WHAT: Katou tries making nice with Hazel by showing her how to spraypaint WHERE: Outside, near their place WHEN: Early last week WARNINGS: Not really STATUS: Complete
Katou hadn’t meant to make Hazel mad, but he’d apologized (well, sort of. He hadn’t actually said sorry, but he’d come close enough), and he thought it was dumb as all hell that she was still sulking over a stupid joke he’d made.
Except, well, he had to live with her. And he liked her, for the most part. Even if she was being totally oversensitive right now. He’d been waiting for her to just get over it, but he was at the point now where he realized he probably was gonna have to make some overture to get in her good books. He’d been stumped for what though, right up until Persephone had mentioned that Hazel was an artist.
Which is why he was now standing at her bedroom door with a bag filled with cans of spraypaint. He knocked on her door with the back of his knuckles.
“Oi, girlie. What are your thoughts on graffiti?”
She was probably too much of a nerd to go for the real deal, but he had a back-up in place if that was true.
Hazel didn’t personally feel not wanting to cause harm to people and feeling the way she did about it when she’d already expressed how she felt about what happened in her childhood. She loved her mother, but she had never really pushed past the guilt that she’d forced on her by making her do the things they had. She’d been too young to live with the things that she had and yet, she didn’t have the choice not to.
She hadn’t necessarily been avoidant, but she’d kept busy when she wasn’t at school. It was easy because she had horses to take care of and Hannibal and general things to do around.
Looking up from what felt like reading the same sentence over and over for too long, Hazel focused on Katou. “I’ve seen it around when we’ve been traveling.” Was the response. She took in the bag of cans, not sure if he’d already done the graffiti or was intending to. “Why?” She could act like she wasn’t sure anyway.
“‘Sephone mentioned you liked to do art shit,” Katou said, shrugging, feigning nonchalance. “I thought maybe we could, you know, paint some shit.”
Hazel was quiet for a moment. It was probably some way of apologizing or at least she guessed it was since she wasn’t sure why else he’d have gone to Persephone about her interests. “I mostly do landscapes or the occasional pet portrait,” she said after a minute, choosing to set her book aside. “Dad and I made an art studio a while back in one of the rooms.” It was a present sort of. But she didn’t know if he knew about it or not. She was in there sometimes, but usually only when she had free time, which hadn’t been a lot lately with all her making extra work for herself.
“We didn’t have graffiti when I grew up. At least not in Louisiana. I never saw it.” She stood then, moving to grab a hair tie to pull her hair back. “So I never tried it. Is it hard?”
“That’s just ‘cause you never looked for it,” Katou said with a wink. “Anyplace you got walls and bored teens, you’re gonna have graffiti. It ain’t that hard though.” He was already turning and heading outside. “You ever work do anything with spray cans?”
Hazel looked at him for a moment. “I was born in 1928.” But it probably wasn’t as obvious as it had been when she first showed up in the 2000s with a lot of confusion and more than her fair share of blackouts. But that had been a different thing. “I mean, I guess I could have missed it, but I don’t think so.” She would have to look it up and see if there was anything. She didn’t remember it, but anything was possible. “No. I’ve never used spray cans.”
“Really?” Katou asked. He frowned, giving Hazel a once-over. “I’d’ve never guessed. You don’t look a day over twelve. Guess if you ain’t ever used them before, then you oughtta get some practice before you move onto the big leagues.”
Practice Katou could provide, at least. He led her outside, passed the gardens, where he’d strung up a large, heavy canvas between a couple trees.
“It’s easier if you use stencils, and like, if you wanna tag a building or something stencils are a whole lot quicker. But I didn’t feel like making any stencils for this, so we’re gonna freehand this shit. Here.” He tossed a bandana at her, and then tied a similar one across the lower half of his face.
Hazel rolled her eyes. “I died when I was 13. But Nico found me in Asphodel and brought me back. That was…2009?” Sometime around then. It was a bit unsettling to think of how much time passed. “And I’m seventeen.”
She followed after Katou, studying the canvas he had set up. She couldn’t help but picture what it could be covered with, but she didn’t stress herself about it. Maybe it would be something interesting. She caught the bandana effortlessly, demigod reflexes taking over almost immediately. It didn’t always help, but most of the time it did. She followed suit with the bandana, feeling rather like Nico was laughing at her somewhere, but it was fine. “So tagging is just spray painting a building?”
“Kinda,” Katou said, frowning. “It’s like your signature, I guess. So a lotta people write their names or whatever. Me, I…” he shook the spray can he had in his hand, taking a little pleasure of the pea rattling noisily inside the canister, “used this.”
It didn’t take him long to spraypaint the cartoon monkey, bandana covering its mouth; he was well practiced with drawing it. This one was flashing Hazel the Victory sign, its index and middle finger forming a V.
“You wanna make sure the nozzle aint pointed at you, since there ain’t nothing worse than a face full of spraypaint.” Unless you were huffing, he guessed, but he was pretty sure Hazel wasn’t into that. “But other than that, just, you know, play around and figure out what works.”
Hazel watched as he spray painted the monkey with the bandana. “It looks just like you,” she teased, taking a moment to look at him and then back to the monkey before nodding again. She bet Frank could turn into a monkey. Maybe not that one, but there was always some weird possibility.
Still she took his warning about making sure the nozzle was pointed away from her, carefully inspecting it before putting her finger anywhere near it to make sure. She didn’t really know what to paint at first, trying to think of something particularly Roman before she remembered the tattoo on her arm. Pluto’s mark. She pushed her sleeve up slightly before trying, very poorly because she jumped a bit when she first started, to mimic her tattoo minus the bar signaling her one year with the legion. “It’s not great,” she admitted, but shrugged. She wasn’t great at drawing when she started either or most things she’d had to learn, but if she could make it through training with Lupa, who constantly threatened to eat her at any sign of weakness while also having blackouts any time she tried to think of her life before, she could do this.
“Naw, the monkey’s way better looking,” Katou answered glibly.
He tilted his head, looking at Hazel’s drawing. If he squinted and tilted his head, it almost looked like a minimalist dancer, arms raised above the dot of her head, and so next to it Katou drew another dancer in the same style, one arm raised above its head and the other bent below, a leg bent like a figure four, and then he sat back so Hazel could go again.
Hazel glanced at him for a moment, trying to figure out if this was an honest feeling or a joke. If it was honest, she might just show some concern, but it didn’t seem overly serious, so she let it go.
She watched him spraypaint something almost similar, but it looked more like a dancer than Pluto’s symbol. Though, the more she looked at it, the more it did kind of look like a dancer. She considered this for a moment, trying to figure out what she should do next. She tried again with Pluto’s symbol, but made the arms a little lower down and made two lines instead of one. “My dad would probably have something to say about this,” she said after a moment. “The one back home, not here.” She felt the need to clarify because she did call Hades Dad now and it probably would get confusing. “Pluto, not Hades.” She’d only met him a couple times, but almost every god or goddess was more serious as a Roman.
Katou had, in fact, been serious. He’d spent a long time hating his looks; his inconsiderate eyes, pale skin, thin lips that, without a doubt, showed him to be the progeny of a man that he’d only ever seen in a photograph. The reason why the man who raised him, the man he’d thought was his father for so long, hated him so much. He wasn’t handsome, he knew that, as much as he liked to proclaim that he was. But he’d also grown to accept his appearance. It was his. If he wanted to change it, he could have with a thought. He had to hold the image of himself in his mind at all times, each hair, eyelash, fingernail, lest he become a faceless doll, and if there was anything he’d wanted to change, he easily could have. Maybe he would have, once, before he’d died. Before Setsuna had helped him become someone he didn’t hate quite so much.
“Well, he ain’t here so I guess he won’t get a chance,” Katou said. He glanced at what they had so far, shook a can of green spraypaint, and sprayed the area above it. He emptied the plastic bag that the spray cans had been in, and used it to press into the green paint to create a nearly marbled effect.
“How’s that work, anyway? With the not-your-dad-but-kinda-your-dad thing, I mean?”
Hazel had struggled enough with her appearance, but she’d really only worried because of the comments she’d gotten from other kids. She’d mostly grown up in the 30s and the world in general wasn’t that kind to people that looked like her. But she had gathered confidence over time and Frank was her biggest hype man. She’d made it through too much and she knew that she had something about her, so she never worried about it.
“Yeah.” She remembered his suit most of all. If she stared closely, she could see the souls trying to escape. In that way, it was like being in the Underworld…and she could understand it keenly even if she’d never tried to escape until Nico came along and got her.
She watched as he made the spraypaint change, looking more like marble. “It’s a little weird. I can see the differences between Hades and Pluto. Pluto is…” She paused, trying to think of the way to explain it. “He is more warlike, more militarized…but sad.” She could remember his expression, the way he’d pleaded with her mother not to leave and go to Alaska. She remembered all of the negative things she’d felt about him, too. “Hades is sad sometimes, I think, but it’s different. I don’t know. He’s different even from our Hades. I’ve only met him once when we were fighting the giants.” Shortly followed by the harrowing adventure of being slapped across the world on a boat that was quickly falling apart around them. She shuddered, muttering something about hating boats before shaking herself out of the thought. “The simple thing is just a general weirdness.”
“Yeah, Hades does seem sad,” Katou agreed. A gentle kind of sadness though. He reminded Katou a lot of Uriel, the angel of death, the man who’d built Katou’s body in Hades. The place was called the Underworld in Hades’ world, not Hades, and Katou thought it was different, Hades being the place angelic souls fell to when they died, Eden being for human souls. But overseeing the realms of the dead was probably enough to make anyone melancholy if they were at it long enough, no matter what kind of souls wound up there.
“This Pluto guy alright?” Katou asked. He didn’t really like the way Hazel talked about him, when she did, and her using warlike to describe him made Katou think that maybe he was violent as well. Then again, maybe she meant warlike like the Archangel Michael, who was violent but also a complete idiot.
Hazel conjured up his face for a minute in her mind, focusing on everything. “They’re gods,” she said after a moment with a shrug. “All of them have something they’ve done that’s been terrible. But I’d take him over Juno any day. Hera. She’s the one that got us all caught up in the first mess we were in.” She rolled her eyes as she thought about it. “I didn’t know Pluto was Pluto when I met him, but he gave me my first set of colored pencils before we went to Alaska. I think he knew what could happen, but…Mom didn’t really want to listen at that point.”
She glanced down for a minute. “The Romans were more focused on battle and war-like strategies. So it reflected in how the gods were imagined. Not that the Greeks didn’t know how to fight, but it’s just…different, I guess.”
“Pretty sure everyone’s done something that’s terrible whether they’re a god or not,” Katou said, shrugging. Most of the humans he knew, at least, had done something awful. Definitely every single angel he’d ever met had. Maybe people with immortality did tend to have more skeletons shoved in their closet, but maybe that was only because everyone would end up with a few if they lived long enough. Katou definitely hadn’t lived very long, and he had more regrets than he knew what to do with.
“Huh. I don’t really know much about them Greek or Roman gods,” Katou admitted. He sure as hell didn’t know who Juno was. “I watched Hercules a couple years ago, which is about the extent of my knowledge on the subject. You tell anyone that, by the way, and I’ll kick your ass.” He frowned a little. “But I guess it would make sense if the gods are all war-like that the people would be too. Do they like, fight each other? The Greek and Roman gods?”
Hazel guessed that was true, but she’d been at the receiving end of the gods bullshit since she was young. But there were things she’d done. Things they’d already discussed. “I think being immortal makes you forget what being mortal is like.” Not that the majority of the gods had been mortal, but a few had. Apollo had once before his most recent stint. He seemed less insufferable when she saw him last. Even if he had delivered one of her best friend’s dead bodies to the camp. Jason had chosen that. Big damn heroes. She was surrounded by them.
Hazel let out a sigh when he mentioned Hercules. That guy was an asshole, too. “I won’t tell anyone, but he’s definitely not a role model.” The next question, however. “They are like…two sides of the same coin. Almost every god has a Greek and Roman side. I’ve seen two sides warring with each other inside one body. It was a mess for a minute. We managed to get the Athena Parthanos back to Camp Half-blood, though. So I think both sides are okay with each other now. We don’t really see the gods until something bad is about to happen, though. Or it’s already happening.”
“Kinda like how every single adult forgets what it’s like being a kid?” Katou asked, raising an eyebrow. He’d met enough adults who liked to act like anyone younger than 20 had never experienced any sort of hardship.
Katou frowned. All of that sounded way above his paygrade. “Sounds like you’re better off not seeing them much. Hope none of ‘em decide to show up here.” Not if it was just going to cause headaches. “You know, except for Hades and Persephone.”
They were alright. He liked them both a lot more than he’d ever say aloud.
Hazel smiled. “I don’t think I even know what being a kid actually is half the time.” She’d spent the larger part of childhood fighting monsters or doing something that didn’t distinctly feel like childhood activity. She had Sammy, sure, but things weren’t exactly the same and she wondered sometimes what her life might have been like if she hadn’t been a demigod. It probably didn’t matter, though.
“I don’t miss them too much. I miss my friends, though.” She had friends here, but she missed Jason, Frank, Percy, Annabeth, Nico, Piper, and Leo. Some of the others, too. The last she remembered, so many had died. Maybe they could live. “Thalia’s been nice to have around, though. Even if we weren’t super close back home. At least someone understands when I curse Juno under my breath.” And they had Capture the Flag.
“But Dad’s not so bad…and Persephone doesn’t seem likely to turn anyone into a flower in anger, so that’s nice.”
“Yeah, me too,” Katou said, a little awkwardly. He missed Setsuna a lot, and he found himself thinking of Kira well… nearly all the time. Kira was dead, Katou’d watched him die, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t someday appear in Vallo, and he wondered sometimes what he would do if he did. And Uriel.
He shook his head as if he could shake them out of it. There was no point in thinking of any of them; the chances of any of them showing up here wasn’t likely.
“She did turn some of those creepy fuckers into trees though,” Katou said, shooting Hazel a grin. He’d been pretty damn impressed by that. “Did the Persephone in your world turn people into flowers for shits and giggles?”
Hazel gave him a small smile. She could sort of understand the reaction to missing people and she was at least glad she didn’t have prophetic dreams about home. She didn’t want to know if anything dangerous from home.
“Well, that’s fine with me.” She couldn’t change things into other things. She could paint illusions, but the other person had to believe it. “She turned Nico into a flower. He told me about it. I don’t think our Persephone is exactly a fan of Dad’s other kids. I guess it’s fair. But we didn’t do it. But that doesn’t stop anyone, really.”
Something flashed in Katou’s eyes at the mention of the other Persephone not liking Hades’ other kids, something like pain, and he turned away from Hazel toward the canvas, hopefully before she noticed it.
“I can leave this up for a little bit if you wanted to practice,” Katou said after a moment. “You can do some pretty sick shit with spraypaint once you get the hang of it.”
Hazel noticed that he looked away, but she wouldn’t bring it up. She gave him quick, curious look, but turned her attention back to the spraypainted canvas. She wasn’t entirely sure that spraypainting was going to be something that she did too much of, but maybe as a sort of way to get to know Katou a little better.
“I might,” she said quietly. “But maybe later? I eventually have to make horse rounds. Make sure everyone is still doing okay. But maybe we can do some more stuff sometime? Come with a hint of an idea and see how it turns out? Once I’ve practiced more.”
Katou nodded. That was good enough for him. “Well get you painting the sides of buildings soon enough, girlie,” he said, shooting her a toothy grin.