for having these problems are gone. Reyna’s off to join the Hunt and Jason-
Jason’s gone. He’s gone and yet she is here and how is that fair?
Hazel wants more with her life. It occurs to her when Reyna leaves to join the Hunters. She just didn’t know she was ever allowed to want more. After coming back, her life had been so mapped out for her: Centurion, and now Praetor. Except, Reyna was Praetor and she left.
Hazel has already accepted the new position. She loves being Praetor, that’s not the point. She accomplishes more as Praetor than she ever did as a Centurion. She rebuilds. She welcomes new recruits. New Rome flourishes. She does her job.
Is her job her life? She thought she would die. She thought she came back to life to help defeat Gaea, and then she would die again. But she didn’t die, did she? So she works hard, and does her job, and it’s fine. What else is she supposed to do?
In a couple years, she’ll study at New Rome University. And then what? Marry Frank? Yes. Have his babies? Probably. And that’s fine, it really is, she even wants that.
Hazel also just wants more. It’s a feeling she can’t explain, not until Reyna leaves, but there is more out there, in the world, and Reyna is going off to find it. Hazel didn’t know that was possible but something inside of her is aching for more.
She just doesn’t know what. So she does her job, her life, and she’s content. She helps the new recruits, and tries to ignore how young and frightened they look. She supposes she must have looked like that once, too, all those years ago.
Hazel does her best to remember everyone’s name, as she is Praetor now, but there are hundreds of people at Camp Jupiter. The names that stick out are the ones that end up working close with her.
One of the new girls is named Lilia and she has the pleasure of helping out in the stables. Hazel loves the stables, and visits them often, and therefore, she becomes quite acquainted with the new girl.
Lilia is 12 and has flowing brown hair and big warm brown eyes. Her mother is Ceres-Demeter, in Greek, though Lilia is definitely a daughter of Ceres. Lilia has an aurora to her that most kids her age just don’t. Hazel really can’t explain it at first, but she knows it’s there.
Lilia arrives at a bad time. She shows up a week after Jason dies and it’s not her fault, but it means Hazel isn’t exactly in a welcoming mood when Lilia is introduced to her. Lilia says she’s from Gotham, which is a city in New Jersey, and Lilia comments how it would be a lot easier if she was Greek, because New Jersey is a lot closer to New York than California.
Hazel had never heard of Gotham before, and she just hummed when Lilia said this, and then after some explanations, Lilia was being whisked away to the fifth cohort. Later, when she asks Frank about this city in New Jersey, Frank shakes his head in sympathy.
“Gotham, huh?” he says, scratching his chin. “That’s a tough break, poor kid. Well, she’s safe here, at least.”
At the time, Hazel had been so consumed with her life that while she took a mental note of this, the information glided over her. She had much more pressing matters than to worry about where a new recruit came from.
One of those matters were, of course, the stables. The pegasus without their wings were being well taken care of, but it was a hard adjustment for them. The Vulcan kids were working together on some sort of mechanical wings for them, but it wasn’t going well. The materials were either too heavy or too light, or they didn’t stay on with takeoff.
It makes Hazel’s heart hurt. The cruelty of people was never a changing thing. As sadistic as it was, Hazel would appreciate that. Some things never changed, even if it made her cry in sympathy for these poor creatures.
A few weeks into Spring, Hazel visits the stables to check on the pegasi. She’s using her only down time of the day, which is her lunch break. Normally, she’d spend it with Frank, but she didn’t want to talk to him right now.
She wasn’t avoiding him, necessarily, but there had been some discussions as of late that she didn’t want to get into, at least not while she was trying to talk. She had so many more important things to worry about right now, such as setting up her failsafe symptom for demigod orphans.
Julia was to thank for that.
Demigod orphans were not common, but they weren’t rare, either. All demigods of all ages were welcomed at Camp Jupiter, that has and will always be true. The oldest ones did just fine, but the younger ones, like Julia, that was an issue. As much as Terminus cared for the girl, he obviously couldn’t actually raise her. They had found her a foster family, but it hadn’t been easy.
There wasn’t an official system when it came to that kind of thing. Hazel had spent her entire morning going over the specifics about her plans with the others, and then she was due in the afternoon to oversee some physical rebuilds of the camp.
Safe to say, she wants to eat her lunch in peace, without worrying about upsetting her boyfriend. She takes a sandwich with her and brings it to the stables. To her surprise, she sees Lilia, on a stool, outside one of the doors, quietly eating a sandwich herself.
The girl looks up when she hears Hazel’s footsteps, and she gets to her feet. “I’m sorry,” she says quickly, looking as if she was waiting for Hazel to start yelling at her. “I just didn’t feel like eating with the others today, and no one usually bothers me here, and-”
“You’re fine,” Hazel reassures the young girl, and pulls out a stool to sit across from her. She holds up her own sandwich. “I didn’t feel like eating with others, either.”
They share a smile and for the first time, Hazel takes a good look at her. Lilia is skinny and holds herself with all the awkwardness of any other 12 year old. She was cute though, in that way you could tell she’d be once she got out of the awkward stage.
“Can I ask you something?” Hazel suddenly asks, intrigued by this young girl who reminded her so much of herself.
“Sure!” Lilia chirps, before she blushes. “Um, I mean. Yes. Of course.”
“Stables are not exactly a highly sought after, respected job,” Hazel says. “Why here? Why not help out growing crops, or you know, any of the other agriculture fields?”
Right away, Hazel knows she misstepped. Lilia goes stiff, and she suddenly downcasts her eyes, picking at her sandwich. “Um. It’s kind of embarrassing.” It comes out mumbled.
“I won’t judge,” Hazel promises.
Lilia inhales and continues to pick at the crust, not looking at Hazel. It would be considered rude, if Hazel actually cared about that kind of thing. “Um, I mean, I could. I’m good at it, but. I’m.” Lilia pauses, taking another big inhale. “I’m kind of scared of flowers and gardening. Well, vines, mostly, but all of it.”
It is . . . peculiar. Hazel admits that she is probably silent for too long, trying to comprehend and make sense of what was just said.
“I know,” Lilia says darkly, rolling her eyes. “A daughter of Ceres scared of agriculture? How funny, right? The fates sure have a wicked sense of humor, but I imagine they’ve never been to Gotham, have they?” Here, Lilia shakes her head, sitting up a bit straighter. “No one here has, so really, they don’t get a say in what they think about me, especially if they’ve never been strangled by a vine or gotten flower pollened before. Maybe then they’d understand why I'm so scared of gardening. That’s a real thing, by the way, but it’s not as bad as the fear gas, or gods forbid, the sex pollen.”
It’s a long tirade, almost like a confession, only it’s spit in anger and frustration. Lilia won’t even look at Hazel and all Hazel can do is sit there and try to make sense of it all. Truthfully, Hazel doesn’t recognize half of what Lilia said.
“I’m sorry,” Hazel says slowly, and her lunch now sits long forgotten in her hand. “I don’t understand, Lilia. These things happen in Gotham?”
“Oh yeah. All the time. But Poison Ivy caught me in her vines when I was a little kid, so she specifically scares me.” Lilia sighs. “It’s not fair. She suddenly goes from villain to antihero and we’re all just supposed to ignore her evil past? Because now she’s shacked up with Harley Quinn? It ain’t fair, I’ll tell ya that.”
A bit of an accent slips out, which Lilia immediately notices because she blushes and clears her throat. Hazel barely even registers it though, focused on words like “villain” and “antihero”. The thing is, Hazel isn’t sure if this is just another one of those common knowledge things that everyone knows but her, or something else. She doesn’t really want to find out.
“I’m sorry,” she tells Lilia, and she is sympathetic towards the girl. “I know a thing about fearing your own powers. Did you know I used to be cursed?”
Hazel tells Lilia all about her curse and her past, but her mind is elsewhere. Lilia looks honored to have someone like Hazel sharing so much of her personal life with her, and Hazel finds she quite likes this weird stable girl.
Later, after all her duties are done for the day and she can spend the rest of her night however she pleases, she meets Frank in his own personal quarters, and when he opens the door, she blurts out, “What do you know about Gotham?”
Frank just blinks at her before scratching his head. “Well. It’s a city in New Jersey and people there are just crazy, Hazel. Crazy doesn’t even describe them. More like mad. People there are mad.”
He opens the door, and the next hour is spent with Hazel getting a run down of this one really weird city in New Jersey that is overrun with incompetent police, vigilantes dressed as bats and birds, and the most evil yet comical villains you’d ever meet.
“And what’s crazy,” Frank says with a shake of his head, pushing the popcorn bowl closer to Hazel, though she doesn’t feel like eating, “is that nobody in that city seems to stay dead! It’s like, the villains sometimes disappear for a while and it seems like they died, but they always come back. And same with the heroes! It’s kind of a running joke.”
“How do you know all of this?” Hazel asks, in a fog, her brain trying to put together the words “dead” and “come back”. “You’re Canadian.”
“Well yeah but-” Frank shrugs his shoulders and tosses some popcorn up in the air, then catches it with his mouth. “It's always in the news so it is kinda hard to ignore. There’s always an escaped asylum patient or the entire city is being gassed with weird flower goop. There’s always something. What brought this on, by the way?”
“The new stable girl,” Hazel answers on autopilot. Her brain has latched onto this strange city and she feels like there is still so much she doesn’t know, something that she’s not getting. “She’s from Gotham.”
“Oh yeah.” Frank nods. “Yeah. It really is a tough break. But hey, she’s safe here. She can leave that city behind and have a fresh start.”
“A fresh start,” Hazel agrees.
Hazel can’t get Gotham out of her head. It’s so strange, but she latched herself onto this weird city. Everything she learns about it just pushes her to know more and more.
The most interesting thing was that Frank was right. Nobody ever seemed to stay dead in this city, and yet, no one ever bats an eye. The internet (from what she can gather, because she’s still not the best at using it) has a lot of theories about this. Most of them say that nobody actually dies, just disappears, and that’s why they come back. Others say the city is cursed, and that’s why they keep coming back.
Can an entire city be cursed? Hazel can’t let the thought go. She talks more with Lilia, who is happy to share some aspects, but locks up on others. Lilia happily talks about the vigilantes, the ones she calls “the good guys” but she doesn’t like to speak about the villains, not even the now turned antiheroes.
She’ll happily discuss the gang wars and the different parts and territories of the city, but she won’t discuss what fear toxin is or what that “sex pollen" does. Apparently, she’s been hit by flower pollen before, but not the sex kind, which is a relief to hear.
Hazel just wants to know more and more. Of course, that’s when she starts having dreams. As a demigod, she is certainly no stranger to weird dreams, but they’ve always been of her past life. She’s never dreamt of strangers before but she starts to now.
Masked heroes in suits fight off deranged clowns in her dreams and she wakes up gasping for air after each dream. There’s one who appears the most frequently. He is huge and tall and wears a red helmet. For a “good guy”, he’s quite violent. He leaves his enemies half dead. Some nights he works alone, and other nights, he’ll cooperate with the other suits, but Hazel can tell they’re not exactly teammates. Just people he works with for a common goal.
Every time she dreams of this weird city, there’s this weird pull Hazel just can not explain. Then she has her most vivid dream yet.
The red hood guy is beaten half to death with a crowbar. It’s weird. It feels like deja vu, but that can’t be possible. In her dream, the red helmet guy is smaller, younger, and he’s wearing a completely different costume. She can’t see his face in either suit, but yet she just knows it’s the same person.
And she watches, as a ghostly onlooker, as a crowbar comes down on him over and over and over, until he dies. It’s violent. It’s terrifying and Hazel screams and cries but she can not move. All she can do is watch as this boy who is not much older than her dies.
And then her dream changes and this boy wakes up alive and Hazel screams herself horse, waking herself up, but almost instantly, the face of this boy is gone and all she can remember are scared, blue eyes.
This dream happens again and again. She allows it to happen only three more times before she’s throwing a bag together. It’s the middle of the night and she’s not thinking clearly but she knows this is something she has to do.
She sends an Iris Message to her brother, who thankfully picks up even though he shouldn’t be up at this hour. (She’ll have to worry about this later.)
When Nico sees her face, he immediately jumps to full alertness. “What’s wrong?” he demands, always ready to be an overprotective brother. “Are you hurt? Is the camp under attack?”
“I need to go to Gotham,” Hazel says, and dumps some mortal money into the pocket of her duffle bag and catalogs everything else she’ll need.
“It’s the middle of the night,” Nico says, as if Hazel does not know. “Wait. Gotham? As in New Jersey?”
“Yes,” Hazel answers. Her heart will just not calm down, consistently pounding against her chest. “I need to go right now.”
“Hazel, slow down, you’re not making any sense.” Nico waits until Hazel takes three large deep breaths and sits down back onto her bed before he cautiously asks, “What’s in Gotham?”
“A boy.” Hazel pauses. “I think he’s a man now, though. I’m not sure and I don’t know The Google well enough to ask.”
“It’s just Google,” Nico corrects, as if he wasn’t also a child from another decade before the internet. “But okay. Back up. Did you meet this boy online, or something?”
“What?” Hazel demands, incredulous. “No. In my dreams, I met him in my dreams.” And then she realizes how she sounds and clears her throat. It was still so late-or maybe early-and she was suddenly so tired. “I have to get to Gotham, Nico. I can’t explain it but you have to trust me. Please. I really need to go.”
Nico is silent for a very long time. He takes in her duffle bag, her wild expression, her messy hair, the alarm clock barring the time. “Okay,” he finally says. “I’ll take you to Gotham, but not until the morning, okay? You need to go back to sleep.”
Hazel doesn’t feel nearly as relieved as she thought she would, because the thought of actually being in Gotham doesn’t calm her in the slightest. But she nods and she closes her eyes, and she says, “Thank you, Nico.”
And she tries to go back to sleep, but she’s worried that the blue eyed boy will haunt her again, and Hazel, who for so long was haunting the present as a girl from the past, is not used to being the one who is haunted.