let's be alone, together. letos blitz.

[✨ zozo.]

To be Calypso Leto is to be lonely.

From your own doing. So terrible to everyone that they leave, drifting, letting the tide that is your malice sweep them away without a fight. Thea and Tags live their own lives now, no longer girls on a cliffside watching a tsunami sweep away your home. Nino learned how to deal with loss many years ago - you imagine losing your friendship is no great harm. And he, well. He left on his own accord.

You don't blame him. You don't blame your sister, either. It is what it means to be a Leto girl, pushing everyone away. To be cruel and to be ungodly awful is a curse you both carry and she found a way out.

Doesn't mean she wasn't awful, right 'til the end. Doesn't mean it didn't hurt any less to watch her go again and again and again.

Nico stays. You can't understand why. You cracked the case, freed a bunch of orphans, said your goodbyes to Wade Hailsham and let him discover a life he never thought he'd have. Didn't stop one of them from throwing themselves into the Games anyway. You learned that even when choice is there some people choose to die anyway - it's all they've known, to destroy those around them.

Even when she's gone, Perdita's choice still rips through her like something else.

So you sit on the beach and project your memories, three children with two hearts between them. Artemus, whole. You and your sister, half a heart left for each-other. She teases you and you bite your tongue, biding your time. You watch them run, chasing each-other with seaweed and sticks and laughing.

Perdita is the first to grow tired, trailing off down the shore. Arty calls out for her - you shrug it off, "Leave her," you instruct. "She always comes back."

She always comes back, until she doesn't.

[umber vivuus 12b 🥀 [dars]]

ARTEMUS
LETO

He preferred the beach when it was like this, all overcast and muggy and quiet. They found themselves down there a lot these days, sometimes alone, sometime with a cat to distract their hands. But now, and always, it was just the two of them. Last of the Letos, his hands digging themselves into the sand while she saw ghosts of things that she could only wish were there.

He wondered if he was one of them, but he wouldn't have been mad if he wasn't. He was used to living in the shadows. One sister whose final moments were being broadcast in re-runs and featured on Saddest Games Deaths podcasts in the Capitol, another whose face was still pinned on the refrigerator for single-handedly bringing down the Hailsham Institute. He was just Arty; that's all he'd ever been. The calm waters that his sisters always swam to when they started to drown in each other's storms.

"Nah," he said, leaning a head onto her shoulder, "She's really gone for good this time, Sis."

All of them were, in a way.

[✨ zozo.]

Arty is a comfort, an anchor. Were it not for him, for Nico, Caly thinks she may let the sea take her. It already stole her grief, screaming it into the depths months ago. She thought it might have helped, hiding her mourning in the ocean where nobody could find it. But instead she felt empty, like she had lost something she couldn't get back.

The ocean takes, and takes, and takes. Her grief, her pride, her home. Some days she wishes she was swept away in the tide that took their home, but then all that would be left of the Letos would be Arty.

Perhaps it would be for the best. Better for him to be rid of both terrible sisters than left resting his shoulder on the most wicked. How cruel, she thinks, to be left alone with her.

"I know," it is a cruel reminder said in the softest way. "It's just hard to admit that she's not coming back."