Archive of Our Own ^beta

“You haven’t been sleeping, again.”

Nico hums, eyes fluttering shut under Will’s gentle touch. His thumbs are calloused — years of endless determination with a bow and a guitar — and tickle the sensitive skin of his eyebags, but he welcomes the feeling. He goes so far as to lean into his touch, grinning when he hears Will’s fond huff.

“Why haven’t you come to me?”

“It’s just started,” Nico promises, turning his head to press a kiss to Will’s palm. He smiles, although it doesn’t reach his eyes, worry swimming in lakes of blue as he continues to gently brush his thumb just above Nico’s cheekbone.

“Still.” He exhales deeply, squeezing his eyes shut for a moment; when he looks back over his expression is urgent. “You worry me, darlin’.”

“You’re a worrier.”

“Still,” Will repeats. He presses their foreheads together. “Can I help? I want to help.”

“Hm.” He takes Will’s closeness as an opportunity, wrapping both hands around his hips and tugging him forward, gently, until Will gets the hint, wrapping his arms around him in turn and clinging tightly. He lifts his head and tucks it back into the crook of his neck. Nico tips forward just slightly enough to press his lips in the dip behind his ear, lingering, more of a press to skin than a kiss; somewhere more to touch.

“I want you to sleep well,” Will admits, voice small, almost lost in the wrinkles of Nico’s heavy sweater. “I want — ease. I want you to eat ‘till you’re full and smile when you feel like it and sleep through the night. And be healthy, and feel strong, and —”

“I know, vita,” Nico interrupts softly. Will’s hold tightens, and his does in turn. “I know.”

“Let me spend the night.”

“…Okay.”

He feels the bob of Will’s throat as he swallows, feels the slightest tremor across his broad shoulders. “I’ll keep watch. That way you can — you can —”

“Thank you.”

Will nods. Nico pretends he doesn’t feel the wetness that drips onto his neck, doesn’t feel the way he shakes. He knows he feels — useless, sometimes, when Nico is plagued by nightmares, when he struggles. It frustrates him not to be able to fix it. Nico doesn’t know how to explain that it will never be fixed — but he helps. He always helps.

“You’re like morphine personified,” he teases — the closest he can come. “Relieving, addicting, sweet, and deadly in high doses.”

As Nico had hoped, Will snorts, swatting him gently on the shoulder before straightening. He sniffles, once, swiping the tears under his eyes.

“That doesn’t even make sense, you loser.”

Nico grins back unashamedly. “Doesn’t need to. I met my goal.”

He’s rewarded with a slight pinking of Will’s cheek, even as he rolls his eyes; clearly, obviously pleased. Nico can’t help stretching to his tiptoes and pressing a long, lingering kiss to his lips.

“I love you,” he murmurs.

“Love you too, baby.”

“Nico,” Will said, softly.

Nico hummed.

“Nico,” he said again. His voice was no more urgent, but instead almost breathy, half a sigh. The weight of Will’s head in his lap grew heavier. He set down the block of wood he was carving, sliding both hands into golden hair, instead.

“Yes?”

Will’s eyes were half-lidded, lethargic, blinking slowly. He met Nico’s fingers when one hand slid down his neck, his shoulders, to grasp it, squeezing gently.

“Kiss me,” he requested, voice soft as strawberry blossoms.

A light, late-June breeze blew through the valley, rustling the leaves of the tree they say under and carrying Will’s voice away. Nico heard him, anyway, watched the curve of his lips and the shape of his teeth as he murmured the words, eyes dusk-blue and dark and meeting his, head-on.

Hands shaking, Nico rested them gently on the sides of Will’s face, palms on his cheeks, thumbs stroking the soft line of his jaw.

Slowly, he bent down, pausing a hair’s breadth away from warm, freckled skin, breath tickling the light, delicate hairs of his eyebrows and making his eyes flutter shut. After two breaths, three, four, shaking in his lungs, he pressed his lips, dry and lingering, to the bridge of his nose, the skin between his eyebrows.

“Like that?”

“Yes,” Will breathed, chest rising slowly as the winter sun. “Again.”

Hardly lifting his mouth enough to make space between them, he followed the contours of Will’s nose, leaning to the left and hovering over the apple of his left cheek, sun-kissed and heated. He pressed his lips there, too, giving him no time to speak before moving to his other cheek and kissing there, just as softly.

This time, his voice was heavier, breathing more laboured.

“Like that?”

The cooing of the mourning doves and distant camper laughter should have drowned out the sound of Will’s breath, but Nico heard it anyway, the sharpness of it, the quickness of it.

“Yes,” he whispered. His throat bobbed as he swallowed. “Another. Please.”

Nico’s hands were trembling openly, now, and the slightest of shudders wracked his frame — Will’s voice was deep and wrecked, like river rocks. He had never heard it like this, and he had to press his hands closer to Will’s skin — if that was at all possible — to reserve himself.

He moved slowly over the swell of Will’s jaw, brushing his own thumb in the process. He hovered over Will’s mouth, feeling more than hearing his breath hitch, and pressed a long, lingering kiss to the dip just below his bottom lip.

“Like that?” he whispered, voice hoarse.

“Yes,” came Will’s shaky response. One of his hands came to rest on top of Nico’s, overheated palms burning a brand over his knuckles. “One more.”

As slowly as he dared, Nico dragged his mouth along the crest and swell of his lip, lingering at the corner of his mouth and kissing the peak of it, open mouthed, near frozen —

“Please,” Will begged, “Nico, please —”

— and when he finally pressed their lips together, nose brushing his chin, he could have keened in relief; he was bowled over by the intensity of it, by the way Will surged up and tilted his face and gasped into his mouth, as if this was the first time they’d kissed instead of four hundredth. Nico moved the hand not trapped under Will’s for rest on his chest, palm to his heart, feeling it gallop and speed faster with every second they spent pressed close together. Nico was convinced he could taste Will’s devotion on the roof of his mouth, suck the blinding light of him from his molars. He breathed heavily, hardly focused on it, hardly focused on anything except the smell of him and taste of him, the scratch of his nails in his scalp.

“Don’t stop,” Will pleaded between breaths, and Nico thought the Earth Mother could rise again and I would not move.

He said, “Would never,” and pressed closer, and committed every one of Will’s gasps to memory.

“Oh, gods, it’s late.”

It’s the movement rather than the words that draw Nico’s attention; Will has been muttering to himself for hours. He usually does. It’s odd for him to stay quiet.

“Hm?”

“Curfew,” Will says shortly, strained as he flips upside down to store his book with the others under his bed. Nico grips his ankle, grinning, the dozens of times his boyfriend has landed sprawled on the creaky floorboards flashing through his mind. (He’s always so whiny after, embarrassment making his cheeks flush. Sometimes Nico just wants to — squeeze him. He’s such a klutz.)

“I could stay here,” Nico offers once he’s upright again. He tries for his most casual expression, leaning back onto Will’s pillows like it’s nothing, no big deal. He hears Austin’s snickering from the bottom bunk and subtly stretches down to kick him in the shoulder. “Might be easier.”

“I’ll walk you to your cabin. C’mon.”

Nico sighs, flipping his DS shut and climbing down ladder after him. Austin sticks his tongue out as Nico passes, so Nico flicks him on the head. Will watches them with a roll of his eyes.

“Teenagers,” he huffs.

Nico slips his hand in his. “You are fifteen years old.”

“In body. In spirit I am leagues beyond you. Sagacious. Wise. Enlightened. Uh —”

“Full of himself?” Nico offers. “Pigheaded? Conceited, perhaps.”

Will pouts. Nico laughs, slowing them down and leaning up to kiss it. He’s warm, even in the cool, late summer night, and he shudders when Nico slides his hand in his hair. His palms rest — hesitantly, as they always do, waiting for Nico’s hum of approval, waiting for him to set the pace — on his hips, fingers curling.

“Harpies,” Will mumbles against his lips. “Bad.”

“They’re afraid of me,” Nico dismisses. (It’s true. They are. It’s one of the many perks of being the son of Hades, he supposes, along with his knack for finding dark, private corners to drag Will into.)

“Yeah, but —”

“William. Può esso. Kiss me, before I lose my mind.”

He can feel Will’s smile against his mouth, feel his willpower — ha — dissolving.

“Yes, sir.”

“Good boy.”

As much as Will indulges Nico’s bossiness, grinning and saluting and letting Nico get away with things no one else would even push, he’s still Will. And after a few more minutes of Nico pushing the envelope, he sighs, pulling away, ignoring Nico’s huff and rolled eyes.

“C’mon,” he says softly.

Nico lets him tug them down the path to the Hades cabin, only dragging his feet a little bit. He resists the urge to sigh again — he doesn’t want Will getting guilty. He doesn’t actually mind Will’s whole thing about meeting curfew every night, despite his complete disregard for almost every other camp rule. He knows it has something to do with the example he tries so hard to set for his siblings, and besides — on nights where Nico really can’t sleep by himself, Will doesn’t hesitate. If he showed up pounding on the door of the Apollo cabin in two hours, wide eyed and wired, Will would have him ushered inside and layered in his lavender wash-scented blankets in minutes.

“Hey,” Will murmurs, sliding his hand down Nico’s arms to rest on his wrists, squeezing gently. “I love you.”

Nico smiles tiredly. “And I you, tesoro.”

He stands on his tiptoes and presses a soft, lingering kiss to the corner of Will’s mouth, smiling at his shiver, squeezing his hands twice before walking through the heavy stone doors. He watches out the one-way windows as Will lingers, grinning, hand pressed to the spot Nico kissed, before turning back and practically skipping to his own cabin.

Nico shakes his head. “Dweeb.”

His own smile makes his cheeks ache.

He doesn’t say anything as he sits down.

He makes noise — he doesn’t want to startle him. Not that Will would mind. Of all people, Will is the only one who laughs after he jumps, when Nico pops up next to him. Even his sister, even Reyna, even every other person who has known him forever: they jump, they press their hand to their chest. Maybe smile. Scowl, if Nico is pissing them off on purpose.

But Will laughs.

Every time.

“Hi, Nico,” he whispers into his knees, eyes squeezed shut. The laughter is a little more broken this time, a little more hurt, like it has to push through the tears clogging up his throat.

Nico hums, resting his cheek on his knees, watching him.

He looks good in the sunlight, even when he’s sad. His hair is braided, today, his favourite way to wear it and Nico’s favourite way to see it. Two French braid pigtails. The elastics tying them down have the little ghost charms Nico bought him as a joke last Halloween, that he treasures unironically. He picks distractedly at his dozens of woven friendship bracelets, nervously twisting his anklets around his finger until they’re so tight they cut off the circulation. He’s not wearing shoes. His Head Medic shirt clashes horribly with his hair, as usual, but the orange is — faded, almost. More sunset than neon, like it’s been in the wash so many times the colour has bled. The black lettering has almost completely worn away. The shirt is a size too big.

Lee’s.

He sniffles. “Sorry I wasn’t there for dinner. I hope you didn’t eat by yourself. You ate, right? You should eat. It worries me when you don’t.”

His hand shakes. He slides it into the grass to try and stop it, breathing slowly and deeply. It doesn’t work.

“Hey,” Nico murmurs, scooting closer. “Look at me.”

It takes a minute. When finally he peeks over the swell of his knees, his eyes are red-rimmed, tear tracks staining his freckled cheeks. Nico is reminded of streaks of red clouds of a rapid summer sunset. He tries for a smile, but it’s small, strained, and fades under Nico’s gaze. He’d look away again if Nico’s palm on his cheek didn’t hold him steady.

“You’re allowed to have hard days.”

Will shrugs. “I know.” He glances down. A new wave of wet drops from his eyes, and Nico swipes it away with his thumb, noticing as the action makes Will’s chin tremble.

“Do you?”

Will shrugs again. There’s a glassy look in his eyes that makes Nico ache. Sometimes it’s hard for him to remember how vulnerable Will is, how hurt. He tries so hard to stamp it down, and he has so much practice that he’s good at it. It’s hard to track when his shoulders droop at the end of his shifts, hard to notice the imperceptible flinches when someone tousles his hair, hard to look for the building frustration when his bullseye remains unpierced. Nico knows this is by design.

He wishes it wasn’t.

Swallowing his own knee jerk discomfort, he whispers, “You’ve done so much for me, you know that?” He leans forward and touches their foreheads together. It’s a little ridiculous, meeting his eyes from this angle — after a minute, a small smile twitches at Will’s lips, and Nico grins in victory. “You worked very hard to weasel your way into my life. Lucky for your persistent ass, that goes both ways. You can be sad in front of me. You can miss your brothers in front of me. You can be bitter in front of me. I promise, Will. I can handle it.”

“I don’t want you to see how often it happens,” Will admits in a small voice. “It’ll be harder to keep me around.”

Nico’s heart breaks.

“You are a leech,” he says firmly, pulling back to press a kiss to the bridge if his nose. He shakes Will’s head slightly, palms still pressed to either side of his face, voice stern. “My favourite leech, okay? You are stuck to me. I am keeping you around no matter how often you nag me about cardiovascular health and the perils of deep fried garbage. I am keeping you around even though you barge into my cabin at odd hours and pester me into helping you do stupid things. I am keeping you around even though you keep stealing my socks for reasons I will never understand.”

“They have little skulls on them,” Will mumbles.

“I know,” Nico says patiently. The smile on his face is so fond that he would be embarrassed, were he not full to bursting with affection. “That’s why I bought them, you little shit.”

He waits as Will weighs the words, as he twitches his hands, coming to terms with them. He tucks a flyaway hair behind his ear.

“You really like me even when I’m…like this?”

He stumbles over his words, scared in a way Nico doesn’t see from him. Hopeful, too, like he can scarcely believe Nico is still here, holding him as he cries. Nico vows to sit with him through a thousand more miserable days, until the fear is totally gone.

“I do. I promise.” He presses another kiss to the tip of Will’s nose. This time, it makes his face burn, and Nico grins.

“Okay.”

“Have some faith in me, Sunshine.” He presses another kiss, to his cheek this time, and another. “Okay?”

Will smiles at him, small and sad and absolutely breathtaking, radiant. He leans into the next kiss Nico presses to his temple.

“I have all the faith in the world in you, Nico.”

“My back is killing me.”

Nico snorts. “That’s what you get, doofus. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.”

He doesn’t have to look over to know Will is pouting. He can practically taste it in the air, it’s so potent.

“I don’t know when you stopped loving me.”

“Hm, I dunno.” Nico closes his book and glances down at his dramatic-ass boyfriend, sprawled on the bench next to him, wide-eyed and pitiful. When he notices Nico’s full attention finally on him, those baby blues grow round with hope, and he purses his lips for a kiss. Nico indulges him with a huff of laughter and rolled eyes, holding his hair back as he leans in. “Maybe when I told you not to lift the giant box of bandages by yourself and you didn’t listen. Might’ve been around then.”

“I could’ve handled it,” Will grumbles. He reaches out and grabs hold of Nico’s cheeks, holding him when he tries to pull away. Nico can’t say he minds.

“Mhm. So your back is killing you for unrelated reasons, then.”

“Exactly. You get me, babe.”

“You’re ridiculous.”

Will’s grin is wide and toothy under his own.

“You love me.”

And Nico has never been able to resist him.

“I do.”

“Isn’t he dreamy.”

Nico di Angelo stands in the centre of the amphitheater arena, sword drawn, shadows leeching from his frame. Winds swirl dangerously around him, ground trembling with every step. Concentrated terror curls its smokey tendrils into the nostrils of every onlooker.

Lou Ellen levels her best friend with a look. Will is too busy with his chin in his hands, moon-eyed, to notice. He doesn’t so much as flinch when she waves her hand and changes his freckles to glow bright purple, so she leaves them like that out of spite. Sucker.

“…I mean, he did just unseam that automaton nave to chaps, MacBeth-style, and cackled maniacally into the air. So.”

Will sighs. “I know.” The dust of the amphitheatre floor is covered in finger-drawn hearts. Lou Ellen is embarrassed for him. “He’s just so — gods. Look at his smile.”

Lou Ellen does. It’s frightening. He’d taken the flat of a blade straight to the face a few minutes back, making blood stain his teeth and drip out the corner of his mouth.

“And his eyes sparkle. Do you think they’re more…moonstone, or agate?”

Crazed. Lou Ellen thinks his eyes look crazed. The sparkle in question may simply be the reflection of the tip of the dagger that has appeared in his non-sword hand, which appears to be made of sharpened human bone. Lou Ellen wonders, morbidly, what bone it is for about point three seconds before Will sways — genuinely sways! — and says, “And the way he handles that femur! Oh!”

“Dude,” she says, aghast. “Will, man, get ahold of yourself.”

There’s a thunk as her best friend throws himself dramatically upon the ground. His wrist is poised delicately on his forehead, face twisted pitifully. She rolls her eyes hard enough that she actually goes blind for a brief second and falls off the bench in panic. Will seems pleased that she’s joined him on the floor.

“I can’t. He’s too beautiful.”

Lou Ellen cranes up her neck.

“A nine year old just looked at him and cried.”

His sigh is more wistful than dreamy, this time. “He’s gonna be a great dad someday.”

“…Good gods, Solace.”

Will’s voice softens. “I’m gonna marry him, Ellie.” When she looks over, the smile on his face is just plain loving. She follows his eyes and sees Nico panting, training on pause, gesturing wildly with one hand and loosely holding a water bottle in the other. She’s never seen him so animated. The class he’s teaching watches him in a predictable mix of awe and horror, erring on the side of terrified.

Lou Ellen will admit, in the very recesses of her mind (let Will get a bigger head than he already has), that it is a little charming.

A little.

“I know, you goober,” she murmurs, cuffing him on the shoulder. He doesn’t even flinch. “I call dibs on flower girl.”

“I had a dream about you last night.”

“Oh, did you.” Will grins at him over his shoulder, up to his elbows in blood and fluids.

Nico kicks him. “Focus, stupid.”

“Yeah,” snarks Chiara, whose blood is currently splattering Will’s shirt. She reaches over and flicks Will on the forehead. “Focus in stitching the gaping gash in my leg, Solace.”

Nico frowns around his juicebox. “Hey. Lascialo stare. Only I call him Solace.”

“‘S my last name, Neeks.”

“Uh-huh. Everyone else can figure out something else to call you.”

“Possessive, are you.”

Nico smiles. “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“What’d you dream about, anyway?”

If Nico didn’t know Will so well, he’d take the casual tone for what it was. But he does, in fact, know Will and his horrible poker face, and notices the purse of his lips, the flick of his eyes in Nico’s direction every three seconds.

“Wouldn’t you like to know.”

“Everyone would,” huffs Chiara. “I have about forty dollars resting on you, di Angelo, and I will not be losing it.”

Nico sticks his tongue out at her. “Masticare lo zoccolo, zitella.”

“Hey!”

Will’s shoulders shake so hard he has to pause, trembling with the effort to hold back his laughter.

“I am trying to do a medical procedure, you two.”

Nico and Chiara speak at the same time.

“Yeah, in flip-flops.”

“Oh, are you? You’ve been flirting so long my numbing cream has started to wear off.”

That knocks Will back into doctor mode, eyes narrowing in focus. He is especially freckle-y today, not that Nico notices. And the sun is shining out the window at just the right angle to make Will’s curls look luminous. And his tongue sticks out of the corner of his perfect mouth, when he concentrates. And, gods, he’s wearing a shirt but the muscles in his back —

“I can’t work with you oglin’ at me, Ghost King.”

“I’m not ogling at you.” Nico is a beautiful liar. Ignoring Will’s smirk, Chiara’s snickering, and his own flush is easy. “Why would I ever ogle at such an ugly person?”

“Because you’re in love with him, stupido. It’s embarrassing.”

“I think you should check her eyes, too, Solace.”

“How about you check deez fuckin’ nuts —”

“Alright,” Will says exasperatedly, before they can escalate too much and end up knocking a shelf off the wall. Again. “You’re done, Chiara. Take this ambrosia and scram. Don’t do anything strenuous and rip your stitches, ‘cause I’m not doin’ them again.”

She wastes no time bounding out of there. As soon as she’s gone, Will turns to face Nico, grinning.

“So,” he says, stretching out the syllable, grin wide and crooked, “you had a dream about me?”

Nico glances both ways, making sure no one’s watching. Then he darts forward to press a kiss to Will’s lips, relishing in the smell of his herbal shampoo, the chapped skin of his lips. Will grabs the side of his face and holds him longer, far past the quick peck he’d aimed for, kissing him until he smacks his boyfriend’s shoulder and pulls away, laughing. Will grins triumphantly, like he has the upper hand.

And, well.

Nico can’t have that.

“Yeah, lemme tell you about my dream.” He smooths his hands over Will’s shoulders. “This shirt was gone, for starters.”

“Mm. What else?”

“We certainly weren’t in the infirmary.”

“No?”

“No,” Nico breathes, breath hot on Will’s ear. He shivers. Nico smirks. “My cabin, dark, some low music playing…”

Will gasps. “Yeah?”

“…No one to bother us, you looking pretty as a picture on my bed…gagged.”

“Kinky.” Will shudders, hands sliding into Nico’s hair.

“Mhm. My dream come true.”

“That’s your dream?”

“Yes.” Nico pauses. “Dark, comfortable, warm…” He grins, wide and sharklike. “And finally, finally…quiet.”

It takes a second for it to sink in.

“Oh, you jackass!”

Nico cackles, stumbling back at Will’s shove. “Your — your face!”

“You jerk! I despise you!”

“Oh my gods,” he wheezes. He tries to calm himself, but one look at his boyfriend’s bright red cheeks sets him off again. “Oh my gods!”

Will huffs. Despite his embarrassment, he’s visibly struggling to hold on to his scowl, mouth twitching. “I’m breaking up with you. I’m gonna go date someone who appreciates me.”

“Nobody appreciates you more than I do, Sunshine,” Nico says, grinning. He presses a kiss to Will’s glowing cheek. “You’re just so easy to tease.”

Will rolls his eyes. “Whatever. I gotta work. Leave me alone.”

Nico presses another kiss, lingering until he feels him smile. “Okay, okay. I’ll see you at dinner, okay? Te amo.”

“…I love you too. Asshole.”

The rules of Persephone’s garden don’t apply to him.

He’s not entirely sure why. He’s mortal, or at least half. No ichor flows through his veins, not that it helped Persephone. Perhaps it is because he already spends so much of his time in his father’s kingdom; perhaps the Fruit of the Underworld has lost its potency so far removed from the Ancient Lands, so long after Pam’s death.

Regardless, Nico gets to indulge.

Anything from the roundest, sweetest apples to the bitter tang of pink grapefruits, he has sat under the poplar trees and devoured. He likes fruit more than any other food group, more than any other taste. He has always had a sweet tooth. And his eyes eat as much as his lips, drinking in the glimmering sheen of dimpled lime peel and delicate pearls of round concord grapes. He has made himself sick eating strawberry after strawberry.

But his favourite, without question or pause, is a clementine.

The best he’s had, secretly, was not in his stepmother’s garden but in a tiny orchard in Algeria. Engineered for generations by human hand and grown under wide, sparkling sun, the skin had been bright and fragrant, pith minimal and pleasantly bitter, and thin-skinned globules of flesh so plump with juice they’d begged to be burst under his teeth. He’s dreamed about those clementines every week since he’d eaten them. If it wouldn’t kill him, he’d jump to the north African country every day and buy them in swathes.

Unfortunately, at camp, he’s stuck with what he’s got.

But they aren’t so bad.

“You have a sweet tooth worse than anyone I’ve ever met,” Will grumbles, poking at his shoulder. “And when she was 11, Kayla lived off Nerd ropes and Gushers for two months.”

Nico cracks a smile. “Kayla’s continued existence astounds me.”

“I do genuinely think she’s a medical marvel.”

“Don’t tell her that.”

“Believe me, I wasn’t planning on it.”

For a while there’s nothing except the tearing sound of Nico ripping off the peel of his citrus. He’s skilled enough to remove it in one go, but sometimes, as a random challenge, he tries to remove it in a certain shape. Today, for no particular reason, the peel comes off in the shape of a heart.

“I can feel you eyeing this,” he says, shooting an exasperated look over his shoulder. Will smiles small and guiltless, in response, raising and dropping his shoulder.

“Dunno what you’re talking about. Just wishin’ you’d eat a vegetable or two.”

Liar. Well, that exact sentence isn’t a lie — Will is such a bad vegetable pusher that he is often teased about secretly owning a farm — but it’s not what he’s thinking about. Nico isn’t stupid.

He sighs. “Here,” he grumbles, wedging his thumbs between the two hemispheres of the fruit and tearing. “You can have half.”

Will brightens. His smile is like clouds clearing, like the give of a snapping elastic. Startling, demanding, storm-cracking and loud. Eye-catching in every possible way.

“Thanks!”

He holds out a cupped palm, and Nico rests half the fruit inside it, fingers brushing the heel of his hand for no justifiable reason. It’s callused — most of his hand is callused. Nico wants to trace the outline of them, with his fingers and then his tongue.

He watches as Will brings the fruit to his mouth, happily munching on the whole thing without bothering to separate the sections, like always. Nico winces.

“You’re barbaric.”

“It goes to the same place! There is not logical reason to eat it section by section!”

“If the sections weren’t meant to be eaten one by one, they wouldn’t be naturally separated, you heathen.”

“Corn is naturally separated. D’you eat that kernel by kernel?”

Nico hates being friends with smart people.

Will laughs, and Nico’s eyes flutter shut, savouring.

“That’s what I thought.” He pops the last bite in his mouth, chewing and swallowing and smiling his dazzling smile, after, sticky citrus juice making his lips look shiny. “Thanks for sharing, Neeks.”

“Course,” murmurs Nico quietly, hiding his smile behind a segment of fruit. “Anytime.”

“I made this for you.”

Nico stares, blankly, and the freckly hand extended out to him. Twisted around the long, calloused fingers, snagging on a black-lacquered chipped nail, is a bracelet.

Hesitantly, Nico takes it.

It’s woven in some way. He doesn’t recognize the exact pattern; Annabeth probably would. Not a braid, certainly, not any particular shape he can recognise. It’s bi-coloured, a twist of black and yellow, strings wrapped around them in an aborted spiral, almost. There’s a snag a third way into the bracelet, a tiny little error betraying its homemade status.

Under the guise of still inspecting the bracelet, Nico peers through his eyelashes. Will’s attention has long since shifted to somewhere to the left of him, rocking back on his heels, teeth gnawing into his lips as he hums. No longer extended out between them, waiting for Nico’s next move, his hands pick at the colour on his nails, picking off the polish chip by chip.

Dozens of similar bracelets stack his wrists, his ankles; rainbow of colours clashing horribly with the mint green of the cheap plastic shoes.

“What…” He pauses, clearing his throat. He feels Will’s attention on him, the warming rays of his soft smile. Surely this can’t be…

“It’s a friendship bracelet! We were makin’ pottery in Arts ‘n Crafts; I got distracted and the whole thing went squelch.” He blows a raspberry, smacking his fist into his hand. Nico jumps. “Totally collapsed! Anyways. Made a friendship bracelet for all my friends, yellow for me, black for you. I got a matching one!” He holds up his his wrist. It takes Nico a second of squinting to find the matching one — yellow and black, twisted, just like the one he’s wearing, nestled against the others like he’s been wearing it for years.

I made one for all my friends.

“You, uh.” His palms sweat. He tucks them behind his back before Will notices, although the twinkle in his eye tells him he might have an idea. “You’ve done this before.”

It’s not much of a question. Will takes it as one anyway.

“Mhm. You don’t have to wear it, if you don’t want to, I can take it —”

Nico wrenches himself away. Will blinks.

“Absolutely not,” he says, before he realizes what’s coming out of his mouth. “You made it for me. It’s mine.” In a flurry of movement, he tugs the bracelet over his hand, twisting the loosely hanging part around his thumb.

Slowly, giving him time to pull away, a freckly hand comes back into his space. When Nico — frozen — doesn’t flinch away, they rest on the jut of his wrist, the scar on the palm of his hand.

“I got it,” he murmurs. Nico glances up to find Will already looking at him, blue eyes wide and imploring and soft.

Nico has never associated blue eyes with softness. Intensity, maybe. Clarity. Softness, to him, has long been the understanding brown of Reyna’s, the softly glowing embers of Lady Hestia’s. The golden glow of Hazel’s, especially, ever-smiling. (The gentle, endless, sun-warmed clay brown of Bianca’s. Too big for her face, hidden behind her bangs; except, of course, when Nico was overwhelmed and miserable and needed her, needed her, needed her. Or when the lawyer came to their room door, steel-faced, giving the same news, and Nico would slide a small hand in hers, squeezing.)

Will’s eyes are soft, though, he realizes. Like cotton candy at DC fairs, like grape hyacinth, like the blanket he toted around as a baby. Like a sunny smile and golden hair and teasing winks when everything is too too much.

“There.”

With a gentle tug, the loose strings of the friendship bracelet tightly pull the bracelet snug against his wrist. Looser, barely even touching, Will’s fingers follow the contours of the bracelet. He lingers. Nico wonders if he can feel his pulse, pounding, endless.

“Thank you,” he manages, finally. His throat is dry. “For.”

The rest of his sentence won’t come out. Before he can panic, Will smiles; beams, really, eyes crinkling shut, and the short breaths clattering his lungs fizzle out entirely. “Oh,” he murmurs, several things slotting together at once. “Oh.”

“Anytime,” Will responds grinning, squeezing Nico’s wrist once more before bouncing off. “See you around!”

He’s far gone before Nico finds his voice again. But he smiles, still, eyeing the pretty bracelet, and whispers, “You, too.”

“Will. Hey.” He reaches out when the medic doesn’t react, forcibly stilling his hands. Even then, he can feel the minute twitches, the fighting he’s doing with himself to keep still. “It can wait until tomorrow.”

“They leave tomorrow,” Will stresses, finally pulling his hands free. “The Romans are early risers, Nico, you know better than anyone, I need this done before they —”

He cuts himself off, too invested in the sprawl of paperwork completely covering the nurse’s station. Under his eyes is almost completely bruised black, not unlike the war paint he wore so long ago, and there’s a grey dullness to him. If he stays in one place too long, he sways on his feet.

“I’m fine,” he says, suddenly, as if remembering Nico is there. He pauses briefly to shoot him a small, strained smile, then returns to his frantic sorting. A red thumbprint bleeds onto the corner of the page of one of the files. He doesn’t seem to notice.

Without straying too far, Nico gathers the supplies he needs. He pulls out a tray to grab some antiseptic, swipes a Pac-Man bandaid off a box on the counter. Arms laden with his spoils, he nudges the half-door open with his hip, setting the supplies down when he’s inside the round desk-station.

“Will,” he says quietly, wrapping his hand around his elbow. He jumps.

“I’m — fine.”

“You’re bleeding.”

He blinks, staring down at his hands; brows furrowing as he notices the several scattered paper cuts crossing almost every finger. Many of them are clotted, scabbed over; dried blood streaking between his freckles and swirling around stark white scars.

“Come here.”

Without protest, for once, he does. He sets down the pen clenched in his left thumb and turns to face Nico fully. In the minimal space between them, his hands shake.

“I didn’t notice,” he murmurs, flinching as Nico soaks a cotton pad and presses it to a cut on the inside of his thumb. Nico can’t quite read the expression on his face, although there’s a choked quality to his voice. “I need to — before they —”

“Not everything is your responsibility,” Nico interrupts. He meets Will’s gaze head on, his own gaze steady, heart breaking at the fragility in his ice blue eyes. “Not everything is your responsibility, Will,” he repeats, firmer this time.

Will’s face crumples. “I haven’t slept in five days.”

Nico closes his eyes. “Gods, Will.”

“I’m sorry.”

In moments like these, Nico hates working for his father.

He had left to relative chaos. Relative, meaning in comparison to what the rest of the eight billion people on the planet would consider calm, camp wasn’t it, but by demigod standards it wasn’t too bad. Several Romans, including Reyna and Hazel, were due to arrive the day after he was summoned by his father, which was a bummer, but he had assurance from both of them that they’d stay long enough to see him. And reassurance from his father that the errand wouldn’t be too perilous. And, lastly, a threat (warning out of love, he would say, but Nico knows a threat when he sees one) from Will to take it easy.

He got back to debris and blood and a flurry of stress — a weapons development disaster, he’d been quickly informed. No deaths, at least not yet, but several in critical condition that were quickly approaching it.

And Kayla and Austin, back at school, and Will in the infirmary by himself.

“Will,” he repeats for the third time, a little more urgently this time. He places a gently finger under his chin. “Look at me a second.”

He regrets asking, almost, when Will meets his eyes, although he immediately feels guilty for the thought. The son of Apollo is so rarely vulnerable, stubbornly intent on carrying the burdens he’s stuck with without half a hand of help. It wears on him, and the proof of the weariness hurts Nico somewhere, deep in his soul; he hates bearing witness to it.

Worse, though, is the knowledge that Will is struggling with it himself.

“Everybody critical has been stabilized,” he says firmly. When Will opens his mouth in protest, he adds, “I can feel it, Sunshine, do you trust me?”

“Yes,” he says, immediately. He snaps his jaw shut. “Yes.”

Nico’s own shoulders slump when Will exhales, long and exhausted. “Good. This —” he gestures to the paperwork — “this is secondary, Solace. I don’t care if they want to leave tomorrow. You need rest, and, hell, if they’re that pressed about it, I’ll make them do the fucking paperwork.”

“Please, don’t,” Will says, laughing feebly. He swiped quickly under his eyes, pulling away, and Nico lets him, if only because his small smile seems genuine, if not exhausted. “The idea of that actually makes me want to puke. I hate paperwork, but I hate anyone else doing it more.”

“Right, right.” Nico nudges his shoulder, something like teasing showing in his eyes. “Heaven forbid someone dot their i’s incorrectly.”

“Exactly.” Will looks so serious that Nico stills, trying to figure out just how anal, exactly, his friend is, before his face breaks out into a wide, genuine grin. Nico’s stomach flips. “I’m only teasing, Death Breath. I don’t actually care if people dot their i’s incorrectly. And I would appreciate the help.”

“I feel like it hurt you to say that,” Nico says, once he recovers from the staggering force of one million megawatts of smile power.

“It did.”

“Also, you implied that there genuinely is a wrong way to dot your i’s.”

“…Of course there is.” Will looks at him strangely. “Maybe I’m not the one who’s sleep deprived,” he muses, reminding Nico that oh yeah, dumbass, Will is actually genuinely sick with how little sleep he’s gotten, maybe fix that.

“Will you sleep, now?”

Will hesitates. “There was a girl with a — skull injury.”

Nico understands immediately. (He saw the mangled mess of Lee’s shroud.)

“Come sleep in my cabin,” he suggests, squeezing his wrist. “I’ll keep watch, and you’ll have some privacy.”

“Okay,” he says quietly. He allows himself to be tugged out of the infirmary, only looking back a couple times. “Thank you, Nico.”

“Anything for you,” Nico responds, just as quiet, and his heart races when Will beams.

If there’s one thing Will is, it’s committed to the bit.

Is there, perhaps, a touch of regret in his heart as he shivers, freezing, clad in nothing but his t-shirt and cargo shorts? Had he been told, before he left his cabin, by his long-suffering siblings that he was going to regret not wearing a sweater? Was the none-too-gentle reminder sixty-four percent of the reason he’d stubbornly refused the sweater he’d originally been planning on wearing in the first place?

Yes, yes, and no, surprisingly; take that, predictability allegations. He’s spontaneous as shit.

(Eight-three percent.)

(Whatever.)

He walks under a shadowy tree, briefly enveloping him in a deeper cold. He tries and fails to hold back a shudder.

“You’re cold,” says a critical voice to his left.

“I’ve never experienced even a mild case of hypothyroidism-borne boreal temperature intolerance even one time in my life, di Angelo, so check and mate.”

Unfortunately, the second half of his sentence is garbled by both his chattering teeth and his throat beginning to close. Curse you, Apollonian inability to lie. Will has people to gaslight, and a reputation to protect.

“You’re an idiot.”

Will wheezes. After three or four attempts, and the threat from his brain to his lungs that he will self-tracheotomize, really, he will, just try and fuck around cause you will sure as shit find out, bitch, he manages to clear his airways enough to employ his vocal chords (which, actually, are inaptly named. They are not chords, they are membranophones. Obviously).

“Nuh uh.”

“You really are an idiot. A frozen one.” Nico huffs. There is the sound of rustling, and for a moment Will is blindingly jealous of his friend’s night vision. He wants to snoop around in the dark to identify rustling sounds. How come he only glows when he’s embarrassed? He gets the stupidest Apollo powers. “Take my coat.”

Before Will can do much as protest, a heavy, undoubtedly warm jacket is shoved onto his shoulders.

“If you don’t wear it I’ll shadow travel to Slovakia,” Nico threatens. “And it’s winter for them right now, too, so I’ll pop out and immediately succumb to the elements.”

Will’s turn to be huffy, he slides the stupid jacket onto his arms. Immediately, he’s filled with a warmth so potent he feels as if he can almost fix his many mental problems. It’s glorious.

“Jacket smells like you, stink-face,” he says instead. He buries his nose in the collar and takes a deep inhale, closing his eyes as he savours the smell of woodsmoke, leather, and, amusingly, a little bit of oregano.

“Remind me to stab you tomorrow morning. It’s been too long.”

“It’s been three days,” Will argues, but dutifully makes a mental note.

Nico seems pleased.

They finally break through the woods’ borders, stepping into the torchlight of camp, late evening. Will spots three couples sucking face behind their cabin. He then spies thrice as many Hermes kids up to nefarious deeds, such as attaching timed fireworks to windows and doorways for a fun morning surprise. Will makes a mental note, under the stabbing reminder, to prepare burn salve tomorrow morning. And to hide Cecil in his office for his own protection, because he’s a good friend like that.

“Thank you for getting herbs with me,” Will says, turning to Nico. He smiles, trying to pour as much gratitude into his voice as he can. “I hate going alone.”

“Yeah,” says Nico, stiffly. He looks everywhere but Will’s face. When Will does not look away, he glances over, scowling at Will’s broadening grin. “Whatever, Solace. Don’t be so needy, next time.”

Tactfully, Will refrains from mentioning that he had not asked for Nico’s accompaniment at all, actually, and was halfway to the forest with a list of ingredients when Nico had shown up, red-faced, and snatched Will’s list clean out of his hands and muttered something about incompetence and monster baiting fools.

“I still appreciate it,” he says diplomatically, and then, because he is an asshole and also struggles with impulse control, he leans down and pecks Nico’s forehead. “Smooch of gratitude,” he explains when Nico freezes, facial expression resembling that of a squished pear.

“Ha nngh mfgh,” Nico says after a moment. Or perhaps he said hangry muffins, Will’s not sure, sometimes his hearing aids go wonky.

“Indeed,” he says anyway. He leans down to smooch Nico’s forehead again, because it was nice, and because he didn’t get stabbed the first time. “See you in the morning, Neeks. Love you bunches and bunches.”

“Hngh daga,” Nico responds, and when Will pouts he clears his throat and rectifies, “I love you…too?”

Will nods, satisfied. “Yes, exactly. Goodnight.”

He jogs off, waving. It isn’t until he gets back to his cabin and is immediately accosted by his siblings that he realises that he has stolen Nico’s jacket.

“Hm.” He glances down at it. It really is a wonderful jacket. And, plus, Nico didn’t give him a return date, or anything, so it’s probably fine if he keeps it a little longer.

He doesn’t want to get cold, after all.

Just as he’s about to turn away, slinking back to his cabin by himself, again, a freckled hand sticks in the air, numerous bracelets jingling as it waves frantically.

“Nico! Nico! Hey! Over here!”

Nico (along with half the camp and people in the Maldives, probably, gods is that boy loud) turns to gawk. Will Solace sits on the ground right in front of the campfire, one child climbing on his head, another on his lap, Kayla and Austin on either side of him. His face is pulled wide in a grin, eyes nearly squeezed shut, hand still up, waving. He flinches when the child on his head — his youngest sister Gracie, if Nico is remembering correctly — knees him in the chin, but his hand doesn’t falter or lower.

Several people turn to look at Nico, eyebrows raised, mouths curled in amusement; nudging their friends and whispering. The campfire burns hotter, flame starting to bleed purple.

Nico hurries over to the Apollo bench, flushing.

“You’re gonna make every monster come running, screaming like that,” he hisses.

Will leans back, smiling. A sparkly pink light-up sneaker comes dangerously close to his eye. “I saved you a seat.”

Nico hesitates.

(Behind him, he hears giggling. Will either doesn’t notice, or doesn’t care; his siblings, definitely do, shooting Nico sly smiles of their own.

“Will’s sitting with Nico?” he hears, barely, and then several loud, curt shhh!s.

In the firelight, Will almost glows. His eyes don’t waver.)

He steps up to the empty patch of grass between Austin and Will, sinking down before he can talk himself out of it.

“I’m glad you came,” Will murmurs warmly, catching Yan, his little brother, by the ankle before he can tumble into the flames. He rights him, ruffling his hair and pressing a kiss to his forehead, before turning blue, imploring eyes back to Nico. “I’ve missed you.”

“You saw me this morning,” Nico mumbles, eyes focused on his fraying shoes.

“And I’m seeing you now.” Out of the corner of his eye, he can tell Will is still staring, although his smile has softened. “I’m happy you came.”

He doesn’t respond. Will doesn’t seem to mind, settling in next to him, answering Yan and Gracie’s chattering questions when they ask. He doesn’t pull Nico into conversation again, doesn’t nudge him or force him to make s’mores or huff in exasperation as he sits there, motionless, soundless.

When he catches Nico’s eye, though, he smiles.

The butterflies in his stomach go crazy.

“Woah, hey, I wanna try.”

Nico startles at the voice, tiny bone falling from his hand and sinking back into the dirt.

“Aw.” Beat-up flip-flops slow to a stop right next to him, and Will plops himself down. He shoots a bright, too-wide smile in his direction, eyes crinkling. “Hi!”

“Hi,” Nico says warily, subtly inching away. Will, either oblivious or uncaring to his intention, just leans in closer, blue eyes watching him intently. “…What are you doing here?”

“Hanging out with you. Duh. How did you do that?” He points to Nico’s hands.

Confused, Nico re-summons to the squirrel femur, dragging up the rest of the skeleton too. It chitters to life, nosing at the sliver of bare knee out from Nico’s ripped jeans, before bounding over to Will. He doesn’t even flinch, laughing as the little thing scampers up his arm and rests in his hair. Nico’s mouth twitches.

“I don’t actually know? I guess I can do it the same way you can heal. It kind of just happens, I can’t really teach you.” He pauses, squinting. “Unless…necromancy is healing, technically. Can you do necromancy?”

Will shakes his head, wincing as one of the squirrel’s ribs gets catches a curl of his hair, tugging it as it moves. “No, the other thing. The spinny thing.” He gestures towards Nico’s hands, wiggling his own in explanation. “With the — bone.”

“Oh! Oh, that.”

Closing his eyes, Nico lays his palm flat on the packed dirt, feeling around under it. He can’t see it, exactly, but he can feel buried things the same way you might feel the air shift when someone comes in an empty room. Things take up space, and there’s a record of that you can feel. Nico’s ability just extends underground, and bones, especially, are like someone entering a room loudly. He’s directed to them almost automatically.

He feels around until he gets pulled towards another buried dead. A mouse, this time, or at least a part of its skeleton. Nico leaves it. The bones are too small for his purposes.

He keeps searching until he finds a raccoon’s ulna — perfect. He drags it up, patient as it worms its way around rocks and through clay and even, notably, a snake’s burrow, and finally breaks through the surface, right up into his waiting palm. He taps it twice on the ground, shaking off the excess dirt, then poises it deftly in between his right middle and pointer figure.

Then, aware of Will’s intense gaze on him, he starts to fiddle with it.

So fast the movement looks fluid, he passes the thin bone along his deft fingers; in, out, in, out. He bends it under his hand back into the looped curve of his pointer finger when it reaches his pinky, starting the cycle all over again. The bone makes tiny swishing sounds as cuts through the air.

“Woah,” Will breathes, eyes wide, pupils wider. “That’s so cool.”

Nico shrugs, embarrassed. “It’s just — twirling. It’s not hard.”

“It’s like the bone is moving itself, though! That’s so sick!”

Nico has never had anyone look so — delighted at him, before, at his magic. Not that this even counts — he did this with sticks, when he was a kid, with pencils. It’s just a fidget, but Will grins at him like Nico’s turning straw into gold.

“I can — show you, if you like.”

Will cheers, scooting somehow closer. Their knees touch, and Nico has to bite down a gasp; somehow, even that touch is hot, even through his jeans he feels like he’s been shocked. His hands, too, under Will’s intensive, determined scrutiny, start to tingle.

“Extend your middle finger up, a little, like you’re trying to cross it over your pointer. No, don’t actually cross it, just — here. Let me.”

He grabs Will’s hands before he can think about it, and he regrets it; the contact makes it suddenly hard to breathe. He forces himself through it, breathing through gritted teeth, and places Will’s fingers the right way.

“Your heart rate’s way off,” Will comments. “You’re also producing an excessive amount of adrenaline and cortisol. You okay?”

Nico bites back a curse. Damn vitakinesis.

“I’m fine,” he grits out.

“If you say so.”

He rushes through the end of his explanation, practically flinging the bone in Will’s direction and throwing himself away, making sure there’s a healthy stretch of space between them when he sits back down.

“You try.”

Will shifts, eyes narrowed on the poised bone. His tongue peeks out of the corner of his mouth in focus, just barely, and Nico has to beat back his thoughts with a mental battering ram. The squirrel skeleton, still sitting on Will’s head, rattles as if laughing at him.

I’ll give myself a lobotomy. I will. Do not test me.

“I got it!”

He glances back down at Will’s cry, accidentally meeting his eyes — blue, blue, gods, they’re so blue, is that an Apollo thing? First the sunrise-coloured hair, then sky-eyes? Apollo’s eyes are brown, usually. Blue only when he feels like it. Why are Will’s so identical to the heavens, then? Why do they seem to take up half his face, they’re so constantly wide, constantly watching? Attention everywhere, all the time, like everything is worth looking at, committing to memory. They go near black, when the sun sets, they get so dark. Mirrors of the night sky. That can't be mortal.

Sure enough, the ulna weaves through Will's fingers — clumsy, stuttering, not as fluid as Nico, but the foundations are there — successfully.

"Good job."

The answering smile could light up the Earth in an eclipse. Nico feels sunburnt.

"I gotta go show off to Kayla and Austin!" Ulna tucked in his ear like a pencil, he reaches up a hand, waiting for the squirrel, despite not having an olfactory system, to sniff his palm, deem it safe, and crawl in. "Come on, Sammy. Thanks, Nico! You're the best!"

"Sure," Nico mumbles. He watches him run off, cradling the little squirrel skeleton carefully. "No problem."

A small smile pulls at his face.

Despite his best efforts to be silent, Will wakes up as soon as Nico opens the door.

“Neeks?” he mumbles, squinting at the sliver of light bleeding into the bedroom. Nico hurries to close the door behind him, padding forward to the bed and dropping a kiss onto Will’s hair.

“Yeah, baby.”

Will sighs, curling up, leaning into Nico’s touch. “Good.”

Nico feels his tired eyes follow him as he putters quietly around the room, hanging his sword and his jacket, shucking off his torn jeans, tossing his shirt in a corner somewhere.

“Y’hurt?”

Nico smiles. He loves the heavy drawl of Will’s y’s that he gets when he’s sleepy or passionate, as much as he teases. It always makes him fluttery, makes the hairs on the back of his arms stand up.

“No.”

“Promise?”

Nico digs around until he finds a pair of Will’s flannel pyjama pants, tugging them on and rolling the waistband until he can wear them without tripping. He doesn’t bother with a shirt.

“Yes.”

“C’mere.” The blankets shift and whisper as Will peels them slightly back, lifting his arms around the empty space next to him. “Can practic’ly see ya shiverin’. Y’r g’na turn blue inna min’t.”

Nico can’t stop a giggle. He curls into Will’s hold, pressing a kiss to the sun on his chest and muttering something about cowboys and bull-wranglers. He’s well-used to the playfully stern pinch Will nicks on the curve of his thigh, and snickers more.

“Y’r not funny.”

“Y’r’n’funny,” Nico mocks, exaggerated. He clears his throat, and says with exaggerated deepness: “Y’ain’t from ‘round these here pards, pardner.”

Will pinches him again, but does nothing to hide the curve of his smile as he presses a kiss to Nico’s neck, his bare shoulder.

“M’gonna bite you.”

“Y’would’nt —”

Will does bite him, and Nico smacks him in revenge, although he doesn’t really care. If anything he kind of relishes it.

“Freak,” Will says fondly, knowing exactly what Nico’s thinking. He drags his head up to press a long, lingering kiss to Nico’s cheek. “Sleep. Warm up. Talk in the mornin’.”

“Mornin’,” Nico mocks tiredly, but settles in too, presses a last kiss to Will’s jaw before settling against him, breaths evening out to join him in dreamland.

Waking up to music screeching in the inside of his head a half-hour before sunrise every single day is, frankly, hell. Especially when he has the day off. That’s the worst.

But there is, on those rare days off, one benefit — so good it might, although Will shall never in a million years admit it, make the whole ordeal worth it.

On morning shift days, he spends the first ten minutes after he wakes up with his face down into his pillow, praying for the sun to hit the Earth. His prayers have yet to be answered. He spends the next ten minutes sitting, bleary-eyed, at the edge of his bed, waiting for his brain to boot-up and imagining his neurons are making little dial-up internet noises to amuse himself. The final ten minutes before sunrise he spends sprinting silently around the cabin, trying to brush his teeth and put his shorts on at the same time and generally failing at being a person.

Mornings are not fun.

But on his days off, he can afford to be slower. He can’t go back to sleep, true, but he can take the time to let his brain catch up with the rest of him, to breathe, to actually, genuinely wake up, not just be forced to be awake. And then as the sun rises, golden rays bleeding through the window, he bears witness to the most beautiful sight he’s ever seen.

Nico is gorgeous, swathed in sunlight.

Some might say Will is biased. But Will, these same people might forget, is the son of the god of truth, the god of beauty. He sees these things in the world as easily as some mighty see colour — he can see the Nico is beautiful, and he can see that this is true.

He always is beautiful. Even when he was halfway to dying and twisted in rage in sorrow, he was beautiful. Aside from high cheekbones and a devilish smile and fine, gorgeous hair, he stands in divinity. There is something wholly powerful in the set of his shoulders, the rigidness of his spine; the same kind of beauty in a staggered mountain, in a gnarled tree. A sturdiness, a timelessness, an I have been tested, I have been challenged, I have been beaten; still, I am here. Gracefully, I am here.

Now, Will watches, back to the headboard, as the first few lines of yellow-golden sun filter through the open window above Nico’s bed. They climb slowly, started at his sheet-covered feet, travelling in time up the curve of his calf, stuttering at each fold in the linen, to the crest of his hip. By the time the sunlight crawls over the ridge of the end of the sheet, in bleeds through the window in full, bathing his bare torso in light: his scars, curving like sparkling rivers, his freckles and moles, flicking like dappled light through leafy branches. A forest floor of beauty, in the twisting roots of muscles under his skin, rock-dark bruises over the square of his scapula, the valleys and hills of his ribs. Thousands of miles in which Will loses himself, following the path of the light.

He stirs, slightly, at the brush of his lips against the blurred line of daylight and shadow, tickling the line of his shoulders.

“W’ll?”

“Go back to sleep,” Will murmurs, breathing the words into sleep-warmed skin, raised with goose-flesh.

Nico hums. A small smile tugs the pink curves of his lips, making the corner of his eyes crinkle, the fan of his lashes flutter. Will is awestruck.

“‘Kay.”

He’s out again in seconds, sighing as he settles back against the pillows. His hand, acting out his dreams, drags across the mattress until it spans the curve of Will’s thigh and stills, gripping loosely. Will wraps his own fingers around it and squeezes.

“I love you,” he says softly. He holds his breath, waiting for Nico to stir again, and sighs in relief when he doesn’t. “It scares me.”

A breath of air blows a strand of Nico’s hair across his forehead, almost copper in the early morning sun. Will brushes it easily out of his face, lingering as he tucks it behind his ear.

“I’ll tell you,” he promises, risking another, softer, kiss to his lips. Barely a murmur of touch. “Soon. Sleep well, darlin’.”

“Oh, shoot, sorry. Go back to sleep. Sorry.”

Nico shifts, blinking the sleep out of his eyes. The light in the infirmary is low, and strangely soothing. It’s almost hard to keep his eyes open. But he manages, rubbing his knuckles under the curve of his eyesockets, and searches in the dark until he finds what woke him up.

Will stands a couple feet away from his bed, figure curled and shadowy, owlish eyes wide and almost unnaturally reflective in the dark.

“‘S’okay,” he mumbles. “Couldn’t really sleep anyway.”

“Oh.” There’s a shuffling sound, and suddenly Nico feels warmer where Will has stepped closer. “You in pain?“

“No. Just bad at sleeping.”

“Hey, me too.”

Surprise at Will’s easy admission and a little bit starstruck at the bright flash of Will’s grin, Nico doesn’t have the chance to beat himself up over being so flippantly open. His teeth seemed to glow as much as the whites of his eyes, which would be creepy, except it’s hard to feel anything but calm as a cool night breeze wafts the scent of lavender from the sill planters in every inch of the infirmary, and it’s hard to think of Will as anything but warm. Especially the hand he places, briefly, on the curve of Nico’s knee.

“Insomnia?”

“Something like that.”

“Still. Sorry for waking you up.”

Nico hums, fiddling with his skull ring. “Why were you up, anyway?”

“Oh, I won’t have time to sleep for another couple days.”

There’s a mellow cracking sound, and then all of Will’s knuckles begin to glow a soft, sunset yellow. Nico startles.

“Apollo thing,” Will explains. A smirk is now visible at the corner of his mouth, forcing a dimple on his right cheek. In his hands, almost hard to see under the glow, are three small vials of something Nico doesn’t recognize. “Getting meds and salves in order.”

Hesitantly, Nico drags his gaze away from the clinking glass bottles, forcing himself to meet Will’s eyes. They’re ridiculously bright. Is that an Apollo thing, too?

“Why does that mean you can’t sleep?”

Will gestures to the myriad of occupied beds outside the curtains Nico has pulled up. “Shitton of injured, man. I got way more people than I got stuff. I prepped for the Romans beforehand, obviously, but I didn’t have a good hand on their numbers and didn’t prep enough. I’m short on supplies. Haven’t slept since Gaea did.” At Nico’s look of alarm, he quickly assures, “But don’t worry, I had Cecil brew me something strong. It’s disgusting, so I think it might be his Coffee Redbull Matcha Heartstopper Special, With A Shot Of Crushed Caffeine Pills For Good Measure, but I’m not sure. Hands are only a little shakey, though, feel.”

In a mirror of a few days ago (fuck, Nico hopes he’s kidding; how long can people go without sleep?), he darts out and rests his hands under Nico’s. Sure enough, they’re trembling, although nothing nearly as bad as before.

“Dangerous levels of sleep deprivation aren’t as bad as delivering a baby, huh.”

Will shudders. “Don’t even joke.”

He looks so genuinely horrified that Nico can’t help but laugh. All they’ve seen, all they’ve suffered — and golden boy is gagging at the miracle of life. If Nico wasn’t so sure that he’d seen at least as many gory nightmares as Nico, if not more, he’d tease him for being squeamish.

…Actually.

“What kind of school nurse wannabe is squidged out by birth?”

“Nurse?” Will squawks, snatching his hands away (Nico finds his own hands, strangely and suddenly, cold). “I didn’t go to seven years of med school to be called a school nurse wannabe!”

Nico narrows his eyes. “You didn’t go to med school. You’re fifteen.”

“As I said.” He grins teasingly. “I didn’t go.”

It takes Nico a second, but when he gets it he cannot physically hold himself back from kicking him. Solace, weak from muffled laughter, stumbles sideways into a lamp.

“Ay! Be careful, you wanna kill the camp’s only brain surgeon?”

“If he’s being annoying,” Nico bites back. He can’t quite stop smiling, and he’s embarrassed about it, but thankfully the darkness hides his face. “There’s no way you’ve done brain surgery.”

The shitty cot Nico’s been coerced into camping on for the next three days creaks as Will perches on the edge of it.

“Have so. In the woods, two years ago, removed a brain tumour. Stressful as shit.” He flashes another sideways grin. “Couple dozen more medical emergencies under my belt, and I might actually be as qualified as a nurse in this country’s garbage medical system. Thank the gods for them, honestly. They do a shit lot more than a lot of doctors claim to.”

Sensing the topic change for what it is, Nico doesn’t press any further. “That what you wanna do?”

“Aw, man, I don’t even want to think about it. The idea of someone else running this infirmary gives me a stress ulcer. Y’all do a lot of stupid shit and frankly some of the procedures I have performed exist in no medical textbooks anywhere, medical or no.” He snorts. “Anyways.”

His hands are blazingly warm again, almost like sun through a maginifying glass, when they pat his shin twice. He stands, stretching — more bursts of light appearing along the length of his spine, lighting what his fading knuckles leave out.

“Try to sleep again, Neeks. You’ll need it.”

“Maybe I should be the one to say that to you,” Nico says. Will waves his hand dismissively, and in a fit of impulse Nico reaches out and grabs it, meeting his raised eyebrow with a stubborn set to his jaw. “I mean it, Will. No one’s awake right now. I just woke up. Why don’t you crash for an hour or so? I’ll wake you if anything happens.”

Will hesitates. “If anything happens, that’s on me. It — I can’t let it be on me.”

“Do you trust me?”

Stupid question. Of course Will doesn’t trust him, Nico let someone die in front of his eyes, Nico is the bringer of death and darkness, why would he —

“Yeah.” Will sighs. Nico looks up, startled, but the medic is eyeing one of the few spare cots, face screwed up in consideration. “You’ll wake me?”

“Immediately,” Nico assures hastily. He nods his head at the bunk next to him. “Sleep, man. You look like you need it.”

“Oh, well, just what I’ve always wanted to hear from you. You look stunning, by the way.”

Nico knows it’s a joke, but he flushes anyway. Thank Hades again for the dark infirmary, and the length of his hair.

“Whatever. Sleep or don’t.”

“I’m going, I’m going.”

In seconds he’s out of his flip-flops, slightly-scratchy blankets turned up and wrapped tightly around him all the way up to his neck.

“Thanks, Nico. I owe you.”

In the next breath, he’s out, all that’s visible of him the flutter of his light eyelashes and the tangled mop of blond hair. He snores, slightly, with every puffed exhale; a tiny, stuttered sound, not unlike a cat. It’s kind of cute, and Nico’s smiling before he realising.

“You don’t owe anybody shit.” He shakes his head fondly, leaning back onto his pillows to keep an eye out. “Goodnight, Will.”

Will wakes up sometime around two, stumbling over to Arts & Crafts. He looks so incredibly, adorably sleepy, face creased with pillow marks and hair sticking out everywhere even worse than usual, that Nico can’t help his smile.

“Morning,” he says quietly, shifting over in the bench to make room. “Or, well, afternoon.”

“Mmfh,” Will responds. He sways on his feet, eyes still closed, so Nico has reach back and take his hand, guiding him to the seat Nico cleared for him.

“Still sleepy?”

Instead of answering, Will slumps onto his shoulder. Nico tenses for a moment, but quickly relaxes — Will is out of it. He’s a heavy weight on Nico’s side, and his breath comes out in little puffs; he’s halfway to snoring. He sets aside the clay sculpture he was making, wiping off his hands, and shifts slightly to make his shoulder more comfortable, sliding his hands in Will’s hair. After a quick glance to double check that no one’s around, he cards through the matted curls, carefully untangling the birds nest that sits currently upon his head.

“Night shift was long?”

Will groans, nuzzling deeper into Nico’s neck. Nico huffs, allowing it, turning his half-limp body so he’s practically sitting on top of him. It’s kind of a nice weight, actually. And Will is warm, slumped and half-sprawled in his lap like a freckly blanket.

“Got thrown up on three times.”

It takes Nico a second to decipher the words, mumbled as they are. His finger gets caught in a strand of Will’s hair as he winces, tugging a touch too hard. Will shivers.

“Oof.”

“Mhm. Shouldn’t complain, though. Not Cecil’s fault.” He pauses. “Well, it’s a little his fault. I told him not to mess with Billie’s garden.”

Nico smiles. “You know, it’s not the first time a Hermes kid has been poisoned for their dumbassery. You could’ve left his cabin to handle him.”

“They would do a horrible job. They might actually make him worse.”

“Yep.”

“…I can’t leave him to suffer, Neeks.”

“Hero complex,” Nico teases. “Sounds like a natural consequence to me.”

“Shhhh. I’m sleeping.”

“It’s two thirty in the afternoon, Solace.”

“Pot, kettle, et cetera.”

Nico smiles. “Only dorky people say et cetera when they’re half asleep.” He shifts, accepting that he has a lapful of head medic, now, no refunds or exchanges. It’s still, somehow, very comfortable — he feels as if he’s laying in a sun patch, under a warm, heavy blanket. Plus, Will smells like strawberries and lavender and his sandalwood shampoo. Nico could get used to it.

He does, however, subtly raise a couple skeleton to stand guard outside the gazebo — no need to get anyone gossiping. As cute as a sleepy Solace is, Nico can and will shove him to the ground the second anyone gets too close. He has a Reputation.

(He is a liar.)

“Did I miss the strawberry coffee cake this morning?”

“Yes.”

“Aw.”

Nico hums, untangling the last of his hair. Without anything for his hands to do, he slides them under Will’s hoodie, resting them in his stomach, ignoring his whining and exaggerated shiver at Nico’s ice-cold hands.

If Nico is going to function as his personal bean-bag chair, Will is going to function as his space heater. Fair’s fair.

“Saved a piece for you, though.”

He feels Will’s grin more than sees it, twisted up as they are. He feels his happy little wiggle, too, arms flailing before wrapping around Nico’s waist, thighs shifting before re-bracketing his hips.

“You’re my actual favourite.”

“Hm. I think you say that to all the boys you save you strawberry cake and let you nap on them.”

“Nah.” Will’s breathing starts to slow, body stilling as he rests his head right about Nico’s heart. He can feel his puffs of breath in his collarbone, tickling the skin under his thin t-shirt. “Just you.”

Nico flushes, more pleased than he’s willing to admit, and rests his chin on his head, watching over the strawberry fields. He checks that Will is actually asleep, and when he is, he presses a quick, darting kiss to his still-creased cheek, and smiles.

“You’re my favourite, too.”

“You have horrible taste.”

Will shoots him an exasperated look. “I know,” he says, shoving a spoonful of ice cream in his mouth before speaking because he’s disgusting, “just look at the company I keep. Revolting.”

Nico kicks him in the shin. He dodges, laughing through the pain when he slams his knee against the rickety table in his attempt to flinch away. Nico smiles, satisfied.

“That’s what you get for being a basic bitch.”

“That is not what I get for being a basic bitch! That’s what I get for falling for the biggest grouch at camp!”

Despite himself, Nico flushes, ears going as red as the plastic spoon hanging out of his boyfriend’s mouth. He busies himself with his cone, looking anywhere but at bright blue eyes and a wide, teasing smirk.

“I can’t believe I let myself be seen with you.”

“…Baby.”

Nico shivers involuntarily at the sugar-sweet rumble of Will’s voice, the dragging twang and dropped octave. He meets Will’s eyes like his head was dragged upright with a magnet, melting faster than his ice cream at the heated look he finds there.”

“What,” he manages, well aware his voice cracks and choosing to ignore it. It’s one thing to die of mortification, it’s a whole other thing to go without any dignity at all. He will not be so weak to one godsdamn pet name — he’s the Ghost King.

(Even if the pet name is accompanied by a warm hand on his wrist and fanning gold eyelashes.)

(He has standards.)

(And a reputation!)

(…Gods, though.)

(Will looks good in a tank top.)

“Nothin’,” Will says, holding his hands up in false surrender, “I jus’ think it’s real funny —” he sets down his ice cream, patting his face with a napkin — “that you put on this whole grouch an’ grumble routine, darlin’ —” his voice drops low to a whisper, and Nico leans forward without meaning to, slowly meeting him across the sticky table —“‘cause anyone with eyes can see —” he tilts his face and Nico inhales sharply, lips barely brushing his with every word — “how far-gone badly you are for me.”

“Gods, you’re full of yourself,” Nico gasps, and lets the ice cream fall from his hands and splat on the table as he busies them with sliding into Will’s hair, yanking him close, and proving him absolutely, undoubtedly right.

He tastes like vanilla.

Nico doesn’t mind so much, this way.

“Come here, you dweeb. Let me fix it.”

Will pouts, dragging his feet over and slumping half on top of him. Nico allows it with a smile and a roll of his eyes, pinching Will’s shoulder. He doesn’t react except for a wounded noise, muffled in Nico’s lap, so the situation is evidently quite dire.

“It’s just hair, Will.”

“But I worked on it!” He shifts around until he’s got his head in Nico’s lap, face turned towards him, body curled up on the grass around him. Nico brushes his tangled bangs off his forehead, meeting his big sad eyes. “I spent forty minutes with a stupid brush! And yet!”

“And yet,” Nico agrees, unable to appropriately school is face into one of somber understanding. Will scowls at him for his lack of proper sympathy, a little bit of genuine hurt in his eyes, so Nico leans down and kisses right between his brows in apology. He seems mollified, if only slightly, or at least he leans into Nico’s touch and stops mumbling quite so much.

“‘S’not fair.”

“Mhm.“

“Your hair listens to your instructions.”

“Yep.”

“Even Cecil’s hair listens to him, and no one listens to Cecil.”

Nico purses his lips thoughtfully. “I think Austin listens to Cecil.”

“Yes, I know. It’s an ongoing issue. I’m trying to train him out of it.”

“And how’s that going?” Nico murmurs, curling a strand of golden blond hair around his finger.

“Oh, well, I’m doing my best, so of course it’s going horribly.”

Nico snorts. He resists the urge to hold his palms to Will’s cheeks and kiss every single freckle at light speed, because he will screech something about how Nico is one-upping him in the romance department or something stupid like that. Instead he settles for looking at his dumb dramatic boyfriend’s face and marvelling over the fact that the cutest boy in the entire world, and Nico is being totally objective, hunts around camp until he finds whatever tree Nico is hiding under and curls up into a ball around him and trusts Nico to hold him while he complains about stupid things that genuinely hurt his feelings a little. It’s nice. So many people at camp are still so rigid around him, like he’s collecting information for their judgement day or something. Will prefers to exercise his lesser-known Apollonian talent of being a bigger drama queen than the god himself.

“Stay still,” Nico says softly, moving Will around so he’s laying perpendicular to Nico, now, head centered in his lap and staring up at the sky. Will sighs and squirms a little and turns his head to press a kiss to Nico’s knee, scrunching up his face and releasing it, and then settles in the position.

Humming something soft that exists on the fringes of his foggy memories, he sinks his hands into Will’s hair.

“It’s not that bad,” he promises, moving slowly and pausing whenever he comes across a knot.

Will harrumphs.

“I mean it, Marilyn Monroe. You can tone down the histrionics.”

“I used gel.”

Nico flicks a dried clump of it onto Will’s forehead, amused. “I can see that.”

“I followed every single one of Mitchell’s instructions!”

“I bet.”

“And yet!”

“And, yet.”

Nico has a sneaking suspicion that someone made a comment about Will’s hair, in the last few weeks. He can never confirm it and Will has been shifty about it every time he asks, but Nico has noticed the uptick in hoods and hats the past month and his little flinches every time Nico reaches up and tugs on it. Despite being oddly confident about the oddest things — why he is so proud of being able to fit his fist in his mouth, Nico will never know — Will is very sensitive to how people think of him. He needs to know he’s liked, and when people don’t like him, he gets…desperate, pleasing. The opposite of Nico, who becomes worse in an attempt to push them away on his own terms.

Nico leans down and presses a long, lingering kiss to his forehead.

“I like your hair, you know.”

“It’s a stupid mess.”

He smooths down a handful of it, pressing it over Will’s eye. He manages to keep a straight face for one, two, three seconds before he huffs a laugh, batting Nico’s hands away. Nico grins.

“I like the stupid mess.”

“Yeah, well, you like a lot of weird things.”

“Like you?” Nico suggests, pressing another kiss to the tip of his rounded nose.

“Shut up.”

Another strange thing about him, that Nico has to duck his head to hide his automatic smile: he gets embarrassed easily.

Nico never expected it of him, with all the dorky, medical-themed pickup lines and general shamelessness in his affection towards everybody on Earth, but especially Nico. When the poking, prodding attraction is turned on him, however, he shuts down like an overloaded Playstation. Nico can sometimes see the error messages playing behind its eyes. It’s hilarious.

“Will.” He pokes him in the cheek. “Hey.”

“What,” Will grumbles.

“I think you’re beautiful.”

Watching the slow spread of red from below the collar of his shirt to the roots of his hair is a delight. Nico watches in glee, wrestling Will’s hands away when he tries to slap them over his face.

“Shut up! Leave me alone! Go — flirt with somebody else!”

“You’d curse them to speak in rhymes for ten years,” Nico teases.

Will makes an agonised noise. “Who! Asked you! Shut up!”

“You’d sic Kayla on anyone who so much as winks at me, you jealous bitch.”

“I would not!”

“You would so. You rolled your eyes at everything Percy said for three weeks when you found out I used to crush on him —”

“I did not!”

“— and you didn’t even have the balls to ask me out, back then.”

“You are a — peddler of falsehoods! A prevaricator, a perjurer, and a fabulist!”

“And you sound like you swallowed a thesaurus,” Nico snickers. He catches the hand Will flails at him, pressing a kiss to the wrist, which only serves to fluster him more. He decides to take mercy when the kisses he trails down his arms result in one loud, long, tortured screech, pulling back and giving him some space.

Notably, he doesn’t move from Nico’s lap.

“I like it,” Nico admits, once Will has calmed down some. “I like that you’ve liked me for so long.”

Will peeks through the fingers he has covering his eyes. “It’s embarrassing.”

“Yes.” Nico squeezes his shoulders. “And endearing, which seems to be your sweet spot.” He presses a much softer kiss to the underside of Will’s ear, lingering there until he sighs, slumping under all the tension finally leaving his body. “I love you, Will. I love your clumsiness and your rambles and your nose and your freckles and your awkwardness and your jealousy and your hair and I love you, Will, all of you. Even the embarrassing weird parts.” He kisses him again. “Especially the weird parts.”

Will breathes slowly, carefully, evenly, face pressed to the inside of Nico’s thigh. His long eyelashes tickle his skin. Nico can feel the press of his Adam’s apple when he swallows, pulsing against his calf.

“I never thought you were a freak.”

Nico brushes his knuckles over his cheek. “I know.”

“I used to — talk about you. All the time. And your oxytocin levels.”

He smiles.

“I know.”

“Lee had a — chart.” Some of the flush rises back up in his cheeks. “A ‘Days Since We’ve Heard About Di Angelo’ chart.”

Nico bites his lip. Hard.

“The number never got higher than six.”

“…I am trying really, really hard, Will.”

Will sighs.

“You can laugh.”

Nico cracks up, trying desperately to muffle his giggles in his bitten fist. It doesn’t work very well, but the glare Will sends him is somewhat softened by the smile twitching at the corner of his mouth.

“Gods, you are — a mess.”

“Mhm.”

Nico cups the side of his face. Will turns, slightly, enough to press a kiss to the centre of his palm and then stay there, eyes closed, breathing against his sword-callused skin.

“I love you too, by the way. Obviously.”

“I know.”

“Don’t Han Solo me, you bastard.”

“Go ahead and try to stop me,” Nico challenges, grinning into the passionately indignant kiss Will presses to his lips, finally, letting Nico curl his hands in his hair.

Nico is going to be smote by Hermes.

As he trudges through the muddy lake water, seething, he weighs each elaborated murder he has planned for each member of Cabin Eleven against how harshly Hermes will punish him for it. Connor will be flayed alive. Travis will be cooked over an open flame. Julia will be strapped to a rocket and blasted into the sun. Alice will face death by a thousand paper cuts.

And Cecil.

Fucking Cecil.

Cecil Markowitz will face a death so tortuous and harrowing that the constraints of the crime cannot be adequately covered in any mortal tongue. Crucified is too light a term. Nico is going to kill him in a way that is unspeakable — to hell with Hermes and his wrath. Nico is going to smite his dumbass children himself, and it will be worth it.

His boyfriend waits for him, lips pressed together and eyes trained to the sky, on the dock, holding several towels.

“Say nothing,” Nico hisses, slamming his sword on the wood and dragging himself up after it.

“Wasn’t going to,” Will lies. He immediately begins to cough, face turning slightly red. “Well, if I were to say anything —”

“William,” Nico warns.

“I just mean to say,” he soldiers on, setting all but one of the towels down, “that you look —”

He cuts himself off with a quickly smothered giggle.

“I swear to all that is fucking holy, Son of Phoebus.”

He lets Will maneuver him about, towel turning almost black with all the mud it’s absorbing off Nico’s clothes. He has to move on to another towel once he’s finished just Nico’s arm, dripping the soaked towel with a wet plop.

“It’s not that bad.”

Nico stares at him, deadpan. In fact he has to swipe pond scum out of his eyes and hair to glare properly.

“I am the fucking Creature of the Black Lagoon, Solace.”

Will bites his lip, hard. A burst of laughter escapes anyway, heedless of his desperate attempt to smother it, and the worst part is that it’s gorgeous and it makes his eyes light up and his stupid face looks stupid divine, when he’s giggly about something, and it makes Nico want to crush him a little. In the facial region, with his own face.

Except his own face is covered in stinky lake mud.

And Will is laughing.

Hard.

“I mean,” he manages around giggles, holding up a new towel to dab at Nico’s face, “it brings out your eyes, honestly.”

Nico closes his eyes. He lets that sit for a moment. He exhales for ten solid seconds.

“William Andrew.”

“It does! I mean, it’s really the perfect shade —”

“Romance is actually, genuinely dead.”

“— makes them look very deep, actually —”

“I should’ve listened to Demeter and married a doctor.”

“— and lake mud has so many uses! Most of the microbes on you are excellent for the skin. Who wouldn’t want to be compared to lake mud?”

“Oh wait! That is useless advice.”

“And you didn’t even pick up any leeches! Just all this dark, beautiful lake mud, as brown and beautiful as your eyes —”

“I’m returning you to whatever lab you were created in. Obviously you’re defective and I want a new model.”

“— in fact I’ll write a haiku about it.” He clears his throat. “My boyfriend is so hot —”

“Enough,” Nico interrupts, slapping his semi-clean hand over Will’s motormouth before things get any worse. Unfortunately the mud still caked into the lines of his skin contrasts beautifully with Will’s sparkling eyes, making them even bluer somehow. That’s a felony. “Also, that’s six syllables, dumbass.”

“I’ll revise,” he shoots back, muffled.

“If you promise not to, I’ll move my hand.”

Will presses a kiss to his palm because he’s a sappy loser who knows exactly what he does for Nico’s heart problems, based on the wiggle of his stupid perfect eyebrows.

“Deal.”

Nico removes his hand slowly. He lifts it back up when Will opens his mouth, threatening, but luckily he changes course before Nico has to make good on the threat, leaning down to kiss Nico softly, properly.

“I’m crucifying your best friend,” he mumbles against his lips. “That is step one of a ten step torture process.”

“‘Kay.”

“His siblings, too.”

“Sounds good.”

“Hermes might grind me to dust, after.”

“Trying really, really hard to focus on something right now, babe.”

“Right,” Nico breathes. There is still mud drying onto him and it is the Worst, actually, and he still has several homicides to play out, but.

But.

He can spend a little time kissing his boyfriend first.

(As long as that will keep him from spouting any more damn haikus.)

Will would like to say, at risk of perjuring himself, that he did not intend to fall asleep.

Like, he wanted to.

And he did.

But it was not his original intent.

His original intent was to stabilize his patients (success), climb out the back window of the infirmary (success), stick the landing (failure is good for growth), meet Nico behind the Big House (success), and shadow travel to his cabin without throwing up (fifty percent is a pass). The secondary intent was to sprawl on his boyfriend’s lap, taking up as much space as possible in his massive, against-camp-regulations bed (how it is possible to be Dionysus’ nepo baby without actually being a child of Dionysus, Will shall never know), turn off his brain, and watch him play video games for a while.

The issue is that Nico is so comfortable.

Yeah, he’s bony. And yeah, sometimes he gets really into the game and forgets that Will is there, elbowing him in the face as he cusses at the screen in what sounds like ancient Latin. And yeah, the sound of a CoD lobby is the opposite of a sleep-conductive environment. However.

However.

While he may spend hours of his week standing on tables, lecturing on healthy eating habits and regular circadian rhythms via sonnet, and enforcing said habits via taser (rip Leo Valdez, you would’ve loved watching Will taser people for stress relief, come back alive soon), Will is what his friends and family call a ‘big fat hypocrite’.

He wouldn’t know healthy habits if they painted themselves bright neon blue (the easiest colour for him to see), stood ten feet tall, dressed in Malvolio’s outfit from Twelfth Night, and roundhouse kicked him in the teeth his mother spent thousands of dollars on (braces suck). He has not slept through the night even once his whole life. Yesterday, his two meals were 1) twizzlers and 2) audacity. He once measured how much liquid he had in his system on any given time and then drank approximately two point seven litres of RedBull to become, by volume, one half percent caffeine. (His heart did indeed stop. But it started back up again when Jason shocked him, so it was fine. Plus, he wrote it all down, so in reality it was science.)

Also, his dumbfuck peers keep getting themselves maimed, and he was informed unfortunately by Chiron that he cannot strike and leave them to suffer. (Accusing him of violating his First Amendment Right To Petition got him nothing but stable duty.) As of ten minutes before Nico picked him up, he was on his thirty-ninth consecutive hour of being awake. Probably. (He’s reasonably certain that climbing a tree on Friday morning and belting himself to the trunk, Katniss Everdeen style, for a quick catnap was not a fever dream, but one can never be too certain.)

Regardless. Point is, Will had cute boys to cuddle and Thoughts to Think. He had no intention of falling asleep.

And, yet.

He wakes up warm — the perfect kind of warm, wherein you feel akin to a soupified caterpillar in a chrysalis — or like a croissant lovingly shaped by the hands of an elderly chef in Paris and baked with care in a regulated oven — or like a wonderfully blubbery elephant seal baking on a slick rock — or like a space rock hurtling through the —

“Morning, Sunshine,” murmurs a very familiar voice. Following the very gentle murmur is a very gentle smooch on the forehead. Will, still mostly asleep, thinks he would sign off his soul without a second thought to ensure it happens again. “Or evening, rather.”

“Has anyone ever offered you their soul?” Will asks, fuzzy and disoriented. He tries and fails to blink the grogginess away, but the world around him stays dark, and the hand in his hair remains where it is, and he is so, so sleepy.

“Not yet,” Nico says. Will can hear the amused smile in his voice. “Why?”

Will yawns. “No reason. Timizzit?”

“Late, tesoro. Past curfew.”

Will groans, knocking his head gently back into Nico’s hold.

Of course his dumb ass slept through the evening. Of course he now has to drag himself awake and walk, in the blistering, nose-numbing frost (it’s sixty degrees, Solace) across camp, dodging feral harpy attacks (Apollo kids have harpy immunity, William), and trudging into his sad, small, lonely bed (gods above you are your father’s son) where he will of course be fully awake by the time he gets there. God really does give his hardest battles to his strongest soldiers. (You’re an atheist, William Andrew.)

“Why me,” he laments, refusing to move from his boyfriend’s lap. Perhaps he will simply wither here, warm, satisfied, and more importantly away from little siblings who will not stop squabbling even when their long-suffering older brother looks longingly and pointedly at a bottle of cyanide.

Nico snorts. “Because the gods are punishing you for your crimes.”

“I have committed no crimes! This is unjust! Partisan! I am Hester Prynne and she is me —”

“Your mother is going to hell for teaching you literacy.”

“Defamation and libel!”

“Shut up, Will, gods —”

But he softens the blow of his words by leaning down, hands on either side of Will’s face, and kissing him like he’s trying to breathe him back to life. Or keep him quiet, honestly, but he smells like woodsmoke and citrus and old leather so Will doesn’t really mind. Even if he did, the chapped skin of Nico’s lips serves as a very good distraction, as does the brush of his thumb over Will’s cheekbone and the cool press of his ring against Will’s heated skin.

“Stay over,” he whispers, shifting his lips to Will’s chin, his jaw, his neck. He scratches his teeth lightly against Will’s adam’s apple and his hemoglobin briefly forget how important their job is. “You don’t have a shift tomorrow and everyone at camp owes you, like, twelve favours each.”

“That’s very convincing,” Will mumbles, unsure if he’s referring to Nico’s sound logic or the breath he blows on the shell of Will’s ear, which makes his arrector pili muscles go crazy. (He could make a more convincing case for the logic if all the blood had not abandoned his brain. Alas.)

“I’m a very convincing person.”

He slides a hand under Will’s shirt and his already very weak resolve pulls out a suitcase, packs its things, and abandons its family to pursue a career in competitive shoemaking. Or something. Nico’s hands are very very cold and it feels really really good for some reason and Will is just one man, okay. He may have been named after willpower but that does not mean he possesses any. And Nico is a convincing person. He out-stubborned Death.

“Okay,” he gasps out, arching into the nail Nico scratches over the intensely sensitive skin of his hip, “I’m staying, I’m staying, please take all your wiles and ship them out into the sea in a wine crate ala Danaë and her newborn.”

“…You are such a deeply strange person.”

“And yet you love me so.”

Nico presses his smile to Will’s forehead. “Indeed, I do.”

“It’s half past eleven, Nico. I told you to get some rest.”

Nico’s face twists somewhere between a scowl and a frown.

“I don’t need to.”

He’s sorted the medicine cabinet eight billion times in his life — Will doesn’t need to think about it. Instead, he lets his mind wander, lets his hands handle themselves, lets his eyes stray to the hunched way Nico is standing, one knee resting on the cot Will assigned him, the other straight, foot resting, pointed, towards the door. His fingers twist and steeple together, thumb worrying his skull ring, faint scratches picked and scabbed over. His clothes sag off of him.

“It’s safe,” Will assures softly. Nico startles, turning his big, dark eyes to face him, and Will meets them head on, determined to let the seriousness show in his face. “Argus is watching the door, and Peleus is awake at the border. Nothing is going to attack us while you sleep.”

Nico worries his lip. “That’s not it.”

Half-lie. He was worried about being attacked — Will can feel it, the same way you can feel a bug crawling on your skin. Tiny brushes of something foreign along the sensitive nerves of his skin. But he’s shifty, still, beyond that, beyond the same fear they all carry.

“What is it, then?”

Nico shrugs. Squeezing his eyes briefly shut, Will focuses his energy, sending out teeny tiny vibrations too tightly wound for regular human senses to pick up, waiting for them to bounce back at him. Usually, he hates doing this — too much input. He can feel the ions shaking on the metal bed frames, feel the cling of every microbe on non-sterile surfaces, feel microscopic patch of skin flake off every person’s body, feel the ka-thunk ka-thunk ka-thunk of every heartbeat. It’s hard to sort and hard to interpret. A massive wall of noise beyond auditory.

But he focuses, channels the input as much as he can, and interprets like Rachel taught him — like picking up a handful of silt and focusing on one grain of sand at a time. One person out of the masses — one input at a time.

Sweat, gathering in the palms of his hands, chock full of DHEA and adrenaline. Pinpriked with serotonin and a sprinkling of cortisol. Elevated heart rate, barely so; increased blood pressure. Fourteen hundred hair follicle deaths. Minor lactic acid buildup in the muscles. Contracted veins and capillaries.

“You’re feeling guilty,” Will guesses.

Nico gapes.

“How did you — there’s no possible way you — lucky guess,” he lands on eventually.

“Stress is just pouring off of you, man,” Will says, holding back a small smile, “I can feel it.”

Ha. If only he knew.

“Whatever. I just —”

Will waits, tucking away the last of the half-used bottles. They’re going to have to start rationing nectar, soon. And he might have Nico cut some bandages if he’s up for it, tomorrow; it’ll save him some time before Chris’s surgery.

“You just?”

Nico gestures helplessly at where Will is finishing up the last of the inventory. “There are a dozen more deserving people than me of this bed, I can’t —”

“You’re important too, you know.”

The click of Nico’s jaw snapping shut rings throughout the quiet infirmary. It’s just barely louder than sleeping patients shifting in the cots, and a little quieter than Miranda’s snoring.

“I know that.”

“Do you?”

Hesitation. Cortisol and adrenaline, again, even higher heart rate.

“…Yes?”

Hm. Interesting.

“You’re telling the truth,” Will muses. He tilts his head. “Do you trust me?”

“Yes.”

The immediate honesty in Nico’s voice is flattering. Will smiles, and he flushes, slightly.

Serotonin flash. Salivary gland inhibition.

Interesting.

“Listen to me, then: you’re important. And you’re still dangerously exhausted — medically exhausted. You’re a step and a half away from a coma, dude. You need this bed as much as anyone else here.”

“There are stab wounds in some of them,” Nico argues. “And missing limbs and slash marks and —”

“And they’re all stable,” Will interrupts. He raises a challenging eyebrow. “D’you think I maybe know what I’m doing after three years of this, Nico? I know how to triage. Is anyone close to death?”

Nico purses his lips. “No.”

“Right.” Will shrugs. “I know you’ve been teetering on the edge of fading, which isn’t great. The only reason I waited until now to get you in here was because I had people in worse condition. They’re stable now — and so I have space to prioritize you. Okay?”

Slowly, Nico nods. Gut serotonin and heavy endorphin release — good.

“Okay,” he says quietly.

Truth.

“You’ll sleep?”

A ghost — ha — of a smile flashes on his face. “Yeah, you nag, I’ll sleep.”

“That’s all I ask,” Will responds, meeting his smile. “Night, Nico.”

“Goodnight.” He hesitates. “Thank you, Will.”

Will grins wider.

“Anytime.”

The best part of being his own camp counsellor is that he can wake up whenever the fuck he likes.

Nico’s a fan.

Because, however, his dumb ass made friends with the camp’s head medic, he doesn’t get to sleep in as often as he would like. He is instead often woken up before the clock strikes nine, which is a tragedy and one of the forty thousand reasons he is going to be present on Will’s judgement day. (The scales tip any which way on a regular basis, but as of last week, Will is going to hell. Unfortunate. Nico’ll still visit him, though. Bring him one half of a twizzler or something.) So when he wakes up, one lovely morning, mouth tasting like something rotted in it and sun well past halfway across the sky, he is capital-C Concerned.

What a horrible tragedy that is. Finally, for the first time in months, he was able to sleep in. And his first thought is not gratitude. Solace may indeed have to die — Nico was not this way before he started planting his annoying ass front and centre in Nico’s life. He’s quite fairly certain he used to be frightening and badass. Now Will orders him to drink milk for the sake of his calcium and he does. Gods.

“Morning,” he hedges, approaching the archery range, feeling marginally more alive than twenty minutes prior.

Kayla raises an amused eyebrow. “Dude, it’s, like, two.”

“Well fuck you, then.”

She smirks. “Aw, did baby not get his Sunshine fix of the day? Is that why he’s so grumpy?”

It really sucks that Will is so fond of his siblings. Nico wonders if Will would still like him if he knew how many times he daydreams of transporting Kayla onto the moon per day.

“As soon as I figure out which god would appreciate you as a sacrifice, you’re gone.”

“Yeah, right,” she snorts, turning away and lining up an arrow. She lets it fly, watching as it shaves a splinter off a hunk of wood fifty feet away. “You couldn’t get close enough to kick my ass before I’d skewer you, di Angelo.”

Remembering the warning arrow Kayla had shot through his shoulder last week, he wisely chooses not to press the matter any further. The power visibly goes to her head. Fuck.

“Just — tell me where Will is.”

“Why?” She strings another arrow. The grin on her face is a level of shit-eating that Nico has only before seen on a Stoll. She should spend less time around Julia, or else the camp is in for some serious trouble. “What are your intentions with my dear brother?”

Nico, on principle, refuses to answer that question. Kayla shrugs, finishing her shot and then turning around to stick her tongue out at him.

“No answer, no location! Find him yourself, loverboy. And remember that I am always watching.”

Stomping away, and ignoring the smile twitching at his lips — she is so annoying, truly, gods above he owes Bianca a thousand apologies for ever opening his mouth — he heads towards the infirmary. There are only six locations Will is at any given time, after all, except when he disappears for several hours randomly but Nico doesn’t know how to bring that up yet. As he approaches the infirmary, though, he hears it absolutely blasting with music, like genuinely shaking the ground a little bit, and knows exactly where to find him.

As he approaches the door, wincing at the door, he finds it closed. Odd — Will likes a breeze when he works. Even odder is the hastily-written sign pasted onto it:

ANNUAL CLEAN OUT DAY. IF YOU NEED ME, TOUGH SHIT. IF YOU NEED A BANDAID, TOUGH SHIT. IF YOU’RE BLEEDING OUT, CALL AN AMBULANCE AND PRAY. I AM BUSY.

(‘Busy’ is underlined three times.)

In smaller print, under the all-caps monstrosity, is:

Unless you’re Nico, in which case disregard the previous sentiment. No, Cecil, this does NOT mean you.

The note is written again in Ancient Greek, Latin, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Mandarin, Italian, Polish, Korean, Morse Code, and another ten languages Nico can’t even name. Actually, wait — the top left is Klingon. And middle right note does not appear to be language, showing instead a poorly drawn stick figure in armour being shoved into a cannon and shot into the sun by another poorly drawn stick figure in a lab coat. Nico loves a man who’s multi-talented, indeed.

Hesitantly, Nico cracks open the door. He is immediately assaulted by a solid wall of sound, and then nearly bowled over by the enigma himself, William ‘I Can Restructure A Human Brain But Cannot Tie My Shoelaces’ Solace. He catches himself at the last second, and then barely manages to catch Will, grabbing him around the waist just before his head hits the floor.

“Nico!” he shouts over the music, smiling brightly. “Hi! You’re here!”

“I’m here.” He can physically feel his voice cracking, but luckily the music drowns it out. Hopefully. “Uh, what’re you doing?”

“Cleaning!” Will straightens up, although he stays within the circle of Nico’s arms. Nico tries real hard to keep his gaze firmly planted on his face and not on the hands he still has in his hips. “I do it once a year, kick everybody out and deep clean the place. Helps keep it fresh and minimize the bloodstains on the floor.”

“Ah. And the music…”

“It’s fun!” Will shouts. He gasps when the CD player skips and a new song comes on, heavy base and funky synths blasting so hard the window panes shake. “Oh my gods! I love this one!” He turns his bright grin at Nico full force, absolutely no holdbacks on the dimples or freckles, gods help him, and bows cheekily. “Can I have this dance, good sir?”

“It’s Britney Spears’ Outrageous,” Nico protests weakly.

“Yeah!”

…Very, very weakly.

“…Okay.”

Will whoops, grabbing his hands and spinning him around. Nico yelps, nearly tripping over a cot, but when he looks back up Will has his eyes closed and is shimmying not unlike a worm on a fish hook, and it’s so ridiculous that he can’t help but laugh. Will pries one eye open, grinning widely, and shimmies harder.

“You’re such a dweeb!”

“Join me in the dweebiness! Free yourself!”

Nico rolls his eyes fondly, squeezing Will’s hand, and lets himself get ridiculous. He’ll deny it if anyone asks, but it’s fun.

…And not just because Will is next to him, smile brighter than any star, dancing like a massive dork, hand clasped in his.

Will knows who it is at the first light brush on his shoulders.

He tips his head back back, bumping his boyfriend’s hip, leaning into the hand on his trapezius, his scapula, the base of his neck.

“Hi,” he says, grinning.

“Hi,” Nico says, leaning down to press his smile onto Will’s forehead. His hair tickles his cheeks, and he smells like woodsmoke and citrus, and Will slides his hand across his jaw and tugs him closer.

“Errand done?”

“Yep.”

“Lord Hades pleased?”

“As much as he ever is.” Nico shifts, kissing the corner of his mouth, the curve of his chin, the shape of his jaw. “My ears are ringing from five days of quiet. Even the echoing sound of lost souls cannot compete with your constant blabbing; I hardly knew what to do with myself.”

“Oh, shut up. You love my chatterin’.” He smacks the side of Nico’s head, but it’s hard to play mad when he’s smiling, shameless, wide enough that his teeth nick Will’s cheekbones, that his snickers are muffled into his skin.

“If I wanted to be stuck with someone who yaps nonstop I would’ve stayed down with Cerebus. In fact he might shed less, and he doesn’t drool when he sleeps.”

“…I do not shed.”

Nico plants both hands next to Will’s head, heaving himself up, and scans his camp shirt. Within three seconds, he locates a strand of hair, pinches it off, and flicks it at Will’s face.

“Uh-huh.”

“Oh, for the love of — get over here,” Will demands. Laughing, Nico goes where Will tugs him, curling up next to him on the bench. “You’re such a shit. Normal people are much kinder to the significant annoyances they leave behind for five days, you know.”

“Are they.”

Nico lifts his arm in offering and Will accepts with relish, tucking himself under it and making certain to drag his curls down Nico’s face in the process.

“Yep. In fact I was expecting hand-written letters by day two, honestly, telling me how much you missed me and how the distance was physically painful, et cetera, et cetera. Maybe a sonnet or two. Italian, preferably, Elizabethan are not my favourite.”

“You’re very picky.”

Will sniffs haughtily. “Well, I’m a catch. You have lots of competition, you know. I was fighting them off while you were away but now that you come back and insult me upon reunion, I shall reevaluate my options.”

He feels more than hears the quiet laughter Nico presses in his hair, thumb brushing his collar, dipping onto bare skin.

“Is that so.”

“Indeed. My suitors have even offered a dowry quite handsome. I’m worth twenty-seven goats, didn’t you know.”

“Oh, well then. I might as well return what I brought for you, since I’m not sure I can outshine two dozen goats.”

The cool thing about being a son of Apollo is that Will has range. His dad is the god of arts, generally, up to and especially the dramatic ones. Will knows how to school his face into the perfect mask, how to smile on command and cry as desired, how to deliver a line and bow with a flourish. Playing a part comes as naturally as breathing, as naturally as healing.

“A present?” he asks, checking his nails as if the mere thought bores him. “That’s interesting, I guess.”

Nico doesn’t even bother to indulge him.

“Here, you massive dweeb,” he snorts. He hands over a small paper box, hand-folded and thin. “I can practically feel you vibrating.”

There is only one thing in this world, quite possibly, that Will likes more than proving Nico wrong, and that is letting his boyfriend spoil him. In all honesty it’s a real challenge sometimes, because Nico is really very good at being everything Will has ever wanted even if he has wrong opinions on most movies. Truly Will’s life is a joke at which the gods must howl with laughter.

Eagerly taking the box, he holds it up to his face, carefully inspecting every corner. The paper is regular printer paper, slightly waterlogged (from the Big House printer, then, ‘cause Will was carrying a giant bag of saline in from storage when he was eleven years old and tripped on the shipment of office supplies that someone had left, for some reason, in the middle of the fucking hallway, and the bag had exploded on impact all over four boxes of printer paper holding one thousand pages each) and carefully bent into shape. He recognises Nico’s handiwork from the dozens of origami paper sculptures he’s been gifted over the past few months.

“Open it.”

“What is it?”

Nico rolls his eyes. “What did I just say.”

“No, I mean — it’s not my birthday or anything.”

“So?”

“So you’ve wrapped me up a present! I want to know why before I open it.”

“Just because,” Nico mumbles, pressing a kiss to his temples. “Not everything needs a reason, nosey.”

“If nothing had reason then we would still be premordial soup,” Will mutters, but pops open the lid anyway.

He gasps.

“Oh my gods, Nico, you —”

Nico’s smiling smugly, but Will barely notices. Inside the box is a black chain darker than shadow, so dark it doesn’t even glint in the heavy sun, and dozens of little charms, from polished obsidian to a ball of slowly flickering flame.

“You like?”

“It’s gorgeous!”

He makes a triumphant nose, pumping his fist, and says, “Fuck those suitors, I fucking win,” and the funniest part is that he’s damn serious. There’s a glint in his eye identical to when he wins a sword fight, to when Connor loses a bet to him, to when twenty-odd bets are stacked against him and he’s got a full house. Something dangerous and wild and superior and Will is not an enabler, okay, he is not, but he is only so strong and there is only so much he can do when pretty boys wrap their arms around him and smirk at him and bring him bracelets they made in the Underworld. He’d like to meet someone who wouldn’t fold, actually.

“There were no suitors, you loser,” he says, but he’s flushed, pleased smile stretched wide across his face, and Nico’s grinning that too-wide grin and tilting Will’s face closer with the edge of his thumb, like he barely had to try. And there’s always a little bit of shadow leeching off him when he comes back from a quest, an aura surrounding him like he’s squaring off to the sun, and of course the wild churning in Will’s stomach has nothing to do with that but what’s he to do, really? What is a warm-blooded person with eyes that can see to do when faced with such a look?

“Of course there aren’t. They know I would reap their actual souls.”

“Possessive, much.”

“You’re literally going red.”

“Shut up.”

And he does, but only because Will makes him.

Although judging by the hand he shoves in his hair, he doesn’t seem to mind.

Will wears earrings that glint in the sunlight.

Nico is very aware of them.

He’s never seen anything like them before. Bianca wore earrings, little citrine gems that dotted both earlobes, and Hazel wears little hoops in each ear. Piper has dozens of beaded earrings she made herself. Annabeth wears little owl charms. Percy has a diamond stud, Connor’s ears are pierced all over, and Lou Ellen has gauges she’s slowly stretching out. Most people in camp have a piercing or two, really, some of them done by the Apollo or Aphrodite campers, and really sunny days they glint together like the massive disco ball that spun over the slot machines of the Lotus.

But Will’s earrings are different.

There’s no…pokey part, is the best way Nico can describe it. Each piece is a delicate gold chain, maybe two inches long each, with a thin blue sapphire hanging off one end. He threads them through the tiny holes in his lobes, and they dangle, glittering every time he moves. The sapphires refract the light when he tucks back his hair, shining an array of tiny rainbows on his neck, on his jaw.

He is distracted by them, often.

“You’re staring.”

Nico blinks, twitching back to his body. The blue sapphires he’d been staring at are replaced with blue eyes, twinkling with amusement, and he flushes.

“I was — spaced out.”

“Mhm.” Will turns back to his arts & crafts project, dragging a brushful of lavender paint over stained wood. A jewelry box, by the looks of it. “If by spaced out, you mean staring at me.”

Nico returns resolutely to his own project. His is much less delicate than Will’s — the sheath he has strapped to his calf at all times broke, last week, and he’s felt naked without his dagger — and there’s a warp in the leather, where his attention slipped. He focuses on smoothing it.

“Not on purpose.”

“No?” Coming from anyone else, the teasing tone of voice would have him raising his shoulders, twisting his face. But from Will it’s — tolerable, somehow. Perhaps it’s the hand that rests gently on his wrist. “You space out at me a lot, then. Crazy coincidence.”

Nico stars at the freckly, tanned hand, waiting for it to move. It doesn’t. Will keeps it there, callused fingers brushing gentle circles on the base of his thumb, dipping and swooping along with his quiet humming.

Nico swallows. “You’re — distracting.”

Will’s smile spreads slowly across his face; stilted, almost, like he’d tried to bite it back.

“How?”

“You’re —” Nico gestures, vaguely, at all of him. Will’s smile grows, and his cheeks slowly grow pink, blonde ringlets falling out of place and curtaining his face.

“I’m?” he presses.

His voice is soft, near silent; searching, prodding. Hoping. Nico’s breath hitches, and his palms sweat, and Will’s gentle tracing pauses, briefly. He bites his lip, worrying the chapped skin, breathing quick; in, out, in, out. In a slow, calculated movement, watching Nico carefully, carefully, out of the corner of his eyes, he slides their palms together, fingers resting loosely in the spaces of Nico’s open, twitching hand.

“…Is this okay?”

Nico feels lightheaded. He’s sure his palms are clammy, although he can’t tell against Will’s. He gnaws at his lip again. Nico’s exhales are quick, short.

He curls his fingers until they rest on Will’s cracked knuckles.

“You’re striking,” he says quietly.

Ducking his head, Will turns back to his painting. He dips his brush in a deep, blooming green, now, tracing it along the edge of the lavender.

He’s smiling.

Nico has been watching him intensely for the last twenty minutes.

Will has been letting him.

Nico watches him a lot, actually. While he heals, if he’s tagged along to the infirmary, while he plays volleyball or basketball with his siblings. When they’re sat in Nico’s cabin, curled next to each other on his bed, Will reading, Nico, supposedly, playing on his DS. While Will trains, especially, although it doesn’t take long watching that clusterfuck for him to get up and come help out.

(“You are not this bad at swordfighting, William.”

“No clue what you’re talking about, darlin’. It’s just not my strength!”

“You are holding the sword backwards, William.”

“Oh, am I?”

“I am going to kill you, William.”

“How about you help me, instead? I don’t remember how to grip the handle right. Can you come show me again?”)

Will doesn’t mind. He watches him, too. It’s hard not to.

“I thought you said you don’t have any musical talents.”

Will shrugs, whistling the last notes of the melody. A quick one that Michael taught him, years ago — something to ease nerves, to calm the mind. “It’s just an extension of my sonic powers, really.”

Nico stares like he knows the exact day you’re gonna die. Will knows a lot of people find this unsettling. He doesn’t get it. He relishes the attention, if anything; the scrutiny. One hundred percent of Nico’s intensity on him is — intoxicating.

“Sounds pretty musical to me.”

Will grins at him, cheeks aching, stomach flipping. Nico’s expression doesn’t change; eyebrows narrowed, mouth twisted into a thoughtful scowl. Evaluating every shift in Will’s expression. He squints one eye, when he’s focused. Will aches to brush his thumb under it.

“Do you know how to whistle, Nico?”

Nico’s dark eyes flip up to meet his. Will’s breath hitches — there are a thousand layers of Earth in those eyes. Like the crackling fractals of Pangea; eyes browner than earth, darker than black dirt. Deeper than the burnt sepia of the planet’s mantle. Two round abysses that Will has been falling down for half his life; air billowing around him, slowing his descent.

Gods, Nico is gorgeous.

“I — think so.”

His endless eyes squint, slightly-freckled nose wrinkling as he focuses on the purse of his lips. He glances down at them like that’ll somehow help, going goofy and cross-eyed. Will’s soul melts like a grape popsicle on a scorching summer day. His impulse melts away with it. He darts in close and pecks Nico’s pursed lips, pulling away just as fast. Those crossed-eyes blow open wide, pupils shrinking, and the air comes out of his lungs in a quiet, punched-out whoosh. Nowhere sharp enough for a whistle.

“…Wow.”

Will smiles sheepishly, rocking back on his heels.

“Um. Sorry?”

Nico’s thin fingers come up and brush the swell of his lips.

“Solace, you are the corniest motherfucker on the planet, you know that?”

Ducking his head to hide his laughter, Will nods.

“I know.”

“‘Can you whistle’, he says.” Nico scoffs. “Get over here.”

“Why?” Will asks cheekily. “Gonna ask me to show you?”

“Shut up.”

Nico grabs the back of his neck and yanks him down. Will can feel the press of his teeth, this time, the warmth of his skin now that he’s not pulling quickly away. He tastes good, too, like the citrusy chapstick he’s always got on.

He kisses as intensely as he stares.

Will finds he doesn’t mind that, either.

Nico is pretty sure, at this point, that something has gone wrong. A chasm has opened up, a trap went haywire, an explosion went off and blew up half the camp. Something drastic has to have happened to make everyone go quiet.

But the rocks of Zeus’ fist are sun-warmed. A sweet-smelling breeze ruffles brand new leaves, musses his hair, although it’s hot enough that he’s rolled up the cuffs of his jeans and forgone a sweater. Will is on guard duty next to him, and no one has come to bother them in hours, and he cannot bring himself to care.

“Found one!”

“No way,” Nico protests, leaning over to see. “It’s been ten minutes!”

In the palm of the cupped hand Will holds out between them, held loose so as not to crush it, is a four-leaf clover. One of the more picturesque ones, too; emerald green, heart-shaped leaves, delicately crimped, and a thin curling stem tapered perfectly down the middle.

Will shrugs, smiling. There’s enough bitten-back teasing in his expression that it looks more like a smirk. “I guess I’m just lucky.”

“Lucky I don’t smite you, maybe,” Nico grumbles. “Go away. Your bad vibes are hindering my success.”

Snorting, Will does, shuffling back over to let Nico comb through the clover thatch in peace. He stretches out on the grass — he ditched his shoes and helmet and armour the literal second the rest of the team ran off, the dork — and shifts ‘til he’s comfortable, ankles crossed, hands behind his head, eyes closed. Nico pictures him with a piece of straw sticking out of his mouth and a cowboy hat resting over his eyes and giggles to himself. The image is so clear he’s half-certain it was a vision.

“Though you were tryin’ to focus,” Will mutters, cracking one eye open.

Nico sticks his tongue out. “I’m trying, derpface. All your shifting around is distracting.”

“I’ve moved maybe three times.”

“Yeah, in as many minutes.”

Will, without looking, plucks a blade of grass and flicks it at him. “Stay focused, Death Breath.” He stretches his arms above his head, sighing. “I’m gonna nap.”

He doesn’t move when Nico flings a handful of (regular) clovers at him, infuriatingly serene. He’s trained himself to fall asleep anywhere, anything to catch up on the sleep debt he’s been wracking up for years, and the sunny patch of clearing in the first they’re in is one of the nicer places Nico has found him passed out. At least here he can stretch out, sit in the sun — Nico found him tucked in between the camp washer and dryer, once, curled under a stack of laundry baskets. He’d made a valiant effort to hide himself from accident-prone younger siblings and best friends who invite mortal wrath, but his snoring had given him away. Nico’d heard him outside the building.

Here, though, no one is bothering them. Chiron’s playing field medic, the infirmary has been stocked, the Ares kids were cursed by Clovis and co. last week and have been asleep since. There haven’t been any echoing screams of agony. No desperate IMs. Nico, even, makes sure to keep his sword within reach, armour still firmly strapped, quietly on guard so Will doesn’t have to be. For once, he can take up as much space as he likes, bare skin absorbing the sun that has outshined the clouds perhaps for the express purpose of keeping him toasty even without a blanket.

Nico drags his eyes back towards the clovers, smiling. He’s cute when he sleeps. Sometimes he mumbles, nonsensical ramblings of the half-conscious, too slurred for Nico to make much sense of it. He catches bits and pieces of words and phrases as he picks through the soft leaves; lemme try, twice, as he watches a ladybug hop her way over a stone; careful with that, as he tosses a handful of regular, three-leaf clovers into the air; and notably diphenhydramine as he digs his hand through the soft dirt to yank out a worm.

Nico turns to face him. “You’re a nerd,” he says solemnly.

Will snores in response.

“Sleep quieter, why don’t you.”

The thing about Will is that he is like a tapeworm.

Nico means this in the best possible way. They start out invisible — sure, you might feel the irritation of something new burrowing its way into your person, but it’s not your most pressing concern. You’ve maybe got other things on your mind. You’re not focused, intensely, on how tiny changes are happening to you; you’re eating more, moving more, sleeping weird. Sometimes this happens. It’s nothing notable.

Slowly, though, you start to change. There’s this…cavern, inside of you, that you’re suddenly aware of. Maybe it was always there. You’re struck, more and more each day, with the need to fill yourself. To consume. You are aware, for the first time in years, that you have not had enough. There has been an emptiness inside you. And now there’s this driving force making home inside you instead, pushing you to take enough to not just survive but to thrive. You’re capable, now, in a way you weren’t before, to feel your needs, your wants. To listen to them. There is something that has worked it’s way inside you and grown and grown and grown and forced you, alongside it, to care about yourself enough to maintain its life inside you.

Will would probably not appreciate being compared to a parasite. It might be funny to tell him anyway, though. Watch his eye twitch as he tries to find a diplomatic way to ask Nico what the fuck his deal is. He’ll have to tell him when he wakes up.

A quiet groaning noise has him looking up again; the sound of rustling clothes and twisting grass.

“Y’r smirkin’.”

Speak of the devil. Or parasite.

Nico picks at a tangled stem. “What are your thoughts on tapeworms?”

“Generally bad,” Will says, yawning. He doesn’t seem fazed at all by the random question — he usually isn’t. People ask him a lot of strange things, generally. Like, how many consecutive concussions are medically unsound? (any, dude, please), or what is the recommended liquid amount of iron to swallow to fortify your blood? (none, please don’t fucking swallow liquid iron), or perhaps most notable are you up for learning how to un-do cerebral paralysis within the next ten seconds? (no, Jesus Christ, get off the fucking roof and set down the wax wings, do you people learn nothing ever).

“What about tapeworms as a metaphor for friendship?”

“…That’s a new one, I’ll give you that.”

Hell yes. Point to Nico.

“D’you find one, yet?”

Nico’s face drops into a scowl. “No.”

He doesn’t understand how Will found a four-leaf so quickly. Nico’s been looking for much longer, and the clover patch is huge — statistically, he should have found one by now, right? It just makes sense.

Will hums, dragging himself to his knees and then somersaulting over. He lands legs sprawled over a smattering of pebbles, head by Nico’s knees. Nico reaches out and flicks his temples, just to watch him wrinkle his nose in protest.

“Whattaya so bent on getting one for, anyway?”

Nico shrugs, looking away. “Luck.”

“Duh.” Will pokes his thigh. “What for?”

“None of your business, nosy.”

“Well, that just made me a thousand times more interested. I was going to let it go, before, but now —”

“You’re so full of shit,” Nico huffs, grinning. Will matches his look with a shameless smile, placing his hands under his chin in a caricature of cherubic innocence.

“Why, whatever do you mean.”

“I mean —” he punctuates every word with a pinch — “that you have to know every detail —”

“Ack! Stop!”

“— of everybody else’s lives —”

“Hey! Derek Hale! Put the claws away!”

“— at any given time —”

“I am going to scream!”

“— or you’ll die.”

He acquires, finally, to Will’s screeching and writhing, pushing him away with one last poke. He pouts, looking at Nico with round, wounded eyes.

“You’re so mean to me.”

“You invite it, honestly.”

“By caring about you, you butthead.”

Nico rolls his eyes, fighting back a smile. “Yeah, yeah.”

Looking for the four-leaf is different with Will watching him. Different, somehow, even though he’s quiet, chin resting on his knees, eyes following Nico’s searching hands. Every shift has Nico’s breath catching, fingers twitching at his minute hums, his tapping fingers. He’s distracting. If Nico was struggling to find the lucky clover before, it’s hopeless now. Will drags his attention like the core of the Earth drags everything towards it.

“Hey,” Will murmurs, poking Nico with his toe. “Take mine.”

Nico glances up to find his hand, again, outstretched between them, four-leaf clover centred in the palm of his wide hands. His eyes watch every minute shift of Nico’s form, his stuttered breath, sweating palms. Bitten lip, shifting eyes.

“…You don’t know what I need it for.”

“I don’t need to.” Blue, blue, blue eyes. Ridiculously so, really. An exact match for the sky no matter what time of day; olympic blue, now, an perfect reflection of the late afternoon. “Take it.”

He thrusts his hand out farther. Heart pounding, Nico does, lightly pinching the stem between his thumb and forefinger, keeping his hand curled on Will’s.

He promised himself. One to ten thousand chance — if he found one, he’d do it.

It counts.

“Hey, Will.”

Blue widely above him, encroached by the canopy. Blue flapping in the wind behind him, perched on Zeus’ fist. Blue on the plumes of his helmet. Blue in the lavender, in the grape hyacinth, in the cornflowers.

Blue, blue, blue eyes, meeting his, flicking down. Flicking hastily back up again.

Nico tugs, gently, on his wrist. He moves where Nico directs him. Easily.

Up. Down. Up again. Perfect rings, thinning against a growing expanse of black.

Nico darts forward and kisses him. He sighs into it, immediately, hand going limp in Nico’s hold. The clover flutters to the ground between them, disappearing once again in a sea of green.

“You didn’t need luck for this,” Will mumbles.

Nico tilts their heads to rest closer together and kisses him ‘til he’s quiet.

“Thought you might like this.”

Nico turns the thin plastic casing over in his hands. It catches the limited light from the one open window, refracting a burst of rainbow across the shadowy ceiling.

“What…is it?”

“Mixtape.” Will rocks back on his heels, hands swinging slightly at his sides. He hums idly, flicking his gaze across the room faster than Nico can track. Distracted. “Songs ‘n stuff.”

Contrary to popular belief, Nico knows what a mixtape is. CDs as well, for that matter. In fact he distinctly remembers when they came out — the transition from cassette to CD was a triumphant one. Way easier for him to save his game processes and transfer to new machines as they came. (He wonders, idly, what happened to his stack of CDs left at the Lotus. Are they still there, standing alone in his half of the room? Next to his dresser, across from Bianca’s coin and token collection? Is there enough dust in that standstill place to cover the entire living space in a thick blanket of forgotten memory?)

“I can see that, Solace. I meant — why.”

“Because!” Solace gestures grandly, hands fluttering in some particular way that means nothing, really; just accentuates his wide grin, his twinkling eyes. The rocking he’s constantly doing, back and forth, back and forth, the twitching of his fingers. Electrons on a wire. “It’s been a while since you’ve had a radio or anything, right? Figured you might have a couple years to catch up on. Might be fun.”

Nico turns the CD case over again in his hand, peripherally aware of the shifting rainbows, still, reflecting off Will’s hair now, dying it redgreengold. There’s sharpie scrawled across the surface, completely illegible except for the plethora of exclamation points, the doodle of a cat, and the chain of flowers drawn carefully around the edge.

Will is smiling so, so brightly.

“Thank you,” Nico says quietly. He clears his throat, looking away. “I’ll, um. I’ll listen to it. Tonight.”

“Great!” Will chirps. “I got lots more, I’ll stop by after my shift and you can tell me what you liked. That way you can have more input on karaoke night.”

“Oh, I’m not gonna —”

“See you tomorrow! Write down what you think!”

“— do that.”

Nico returns his parting wave helplessly, watching as he sprints down the stairs and then, for no discernible reason, cartwheels three times on his way across the common. Immediately upon righting himself he walks into a (thankfully unlit) brazier and goes sprawling, calling out, to no one, I’m okay! and bounding back off.

“How are you alive,” Nico mutters to himself. He turns back to the CD case, running his thumb across the edges. He notices, for the first time, the hearts that have been drawn along the clasps. A smile pushes its way across his face no matter how hard he tries to fight it back.

When he plays it that night, lying on his bed with his headphones tucked over his ears and his Walkman resting on his stomach, the first song is Walking on Sunshine.

He can’t fight back a smile then, either.

“Happy birthday!”

“Still not my birthday, Solace.”

“Eh. One day I’ll say it and it’ll be right.”

The flowers he’s holding — pretty, ruffled deep red, although Nico doesn’t recognise them — remains extended between them, clutched fist unwavering. Nico rolls his eyes, biting the inside of his cheek, and takes them.

“Of course, you could also just tell me when your birthday is.”

“No.” A pause. He brings the flowers up to his face, pointedly ignoring Will’s wink, and inhales. They smell almost identical to the shampoo Will wears. “You’re such a loser.”

“And yet you spend all your time with me.”

“Not — all,” Nico protests, cheeks burning. “I spend —”

Time with others, he was about to say, and while it is indeed true that he does, in fact, socialize with more than one person, he realises with startling clarity that Will is almost always there.

Will grins, wide and cheeky and knowing. “Having some thoughts, there, Neeks.”

“Shut the fuck up.”

Will gasps dramatically, and when that is not enough he holds up a hand, digs a string of plastic pearls out from his many pockets, clasps them around his neck, clears his throat, and gasps even more dramatically, clutching said pearls.

Nico laughs.

Unfortunately.

But he chokes it back last minute and turns it into a weird horse noise instead, so he’s victorious, basically.

“How dare,” says Will, indeed dramatically, “how dare, di Angelo, deride me, your closest friend, in such a way —”

Nico deliberates his options. Should Will have the space unimpeded to continue on than he shall do so, with increasing gusto. At the six minute mark he will graduate to elevating himself on whatever surface makes itself available, from an infirmary stool to An Actual Roof, and project his voice to make sure that everyone suffers his Elizabethan histrionics, not just Nico (or Kayla or Austin or Lou especially Cecil or Mitchell or Piper or or or or). At the nine minute mark he will be accompanied, magically, by intense background music, because Apollo deserves all of his trauma. Nico doesn’t know what the ten minute mark will bring, but frankly he’d rather walk on hot coals with open sores on his feet than find out, so.

“— good friends, sweet friends, from this group I hail, and to such a sudden flood of mutiny! To bend to the leadborn suffering —”

When Nico gestures he is graceful, obviously. And poised. When Will gestures he narrowly avoids smacking himself square in the face nine times out of ten, and sometimes, like now, he actually does smack himself in the face, but for some reason this does not deter or embarrass him. Perhaps because he, like most Apollo children, does not actually have the part of his brain that produces shame, and such gleeful shamelessness shows in his devastatingly wide eyes. Which are, Nico notices, beginning searching for the nearest climbable surface.

Ah. Level one has been exceeded.

“Hide not thy poison with such sugar’s words —”

Drastic times, drastic measures; in time of theatre kid, regress to caveman instincts. Et cetera. Nico knows the drill. He’s a twice-adorned war hero. He understands sacrifice. He understands betrayal. He knows timing, knows difficulty. He knows the burden of doing the right thing to prevent further tragedy.

He sets his flowers delicately on the ground beside him, ties his hair back out of his face, does a couple stretches, exhales peacefully, and tackles Will to the floor.

“Shut up,” he grunts, over Will’s screeching. Will, predictably, does not shut up, moaning instead about his spleen, his spine, pausing to yell, loudly, et tu, Brutus?!, moaning about his kidneys, and then once again wallowing about Brutus and betrayal.

“Someone should take away your Riverside,” Nico says solemnly, pinching Will on the arm one last time for good measure before crawling off him.

Will remains on the floor, arm thrown over his eyes. “I would sooner live without the lungs in my chest.”

“It’s gonna be me. I’m taking away your Riverside.”

Will lifts his arm, searching to meet Nico’s eyes before pouting. It is a remarkably well-planned strategy, because he has very pretty eyes, and Nico is a flaming homosexual who is openly weak to Will’s wiles. Will, who is a shit and judging by the smirk he is barely fighting back in favour of a quivering lip, knows this.

“Don’t you love me?”

“No,” Nico lies. He forces himself away from Will’s gaze, ears burning. “Go away, you walking annoyance. I never want to see you or anything about you ever again.” He scoops up his flowers and stomps off, smiling as Will cackles.

He carries around the flowers for the rest of the day.

Nico wakes up to gagging and a soft glow coming from the bathroom.

His first thought is, bizarrely, that Hazel’s home. But her bunk is still empty, and her shoes aren’t by the door, and she didn’t wake him when she came in. She always wakes him when she comes in, even if it’s four thirty in the damn morning, because nothing makes her cackle quite like Nico choking back curses and tweaking under her smothering pillow.

“Shit,” comes a small voice from the bathroom, followed by more retching. “Shitshitshit, no —”

Nico bolts for the door.

“Hi,” Will says, or tries to. His scarred knuckles clench with every gag, wrapped too tightly around the rim of porcelain to tremble like the rest of him.

Something about the wobbly smile he keeps trying to form in between gags. Something about the sweat that has drenched his t-shirt, something about the deep circles under his eyes, something about his spot in the bed completely cold, wrinkled.

Something is not adding up.

“You’re not sick,” Nico murmurs, pressing the back of his hand to Will’s forehead. Will mutters something about bliss, leaning into Nico’s hand; he smiles again, but it is strained, and at odds with the glassy look in his eyes. The sharp, rapid breaths.

“Just don’t — feel good.”

Every word is punctuated by a big, heaving gasp, like he’s trying to breathe through heavy cotton. On a hunch, Nico slides his hands down Will’s face, brushing the goosebumps on his neck, the irritated, pulsing tendons, and rest flat against his chest, over his heart.

His heart that is pounding, so quickly it is actually challenging to recognise as a beat rather than a buzz.

“You’re having a panic attack,” Nico says quietly.

Will shrugs. He gags again, but clamps his mouth shut before it goes anywhere, breathing deeply and carefully through clenched teeth, squeezing his eyes shut. His heart pounds faster, and the rapid movement of his chest grows shallow, but he manages to choke back his bile, swallow down whatever nausea is plaguing him.

“I’m — fine.” His laboured breathing is the loudest sound in the cabin. In the camp. “I’m handling it.”

Nico watches him. Watches him clench his jaw and squeeze his eyes shut and make a noise like he is being betrayed, like he is being sold for thirty silver by his own body, his own mind; watches him flex his muscles rigid and hold himself still like he can stop the nails and thorns from coming. He thinks of wide smiles and far away eyes and mental health pamphlets and cheerful slogans on infirmary walls.

“I think one of those things are true.”

“I don’t need —”

Whatever he doesn’t need is forgotten, because he is heaving again, only this time his body finds something to dredge up, even if that something is stomach acid and he cries as it burns its way up his throat, and in between heaving he wheezes, horrible whistling gasping noises, and his hair plasters to his forehead, and his body slumps into Nico’s hold and jerks away from him like rocky waves against a lakefront.

“How long have you been here?”

Will just shrugs again, and he cries, and he says “Leave, please,” and Nico wraps an arm tighter around his waist, and presses a kiss to his sweaty temple, lingering, holding, tasting salt from Will and from his tears both, and squeezing his eyes shut, and holding back the anger. Gritting his teeth and softening his hold, deliberately, resting his fingers delicately on the dip of Will’s hip, the raised pink of the stretch marks along his ribs.

“I hate it when you run from me,” he murmurs, and Will sobs again.

“I can’t breathe,” he says, and Nico squeezes and promises he can. “I’m dying. I’m dying, I’m gonna —”

“I’m here, Will.” He doesn’t say you’re not dying. He doesn’t say you’re fine, because this is the longest they’ve sat together in five days, because it is the the quiet middle of June, because yesterday Kayla spent half her shift screaming at Will to get out and ignoring him when he shouted back. Because the bandage around Will’s wrist has been worn to threads, because Lee’s hoodie has not been washed in weeks, because there is a newcomer named Michael and Will cannot even look at him. Because it has been bad. “I’m here.”

It is as much a reminder as it is a plea as it is a reprimand as it is a fruitless nothing, because when Nico struggles he gets angry, when Nico struggles he gets mean and biting and violent, but when Will struggles he wants the world to kill him. And for all that Nico is halfway to the grave he has clawed and chewed and fought his way to survival. And when Will scratches at the skin around his ears and screams into his hands and opens the chapped over scars on his lips his palms his fingers, Nico can only hold him, Nico can only gently pry his nails from his flesh and tell himself that one day they will get to the point where Nico wakes up. Where Will wakes him up, where he burrows into the place between his arms and his chest and hides in someone else for once. Where he trusts someone outside of himself enough to bare his back.

“I’m here,” he whispers again, and he presses his lips to Will’s hair and holds him as he sobs, “I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.”

“Call me if you need anything.”

Nico raises an eyebrow, glancing down at the phone, glancing back up at Will. The corner of his mouth twitches.

Will shakes it at him, gesturing vaguely with his free hand. “Just in case,” he insists.

“If I need anything,” Nico repeats, blinking again at the little device. It’s compact, at least, not even half the size of Will’s palm — although that doesn’t mean much — and appropriately black. There is a dorky little Pokémon charm clasped to the antenna, but it’s removable, probably. At the very least it can be stashed in a pocket. And it thankfully does not look brand-new.

“Yes.”

“From you.”

“Thus the ‘call me’.”

“…From the Underworld.”

“Would you just —” He darts out and grabs one of Nico’s hands, prying open his fist and slapping the phone in his palm, curling his fingers back over it. “Take it. Please.”

Nico takes it, twisting it in his hands.

“I’m not gonna need it, Will.”

“That’s what you think.”

“What, d’you get a dream or something? Should I be worried about this?”

“Of course you should be worried about this! You’re chasing down errant souls in the godsdamn Underworld.” He works his jaw, gaze dropping to the ground. “By — by yourself, with gods know what after you. So.”

The smile Nico had been trying to fight back pushes through the last of his defenses, softening his face, and in one move he pockets the cellphone, swallows back the laughter pushing at the bubble in his chest, and reaches out, hooking a finger under Will’s chin.

“Will,” he says, grinning when those pretty blues finally meet his eyes, when he rolls them, glancing stubbornly away again. “Will, sweetheart.” Stubborn, stubborn boy; pulling away from all of Nico’s touches but leaning into the hand he uses to tuck his hair behind his ear. Melting into it, like he always does. Nico’s smile grows into something much more smug, and his voice bleeds something teasing. “I lived there. For years. My father is the king there, if you recall. I’m something of a prince.”

“Yeah, prince of being a pain in my ass.”

Nico snorts. “You know, it’s almost like we switch roles when you’re nervous.”

“I’m not nervous, you jackass, I am responding normally to a stressful situation. That’s logic.”

Nico glances down at the nails he’s chipping, clicking them rapidly.

“You’re clicking.”

His hands still.

“…Am not.”

“Well, now you’re not.”

“Just —” He blows an errant curl out of his eyes, mouth twisting in frustration. “Call me, Nico.”

“There are maybe four places with cell reception.”

“Well, you better find them.”

Nico laughs, pulling him down at the same time he pushes up on his tiptoes, kissing the worried line between his eyes.

“I kind of like worried on you,” he admits. “You’re cute when you’re grumpy.”

Will makes a noise in the back of his throat, something halfway between a scoff and a sigh, and follows Nico’s mouth when he starts to pull away, pressing close, pressing close, pressing closer. He tastes like mint chapstick and sunshine, as usual, but his lips are bitten, and his cheeks are flushed more than usual.

“I’ll call,” Nico promises softly. He pulls away just enough to meet his eyes again, holding his gaze until he softens, nodding. “Not a lot, ‘cause I’ll be busy, but I’ll call, tesoro. Once every couple days at least.”

“I’ll come find you if you don’t,” Will grumbles, scowling when Nico laughs again, smiling when Nico kisses him on the cheek, in the nose, on the forehead and eyelids and mouth. “Stay safe.”

“Love you too, azzurro.”

Plink.

“Psst, hey! Nico!”

Plink. Plink.

“Nico! You up?”

Plink.

Plink plink plink. Plink —

“What in the world,” Nico hisses, yanking open his window, “is going — oh.” He blinks. “Will?”

Will grins. “Hi.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I was in the neighbourhood,” he says, voice not nearly quiet enough for someone who is at direct risk of being devoured. “Thought I’d drop by. Can I come in?”

If Nico were smart, he would say no, actually, it’s like four in the godsdamn morning, go the hell back to your cabin. What is wrong with you.

Instead, he says, “We live in the same neighbourhood, dweeb-face, this is a camp,” and opens his window all the way. Will grins at him, wide and glinting in the dark, and yanks himself in head-first, somersaulting onto the floor and staying there, sprawled on the polished marble floors.

“Hi,” he says again, grin shifting into something more crooked.

Nico breaks away, hiding a smile with rolled eyes. “You’re ridiculous.”

“It’s ridiculous to want to see you?”

“Before dawn? Yes!”

“Aw.” He settles against the ground, tucking his hands behind his head and letting half lidded eyes trace over Nico’s form, over the sleepy shape of him. Nico shivers. “I was awake, you know. I dreamt of you.”

Cool the fresh hell down, Nico screams at his brain. Out loud, he says, “Shut the fuck up,” and ignores Will’s snickering. How dare he, honestly. For someone who gets clowned as often as he does he is not nearly humble enough. Apollonian genes, indeed.

“What, you don’t dream of me?”

When Will lies, his throat swells up and he breaks out in hives. Nico is at the top of the leaderboard for getting the reaction out of him, with Cecil at a close second and Kayla no slouch in third place. Will is highly manipulable. It’s a good time for everyone around (even Chiron, who is, to his own irritation, lumbering behind at spot #42).

Nico, however, has no such holdups. Nor is he inclined, at any point in time, to fluff up Will’s ego, no matter how he looks when he’s cocky. Nico has self control. Mostly. (Well, at times.)

“Of course not. My subconscious would never do that to me.”

“You’re mean to me, di Angelo.”

“You like it.”

Nico watches, fascinated, as Will’s loudmouth snaps right shut; as his face burns sacred cow right in the low light of the cabin, as he squirms.

“Oh,” he says, gleefully.

“Can it, di Angelo —”

“Oh ho ho ho —”

“I’m gonna curse your ass with haiku disorder, do you know what that is, ‘cause I’ll show you, dickhead —”

Nico crouches down and pokes Will hard in the cheek, and he doesn’t even flinch — he just goes redder. Nico guffaws.

“Dude! Have some — dignity, oh my —”

“Shut up! Shut up! You’re so horrible, gods, I am leaving —”

“Oh, come here.” Will is dragged easily from the windowsill, because he is a big fat faker. There are actual claw marks on the infirmary door from the last time Austin brought Nyssa to drag him out.

“I don’t wanna stay where I’m unwanted,” he laments, bouncing on the bed when Nico shoves him. He takes the inch Nico gives him and burrows deeply under the blankets, throwing a melodramatic hand over his eyes. Nico rolls his own eyes, hoping if he rolls then hard enough Will can tell regardless of whether or not he’s looking, and crawls in after him. He makes sure to kick him at least thrice. “I can take a hint, you know.”

“Medical arts were the wrong career path for you. It’s not too late, you know. I’m sure you could shadow Nicholas Cage or something —”

“I am going to kill you with hammers —”

Nico evades his clumsy attacks with ease, snickering as he pins him to the bed, smirking when he gives up fighting with a huff.

“I’m glad you came when you couldn’t sleep,” Nico says, after a moment for them to catch their breath. “But the point of that agreement is for you to then shut the fuck up and sleep. Here. So.”

“I’m trying,” Will grumbles. “But you’re being mean and it’s crushing my soul. How am I supposed to sleep with a crushed soul?”

“Oh my gods.”

“Okay, okay! Put the pillow away, jeez, I’m sorry. Meanie.”

Nico rolls his eyes again, settling down next to him. Will takes longer to settle, because he’s annoying, but right before Nico is ready to smack the shit out of him again, he calms down, burrowing stilling once he’s turned on his side.

“…Thank you.”

“Whatever, goober. Go to sleep.”

The smile is obvious in his voice. “Goodnight, Nico.”

“Goodnight, Will.”

“In the morning can we —”

“Goodnight, William.”

“Okay, okay. Night.” He pauses. “Love you.”

Nico shoved his grinning face into his pillow. “Love you too.”

“After you.”

“Nerd.”

Nico tugs on a curl as he walks by Will’s bowed head, scoffing when Will winks at him. His hand lingers, though, waiting for Will to kick the door shut, trailing past his ear and down his neck and twisting down his arm, sliding down to his palm. His fingers are cold, as they always are, and Will brings them up to his mouth and kisses them, gently, and Nico rolls his eyes then, too, but the smile pushes out onto his face anyway.

“You can’t be doing all this in public,” he scolds.

“You started it,” Will points out, even though he’d be doing this anyway. Cursed be the day Will has Nico next to him and keeps his distance. He can’t imagine it. When he is around him he often feels like the desperately spinning needle in an old compass. Whirling around to find his source, his true North.

“Stop saying mushy shit in your head.”

“Out loud it is, then.” He clears his throat. “Oh, Nico, shimmering stars in my skies —”

They’re loud, far too loud, for this time in the morning, and even Nico’s slapping hands and laughing shushes do nothing to keep the infirmary quiet, but Will can’t bring himself to care. Partially because each one of the fuckers kept him busy for hours yesterday, straight through lunch, but mostly because the freshly risen sun beams almost directly onto Nico’s face, melting his eyes into pools of amber, and he smiles in that quiet, private way of his, close-lipped and crooked. There is breath in Will’s lungs, he knows it, but his body forgets, and all he can see hear think feel is the shape of Nico’s smile, and the slope of his nose, and the feel of his cool roughened hands on Will’s face.

“You’re beautiful,” he murmurs, and the words are muffled by his palms but the sincerity is not. The sincerity is punched out of him like the air hisses out of the gills of a hooked fish.

Nico huffs. “You’re buttering me up.” But he is preening; shoulders shuddering and eyelashes fluttering at the praise. At the wideness of Will’s eyes, the brazen, blatant awe.

He doesn’t let Will look long, because he rarely does, but he pulls away with a smile, softens his distance with three quick squeezes to Will’s fingers, with a brush of his hair. He stalks over to the nurse’s station, humming, plucking the clipboard from the wall and inspecting it, pulling his own crumpled paper from his pocket and smoothing it out side by side. Will trails by after him, plucking his coat from the bench and shrugging it on.

“Where are you today?”

“Arena, mostly. Kiddie classes today. You in here all day?”

Will looks over at the sleeping Hermes kids — all nineteen of them — and sighs. “Yep.”

“Won’t see you much, then.”

“Ugh.”

“However will you survive.”

“Maybe I have a nervous breakdown and get reassigned. You think I’d thrive in California? Maybe Pennhurst —”

“Oh my gods.”

There’s no one quite as effective as shutting Will the fuck up as Nico. Something about him just makes him pensive, makes him reflective. Makes him realise that time is limited and silence holds weight, that moments of quiet tranquility are infinitely more valuable than one realises outside of them.

Also tonsil hockey. That works pretty well, Will has to admit. Lou Ellen has disgustingly described it as ‘Will’s off button being located in the back of his throat’, which, fair, but she shouldn’t have said it.

“Have a good day at work,” Nico murmurs, pecking Will’s pout. “Try not to commit medical malpractice. Or negligence.”

“…I might do negligence.”

“Oh, shut up. You love your job.”

“I love you,” Will grumbles, his own smile twitching behind pressed-closed lips. “My job drains me and violates several labour laws.”

Conveniently ignoring the second half of his complaint, because he loves to watch Will suffer, apparently, Nico murmurs “Love you too, drama queen, I’ll bring you lunch,” kisses him again, and then jogs off, headed for the Arena.

Will sighs, turning to his clipboard, and starts running through a list of every god he knows, thanking them for Nico.

He’s pretty lucky.

“I’d pick you up at the airport.”

“What?”

“If we were normal. I would — have one of those signs, you know. When you came back from your adventures.”

“Oh.” Nico snorts. “I’m still fucking off all the time when we’re normal? And you’re not coming?”

“It is woven within your very soul to fuck off as you please,” says Will sagely. “You get antsy. You know, like a house cat.”

He laughs when Nico shoves him. Less when he loses his balance and rolls into a tree, but he crawls back, anyway, kicking Nico’s ankle as he lies back next to him, folding his hands over his ribs. Nico watches him for a moment, tracing the round edges of his knuckles, until Will’s smile begins to twitch with him knowing, and he looks hastily back to the sky. It’s embarrassing, Will’s snorting huff of amusement, but more than that it’s electrifying, zapping a trail down Nico’s spine and making him shiver.

He can feel the heat Will is always throwing off, blazing every centimetre from his shoulder to his heels, a hair’s breadth away, a millimetre of distance.

“What else would it look like?” He clears his throat. “Our, um. Our normal?”

Will hums. “New York, probably. Big-ass penthouse with your trust fund.”

“I’m a trust fund baby?!”

“Hey, Nico, how much does dish soap cost?”

Nico opens his mouth, and closes it again. Will’s snickers get louder. Is it considered bad etiquette to banish one’s significant annoyance to the Underworld? Only permanently, probably. If he only keeps him there for a couple weeks it should be find. A couple weeks would be appropriately humbling.

“And what do you contribute?” Nico asks, instead of answering. (Not because he doesn’t know. Obviously. Because he is dignified, that’s why.) “Your dimples and boyish charm?”

“Yes, obviously.”

Well.

“…Okay, fair.”

Will snickers triumphantly.

“You still a doctor?”

“Mhm.” Will shifts, mouth curled in amusement. “Paediatric in Mount Sinai. We live close, by the way. You said it’s cause it’s close to Central Park but really you like to hide my lunch in the mornings to have an excuse to come see me.”

“Sounds like you forget your shit a lot, actually.”

“That, too.”

He looks over and smiles at Nico and for a moment he is convinced, wholly genuinely and truly, that the sun that’s been hiding behind the clouds all day has finally peeked out, because he can actually feel his whole body warm, in that slow-rising, penetrating way; he can actually smell the surge of sunshine in the air, feel the red glow in the backs of his eyelids, taste the brightness of the light. Every one of his neurons sinks into his system, sighing, cells reacting to thousands of years of memory of the gentle warm of the Earth’s closest star.

But the sun is not shining, and there is only Will, and his too-big teeth brush against the bottom of his lip, and his dimples show, and his eyes crinkle, and he is more radiant in even his old stained camp shirt and fraying jean shorts than his father has ever been and could ever hope to be. A thousand planets could thrive under a hundred blazing stars and none could come close to him. He knows it, how those ancients felt, the drunken surety as they stood and challenged the gods, swore up and down that their beloveds outshone Venus, Diana, Juno; Will does, Will does, and Nico understands intimately the hubris in a way he scoffed at as a child, because the words bubble and boil and threaten bursting inside of him now. What claim have the Olympians? Over sunlight? Over beauty? Over Will?

“We’re happy?” he says instead, choking hoarsely over the veneer words, over the blocked desperation, truth. “In our normal, we’re happy?”

“Always,” Will whispers. He twists onto his knees, crawling the two inches over to press close, close, closely, hand gentle on Nico’s stomach when he tries to sit up, and presses his lips to Nico’s cheek, dry, twitching with his smile, shaking with his laughter. Nothing is funny, and he isn’t joking, but Nico can feel the giddiness bubbling up and out of him the way sadness flows out in tears; when Will is giddy he giggles, constantly, hiding it barely in his hands, and now he presses it into Nico’s skin, because he knows how Nico aches to hear it, how he watches him like he’s burning it into the ridges of his brain. “I am always happy with you, Niccolò.”

“I love you,” Nico says, fiercely, and it will never be enough, not in English, not in Italian, not in Greek, but he will try. “Te amo. Capiscimi? I love you, Will, I —”

“I know.” The tiny little vibrations of his laughter are — intoxicating; Nico is drunk, ascending. “I know, di Angelo. Sap. I love you, I know.”

He dissolved into giggles into the crook of Nico’s neck, and Nico is lying, still, facing the clouds, and he is warmed, and he is warmed, and he is warmed.

“You’ve been driving a while.”

“It’s a long trip.”

“Hm.”

At the tail end of summer, nighttime roads bend time. There is something about the blacked abyss that haunts you, Will has noticed, that sings to you like saccharine silver lullaby, that blurs the edge of your vision into something soft and infinite, no end or beginning, no harsh edges, no starts or stops. There is no line where the horizon meets the sun-warmed asphalt, no border between shadows. All that lives is black, in its thousand siren shades, surrounding the weak yellow headlines with sweet words and gentle promises. I’ve got you, Night whispers, come rest with me. Lay down your weary head. I will watch for you.

In the winter there is snow. In the winter there is light, in the stars reflecting on the white tops of trees and bright icy lakes, and the sky glows with it, swelling with pride, ballooning a thousand times larger than the yawn of pavement, than the brush of branches stretching out to hold her. In the winter wind roars over anything in her path, in the winter salt bumps along hardened rubber, in the winter snowflakes shimmer and dance a thousand movements in the doting attention of a bright blue moon. In the winter the night laughs, long and lavish and bright, and pays you no heed or mind, resting on her frosted laurels.

The January trip to his mother is easy. The night is not lonely, and does not call to him. Will has never feared the ice and the snow, not in the way he forgets to fear warm summer’s whispers, in the way his eyes follow the night’s expanse until his irises turn black.

There is something about shadows and shadows and shadows that Will has only barely ever resisted.

In the summer the night’s song swells along the tired beat of the van’s old blinkers.

“You’ve lasted so long,” Nico observes.

In the night the son of Hades melts, almost, into the dark of the passenger seat, into the blanket of heavy obsidian that drapes gently over his slight shoulders. Only the sheen of his bright eyes, as Will turns to him, shine like sunrise, like the first clear breaks of light through the murmuring night’s shroud.

“I’ve — made the drive before.”

Nico hums again. It is louder, barely, than the crooning cicadas, than the lilting long-eareds.

“You should pull over. Let me drive a while.”

“I know the way.”

The words are automatic, blending in his ears like the tick of a watch clicking endlessly away in the background.

“I know.”

Nico touches Will’s wrist and he startles, cool-cold fingers contrasting the cozy current coming through the cracked windows. He notices his hands resting on his cramped knees, palms creased in the shape of the steel steering wheel. Hears the blinkers, both sides, beating along with his heart, flickering amber, bleeding into the darkened dashboard. Feels the gentle purr of the old engine, slow beneath his tired feet, rattling his aching eyes.

The dark is no longer moving.

“I’m — we —” He stops. He breathes in. “The van’s —”

Nico’s thumb brushes gently over his heated wrist, end to end, and pauses, bitten nails tracing circles over the burn scar at the base of his thumb, then drags gently again across.

“You’re parked,” he says quietly. “It’s been an hour.”

Will swallows. “Oh.”

“It’s just straight down here for miles, tesoro. I can handle it.”

“I — know that.”

Nico flashes a smile. It’s bright, like his eyes, clear, edged, boundaried. “Switch with me, sweetheart.”

He does, and the numbness in his arms pulls heavy, but the cool press of Nico’s hands on his skin, on his hip, on his arm, is heavier, firmer, realer. The click of the seatbelt is startlingly loud, and the pull of the polyester over his chest is taut, grounding. The roar of the engine is deafening, discordant. Definite.

“Rest, Will.” The flush on his cheeks is assuaged, briefly, by the brush of Nico’s hands. “Let me handle it this time.”

Will breathes out, leans into his touch, and lets go.

“I like it when you think.”

Nico stops. He blinks.

“When I — think?”

“Yes.”

“I — think all the time.”

“I’ve noticed.” Will smiles. “I like it.”

The pink on Nico’s cheeks is pretty. It pushes softly against his skin, like small waves against the edge of the sand, hiding behind his curtain of hair, his ducked head. His agile hands twitch, arrhythmically, against the gritstone, against his sword, against his leg. He looks up, once. Watches Will’s eyes on him. Swallows.

“Okay.”

He flexes his short fingers and goes back, twists his body. Returns to the slow drag of the stone against his blade, the king exhales as his lean muscles flex, relax, flex. The worry of his lower lip, the sheen in his dark eyes.

Will rests his chin in his hand.

“What are you thinking about?”

There is no falter this time. But his shoulder hike up to his ears, and his mouth twitches, twitches, and he says: “Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Yeah.”

“Hm.”

Will smiles. He smiles wider when Nico looks up at him, when he taps a bitten fingernail on the hilt of his sword and sighs. Sighs, long and heavy, exasperated. Sighs, swinging his leg over the bench, shaking his head. Looking over. Smiling.

“You’re distracting.”

“Yeah?”

Nico huffs. “Yeah. You — yeah.”

“I’m sorry,” Will says. He tries to stop smiling. He can’t. “I don’t mean to be.”

“Well, you — are.”

“How am I distracting?”

Tap. Tap. Tap. His bitten nails scratch, ever slow, on the ridges of his worn jeans. He scratches the side of his face.

“You.” Scratch. Scratch. Scratch. “ You Look at me.”

“I do.”

“And you — smell nice.”

Will grins. “I do?”

Nico flushes, again. He scratches his nose. “Well I’m! I’m not saying. It’s just. It’s just that everyone notices, you know.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Lilac and — something.”

“And something.”

“Stop copying me.”

He exhales, gaze softening. He reaches for Nico’s hand, stops. “Sorry.” A beat. “I can leave.”

Nico looks up, frowning. “Why would you leave?”

“If I’m — distracting.”

He frowns again. “I didn’t mean — I don’t mean that.”

“Okay.” Inhale. Exhale. “What do you mean?”

There is that face again. The thinking. The furrow of his thick eyebrows, the flash of his front teeth as he gnaws on his lip. The scritch, scritch, scritch of his ripped nails. The flutter of his long eyelashes, swish, swish. Will hides his smile in his hand.

“Stay.”

“Okay.”

“Good.”

Will smiles wider. “Good.”

He shifts back towards his sword. The grindstone creaks against the blade, squeeeeaak. Squeak. He exhales. Sinks into the push of his lithe arms.

Will watches.

“Will, the harpies don’t touch Apollo kids.”

Will scowls, crossing his arms. “I have no idea who started that rumour.”

Nico raises his eyebrows. “It’s not true?”

Instead of responding, Will lifts the edge of his shirt, cocking his hip slightly so it’s easier to see the skin in the low light. Nico leans in closer, squinting, tracing cold fingers over the raised white scar. Will shivers.

“That’s harpy alright.” He whistles. “They got you good.”

“I was nine years old and mislead,” Will grumbles, pulling his shirt back down. He catches Nico’s hand in the process. “Cecil said we would be fine. Cecil is a liar and a fraud.”

“Hermes kids often are.”

Nico could be a Hermes kid, honestly. Beyond the insane poker ability, there’s a…bend, to his smile, something knowing and quick and crooked, as fleeting as the flash of his sharp canines and absolutely impossible to miss. Will swallows, a couple times, fighting the dryness of his throat that pops up like clockwork at the turn of that teasing grin, at the gold in his river-mud black eyes. Nico smiles like he’s about to sell you back what he stole for ten times the price, and Will falls for the scam every time.

“Well, it was — whatever.”

He can’t quite find his train of thought, flexing his newly damp palms, shrugging at the itch at the back of his neck. Nico’s grin flashes again like he knows it’s there, like he can see the neurons crashing into each other in Will’s head, like he can hear the pounding of his heart.

“Eloquent.”

“Shut up.”

He snorts, rocking back on his heels, turning his gaze out to the common. The braziers burn low, sprites of flame crackling up to the heaven, winking back at the tittering stars. Wind hums gently through the silver poplar trees outside Cabin 13, and cicadas and fireflies sing lowly back, swelling and crashing in sync with far-off waves. If it weren’t for regular screeches of angry bird-women, it would be beautiful. Breathtaking.

Will’s not nine anymore. Apollo kids may not have immunity, but he’s fast. Uncommonly so. Realistically, he can make the sprint from Nico’s cabin to his long before the harpies notice, let alone descend in a wrath of feathers and fury.

And yet.

“I haven’t seen a harpy devour someone in ages,” Nico muses. “I bet they’re pretty hungry.”

Will scowls. “Oh, shut up.”

Nico grins wider. “Bet they’re chomping at the bit for a real meal of the delicious golden boy flesh they tasted so long ago.”

“I hate you.”

“Bet they’re watching you. Waiting.” He wiggles his fingers, hiking up his shoulders and twisting his face. “Wi-ill, Wi-ill, come out come out, come break curfew —”

He laughs when Will shoves him, cackling louder than the she-demons, choking on his own horrible impression of their shrieking voices. His laugher rises in the damp-humid night, dancing in the leftover campfire smoke and resting heavy on Will’s shoulders, and it is gravelly and low and Will is weak, weak, weak. Weak for the sound of it the feel of it the taste of it, curling up hot in his belly, zapping up and down his veins at the speed of sound, forcing the breath out of his lungs in an awed sort of exhale, a sigh he could not stop if he tried.

“C’mon, you weenie.” Nico wipes the tears out of his eyes and holds out his hand, flexing his fingers. “I’ll walk you home.”

There is no world in which Will doesn’t reach out and slide their fingers together, no world in which his vision doesn’t swim at the contact, his throat turn to sand, his knees to leaves and twine. Nico is freezing, like he always is, and it zips through Will so quickly he barely manages to choke down the gasp that bubbles out of him.

“You got harpy immunity, now?”

Nico grins, and this time it’s sharp on purpose, this time it’s wide and more crooked than a thief’s and sharp as the deadliest of knives, wide and cocksure and knowing, knowing, knowing.

“Don’t worry, princess. They won’t come near you.”

Will follows him across the common with a heart so cold it burns.

It has been an hour.

Nico scratches some dirt off his ankle.

“Hey, Solace,” his brain says, but his mouth doesn’t form the words. Instead, his jaw drops into a sigh, quick and gasping and soundless, and his shoulders droops with it, landing his chin in the cup of his hands.

Will is pretty in the sunlight.

This is not a revelation. Noticing Will’s pretty in the sun is just — it is there, it is obvious. ‘Will is pretty in the sunlight.’ ‘Snow makes your hair wet.’ ‘Flowers smell nice.’

But still he thinks it, still he shapes his tongue around the words, pursing his lips around the sounds; Will is made of yellows and golds and blues, swirling celestia, and in the cradle of the meadow in the depths of the ancient woods, he is radiant like gilded clouds. He is beautiful and he is blinding. He is thick coiled hair, sticking out in dandelion poofs, he is strong scarred hands tanned dark and dappled, he is bare toes and browned knees. Nico’s throat is dry, and his whole body is thumping, thumping, straining; the words echo in the cavity of his mind, in the tubes of his veins. I love you. I love you. I love you.

Instead, he sits.

Instead, he smiles.

Instead, he says, “You are such a dweeb.”

And Will snorts and ignores him and cups his broad hands around the little critters, tongue peeked out of the corner of his mouth. The ants walk easily around the mountains of his knuckles. He coos.

“Honest. Just — hours, of you watching ants.”

“I like watching ants,” says Will loftily. He turns back to grin, to stick out his tongue, and his helmet slips down his straight nose, blue frill flattening. “So there.”

Nico smiles. He smothers it. He smiles again and rolls his eyes and says, “Of course you do.”

And Will snorts again. And it is exasperated and long-suffering and pleased, so pleased, and he looks back when he thinks Nico isn’t looking and bites his lip and shivers. And Nico stares at the white of his too-big front teeth and is hungry, like a scorpion in the springtime, and is silent.

Will looks away. He repeats: “I like watching the ants.”

Nico licks his lips. “I know.”

“I — they’re smart. And disciplined. I just think they’re — neat.”

“I know.”

“And kind of — cute.” He wipes his nose with the back of his hand, careful not to disturb the little black dot balanced on the crown of his knee. “You know. For insects.”

“I know,” Nico says. Or sighs.

And Will huffs and says: “Well, what do you want to watch?”

— and it is there in his eyes again, the shine, the bright light of his stubbornness, and Nico’s eyelashes blink and his eyeballs water and his mouth drops open and says, jumping ahead of his brain, “You.”

Will’s mouth snaps closed. He looks away, hasty, tips of his stuck-out ears reddening.

“Well,” he says. He coughs. “Well.”

He looks back at the ants.

Nico smiles. He watches him watch them. Watches the chin he rests on his hand, watches the slide of his bright bright bright blue eyes, tracing the patter of microscopic little legs.

Time stretches on.

"Don't worry about me."

"I'm allowed to worry for people when they are doing stupid, foolish things."

"You worry about everyone."

"False. I've never worried about Cecil Markowitz a day in my life."

Nico snorts, tugging on his boot and yanking on the laces. "Right," he drawls, "and the insistence on walking him fourteen entire fucking miles to the bus stop at the end of camp was because..."

Will flushes. "Because he's stupid, okay. He's actually unwell. I checked his brain and everything. If I leave him alone too long he'll get kidnapped, and then what?" He cocks a hip to one side, crossing his arms and tapping his foot and generally just looking like a carbon copy of his mother. Nico mourns his lack of camera. He needs to send Naomi another snapshot for the Wall of You Do Act Like Me, You Little Shit. "What am I gonna do if he dies, huh? Resort to off-brand Twizzlers from the camp store? I'd rather kill myself."

The frayed ends of his laces cooperate, finally. He desperately needs new combats but the thought of having to break in a new pair makes him want to strangle the nearest karpoi. Any one of them would do.

Nico pushes himself to his feet, cupping both sides of his boyfriend's scowling face and pressing a gentle kiss to his lips, holding there until he feels them soften. He smiles, snickering at Will's huffy pout.

"I am doing one errand," he says, exasperated. "Just one."

Will throws his hands up. "You know who else did one errand?! Orpheus! That's right, dumbass, and he died! So!"

He waves his hands again, because obviously he cannot simply make his point with his words alone. Oh, no. His whole body needs to get involved, or else there is Not Enough Emphasis.

Gods, Nico loves him to death.

To death, and then some.

"You are more dramatic than your father," Nico says, kissing him again before pulling away. "You know that?"

"I thought you loved me," Will grumbles. "I thought you loved me, and then you go around saying such insulting things. Don't you love me? People who love me would never say that to me."

"I have actually heard that exact speech come from Apollo's mouth. Twice, at least."

"I'm about to commit a felony. It rhymes with shmassault and shmbattery."

"Shut the fuck up," Nico says, but he's grinning. Will is scowling hard but doing a very bad job of it, and Nico can actually see the don't you dare fucking laugh you're mad at him you have to stay mad at him flashing around in his eyes.

Nico swipes his thumb gently over his freckled cheeks.

It does not take very long for him to cave.

"I'm just worried," he admits, sagging into Nico's hold. His head, as it always has, fits perfectly in the crook of Nico's neck. He presses a soft, lingering kiss to his temple.

"Knew it."

It is normal for infirmary medics to work a night shift.

It is normal for infirmary medics to work a night shift.

Especially if they’re in charge.

Especially if they’re a demigod.

Especially if they’re the most powerful healer in centuries and the Romans — and their war games — are visiting.

“Holy gods above,” Nico shouts, and trudges to the door.

The marble floor is fucking cold on his fucking bare feet (bare, because Solace mutters about his sleeping in boots), the fucking air is fucking frosty on his warmed skin (warmed, because Solace insists on piling his bed with thick blankets), and his fucking sword is far as fuck away in the corner of his dark fucking cabin (far, because of Solace, and his wide, teasing smiles, and his stupid raised brows and prodding questions and teasing dares).

“Fuck this camp and fuck Will Solace,” he announces, wrenching open the door.

“If that is what will make you shut the heck up!” Hazel shouts at his retreating back, pillow jammed over her head. Nico’s face burns bright red as he flees.

It is too godsdamn early in the stupid godsdamn morning for this.

By the stars, it is hardly past two. Not even witching hour. Last summer, Nico wouldn’t even dream of sleeping at this hour. Wouldn’t even consider it. The Nico of last summer would be awake, back straight, boots tied firmly on, sword held in tight, tired hands. Eyes trained on the exit. The Nico of last summer was prepared. The Nico of last summer was battle-hardened and vigilant. The Nico of last summer was badass, and not stomping across the stupid fucking common to the stupid fucking Big House kitchen to get a stupid fucking sandwich because their stupid fucking head medic is a stupid fucking idiot who never, not even once, practices what he preaches.

“I hate him,” Nico announces to nobody. Maybe the harpies. But they steer clear of him, because he used to be cool, and they’re smart creatures, even as they edge the constraints of his death aura and regard him warily.

He really shouldn’t be out this late, flaunting it in their faces.

Whatever. As long as the little kids don’t see and copy him.

He forces himself to soften his step as he approaches the door, wary for all his annoyance at waking Chiron — the harpies may be afraid of him, but the centaur most certainly is not. Not even when Nico threatened a real life zombie apocalypse if he had to clean the stables. (Which stunk. And the zombies in question were no help, because everything is the worst and sucks horribly, and even they were better than Solace, who sat on a nearby rock and laughed himself to tears every time he looked over.)

“I hate him for real,” Nico whispers, still kind of yelling a little.

There is no meal ready in the fridge, which confirms Nico’s theory. He digs around to make sure, shoving aside the Lucky Ranch Of 1998, tossing an empty yoghurt container over his shoulder, and elbowing aside a jar filled with nothing but brine and leftover cucumber seeds.

“Of course I remembered to pack a dinner, you worry too much,” he mocks, in a Texan accent as purposefully offensive as he can make it, “nyeh nyeh nyeh.” He barely manages not to slam the fridge doors shut. “Gods, I hate him to death.”

He stalks over to the pantry and fists a loaf of toast. He holds a butter knife as threateningly as he can manage, glaring at the peanut butter, and assembles a sandwich with his eyes screwed shut and his brain beaming a beacon of hate with enough force to hopefully taste.

“Hate,” he reiterates, then repeats it in four languages just to be sure.

He grabs the plate and stomps over to the infirmary, opening the door quietly because there are sleeping people and he is not a monster. He makes sure to bare his teeth.

Solace, however, does not even startle at the door, and grins brightly at the sound of him. Nico’s eyes ache from the strain.

“Neeks!” he calls, in a poor attempt at a whisper. Nico’s heart immediately softens.

“Absolutely fucking not,” he tells it.

Will pays his muttering no heed. Instead, he beelines for the sandwich, taking the plate in hand and beaming even brighter, somehow.

Spots dance in Nico’s vision.

“You made my favourite!” he exclaims over mouthfuls of peanut butter, which is disgusting. Nico is repulsed by him and his total disregard for manners and tact and etiquette and also Nico’s heart problems and reputation.

“I hate you and hope you choke,” Nico responds.

Will’s infernal eyebrows wiggle. He swallows, polishing off the last of the sandwich because he is a gross freak who eats things in two bites and is horrible, and scrunches his nose. His freckles hide in the folds of his tan skin, and it’s so awful that it makes Nico want to punch him. Gently.

Because Solace is bad at hand to hand, and Nico is not a monster.

Obviously.

“Thank you,” he says, and faster than Nico can follow leans forward and pecks a kiss to his cheek. Nico’s mouth opens. Will leans back and grins. Nico’s mouth closes. Will’s grin gets sharper.

Nico turns around and walks away.

“I really do appreciate it,” Will calls, cackling as quietly as he can manage.

Which is not at all quietly, because unlike Nico, Will is a monster and has no issue bothering his sleeping patients. Also, he wouldn’t know quiet and stealthy if it roundhouse kicked him in the face and stole his organs and will die immediately in combat if Nico isn’t there to protect him. Because he is stupid and Nico hates him.

And his stupid fucking melodic fucking laughter.

“I hate him,” Nico seethes to himself, and dashes back to his stupid fucking cabin.

Hazel laughs at his burning face until she chokes.

“We’ll just — fight it out.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. There’s enough room for both of us.”

Nico swallows, twice, trying in vain to fix his dry throat. He hovers over the hilt of his sword, fingers twitching.

“I really think fighting is the better option,” he pleads. “Look, I’ll even fight with my left hand, okay, I’ll even the playing field —”

“Nico.” Will stops, turning to face him. His eyes are unusually serious, dark and kind of dazzling; he blinks, a couple times, light blond eyelashes fanning over spatters of freckles, and Nico gets a little dizzy. “The pegasi are largely stallions. I once saw Guido kick the back of his stable in rage and the entire wall exploded to literal actual splinters. Tyson rides them on the regular. Often carrying whatever giant metal project he’s showing us that month. Pegasi are made essentially of pure corded muscle. They’ll be fine.” He pauses, glancing sideways at a dusky orange mare, and lowers his voice. “Well, most of them are corded muscle. Some are, um. Insulated.” He clears his throat. “Isn’t that right, Princess Peach Sour Rings?”

The winged horse, perhaps sensing his teasing, levels the son of Apollo with the nastiest look Nico has ever seen a horse give a human person, including all the dozens of times he has been glared at by horses for the crime of being born. Strangely, it gives him hope.

Will laughs, leaning close to scratch under her big head. She forgives him almost instantly — Will seems to have that effect — and leans into the kiss he presses between her ears.

“Aw, Princess, I’m not blaming you. I can’t be left alone with a dozen donuts either.”

True.

He pets her for several more minutes, cooing and nuzzling at her until she visibly fully forgives him, nudging him softly and whinnying in Nico’s direction. Her eyes are big, and brown, and somehow very all-knowing; Nico has the sudden urge to bow and promise obedience. He wonders vaguely if this is the emotion his father keeps trying to instil in him. He is doing a very bad job.

“Hi,” Nico says, or rather squeaks. He takes a slow, cautious step backwards, then another. “Bye.”

Will lunges over and grabs him by the collar before he can sprint off.

“Oh, no you don’t, Death Breath. There will be no deserting, or mutiny, or seppuku, or — whatever else you’re scheming —”

“Next step was invoking the ancient spirit of Helios to swallow the Earth, actually,” Nico wheezes, scrabbling at Will’s unmoving hand. Stupid ranch-handling muscles.

“— zombie apocalypse, or whatever.” He pauses. “Huh. Helios. Alright, I’ll add that to the list.” He shifts so his hands rest firmly on Nico’s shoulders, pushing him towards Princess Peach. The heels of his boots leave draglines in the soft mud that Will trips over no less than four times. “It’s one pegasus ride, Neeks. I’ll be right with you the whole time.”

“We’re gonna fall off and die,” Nico hisses. “Do you want to go face my father? I do not!”

“Is it because you stole his —”

“Yes it’s because I stole his signed copy of the Godfather! Obviously!”

“Well.” Will claps his shoulder definitively. “That was dumb as nuts, I ain’t got nothing to say to that. Get on the horse.” Princess neighs indignantly. “Noble steed, my bad.“

Princess huffs, tossing back her hair. She eyes the both of them with something Nico can only identify as daring. As in, I dare you to climb on my back. As in, go for it, son of Hades. As in, I will horse-laugh at you as you plummet to the ground.

“Yeah, no, I’m out.”

Now Nico is no slouch.

He keeps up with training. He keeps up with training hard, and he has since he was a kid. He has the best technique in Camp hands-down and never loses a fight. Never. Not to Percy, not to Hedge, not to Sherman or Ellis or anyone. Nico is all elbows and knees and hard lines and sharp points and he has never been afraid to use them, not since he knew the danger of the world and knew what he had to do to protect himself.

Will Solace is, unfortunately, six-foot-two of solid Texan farm boy muscle and has spent the majority of his adolescence dragging kicking, screaming demigods bodily to an infirmary cot, and throws Nico over the breadth (and he does mean breadth) of his stupid farm boy shoulders, whistling as he hauls them both over the expanse of Princess’ back.

“You know, it would be less terrifying if your ass was situated upon the horse instead of some distance above me.”

“Put me down! I hate you! Who the fuck says upon! I’m gonna damn you to hell!”

Will snorts. “No, you’re not!”

“I will! I am! I’m doing it right now, I’m deciding the fate of your soul —”

“Alright, alright, by the gods.”

He clamps both hands around Nico’s waist and sets him down with a grunt. His hands are searingly hot. Nico’s heart astral projects itself out of his chest and drowns himself some distance away in the lake. The rest of Nico hits every functioning alarm button at once with the same unreasonable force.

In other words, Will is smiling at him, wide and white and crooked, and Nico’s lungs stop working.

“You wouldn’t damn me to hell,” he says, too-big front teeth twinkling in the sunlight. “You love me too much.”

“I genuinely hope you get pneumonia and die,” Nico croaks, and hates himself for following the movement of Will’s throat as he laughs. What the fuck.

“Yeah, yeah.”

Suddenly, there are two strong arms on either side of him, pressing close around his shoulder, his waist, and a warm chest pressed to his back, and gentle breath tickling the back of his neck, and there are more things, sure, but Nico flatlines and can’t actually identify any more of them.

“Let’s go.”

It’s a good thing that he’s dead, he supposes, because Will flicks the reigns and shouts and Princess Peach Sour Rings The Horse takes off without so much as a beat of pause, heading ninety straight degrees into the air, and if Nico’s soul was not already descending into the realm of his father than that would have fuckin’ done it.

“What — the — shit!” Nico shrieks, wind stealing away his yelling. “Will! You fucking shithole! I hate you!”

“Can’t you feel it in your stomach?” Will whoops, raising his arms in the air. Nico shrieks louder and snatches them right back down, clamping them back firmly down around his waist and the leather of the reigns. “Live a little!”

“I’m fucking trying! Do not let go of me!”

Will smiles, then, and Nico can feel it more than see it, curved gently, almost shyly, against the back of his neck, against the rapid pulse of his heart.

“Won’t,” Will promises, and squeezes his arms tightly around them both. “I got ya, Nico.”

The first time Will’s shoulder twitches against his, Nico is startled awake. He glances quickly around, but Malcom and Ellis are still arguing, Clovis is still drooling a puddle onto the pool table, Piper and Connor are still competing over the number of spitballs they can land in his gaping mouth, and Chiron is still cradling his head in his hands and praying for death.

“Sorry,” Will whispers. His hands twist into the hemline of his worn shorts.

“‘S’okay,” Nico assures. Then he nods right back off.

The second time is not Will’s shoulders, but his legs. The vibration against Nico’s thigh drags him back before he can properly slip off to sleep, and he stares at the contrast of their legs, his dark ripped jeans and Will’s freckled knee shaking so rapidly it blurs, with bleary eyes.

This time, Will does not apologise. When Nico glances over, careful through the gap in his hair, Will is staring at the door, eyebrows drawn tightly, gnawing at the base of his thumb.

The third time Nico is watching carefully to notice. Will has turned almost ninety degrees, now, to stare at the door, and slowly his left hand comes down from his mouth, curling in his lap, and his right hand drifts slowly over to meet it, callused fingertips brushing over his wrist, before he glances down, and almost quicker than Nico can track snaps his hands to his sides, tucking his fingers under his thighs and sitting heavily, hunching forward. His legs still.

Nico frowns.

The arguing, he thinks, begins to fade. The millisecond of silence is quickly punished, voices swelling in the too-warm room, snippets of complaints and threats whizzing overhead like paper airplanes, humming like engines on tarmacs. Chiron’s praying grows more desperate. The spitballs levelled onto poor Clovis grow exponentially, as more join the competition — none, however, as graceful or accurate as Piper’s almost beautiful nonstop volley.

Four more times Will twitches against him.

The fifth — or really the eighth — Nico nudges their shoulders together. Will startles, twitching forward, and nearly tumbles out of his chair. Nico steadies his arm, lingering gently on the crook of his elbow.

“It doesn’t bother me,” he murmurs. He points his gaze to the loosened bandages around Will’s wrist.

Will hesitates. “It’s — irritating.”

“Not really.”

“It is.”

“I don’t mind, Will.” He nudged their shoulders together — on purpose this time. “Seriously.”

“You, uh.” He picks the loose skin of his nailbeds. Nico puts his hand overtop of his, pressing until he stops. “It’s crowded in here. I might — graze you.”

Nico smiles faintly. “I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

Will bites his lip. He glances once again at the door, legs bouncing again, before turning back to Nico, shoulders slumping.

“Just — tell me to quit it and I will, okay? I will.”

“You’re fine, Will.”

With almost guilty hesitance, he tugs his hands from under his thighs, glancing back at Nico every second, and rests them in his lap, breathing slowly, eyes closed. The arguing around them lulls, just for a moment, and then someone brings up the shower schedule, and it starts over again, louder still, and the giant clock in the corner of the room tick, tick, ticks.

The long-softened bandage is pulled loose from its tie. It is wrapped around one long finger, first, then another, then his wrist, and in moments unwrapped, pooled in Will’s large hands. And then the process is started again, and again, getting faster and faster each time, knees stilling, shoulders loosening, exhales growing longer as he leans back in his chair, away from the exit, now, eyes drawn intently to his task. With every wrap, his elbow nudges Nico’s arm.

Nico smiles slightly, and leans into it.

“I just think improvements could be made,” says Will, absentmindedly taking a patient’s vitals and totally oblivious to Nico’s fervent praying for death. “Like, take Sisyphus, for example. I think he would be much happier if there was a big number at the top of the mountain —” he pulls away from the increasingly bemused daughter of Venus he is meant to be treating, waving his hands about in emphasis — “that incremented with each successful rock push. You know? And also if they let him spend those points on temporary tattoos or stickers or the such.”

He opens a dinky purple plastic treasure box, fishing out a sucker for himself and then offering the bounty to the legionnaire. She hums thoughtfully, deciding eventually on a glittery sun tattoo and using a random fever-breaking washcloth to stick it immediately in the dead centre of her forehead. Will dismisses her cheerfully.

“I just think it would improve the general morale of the area.”

“That’s — no,” Nico says, dragging his hand down his face. “There’s no improving morale, it is an eternal punishment. He cheated Death!”

Will waves a hand. “Bah.”

“Wh — don’t ‘bah’ me! He bound Thanatos up with leather string! He stuffed him under a mattress!”

“Thanatos is an all-powerful Nyxian deity,” Will points out. “If he stayed stuck under the mattress, that’s lowkey a skill issue.”

Nico sits in gobsmacked silence for several minutes. Will does not appear to notice.

“Don’t — say that,” Nico hisses, glancing around. “Christo, Will, you’re going to get smited.”

“I don’t think anyone will smite me. I’m not important enough. If I was important enough, they’d listen to me, vis-a-vis improving the Underworld vis-a-vis improving Sisyphus’ condition. Here, drink this, it’ll make you feel better.”

“What is your fascination with that man,” argues Nico weakly, accepting the drink and taking a wary sip. “Oh, huh, bubblegum.” He drinks half of it in one go. “That’s not too bad.”

“Yeah, I know you, di Angelo. You’re not mysterious.”

Nico’s jaw drops, and drops further at Will’s snickering. “I — am so.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Well I would be more mysterious if you didn’t lock me in here four times longer than you said you would!”

Will slows down, sets down his suture needle, walks away from his patient — this time Conor Stoll, who holds closed his gaping leg wound with practiced patience — and walks over to Nico’s bed, hands on his hips, eyebrows raised to the mighty heavens.

“People who disappeared into the shadows and had to be dragged back by sheer force of Will — I mean that exactly as it sounds — do not get to complain to me.”

Nico settles back into his stupid infirmary bed cushions, bright red and scowling. As if it’s his fault the shadows tried to devour him —

“It actually is directly your fault, Mr. I Want To Valiantly and Dramatically Sacrifice Myself to the Nether Instead of Listening to my Doctor so I can Avoid That Foolishness.”

Nico ignores him, chugging the rest of his bubblegum-flavoured whatever-it-is, until he rolls his eyes and returns to Connor, who has at this point fainted from blood loss. Will flicks him on the forehead with impressive force and grace and he snorts right back awake. Nico catches himself feeling impressed and shoves it immediately away with a glower.

“Hmph. Go back to Sisyphus. You were less annoying when you were advocating that one of the original mortal sinners be pardoned.”

“Gladly! Do you think Sisyphus would be sad if they took away his rock and gave him a functionally identical one —”

“Oh my gods I take it back youre the most annoying person on Earth —”

“I can see the Doors of Death, I think,” comments Connor absently, and is ignored.

“It’s not annoying to care about the afterlife!”

“Focus on your own! How about that!”

“That’s depressing!”

Nico throws up his hands. “You’re an emergency field medic! Your life is depressing!”

Will snorts. “True,” he concedes. He pauses for a moment, and then Nico can tell, by the twitch of his stupid shoulders, that he is making that stupid smirking expression — “Although you know what would make it less depressing —”

“If the word ‘Sisyphus’ leaves your mouth I am going to leap out of this prison bed and maul you to death —”

“—if I was only sure —”

“— I’m not kidding Solace —”

“— that the state of my fellow dead man —”

“— I’ll be at your fucking judgement day, asshole, don’t test me —”

“— would be one of one of blissful, deserved relief.” Will glances backward, grinning. “By fellow dead I mean my homegirl Sisyphus, if that was in any way unclear.”

Nico brings up his hands and mimes strangling the infernal son of Apollo. It makes him laugh, dimple-cheeked and wide-mouthed, and Nico’s stomach flips.

“You’ll die by my hand, Solace, I mean it.”

“Yeah, yeah, di Angelo, I’m real scared of a five-foot —”

Connor’s heart monitor lets out a long, continuous beep.

“Oh, shit, my bad. Clear!”

“The key is under the mat.”

Nico glances down at his boots. Under them is indeed a mat, or at least an approximation of one, woven grass long since thinned and ripped enough to see right through. Enough so that Nico can see, quite clearly, the rings of the giant tree, but no key.

Not the it matters. Since the treehouse doesn’t have a lock.

“Will,” Nico sighs, “can I please just come in.”

“The key is under the mat!”

Nico wishes he was friends with less complicated people. Like Connor, maybe. Gods, he can’t believe he’s even thinking it, but bring back the Stolls. Nico needs to spend his time with people who aren’t worried about thoughts or neuron pathways. This is too hard.

“I can hear your superiority complex from in here.”

“Shut the hell up.”

“It’s stifling.”

Scowling, Nico really considers barging through the faded tapestry currently serving as a door. It would be so much easier. It would take him three steps, he estimates, to lunge in, grab the holy fool he calls his best friend, and drag him out, kicking and screeching if necessary, down the stupid tree and back to camp. Just to eat and shower and sleep.

Gods, when did he become a babysitter.

“The key is under the mat,” Will insists for the third time, and to avoid blowing up like an actual bomb Nico whips the stupid mat off the stupid floor and looks.

And.

Well.

“Huh,” he mumbles, and ignores Will’s indignant I told you so!. He squints at the faded letters, puzzling what they might really be — because there’s no way he’s reading them right — before giving up and hesitantly saying. “Ghed?”

“It’s gheD,” Will corrects.

“I said that!”

“No, you said Ghed.”

“I —” Nico takes a deep breath. And another. Then he mimes strangling someone in the direction of the door. “Okay. Can you. Repeat it please.”

“Yes,” says Will patiently. “Say it like this: gheD.”

Nico wonders what sins his father is punishing him for.

“GheD,” he tries.

“Lower case g!”

“How the fresh fuck do you —” He pinches the bridge of his nose. “Okay. Okay. In through the nose, out the mouth. Okay. Fuck. gheD.”

The tapestry door-thing whooshes open. Nico stares at it.

“Jesus fucking Christ.”

It begins to descend. He rushes through it, tripping over a bent branch on the door frame and nearly toppling himself straight out of the tree and splatting on the floor. Fuck.

“This is, without a breath of hyperbole, the most annoying structure I’ve ever —”

His gaze skips over to the middle of the cramped little treehouse, where Will is curled up, in the middle of a frankly offensively large beanbag, knees tucked to his chest, curls dropping, eyes red.

“— seen.”

Will tries for a smile. “That’s what they get for letting an eight year old nerd design it.”

A curl of guilt cinches Nico’s heart. He does not have to ask who ‘they’ might be.

“How much did you have to beg to let them do that?”

“Barely.” Will snorts, scooching over to make room, snorting harder as Nico misjudges the softness of the beanbag and lands facefirst into the center of it. “Michael liked to pretend to be a hardass but he was a big fat liar. I asked him first.”

Nico tucks his legs together, criss-cross, swiping the lint off his flaming face. “Now that is a challenge to picture.”

“Mhm. He really had the whole camp fooled.” He squeezes his eyes shut, burying his face in his knees, but he can’t hide the tremor in his voice. “He spoiled me bad.”

“Figures,” Nico says softly. He pokes his friend hard in the ribs. “Only brats like you are this annoying to find when you need to.”

Will chokes on a laugh, and then it warps something heavy in the back of his throat, and Nico winces at the sharpness of it, rubbing his own neck. He shifts, hands twitching. Will curls up tighter, leaning away.

“S-sorry.”

Nico clears his throat. “Don’t be.”

It is hard to be in the same room as someone who is crying. It is harder still to sit next to someone who is trying desperately not to.

Slowly, heart pounding, Nico pulls his hand out of his pocket, and rests it on the curve of Will’s spine.

The shaking worsens. But the muscles of Will’s back relax under his palm.

He lets Will cry. He’s not sure what else to do. He tries to imagine it, for a moment; not just Bianca’s death but Hazel’s, Reyna’s, Jason’s, even Percy’s and Annabeth’s and — gods, six more. At least. Watching them die, one by one. Feeling them die through the burning heat of your hands. The lump in Nico’s throat aches something fierce.

Fuck. He’d run away sometimes, too. He did, really.

“Is it — is the doorway enchanted?”

He winces. That is not the Statement of Support™️ he’s meant to say, but luckily Will only laughs, wet and muffled as it is, and nods. Unbidden, Nico’s heart begins to smart something nasty, hand sliding up without his permission to comb through Will’s hair. Of course he’s — laughing. Even when hurting.

“Yes. I — me and Cecil got banned from any kind of locking mechanisms after The Incident of 2006 so Diana improvised. She had a buddy in New Jersey, an old foster sister, who was a Hecate kid, so she called in a favor. And Lee let me choose the code word before Michael could stop him so it’s in Klingon. That’s why it’s hard to say. Cass convinced me to write it under the mat. She said it was in case I ever lost my voice or something and someone else had to let me out, but really it’s ‘cause I used to fall asleep in here all the time and they had to come carry me back.”

“They sound like they loved you,” Nico says softly.

Will turns his head, just enough that Nico can see the dark blues of his eyes, the tears sliding across his nose, his temples. He smiles, wobbly, and it is so cracked and fragile that Nico is reaching out before he realizes, palm wet where it covers Will’s cheek, and Will’s long fingers are wrapped around his wrist.

“They did.” He sniffles. “I miss them, Nico.”

“You’re allowed to.” He runs his thumb over the heavy bags under Will’s eyes, careful not to catch the soft skin with his calluses. “Maybe, like, let someone know before you disappear, but you can take the time to miss them, Will.” He squeezes gently. “‘Feel it, don’t forget it’, right, Mr. Therapist?”

Will smiles again, and there is no attempted lightness, in it, this time; it is small and it is sad and it is sincere.

“Right.” He leans into Nico’s hand. “Thank you.”

Nico exhales. “Of course, tesoro.”

“Hnnnngh.”

Will snorts, reaching around his book to pat his currently cooking boyfriend gently if teasingly in the face region.

“There, there.”

“Hnnnnngh,” says Nico, with more emphasis. He curls up a little closer to Will, tucking his burning forehead to the dip in his shoulder.

Which, like. Is obviously very bad for him and everything, Will would of course prefer him to be healthy, et cetera, et cetera, but also the woods are a little chilly and Austin said he was gonna regret not wearing a sweater, so obviously he couldn’t go back and get one, and while unfortunate for the boy in question Will is a teensy weensy bit grateful for Nico’s pyrogens. Sue him.

Will flips a page.

“You know, you would be in less pain and misery if you went unconscious. Hard to feel anything when you aren’t aware of anything, famously.”

“Shldn’t b sleepin’,” Nico mumbles. Will widens his stance ever so slightly. Nico curls further against him. Will grins. Score.

“You better sleep. I worked hard for those herbs, you know. Don’t waste all my hard work.”

Nico makes another noise of stubborn misery, freeing his hand for the sole purpose of flapping it dismissively.

“Nnngh.”

Will sighs. Nico’s eyes are squeezed shut, but there is a brazen, shameless pout to his lips, and he just looks so miserable, and it is entirely his fault for traipsing about in the dark and cold but he is so so pitiable and so so cute. Will is moved, a little. Not a lot, ‘cause his boyfriend’s a dumbass and Will does not indulge dumbasses, but.

Most dumbasses aren’t quite so adorable when they’re hacking up a lung and wishing for death.

“It’s a head cold, you fucking goober.”

“I’m fevered,” Nico retorts, popping one dark eye open to glare. “My brain is cooking, and this is how you treat me? Your beloved? This is how you treat me, the love of your life, when my brain is simmering at one hundred and ten degrees?”

“You are barely one hundred point four.”

“Cooking!”

“Oh my gods.”

Will cannot help himself. He ducks down and kisses Mr. Drama Queen Of Darkness on those ridiculous pouty lips, not bothering to hide his smirk. Nico whines again.

“Go to sleep, you dumbass.”

Nico puffs out a breath, sagging against Will’s side.

“I can’t.” His eyes flutter shut, limbs growing heavy. Will pushes his book to the side, settling against the tree they’re laying against and sliding his hands into Nico’s sweaty hair. With every knot he detangles, Nico shivers. “I can’t sleep, there’re — dng’rous things. Inthe forest.”

Will snorts. How chivalrous. “Don’t worry about it, Ghost King.” He slows his hand as Nico stills, breaths evening. He waits, motionless, counting Nico’s laboured breaths: in, two, three, four, out, two, three, four. In. Out. In. Out.

He picks up his book again when he’s sure Nico’s asleep, wrapping an arm around him. He looks out into the clearing, watching the shifting shadows, meeting the glare of glowing red eyes and flashing fangs. He grins, green circling his eyes, acrid, emerald smoke simmering in circles around them.

“I am the most dangerous thing in this forest.”

"It reminded me of you."

Will looks into his cupped hands. He purses his lips. He opens his mouth. He closes it. He opens it again.

"This is, uh." He clears his throat. "It, being this fish skeleton?"

Nico nods. "Yes."

Will waits for an explanation. With none forthcoming, he looks up, intent on asking for it directly, but his tongue does completely numb in his mouth, jaw softly unlocking. From the late afternoon sun behind him golden rays shine directly into pools of what has become spun copper and amber brown; spools of shining wire surrounded by shining white. It takes him time uncountable to register the wide, round soporifics in front of him are in fact Nico's eyes, cradled in the light, watching him.

"What," Will tries, mouth dry, "uh, what? Why. I mean." He holds up his hands. They're shaking. "Fish?"

"That's you," says Nico, crowding into Will's space. Will makes a noise that can be registered only by bats, dolphins, and bush crickets.

Nico's callused hands encircle Will's wrist and his soul ascends, exiting from his body, floating away gayly away until Will snags it by the ankle and yanks it back to his mortal body. Dad, if you can hear me, I cannot stress how much you owe me and how badly I am calling in that favor. SOS. SOS. SOS. SO --

"It's small, see. Delicate."

"I'm -- six two?"

"Yeah, physically." Nico pokes at the tiny little spine. "But you're, like." He makes a squishing motion with his hand. "Crushable, you know? You just go around feeling your feelings at full force. All over the place. Delicate."

Will is pretty sure he's ghasting. Is that what it's called? Flabbering one's ghast? When you just -- kind of stand there, slack jawed, wheezing like a doofus? Maybe he is a fish. "Nico, I've got --" He makes a swooping gesture in front of his nose, trying and visibly failing at indicating a plague mask. "You know? I could poison you."

"Yeah, that's why I picked one that died from whirling disease."

"How...thoughtful?"

"Thanks."

Nico returns to the fish skeleton. He points out the eye sockets. "See here? The fish had shallow orbits so it probably had big eyes like you."

"I have big eyes?"

"Duh. You are ninety percent eye. Everyone looks at you and it's like bam. Blue. All you can see."

Will begs the red to recede from his cheeks. He can hear the echo of his father's cackling, all the way from his stupid dork ass nerd ass lame tryhard chariot, and the red continues to rise.

"You -- like my eyes?"

"Yeah."

"Oh."

"Hey, look here. You can see its -- are you looking? -- you can see its heart cavity. Cool, right? Your heart is going really fast."

A high-pitched noise comes out of Will's throat, sourced from somewhere in his kneecaps, probably. They're wobbling enough.

"Yeah, I -- uh, best believe I noticed."

"Are you okay?"

"I'm vibing. Chilling, even. One could even say I'm maxing, relaxing, acting all cool. If there was a basketball net outside of a school I would be totally shooting right now."

"You're acting weird," Nico accuses.

Will laughs out loud. No, like, really laughs, it comes out of his stomach and then his knees give out and he barely manages to catch himself, hunching over, veins hot rod boiling and stomach writhing and face the color of a gently polished tomato. He may have passed.

"Oh, my gods, something kill me."

"Whatever, weirdo. Come back over, I want to show you why the rib cage is representative of your repression issues."

"Okay."

“You know I love you, right?”

“Yeah?”

“Mhm.”

Will smiles, pushing down the bubble of air that fires up his torso, pressing down on the balloon of giggles that expand up his belly, into his lungs. He hides into the pillow, acting at sleep, feeling Nico’s hand walk across his chest.

“Tell me more.”

That callused hand pauses, and Will’s breath hitches, goosebumps pilling up all over his warmed skin. He can feel the slow spread of Nico’s tiny grin in the air, can feel the crooked edge to it, the sharp edge of possession. His teeth-torn fingernails dip below the sag of Will’s stretched-out tank top and feign hesitance, feign modesty, before sliding clear up along his abdomen, his sternum, his pectorals. The web of Nico’s thumb rests dangerously, daringly close to the edge of Will’s areola, by no accident. Will shivers.

“Greedy,” Nico murmurs, and his lips are so close to Will’s skin that he feels the rumbling baritone of his voice in the hard lines of his muscles, and they clench, tiny little spasms, with every ghosting breath. “Greedy, greedy boy.”

Will’s stomach bottoms out. He feels it, dropping to his clenched toes, and drawn unbidden from his mouth is the tiniest of little sounds, breathy, gravelly, humiliating; the quiet echo of Nico’s snicker makes it so, so much more intoxicatingly worse and he can feel it, the headiness. The way his mind starts to float.

“‘M not.”

It’s barely a defense. It’s barely words. He can focus only on the scrape of Nico’s palms against his skin, on the heat of his breath, his body; so close. Will’s mind spins and his own breathing gets short, shallow. Wanting.

“You are.” His lips touch, finally, the burning want of Will’s skin; pressing firm against the slope of Will’s shoulder, hard enough to feel teeth, to feel panting, to feel the strength of Nico’s wanting. His taking. “You drink everything I give you. You replenish your blood with it, don’t you.”

“And?” Will asks, breathless, challenging. He bares his neck and hears the sharpness of Nico’s inhale; looks out of the corner of his eyes and smirks at the clench of his Nico’s jaw, the tongue that darts out to wet at his lips, to lap at him. “Will you give it to me?”

“I will give you anything.”

He says it with the force of a thousand whispers, a million final oaths. He says it and Will hears thunder clap. He feels the ground shake, the bed shake, his thighs shake, uncontrollably, weak under the bruise of Nico’s clench, the brand of his palms. I will give you anything. I will give you everything.

“How will you ever afford it?”

Nico’s teeth sink into his skin and Will opens his mouth to shout but the only sound to exit is the broken vowels of his Nico’s name, all of them. Nico shifts to face him and he knows, but the steel in his Earthen eyes, that cost is of no question, if no concern.

I will. Easily.

Will folds into him like the stars do their ending, glowing sun.

"I'm so sorry for your loss."

"Solace, I am going to strangle you."

For someone to claim to have absolutely no Apollonian talents outside healing, Will has an exceptional proclivity for the dramatics. If it weren't for the slightest, barest, most miniscule twitch in he corner of his mouth, Nico would have believed his ruse wholeheartedly.

Instead, he watches that tiny little twitch and the deliberate, sympathetic tilt to blond eyebrows and rolls his eyes as hard as he can.

"You really have my deepest sympathies!" Will insists. He tucks his hands behind his back, glancing down at the ruined, crushed brownie making home in the grass, next to the brazier. "It's -- a tragedy, really. So young, so fudgy. Taken from us too soon."

"You have a lot of gall for someone so close to a fire."

"The last camp brownie of the month, too. Squashed on the grass. It's a metaphor, really. For life."

"Oh my gods."

That cracks him, and he smiles, shoving it down as quickly as he can but Nico sees it, because he isn't fucking slick, because he is an irritant and annoying and an all around pain in his side who has better things to do than taunting Nico about a stupid freaking brownie, but he is not doing these things because he is a doofus. Of the highest magnitude. A doofus with very big blue eyes that sparkle ever so in the evening sun and a very delicate Cupid's bow, that is still fucking twitching.

"You should give it the proper rites," says Will solemnly. "Here, I'll help."

Before Nico can stop him, or strangle him, he drops to a crouch, his own plate of food falling forgotten by his feet, and scoops the brownie chunks in his large hands. He fishes a napkin out of his pocket, smoothing it on his thigh, then lays the brownie ever so gently upon it, picking out the blades of grass and covering it carefully.

He holds out the napkin-shroud.

"O Prince of the Dead, Seer of Rites, Guide of Lost Souls, I pass this Fudge Brownie Supreme onto thine most capable hands; grant, take her, and with great care, bring her to the gates of Hades, so that she may be judged, against the lightness of her heart, and brought to the gardens of Elysium; paradise."

"Are you done."

"No." He clears his throat. "For mine own healer hands could not bring her back to the warmth of the Earthen light --"

"Oh my gods."

Nico watches, with his own two working eyeballs, gobsmacked, as Will begins to glow golden from the palms of his hands, enveloping the brownie corpse in strands of gentle sunlight.

"-- and so I entrust her, O Reaper Junior, O Pipsqueak of Pluto --"

"That's enough."

Faster than Will can stop him Nico tears off a chunk of his shirt, wraps it around the tip of his sword, and plunges it into the fire. Will shrieks and, wisely, bolts; in milliseconds Nico is gaining, now-flaming swords inches from the dumbass's neck, cussing him out in every language he knows one decibel louder than Will's screaming for help.

None comes.

As is life at Camp Half-Blood.

"Okay! Okay! I was joking! I'll never call you Pipsqueak again --"

Immediately, Will starts wheezing, neck swelling with splotchy red hives, and Nico has to take a moment to hold his flaming sword to the side and drop his face in his free hand. He prays to his father for strength. His father, more miffed about the blasphemy than the blatant disrespect of Nico's honor, gods help Will's soul, does not respond.

At Nico's pause, Will falls to his knees.

"Please," he begs, or with his swelling tongue more says pdease. He clasps his hands together, brownie falling to the ground. "Spare me! I'm too pretty to die! Or, at least, I'm too pretty to die by flame! Have mercy on me and stab me lightly in the side, so I have enough time to recite Mercutio's monologue as I bleed out!"

"I wanted to stab you twelve percent more with every word."

"That's what, almost five hundred percent? Surely that is enough for the rage to become funny again. Jester's privilege. I must be spared."

He waves his clasped hands again for emphasis.

Nico's mouth twitches.

Godsdamnit.

"You are the most annoying person in this camp, you know that?"

Will counts seven seconds after his sword is sheathed, just for insurance, then jumps to his feet, beaming.

"Really? Only camp-wide? Aw, you do love me."

His allergic reaction immediately begins to subside. Nico flushes. Will pounces upon his moment of weakness and slings a stupidly long arm around his shoulders, pulling him close enough that Nico's can't flail away or sucker punch his way free.

"I love you too," he says, pressing a smacking kiss to his cheek with a mwah! so loud it echoes from the lake to Half-Blood Hill and causes four separate eavesdropping Aphrodite campers to faint, fanning their faces. Nico's face goes so read his vision starts to swim.

"Your death will be slow and public," he promises darkly.

Will's mouth twitches. "Whatever you say, Death Boy."

"You comfortable?"

Nico lifts his head from the pillow, squinting groggily. Will giggles.

"You don't have to say anything. Just make a general noise of misery if you're actively suffering, and I'll try to fix it."

Nico understands maybe every other word. His head is swimming, his throat aches something awful, and the infirmary is busy; the bags under Will's eyes evidence of the once-monthly outbreak of Just Whatever. Consequence of close proximity to germy children in a small-ish space. Nico is going to quit his day job.

"None of that was words," says Will gently. He reaches out, slow enough for even Nico's affected reflexes to have time to pull away, and rest the back of his blissfully warm hand on his cheek. "You're rambling, darling. And slurring your words."

"H'te k'ds," Nico rasps. "Germy."

Will snorts. "Indeed they are."

"Evil."

"Aw, it's not their fault. They're plenty miserable about it, too. Anyways, you're warm, more than I'd like. Let's get your fever down."

Will pulls his hand away reaching for something beside the cot. Nico mourns its loss. The spattered burn scars that cover Will's hands are, oddly, an unbelievably calming texture -- as much as Will hates them, binding up his forearms to hide the worst of them, Nico loves nothing more than to run the tips of his fingers against them, to hold them to his lips. The map of his dotted, mottled skin sticks cleanly in his memory, as well as he knows the every bending poplar stalks of the Underworld, or the familiar shadows of his cabin. Will's touch had hardly a pulse of healing magic in it, although there is always some, and still the ache in Nico's throat is less, and the ringing in his ear fades to nothing. He twists until he is on his back, leaning against the headboard, and watches Will flutter, watches him easily fill a medicine cup without looking, guide a tired Austin around a heart monitor with his free hand, watches him sweep the noisy infirmary, checking and cataloguing on reflex.

He is handsome, when he works. Even when he is tired. There is something about the infirmary, for all its baggage, that relaxes his shoulders, that reminds him he is needed, he is capable, he is astounding.

Plus, the lighting does actual wonders for his hair. Just Nico's noticing.

"Drink this, please."

Nico takes the little cup, dipping his tongue in to make sure it's tolerable before downing the whole thing. He pretends to be too sick to notice Will's rolled eyes.

"Good boy."

Will's eyes twinkle. He responds to Nico's glare with an easy, crooked grin, leaning down to press a kiss to his flushed cheek before stepping away.

"Okay, go back to sleep. I gotta check on a list of people before Lou comes to switch out with me, so I'll be a while. I'll wake you up before I go, okay? Maybe you'll be well enough to go back to your cabin. I'll take you off saline as soon as its safe."

Nico hums in vague confirmation, watching him write all that down on Nico's chart. Whatever medicine he just took is already taking effect, and his head is heavy, unbalanced. He blinks and he is on the pillows, blankets up to his chin, eyes fighting to stay open.

"Sweet dreams, my love."

The last thing he registers is a slight, lingering pressure on the apple of his cheeks, and then he succumbs to the warmth of Will's touch.

"That is not the point!"

Slowly, as Will rants, Nico reaches for his bags. The wilder stuff he puts back -- the fourth pair of jeans, despite the fact that Nico has never seen him wear hip to ankle anything in all the time he's known him; the six different pairs of extra shoelaces; the defibrillator; the iron supplements; the aforementioned power adapter. Anything that can be purchased at a corner store or lifted, if necessary and Will is distracted, from the nearest Walmart.

He keeps the old, faded photograph. And leaves the three pairs of cargo shorts, even though it is January and it physically pains him.

"Put the hoodies back," Will frets. "I don't -- Chiron wouldn't let me check the weather."

"I'll put one back."

"Two?"

"One, and if you get cold, you can borrow mine."

"What if you get cold?"

"My frigid heart and I are used to it," Nico says drily. Will snorts, and -- a genuine thanks to the gods -- the cloudiness in his eyes starts to fade, the tension melts from his shoulders. Nico feels his own head begin to sag.

"You are not frigid," Will says. He shuffles back over and leans on Nico's side as he works. "Thank you. You make it -- easier."

Nico presses a kiss to the side of his head.

"Any time," he promises, and in his head he swears it. He rocks them, slightly, and relishes in Will's limp, tired arms wrapped around his elbow, in Will's slow, deliberate breathing. He pushes the bag to the side and turns into him fully, pressing his lips to Will's forehead and lingering, holding, breathing in the windswept smell of his hair and the warmth of his body. "Anything, as long as you need it."

He doesn't quite wake up with the sun.

Well, not literally.

When Will first stirs Nico is still deep in the trenches of his own subconscious, and tonight it is sweet. Tonight he can smell the magnolias in the forests of the South, where he wandered for hours, learning to be comfortable with the size of his hands and the weight of his feet on the ground. Tonight he can hear his sisters' humming, both of them, Hazel's high, sweet voice with Bianca's baritone. He can feel, even, the warmth of his duvet, heavy around his shoulders. None of it makes sense, not together, but it is comforting regardless, and he does not want to leave.

He does not get much choice, in the end. The dawn's sun beams softly through the open windows, and beside him Will wiggles, eyes narrowed carefully as he tries to extract himself from the cage of Nico's arms without waking him. Nico blinks the bleariness out of his eyes, and sees the edge of Will's tongue peeking out of his mouth.

"Y'coulda jus' woken me."

Will jumps.

"Aw, shit. I almost had it this time."

Nico's eyes slide back shut. "Not even close," he snorts.

"I was so. I was up a whole twenty minutes before you sensed it like the little sonar you are."

Will's padding footsteps sound louder than they really are in the quiet morning, echoing off the frigid marble; Nico exhales slowly and maps his steps in his mind: his trek to his drawer in the cabinet, rooting around until he finds his scrubs, his six quick steps to the ensuite, his muffled crash and poorly muffled cursing as he stubs his toe, like he does every morning, on the edge of the doorway.

"Mother -- fucker," Will hisses, clamping his teeth shut at the last minute.

Nico smiles.

He doesn't realise he has fallen back asleep. In his dream, he still hears Will's footsteps, still sees his shadow through the shade of his eyelids as he passes, fluttering from one edge of the room to the next. In his dream there is still the ruffle of the bandages wrapping against his wrists, the tear of a brush as he yanks it through his perpetually-tangled hair. In his dreams Will his humming, terribly off-key, to a song that has not yet been invented.

In his dreams their room is made of hardwood floors and gigantic windows, on an apartment across the street from Mount Sinai. Their blankets smell like peppermint and magnolia body wash.

"I'll see you later," Will murmurs, pressing a kiss to his forehead, his temple, his cheek. In Nico's dream there is a pressure next to him as a hand leans into the mattress. Will hovers above his face. In his dream he smells toothpaste. "I'll be back before you're up, Sleeping Beauty."

"You will not," argues Nico weakly, and his huff is swallowed by Will's teasing grin.

"Love you."

Twelve footsteps to the door, rubber soles slapping the hardwood. The obsidian doors scrape open, and when Nico blinks awake again, they are closed and cold, and the sun is brighter.

He smiles, and goes back to sleep.

"You can go first."

"Are you sure?"

Nico smiles. "Yes, Will. It'll be fine."

There is something unbelievably sweet about the hunch of Will's shoulders, the too-tight grip on the handle of the practice sword. He even stands differently, on the sand of the ampitheatre, unbalanced and unsure. He chews on his bottom lip and Nico wants nothing more than to drop everything and tug it from his teeth, soothe away the worry lines with the press of his tongue.

"I don't want to -- hurt you."

"You won't."

"I -- could!"

"I know you could." Nico steps closer, his own practice sword held loosely in his hand. "But you won't."

Will shifts his feet, looking at the shortened space between them and swallowing. A cloud passes over the sun and his eyes darken, fluttering blond eyelashes blinking away the sweat beading on his brow.

"Will," Nico says again. He closes the final foot of space between them, wrapping his free hand around Will's wrist. His pulse hammers through his palm. "You are going to swing, I am going to block. Nothing is going to happen. Right?"

Will breathes in, then breathes out. He repeats, closing his eyes. The buzz of his heartrate slows, ever so slightly.

"Trust me, Will."

"I trust you."

It is automatic and speedy. Nico's breath catches in his throat, and he pushes it back before Will's opening eyes can track it, can track his slack jaw and sharp breath.

"Good," he says hastily. He steps back, clearing his throat. "Okay, like we talked about. One foot forward. Drop your center of gravity, that's it. And then swing.”

Will follows his instructions quickly and determinedly, and, finally, when it comes time, swings — he grips the sword in two large hands, tendons rippling over the handle, and arcs the heavy thing cleanly over his head, broad shoulders sparkling in the midday sun.

Nico almost does get hit. He yelps and lunges away at the last second, heart racing.

“Oh my gods!” Will shouts, dropping his sword to the ground like it had burned him and rushing over. “Oh my gods, are you okay, did I slice you —”

Nico shifts slightly away, trying not to groan. For fuck’s sake.

“We’re done,” says Will, pressing light-hot, glowing palms on his shoulders, his back. Nico shivers. “You’re okay, thank the gods, but that was way too close —”

Nico is going to go back in time and kick his own ass. He needs to learn to focus, apparently; he’s not sure when exactly his brain liquified and melted out of his godsdamn ears but he has a feeling it was sometime around Sunshine Smile #1.

“This isn’t over,” Nico says weakly. His chest still flutters. All he can feel is the heat of Will’s skin, and he is overwhelmed by the gentle scent of lavender. “We’re gonna — uh, we’re gonna. Come back to this.” Will’s eyes are just — wow, this amphitheatre is hot. Nico clears his throat. That’s a lot of blue for one person to have, right? It’s not just him? “This isn’t over, Solace.”

“It sure as shit is,” says Will firmly. He kicks his practice sword in disgust, sliding his oh gods oh gods oh gods wide palm across Nico’s shoulders, hovering on his neck. “Lemme check you over, okay? Just for my own peace of mind.”

“Your lessons,” Nico tries.

Will waves a hand. “Bah. I appreciate the effort, Nico, but I’m hopeless. You’ll protect me, anyway.”

He is not hopeless. He is strong. He is strong and he is quick and he is observant, maybe more than anyone Nico has ever met. He is new in clumsy, sure, but that doesn’t mean he is not capable.

He opens his mouth to say so. But there is a look in Will’s eye. So he holds it, and smiles, and leans into his friend’s touch.

He will protect him.

Even if it’s from his own disbelief.

"Can I kiss you?"

"I don't know, can you?"

The second the words are out of his mouth Will prays for death.

Oh my gods.

"Purge it," he orders, words muffled by his own hands. He glares when Nico laughs. "I'm not joking, purge that from your memory or I'll do it for you --"

"Solace," says Nico, and there are crinkles in the corners of his eyes, and his smile is just slightly crooked, and his hands are cool like cobblestones in the early mornings on the rings of his wrists. He tightens when Will continues to try to wrench away. Or hit him. Or both.

So fucking humiliating.

"Solace, hold still."

Ever since ten year old yapatron dork Nico di Angelo stepped foot in this godforsaken child soldier hellscape however many years ago, Will refuses to count for his own mental health, he has not known peace. Since the very first day the bright-eyed smirking punk pulled up with a pack of cards and a literal bag to collect the change he swindled out of the Entire Apollo cabin, Will has been karate-chopped in the face with the very specific strain of the Ella Enchanted curse wherein his stupid mindless drone of a brain stops every available function and immediately pivots to do whatever Emo Boy commands. It's an issue. It's a problem. It's a curse, and no one takes him seriously.

"Bars," Nico says solemnly.

Will snaps his teeth at him.

"You know, you get kind of bitey and hot when you're embarrassed."

"Shut the fuck up."

"I'm just saying," Nico grins. "It happens when you're angry, too. You get this -- dimple, here, when you scowl."

He reaches out without permission and presses his thumb into the divot of Will's cheek, ridges of his fingerprint sliding along the valleys of his spattered scars. Like the jagged edges of torn paper.

There's a haiku in there, says the Apollo that lives forever in Will's brain.

I'll kill myself for real, seethes Will back at it.

He notices Nico's widening smile when his delicate hands reach behind the curve of his ear, sliding through strands of his hair. His palm burns icily along the length of his jaw.

Coincidentally, his heartrate jumps three ECG strips.

"So?"

"So what."

His voice cracks so horribly the clouds wince in sympathy. Were his face capable of getting any redder, it would, but at this point in time it was already riding the line between roan and pumice.

"So." Nico ducks his head, meeting Will's eyes. "Can I kiss you." He snorts. "Or, rather: may I kiss you."

Will thinks of saying no, just to be difficult. But then the ten-year-old Will that lives in his mind throws himself to his knees, weeping in agony, and he relents.

"Fine," he says quickly. "But only a little one and it can't be very good!"

Nico raises an amused eyebrow.

"It can't?"

"No! I'm in -- scrubs!"

"As opposed to your ratty camp shirt," Nico surmises. "Ah, yes." He waits a little. He smirks. Will clocks the fuckin' Look in his eye one half millisecond too late, because God hates him. Yeah. That one. "Or, you know. The scrubs don't have to stay on."

"Bye."

Will turns around to leave, or tries to, but the sheer amount of blood in his head and face region leaves him more than a little lightheated, so he goes ahead and just sways right into Nico's waiting arms. Why not? His dignity is dead and buried. Might as well put some flowers on the grave.

Or something.

Look. You try digging up metaphors when none and all of your synapses are firing at once, somehow.

"You're so dramatic," Nico murmurs, voice liquid with fondness. The curve of his smile melts into something sweet and he adjusts his arms around Will's waist, dipping him backwards. "I am going to kiss you, now. Stop me."

"'Kay," Will squeaks, and grips onto strong, wiry shoulders as hard as he can. His toes curl.

He's laughing, when he presses their lips together.

It tastes like sweet bubblegum and ancient TV static.

"Call me when you get home."

Will smiles. "You could come too, you know."

Nico scoffs, reaching for his twisted collar. He fixes it as Will snickers, quickly moving on to the rest of his badly wrinkled shirt. Where did he keep this. His pillowcase?

"I'm -- busy."

"Yeah, workin' on that excuse."

Nico's face burns and he refuses to dignify that with an answer.

"Shut up."

"Mhm." Will wraps his fingers around Nico's wrist, shifting his hand off his shirt and sliding their fingers together. Nico stares at them, the contrast -- Will's scarred, freckled tan against Nico's pale calluses. He closes his eyes and tries to freeze the picture, hold onto it, but it fades quicker than sunset. "I'm only gone for a week, babe."

"That is a stupid amount of numbers."

"Hundred sixty-eight, yeah."

"What if you get -- attacked?"

Will pulls their joined hands to rest on his chest, using his free hand to place theatrically on his forehead due to who he is as a person.

"The depth of my love shall save me," he says, dramatically. "You will hear my plea for help from thousand miles away, O Saver Of Damsels."

Nico scowls. "You're irritating."

"And you make the choice to date me every day, so who is the real dumbass here."

"You, still."

"Fascinating logic as usual."

A smile cracks on his face and Will pumps his fist like the dork he is, crowing his victory to the heavens. Nico wants to punch him as much as kiss him, and then abruptly realizes he can do nothing about that feeling for the next several days.

"Hey." A gentle thumb brushes against his bottom lip, tilting his head up. Will's smile has softened. "You know you can, like...teleport, right? That is a thing you can do? If you're worried you can just stalk me from a distance. Lurk, as you do."

Nico could lurk. It's true. And then he would not have to face Will's mother and have to potentially flay himself as soon as he inevitably fumbles every interaction and their entire relationship goes up in smoke.

"You could also just come with me normally. Like, you know, as my boyfriend meeting my mother. Who is normal. And kind of an awkward person herself. You should see her interviews. She'll put her foot in her mouth four times faster than you will, I can promise you that."

"Your mother is lovely," Nico stresses, which he knows objectively. Many are.

"As are you," Will responds easily. He bends down to distract Nico with a gentle press of their lips. Nico is indeed distracted. He is soft and smells like lavender. Nico has weaknesses and urges and they are all stamped with WAS.

"Hngh."

Nico emphasizes his point by flapping his free hand emphatically. Will accepts his point by Sighing.

"Sigh," he adds, out loud. "One day. Next time. Soon."

"Sure," Nico lies.

"Sigh," Will says again. His grin is wide and soft around the edges, even as he rolls his eyes; he leans down and kisses him again and lingers, this time. Waits for Nico to sag into his hold and close his eyes, wanting.

"Okay," Nico mumbles, refusing to pull away. "Okay, you gotta catch a train."

"Yep."

"It leaves in one hour."

"Mhm."

"The bus ride from camp to the train station happens to be one hour exactly."

"Right on."

"You gotta -- leave, Will."

"Sure," Will says, kissing him again, "five more minutes."

Nico smiles, and lets him.

"Don't cry."

"...I'm not."

"Omigods. Will. Don't cry."

"I'm not!"

But there are welled up tears making his eyes looking huge, and even as he bites it his lip still trembles. In seconds there is the slightest of sniffles.

Nico groans, slumping against the handle of the grocery cart. A WASPy mother glares at him in passing. He glares back and sics an errant soul onto her monstrosity of a hairdo for good measure.

"Will," he groans, metal bar digging into his forehead, "Will, it's a lemon."

"I know," Will sniffles, bravely. "Just -- leave it. Let's go."

Nico moves his arm, just enough to watch his too-tall over-empathetic dumbass best friend try and fail to pull himself together in the, and Nico cannot emphasize this enough, very public grocery store in the suburbs of Long Island, where people stare.

And, like.

The staring is not too unusual.

Will is in cutoff shorts and flip-flops. It's early March. Climate change is not that bad yet. The two of them are wearing neon camp t-shirts -- Nico's good, goth t-shirts have been stolen from him to be 'washed' -- and are both, Nico must emphasize again, fifteen years of age, with a grocery cart each full to the actual brim with Pop Tarts, Twizzlers, medical supplies, socks, and silly string. Will is approximately nineteen feet tall. They make a scene. That is a fair evaluation.

But rare is the day where Nico cannot quell the stares by reflecting hellfire into his eyes. Mortals usually flee in terror or at least walk away traumatized. Today they aren't even looking.

"Will," he says, as gently as he can manage. Will looks over, after a minute, and his bright eyes look so glassy and miserable that whoa, hey, Nico can manage a whole lot gentler than he thought he could, can't he. He reaches up and pats a palm against Will's wet cheek, swiping a thumb under his eyes. "Do you. Want." He glances over at the lone, half-dried up lemon on the floor by the produce baskets. "Would you like to take the lemon home with us.

"Yes," says Will quietly. Nico's hand falls away and Will wipes his face, crouching down to scoop it up. He hesitates before putting it in the cart, cradling it against his chest. "It's just." He looks at Nico through his eyelashes. Nico tries to smile encouragingly. Based on the immediate tears and sobbing of a child directly behind Will's shoulders, he is unsuccessful. "If we don't take it, no one will, you know."

"Yes," agrees Nico slowly. "Due to the fact that it is garbage."

Will snatches his hand back like Nico had smacked it, glaring hard. Nico is really starting to consider those bipolar pamphlets Kayla left pointedly on the Apollo table. Yeesh.

"It's not -- garbage! Just because -- just because something isn't as good as everything else doesn't mean it's garbage!"

...Or not.

Ah.

"Ah," says Nico. He clears his throat. "Ah."

Some cultures attribute tact and gentleness to his father -- Death accepts all, and in facts invites all, to reside with Him. He will take your hand and guide you to whence you have never travelled, where you have no kin. He will speak to you in your shock of your life and your triumphs. He, when you have no one, is your compassionate, voluble friend.

Hazel inherited all that, unfortunately. Nico got the dead-eyed stare and fruitiness.

"Uh," he tries, anyway, "if you were a rotten lemon, I would take you home."

Will looks at him skeptically. "You would?"

"Y -- uh, yes. I would make." He wracks his brain. "I would use you to clean surfaces."

"...Oh."

"Yes. Like -- chopping boards, and the like." He makes a karate chop motion with his hand. He immediately takes the hand and shoves it into the untraveled depths of his pocket, which is a challenge due to the fact that it took him forty minutes to paint his jeans on this morning, and vows to cut its quisling digits off as quickly as possible. Why is he alive.

He is grateful at least that his friend is about as stupid as he is.

"That would be a good use for me if I was a rotting lemon," Will agrees. He looks down at the rotting lemon cradled in his hands. "Maybe we will use you to clean."

"Yes," Nico says, gentle coaxing. "Now let's put the lemon in the cart, okay? We're almost done. We just need the nineteen quarts of ice cream Cecil paid me ninety dollars not to disclose to Chiron. Let's go."

"'Kay."

Garbage lemon safely laid among a braid of licorice packages, dead center in the cart, they move on. The stares follow them, but Will at least does not seem to mind -- used to it, veteran camper that he is -- and slides his arm through Nico's crooked elbow. Nico takes that as the opportunity it is to steer him away from the cake that a nefarious teenager has pushed to the floor, lest that set him off next. They have only minutes until they make it to the cash register, where Nico will pay for whatever Will is watching him scan, and are home free.

"Hey, Nico."

Nico hums, eyeing the self-checkout line. "Yeah?"

"Would we still be friends if I was a worm?"

"Oh, for fuck's sake."

"Take my seat."

"Your seat sucks."

"Well, aren't you a ray of sunshine this morning."

Nico scowls at him. It, unfortunately, does nothing, because Will was born with zero fear instinct and is looking forward to the day Nico kills him.

"It's six in the fucking morning, Solace. The sun is not even a ray of sunshine this morning. Because it is too fucking early."

"Children," drawls Will, lazily. He gestures to the children in question, who watch Nico, giggling. Nico flushes.

"Move."

"I'm movin', I'm movin'."

He scooches down the bench, pushing his little siblings as he goes. They offer zero help, letting him manhandle them around on the little wooden bench and boasting about how big they're getting. Will rolls his eyes playfully at them and tells them to eat their vegetables to keep that up.

Nico perches tentatively onto the open spot, holding his breath.

"Sorry," he mutters, gaze locked onto the table. "For -- cussing."

The oldest of Will's sisters -- Kayla, if Nico remembers correctly -- barks a laugh.

"Oh, don't you worry, Nico, you shoulda heard Will last night when he walked right into the --"

"Aaaaaannd that's two weeks of laundry for you."

"What?! No! That's abuse of power!"

"That's what you get for being a loudmouth.

Will's eyes flash something amused and dangerous -- daring her to continue. Kayla scowls, pushing her plate away and sticking out her tongue.

"Ugh." She mutters something, under her breath. It might be stupidhead.

Nico suddenly works very hard to tamp a smile down.

"You'll get used to it," Will offers, nudging their shoulders together. "Kayla is biding her time, see, so when I finally keel over --"

"Don't tempt me."

"-- she'll be ready to take over as Dictator of Cabin Seven."

Nico pokes at the omelette Will put on his plate. There is something green in there. Gross.

"Dictator?"

"'Democracy is by the people, for the people, unfortunately you brats are little demons sent to test my patience and so this is what you get,'" quotes the toddler on Will's left. Probably not a toddler. But he's approximately the size of a peanut M&M, so Nico takes a guess. "Will says when he stops waking up to new gray hairs we can discuss shifting into an electoral system."

"Mhm."

Next to Kayla, Austin -- the musician, Nico remembers -- pipes up. "Although we've been interesting in staging a coup. Would you be interested, Nico? I've heard you have an army or two you can --"

"No," Will says loudly, looking pointedly at his brother. "We talked about this, Austin. No magic from doofus over here until he's healed. You can wait a couple weeks to see a zombie again."

Austin pouts. It takes Nico a few seconds to realize he is the doofus in question. He misses Austin's mumbling about video games and real-life boss battles in favor of sputtering, loudly, and waving his hands with enough force to knock four utensils off the table.

"Ex -- excuse me!" he stutters, glaring at a laughing Will. "I know you are not referring to the King of Darkness as -- as doofus!"

Will has dimples when he smiles, on the dead centers of his round cheeks; they blink in and out of existence as he tries, halfheartedly, to school his face.

"My deepest apologies, Your Majesty," he says, not sounding very sorry. "I shall never refer to you as such again."

Nico scowls. "Good!"

"It would be Prince Doofus, to you. I cannot believe I so misspoke."

The rest of the table -- even Kayla, who is still determined to launch as many pieces of bell pepper into Will's hair as she can -- bursts into giggles. Only Austin bothers to muffle them in his hands.

He, Nico decides, is his favorite. The rest of them are -- are insubordinate, unbelievable, plebian yokels.

(Cute yokels, the little ones.)

(But yokels.)

"I'm leaving," Nico growls, pushing himself up from the table. "I don't know why I even --"

"Hey." Will smiles when he looks, small and apologetic and genuine. "I'm sorry, Nico, I'm only teasing. I'll stop. Stay."

"Yeah," pipes up Kayla. "I'll hit him every time he teases you."

"Me too!" adds Austin. "I'll throw homefries!"

Three other little voices cheer their agreement.

Will nods sagely. "See? They'll hit me."

Nico hesitates.

Will sticks out his bottom lip, fluttering his eyelashes.

Nico melts.

A little.

"Fine," he mutters, dropping back on the bench. "I'll -- whatever."

Will grins, slinging an arm over Nico's shoulders. "Stay as long as you like."

"What was that for?"

He is warm, and soft, and he smells good.

And when Nico catches him by surprise, he touches the tips of his fingers to the swell of his lips, eyes wide, freckles blinking like stars.

Nico hides a smile, rocking back on his heels.

"No reason."

"Not that I am complaining," Will hastens to explain, "uh, I loved it, actually, I just -- I am kind of gross? I was gonna go run to take a shower before I woke you and --"

Nico leans over and kisses him again. From this angle he can -- the sand pit for volleyball is just slightly lower than the bleachers, and if Nico stands on the second step, he can just...lean over. Will's lips are right there, even if it is more a press of mouths than a kiss with Will's rambling.

It stops, though, when Nico kisses him. He clams up and kisses back like he's afraid Nico is going to stop.

"Was that one just 'cause, too?" he says, when Nico lets up. Nico pulls away and notices that he is breathless. That could be the game he just played.

It could also be the little tinge of red around his cheekbones -- barely, really, anything -- and the way he darts his eyes between Nico's mouth and his eyes. Experimentally, Nico leans slightly forward. Immediately, Will closes his mouth, then his eyes, waiting.

Nico waits, too, grinning. When Will cracks one confused eye open he cannot help but laugh, and Will shoves him, scowling.

"You're teasing me," he accuses.

Nico quiets his mirth in his hands.

"A little."

"You're mean."

"Mhm. A little."

He leans forward, again, past the threshold of middle ground between them. This time Will waits, evaluating, pout on his bitten-red lips. He narrows his Carolina-blue eyes and Nico takes the time to watch them, to memorize them. He thinks of brilliant butterfly wings and fire. He thinks of afternoon skies. He thinks of shallow, splashing lakes, of robin eggs and icebergs. Of scorpions and scales and flower petals. He thinks long enough for Will to believe him, again, to fall for it; he thinks he could get away with making him wait, again, but finds he doesn't want to.

"You taste like strawberry," Will mumbles, and presses himself closer, "the candy kind."

Nico smiles against his mouth. A bribe, of sorts. Will's tongue licks along the seem of his lips, determined to taste more. Nico allows it and slides his hands up his belly in his distraction, resting on his chest. He swears he can feel when his skin gives way to dark ink, long-healed as it is. There is less of a buzz.

Will pulls away, slightly, although there isn't much to go.

"I'm supposed to -- get ready."

"Mhm." Nico kisses him again. He resists, or he tries to. Nico hovers, for a moment, candy breath and all, and he cracks in second. "What was it you had to do, again?"

"I --" Nico swipes his thumb along the line of his ribs, featherlight, and he twitches, trembles; "I --"

He is so easy. It is like he has buttons red and tantalizing for Nico to press, and his impulse control has never been good. Nico memorized them ages ago, and uses them at his leisure; Twizzlers, before a game, dipping his hands in ice water so they're cooler than usual. A fingernail against his ribcage, a flat palm on the heart of his tattoo. A little bit of height, and the promise of a kiss, of the end of one.

Like a detonator.

"Don't stop," Will sighs, forgetting. Nico can almost see the list of responsibilities float from his brain, wrapping around Nico's head like laurels. He curls his fists to avoid the crow of victory bubbling in his throat, wrapping his hands in strands of Will's hair -- another button.

He tugs.

Will whimpers.

Easy.

"Won't," Nico promises, and kisses him again.

Sometimes Nico just sits.

And he watches.

Will, squirming, lets him.

“I don’t know what you’re hoping to find,” he admits, one day. The sun is out, but it is cold; Nico wears a sweater over his camp shirt, and had borrowed Will’s least offensive flannel. Goosebumped skin peels through the holes in his jeans. “On me, I mean.”

Nico blinks, slowly. His mouth is hidden in his arms, tucked into his bent knee.

“To find?”

“Yes.”

“Hm.”

He has huge, dark eyes. Brown, will supposes, but really they’re black; black like river mud, black like crumbling ash, black like polished stone. Black like the deep dark bottom of the well, so far down you can see yesterday’s reflection. Black like the stars so far up they blink at the child-age Earth.

“I’m not much,” Will explains, or tries to. His shoulders draw back like a string has been pulled between them, the hilt of his humerus brushing against the fleshy end of his earlobe. “To — look at, I guess. Or anything.”

Nico blinks. Will exhales, quick and sharp.

“Says who?”

“I — don’t know.”

He’s itchy, he realizes, at the back of his neck and under his chin, heated blood churning and pressing until the skin bubbles with irritation, nerves sparking. He pinches at the side of his neck.

“Just know, I guess.”

Nico hums again. There is the tiniest of separations, Will notices, between his pupil and his iris. Only if you — look. If you stare, searching for flakes of gold, of amber. They’re there. Will’s sure of it.

Nico reaches out, slowly. He waits for the weight of Will’s breath to return, for the pound of his heart to calm somewhere near normal; the tip of his fingertip is cool and rough, sword-rough, and in its tracing path across his nose and down the sides of his cheek leaves a trail of ice and pricking needles.

“You’re interesting,” says Nico, quietly. He pauses on the jagged, rounded scar off-centred on Will’s cheek, dug through two years ago, trying to piece together fragments of a skull. He presses his narrow fingertip into the outline, inspecting the contrast. “I like you.”

The coarse wind blows, and Will shivers. Nico’s steady shoulders twitch in the cold, and his finger moves with them.

“I like you. Too.”

There is no smile to be seen with half his face masked so tightly. But there is a flash in his sky-black eyes, like a strike of gilded lightning, like the flaming arm of solar flare; it burns, for a moment, in the dark space behind Will’s eyelids, and he takes the time to memorize it. To stick it in the walls of his memory, like glued-on attic wallpaper.

“Good.” He pulls back, tucking his hand back against the curve of his neck. He nods, once, graphing Will’s exhales “Good.”

"Nico, hey! I was just thinking about you."

Nico shrinks back, narrowly avoiding the impulse to hiss. Will is loud -- it seems to be his default -- and he is quite literally glowing, yellow light shimmering from every freckle. Anyone awake on the cots or on the crowded chairs visiting looks towards them, eyes wide, whispering to friends the second Nico looks away.

"Hi," says Nico, stiffly. "I'm -- here."

Will smiles. It brightens some of the bags under his eyes, teasing, sparkling blue helping some of the glow look less yellowed and defeated.

"I noticed. Thank you, by the way, for coming."

Nico nods. He stands there, for a moment, squirming under Will's scrutiny, twisting at his skull ring.

"Pick a spot," Will says, at the same time Nico says: "What do you need me to do?"

Will's smile turns wry. "You shadow-travelled across the world." He reaches out and brushes his fingers against Nico's hand; he jumps, but, heart pounding, he stays where he is, meeting Will's soft look with wide eyes. "You are still not quite up to safety, Nico. Hell, you're still a little translucent. I want you to curl up and knock out for a minute."

Nico stares. "You said you needed my help," he protests. Will must read the tension in his body, because his thumb soothes over Nico's twitching wrists.

"I do," he says emphatically. He glances around the crowded room, pausing as he looks over at his sister, his brother, and their new Roman cousins. "Short-staffed does not begin to cover it. I needed to be subbed out two days ago."

"So let me help! Let me -- cut bandages, or something!"

Will laughs, softly, and Nico's face burns -- what does he care, about helping. Where has this come from? He doesn't want people to -- die, obviously. But that's all the more reason for him to have stayed the hell away.

The cot squeaks as Will's moves it, nudging it further into a corner under the window. He reaches for one of the curtain covers and slides it around the bed, turning down the covers; he smooths the sheets, once, absentmindedly, and Nico is startled to remember his mother doing the same thing. He blinks to focus again on Will's scarred hands, rather than thin, gloved ones.

"Try some."

Nico wrinkles his nose. "It looks like plastic."

"And you look like someone who's getting on my last nerve." Will shakes the offending -- thing. At him. Nico leans back, refusing to let it touch him. "Oh -- it is not contagious, you goober!"

"It's gross!"

"You've never even tried it!"

"I can tell!"

"You're a priss!"

"You are a human trash can who ate a strawberry that fell on the floor last week!"

"Hey Nico. Quickly. Where do strawberries grow from."

"It is a different thing!"

"In your grand delusions, maybe."

Nico kicks Will in the shoulder, sending him sprawling. He is unfortunately a weird noodle and absorbs the impact easily, shifting so he's lying backwards on the bed, head upside-down over the edge, feet tapping on the wall. Nico pinches him in disgust, only Will catches his hand so it doesn't work. Nico huffs louder.

"For someone with as much of a sweet tooth as you, it is crazy that you have a candy superiority complex."

"Not everyone is addicted to Twizzlers."

"...I'm not addicted. I could stop any time."

Nico looks pointedly at the two empty -- family sized, he would like to add -- wrappers, and the third pack currently being worked through. If it was possible he'd make himself sick off it. Instead he lives in hubris. And shamelessness; he meets Nico's eyes and sends him an exaggerated wink.

(Which.)

(Because he cannot wink.)

(Is just this. Really endearing. Hard blink.)

(Gods, he is so stupid.)

(Nico hates him.)

"You're such a humiliating dweeb that being around you makes me less cool by proxy. Not addicted, he says."

Will shoves another seven -- seven. -- Twizzlers in his mouth. He does not bother to chew before speaking.

"I'm not!"

"You are in actual debt! To the entire Hermes cabin! For the rest of your life!" Nico takes a Twizzler, for the sole purpose of using it to emphasize his point, and also smack Will in the leg with it. "Do you know how hard that is? I have tried to gamble away your debt four times! I have not put a chunk into it!"

"Well, maybe you suck at gambling."

Nico's eye twitches. Will does not even pretend to keep his snickering to himself.

"I was stuck in a casino for seventy fucking years --"

"Damn, and you still can't play poker. Embarrassing."

"I CAN FUCKING --" Nico stops. He takes a deep breath. He stands, putting his book to the side, and does several deep breathing exercises. Will laughs until he cries, because he is a word Hazel made him swear not to say even in his own head.

"Your face," Will wheezes. There is a thump as he falls off the bed and crumples to the floor.

"Kill yourself," Nico says calmly. A muscle in his jaw jumps and he starts his exercises anew. "Better yet, let me."

Will blows a kiss at him. Nico mimes catching it and throwing it on the floor and stomping on it, which makes him genuinely gasp in offense, which is gratifying. Except there is enough hurt in the action that Nico panics a little and hurries to grab the kiss off the floor and brush off the dust and stuff it in his pocket. And then he realizes what he's doing, and that Will is full of shit and is going red with the effort of trying to hold back his giggling, and he goes so violently red himself his vision swims a little.

"That was very cute," Will manages, snickering.

"I am going to blow up this camp and everyone in it," Nico seethes, hotter technically than a red dwarf star.

Will swallows back his giggles. It doesn't work, exactly, and what happens instead is he tries very hard to keep his face pleasant and neutral, except every few seconds his shoulders shake and his chapped lips twitch and his blue eyes sparkle like playful frost. And he stands, and steps towards Nico, and Nico is frozen, and his heart hammers, and his palms, suddenly, get very very sweaty.

"I mean it," Will says, and the worst thing is that he really does sound sincere, even as he smiles teasingly. "It was very cute." He steps closer. What is left of Nico's rational brain leaks out of his ears and fizzles through the floorboards like acid. "You're very cute."

He has no shame. None. Surely it's his damned father's fault; Will gets like this, sometimes, determined and bold and affectionate like all the flailing gangliness that afflicts him every other day of his life disappears, cowed in the grandness of his affectionate determination. He steps closer, enough, and now he is close enough that Nico can hear him humming, can hear the rocking of his heels. Can smell the artificial strawberry on his breath, can almost taste the sweetness in the air between them.

His lips part.

He swallows, dry.

His palms are clammy, and he curls them into weak fists.

"Very cute," Will repeats, leaning closer. "I like how much you care about people even though you are embarrassed about it. Makes me think of a groundhog."

"You are such a weirdo," Nico says weakly, but there is no wit to it, because he cannot taste anything but the wanting behind his teeth, and cannot see anything but the huge pools of Will's sparkling eyes, and the quirk of his red-stained lips. "Genuinely, it's --"

"Hey."

Will ducks down. He's breathing, suddenly, millimeters from Nico's mouth, and Nico stops breathing at all.

"If I gave you some now, would you try it?"

"Yes," Nico says, small and strangled, because that would be the answer for anything Will asked him right now. "Yes, fine, you can --"

But Will does not produce a licorice rope from his pocket. He does not reach over and dart across the cabin to where the open bag lay, abandoned, on his bed, he does not tease out any of the strands curled around his fist. Instead, he -- drops them. And then he reaches his wide, open palms forward, and he --

Nico squeaks.

Will doesn't move, for a moment, lips still pressed to his, eyes open, head tilted, observing.

Nico's eyes flutter closed.

He feels Will's smile, against his lips. Feels the smugness in his warm hands, curled around his jaw, feels the sweet satisfaction sticking to his teeth.

They don't taste so bad after all, Twizzlers.

"Told you," Will murmurs. "See, they're good, they're --"

Nico backs him against the wall, and kisses him until they candy taste is gone from his tongue.

“Watch your step.”

The voice is tired, and drags like heavy grocery bags. The bruises under cloudy blue eyes match it. The pallid, sickly grey skin really seals the deal.

“Will,” Nico says, stepping carefully around the puddle of blood, “Will, carino, I can do that.”

Will doesn’t hear him. Or, he can’t stop: the brush drags back, and forth, back, and forth, back, and forth through the rusty stain, suds a squeamish, soiled near-orange, and his scarred hands are dyed an awful crimson all the way to his elbows. The width of the stain only grows, and soapy, bloody water splashes against Nico’s boot.

“Will.”

His voice is softer this time. Careful. There is no use chiding him when he is like this, when he is far away; not that Nico takes great interest in chiding him anyway. That can be Chiron’s job. Kayla’s. Cecil’s, even, if things are particularly bad. No, Nico prefers this, even as a lump grows in his throat: he prefers to angle himself in front of the window, crouching by Will’s side, sliding his hand down his arm until it rests by his elbow, squeezing. Stilling, holding him in place.

“Will,” he whispers, squeezing his elbow again. “Will, this can wait.”

“It’ll stain,” Will says hollowly.

Nico rubs his thumb against overhot flesh, against still-glowing veins.

“Probably, yeah.”

“…Can’t let it stain.”

Nico doesn’t ask why. He can hear it, anyway, the haunted edge to his voice, the grip of his cracked fingernails on the wooden brush handle and the long, faraway look at the cabinet in the far corner, oversized and resting atop the only carpet in the room.

“…Okay, bello.”

He keeps his voice soft. He lingers, for a moment, keeping a gentle hand on Will’s arm. He can’t feel exhaustion, can’t feel exertion, not like Will can, but he has eyes, has ears. He can feel the slow drag of his heartbeat and the hard edge of his muscles. Back, forth, back, forth. The sun dips lower and lower. The infirmary grows dark, and Camp is still. Quiet.

Grieving.

Nico stands, stretching his back until it pops.

“Hold on,” he says, aware Will is not going to be doing anything else. “I’ll be right back.”

It is late and the stain is huge. There is not much to be done for blood on old hardwood, but Nico gets a mop, anyway. Fills a bucket, hours in soap, leaves the bleach behind. The less on Will’s skin the better. And he walks back to where Will is kneeling, still, and dips the mop in the bucket, swipes up a stripe of red. It is not gone, not completely. But it lessens, a little, and Will slows, stops.

“There wasn’t even half a chance,” he says softly.

Nico grimaces. “You tried for hours.”

“Useless.” He straightens like a furled, gnarled tree. “I knew, from the beginning.”

There is nothing Nico can say to that. Nothing he could say, then, because he knew it, too. Saw the shape of the wound and the size of the blood puddle. Heard Will’s knees hit the floor, watched the sun beams bend. Watched Will get desperate.

“You are not a god,” Nico tries, Nico softens. “Not infallible, Will. Not at fault.”

He reaches for his shoulder. Holds, squeezes. Lingers.

Will crouches back down and keeps scrubbing.

"It looks good on you."

"You think everything looks good on me."

"Actually," Nico says, grinning wolfishly, "I think nothing looks absolutely great on you."

Will blinks. It takes him a second -- not a perfect line, Nico will admit -- but there is an exact moment where the meaning registers and his bright eyes widen and his face goes scarlet. Red as sunrise, as strawberries; he glows, a little, and punches Nico in the shoulder so hard he would cry from the pain if he wasn't so busy crying from laughter.

"We are in public," Will hisses, steam beginning to curl from his hair.

"Your face," Nico wheezes.

Will punches him again but it's a little softer, this time, and he sits in the corner of their cramped changeroom in this weird-smelling Kohl's and hunches in on himself so far his chin hits his chest, too-small shoulders of the plasticky suit jacket sticking up a little. Nico laughs for too long, probably, and he shouldn't, really, because Will is sensitive enough right now and Nico is not helping.

But he is so cute, when he scowls. One eye squints just barely more than the other. And it's hard to get this kind of a reaction from him.

Nico guesses because Will could hear the truth in the sentence, that he is so flustered.

"I do think you look good," Nico offers, voice a little hoarse. He accompanies his promise with a small, real smile, nudging Will's shoes with his own, and Will huffs. And he crosses his arms. And he looks to the side, to the mirror. Meets Nico's eyes, after a moment.

Nico holds his gaze.

"You mean it."

His voice is soft. He pitches it up, like a question, but it isn't: he can tell that Nico does, can hear it in his voice, see it in the set of his shoulders. But Nico gets up, anyway, shuffles the six inches forward and cups his face in his hands, brushing his thumbs over his cheeks. Leans in close. Hovers.

"I mean it," he confirms, voice low, eyes lidded. "You look good, tesoro. We'll get it tailored." He flicks his gaze down. "But you look nice, cleaned up."

"I feel like a kid playing pretend," Will admits.

"As opposed to a kid playing doctor?"

"...Yes."

"Hm."

He sighs when Nico kisses him. More of an -- exhale, than anything. A short little thing, a punched out breath, relief, reassured.

"Don't get so far in your head," Nico says softly. He traces a line with the pad of his thumb, right under Will's eye. Will leans into his hand, blonde eyelashes fluttering shut. "I can't follow you, there."

He can feel Will quirk a smile, pressed against his lips, feel the pleased little hum he lets out at the familiar tease.

"Can't have that," Will murmurs, kissing him again, and again. "Can't go anywhere you can't meet me."

"Are you -- actually deadass."

Nico pauses. He looks back. Will is there, a couple steps behind him. He is holding rather tightly onto a tree. He is not entirely upright.

Nico glances down. His ankle is very, very swollen.

Ah.

"Are you…talking to your ankle?"

"Full fuckin' mile from camp," Will grouches on, not listening. "I cannot fucking believe you. Have you no class. Or calcium." He crosses his arms, hobbling his way to the ground. He scowls. He pouts. "Fuck you."

Nico's mouth twitches.

"You're funny when you're in pain," he says, sitting gently next to him. He reaches out slowly, wrapping a delicate hand on Will's knee when he doesn't stop him. He lifts. Will exhales harshly. When Nico looks, he's flushed. "You get very annoyed about it."

"I do not," Will insists, even though he very much does. Nico has caught him cussing out his fingers for the crime of having hangnails. "I'm just -- I drank milk every single day as a babe. My bones are strong." He looks down at his rapidly purpling foot in disgust. "What -- is this. Weakness."

"Clumsiness," Nico corrects, teasing. He turns Will's ankle to the side, and it's not too bad, thankfully. Will's dorky flipflips make it easy to see, but he swallows, anyway, and tugs the shoe off, taking the full weight of Will's leg in his hand. He holds, for a moment. He hears Will's breath uptick. In the pulse point below the just of his ankle, he feels the blood rush under the skin. Nico's ears go pink.

He's not a healer, or anything. But it's only a sprain, as far as he can tell -- it'll be healed by morning, especially with Will's accelerated healing. Quietly, Nico is quite pleased he'll have a reason to stay off his feet tonight.

But they are pretty far from camp.

Not ideal.

"It's fine," Will says quickly, and when Nico looks up his ears glow through his hair. He looks quickly away when he catches Nico staring, freckles on his nose lighting up next. Nico warms, and smiles. "I can -- hobble."

He tries to pull his ankle away, but Nico tightens his grip. He is careful not to squeeze anything that's tender, only the bridge of his bare foot. Will's eyes go wide. His pupils dilate.

"Nico," he argues, weakly.

Nico swallows. He shakes his head. He loosens his grip, slightly, but doesn't move his hand.

"Will," he echoes.

"Let -- go."

"Are you going to try and walk?"

"Yes."

"Then no."

"You can't stop me," Will says, but he is flushed, but he is warm, but his heart is pounding. He looks at Nico head-on and the red spreads farther. Nico smiles, even though he is just as bad, and traces the shape of it with his eyes. Will glows brighter, and scowls harder. "I'll -- get up right now!"

"I'm stronger than I look," Nico says stubbornly. Faster than Will expects, he darts out. He wraps either hand around Will's gangly elbows, pinning them to his sides. He is watchful of Will's still-extended leg, careful to keep it resting on his hip. He can feel the curve of his calf against his thigh. His breathing is heavy. He swallows, through the flush, and meets Will's dilated dilated eyes. He nods, firmly. "So. Try me."

"I will," Will says, or tries to, but its so thin and reedy it barely passes for a sentence, let alone a threat. He is so flushed Nico can't help but grin. This makes it worse. This makes him smile wider. "You -- think you're some big hotshot, huh."

Nico shrugs. "Not really."

"Well!" Will huffs. "Well." He says nothing more.

"You're not carrying me," he says, when Nico looks like he wants to.

"I'm stronger than I look," Nico repeats.

Will stops saying anything at all.

Slowly -- Nico is careful to move slowly -- he shifts. He pulls away so Will's feet are back into his shoes, and so they are resting carefully on the tangled roots he tripped on. He removes his arms from Will's elbows. He stands. He pauses. His hands twitch.

The red spreads all the way to Will's hairline, and he stares deliberately at the ground.

Slowly, grinning, Nico slides an arm under his bent knee. Across his back, next. He hovers for a moment.

"I hate you," Will says.

His throat spasms. His eyes water. He coughs.

Nico grins very widely.

"You don't."

"Spend more time shutting up."

Nico laughs, lightly, and lifts. Will is not light -- he's too tall for that -- but Nico really is quite strong. And there is a breathless little gasp, in that moment between when Nico lifts and when he settles, where gravity does weird things to his stomach. And proximity, maybe. Hopefully. Nico can feel his heart pound in the backs of his knees. He adjusts, so Will is pressed to his chest, his torso. Will makes a strangled little noise that Nico takes care to memorize and categorize in the very front of his brain. He must smile in a certain kind of way, because Will makes that noise again.

"You're very grouchy," Nico notes as he takes his first step, and then his second. And walks. Not very quickly. Not that that means anything.

"I maimed myself tripping on a stupid root," Will snaps. "I'm -- allowed to be."

Nico ducks his head, slightly. He hides his smile behind his hair. Will sees it, anyway, and huffs. His hand curls against Nico's chest.

"You certainly are," Nico offers. "I suppose I would be too."

"And this is -- humiliating."

"Is it."

"Yes."

"Why?"

Will swallows.

"I don't have an answer for that."

"…Okay."

Nico keeps walking. He pauses, sometimes, even though he doesn't need to exactly. He adjusts. Sometimes he can feel Will's lungs expand against his chest. This is mostly unrelated. Although not entirely.

"There's a scenic route," Will says, when the sounds of camp really start to hit home. Nico can tell by the surprise in his voice that he didn't mean to say it. But he swallows, and says more anyway. "If -- you wanted."

Nico swallows. He nods.

"Sure." He adjusts Will again and hesitates before he moves forward. "You, uh. Lead the way."

"Can't," Will says, softly.

His eyes are very, very blue.

Big.

Nico breathes a little heavy.

"Direct me," he corrects. "I'll, uh. Follow."

Slowly, Will nods. He tilts his head, like he is reading something. His ears are red still. He's warm.

He smiles.

"Okay," he says, softer still. "You'll take the lead, tomorrow?" He blinks, once. Blond eyelashes flashing in the sun. "If I'm still not -- steady on my feet?"

"Yeah," Nico exhales, smiling. "Sounds like a plan."

“I’ll help you study.”

Will scoffs, only it’s muffled due to the pressing of his face right directly against the battered textbook.

“Ugh,” he groans, or maybe ‘urgh’ or ‘argh’ or just some general kind of growl. Nico is not sure exactly. The paper does a really excellent job of absorbing his misery.

Nico reaches out and very carefully wraps his finger around a curl, and then very carefully tugs Will upright, and out of the book, and then very carefully holds his gaze, and then very carefully, and also slowly, leans in. And smooches him very carefully on his cute little pout.

He goes quite a warm shade of red. Nico, not very carefully, smiles.

“Not helping,” Will complains, although he is fighting a smile also. “See, now I don’t want to study, I want to drive the DeLorean back sixteen years and crush baby me’s skull just a little so I remain illiterate for eternity.”

“You’re so goddamn weird,” Nico says fondly.

“Just a *little*,” Will grumbles. “It’s — ethical if it’s just a little.”

Nico resists the urge to kiss him again. It’ll be a whole thing, he reasons. One kiss will lead to another, and then a third, and then a nineteenth, and then they’ll re-emerge from the Hades cabin in a month to several search parties and Will’s weeping mother again, so best not to. It’s fine. Nico has self control. Nico has discipline.

Will does that thing where he makes his eyes dilate on command and bats his eyelashes just so. Knits his eyebrows so he is on the perfect right side of pathetically needy.

Nico’s discipline laughs all the way out of his body and down the express lane to hell. Rip in peace.

“I don’t even really need a future,” Will reasons. He leans forward hopefully. “You can just buy me a palace somewhere and I can eat grapes in bed forever while you read to me, right?”

Nico swallows. It takes a few tries. His discipline makes a brief reappearance to laugh again, and this time it brings his dignity — impressive, he hasn’t seen that in two years eight months fourteen days and half an hour, not that he has been counting or anything.

“If that’s what you want,” Nico teases.

“You know I love you.”

Will grins, and it is wide, and it is shameless. Nico should be wary, probably. He is only warm.

“I know you like me,” Will says, indulgently. He leans over the bed, hair flopping into Nico’s eyes; were Nico more than half awake he’d shove him away, huffing, but as it is he doesn’t even consider the option. Instead he drags his hand up, trailing over Will’s bare arm, his shoulder. Palm smoothing over his cheek. Fingers gliding through his curls, brushing back his hair. Will’s grin falters, ever slightly, to something small, something soft.

“I do,” Nico admits.

“Well,” Will says, flusters. But he recovers, and grins again. “Well, prove it.”

He is teasing and Nico knows he is — shameless, fishing for compliments. What he wants is: a kiss. What he wants is: you know I love you, you little shit. What he especially wants is: yes, you dork ass, I love you enough to wake up and go on this run with you.

Nico opens his mouth for any of the implied. But instead, what his lips do, is bypass the instructions his conscious brain gives them, weakly tired as it is. Instead the wider, darker, hidden part of him, that rules his dreams, steps smoothly in. And he says:

“If you would only let me, there would be no doubt left for even the dead.”

What’s more damning than the words themselves is the way in which Nico says them. While his lips, traitors as they are, have loosened with sleep, his throat at least was wise enough to try to hold the truth back, to rasp his voice. Only the attempt makes things — worse. Only now Nico’s voice is raw and aching, and his palms are warmed, still, from where they pressed to Will’s chest, his stomach, all night, and his eyes are thick with morning tiredness, but awake enough still to watch the shock spread across Will’s face. Watch his full, pretty lips part, watch black spread over dawn blue, watch — feel — blood warmth bloom under scar-and-stubble rough cheeks.

“I —” Will says, and stops. His mouth opens, and closes. The flushed red grows deeper. “I —”

“There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you,” Nico says, quietly, because he’s in deep enough now, isn’t he. The blinds are open and nosy sunlight spills in and he itches to close them, to throw off the twisted blankets and yank the heavy curtains closed, but he holds himself, keeps his cupped palms loose. Exhales. “You know that, right.”

It is a punctuation more than confirmation — you know that. Right. You know that is right. You, know that is right. Remember. Remember.

Curled next to his ribs in the sheets, Will’s fingers shake.

“I — I know,” he stumbles, and he’s bright red, now, voice cracking — “gods, Neeks, of course I know, I —”

“Anything you want,” Nico continues, quiet still. Will cuts himself off and swallows. “I have everything you need, already, but —” Nico exhales, now, and his breath shakes too, but his voice is firm, his eyes head-on to Will’s. “Zeus once offered Hera everything,” he says. Will’s inhale is sharp and pointed. “He couldn’t give it to her, in the end.”

“Please don’t get smitten,” Will begs, glancing worriedly out the open window.

But Nico smiles only. “Too late.”

“You — corndog.”

It had not been his goal to fluster his significant annoyance so early in the morning but it is a good stopping point, anyway, because Will’s heart is hammering so quickly Nico can hear it from down on the pillows, and his own eyes have gotten heavy again. It’s early, still. Nico would do anything for Will but a five-in-the-morning run is not quite on the table.

(Thankfully, at least, Will hasn’t outright asked.)

(…Nico would rather not stoop low enough to grab it off the floor.)

(But it would not be the first time.)

“Not corny,” Nico corrects, smiling. He swipes a thumb over Will’s freckled cheekbone and smiles wider when this makes him warmer. “Not if I mean it.”

“Well! You — well.”

Some poet, Nico thinks, teasing, rendered speechless by a promise.

But he keeps it to himself. Because he knows Will, and how things cripple him. How he is laughing and brazen but how he startles at tiny little touches, at Nico’s linking their pinkies together. How he stares at the smallness of it. The easy way it can be memorized, in its entirety. Relived, again and again.

“I love you,” he repeats.

Will ducks his head down.

“I know,” he mumbles.

Nico’s eyes crinkle and he allows the Han Solo-ing. He worries Will might burst into sunbeams again, otherwise, like the last time Nico held him, kissed down his throat and hovered his teeth on either side of his trachea, scraping the whispering promise of it. Everything. All of it.

“Go for your run,” Nico murmurs. He pushes up and brushes his lips against the corner of Will’s mouth, deliberately avoiding where his breaths come in quick. Squaring instead the tiny scar then, from when he broke a guitar string as a toddler and it snapped back into his face. Nico lingers there until it is not a kiss, anymore, but the press of his curved smile to warmed skin. “I’ll be here.”

“I — know.” Will says again. He pulls away and is redder. He fidgets. “I. Love you too. You know.” He darts out the open door, glowing. “Bye.”

Nico watches it slide close behind him, grinning.

“Little shit,” he murmurs to himself. And shakes his head.