Archive of Our Own ^beta

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11. I didn't want to fail at love like our parents.
12. You made the nomad in me build a house and stay.
- 34 excuses for why we failed at love, warsan shire

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Nico's sitting in the middle of the intersection with his blinker going steadily and his elbow propped against the window, smothering a yawn and trying to make a left turn onto Lysimachia Dr., when it happens again.

No, he thinks, a hot, thick surge of fear bubbling through his gut, but it comes upon him so suddenly there's nothing he can do: a sinking feeling, like nodding off in front of the TV in the early evening, a falling sensation that starts in his chest and weighs down his limbs. He clutches compulsively, hands tightening over the steering wheel like he's clinging to the side of a cliff, but as he watches, his fingers go transparent right in front of his eyes.

The world starts to fizz away at the corners, like static on a badly-tuned radio station.

No! he thinks.

And then --

"Dad!" shrieks Holly, and Nico jolts, coming back to himself so suddenly his ears pop with the pressure.

Everything processes at once, shutter-fast: the feeling of the steering wheel slipping from his hands, the movement of the car underneath them as they breech into oncoming traffic, and headlights, too too too close!

Nico flings his arm out, pressing Holly back into her seat just as metal crunches into metal.

Sound explodes inwards as the glass on the passenger side shatters with the impact, sprays of bright light falling into the interior of the car, and Holly screams and Nico's entire world narrows down to that sound. The full extent of his thought process immediately becomes, Holly is scared, and Holly needs to not be scared, and then there are shadows everywhere, ballooning out to form a cushion between her body and the console. Their seat belts do the rest, catching them in a chokehold as their bodies leap forward to meet them.

And then.

Silence.

No. Not quite. The car engine's still running, and Nico spiders his fingers over the dashboard to feel the hum of it under him.

He turns to Holly. "Are you all right?" he gets out, still with one hand flat to her chest.

She swallows compulsively, her eyes enormous and as dark-colored as a lonely room, and her face is pale with shock, but she nods. Nico looks her over anyway, leaning across the seat to pull her arms forward and check them for scratches, but the shadows are gone and they did their work well. She won't even bruise. "Lean your head forward," he murmurs, and when she obeys, he ruffles her hair to shake the glass out of it.

Outside, where sounds are just starting to filter in, a car door slams and a voice calls out shakily, "Hello? Is everyone all right over there?"

That'd be the other driver, the one who hit them, and Nico calls back the affirmative. "Does anyone need an ambulance?" he wants to know.

"I'm -- I'm good, I think. but I'll call the cops. We need to c-clear this out of the road, right?"

Nico unbuckles his seat belt. The movement makes pain flare all along his sternum, and he hisses: he'll have an incredible L-shaped bruise tomorrow. He checks again to make sure Holly's all right, and then he gets out. The other car is a beige-colored SUV, sitting up on the median with a dented hood, but to be honest, it's Nico's car that took the brunt of the damage, being more of the Toyota tin-can variety and not built like a brick. The other driver is a few years younger than he is, with out-of-state plates that suggests to Nico's he's here for university, and he doesn't seem to remember the procedure for car accidents anymore than Nico does. His eyes keep skittering to Holly's shattered window, the dark duck of her head.

"She's fine," Nico says, as Holly's fingers appear and flick a bit of glass out onto the street.

"You turned right in front of me, dude, I -- I couldn't --"

"Yeah, sorry about that," Nico says vaguely, because he refuses to think about what just happened. "The sun was in my eyes. That's a horrible intersection to try to make a left turn from."

The cops arrive, followed by a road crew to sweep the glass away.

"Do you have insurance?" one asks, once Nico delivers his version of what happened and hands over his license. It's state-issued, has his real name on it, and says his date of birth was 1997, and the cop writes the details down without the slightest flicker of suspicion.

"Uh, yeah. I mean, my wife does -- hang on --" At a loss, he goes to the passenger side, and when the crumpled door doesn't open, he sighs and leans in through the window to pop open the glove department and go looking for their insurance papers. Holly watches him, and he gives her knee a shake and goes, "hey, stinker," and she makes a face at him.

"This part is boring," she informs him.

"Yeah," Nico goes with an indescribable kind of relief. If Holly's already bored, then she's definitely fine. "That's kind of how it goes. Something exciting happens, and then you have to fill out paperwork on it."

He hands over his insurance information. The cop holds it up to the light, squinting. "This your wife?"

"Yeah," Nico sticks his hands in his pockets.

"Her last name's different from yours."

Nico's eyebrows hike a little. "She kept her maiden name," he explains, carefully, confused as to why that even needs to be spelled out. The cop grunts, and sets out on filling out that onto the accident report. There's no place to mark that the insurance is filled out in Hazel's name and her husband is covered to drive the car despite the different-looking names, so the cop makes a note of it off to the side. Finally, Nico gets all of that back, and a ticket for reckless driving that he looks at and then resolutely decides to not think about yet, and the cop flicks a look at their car. "It still run, or do you need a tow?"

"It's fine," Nico says, itching to get out of here.

The cop casts another dubious glance at the dent in the passenger side, then visibly decides not to give a shit. It helps that Nico's got that kind of face: he never grew out of his lanky, teenage slouch and his permanent sneer of a mouth, and his bruised, sleep-smudged eyes that make people want to be done with him before they even start. Nico has never stopped looking like someone you wouldn't trust with your kids.

He gets back into the car. It starts when it turns the keys in the ignition, and Holly says, "Dad?"

"Yeah?"

"What's lysa -- lysee -- ly --"

"Lysimachia?" Nico flicks a look at the street sign, which wobbles back and forth under the force of a wind that sweeps through the interior, lifting Holly's hair and stirring the ticket in Nico's hand. "You know, I'm not sure exactly. I think it's a type of plant. You can ask Katie when we get home."

"Okay," she goes, agreeable, and settles herself against the bulge the passenger door now makes into her space.

Nico drags a deep breath into his lungs, and exhales gustily, glancing sidelong at her like she's a touchstone and then to the door and then he lifts his hand off the steering wheel and looks at it. His skin stretches over the bony knobs of his knuckles, perfectly opaque.

That's never happened while you were awake before, says a tiny voice in the back of Nico's brain. It sounds like Bianca, and she sounds worried.

-

At 5:30, Nico gets back into the newly-minted wreck of a car with a sympathetic pat to the dashboard, and goes to pick up Hazel from work.

Her last appointment of the day is some Internet start-up downtown, so Nico rolls down the driver's side window to match the broken one on the other and lets the wind rush over his face as the scenery changes from the residential to the storefronts. Downtown built up around what used to be a suburb of a neighboring city, and there are still some visible hold-outs; quaint little houses tucked in between chrome-faced florists and for-rent office spaces.

When Nico pulls up to the curb, he has no trouble spotting Hazel through the glass by sheer virtue of the fact she's the only one inside wearing a suit jacket. The door's propped open onto the sidewalk, so Nico steps inside.

Like most Internet companies Nico knows, this one's taken minimalism to a whole new level: the floors are cement with planks connecting the unfinished doorways. The walls are bare and unpainted with the plaster marks still showing. The only functional furniture in the room are the high-top bar tables, the extension cords snaking around each work station, and fans that beat the heat around uselessly. Hazel's standing in the middle of it, talking to a bald-headed girl in a frayed CWS shirt. It takes her a moment to notice him, and her eyes crinkle up in greeting, a split second before they slide past him and see the car. The expression freezes and cracks.

"Excuse me," she says to the business owner, stepping around her.

"Nico, what happened to the car?" she goes, completely horrified, and her widening eyes tell him she's jumping to the worst conclusion: a manticore or the fist of a giant.

He shrugs. "A left turn on Lysimachia," and watches her relax fractionally, easing back onto her heels. The accident wasn't Olympian in nature.

"That's a horrible intersection to try to make a left turn from, are you crazy? No, wait, are you all right?" She grabs his collar and pulls, revealing the red mark standing out against the pale of his throat. Another thought occurs to her, and her fists clench, pulling the fabric taut. "Holly?"

"We're fine," Nico reassures her. "Holly isn't even scratched." He quirks his mouth at her. "The car is a different story."

"I don't care about the car," Hazel dismisses that thought with a flick of her hand.

"Can you fix it?" he wants to know.

This earns him an unimpressed look, a tilt of Hazel's head and a wry pull to her mouth, an expression so familiar to Nico he thinks it's ingrained onto his eyes, so he'd recognize it even if he took a dive in the river Lethe and forgot his own name by tomorrow; he'd still know this look. "Of course I can fix it. It's metal, isn't it? Although," she amends. "We'll have to get somebody else to fix the glass. I can't do glass -- it's made with sand and fire, so it's more a Hephaestus thing, all I get is this … ringing every time I try to work with it. Hey, Lydia!" she turns her head. "Is that everything you needed?"

"Yeah!" goes the bald-headed girl, lifting a hand in acknowledgement from where she's already become ensconced behind a screen. "Girl, thanks for all your help today, you're a star!"

"Oh, please," Hazel hikes the strap of her bag up higher on her shoulder.

"No, really, hang on -- Tracy, hand me -- thank you," and Lydia approaches them, a palette of memo stickers in her hand, like the kind Nico remembers from the military school he attended in Maine that one year, where stickers were the only reward system, unless you count being allowed to talk at lunch a reward, because they lost those privileges so frequently it kind of felt that way. She sticks a gold star to Hazel's cheek.

"There," she says, and Nico admits it looks good there, where it catches at the gold in Hazel's eyes, the streaks of it in her hair. "Thanks again, Ms. Levesque."

And, because it just feels like the thing to do, Nico grandly offers her his arm, which she takes with a roll of her eyes, but she let him escort her out the door with dramatic flourish.

“How was your day?”

“Less destructive than yours,” Hazel says tartly. “Although! I did run into Annabeth.”

“Oh." That sobers him up a little. "Which version?”

“Younger,” says Hazel grimly.

"I'm sorry."

Her hand squeezes his elbow in acknowledgement.

Out on the curb, he unlocks the car and then stands back, letting Hazel climb in through the driver's side.

"You look nice today," he tells her, and cringes as soon as it's out of his mouth, because of course he has to say it when she's rumpled from shifting herself and her bag over the center console and arranging herself, pulling the hem of her pencil skirt down her thighs.

She shoots him a sardonic look, and he makes a helpless gesture back at her, like, you know what I mean! She's got her hair pulled back, a few coils pulled loose to frame her face, and she's wearing her nicest top under her jacket: the silky purple blouse that Piper found for her at a sample sale in New York City a couple years ago. And because she's still the politest person he knows -- and this is taking into consideration that the majority of Nico's authority figures in childhood were bellhops -- she says, "Thank you," even as she's giving him a serious side-eye.

"Are you going to wear that?"

Nico looks down at himself, and finds nothing out of the ordinary. "This is what I usually wear," he says.

She blinks at him, and then, with a note of incredulity to her voice, "Nico, parent-teacher conferences."

"Oh, di immortales!" Nico almost hits the brakes and remembers himself at the last moment. He settles for scraping his hands through his hair and running them over the steering wheel, a nervous tic. "That's tonight?"

"Yes," Hazel sighs.

"It's a Thursday! Who in Hades schedules anything important on a Thursday?"

"Teachers," his sister says patiently. "For parent-teacher conferences."

"I do need to change, don't I?" It would really only be a matter of slipping himself sideways through a patch of shadow underneath the elementary school awning, and pulling on something that looks less like … well, less like he'd been in a car accident today, but there's something unsettled shifting around in his stomach, something that says if he tries to shadow-travel right now, something worse is going to happen than falling asleep at the wheel.

"Never mind, but you're going to need to turn around, since this isn't the way to the school. And for gods' sake, don't take the left turn onto Lysimachia, go around and take the roundabout."

"Yes, dear," says Nico, feigning meekness, and she rolls her eyes so hard the whites show, but she's grinning.

When they reach the school, Nico slips into the office to borrow their phone so he can call Katie and ask her to keep an eye on Holly until they get back, since he'd been anticipating just picking up Hazel and going straight home.

"I know. She told me already," Katie sounds amused. "I love how she remembered and you didn't. A+ parenting, Nico di Angelo."

"Oh, gods, you're fired from life," Nico mutters, and hangs up.

This is the third parent-teacher conference that Nico and Hazel have attended at this school, and when Holly's homeroom teacher introduces himself to them and invites them to sit with him in a circle on the rug like the students do -- which they do with varying degrees of awkwardness, it's pretty hilarious and Nico definitely would have come out just for this -- he's surprised to realize that he's a familiar face, someone Nico's seen before.

It's … unsettling, how much that unsettles him.

Parent-teacher conferences are still a relatively new concept to them. When Holly was in the first grade and brought home the first summons to one, Nico legitimately had to call up Sally Jackson and ask her what they were and if it was something to be worried about, because Hazel had gone to that freaky segregated school and Nico … well, Nico. Sally had laughed at them, not unkindly, and said that yes, of course, parent-teacher conferences were fine and a perfectly normal thing. They were just a way for teachers and parents to size each other up like jackals, trying to determine which one was more likely to screw up a child's development.

That's not funny, Nico had said into the phone, while Hazel made various wide-eyed faces at him. You're not funny, and Sally laughed harder.

When they meet the teacher one-on-one, Nico doesn't realize just how preoccupied he actually is until Hazel's sharp elbow deliberately finds his ribs. He jumps guiltily, because, oh, right, now would be an ideal time to convincingly play-act the husband.

Casually, he reclines, stretching an arm across the back of Hazel's chair; she relaxes into the touch, seemingly unconscious. Holly's teacher narrows his eyes at them, squinting like he's trying to place Holly in one of their faces.

" -- a delight to have," he's saying. "And I personally have noticed that Holly has a very caring personality. Other students aren't afraid to come to her for help, and in my experience, that's a hallmark of future success."

"Is she …" Hazel starts, and twists the ring on her finger nervously. "Does she get distracted at all, during lessons? Like, have you noticed her constantly needing to shift focus, or having trouble concentrating?"

"Not that I've noticed," the teacher says easily, and then, because he doesn't need it spelled out, "Do you think she might be attention deficit?"

"We both have it," says Nico quietly, and the teacher's eyes jump to his, startled, because it's the first time he's spoken. The pen drops from his fingers like it jumped, and he quickly picks it back up again. "We're both ADHD," and Hazel nods. "It runs in families."

"Holly hasn't displayed any such markers in my classroom," the teacher assures them. “But sometimes it takes awhile to manifest itself. I’ll keep an eye out, Mr. and Mrs. --“ he glances down at the spreadsheet on his tablet, and corrects himself. “… er, Mr. di Angelo and Ms. Levesque. It says here that you’re an accountant?”

This last is directed at Hazel, who straightens her shoulders unconsciously.

“Yes,” she says. “I’m a financial manager for local businesses, but I most closely work with area entrepreneurs and their start-ups; I counsel them on fiscal forecasting and their ad revenue,” she gestures. “So and so forth. Tax season is a very busy time of year for me,” she finishes, wry, and Nico smiles to himself, leaning their shoulders together.

It’s their inside joke, that accounting is a career field she probably has an unfair advantage in -- after all, she’s the daughter of Pluto, the god of wealth and riches, and 75% of the world’s wealth is electronic these days. Nico jokes that she’s going to start rearranging bank accounts in her sleep and cause a world crisis.

Don’t joke, Hazel groaned. It was bad enough when I created cursed jewels when I was upset.

When the teacher flicks his eyes to Nico expectantly, it’s all Nico can do to keep the sarcasm out of his voice. “I’m a greengrocer.”

“Ah,” says the teacher, and Hazel’s elbow makes a shallow dig for Nico’s ribs again.

“I have a very flexible schedule, which allows me to finish with the day’s work in time to pick Holly up from school,” he amends.

“Well, one of the things that shows very clearly in Holly’s interactions with her classmates is just how supportive her home environment must be,” the teacher says, smiling at them. The timer on his desk rings, and they rise in unison, shaking hands and saying farewell.

-

This can all be found on official record: Nico di Angelo, born in 1997 in the state of Nevada and adopted by Sally Jackson and Paul Blofis at age fourteen, has a current home address of 1740B Moneywort Ave. He and his wife, Hazel Levesque, who was supposedly born in 1998 in the state of California but whose record seems as strangely spotty as her husband’s, have lived there since the birth of their daughter, Holly, who is now in the third grade.

What official record doesn’t show is this:

1740 Moneywort Ave is a split house about three-quarters of the way down a very steep hill. It's the kind of hill that kids break their necks trying to skateboard down without helmets, the kind car engines have to scream their way up with tremendous effort, the kind they always skid down when the roads are rain-slick.

The house sits in the shade of an enormous silver dollar gum tree, which has far outgrown the property size. Its roots are infiltrating the foundation, creating huge sinkholes in the yard where rainwater collects and turns boggy. Given that the erosion of the hill’s loose soil is threatening all the neighbors' houses, most people are astonished that the house hasn’t washed away in a heavy rain yet.

Nico thinks it’s more a matter of knowing the right demigod.

Katie Gardener owns the place, and she rents out the second floor to them, because demigods stick together, and the gum tree’s no threat to them when she’s around. She lives downstairs in 1740A, which has nearly been entirely swallowed by the hill, and there’s a sign on her door that says in cheerful bubble letters: “Ring Bell. If No One Answers, Pull Weeds.”

Holly must have been waiting by the window, because when they bump their way into the driveway (it’s cracked unevenly in places -- again, the roots) she flings open the door and comes running out to meet them in her footie pajamas.

“Did you like him? Was he nice to you?” she demands anxiously. And, “Hi, Mom! Woah, when did you get a sticker!”

“I got it at work, for a job well done,” Hazel replies, bending in order to accept a hug from Holly, who pokes at the sticker on her cheek and smooths it down where it was starting to peel up. Nico picks up Hazel's bag and slings it over his shoulder. He waves a hand in thanks to Katie, who waves back and shuts her door.

“-- and yes, he was very nice,” Hazel’s saying, taking Holly by the shoulders, spinning her around and giving her a little push towards the stairs. “Did you know what he said to us?”

“What?” Holly says excitedly.

“He says that if you keep doing as well as you’ve been doing on your spelling tests, it’s very likely you’re going to pass with an A+!”

The staircase up to their front door is rusty, with cheap whitewash that flecks off onto their hands as they climb; their feet have rubbed marks into the paint to make a very clear left-right-left outline that they repeat unconsciously each time, Holly in the lead, Hazel’s bushy head following.

Holly’s still talking as they let them into the house, and Hazel looks back.

She frowns. “Nico?”

Nico surfaces with a gasp, his ears popping like he’d crossed a mountain to get here, still at the bottom of the steps. He wavers, unsteady on his feet, and the staircase jolts a little in his grip as Hazel lurches in his direction with a sharp cry of "Nico!", like she’s going to try to catch him.

“I’m fine!” Nico says quickly. “I’m just -- I’m dizzy, I think I might have hit my head in the accident today.”

She pauses uncertainly. Holly’s watching, too, and that steadies Nico even more.

He gets himself under control. “You two go on ahead. I’m going to catch my breath out here.”

“Are you sure? You looked --“ Her mouth makes a funny shape. “You got weirdly translucent, like papery, like someone squirted you with a squirt bottle.”

“Well, that’s charming. How come with strangers it’s all, ‘oh, yeah, I’m an entrepreneur’s guardian angel’ and with me, it’s ‘oh, you look like wet paper’?”

“Yeah, you’re fine,” Hazel says dryly, but she lingers for a beat on the top step, before herding Holly inside.

Nico sinks down, leaning his forehead against the railing. He presses a hand flat to his chest, which aches like it’d been stretched like elastic. He studies himself in the blueish light coming from Katie’s porch light, but he’s completely opaque again.

He breathes in and out, head tilted up to the cloudless sky, and allows the fear to bubble up inside of him.

-

It started four months ago, right after the Winter Solstice. He was trying to do something ridiculously mundane, he remembers, like run Hazel her lunch or something -- he slipped sideways through shadows, and then immediately everything went wrong. It felt sticky, tacky, clinging to him like the residue of an adhesive, like he wasn’t going anywhere at all, and for the very first time, Nico wondered if maybe he could get caught in that in-between place, trapped in darkness forever.

But he went through, and managed to shake it off, thinking he was just too tired to be shadow-traveling.

And … well, you know what they say about denial, but Nico had always felt at home in the shadows. They whisper to him, they tell him what’s behind closed doors and behind people’s backs. They warn him about pitfalls and traps, and they let him teleport between them. Nico’s been like this since he was ten years old, and to lose control now feels a lot like he’s got sea legs that are collapsing under him. It's like drowning must feel like to Percy -- impossible.

Except that’s exactly what’s been happening: when he’s least expecting it and thus is the least prepared to defend himself, Nico’s been … slipping away.

There’s no other word for it. It’s like a window cling that’s lost its stick, like rain sliding in droplets down a window, like bones sinking into earth.

It’s never happened while he was awake, though. And then it happened twice, and once, Holly almost got hurt because of it.

That. Nico can’t accept that.

He’s still thinking about it in the morning, while he’s standing in front of the window and probing absently at the places on his chest that haven't quite blossomed into full, impressive plum colors. The coffee has almost finished percolating when something clatters loudly in the living room and he startles.

“-- ow! Holy hellhounds, that wasn’t there before, what the hell.”

Nico relaxes back onto his heels and smiles to himself, turning away from the window to fetch a second mug from its hook above the sink, this one with a chipped lip and the school crest for Goode High School printed on the side. Outside, the slate-grey sky is starting to lighten with dawn, and somewhere, the birds are singing in anticipation.

He pours coffee into each mug and holds the second one out just as Percy appears in the doorway, hopping on one foot with his knee crooked up to his chest so he can inspect the red mark on his shin.

“Hey, Nico!” he says, and then immediately shushes himself when he notices the time. The girls are still asleep.

“Caffeine?” Nico offers.

“You are a hero among heroes,” Percy says happily, taking the mug from him and turning towards the fridge. “Is creamer still on the second shelf?”

“Third. Holly’s got some … experiment of some sort on the second shelf, I didn’t ask. Just … don’t sniff it, whatever you do.”

“You know,” says Percy when he surfaces. His hair’s long and knotted on one side of his head, tucked behind his ear like he’s forgotten it’s there, and his clothes are ragged, unwashed, but not -- as far as Nico’s able to tell in the predawn -- torn or bloody anywhere. He would guess Percy’s about seventeen today. “You’d think giving hyper kids caffeine would be a bad idea, but it really isn’t. Stimulants help us focus. Sometimes. Depending on our levels of medication, I guess.”

“That sounds dodgy, out of context,” and Percy tilts his mug at him, like, point.

They sip at the coffee in silence for a moment. Outside, somebody’s car heroically tackles the incline, a heavy whine that persists for several long seconds.

“Heading to work?” Percy asks, flicking him a sideways look.

“Yup,” Nico agrees. Then, “Percy, what’s the oldest you’ve ever seen me?”

“Nico,” Percy fires back, not in the least bit caught off guard by the question. Nico wonders if he warned himself it was coming. “What’s the oldest you’ve ever seen me?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“Exactly. What makes you think I can, either?”

Nico sighs, and something understanding and a little sad creeps into the edges of Percy’s expression.

“Why do you ask?”

Because I want to know what I outlive, and if what I outlive is this. I want to know if this shadow thing is something that’s going to kill me. But because the king of shadows is also a king of deception and misdirection, all he says out loud is, “No reason. Curiosity, I guess.”

Percy accepts that, because Percy’s blind spot has always just been conveniently Nico-shaped. He follows him around for what’s left of his morning routine, finishing off his coffee and asking about the various things that are new to him (“Oh, this is adorable. Did Holly make this?” “No, I did!” “Oh.” “What do you mean, adorable? It’s manly as hell.”) They talk quietly, although Nico does catch Percy glancing hopefully at Holly's door. Percy likes kids, he remembers. Percy wanted to take Annabeth and run away and marry her in California, nest with her, and spawn like happy little fish. Then Tartarus happened.

Finally, Nico can’t put it off any longer, or he’s going to be late to work, and he slips into the bedroom to unlock the safe, moving quietly so as to not wake Hazel.

When he comes back out, Percy's flipping through their newest coffee table book: a National Geographic collection of astonishing rock formations. He sighs wistfully and sets his mug down. “Oh,” he goes, like something just occurred to him. “I have an answer to your question.”

“Oh?” Nico shakes a single celestial bronze bullet into his palm.

“Yeah, it --“ he raps at his skull with his knuckles.

“Okay,” says Nico, who has a feeling this might be a continuation of a conversation they haven’t had yet.

Percy seems to come to the same conclusion at the same time, because he explains, “You asked me -- or you will ask me -- which hurts less, being shot in the heart or shot in the head. I’m telling you, for real, head’s less painful. Maybe it’s ‘cause I have less time to process it, I dunno.”

“Oh.” Nico chambers the bullet into the gun, clicks it through. “Good to know.”

Percy’s eyes crinkle. Even through his brave, sad, Percy-ish smile, the threat has registered, and his pupils swell darkly like expanding stars, before they thin into slits and flare shockingly red, blazing in his head like brimstone.

“I’ll see you soon,” Nico promises, then lifts the gun, aims, and shoots him cleanly between the eyes.

-

“It’s probably a midlife crisis, dude,” Leo tells him solemnly, leaning against the counter with one elbow braced in order to study the scratch tickets being advertised underneath the glass. “And that’s why your powers are going all loco. The only way to cure it is to buy a hot red sports car.”

His fingers keep playing around the edge of the dish of pennies that sit by the cash register, like he's contemplating which scratch ticket to get.

“I’m twenty-eight,” Nico replies drolly.

Leo looks up and flashes him a quicksilver smile. “That’s pretty middle-aged, for a half-blood! Man, who am I kidding, that’s elderly, who in Hades thought you would have lived that long. Look!” he abandons the penny dish and reaches across the cash register, plucking at Nico’s hair like he’s picking dandelion seeds. “You even have the grey hair!”

Nico's hair turned silver in places the same year Holly was born, a spray of it appearing at his temples seemingly overnight, as if his body had abruptly realized that it was, in fact, seventy years older than it thought it was. Katie jokes that fatherhood is what did it. It's true, Nico tells Holly every time Katie brings it up. She'd started off wide-eyed, but now the familiar teasing just makes her roll her eyes. I saw you and aged decades on the spot.

It really could be worse, he thinks. He can handle a little silver in his hair.

“I would rather be prematurely grey than prematurely bald.”

“Bro, I’m going to laugh so hard when you go bald. You’ll have to tell me what it’s like. I, of course, being the paradigm of masculinity, will never know,” Leo spreads his hands out modestly.

“Get out!” Nico laughs, and Leo steps back with a bow. Above his head, the security feed flickers a little bit.

Nico works at the grocer kitty-corner to the high school. He opens the store every morning at five, handles inventory and delivery, and shift changes at one. Sometimes Hazel will come and join him on her lunch break or if she has a free spot in her schedule, sitting behind the counter with him as he makes them both sandwiches with yesterday's deli meats. Oftentimes, she steals his stool, her simple black ballet flats swinging above the floor, her legs snapping out to trip him whenever he came close. Nico's found that having her there lends him an air of respectability, which reassures the little old ladies coming in for their morning shopping, because otherwise Nico keeps catching them eyeballing him like they’re the ones worried about being mugged, instead of the other way around.

His most frequent costumers, though, are high schoolers trying to palm Snickers and packs of gum, which whisper gleefully to Nico from inside the shadowy recesses of their pockets.

“Hope you feel better, man!” Leo calls on the way out the door, passing a young woman clutching a thermos on her way in. “And it’s just some creepy dead-raiser flu thing!” Which makes Nico chuckle, and the woman gives him a funny look.

-

"Dad, are you sick?"

The voice comes from directly in front of him, close enough to be alarming because Nico didn't sense any kind of approach -- his eyes pop open, but it's just Holly, leaning over the arm of his lawn chair with her whole face contorted into a concerned frown. Her mouth's parted so that he can see the little white nubs of her front teeth where they've just started growing in, and the dark empty spaces in her gums where her outside incisors used to be. Holly said that a boy at school punched her and that's how she lost those teeth, but Nico's pretty sure she just locked herself in the bathroom and twisted at them gingerly until they came loose. Holly tells the punching story because Katie calls her "metal" for it.

Metal as hell, little shrub, she says solemnly, offering Holly her fist to bump, and Holly beams, gummy, completely ignoring Hazel in the background: Stop calling my kid a shrub, Katie.

"Holly, it was just a sneeze," he says, and then considers it. "Well, I guess I could be sick. In that case, here, have some germs."

He makes a show of trying to smear his palms all over her face and she screeches, darting away.

The backyard is golden with fading afternoon light, grass growing in resilient clumps where the ground pretends to be even. Their next-door neighbor is doing yoga out on her front porch, wearing lavender biking shorts with a matching mat. She has a full nativity scene in her front yard that she keeps up year-round, only swapping out the Baby Jesus in his cradle for the appropriate holiday of choice -- a pumpkin for Halloween, a pink bunny for Easter -- and since her yard overlooks theirs, Nico wonders if he can ever properly settle in for an afternoon nap without the feeling of a plastic Virgin Mary watching him serenely. This is one of the benefits of being descended from the Greek pantheon, Nico thinks: he doesn't have to make any sort of effort to understand anyone else's religion.

Holly circles around again. "Seriously," she emphasizes, with great impatience, and then waits.

"Of course I'm not sick, Holly. I'm fine."

"What about what happened in the car?" she fires at him.

"That's not going to happen again," Nico says immediately, and when Holly just squints at him, he takes the time to remember every adult or god who ever lied to him and corrects himself, gentling his tone, "Okay, it might, but --"

He reaches out, sitting up straight in the Hawaiian-print lawn chair that had been a tongue-in-cheek wedding present from somebody whose name shouldn't even be mentioned because he's a jerk, and she comes over instantly, taking his hands in hers. They're tiny, and a little dirty from playing in the yard, which due to all the sinkholes is muddy at best and downright swampy at worst, and early September definitely qualifies as "worse." Her nails are painted a bright Halloween orange -- Hazel must have helped her, because the paint is crooked on her nondominant hand, sloppy like she'd done it herself, but the paint on her other hand is neat and clean.

He chews at the inside of his cheek, flitting his thoughts back and forth, trying to land on the right words to put together. What would Sally Jackson say?

"It might happen again," he says slowly. "But trust me, I will never let it happen at a time that would put you in the slightest bit of danger."

"Okay," says Holly with easy faith, because she's never come to harm before and doesn't have the experience or the imagination to tell herself what that'd be like. Nico's kind of proud of that, actually: he thinks between his childhood and Hazel's, they have a monopoly on fear, pain, and misery, and don't need to pass it down. "Is it …" she tries. "Some kind of disappearing sickness?"

"I don't know," says Nico honestly. "Do you think your mom knows?"

"I haven't asked," Holly replies thoughtfully, and they both pause, listening to the sounds of Hazel in the driveway, where she's got herself in a pair of corduroys ("don't judge! I'm a smith by genetics, I can dress like one if I want to,") and is currently working on coaxing the dents out of the car.

The car was always Hazel's, ever since she was sixteen. That thing's as loyal to her as an entire camp of Romans would be to their praetor. Nico's perfectly okay with giving them their privacy.

Also, they don't want Holly seeing her using her powers. They never use their powers in front of Holly if they can help it: it's not that they don't trust her, and Holly's closing in on the age where she might be able to grasp the concept of secrecy and Olympus, but Nico and Hazel are probably being selfish, not wanting to open her up to that world. Because the more she's able to see, the more other things can see her.

Holly looks like she's going to ask something else, but then Nico feels another sneeze come up and lets it go as dramatically as possible, and the conversation dissolves into a lot of shrieking and chasing and the neighbor watching with amusement from her yoga mat.

-

This time, it happens while Nico's falling asleep, the two sensations too similar to each other to be distinguishable, and one moment Nico's thinking about whether he should use whole wheat or white for Holly's sandwich tomorrow (the voice in his head that sounds disturbingly like Demeter tells him whole wheat, obviously, but Holly likes white bread and Nico's inclined to spoil her) and whether he's taking up too much of Hazel's side of the bed, and the next, he thinks, no! and flails out with a sick lurch like he's missed a step in the dark, trying to wake himself up.

It's too late.

Nico vanishes.

And Nico sinks. He's aware of something blurring by him, too fast to make out, like he's looking at it through the window of a moving car -- not like it's scenery slowly drifting by, but like it's debris right up next to the roadside.

He lands flat on his back with a solid thud. Completely winded, he gulps uselessly at the air with stunned lungs, trying to breathe around the detonation of pain radiating through his every limb. Even his fingernails felt the impact, it seems like.

He's lying among rough stone and loose pebbles, which accounts for how much that landing hurt. It's like stepping on a Lego in the dark, except with his whole godsdamn body.

"Eurgh," he says, just to let the universe know what he thinks of that, and gingerly pushes himself up onto his elbows.

As he does so, he realizes he knows exactly where he is. Underneath him, a winding footpath snakes onwards, downhill, towards where a small cluster of skull-headed harts pick at the stones, their antlers gleaming like bone-white streaks jaggedly carved against the rocky backdrop. In the distance, the Gates of Alsofodel loom like a mirage. There's no obvious source of light, and yet everything is lit just enough to show that the Underworld is pale grey, tomb-like, and mind-bogglingly big.

He almost laughs. All he's done, really, is travel from one home to another.

He gets to his feet, brushing himself off. Further down the road, he can make out the shape of three women sitting on a flat stone discus the same size as a kiddie wading pool, and makes his way down to them.

The Fates sit side-by-side, cross-legged and wearing t-shirts printed with a design that, when they're lined up like they are, forms the shape of a moray eel that looks like it's wriggling every time they shift around as they work. There's Clotho, the Spinner, Lachesis, the Disposer of Lots, and Atropos, the Cutter.

Atropos is closest, digging around in a battered shoebox with Hermes' winged sandals printed on the side, so Nico shoves his hands in his pockets and addresses her first.

"Yo," he goes.

For his thirteenth birthday, she'd given him a small collection of voodoo dolls wrapped in twine from her sister's spool, and had shown him where to stick pins to cause the largest amount of pain. It'd been rather touching, as far as birthday presents from the Underworld went.

"Oh, no," says the Cutter without looking up. "You're early. I can't abide people who don't stick with their appointments."

"Um," says Nico eloquently.

She surfaces with a pair of kindergarten scissors, which she chomps together like jaws until she's satisfied, and sets the box down, pushing it out of the way with the ball of her foot. The movement makes her ankle unhinge, bending unnaturally in the wrong direction, and then it settles back into shape with a faint crunch of rearranging bones.

Her sister pulls a threat taut, silvery with light and very, very short, and without fanfare, Atropos leans over and snips it. The two ends of the broken thread leap in opposite directions, coiling up, and the light dies. Somewhere in the distance -- or maybe just in between his own ears -- Nico hears the ghoulish wail of a child, abruptly cut short.

Something nudges at his elbow, startling him. But it's only one of the harts, nosing interestedly at Nico's pockets in search of something to munch on. Nico pats its skeletal nose absently: the harts stand at shoulder height, too slender to resemble stags but also too broad to look like antelope. Their skin is dry and flaky like a moth's, and sitting regally atop their shoulders, they've got empty skulls in the place of heads, with thick plates for foreheads and twisting antlers -- hence the name, skull-headed hart. Demeter created them out of gravedirt and the shells of sunflower seeds, Nico learned, as a sort of belated wedding present for her daughter.

Atropos turns back to him and brandishes the scissors. "Come back when it's your turn."

Nico blinks. "I -- what?"

Lachesis speaks up then, her voice rasping out of her like ash tumbling out of an urn. "You --" she starts, and licks her thumb in order to flip a few pages ahead in the great tome that sits on her lap. "You are Nico di Angelo, the only living son of our keeper and master, the lord of the Underworld, the steward of the Dead. Are you not?"

"Yes." But they know this already. At those formal banquets Hades was always putting on for no reason Nico could fathom (other than he was sure banquets were something Zeus and Poseidon did a lot, therefore he, Hades, must have them as well,) Nico always relegated himself to sit with the Fates for lack of an official kid table. They were old, and crotchety, and complained about everyone, and Nico had adored them with all of his shriveled child heart.

"Hm," says Lachesis. She and Atropos study him for a beat. Clotho spins relentlessly on, oblivious, and at Nico's feet, the hart finds a smooth pebble to crunch between its teeth.

Then Lachesis says --

"You have twenty-one days left before we cut your thread, Nico di Angelo, the self-professed king of ghosts. Come back then."

It's strange, how Nico still feels like he's falling, like the earth has swamped out from under him, except there's nowhere further to go. He's fallen as far as he can, and yet, somehow, there's an endless black chasm that opens inside his head, and Nico tumbles silently down.

-

Sometimes, Nico forgets.

For seconds, minutes, sometimes whole hours, Nico will forget. Forget about Olympus, forget about monsters -- he can't forget about his powers, of course, because that's like forgetting he has arms or legs: the shadows that tell him what's behind locked doors and the skeletons that speak from their unmarked graves by the railroad tracks and the ghosts he finds sometimes in innocuous places. But he'll forget that not everybody can do those things, either.

He'll forget, those times he and Hazel are walking back to their car some uneventful day or another, Holly swinging her weight between them with one hand in each of theirs, that there are still half-blood children out there, half his age and dying.

Hazel and Percy and the others, they stopped everyone from dying, because that's just kind of their thing, but that didn't stop half-bloods from being Olympus's most expendable currency.

So Nico forgets, sometimes, that that life still affects him.

(Then Percy or Annabeth show up, or something horrible happens, like the Disposer of Lots telling him that he only has twenty-one days left before he dies for good, and Nico remembers again.)

Nico has twenty-one days before Atropos, who still gets him unique (and kind of morbid) birthday presents every year, takes a pair of scissors to his life line.

Twenty-one days. Twenty-one days is three weeks.

He's going to miss Holly's ninth birthday.

He's going to --

Okay, focus. Focus, Nico.

The clock on the microwave says it's 4:03 in the morning. He needs to go to work. He needs to take the car, because he doesn't think he can shadow-travel in this state: usually short distances like home to the grocer's only leave him a little fatigued, but if Nico shadow-travels right now, he's going to break into a hundred little pieces. He knows it. Or worse, fade out again.

Nico stands at the counter, a full pot of coffee waiting on the burner, and does nothing.

It's not hard to figure out what happened. Hazel would call it a Roman sense of fairness. Nico thinks it's just the gods being dicks, because hey, no need to change the status quo on account of him.

He traded years of his life like currency, buying favors from the Underworld, because if there's one thing a child like Nico thought he had plenty of, it was time. He traded it for the power to control Minos (and what a crappy choice that turned out to be, one point for buyer's remorse,) for the power to contact Bianca before she passed into her first reincarnation, far out of his reach. He traded a decade to bring Hazel back to life, and then Holly in her turn. He traded it to suspend himself in chrysalis, that week that Arachne held him hostage before Hazel and the others did a stupid thing and rescued him. He traded it to close the Doors of Death.

You can't cheat Death, after all. You can only give it more of your time.

If he kind of, sort of assumed the gods of Olympus (his father) might have pardoned his debts on account of him, you know, helping save their collective asses, well …

Well, that was probably really dumb.

-

It's not that he's afraid to die. Not really.

That'd be weird, him fearing death, like Thalia fearing heights (which she does anyway,) or Percy fearing drowning. So it's not that. He knows the Underworld like the back of his hand: he lived in Erebus for a whole year at his father's palace, and after Bianca chose a second chance at life and went where he couldn't follow, he spent a lot of time out in the silence of the Fields of Alsofodel, where he found Hazel and unthinkingly decided to try again -- a decision that, ironically, turned out to be the perfect lynchpin in the plan to defeat Gaia, who knew. He's walked almost the entire length of the River Styx, from the riverside port where Charon docks to the place where he watched Percy submerge and pay the price for invincibility, to where the Styx plummets into Tartarus at the Elosian Ascent.

He's always known what's coming.

Somehow, it's not even surprising that this is how it happens, with all the quick and gleeful shadows of the world trying to pull him down into the earth, like they know he belongs in a grave and it's just a matter of time.

-

I'm never going to see Holly grow up. The thought is inescapable, a shadow all its own, always in pursuit of him and daring him to face it. I'll never know if Katie ever finds her biological father. I'll never meet Percy and Annabeth's kids. I'll never see Hazel grow old and get married for real, to someone who isn't me, and the pain in his chest feels like an earthquake, hard crusted plates cracking and shifting, leaving him fundamentally changed.

-

He's sitting at the desk in his and Hazel's room, with the reading lamp clicked on and pointed directly at the ream of papers he has spread out in front of him. His hands smell still like the money from the cash drawer, which had been the last thing he handled at work before clocking out, and it's driving him crazy. Fed up with it, and fed up with the way the numbers on the page are somersaulting around, he stands up and heads into the kitchen.

He scrubs his hands at the sink. The flowerpot that Holly made them in kindergarten is sitting on the windowsill, with one of Katie's tiger-striped orchids stretching leisurely up the pane. "Love you Mom" is painstakingly painted on one side of the pot, in clumsy kindergarten letters, and "Love you Dad" is on the other.

How come we never go to make crafts like that? Hazel mused, when Holly brought the pot home in time for Mother's Day (complete with matching paint stains on her pants) and proudly told them they made it at school.

Because we had shitty childhoods, he'd replied.

Nico, the question was rhetorical.

Oh.

He shuts the sink off, and then there's a sudden yell from the front room.

Hazel's still at work, and it isn't Holly, which means it's probably Percy, and sure enough, when Nico pulls the washtowel from its hook and sticks his head around the corner to investigate, there's a familiar shape of a teenage boy planted on his ass next to the milk crate where they all keep their shoes.

"Oh, hey," he goes, and at the sound of his voice, Percy pivots into a crouch, one hand planted in the oatmeal-colored carpet and the other instinctively pulling Riptide from his collar.

Nico uses the glow of it to check Percy over: he looks fine, no visible wounds showing, and he stares for a long moment at the sight of Nico drying his hands in the doorway like he's having a hard time recognizing him, his whole body vibrating with tension, before he says, in this hoarse kind of way, "Nico?"

"Yeah, man," Nico acknowledges distractedly, already beelining for the fridge. He drops the towel on the counter. "Are you hungry? Leo keeps on trying to get us to try these recipes he finds, except they're kind of like science experiments in that their capsaicin content should be, like, illegal. I don't think food should be combustible, to be honest, but. What do you expect from a son of Hephaestus?" He pulls out a Tupperware container and checks its contents. "We might have some of that left, if you want."

"Nico?" comes Percy's voice, this time from the kitchen doorway. He sounds lost, bewildered, and he still has his sword out. "But you're … you're old. How are you old?"

Nico glances back sharply, giving Percy a longer and more thorough look, studying his clothes and the lines on his face. He looks sixteen.

He looks like a child. Percy has never looked like a child to Nico before.

He turns all the way around, frowning. "Percy?" he goes, taking a very careful step towards him. "Are you okay?"

Percy recoils from him with a gasp like someone had forcibly sucked all the air from him, like he'd fallen from a spectacular height and shocked his lungs senseless. "Where am I?" he gets out, tearing his eyes from Nico like he's a bright light beamed directly into his eyes, glancing around the kitchen and then the front room. "When am I?" he amends, gaze touching briefly on picture frames and gadgets, a rainbow-gutted geode that Hazel had on a shelf, Holly's silly butterfly net.

"2025," Nico answers slowly, a terrible suspicion dawning on him. "Percy, did you just escape Tartarus?"

Percy's attention telescopes, focusing cleanly on him.

"Yes," he gets out, a hard, desperate bite to it. "Yes, we -- Annabeth and I -- we -- there was a clownfish and the clownfish talked about a weird-way and then it grew these really hoary teeth and we had to --" his eyes scatter, expression becoming so vulnerable and broken-open that Nico feels the intense urge to look away, like Percy just stripped naked or did something horribly embarrassing. He clears his throat and hangs the washtowel properly.

"But the weird-way led out," Percy continues. "It led up," and something suddenly registers in his eyes. "2025?"

Nico sighs. A sense of inevitability grows heavy in his chest, like his bones are turning to clay. He leans against the kitchen table and folds his arms.

"Time runs differently in Tartarus," he starts, and Percy's eyelids flutter and then close, squeezing tight, like Nico had blown ash into his eyes.

"My mother?" is the first thing that tumbles out of his mouth.

"Fine," Nico reassures him, because there doesn't seem to be any harm in telling Percy that. "You have a little brother. He's taken over your room."

A soft huff. "You're kidding. What's his name?"

"Michael."

Eyes still closed, a quick, fond smile crinkles them at the corners, like he's enjoying some kind of private joke, and Nico thinks, maybe someday he'll tell me what the significance behind Michael's name is, and then he thinks, no, he won't, because you won't be around.

Percy's eyes snap open. "Annabeth?" he goes, panic streaking through his voice, and Nico almost smiles, because this is Percy Jackson and the only people Nico di Angelo knows better than Percy Jackson are his sisters, and Holly, and these will always be Percy's first two priorities in life: is Sally okay? Is Annabeth okay? "She went first, she did come out --"

"Percy," he cuts in, speaking very softly. There's no good way to do this. "Have you ever wondered how monsters are made?"

He blinks, unsettled, and Nico watches the war in his body and face, obviously responding to some internal voice that's telling him, this is Nico, you know Nico, there's really nothing weird about this, and then some other one that's telling him that he is sixteen and Nico is twenty-eight and he's responding to that without consciously deciding to.

"Did you know that most of the monsters of Tartarus," he continues without waiting for an answer. "Excepting, like, you know, the big bads -- they were all people once? They were people who fell, or they were banished, and they became so warped from their efforts to escape that they become monsters. That's why they can't truly be killed -- they're already dead, permanent fixtures of the Underworld, so the best we can do is send them back, again and again, until they become --" he gestures.

Percy's knuckles go white around the pen in his hand, and he opens his mouth to say something, except that's the moment Holly darts into the kitchen, wearing a pair of denim shorts and carrying the mail.

She brushes by Percy's elbow, and he startles badly, staring after the dark, curly bob of her head like she's something ancient and fathomless pulled from the depths of the ocean. Holly hands Nico the mail with great ceremony, and then turns, catching Percy staring at her and giving him a startled grin. "Oh, hey, Percy!"

"Holy Hades," Percy breathes, tearing his eyes away from her in order to give Nico a wild-eyed, incandescent look. "Holy Hades, you did it. She's --"

"Holly," Nico cuts in swiftly, and her head jerks up, startled by his tone. He smiles at her, kneejerk, because what else is there to do when she's looking at him, frightened? "Can you do me a favor, and go downstairs to ask Katie for some cane sugar? We'll make cookies for your mom when she comes home."

Holly's eyes light up, and she takes off without even bothering to reply. Sunlight cuts across the carpet in a jagged line when she hauls the door open and disappears, flip flops slapping against the stairs outside.

Nico waits until the door has mostly drifted shut again before he looks at Percy and says, "Now you've met my daughter. That's Holly."

"Your --" Percy looks swamped. Ten minutes ago, the only Nico he knew was fourteen years old and had never had a proper birthday party before (like, with birthday cake and not corpses, there'd been plenty of corpses already,) and now here he is, with a Nico who has his own house, silver-grey hair, and -- "She isn't really, though, right?"

He doesn't answer, pushing away from the kitchen table. He crosses through the front room into the bedroom, dropping the mail on top of the desk where he has their bank statements all spread out -- not that, like, Nico contributes very much to their finances, because that's something he's always had to trust to Hazel, and he knows she'll manage just fine after he … well, after he isn't around anymore, but it doesn't stop him from wanting to make sure. He gets the gun out of the safe, and finds the box of bullets.

In the kitchen, Percy's got his head in one of the cabinets, running his fingertips almost reverently over the edge of a box of Kelloggs cereal, and he quickly shuts the door when he registers Nico's return.

His eyes drop to the gun. "What's that?" he asks, even though it's clear. Nico shakes a bullet from the box into his palm, and doesn't have to look to see the crease folding between Percy's brows.

"Are those --"

"Celestial bronze," Nico confirms. "So much more efficient than swords and daggers, let me tell you. Better aim, too."

He chambers the bullet, clicks it through until it goes live.

"Nico?" Percy keeps his voice even, but Percy at sixteen is somehow even more shockingly expressive than the Percy that comes out of Tartarus at seventeen, at eighteen, and Nico can see the moment the obvious conclusion dawns on him, because his eyes grow enormous and panic shoots through his voice. "Nico?"

"Sorry," says Nico quietly. "But you know what we do with monsters."

He levels the gun at Percy's head. Something horrible and feral and red flares in the grey-green seafoam color of Percy's eyes, something that swells his pupils and then turns them into cat's-eye slits, something primeval, something not Percy at all.

Nico says, "We send them back to Tartarus."

And then he shoots him, right between the eyes.

-

By the third day, after, Nico has collectively gotten about four hours of sleep, and it's starting to crack him clean through.

His eyes, when he catches glimpses of himself off reflective surfaces, look bruised and bitten and pounded into mulch, and he stays awake until it's time to leave for work, curled with all his limbs folded in like leaves in Hazel's soft suede armchair, watching PBS documentaries and ABC Family until the insides of his eyelids feel like sandpaper, crowded with history lessons and sitcoms he thought he had all the time in the world to learn.

Hazel frowns at him when he comes to pick her up from work, and takes the keys from him without a word. That third day, without meaning to, he starts to nod off in the passenger seat and his skin goes as translucent as film. Hazel reaches over the console, wrapping her fingers through his, and they both concentrate on the sensation of solid earth, of keeping Nico's bones exactly where they are.

Nico doesn't want to fade out, not when he already has a date with the Underworld. He wants every last second of the upper world he can possibly get, surely that should be obvious.

But his body is a mortal body, and mortal bodies need to rest, and so when, this time, the sinking feeling of succumbing to exhaustion becomes the sinking feeling of sauntering vaguely downwards, he kicks himself, hard, trying to wake up, and it sort-of works. He only falls a single story instead of off the astral plane entirely.

Katie sits bolt upright in bed with a high, startled yelp, like someone had stepped on her tail.

"Ow," Nico groans from the floor. And then, "Hi, Katie."

"Hi, Nico," she responds, nonplussed. She scoots to the edge of her bed, peering down at him. "Any particular reason you decided to take a mud bath?"

"I fell," Nico admits.

"Uh-huh." She's wearing a pumpkin-colored halter top with a sun motif that's weathered from wear, and when she climbs out of bed and steps over him to offer him a hand up, he notices that she's still wearing the anklet that Holly had made her, three clay beds in different shades of green hung along a knotted string. That can't be comfortable to sleep on, Nico thinks, and then he grabs onto Katie's hand and she pulls him up, peeling him out of the mud with a faint, wet squelch.

Nico never knows how to describe Katie's apartment, other than it's very … her.

And he doesn't envy whoever buys this property after her: she removed the floors as soon as she moved in, and when it rains, it turns the bare earth soft and malleable for footprints. Nico's even noticed that the texture of it differs; hard-packed dirt in the kitchen and a soft, loamy soil in the bedroom.

It's important to me, Katie had said with a shrug. I like it being able to touch dirt with my feet first thing in the morning.

It's always dark down here -- since the hill has almost entirely swallowed this whole level, roots and loose earth obscuring every window except for the ones by the front door -- and always cool, like walking into a wine cellar or a quiet forest at night. All of Katie's lights are UV lights, like the kinds found in terrariums, and between some combination of those and Katie's natural magic, her houseplants all thrive: long trains of philodendron dangle from doorways the way other people might hang beads; mother-in-law's tongue lick up the walls and stand sentinel in corners; large, leafy ZZ plants that stretch their fronds over her sofa like relatives planting elbows where they don't belong. In the front room, where she does get natural light, Katie breeds orchids; striped orchids and patterned orchids and orchids deep and vibrantly colored, and she'll sell them to collectors on eBay. Other than that, and rent payments from 1740B, Nico genuinely has no idea what she does for income.

She turns on the electric kettle and stands to the side as Nico cleans the worst of the mud off his neck and face at the sink. She pours them both a cup of tea and sits Nico down. With the floor removed, it's left Katie free to call up the roots of the gum tree, to train them and coax them to form most of her furniture, her tables and chairs and even a sofa by the place where Holly has her coloring spread out.

"Okay," says Katie, tucking her feet up underneath her and settling against her root-chair. "Let's address the elephant in the room. You're dying, aren't you?"

Nico almost laughs. Four days ago, he'd been fine. Suffering something of a disappearing problem, but otherwise fine. And now it's, you're dying, Nico di Angelo. What, is he wearing a sign?

He blows across the surface of his tea, and then he says, "Don't tell Percy."

Her eyebrows hike up in surprise. "What?"

"Please, Katie."

"I -- I was expecting something more along the lines of, 'don't tell Hazel', to be honest."

"I'll have to tell Hazel," Nico says matter-of-factly, dread churning in the pit of his stomach. He's looking forward to that about as much as he imagines a politician looks forward to doing … well, anything responsible, probably. "I'm not going to just … up and die on her without any warning. That's rude. She should have time to prepare, too."

Katie's throat works for a moment, like she'd been okay with asking Nico about dying as an abstract concept. "But you don't want me to tell Percy? He doesn't get to prepare?"

"No."

"Why?"

She genuinely doesn't get it. Nico sets his tea down and looks at her. "Because he's Percy Jackson. He'll try to save me."

Katie takes a hand off her mug and spreads it inquisitively, like, and that's bad, because?

"Because that's what Percy does," says Nico with all the frustration of someone who'd had to watch, like a spectator sport, as the Olympians moved Percy Jackson like a sacrificial pawn on their enormous Mythomagic board, and then -- even worse! -- had to live with becoming the dude's friend afterwards. And don't even get him started on the whole Tartarus fiasco. "That's basically all he thinks he's designed to do, is save other people. I can't --"

He swallows, looks away, and reaches compulsively for the tea.

This is something he doesn't really have words for, but Katie waits. Katie's always been patient.

"Someday," he says finally. "Someday, saving me is going to cost him something he can't give. So he can't know, Katie. Please."

"And you don't think that's not true for the rest of us? That we wouldn't --" and he's startled when she bites the end of her sentence off, so angry that the muscles in her jaw keep flickering. He can't remember the last time he's seen a daughter of Demeter in a temper; it's not really their thing. They get quiet and they get focused and then they get shit done. But angry? Not really.

"Nico di Angelo, that was an incredibly self-centered thing to say. And that's keeping in mind that I spent the entirety of my childhood within pranking distance of the Apollo cabin and they kind of have the monopoly on self-centered acts."

"I'm selfish because I won't let Percy save me?" Nico is totally lost.

"You are a selfish bastard because you don't think the rest of us care about you enough to try. What about Hazel?" she asks again. "Nico, she's your sister."

"I know that," Nico says sharply. "Why do you think I'm dying now? I traded these years so that she could have her second chance, because she's my sister and she deserved it and I will never, ever, as long as I've got bones on this earth, do anything to make her think she doesn't deserve to be here."

Katie falls silent.

He sighs, and scrubs at the ripe, bruised pits under his eyes. "I'll tell her."

-

Nico di Angelo and Hazel Levesque were married on a typical June day behind the civic center, in an artfully manicured garden that smelled like sweet alyssum and spring, and the county official who did the ceremony had three more weddings to do after them and had resigned herself to the fact she probably wasn't going to get to see her dinner table at any reasonable hour that day.

Hazel wore an ivory-colored dress that had once been Sally's; she and Percy had to take it in so that it fit her in approximate ways, and it wasn't perfect, but it was the best they could do on short notice, and she looked beautiful regardless. She wore no jewels spare for a net of crystals in her full, bushy hair, formed of little shards of ice that Percy charmed so they wouldn't melt. Piper stood beside her as her maid of honor, looking a little jet-lagged and darting perplexed looks at Nico, like she wasn't entirely sure what he was doing there.

Nico wore a suit, because his father's alter-ego was occasionally the god of wealth and there was always a little character bleed, and one of the only fatherly things he'd ever done was teach Nico how to dress -- the suit was grey, something slim and Italian that Charon had recommended. He might still have it, somewhere.

The ceremony had been brief, and Nico and Hazel spent it with one eye on each other and one eye on where Sally stood in the back, bouncing the newborn Holly around so that she wouldn't fuss.

(Not much changed in the eight years that followed. One eye on Hazel, one eye on Holly. Always.)

Marrying him had been Hazel's idea.

After all, Sally and Paul were married, weren't they, and Sally and Paul were the best parents Nico and Hazel had ever known. So becoming husband and wife made sense: they had Holly now, and Holly deserved the best possible family they could give her. If it felt like play-acting, then, well, that's because it was, but as long as Holly grew up happy and loved, it didn't matter. As long as Holly got everything they didn't.

Paul, of course (being one of, like, three mortals in their acquaintance, and thus a constant source of intrigue to them) was the first to ask the obvious question, removing his glasses and giving them a thoughtful polish on the hem of his shirt before venturing, Aren't you guys … brother and sister?

Yeah, Nico said. But no.

Ah, said Paul. That's … clear.

The state had no objections to the marriage of two people who probably each had two birth certificates somewhere, one dating back to the 40s and the other forged with their ages adjusted for the decades they spent in the Lotus Casino and the Fields of Alsofodel, respectively. There are probably death certificates out there somewhere, too. When the civil official asked for anyone to speak now or forever hold their peace, there was only the sound of Holly's nonsense noises in the back.

Nico had honestly thought that Percy and Annabeth would object more than they did. Piper certainly had a lot of perplexed and slightly disgusted questions, and hadn't been satisfied with, "but Holly" as an answer, and Percy's way of compensating for more or less completely ignoring Nico's existence there in the beginning while Nico was making brilliant Minos-related decisions was to completely 180º in the other direction and get in his business all of the time, which had been nice at first, because Nico hadn't really realized how much he missed being, like, cared about up until that point, but man, it also got annoying, fast. So the fact that Percy's reaction to, "hey, Hazel and I are getting married on Saturday, you should come," had been, "cool, bro, we'll be there," was … a little baffling.

And then, shortly after the Winter Solstice of Holly's eighth year, their younger versions started popping out of Tartarus.

So that explained that: neither Percy nor Annabeth had been remotely surprised by the fact that their friend Hazel had found her missing brother holed up with a two-month-old baby and now was going to marry him, because they'd already seen it happen.

-

He wonders how many other half-bloods got this kind of ending; Katie Gardener in the apartment below, Percy Jackson and Annabeth Chase an easy two-hour drive up the coast, a daughter who probably sees through the Mist but isn't bothered by it yet, a job that pays the bills with only minor stress, and coffee mugs with stains they remember making.

Not a lot, he's guessing.

On Saturday, they take the car down to this mechanic that Hazel knows to get the glass for the passenger side window replaced. There's a dead man sitting on the curb across the street, pale as the distant halo of luminescence in a fog, harmonica lifted to his lips and his eyes trailing beseechingly after every pedestrian -- Nico doesn't think he realizes he's dead, so he takes Hazel by the arm and quietly draws her away before the man can spot them.

Inside the building, the station attendant reorganizes shelves of cigarette packs behind the counter, and a row of ancient pinball machines winks and flashes in the back. The part of Nico that's permanently five years old and still living in the Lotus Casino beelines right for them.

"Are you going to win me something?" his sister asks him, following him to lean against the machine.

He steals a glance at her from under his eyelashes and can't risk much more than that. She looks stunning today, wearing a pastel, flower-patterned skirt that flares out from her thighs in a way that reminds him of ballerinas, and a sports jersey with the neckline cut out, exposing her collarbone. Nico has always loved the way he and Hazel looked, side-by-side, her gold-streaked hair matched up to his silver.

"Yes," he informs her solemnly. "I will win you something stuffed and adorable."

Her eyebrows tick up.

Nico looks pointedly over his shoulder just as the mechanic steps in from the garage, fishing in his overalls for a pen. He grins at her. "How do you feel about taxidermy?"

"Oh my gods, Nico!" She smacks his shoulder with the back of her hand, but she's laughing.

The sound attracts the mechanic's attention, and his expression lights up when he sees them. Well, when he sees Hazel, Nico assumes, judging by the way he says, "Ms. Levesque?" He's a young man with rough nails and the beginnings of a beard curling out from his chin (very adorable, Hazel, are you sure you don't want him as a decoration? he thinks. We can turn his bones into jewelry.) and his eyes trip a little over Nico when he steps away from the pinball machine, letting the ball fall back into the well with a sorry thud. He clearly doesn't know what to make of him, bruised eyes and young face with the old man's hair and the semi-familiar way he comes to stand behind Hazel.

Then he licks his lips, and addresses Hazel, "Man, whoever banged out those dents did a fantastic job, ma'am, I can barely even tell you guys got hit. You'll have to introduce me to the guy sometime."

"Oh," Hazel says with some surprise, color flushing through her cheeks. "I did that."

The mechanic -- the name stitched into his coveralls says his name is Liam -- almost trips over himself.

"You?" he goes, sounding completely befuddled, like he isn't sure if he's going to trip head over heels in love or die of embarrassment at the way he totally just put his foot in his mouth, and Nico surreptitiously glances around to see if there's a minion of Aphrodite's afoot. "Oh, man, then I'm going to have to get your number."

Hazel laughs again, a giggle-laugh that sounds like the tinkle of breaking glass. "Oh," she says, pushing her hair back. "It's no big thing. I've been … kind of working with metal all my life. If it came out of the earth, I can work with it."

"Ah, geologist, then?"

"Well, accountant, actually, but I guess geology is a hobby, yeah?"

Nico looks over at the station attendant and finds her watching the display with what has to be a pretty similar expression to his own, her eyebrows practically lifted to meet her hairline. She catches Nico's eye and gestures, like, is this sickening to you, too? And he just shrugs back, like, hey, if you want to interrupt them, be my guest.

The mechanic ducks out again briefly, and Nico, who's overdosed on sitcom television the past couple of nights, sidles up alongside Hazel and nudges her with his elbow.

He waggles his eyebrows. "Is that your new boyfriend? You gonna bring him home? Meet the folks?"

She smacks him again. This time it actually does hurt a little bit. There's a stain of color high along her cheeks. "Why didn't you say anything?" she demands, keeping her voice low. "You totally let me flounder there on my own. Why didn't you step in and be like, 'this is my wife, she's awesome'?"

Nico stares at her, abruptly registering her discomfort for what it actually is.

"I thought --" he starts, feeling a little horrified that he completely missed those signals. "I didn't -- I didn't want -- to get in the way? If he liked you and you decided you liked him, then you should -- you shouldn't have to, just because we're …" he trails off, hunching his shoulders a little bit under the force of her stare, the sunlit color of her eyes. "I want you to be happy."

Nico is twenty-eight years old. He's known Hazel now longer than he ever knew Bianca, and he's constantly surprised by the force of how much he loves her; more than the night sky, more than the safety of a home, more than the sight of a single blue cupcake with a candle sticking out of it -- a feeling like tripping in the dark, every time.

"I don't want a boyfriend, Nico, don't be stupid," she tells him.

They stand there in silence for a long moment, Hazel with her arms folded and Nico with his hands in his pockets.

"He lurves you," he says after a beat.

Hazel laughs. "Shut up," she answers, without bite.

-

The list of people Nico can discuss his sister with is a rather short one, but he abuses the privilege with Leo more often than not, because if there's anyone who understands what it's like to love Hazel Levesque and be entirely clueless as to how to handle it, it's Leo.

"Puta, please," goes Leo with a dismissive flip of his hand, watching Nico stick discount tags on the day-old loaves of bread. "If you didn't, I would have ditched you long ago. Hazel is the only interesting thing about you."

"Excuse you," Nico protests, indignant. "I'm the motherfucking king of ghosts, how is that not interesting?"

Leo levels a flat look at him. "Nico, bro, look at your life, look at your choices. You are a soccer mom. Oh my gods, you do taxes, you drive a Toyota, and nothing has tried to bite your cajones off in two years, like, how do you not die of boredom?"

"I do non-boring stuff! Like," he racks his brains. "Like, I navigate the Underworld on a semi-regular basis, like, when's the last time you did that?"

Leo clutches his heart, like Nico has physically wounded him.

"Stop," he gasps, mouth working fishily. "Oh, stop, have mercy, I can't contain the excitement. It's excruciating."

Nico watches dispassionately as Leo feigns a fit, twitching and clawing at his chest and sliding out of view behind the bin. He waits for the dramatic dying whale noises to stop before he informs him, "I don't like exciting, Leo. Exciting is what got our mothers killed."

"Oh, well," comes Leo's voice from out of sight. "Sure. Go ahead and kill the mood."

-

After Nico's shift ends, he comes home to the smell of something frying. He finds a version of Percy at the stove, one of Hazel's henley shirts pulling taut across the wings of his shoulders and his feet bare on the linoleum in a weirdly homey way.

He turns around immediately at the sound of Nico scuffing to a stop in the doorway, arm held at a cross in front of him with a spatula gripped like a weapon, alert and on guard in a way that makes Nico's heart ache in a formless, sympathetic way. He sees Nico and for some reason, his eyebrows jump up in surprise.

"Oh," he says. "I'm not very far from my first visit, am I?"

Nico shakes his head. "That was five days ago."

Percy stays quiet for a beat while the pan on the stove pops and bubbles sluggishly. The kitchen smells like fried butter. Nico's stomach rumbles plaintively, and he's kind of wondering what happened to Percy's clothes and also kind of thinking he doesn't want to know, but then Percy reaches some kind of conclusion and confirms, "Almost a year ago, for me. You've killed me a few times since then. Never in front of your kid," he adds, like that's the important part. "How is Holly?"

"Good," says Nico, automatically checking the clock, but it's only two. Traveling the slow way hasn't stopped discombobulating him with how time-consuming it is. "She got a 100% on Friday's spelling test. Hazel and I took her out for doughnuts at Monster's to celebrate."

"Yeah?" Percy's mouth quirks up wistfully. "That's awesome."

"Isn't it, though?" Because he doesn't need to explain it to Percy the same way he hadn't needed to explain it to Hazel, or Katie, just how awesome it is that Holly can do that. For her, letters stay on the paper in their correct order, and that's a trick Nico's never learned. Nico doesn't want to think about what that means, because if he thinks about it, then it's going to turn into hope, and hope is something you never show anyone, not even yourself, because it's too quickly dashed.

They eat -- all Percy made was macaroni, smothered in butter and garlic salt and then shrugging when Nico complains, "is that all you're going to eat?", so he takes takes over, dicing up some tomatoes to add to it, and then it makes a passable pasta. Percy wolfs down three bowls without pause. Mortal food doesn't exist in Tartarus.

"Nothing tastes better than the food you successfully make for yourself," Nico says softly.

"Isn't that the truth," Percy says distractedly, and Nico feels his lips quirk like they've been pulled in his direction with a fishhook. He looks away, out the window, where a pair of sparrows are quarreling with each other on the power line as the afternoon clouds roll in, smearing across the blue of the sky like skid marks.

-

Although Nico readily identifies as a Greek half-blood and thus, as a camper, he never actually spent much time at Camp Half-Blood.

He never became attached to it the way the other kids did, because Camp was the last place he saw Bianca alive, and anywhere else felt safer in comparison to that. He stopped in from time to time, mostly when he needed to fetch something or consult with somebody about Greek things (read: bully until they gave him the answer he wanted) or just to let Mr. D look him over, catalogue him, and say "hm" in a vaguely unimpressed kind of way.

So Nico was never at Camp much, but he's sure that if he was, he would know that any camper's biggest mistake would be to underestimate a daughter of Demeter.

"As you might have noticed," Katie announces grandly, shaking out two packets of stevia sweetener and upending it into her ceramic mug, from which curls of steam rise. "I solved your disappearing problem."

"I did notice," Nico allows, and waits.

She smiles, leaning her hip against her counter and crossing one ankle over the other. The soles of her feet are dark brown, smeared with dirt, and her footprints show clearly in the floor. At her elbow is a pot that, tongue-in-cheek, she's print-screened Hazel's face onto, caught in a perplexed expression. In place of hair, a maidenhair fern sprouts from the top of Hazel's head. She stirs her tea.

Nico and Hazel tolerate the soft chiming of her spoon as it circles around for about four seconds before Hazel bursts out, "Aren't you going to tell us how?"

Clearly milking this for all that it's worth, Katie holds up a hand. "Hey, now," she protests, and gestures to her drink. "Let a girl get some antioxidants first."

They let out a simultaneous, loud, frustrated noise, and she laughs.

"All right, all right." She pushes away from the counter, pushing tendrils of hanging philodendron out of the way to usher them through her living room. Holly's sitting amongst a nest of pillows on the tree-root sofa, with Katie's laptop open across her knees. She chews on the end of her hair, teeth clenching in concentration as she clicks fiercely at whatever game she has up on the screen.

"Holly," Nico says warningly, and she stops chewing on her hair, brushing it away from her mouth without otherwise acknowledging their passage.

Katie leads them around to the back of the house, which due to the sharp incline of the hill deposits them at Nico and Hazel's backdoor. Katie's got a vegetable garden back here, milk crates stacked for a layering effect; almost everything's done with for the season, except the tomato plants, which have grown so large they've reached the eaves of the house and started to curl over. Holly's bike is propped among the tomato stakes.

"Now," says Katie. "It's not a permanent solution. It only works if you're on these premises: I can't do anything to keep you from disappearing when you're at work or out and about, but at least you can relax when you're home and can sleep without worrying about waking up in the Underworld."

As she talks, she kneels down on the uneven earth just past the patio squares. She glances around quickly to make sure none of the neighbors are watching from their windows, and then opens her palms and lifts like she's flipping over a basket of laundry.

The soil shifts, loose particles falling to the side in a way that reminds Nico of grade-B horror movies, except grade-B horror movies kind of make up the stuff of his life, so he isn't at all perturbed when, after a moment, something slimy and white begins to surface from the ground, stretching out across the lawn. It forms a cross-hatch pattern, like a trellis or a large net, and Katie slips a hand under the section closest to the patio squares and tilts it towards them, like she's showing off the delicate pattern of a butterfly wing.

"Are these -- ?" Hazel starts.

"These are the roots of the gum tree," Katie confirms. "It goes under the entire property. Think of it like a spiderweb -- if your little black fly self drops, Nico, it's going to catch you."

Nico crouches down next to her. Now that he's closer, he can see that somebody's apparently taken some kind of glow-in-the-dark pen and written what looks like several large sigils on each root. He can't make out what it says; it looks like Greek in that way that … well, everything looks like Greek to him, except not Greek that rearranges into something he can actually read.

"Holly was a tremendous help," Katie adds.

This catches Nico's attention.

"Holly --"

"Yeah." She glances between him and Hazel and back again. "Guys, you do know that she can do little magics, right? She can move rocks and read Greek. I know you want to extend her childhood as long as possible, but now might be a good time to start teaching her things. Especially you," she adds to Nico. "Between Hazel and me and Percy and Annabeth, I think we can raise a necromancer after you die, but it might be nice if she got some lessons from you first."

"What can I teach her in two weeks?" Nico asks, and whatever comes through in his voice makes Hazel step up to him, setting a hand against his spine the way people touch the rudders of ships, just in case.

"Probably something she already knows." Katie lowers the roots back into the ground and folds the earth over them like she's closing a book. "That she's very smart, and if you can do it with minimal instruction from an adult, so can she. That you love her."

He stands. Hazel's hand slips from his back and he catches it before she can tuck it back into herself. He squeezes it.

"You went to a lot of work," he says, not quite sure if he means it as a statement or a question.

"Yeah, well." Katie stands as well, offering him a rueful smile. "Demeter's my mother. We've kind of had it up to here with Hades stealing away the people we love."

-

The Medea is a beachfront restaurant suspended precariously above the waves, sitting astride a jagged rock accessible only by a rickety rope bridge that connects to the marina. It casts an impressive figure, hulking on the rock like a seabird and visible from all across the harbor. It’s been featured on four different travel blogs, and even got a spot on Food Network once, because simply reaching the place is a daring adventure.

Nico stands on the dock, shoulders hunched against the brisk wind blowing shorewards, before he turns and heads down to the Medea’s underground entrance -- which is also the handicap-accessible entrance, because of course rope bridges aren’t for everybody, the restaurant owners included.

With a small suggestive nudge to the shadows within the locking mechanisms inside the door, Nico lets himself in.

The kitchens are empty, too early for even the sous chefs to be arriving yet, so Nico walks out onto the floor. The front of the restaurant is very cabana-style, with wicker chairs and wide-open windows, the sunlight coming in tangerine-colored with the dawn. The smell of the sea is briny in his nose, and he cuts across the mats to the lone figure sitting at a corner table with his back to the kitchen, folding napkins into the shapes of tropical fish. He doesn’t check, but he’s sure there’s probably a school of hippocampi playing in the waters below, enjoying the morning tide.

The man at the table turns around at the sound of his footsteps, and joy dawns all over his face as immediate as the flicker of a light.

“Nico!” he calls, and starts to push his chair out.

“Don’t get up!” Nico protests, and knowing what will be demanded of him next, preempts it by leaning down into Percy’s full-bodied hug, who laughs in delight and pounds his back, saying, “Why didn’t you warn a guy you were going to come all the way up here for a visit?”

When he pulls back, Percy looks up at him, and his expression turns shrewd.

One eye tracks Nico’s movement to the other side of the table, but the glass one stays still. “You’re feeling my mortality,” he says, not a question. “Been visited recently by a younger version of myself, have you?”

Nico nods, and then can’t find the words he wants.

Percy, as always, finds them for him. “You’re doing just fine. Don't worry about it. I mean, obviously we make it though -- Annabeth’ll be in soon with the morning’s catch, and I’m right here in front of you. Isn’t that proof that no matter what you see us go through in Tartarus, we pull through?”

“Such as it is,” Nico says before he can stop himself.

The corner of Percy’s mouth lifts, and the look he gives Nico is both fond and serious. “I think you’ll find that my life was always cheap and easily given. A few limbs, my mobility -- it seemed like a small price to pay to make my life my own again.

“Nico,” he continues, inexorable, and at the fledging age of ten, Nico imprinted on this man the way Hazel imprinted on him: Percy could speak into the shadows on the slim side of a dime and Nico would hear him. “You’ve always done right by me. Well,” he amends. “Except for that ‘selling me out to Hades’ thing there in the middle, but hey,” he makes a dismissive gesture. “That worked out.”

He pushes his chair back, wheeling it over so that he and Nico faced each other directly.

“Trust me,” Percy tells him, quiet. “Because I trust you.”

“Then can you tell me,” Nico blurts out. “When you and Annabeth broke out of Tartarus -- the last time, for real -- was it -- did we do an exchange? My life for yours?”

Horror yawns across Percy’s face, but he masters it. “I would never,” he says, firm. “Ask you to die for me.”

For one quick flash of a second, Nico kind of wants to kill him for the hypocrisy of that statement alone, but that would defeat the purpose.

“You did know that was an option, right?” he presses, because he’s feeling fragile and he only has two weeks to live and it’s making him vicious. “Kill me, and you could punch my ticket out of Tartarus?”

“We knew,” Percy says, and it’s shocking, how that seems to suck all the air out of the room. “Annabeth pieced that bit together our first month down there. But you’re wrong. It was never an option.”

Nico looks away, fists clenching. He swallows a few times, watching a couple seagulls float lazily above the breakers.

“I guess,” he starts, then has to swallow again. Percy waits. “I guess if I had a choice -- if I could pick the manner of my own death, that’s what I’d pick.” He meets Percy’s eyes then, because when it comes down to it, Nico’s always going to be the one to fling himself headfirst into a grave. “I’d die for you.”

It’s too raw, too much, and even Percy has to look away like Nico had come too close with a scalpel.

“I don’t think your sister would be very happy with me if I allowed that,” he says after a long moment, and Nico doesn’t know if he’s talking about Bianca or Hazel, and he thinks that might be the point.

Then he turns, pivoting his chair neatly, and says over his shoulder as he wheels off across the mats, “Do you want breakfast? I can make blue pancakes. After all, nothing tastes better than the food you successfully make for yourself. Someone said that to me once,” he adds, absently. “Wish I could remember who.”

-

On his way back inland, Nico hits morning traffic (see? This is why he makes a habit of avoiding mortals. And also most forms of transportation that include interactions with mortals,) so by the time he detours past the left turn on Lysmachia Dr. and takes the roundabout to bump into the driveway at 1740 Moneywort Ave, Hazel's already awake, sitting in her armchair with her hair still wrapped up in the bandana she sleeps in.

She's on the phone, and when he comes in and toes his shoes off, she looks up and makes a fast, complicated gesture with her hand that could mean "the enemy sniper is in position, delta bravo eagle five," or more likely means, "Holly's in the kitchen and after sunrise, Mufasa, she's your daughter," and then she tilts the mouthpiece back towards her and says, "What you're describing to me sounds more Eisenhower-era than anything Nico and I grew up with, so no, probably not what you're looking for."

Oh, Nico realizes. She's talking to Jason.

He goes into the kitchen, ruffling Holly's curly head in greeting as he passes her chair.

"Hi," she says. "We wondered if maybe you'd gone to work. You don't have work today, so we were gonna make fun of you when you got back."

"Sorry," Nico replies, amused. "I just went to see Percy."

She nods, disinterested. Percy's cool and all, and there are, like, two of them, and that's kind of interesting, but Percy's also an adult and how interesting are adults, really?

"By the way, I beat your high score in Mythomagic last night."

"You did not," Nico says in an instant, appalled.

Holly's lip curls, smug. "I borrowed Katie's laptop and Mom forgot to start the timer on how long I could play," she explains, and feigns nonchalance as she digs into her cereal with her spoon. "So I took Zeus off the throne and replaced him with Artemis. What does 'womanizer' mean?"

"It means Zeus," Nico answers absently. Then, "What do you mean, you took Zeus off the throne? I haven't even gotten to the throne room and I've been playing Mythomagic since I was ten." The closest Nico has ever come to Zeus's throne room is that time he punched Jason Grace in the face for Piper's benefit and almost got struck by lightning. "I've been playing since it was actual physical cards. Cards you had to physically collect. We had boards! And little collectible figurines! You had to calculate EXP by hand!"

She just looks at him.

"… and none of that means anything to you," Nico finishes.

He thinks about it, and then with great solemnity, reaches across the table to offer her his fist to bump.

"Well done, little shrub."

She beams back at him, her smile lifting all the way through her, so that she half-rises out of her chair with the force of it. She bumps him back gleefully.

"Nico?" Hazel pokes her head around the doorframe, the cord from the phone snaking out behind her. "How much would you pay for glass Mason jars, circa 1941?"

"As mantlepiece decorations?" She nods. "Probably not more than $5 a piece. They'll work, but if he's going for full on vintage, he's probably going to need a showier piece than that."

She nods, and relays the information.

Jason Grace, being young and fit and having no official family to hold him accountable, was snatched up by the American government almost as soon as he turned eighteen and then unobtrusively disappeared. Annabeth jokes that he's become one of those ubiquitous government goons that always die first in action movies, which Jason insists really isn't much different from what he did for the gods.

Holly solemnly calls him an agent of SHIELD.

In actuality, he travels across the country (and sometimes around the globe) as a glorified interior designer, setting up overnight living arrangements for undercover agents and longterm officials who don't have the time or freedom to construct their own believable spaces, Macgyvering together living spaces out of paper clips, fake family portraits, and whatever he can scrounge out of highway antique shops. Nico assumes he's very good at his job: Jason's always been the kind of person you want on your side. It used to be because he was, you know, one of the prophecy seven and a pretty warlike dude in that way that Romans really, really respect. Now it's probably because otherwise, he'd buy you a collection of severed heads from the early 90's run of Cabbage Patch Dolls.

He calls Nico and Hazel when he needs them to authenticate antiques, being antiques themselves: are these worth their price tag? Would these stand up to an enthusiast's inspection?

Well, actually, he calls Hazel.

Nobody really ever calls Nico.

Nico holds grudges. And there's always going to be some part of him that looks at Jason and thinks, you're a son of Zeus and the only reason I'm in play on this cosmic Mythomagic board is because Zeus dropped a building on my mother, and I can't even take it out on you because you actually were spawned by Zeus's freaky alter-ego. So yeah, Jason doesn't talk to him much.

(To be honest, it's probably because of the punching thing.)

When people break up, it tends to crack a fissure right through their friends, whether they mean to or not. Jason and Piper didn't work out -- because not everybody can be Percy and Annabeth -- and afterwards, Hazel wound up siding with Piper, and since Nico went wherever Hazel went, he did, too.

Leo tried to be more diplomatic about it.

"Trust me," he said, leaning across the counter at Nico's work and tapping his finger on the glass over the scratch cards. "I've known Piper longer than anyone alive, except maybe her dad, and I mean, I'm sad for her and all, like, I wanted them to succeed because that would make them happy, but Jason is a straight-up jock and the only cajones he has are the kind that hang from the back of a truck." He contemplated that statement and nodded, satisfied. "Yes, tell her that."

"I'm not telling her that," Nico had protested. "No, Leo, I'm not talking to Piper about Jason's balls. Our friendship is not at that point."

"Oh, come on!"

So, no, Piper doesn't talk to him much, either.

-

After she hangs up with Jason, Hazel goes to take a shower, because she usually saves treating her hair on the weekends when she has more time, and when Nico next goes into the bedroom to hunt for a spare bike chain for Holly in the thing-a-gummy box underneath the bed, she's sitting there at the foot of it, toweling at her head.

She watches him rummage for a moment, and then she says, "Nico."

And something in her voice, something in the way she says it, deep and serious like someone putting a name to a country they haven't seen in years, makes Nico put the box down and cross to her side of the bed as if summoned from the ground like bones.

She reaches for his hand, and Nico grabs hold.

"Can you promise me something?" she starts, and he's already nodding before she's even finished with the question.

"I'll try," he allows.

Hazel bites at her lip, towel on her lap and damp patches showing through her shirt from the shower. This close, the smell of her shampoo is overwhelming; Nico tries not to lean into it, watching her eyes tick around the room, plainly searching for the right words.

Finally, she begins, halting, "When -- when you go up for judgment," and his fingers tighten over hers compulsively. Nico di Angelo has two weeks to live. "Promise me you'll ask them for reincarnation."

"What, you don't think that after all I've done for them, they won't just give me a one-way ticket to the Elysian Fields and be done with it?" he mock-pouts. "I'm insulted."

Her eyes crinkle up seemingly against her will, and Nico feels so earth-shatteringly glad. See? Look at that. I made Hazel smile, he thinks proudly, to anyone it might concern. Life's not so bad when you can make Hazel smile.

"Promise me," she says again, gripping him tightly. "Beg, plead, bargain with whatever you have to -- just get a reincarnation. Just get yourself back here, somehow, and I will find you, wherever you are, wherever you wind up. I'll find you. I'll --"

It's easy, then, to drop to the floor between her knees, gathering her up into a tight hug that's more like a beating, hard and bending, and her arms go around his neck the way sailors will throw anchors into a dark and fathomless sea.

"That might be a little hard," he points out, low. "I could wind up anywhere, as anyone."

"I'd still find you," she says against his ear. "My bones would know you anywhere. We're made of the same earth."

Never in a million years would he have idea what he could say to that, and eventually, they let go. Nico gets up and sinks onto the bedspread beside her. The thing-a-gummy box dips towards them, and he catches it before it can tumble to the carpet. She picks at the washing instruction tag on her towel. Their bedroom is painted a bright, summery yellow like the yolk of an egg, and the midmorning sun comes through the windows at such an angle that it casts shade at a slant, shallow pools for Nico to dip his fingers in, always in reach. The wind catches at the branches of the gum tree outside, changing the geography of the shadows within and sending them dancing. Nico's lived in this room longer than he's ever lived anywhere in his entire life.

"Do you remember," Hazel says suddenly. "What it was like in the beginning? That first year with Holly?"

"Oh, gods," Nico mutters, and she laughs, because that about sums it up. "I'm still amazed we didn't kill her. How did we not kill her? I think everything we could possibly get wrong, we got wrong at least once --"

"Do you remember, when she was … what, six months, and she got her head stuck in --"

"I really try not to," Nico interrupts her. He's pretty sure that out of everything he's ever done in his entire life, it will probably be that incident that he's going to have to explain in front of the three judges when he dies. He can already picture the way Shakespeare will fold his hands across his podium and ask, and how exactly did the squid become involved in all this? "Mostly I remember not having the faintest clue what to do. Here I was, with this brand-new baby and absolutely no supplies, and I'd somehow gotten my sister mixed up in --"

"You did not. You disappeared. I came to find you. I found you with Holly and I stayed. I don't know how many times I have to tell you it was that simple."

"-- in it and we were being hunted all the time."

"Yes, well, I hear the Underworld gets pretty upset when you steal something that belongs to it," Hazel says, heavy on the irony.

"She wasn't dead!" Nico protests. "Why does nobody believe me when I tell them this? I didn't just suddenly get a craving one morning and decided to steal a baby out of Charon's boat! She was alive. I brought her back to the mortal world where she belonged. And … and …" he falters. He's lying to himself: he knows exactly why the Underworld has a problem with the way he cradled baby Holly in his arms and said, she's mine, she's mine, I am never letting her go and you're never getting her back.

Hazel doesn't say anything for a long moment.

Then she leans her damp head against his shoulder and murmurs, very quietly, "I'm so glad I got to meet her."

"Me too," he answers, and feels her smile.

-

On Monday, Nico goes to pick Hazel up from work at five like he usually does. This time she's consulting at a fancy puppy boutique on the other side of the civic center that caters mostly to the super-rich and the pets they pamper. They sit in rush hour traffic and complain about how much they hate talk radio, getting more enthusiastic about it as they go. Nothing brings people together faster than mutual dislike of a third party.

When they turn onto the hill at Moneywort Ave, they stop mid-sentence, because something is very wrong.

Holly's waiting for them, standing out in the driveway. Behind her, the door to Katie's apartment hangs open, the "Ring Bell: If No One Answers, Pull Weeds" sign swinging on its hook. She rushes up to their car as soon as it bumps over the uneven pavement, one hand on the driver's side door even before Nico can get the car turned off.

"What?" he goes, taking his foot off the brake and trying to untangle himself from his seatbelt at the same time; Hazel reaches over and slams the car into park before they crunch straight through their stairwell. "What is it?"

"It's -- it's -- Katie," Holly sobs, fisting her hands in Nico's sleeve. "You left to get Mom and I went downstairs like I'm supposed to and I found her --"

Inside, everything's dark and quiet -- not even the UV lamps for Katie's orchids are on, and Nico's pretty sure those were set on an automatic timer. Holly leads them straight through the back, to Katie's bedroom.

"Oh, di immortales," Hazel swears from behind him.

"What's happening to her?" Holly says at the same time, sounding small and very frightened.

She's there, on the ground, neatly spread out on her back like all she'd done was lay down to get a tan. Her hair's gone the color of soil, moldy and damp, and her feet and hands have already sunk out of view, buried in the earth of her bedroom floor. Roots grow forth, still marked with the sigils of capture and protection, wrapped around her chest like a straitjacket. Moss covers the hollows of her body; her collarbones and eye sockets, the divot between her lips.

Nico glances back over his shoulder. In the half-light, he can see that Hazel's gone very pale, her mouth moving soundlessly as she works through the facts in front of her; that this has nothing to do with Gaea, it doesn't, but Hazel's seen the earth devour too many people for it not to be her first, immediate, frightened conclusion.

"You think we can do this?" he asks her, quiet.

She tilts her head, listening. Then she rolls up the sleeves of her suit jacket, stepping out of her ballet flats so that the soil seeps through her nylons as she presses her heels into the ground.

"We got this," she says.

"Holly, stand back," Nico warns, and she does one better than that, clambering up onto Katie's bed so that her feet aren't touching the ground at all. She isn't crying anymore; of course she isn't, her mom and dad are here. They were gone and now they're back and that's what good parents do, right? They fix things.

He adjusts his stance and reaches out. He senses Hazel, now standing at his elbow -- he can feel the uprush of power spiraling through her body because it's so similar to his own. Hades and Pluto might wear different faces, but they come from one legend, and Hazel's right: his bones would know hers anywhere, they're made from the same material. Nico and Hazel could crack fissures and move continents -- they're earthshakers, and it's probably why they've always gotten along so well with the Demeter cabin, hostilities regarding the whole Persephone thing notwithstanding.

He feels her reach back in that space between the physical and the shadow, and then they move in synchrony, hands outstretching to grab the earth and rip it apart.

The ground shakes and ruptures, Holly squeaks, and the roots binding Katie shred apart like paper.

As soon as they break, Katie comes awake with a gasp like she's surfacing from somewhere fathomless and deep. Her hands starfish out, and Nico and Hazel each grab one, hauling her upright. Loose dirt trembles off of her like sands tumbling from an hourglass, and with the finality of slamming a coffin lid closed, Nico and Hazel pack the earth behind her, shoving it deep down into the dark.

All in all, it takes about thirty seconds.

Between them, Katie tips, knees buckling, mumbling even as they catch her, supporting her weight between them, "woah, woah, dizzy, black spots, what just happened?" and Nico glances over the top of her head and says, "I forgot how well we worked together."

Hazel replies, "We haven't had to, knock on wood," and Holly scoots out of the way as they lower Katie onto the bedspread.

"Holly, can you --" Nico starts, but she's already moving, hopping down and hurrying out of the room. She returns with water, filled too full in a double-walled thermos with a cheery ocean theme from Whole Foods, and a white Vidalia onion, leftover from when they kept some on hand for Nico after one of his spells. They're very grounding, onions.

Katie drinks the water and bites gratefully into the onion, grimacing as the sharpness of it hits her empty stomach, making it cramp.

"Does she have the disappearing sickness, too?" Holly asks worriedly.

"I think," Hazel spreads her toes out along the fissure where Katie'd been laying, her nylon stockings smeared with dirt. She considers. "I think Katie was overexerting herself. She was trying to work a spell too big for her."

"Sorry," says Katie around a mouthful of onion, without sounding very sorry at all. "I'm possessive."

"Katie --" Nico starts, because he isn't worth this.

She shrugs with a fierce jerk of her shoulders, signaling that line of conversation is over and it hasn't even started, and then she pats the bedspread beside her. Holly immediately crawls over, letting Katie bundle her against her side, pressing her close in reassurance.

"Hey, little shrub," she says gently, rubbing her cheek against the top of Holly's curly head. "Look, I'm all right. I'm sorry if I scared you."

"It's okay," Holly murmurs, even though it clearly isn't.

-

Percy makes a point of asking after Holly, every single time.

It doesn't matter how hungry, how tired, how broken and serrated he is when he escapes Tartarus again, he always asks. Even the very first time Nico saw him, before he knew what was going on -- this suddenly seventeen-year-old Percy with the monster-colored eyes standing in aisle five between the laundry detergent and the dish soap, the first words out of his mouth were, "Oh, hey, Nico, there you are, I need to borrow your washing machine if you've got a moment. How's Holly doing?"

Another time, as they watch Holly on her stomach on the carpet, clicking around on Katie's laptop at some interactive program that helped her learn the genus order of reptiles while rain drums steadily against the eaves, he asks, "Does she know?"

Nico doesn't have to ask what he means.

"She knows she's adopted, so to speak," he says mildly. "We're not yet at the age where it's going to cause her any existential problems. As for her being a half-blood, well," he shrugs.

"How do you know she's a half-blood this time?"

"She has to be," Nico says, though this was before Katie spilled the beans on Holly's minor displays of power. "There's no other explanation. When her mother died, she went with her to the Underworld, unconsciously. Mortals can't do that."

"There are so many things she is already," Hazel comments quietly, startling them both; they hadn't realized she'd been listening. Cajun music plays lowly from the other room, a soft beat Nico's tapping his foot to without realizing it. "There's still a lot of Holly left for us to meet. We'll worry about the half-blood part when we get to it."

Monday turns out spectacularly, one of those clear-skied September days that feels like a second coming of spring, a crisp, cooling reminder that seasons come and go and this one's almost over, did anyone notice? Nico drives to pick Holly up from school with the windows down, and his eyes go dry and scratchy because he keeps refusing to blink them, wanting to see everything at once; every toss of the green branches in the breeze, the sunlight winking off the storefronts downtown, the shocking blue of the late-summer sky (that color will not exist in the Underworld, Nico needs to memorize it now,) the sight of children in their short sleeves and open-toed sandals racing across the school grounds. It's almost paralyzing, the thought that this is the last time he'll ever see these things.

Holly's on the steps, backpack dragging low against the backs of her knees and her hair unraveled from the plait Nico had wrestled it into.

When she sees Nico, she waves good-bye to the older student she'd been talking to, taking the steps in a long leap. The girl tucks her books against her chest, watching her go; her pigeon toes point towards each other, her uniform skirt hanging to mid-shin, too long for her short frame and fitting horribly. The school had been a Catholic one before a fire in 1979 gutted it, and they tore the skeleton of it down afterwards to build a district school instead, one that would be up-to-date with the fire safety codes. A memorial plaque hunkers atop the steps, copper plating oxidizing in the weather.

Holly clambers into the passenger seat, and Nico glances again at the ghost atop the steps and says, "Holly, do you know that that girl's dead?"

In the process of tucking her backpack into the footwell, she stills and looks at him cautiously, reacting both to his tone and the words themselves, the way children do.

"Yes," she says, yanking the door shut behind her. "But she's not mad about it or anything. I made sure to ask," she justifies.

Nico pulls away from the curb, keeping one eye on his mirrors, watching the afternoon sun crest the side of the building and hit the schoolgirl, smudging her away until she goes completely translucent -- an unsure impression of movement, like trying to squint into the light of a single streetlamp to see if there's rain falling.

"Can you always tell?" he asks, breaking away from the sight and craning his neck to check for oncoming traffic as he leaves the school parking lot. He trusts the shadows under the car to let him know if any living children are about to get underfoot. "If the person you're talking to is dead?"

"Sometimes, if they're wearing something really strange," Holly answers. Nico nods; that's usually his first indication, as well. "But sometimes it's harder, and I forget and say hello and they have to put their finger to their lips," she demonstrates. "To remind me that I'm with other people, who don't see them like I can."

There are six ghosts in town that Nico knows of -- no, seven, he corrects himself, remembering the man with the harmonica sitting outside the mechanic's shop, the one that hadn't realized he was dead yet.

He tries to be friendly with all of them. Pride bubbles momentarily in his chest, because it seems like Holly's following in his footsteps.

"How come they're stuck?" she wants to know, stretching forward in her seat with the enthusiasm of finally having the permission to talk about this, belt pulling taut across her chest. "Shouldn't they go straight to the Underworld?"

"They should," he stresses. People slip through the cracks in every bureaucracy, death included. His dad never had any patience for the games, scandals, and intrigues that the rest of Mount Olympus was so famous for because he was constantly, constantly kept busy, trying to keep the Underworld more-or-less organized, leaving it to his minions to clean up on the surface world. Nico cleared the malevolent ghosts out of town when he and Hazel moved into the upper story at 1740 Moneywort Ave, leaving only the strays who didn't mind their predicaments so much, and who liked Holly. Nico's fond of people who like Holly, even when those people are deceased.

He props his elbow on the window. "A lot of them can only materialize in a certain place. For your friend --"

"Betsy," Holly supplies.

"For Betsy, it's the place where she died. It isn't always so -- and for some ghosts, the only place they can appear has nothing to do with their lives at all."

"And some appear in a place only when a certain person is there," she finishes for him.

"Right."

"Do you have any dead friends?" she asks curiously.

"A couple," says Nico, careful. "Have you seen me talking to people that your mom can't see?"

She thinks about it. Then her eyes widen, September sun catching in the dark color of them. "Oh."

That afternoon, he takes her to the park, because it's that kind of day. Clearly intrigued by this change in routine, she leaves her bag in the car and trails after him, past the picnic tables and the busy barbecues, the neighborhood leagues in their mismatched jerseys fighting on the muddy pitch, out past where even the jogging path curves down safely towards the stream. They hike uphill through the trees instead, sunlight filtering through the boughs above them, until the manicured park grass gives way to brambly undergrowth and the sound of the town echoes like the faraway murmuring of a TV turned low in another room.

Nico listens; the shadows glancing off the trees, the dark undersides of last fall's leaves, the little overturned bones in the earth, until he finds a good spot and comes to a halt.

She stops, too, eyes roving from him up the tree beside him and back to him. She waits.

"I'm going to show you something," he tells her. "And I want you to see if you can do it too, okay?"

She nods.

He crouches down, a movement she immediately mimics with an expression on her face, like, okay, so far so good. He chuckles at her, folding his hands over the dirt like a supplicant and then opening them like he's cracking the spine of a book for the first time.

"Oh!" gasps out of Holly with the suddenness of a stone thrown into a pool, as a small, decimated nest materializes out of the ground, loose particles of soil shivering off of it.

"Watch," murmurs Nico, touching each small collection of bones like he's reading the braille on every skeleton.

Power vibrates inside of him, like a bee's nest that's been shook up, a pop bottle turned entirely to fizz. Nico's never been able to quite describe what it feels like, because he's lived with it almost his whole life, but the best he's been able to come up with is that feeling power like that, using power like that, feels a lot like that the first time you listen to a song that just knocks you out, lays you flat, leaves you feeling a little wrong-sized in your own skin. Music does that. It's a lot like magic, in that regard.

Slowly, with his power extended to her -- he has no idea if she can sense it, the way he and Hazel have always been able to sense each other's, or if she'd recognize it if she does -- he knits together the first baby bird.

"Here," he says when he's done; in the cradle of his palms, the tiny skeleton squeaks, trembles, and rights itself with an ungainly flop. Its bleached-white beak parts, coughing out another high sound.

Holly is completely enthralled.

Shoving her messy hair out of the way with the flats of her hands, she leans in close, her eyes very wide and very bright.

"Can I do that?" she murmurs, holding out a fingertip towards it. The corpse of the baby bird nips at it, questioning.

"I think you can," Nico replies, feeling so achingly fond of her that he's almost sore with it, like he's been beaten and bullied, all the soft places inside his chest bruised with feeling. "I think you're a necromancer, like me."

She cuts him a sharp look, a closing steel trap of a glance, biting off the word he just gave her -- a name for everything inside of her that had never been named before.

"Will I be able to do this --" she gestures. "With everything dead?"

"Start small," he warns her. "Baby birds. Mice. Spiders in the sink. You can pull it like a muscle, trying to do too much at once, and it hurts -- how do you think I got all this grey hair?" he tugs on it to make a point, and she snorts. "They wear out eventually, because no magic is permanent, but the closer you can match the size of the bones to the soul you pull inside of it, the longer it will last."

"So this …"

The baby bird croaks.

"A frog," Nico admits. "It was the closest soul I could find. But you'd be surprised, how big souls can be sometimes, crammed into tiny bodies."

Holly watches the reanimated skeleton in Nico's hands, then glances at the scattered bones still left in the nest.

"I want to try," she says determinedly.

Every day of that week, and every day of the next, Nico takes her out to the park after school and they practice raising the little dead until they have to leave to go pick up Hazel. The second week, they graduate to the pet cemetery, and Nico sits on the low fence surrounding the pound and the connected plot of oft-overturned earth and watches Holly flash in between memorial stones, chased by the small bones of puppies, the yellowed winking of birds, grinned at with the permanent Chesire grins of dead cats.

She shrieks with laughter when one catches the hem of her jeans in its jaws, and Nico loves her with all his heart.

-

"How come," Percy asks, sitting on the toilet seat and letting Nico dab at the deep cuts on his chest with antiseptic. "Every single time we think we've found another way out of Tartarus, we always appear where you are?"

"What do you mean?" Nico hedges, folding up the alcoholic wipe and lobbing it towards the trash. It's the dead of night -- Holly's asleep, and Hazel's boiling water for herbal tea in the kitchen.

He knows exactly what Percy means, he just doesn't want Percy to think about it.

"Annabeth and I -- we get that time runs differently in Tartarus, and that's why whenever we escape, we come out fifteen years in the future. But what we don't understand is the location. When, like, say, Medusa comes back, she could appear anywhere in the country, but I've never come out further than a hundred yards from you, not once, and it's the same with Annabeth and Hazel." He studies the top of Nico's head, bent close to his skin; the weight of his gaze is a physical thing. "Why?"

Because you could punch our tickets if you wanted to, Nico thinks. That's one way to get out of Tartarus permanently; make an exchange, send us there instead.

He peels back the plastic packaging on one of those heavy pad band-aids.

Technically, we should be there already. Hazel's already died once, and I … He presses the band-aid down, sealing it on, and darts a look up at Percy's face, and the quiet, almost peaceful expression there, like he isn't really concerned what the answer is or how badly he's injured, he's just happy for the break. I'm the one that let you fall.

"Tea's ready," Hazel says quietly, appearing in the doorway. "Um, it's one of Katie's herbal blends, so. It's probably a little strong."

"That's fine, I'll take anything," Percy says. "Not a lot of food in Tartarus."

Nico watches him curl his hands around the mug she passes over, and thinks, The monster in you knows it -- it's in the way your eyes follow me sometimes.

-

Annabeth comes out a few days later, and whatever got Percy must have gotten her too, because the left side of her face is swollen, red, and her lip's busted, flecking blood down to the collar of her shirt. She frightens the neighbor, appearing out of nowhere in the shadow of the gum tree, not far from where she was doing yoga among her silent audience of nativity figures. She brings over an ice pack, and Nico, Hazel, and Annabeth all thank her, yes, yes, we'll be fine, no, we don't need to call the police, until she leaves and they can talk about what really happened.

"Nothing's broken," Nico tells her. He can feel the shape of her skeleton under her skin, and the ache in her bones makes his echo in the phantom, but he can't sense a fracture anywhere. "You'll have a pretty impressive bruise, though."

"Thanks," she says absently. "Is Percy --"

"You missed him by a couple days, he's fine," Hazel assures her, low and soothing.

"Okay, cool," she stands, brushing the mud on her hands off on her jeans. It doesn't seem to help, because they're just as dirty. "His injuries didn't look that bad, but sometimes it's hard to tell. And you knows how guys are such babies about pain."

Elsewhere in the house, they hear the front door open and Holly's excited footsteps running through to the kitchen. She runs right back out again; Nico and Hazel exchange an amused look.

"Hey," Annabeth turns her grey eyes on them with the intensity of a hunting owl. "Can I ask one of you guys for a favor?"

"Yeah, sure," Hazel answers for them both, tucking the first aid kit away under the bathroom sink.

"Can one of you drive me up to Whittemore? I think it's only forty-five minutes away from here, right? And anyway, they've got that library that claims it's got the largest collection of ancient Greek and Roman source texts outside of the Mediterranean. I wanted to use one of my stints topside to go take a look, I think there might be something there that can help Percy and I get an answer on how to escape."

He looks at Hazel. "Don't you --"

"Yeah, Latoya's coming to pick me up at five. I don't know how late it's supposed to run -- last month, we were done by eight, but we changed computer systems, remember, so I think we have to sit through a FAQ about that."

"I'll do it, then," he turns back to Annabeth. "But I reserve the right to shoot you in the face if you Hulk out and try to eat me."

"Deal," she looks away from them at last, and Nico suppresses a shiver. It doesn't matter how often he sees her younger version, it's never going to stop being weird; he'd forgotten what her eyes looked like.

In the car, he has to show her how to fasten her seatbelt, apologizing, "Sorry, the car's Hazel's, and it's, like, forever old."

"You're forgetting, I think, that what's 'forever old' to you is still in my future. I've never seen seatbelts like this. What do I --"

"Well, here -- oh, there, you got it."

They sit in the driveway for another moment, the sun beating down on them from above and somebody laboring up the hill on a bicycle behind them, while Nico studies the directions they wrote down, each letter written and then shaded heavily at the bottom so create a weighted look, so they don't dance so much on the page.

She huffs a laugh suddenly, leaning back in the passenger seat, and when he glances over at her, her body language is removed, closed off.

"Look at me, turning to Nico di Angelo for help. Like he's a grown-up. I … I need a moment to let the weirdness pass."

Nico dutifully gives her a moment.

She looks at him again with those bird-of-prey eyes, longer and more thoughtful. "You are, you know. An adult. How did that happen?"

"Same way it happens to anybody else, Annabeth." He tosses the directions onto the dashboard, suddenly feeling very, very tired. "Somebody needed me to be one."

As if on cue, a delighted shriek sounds out from the yard, and the next moment, Holly appears at the window, where she stops and dances from foot-to-foot with excitement. Smiling, Nico rolls it down for her, and she pokes her head in to say, "Hi, Dad, hi, Annabeth, look, look, isn't she gorgeous?"

"She" is a small, black snake, probably driven out of its burrow by Katie's reconstruction, which Holly has captured with a paper plate.

"Very cool," Annabeth says approvingly.

"Do you know what kind of snake it is?" Nico asks her.

She opens her mouth, and then frowns, glancing down again. The snake pokes its head over the edge of the plate, tongue tasting at the air, and seems to decide further investigation isn't worth it, because it curls back around. They all watch the shift of the muscles on its underbelly.

"No," Holly reluctantly admits.

"Tell you what. How about you take a picture of it, and then you and Katie can look it up together later this evening, all right? That way, you can let it go right now, so that it can get on with its day."

"I suppose." Very carefully, she turns around and walks slowly back towards the house.

The sun's in their eyes for most of the drive, and Nico has to stretch his neck for the sun visor to do him any good; Annabeth gives up, pulling at her seatbelt so she can turn around to face Nico. She talks -- mostly in that way that's just talking to herself while Nico happens to be in the general vicinity -- about her and Percy's latest theories on how to get out of Tartarus and stay out, for good, and what exactly she's hoping to find by making one dyslexic adult and one dyslexic kid-turned-monster take a trip to the library.

Nico, of course, can neither confirm nor deny anything she runs past him, and eventually she gets so frustrated that she shouts, "Fine! Be that way, maybe next time we'll just kill you and be done with it!"

They don't say anything for the next five miles.

Nico thinks about the way Percy sat in his wheelchair in the middle of his thriving restaurant and said, Annabeth figured it out our first month down there. But you're wrong, it was never an option. He shifts his grip on the steering wheel, uncomfortable. Between them, the radio plays something middling from the current top 40; a piece by one of Apollo's daughters, if he's not mistaken, the way Apollo's daughters always get hit songs before the world decides that's enough, let's not give teenage girls too much power.

He glances at Annabeth sidelong. She's pulled a stack of papers out of the glove compartment, idly glancing through them, her profile hard and sharp. From this angle, her bruised cheek looks horrible, her split lip black. She and Percy spent two years in Tartarus before they came out roughly a month after they went in. All that time spent searching for a solution that wasn't, Let's make Nico and Hazel switch places with us.

"What's this?" she asks suddenly.

He steals another glance. She has a small sheet of paper in hand, turned towards him. He squints at it; the writing is small and cramped, and --

"Oh," he says. "Oh, crap on Ganymede's dish, I completely forgot. I have to pay that ticket."

It's the one from his car accident, the one he and Holly were in right before he learned of his death sentence, and, you know, somehow it had completely slipped his mind.

She glances at it again, distractedly. "What?" she goes. And, "What, no, not that. You married her?"

He is completely confused for the span of about ten seconds, before he remembers: the issuing officer had made a note off to the side on the ticket, highlighting that Nico di Angelo and Hazel Levesque were married and covered under the same insurance despite having different last names.

"Yes?" he goes, blinking some. He'd thought Annabeth knew this. They live together. Holly calls them Mom and Dad. Granted, the younger versions of Percy and Annabeth might be a little preoccupied and oblivious, but surely they hadn't managed to miss that small little detail? Besides, they'd always been really chill about Nico and Hazel faking marriage in order to create a hypothetically stable space for Holly to grow up in.

Although, they'd been chill because they already knew it was going to happen.

They knew it was going to happen because Annabeth's finding out right now.

"You married her?!" she yells again, volume climbing, and there's a note to it that strikes through Nico as hot as if his insides had been coated in phosphorus and she'd lit a match. "You married Hazel?"

The urge to say "yes!" flares through him, defiant and proud, because they've been married for eight years and godsdamn, nobody's died or gotten eaten and Holly's turned out all right so far, and if you don't think that's the tightest shit ever, you can get out of Nico's face.

But he swallows it down. He's surprised at how mild his voice comes out sounding when he says, "Annabeth, if you want to get technical, Percy's your uncle."

"That's not --"

"Correct me if I'm wrong, but you stick your tongue in his face pretty regularly."

She makes a frustrated noise. "You know that's not -- Nico, you don't date inside your own cabin, you just don't!"

"Hazel's from the Roman camp," Nico points out.

"Oh my gods," she gets out, like she cannot fathom why Nico's being so difficult about this, like he's deliberately missing her point. Which he totally is, because it's a little late to make a fuss about this. "Don't you get it? That's like saying there'd be nothing wrong if Jason and Thalia got married."

"Well, no, that'd be wrong because Thalia did that whole 'I pledge to be celibate because boys are gross' thing and also I think Jason's got that weird boner for Uncle Sam, you know?"

"Stop that!" Annabeth twists her whole body around to face him now, straining against her seatbelt. "Nico, she's your sister! You call her your sister! She calls you her brother! You don't marry your sister!"

And at that, Nico brakes and swerves onto the highway shoulder. He punches the emergency flashers as soon as the car judders to a stop, the sudden absence of the sound of wheels on asphalt deafeningly obvious. It won't matter if anybody passing them turns around to look: they won't see anything, because Annabeth's a monster and monsters are shrouded in Mist.

She waits, her hands braced on the dashboard and the seat back, tension wire-thin through her body like she's the one afraid of him.

He has the gun. He has the celestial bronze bullet. He could, if he wanted.

"The only thing I have ever wanted," he says, as quiet as gravedirt, as quiet as funerals. "Is a family. The only thing I have ever wanted is to give my sister a family. Safety. Security. Two parents. Everything we never had. I have done that. That is something Hazel and I created, together. And if anybody, anybody, tries to take that away from us or somehow suggest that we don't deserve it, after everything we've done --"

As his voice gathers force, Nico feels the ground react too, trembling beneath the car; pebbles levitate to window level, and darkness gathers around him, shadows thickening like they're swelling with rage. He can feel it inking into his eyes.

"-- I will bury them," he promises, in a voice like an earthquake, like the desolate collapsing of caves.

-

Leo tries to convince him that what he really wants to do on his last night on earth is set off fireworks, because if he's going to go out, he better go out with a bang.

"Like, literally."

"Leo …"

"No, man, but really. If you're going to die, don't you want your daughter to remember how fun you are?"

"By setting off fireworks inside city limits and then falling over dead? Yeah, no, we're going to permanently scar her for fireworks for the rest of her life."

He spreads his hands. "Hey, man, if you change your mind, I know a guy who sells them cheap out of a tent on the highway. They're legit --"

"Leo."

"-- trust me, I'm a son of Hephaestus, I know shoddily-made explosives when I see them and these aren't it. They are def something you gotta experience before you kick it."

"You don't know a guy. You can't possibly know a guy."

"Is that what you're choosing to focus on from all of that? I think it's a great plan."

"Your great plan is going to wind up with somebody getting arrested."

"Well, if it does, it won't be you, because you'll be --" he crosses his eyes and sticks his tongue out of the side of his mouth, pantomiming dead.

Nico finishes cataloging inventory and starts back up the aisle towards the front counter, drumming his clipboard against his thigh. Outside, on the street, a bus whines to a halt against the curb, and Nico cranes his neck to get a look out the window. It pulls away again without letting Hazel off, and he sinks back onto his heels, checking the clock. It's her lunch hour. Is she coming today? He hopes she is -- there's plenty of day-old sandwich fixings he's just going to need to toss, anyway.

Leo makes a rude noise from behind him. "You're pathetic," he says, with great affection.

He slinks back behind the counter. "And who are you going to tell?"

Leo, of course, knows exactly what's bothering him. "Oh, bro, pero, she loves you crazy loco too. You two are that stupid-in-love couple that still eat lunch together, almost a decade into your marriage. I don't know what else to tell you."

Nico tosses him an amused look, ignoring the flutter of feeling that licks at the bottom of his heart, like he'd brought it too close to an open flame. "And you're basing this relationship advice on …"

"Fifteen years of being an expert in the language of ladies," he replies, shoving his hair back off his forehead in a supposedly suave gesture.

Nico snorts. "An expert in what now? You've been dead for fifteen years."

Leo just shrugs a shoulder at him, like, touche. The noontime sun comes pouring in through the window, highlighting the half-price loaves of bread on the end display and shining straight through Leo's body as clear as if he was made of glass. "Maybe I just want to say thanks," he says. "For being my friend all these years of my afterlife. See you around, bro." And in the space of a single blink, Leo fades from view entirely, leaving nothing in his place but sunshine and the smell of burning oil.

-

The day before he dies, the very last night Nico di Angelo gets to spend on earth, Katie comes up and they eat waffles and cereal out of coffee mugs for dinner, and spend the rest of the night on the carpet in the front room, playing Mythomagic the long way, on a board that Hazel found tucked away in storage ("I knew there was no way you got rid of it," she laughed at him, shoving his gleeful face out of her way,) while Holly complains loudly about how inefficient it is. She plays Artemis as she always does, and sweeps the board of all the other Olympians.

After Katie leaves, they get ready for bed, and Holly piles into Nico and Hazel's blankets with them. They wrap the comforter around them, all of them fighting for the warmest leg room and the least amount of bony elbows, and then Holly settles her weight against the headboard and reads to them out of the book she has to read for school. Anne of Green Gables seems a bit dense for the third grade, but Holly copes with it just fine, words lining up for her in their proper order, and Nico and Hazel listen to her steady voice. It's a strange feeling, both pride and jealousy at once, to listen to your child be better at something than you are.

They fall asleep like that; Nico on one side of the bed, Hazel on the other, Holly between them.

When Nico wakes briefly in the middle of the night, the light's still on, Holly's slumped against her mother's shoulder, and the book is jack-knifed around her hand. He removes it, turns off the light, and smooths her hair down.

The twenty-first day, the last day of Nico's life, progresses much like any of the others did. Hazel sticks close by, not quite hovering but clearly nervous, and Nico thinks about trying to reassure her, but he's too anxious for it to do much good, probably. He keeps seeing the Fates in his mind's eye, their moody mumbling and shuffling around on their rock and the easy way they complain like they're hoping to medal in it like an Olympic sport, and wonders when they're going to pull his string taut and cut it, as dispassionately as if he's anybody else.

It's amazing, how many things can kill you when you're thinking to look for them.

Morning progresses into afternoon, afternoon into evening, and as the sun sets, they decide to eat dinner outside on the patio with all of Katie's plants and the shadow of the gum tree. It looks like Nico's going to get a chance to set off those fireworks after all.

Holly, of course, is thrilled.

"It's not even 4th of July!" she shrieks, running around the packages and inspecting them, mouthing the warnings to herself.

Katie comes out to join them ("if you're going to do this, then somebody better provide adult supervision," she remarks dryly, and Nico deadpans back at her, "let me know when they get here,") and they're in the middle of trying to decide what they want to cook up for dinner when a taxi pulls up outside. Its engine is old and doesn't tolerate the hill very well; its brakes squeal.

They don't think anything of it, until a familiar voice calls out, "Hello? Nico? Hazel?"

It's Percy.

Caught mid-sentence with Hazel about the pros and cons of microwavable corndogs out of the freezer, Nico swings around and glares violently at Katie.

Looking surprised and deeply wrong-footed, Katie catches his glare and immediately starts shaking her head. "I didn't tell!" she protests, holding her hands up. "Nico, I swear, I promise on the River Styx, I didn't tell him!"

Curious and drawn by the raised voices, Holly drifts over. Hazel sets down the fireworks packaging she'd been wrangling, rounding the corner of the patio by Katie's tomato plants and calling down the hill, "We're up here, Percy! Do you want to try to tackle the hill, or do you want to come through the house?"

"The house, I think," Annabeth's rough voice calls back. "But we need two people to lift his chair up the steps."

Hazel's already setting off down the hill before she's done speaking.

"Is that Percy and Annabeth?" Holly asks.

Nico nods. "Do you think they know --" starts the part of him that's still fourteen, always fourteen, lost and desperately alone and wanting, expecting, waiting for Percy Jackson to rescue him, because that's what Percy Jackson does. The adult part of him catches the sentence by the throat, choking it off. Percy's done enough. Percy and Annabeth have both paid enough, mentally and physically, and now it's Nico's turn.

"I don't know," Katie answers quietly.

A few minutes later, Annabeth pushes Percy out onto the patio, Hazel holding the door open for them and Percy directing Annabeth with his voice, easy with the routine of it. Annabeth's hair is wound into a cone atop her head, held in place with a dark coral-colored starfish pin (Percy must have done it,) and a picnic basket perches in Percy's lap, swollen with self-importance.

Holly flies at them. "Did you bring us dinner?" she goes, delightedly. "From your restaurant?"

"We did!" Percy confirms, laughing when Holly reflexively flings her arms around his neck and hugs him tightly. He leans over the arm of his wheelchair to hug her back. "All the good stuff."

"Lobster?" Holly presses, naming the rarest delicacy that exists in her eight-year-old world.

"With plenty of butter," he promises. "And cake, and, of course, a whole pot of shrimp jumbalaya for the lady of the house," he nods to Hazel, who blinks back at him, looking touched and a little helpless, caught out of time, almost ninety years and thousands of miles away from her mother's New Orleans table. He grins around at them all, easily catching Holly and Katie and Hazel and Nico in the beam of it, loving and warm and so very Percy. "Who's hungry?"

After that, there really doesn't seem to be anything to do but fetch plates and silverware and eat. Nico and Hazel set up the fireworks, Holly sneaks a second piece of cake, nobody tattles on her, and she talks excitedly to Annabeth, narrating everything that's going on around for her.

"Wait," Annabeth says, clasping a fork to her chest in surprise, her grey-wreathed Athena eyes fixed pointedly ahead at nothing. "Your dad has grey hair?" Her tone turns teasing. "When did he become such an old man? Describe it to me."

Holly is more than happy to.

"Traitor," Nico calls to her, and they both laugh back at him.

At his elbow, Percy murmurs, "I'm so glad you found her."

"I was always meant to find her," Nico replies without thought, then glances down. Percy's eyes crinkle back at him, and Nico shrugs. "Raising her seemed like the least I could do, after all she did for me."

"I never doubted it," he replies.

The sun sinks out of view completely, leaving only a violet-smudged sky visible around the profile of the gum tree, and discussion follows about whether or not there's enough clear sky to even set off fireworks, or if perhaps they should relocate. The cons of relocating is that it would take quite a lot of time; Hazel's car can't accommodate all of them and Percy's wheelchair.

"Well, so long as you don't aim at my tree, I think I can protect it," says Katie. "Or stop it from blowing up. Or burning down. Oh, please don't aim at my tree."

"How safe did Leo say these fireworks were?" Hazel asks dubiously.

"Leo didn't mention safety at all."

"Figures."

"Come on!" Holly's eager voice rises out of the grass. "Let's set them off already!"

Nico crosses the lawn to her, picking his way carefully around the boggy sinkholes and carrying the matches in his hands. "Ready?" he asks.

She tosses him a look, like, duh!

He grins, kneels down, and lights the fuses.

The sound is spectacular and sets off a round of howling dogs up and down the street -- they probably should have warned the neighbors -- but the sight is even better, neon color blossoming in rings and starbursts against the dark of the sky. Holly dances around him, returning again and again to hug him around the waist.

He squeezes her back. On the patio, Hazel surreptitiously moves Annabeth's drinking glass within range of her searching hand without drawing attention to herself for doing it, Katie's sitting in the lawn chair with her knees drawn up, one hand absently playing with her anklet. Percy, seemingly always aware of where Nico's eyes are, catches his look and smiles. Nico turns back to watch the sky, full of food that had been cooked with love and surrounded by the people he loves the most, which is why he doesn't see the figure that materializes at the edge of the property. Not immediately.

"Hey," says Holly with a frown, just as another fuse burns down. She points. "Is that Percy?"

Nico looks. The firework launches.

It dashes itself across the sky. The light of it reaches them first, a bright flash of it that etches the entire yard into color-lit visibility, showing the uneven earth, the patchy grass, and Percy, the younger version, the one that still has use of his legs, standing by the fence with his back to them. His shirt is orange, his shoulders tense.

And then the sound hits.

It explodes, booming percussion that hits like a physical blow, the way really good fireworks do, and since Nico's already looking over there, he sees Percy startle, jumping clean out of his skin and whipping around.

His eyes bug out, enormous, panicked, and frightened, and his hand is already moving before he's entirely completed the turn.

Percy, Percy who has lived in Tartarus for two years, Percy who's been trained to react quickly, to fight without thinking, to make life-saving decisions in the space of a single second, Percy hears a sound like the world ripping apart, like being attacked, and answers. Riptide arcs flawlessly out of his hand.

His aim is perfect.

It's like being struck with an SUV all over again. Nico's world pinwheels. The ground unbalances underneath his feet, although really he's the one that's been sent reeling, gravity turned meaningless and laughable. Pain detonates in every part of him, as if it was him, up there in the sky and blown to bits.

The matches slip from his fingers, scattering into the grass. Somehow, this is what concerns him the most. He needs to light the rest of the fireworks.

The fuse of the last one he lit burns down. He touches his fingers to his sternum, and cannot stop himself from looking.

Riptide skewers him completely, his whole body curved reflexively around it like an insect curling around a pin. It hurts, Nico thinks distantly. He feels like a speck, a small planetisimal floating around the corrosive, radiating heat of the sun, lost in its bulk. That's what this pain is like, and he's this inconsequential thing squinting against it, complaining, it's bright.

The firework launches.

And then Holly starts screaming.

Light convulses overhead, painting the yard in stark light one more time: Holly's mouth, caught open in a rictus, her eyes a mousetrap of horror; Percy on the other end of the yard, fingers still outstretched in the shape of a throw, a dawning on his face when he sees the target he hit, and the burn of monster red in his eyes doesn't quite erase the awareness, the terrible, terrible collapsing of his mouth into the shape of a no.

Then he jerks, limbs going askew. He staggers to the side, and jerks again.

Two daggers pin him, one in the ribs, one in the neck, and he disintegrates into Mist with that expression still on his face -- the look of someone who just committed murder.

Nico looks over. On the patio, Annabeth stands with a third celestial bronze dagger in hand, waiting for Percy to tell her where to aim. Her mouth is a hard line, sightless eyes a strange, starlit color, and beside her, Percy's mouth forms over the words, too late. Nico can't hear them, but he knows they're said, and he nods back solemnly, because that makes sense. Percy and Annabeth didn't need to be told that Nico was going to die today; they already knew. They didn't come to be here in his last moments or to say good-bye. They came to stop it from happening.

They knew it was going to happen because it had already been done.

Percy Jackson knew Nico di Angelo was going to die today because Percy Jackson was the one who killed him.

That's fair, Nico thinks.

His legs begin to wobble, knees disjointing like they'd become too soggy to hold him upright, and it's a curious sensation, the buckling, like it's happening to somebody else entirely.

Nico falls, and then, seemingly from nowhere --

Hazel catches him.

Everything returns to real time: the boom of the firework in the sky, the curl of smoke across the night, obscured by the halo of Hazel's wild hair. Holly's still caught on that first horrible scream, and in the next moment, as Hazel gathers Nico close, staggering both of them to support his weight, Katie appears and snatches her up.

"Dad!" Holly's voice cracks, and it feels like every bone in Nico's body breaks from the blow of it. "Dad!"

"Hol --" Nico tries, and chokes. Blood fills his throat, a copper-tasting stopper. He coughs wetly against it. "Hol --"

"Dad! Dad!" Two figures, barely visible, one very small and struggling desperately. "Let me go! Let me go! DAD!"

"Holly." Katie's voice sobs out. "Holly, baby, no, don't look."

She barely has the strength to speak, but she has the strength to hold Holly to her, to carry her away from where Nico's blood is pulsing across Hazel's lap and knees with his every heartbeat, and that's the important part. Holly should not have to see him die. That should never be a memory she has to carry.

Hazel rocks them both back and forth. Riptide, of course, vanished when the younger Percy did, and she keeps one hand pushed to where it was, but blood bubbles up around her fingers, a ceaseless wellspring.

"You can't die," she tells him, like it's an order. Tears blink from the corners of her eyes, hard and sharp as diamonds. She curls her body against his. "You can't, you can't, do you hear me?"

She is very comfortable.

"You can't die. We have coffee mugs, Nico di Angelo. We have coffee mugs."

We do, he thinks proudly. How many half-bloods can say that?

"You can't die on me, not after we've come so far. We have our own coffee mugs, Nico. We made that."

"Nico!" Holly's voice cries, bird-like and breaking. "Nico!"

"Nico," Hazel's voice echoes. His skeleton feels like it's coming undone, pulled in two different directions: Holly reaching for him from one side of the yard, and Hazel grounding him to her here, both of them trying so desperately to keep him. "Nico, please don't die. Please."

I hope I get to see you again, he wants to tell her. I hope I reincarnate soon, and that you find me, like you promised you will, that I get to see you grow old and Holly grow up, even if maybe I don't recognize you. Maybe someday we'll reincarnate together, in bodies that aren't a battlefield, aren't pawns in somebody else's war, where we'll be free to be husband and wife as well as brother and sister, properly this time.

But he doesn't get to say any of it.

Somewhere far below, a Cutter named Atropos positions her scissors over a short, silvery thread. The scissors slice down, and the thread halves.

-

Nico lands in the River Styx with all the weight of a single teardrop, splashing against the surface of the river and dashing to pieces beneath it.

Without a body, he's grey and ghostly matter, colder than anything he's ever experienced. It takes effort to remember the shape of himself; even then, his hands and feet blur out of view like paint smudged by rain. He can't remember the exact appearance of them, which is weird. He's been attached to them for twenty-eight years, you'd think he'd've known them quite well by now, but he can't quite picture them.

An oar breaks through the river beside him, startling him, and the next thing he knows, it scoops underneath him and lifts him from the water. His passage barely even leaves a ripple behind.

"Ugh," says Charon from the other end of the oar. "It's you."

"Hi," says Nico, clinging to the flat of the paddle with all the awkwardness of a guppy.

"No," Charon says flatly. "There's no room in my boat for one of your kind."

Approximately one passenger sits in his boat, because Charon's still a notorious penny-pincher when it comes to ferrying people without payment. Don't tell, but many years ago, when they were trying to ease the population crush on the shore, Persephone and Nico built a small path of stepping stones upriver for the dead to cross without having to pay Charon at all. It was dangerous, they agreed, because what could enter the land of the dead could also escape it. So far Charon hasn't noticed.

"What are you talking about?" the passenger says blankly. "There's plenty of room."

She stands, bobbling the boat, and Nico looks at her and, for the space of a single, startled moment, he's eight years younger, twenty years old and cornered by a dead woman in a hooded jacket, stray curly hairs springing free from underneath it. Please, she had said, whispering so that Charon couldn't overhear. Please, can you take her? She isn't dead.

What -- Nico had started, baffled, and then saw the infant she had zipped protectively to her chest -- a living child, just a day shy of being two months old.

Please, Holly's dead mother begged. Can't you take her? I don't know what will happen if she crosses the river with me.

So Nico had taken her. He'd been helpless not to, once he laid eyes on her, and that's how Hazel found him, later, holed up in a motel in the desert in the living world with Holly cradled to his chest the way a man would hold his heart after it had just fallen out of his ribcage. She found him, and he explained, and they stuck together ever since. Until now.

It's silly, of course, because it's not the same woman.

"There's plenty of room," she says again, extending a hand off the side like she's going to scoop Nico's small, grayish self and deposit him in the boat with them.

"Not for the likes of him," Charon says shortly. "He has a different path to tread," and he makes a faint gesture with his free hand.

Power burns through the places Nico imagines his hands would be, painfully hot and so ancient he tastes gravedirt and celestial bronze, bitter and corrosive on his tongue.

Without noise, without scarcely any effort at all, he lets go, slipping weightlessly back beneath the surface of the river.

It's easier, then, to just let the current do its thing and pull him away. He bobs along, buffeted and bumped by the eddies of the River Styx, following it downstream. The further from Charon's dock he gets, the choppier the waters become, sloshing over his face. He floats through the debris that cakes the waters at Promise Point, where Percy had almost died to make himself invincible some sixteen years ago. He passes the supremely disinterested Cerberus, the grazing herds of skull-headed harts at the shore.

He continues on for some time, and when he next thinks to lift his head, he blinks, disoriented by how far he's managed to drift.

The light down here is dimmer; a murky, indistinct cavelight that makes every shadow stretch to twice its length. He paddles vaguely with his remaining impressions of hands and feet, still making no attempt to halt his headlong progress, and looks around, trying to get his bearings.

He's on the outskirts of his father's realm: this is the Elosian Ascent, a sheer rockface built up in thin, high ridges like somebody had tried to shuffle it like a stack of cards.

The Styx sidewinds parallel to it for a considerable length of time, swerving close to the looming cliff-face that grins with all its teeth on display and swerving away again, before it ends in a waterfall -- the River and the Ascent both just stop, leaving nothing but a plummet. A breach into Tartarus. Nowhere to go but down.

Well, of course, Nico thinks, unable to bring himself to feel anything about it other than a faint resignation. He feels grey, every color and feeling and caring drained out of him.

He's headed to Tartarus.

Tartarus, home of monsters and Titans, the dungeon deep and dark where Olympus likes to lock the things it doesn't care to think about, like their parents, like their children. Annabeth and Percy lived here for two years before they found their way out, without Olympus ever once lifting a finger to rescue them, and now Nico's come to take their place. He was always meant to wind up here, he thinks; he might as well have started swimming that day in Arachne's cavern, when he let Percy and Annabeth fall.

That's fair, he decides.

Very, very carefully, he avoids thinking about Hazel or Holly. If he does, the river will just bleed them from him, too, and they're the one thing he cannot bear to let go.

He stops paddling, letting himself float along on his back. The darkness grows deeper.

Then.

Then, the unthinkable.

The feeling of being caught.

-

What seizes him first is a vision, a clear sightline to what awaits him at the precipice into Tartarus; a chokehold collar, waiting to be fastened around Nico's neck to drag him down.

He sees a creature safely at a distance, its back turned to him. It looks like Hazel, almost, if someone had taken Hazel and thinned her out like paint, turning her as grey and ghostly as Nico himself and stretching her limbs abnormally long, like someone had splashed her carelessly across a canvas, or tried to shove her together out of thin, humpy bits of clay. Horns curl sideways from underneath its bushy hair like a ram's. It stops, as if aware of Nico's eyes on its misshapen back.

Then it begins to turn.

Very slowly, it pivots to face him. A horrible spasm of fear seizes itself through Nico's gut, and he knows, he knows he doesn't want to see its face, but it's too late to look away. He is horribly, helplessly paralyzed.

Then, just before its face becomes visible, it moves.

Suddenly no longer at a safe distance, it's right there, right above him, so unspeakably fast there's no time to prepare or even to startle, and Nico sees ghoulish teeth and eyes like Percy's had been, flared red and hungry and horrible and so, so, so close, and opens his mouth to scream because he's caught, he's caught, this is Tartarus and Tartarus will drag him down and devour him, this is fear and death and Nico will be torn apart, Nico is --

-

Two pairs of hands seize him under the armpits and lift him cleanly out of the water.

Nico goes gasping, choking, a scream half-caught and leaking around the edges of his mouth. His hands -- he has hands again! Clear, visible hands, how could he have forgotten what his own hands looked like? -- flail out, grabbing at the arms that hold him. HIs legs kick at the river. The current pulls at him, tugging, but it's somehow very easy to ignore all of a sudden.

The hands carry him to the shore and set him down.

Two voices speak at him, and it takes a moment for Nico to be able to distinguish what they're saying, because they come out no louder than the rustle of autumnal leaves, like they're being forcibly crushed into existence.

"No, Nico di Angelo," they say. "This is not your path to travel."

Panting with fear, Nico draws his knees up to his chest and hides his face in them, choking out, "-- how can I? I can't, I'm dead, I have to --"

"You cannot," answer the voices, a furious crush of leaves. "Nico di Angelo, you cannot pass this way. It is not your path to travel."

He looks up.

Two women stand over him. Their whole beings are seemingly made of gossamer and light, spun together to make a human shape; their clothes and skin and the shape of their bones underneath are all somehow clearly visible, shifting at odds with each other at every movement, like each remembers how it's supposed to act and then fails to tell the others. They're dressed like Roman sentinels, and even the shadowy rock face of the Ascent seems to hunch away from the brightness of them like one rudely awoken.

He looks in the face of one, the taller one, and recognizes her.

"Mother," he breathes out.

The ghost-sentinel of Maria di Angelo smiles at him.

He looks to the other, and recognizes her, too, even though he's never personally met her before.

"Madame," he says.

Marie Levesque nods back to him; the movement sends an impression of starlight winking across her ghostly mane of hair.

He looks between them. Past their phantom-like figures, he can just make out the place where the River Styx ends, the plummet and the fathomless fall into Tartarus. He came so close, he realizes, and shivers like snow, pulling himself tighter together. There would have been no judgment, no chance at reincarnation, just a Nico-monster, escaping into the mortal world again and again, only to be sent back by whatever half-blood was clever enough not to die that day.

"I --"

"You cannot pass this way," says his mother again. She bends, the longness of her folding down like a paper crane coming to rest beside him, and puts a hand on his shoulder. "Nico."

He covers her hand with his, the both of them spectral. "You …" he trails off, unsure what he wants to say, and instead lapses into silence, hungrily searching her face. He had been scarcely three years old when Zeus dropped a building on her out of spite, and his memories of her had very little to do with her as a person; most of what he knows about his mother came secondhand from his sister and his father, on the rare occasions Hades felt comfortable talking about her, like it never occurred to him just how important any small detail would be to Nico's little black fly life.

She smiles at him again. "Today is not the day you die."

"Your thread has been woven anew," Hazel's mother adds. "This path is not for you. You have a new path to follow."

The words sink into him slowly, flushing like bruises. "What?"

"The daughters of Death are very adamant," she says, pride coming into her skeletal grin, the dimple of her cheeks. She's talking about Hazel and Holly, he realizes, and his first feeling is of profound fear: what have they done? "Your friends sent us to bring you back from the Doors of Death."

"Two weeks have passed for them," Maria di Angelo says, correctly anticipating Nico's next question. "They have paid all the prices they must pay. A new contract has been written for your life. And now it is time for you to rejoin them."

They grab him by the armpits and begin to lift him to his feet, and he grabs back at them, terrified. This might be the first and last time he gets to see them.

"Be good," his mother tells him, brushing a phantom's kiss to his cheek.

Hazel's mother does the same to the other. "Remember," she rustles out. "Choose who you want to protect, and protect them all the days of your life. They will do the same for you."

"Go now," murmurs the ghost-sentinel of Maria di Angelo.

He looks at them, long and hard and drowning in them, and then everything washes away to white.

-

He wakes.

Everything screams at him at once:

His body, bent and contorted into a tiny, uncomfortable space, is in immense pain and wants him to know all about it. Pain shrieks its way like a slap up his spine, his shoulders, his legs -- both from the uncomfortable position and the fact he seems to be lying on a thousand pebbles.

Or, no, he decides when he shifts his weight, stretching his palms out to explore the surface. Not pebbles, but a single rock. He puts a hand up and meets a similar surface above his head.

He realizes two things.

First, he's been shoved inside of a rock with no finesse, the way someone would dump a body into a trunk -- a geode, Hazel would call it. Fresh air breathes across his face, so at least he hasn't been cocooned inside of solid rock just to suffocate to death.

Second, he's two states away from 1740 Moneywort Ave. The earth below tells him that, greeting his senses as he stretches them out the same way he stretched out his hands to search his physical surroundings. Shadows blanket themselves everywhere, depositing tidbits of information into his hands when he asks. He blinks, and the silvery etching of things materialize in the dark. He's not trapped in the utter darkness of the underground, but rather the near-darkness of an unlit, windowless room at night.

A museum, he realizes. He's in a museum. There's a particular tone that all shadows in museums have, dusty and quiet.

And then another shadow moves across the floor, stretching thinly through that small space beneath the doorframe, the way shadows do.

All his senses leap towards it at once, and his body clumsily tries to follow, arms and legs flailing out, akimbo, entirely without direction from his brain. From the other side of the door, he hears the sharp, short knife's edge of a gasp as Hazel feels it, too, the way all his bones reach for her and bring the rest of him along. She reaches back.

The next he knows, there's lights flicking on and a skeleton with a woman attached to it, there at his side.

She grabs him by the arms, much the same way her mother had in the River Styx, and lifts him bodily out, and all he can do is clutch back at her, blinking owlishly up at her face and feeling at once too small and too large for his skin.

They fall to the floor.

In the light, he can see that the geode is roughly the size of a coffin, cut neatly in half and opened like a clamshell for display purposes. The inside is coated in amethyst, which in turn is flecked with pinpricks of light reflected from overhead, giving the stone the impression of having captured the night sky, because Greek heroes always wind up as constellations eventually. The little informational plaque beside it says it had been found in Uruguay, and is on loan from their geology institute there.

"What --" he chokes out. HIs throat feels dusty, earthen like it's been caked with clay, and the word coughs out of him.

For someone who's supposedly been rotting for two weeks, he doesn't feel half-bad. Okay, he feels awful, but awful isn't bad! Awful is better than dead!

He coughs, and tries again. "How?" he gets out, when Hazel has seemingly finished kissing his face, giving possession of it back to him. Her eyes are crystalline, bright, as starry as the geode behind them. Nico can't even begin to tell you what she smells like; herself, he'd assume, and he drags it into his lungs, again and again.

"How?" she echoes, and huffs out a soft, "Oh, a whole order of things, which I'll tell you eventually."

She finally releases him, long enough to brush at the corners of her eyes. Three small diamonds scatter across the tile, pinging off the floor and disappearing underneath another display case, which Hazel ignores, but it startles Nico: it had been years since she got upset enough to lose control and produce precious gems.

"It's impressive, really," she continues. "What we managed to come up with in twenty-one days, but I guess that's what happens when your childhoods have all been defined by prophecies that come with really narrow time limits. You become frighteningly efficient. But, suffice to say, my part boiled down to one important thing."

She holds up her left hand. They're so close together on the floor, legs folded over and around each other, that he sees double before he pulls his head back enough that her hand comes into focus.

It's splayed to show her wedding ring, there on her fourth finger.

Dazedly, Nico lifts his own to show her the matching ring, which is exactly where he left it.

"You made a vow," she says quietly. "To me."

Of course, he thinks, catching her hand with his and pulling it around his neck; her other arm joins it, and they hold each other like that. Of course.

Give Hazel a single stone and watch her move continents.

-

So they saved him, the four of them: Hazel and Katie and Percy and Annabeth. They did exactly what Nico was afraid they'd do.

They've done it before, sort of. The prophecy seven sailed to Rome to free him from Gaea's clutches that one time, and granted, that had more to do with Annabeth's Quest than it did with Nico, he just happened to be nearby and needing rescue, but still, he hadn't been expecting it at all. So maybe the fact there was precedent encouraged them. Or maybe they've just got a bad habit of trying to save people.

The next time he wakes, he's in Katie Gardener's earthy downstairs bedroom, and she's sitting on a stool in the corner, legs drawn up so that she can paint her toenails. Her dreadlocks are pulled into a knot on one side, the rest of it falling around her face on the other, a bit frazzled from the late September humidity. Dreadlocks were a really good look on her, he thought, except after she came home with them, Hazel pulled her aside to inform her that dreadlocks were a remnant of the African slave trade: slaves would come off of ships with their hair horribly matted, and the current aesthetic nature of dreadlocks were a way for black people to reclaim that, at which point Katie began the apologetic process of combing them out. She's more than half-way done, by the looks of it.

"Thank you for going directly against my wishes and doing exactly what I told you not to," Nico tells her.

"You're welcome," she replies, unrepentant.

"That was a stupid amount of trouble to go to."

He doesn't want to think about the prices they paid.

She screws the cap back on the bottle of polish, extending her toes to get a good look at them. "I think you'll find," she addresses them. "The only people more selfish than you are the people who love you."

She stands. Nico, for an instant, envisions dirt caking itself into the fresh paint on her toes and opens his mouth to exclaim, but when he cranes his head to look, he's surprised to see that there's green beneath her feet, not bare earth; some small-leafed, creeping plant covers the whole floor like carpet.

"What -- ?" he starts.

She follows his gaze downward. "Oh, right," she says absently. "It saved your life. Well, partially. It helped. It's called creeping jenny." When he just looks at her blankly, her mouth quirks, wry. "Also known as Lysimachia. Moneywort, Nico. It's moneywort."

As she leaves, she throws over her shoulder, "Your sister wants to talk to you, by the way."

Nico lets his head fall back against the pillow, and starts to draw his legs and arms in close to his body to give Hazel room to join him on the bed when she comes in. Why is he in Katie's bedroom anyway, and not their own? Is it to get him closer to the ground? Or did it have to do with that plant?

Then a voice from the doorway says, "You take so much looking after."

He sits bolt upright.

Holly's body stands there, wearing a summer skirt patched with polka dots and a white headband shoved into her black hair. Her hands perch on her hips, and the person smiling out of her eyes isn't Holly at all.

"Hi, Nico," says Bianca. "It's been awhile."

Nico's heart misses a whole beat, trips, hammers, and starts again.

He'd known, though, hadn't he? She'd been there when he died -- he heard it in the way her voice changed, the way she'd called his name. Holly had never called him "Nico" before.

"You remembered."

"I remember," she confirms. It all came back to her, just in time for her to watch him die. "I don't know if that's common -- remembering the events of your previous incarnation -- or if I'm just special because I'm a daughter of Hades. Holly isn't," she answers him before he can open his mouth to ask. "Holly wasn't born a half-blood. She won't attract our troubles. But she gets her necromancy by being me."

"I knew it had to be you," blurts out of Nico. "When I saw you in Charon's boat. You're on your second reincarnation, aren't you?"

"I think so," she nods, and neither of them mention the fact that she must have died incredibly young in her last life, if she's meeting Nico again on her second reincarnation, and he was only twenty when she was born. "One more after this before I get the Elysian Fields."

He nods, dry-mouthed. He wants to say everything, all at once, and yet his tongue sits heavily in his mouth, sandpaper and stone. Gravedirt cakes his throat.

Finally, he gets out, "Are you happy?" and she startles a little bit. "Are you -- am I -- are we doing okay? Are you happy?"

She gets it, because her arms come down and she flies at him, the expression on her face at once both Holly and Bianca. She climbs onto the bed with him, wrapping her skinny girl arms around his neck, almost choking him with the ferocity of it. He hugs her back. This is his sister, eight years old again.

He remembers the last time she'd been eight years old; then, he'd been four, instead of twenty-eight. She looks exactly the same.

"Of course I'm happy!" she says, and pounds her fists against his back for emphasis. "Nico, I've got you and Hazel and I get to go to school and it's fun and nothing tries to eat me and I'm beating you in Mythomagic, I'm stupidly happy! I can't imagine ever being sad!" She squeezes him tight, and pulls back. Her eyes are bright, coal-colored. "I've got you. You're raising me. You're being my big brother and my dad and my cool uncle and everything."

"It seemed fair," Nico says hoarsely. "You raised me first."

She hugs him again. "My baby brother," she murmurs, fond. "All grown up. Look at you. And Hazel!" She lets him go, bouncing on the mattress in her excitement. "Nico, we've got a little sister! And she's so cool!"

"Yes, she is." Understatement much?

"I got to spend two weeks with her while we were negotiating getting you out of the Underworld, and, like, okay, so I've spent the last eight years with her, but it's different, you know?"

"So are you here as Bianca for good? Like, will you always be like this?"

She dims somewhat. He reads the answer on her face and tries to swallow the disappointment.

"No," she says. "No, I'm -- I'm temporarily borrowing Holly's lifeline. Don't let them fool you, the Fates like you. Clotho spun me into Holly's thread for a little while, but ultimately, it's her life. I'm her and she's me, sure, but I won't -- I won't remember."

He nods some more, and doesn't even bother trying to sort out what he's feeling. On one hand, Bianca. On the other, Holly.

That … pretty much sums it up.

"Okay," he says. Then, in case she needs to know, "I love you. I'm -- I'm going to be here for you for a very long time, if you ever need me."

She rolls her eyes at him, looking very affectionate. "And that's cool and all, but let's be real, I'm going to be here for you the next time you need to be rescued. So please try to keep from dying anytime soon, it's such a hassle."

"Excuse you," Nico retorts. "I'll try not to inconvenience you, Your Majesty."

"Good." Bianca grins at him, showing the nubs where her front teeth are growing in. "I am, after all, the king of ghosts."

And she will be again.

With training.

-

So what price must four half-bloods and one reincarnated necromancer pay in order to raise one Nico di Angelo from the dead?

The answer, of course, is whatever they think is equal in value. After all, mortal lives are easy disposable currency to the gods, and the lives of half-bloods are even more so. It would be no trouble for one of them to have a new thread woven, or even to repair the one that was cut. But why would they bother unless they were given something for it? Why bother when they can make other mortals pay instead?

Where would the fun be in doing it any other way?

This is Olympus.

Come on.

For Nico, Hazel and Katie and Percy and Annabeth were all made to give up a single thing. A hope. A wish. Something they've wanted for so long the desire for it became a knot in their chest they had to unravel, cutting heartstrings one-by-one. This is exactly what Nico was afraid they'd do: sacrifice something he'd never be able to repay.

Three days, after, he sees Katie pick up a photo frame from her mantle. As long as Nico's known her, that frame has been empty, showing only a sheet with the dimensions and the manufacturer's available sizes.

As he watches, she folds it up, stepping down from the hearth and pausing only long enough to drop the frame into the trash on her way through to her orchid room, humming the background music from one of Holly's browser games to herself. He looks at the trash can, then at the retreating line of her back, and knows what she's given him: the knowledge of what he's worth to her. Katie Gardener gave up the possibility of ever meeting her biological father. That is the price she paid for Nico di Angelo's life.

As for Percy and Annabeth …

Well, he's pretty sure Percy and Annabeth had the same wish and thus gave up the same thing. He hasn't seen them since he woke up to ask. He doesn't want to. Everyone knows what Percy and Annabeth wanted more than anything in the world.

And Hazel?

"Please tell me you didn't," he says, standing behind her in the bathroom doorway and watching her trying to straighten out her eyeliner. He goes back to work next week -- fortunately, he has something like two years of sick days saved up, and his coworkers had been extremely congenial about covering for him (according to Hazel, at any rate. Nico's more suspicious: what's he done to earn loyalty from anyone?), so that's one thing they didn't have to worry about. Until then, he gets to see a side of Hazel and Holly's routine he doesn't usually get to see.

She lifts the wand, inspecting herself in the mirror and muttering, "close enough," capping the eyeliner and stashing it in the drawer. She glances back at Nico. "Sorry, what?"

"Please tell me I'm wrong. Please tell me the deepest, darkest desire of your heart was for somebody to invent a type of coffee that can go cold without tasting like foot and that's what you gave up instead. Please tell me I'm worth cold coffee and not -- not --"

The one thing Hazel wanted above anything else in this world was to die on her own terms this time, without Olympus or Gaea or Pluto or anybody else calling the shots.

She fishes lip gloss out next, flattening her mouth to apply it.

"I hitched your lifeline to mine, sorry, you're stuck with it." Somewhere in the Underworld, there's a woebegone silver thread tossed into the basket at Clotho's feet, as she spins and spins tirelessly above it. It's patched, and a little thicker than the others, because it carries the weight of two souls, wound together; Nico's severed strand tied now into Hazel's. "So please try not to get yourself killed. It'd be unfortunate."

Heartsick, Nico stares at her. "Hazel."

"Nico," she returns in kind. "Stop. If you think it was a sacrifice in any way, then you're wrong. Simple as that."

"You shouldn't have to! You --"

She spins around, and in the narrow space of the bathroom this means she's suddenly right in his space. She seizes his face between her hands, going up on tiptoes in her stocking feet to hold him there.

"Now you listen to me," she says fiercely, and up this close, her eyes look like combustion, as rich and golden as the sun. "You are my brother. You are the only thing in the world I know is mine. You got that?"

It's like having his throat slit, just that quick, and because he's not Nico if he doesn't find a way to ruin everything, that's the moment he chooses to put his hands on her hips and lean in.

She realizes where he's going at the last second and startles back from him, so that just his bottom lip winds up catching at hers.

Nico immediately releases her, already apologizing -- should he try to pass it off as a brotherly thing, a thank-you kiss among family members? He could probably get away with it, except Hazel clearly already knows it wasn't a brotherly kiss at all, if the expression on her face is anything to go by. It certainly wasn't the right moment for one. The only reason she'd let it slide would be to save them both from terrible embarrassment. Well done, Nico di Angelo.

There's a slickness on his lip from her fresh coat of lip gloss. He fumbles back a step.

Well done.

Hazel reacts.

"No, wait," she goes, and her hands catch at him the way you'd grab for something falling, instinctive and open-palmed. "Come back."

He's got one hand on the door handle, so what this winds up doing is tugging the door shut behind them. Their feet scuffle, her nylons overlapping his bare toes for a painful moment, and they knock her damp towel from its hook on the back of the door. Somebody kicks it out of the way. The fabric of her blouse is still cool from the closet under the flat of his hand, not yet warmed to the temperature of her skin.

She kisses him with her whole mouth.

Somebody's skeleton is aching, bones bending, and he has no way of telling if they're his or her own.

She's the one who pulls away this time, and she does it slowly, lingering with a press. She opens her eyes.

Then she laughs at him.

Nico's shoulders hike up defensively. "What?"

"Nothing, nothing --" and then she corrects herself. "Your face."

His hand goes up to check, like he needs to make sure it's still there. "What about my face?"

"Well, it's attached to you, for one, you should probably look into that, it might still be curable --"

"Hey."

"-- but no, you looked like I had just slapped you in the face with a fish."

"That does happen with unfortunate frequency," Nico admits with all the ruefulness of someone who's known Percy Jackson for more than half his entire life. Then, "What did you do that for?"

And there's that look, that look he'll be able to recognize out of a crowd of hundreds of thousands; Hazel Levesque, looking at Nico di Angelo like he's an idiot.

"Nico, I married you."

"Yeah, but that was --"

That was for Holly, Nico doesn't say. That was the daughter of Pluto repaying a debt. That was us, creating an environment that we never had, so that Bianca could grow up more emotionally wealthy in this reincarnation than we ever did. It was never supposed to be permanent.

Hazel was supposed to find somebody. It was bound to happen sometime; Nico heard that falling in love was something people did with alarming and frankly baffling regularity (it wasn't something he'd ever done himself, at least not in a way he recognized until it was too late,) and if there was one thing Nico and Leo agreed on, it was that it was harder not to fall in love with Hazel Levesque once you got to know her.

She was going to find somebody, and when that happened, there'd be an amicable divorce and she'd go on her way, and Nico and Holly would see her all the time, and it would be good, because then Hazel would be living life on her own terms and that's all he wants for her.

That's how this was supposed to go.

"You are so stupid," Hazel whispers, so fondly that Nico closes his eyes, overwhelmed. "You are my brother. You are my husband."

It's the way she says it, the way she says it, her voice dropping like she's tipping headfirst into a grave, that convinces him, that floods through him. He looks at her, and the whole world is her hair and her eyes and the remnants of lip gloss on the edges of her mouth, and Nico puts his hands on her skin because it's either that or drown.

"Are we going to?" he asks, has to know. "Are we going to fall in love?"

Her hands are on his face again.

"We're already in love. We always have been," she responds, and she says it with the finality of a tectonic shift. "Now we're just deciding it's what we want."

-

Holly's ninth birthday falls on the second of November, which this year turns out to be a chilly, grey-skied day, like someone had flung a sheet across it in preparation of leaving on holiday, or else like they were going to tuck it into the closet until winter was over.

She'd picked the day herself when she was younger, since neither Nico nor Hazel had any idea when her actual birthday was and had just sort of been celebrating it roughly the same time every year, whenever they had the spare money for cake and candles. After studying a calendar for a very long time in the solemn way of children who couldn't read yet, Holly had picked All Soul's Day, the second day of the Dia de Muertos celebrations -- which Leo had informed them meant that they were officially raising the world's most morbid child, congratulations.

When she gets older, bro, you should ask her if she wants to be called Wednesday Addams.

That reference is lost on me, Leo, Nico had lied. Paul and Sally had The Addams Family on Netflix.

This year, Holly asks Katie for a treehouse. The gum tree is big enough, she insists. And it'd overlook the entire neighborhood!

"I don't think so," replies Katie, sounding a little disconcerted. "A wooden treehouse? How would you feel if we picked off some pieces from the corpse of one of your friends and asked you to carry them for the rest of your life?"

"Oh," says Holly. "I didn't think of it like that."

"I mean, don't get me wrong, carrying your fallen comrades is metal as hell, little shrub, but I'd feel bad asking our friend to do that, don't you?"

They're a little tight on money this year, since Nico got hit with a penalty for failing to pay his ticket on time and, shockingly, "but I died and everybody was too busy trying to bring me back to pay my traffic tickets by deadline!" isn't an excuse the police department accepts. So Holly's party is pretty small; she and a couple friends from school, sans Betsy, had gone to the skate park earlier ("she has friends!" Nico had exclaimed with quiet, fond delight, and Hazel squeaked back, "I know!" with utter glee, and they clutched at each other,) and now it's just her and her parents and Katie in the backyard, waiting on the cake to finish baking so they can sing "Happy Birthday" and open presents.

They did arrange one surprise for her, though, and they arrive presently.

"Hello there!" a voice sounds out from further down the hill. "I heard there's a birthday girl on these premises today!"

Holly's face lights up, and she hops up off the ground to go tearing around the corner of the house, calling back, "Percy? Percy! Annabeth!"

Individual words are lost in the shouts of greeting, the "oh my gods, have you grown?" and the "Annabeth, you cut your hair!"s. Nico pushes himself off the ground too, heading down to give them a hand with getting Percy's wheelchair back up the hill, which is easier now that the ground is harder. Percy manages to simultaneously hold a conversation with Holly about the Medea's Food Network episode, which had rerun on TV the previous week, and be Annabeth's eyes for her. It astonishes Nico, how despite only having one functioning eye between them, Percy and Annabeth manage to be competent, successful, largely happy people. It probably has a lot to do with them being them, though.

"Did you bring food?" Holly asks shrewdly.

"Of course we did," Annabeth sounds offended. "Who do you take us for?"

Holly beams, squint-eyed, and bounces the way up the rest of the hill, circling back when they aren't fast enough to ask them their opinions on pets.

"We're thinking about getting one," she informs them seriously.

"We are not!" Nico retorts in horror, navigating around an uneven patch of ground.

With her hands steady on the back of Percy's wheelchair, Annabeth contemplates the question. "I have a boyfriend," she offers finally. "He's housetrained. It's nice."

"I am," Percy agrees readily, and Holly giggles, hiding her teeth behind her hand.

When they get them both settled on the patio, pulling warm Tupperware containers of food from Percy's picnic basket to set out on the table, Holly drags Annabeth out into the yard to narrate all the changes to her; it's Holly's favorite thing about Annabeth being blind, is getting to tell her everything. Annabeth, as far as Nico's ever been able to tell, doesn't mind.

It's Hazel who asks the question, setting out silverware on the patio table.

"How'd it go?"

Percy shrugs, a surprisingly fragile movement. "We went to see Priyanka Shruti -- you know, the daughter of Apollo who got her MD last year? She's a safe bet when it comes to treating half-bloods, and, well …"

He trails off.

"And?" Nico prompts, trying to be gentle.

It earns him a distracted smile. "And she didn't tell us anything we didn't already know," Percy responds. "It's a no-go. I'm not -- and Annabeth isn't going to be able -- so. So yeah, no kids for us. Not ever."

He shrugs again, in that very, very careful way of people who are feeling as thin as eggshells but don't want it commented upon.

Nico and Hazel look at each other. This was what Percy and Annabeth traded in order to bring Nico back from the dead: this was their greatest wish, the thing they measured up against Nico's life and then, bit by painful bit, sawed from them to barter it away. Percy and Annabeth will never have children. That shining future they imagined for themselves, that dream that got them from Tartarus -- now null and void.

"But!" he forces himself to brighten, and after a beat, he looks at them and it softens into something genuine. "We're okay with that, we decided. We did all right, I think."

Hazel slips an arm around Nico's waist, squeezing him very hard.

"Well," she tells Percy, with an airy note in her voice. "If you want children, you know you're always welcome to some of ours."

"Oh, gods." That's Annabeth, materializing on the other side of the table in order to catch that statement. She sounds horrified. "Can you imagine?"

"Hey!" Holly protests.

Chuckling, Hazel turns Nico around and steers him towards the house, murmuring something about needing to check on the cake. She has one hand on his hip, the other straying absently to flatten out across her stomach. She smells like her shampoo, like earth, like everything Nico thinks of when he thinks home.

They can tell the exact moment it clicks, because Percy's head suddenly snaps around in their peripheral.

He goes, with a climbing note in his voice, "Wait. No way! Are you? Nico, Hazel, oh my gods, are you --"

Shoulders shaking with laughter, Nico and Hazel disappear inside 1740B Moneywort Ave, leaving the door open behind them.

-
fin