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mediumgayitalian · 24 hours

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———

Hand tight around the handle of his sword. Shadows pulled close, close, closer; cloak, hood, shroud. Still as a stone, hardly moving, barely breathing, waiting, waiting, tensing.

The whispers outside his cabin door grow louder.

He shot awake half an hour ago. A shift, under the cracked-open window, rustling, turning. Fabric, maybe, or fur brushing across the polished stone of the wall. Not a hellhound — he’d feel the bent shadows of its presence — nor any other creature from the Underworld, but clearly something dark, foreboding. Some heavy, stifling presence. And many of them, too, or perhaps one thing that is growing. It shouldn’t be possible within camp borders, but he can — feel it. A sense of ambush, of impending attack.

Every few minutes there’s a shake at his door handle. A wiggling of the Stygian iron metal, a whisper of sound as it’s jiggled, fruitlessly, a hiss as something draws away. The sound of quiet, throaty murmurs, muffled through the obsidian door. Escalating. Louder, louder; angrier, frantic.

Something is waiting for him.

It’s some comfort that it can’t get in. The handle was his design — not that most monsters would try to use it, but the burn as it touched their flesh, the threat of the Pit, would certainly would deter them. The obsidian doorway he insisted upon, regardless of skeletal complaints, was for practicality as much as pageantry. He has spent enough time in the well-run Land of the Dead to take notes from his father, paranoid he may be.

The noises, though, still grow stronger. Whatever is waiting for him has not been deterred by his fortifications, nor frightened by his aura of death. The handle jiggles again, and this time, the intruder is smarter — the lock turns, clicking as it is overcome, handle turning to follow it slowly, slowly. Nico holds his breath, gliding along the shadow, hovering in the doorway.

The door swings silently open. A clumsy lump of something steps hesitantly forward, huge and cumbersome; bulbous. At the front of it is a single long, glowing talon. The intruder pauses, contemplating, in the flood of low light, the cabin’s twisting shadows, turning slowly, carefully around. Nico glides along the floor, guessing at its blindspot, holding close to himself, waiting, waiting.

One.

The creature pauses.

Two.

The talon twitches to the left, following the creak of the settling bed springs.

Three.

Nico surges forward, bringing down his sword. It clangs against the talon, reverberating outwards, echoing the screams of the monster and tear of fabric —

“Nico! Nico! It’s us! Cool it! Watch the sword! Watch the sword!”

A burst of fire shoots upward, enveloping the cabin in a burst of white light. Nico hisses, nearly dropping his sword in his hassle to clamp his hand on top of his eyes, hunching protectively forward.

“Leo! Fucksake, you tryna blind us?!”

“Sorry! Sorry! He freaked me out, I flamed too hard!”

“Just fuckin’ — scream, next time! Jesus! I’ve gone blind!”

“What the fuck,” hisses Nico, blinking the spots out of his eyes, “are you idiots doing?”

In front of him stands not a monster but five infuriatingly familiar faces, each holding — for some reason — a mattress. Percy’s sword is still held loosely in front of him, and Jason’s jacket has been singed. Piper and Annabeth blink spots out of their eyes. Leo stands, in the charred ruins of his mattress, wringing his hands.

He glances up at the ceiling. Nico follows his gaze, noting where the black rock has been re-vulcanized into glass from the heat of the flames. He looks back down.

“From the bottom of my heart,” Leo says, solemnly, “my bad.”

Nico sinks to the floor with his head in his hands.

His friends, for some reason, take this as a cue. The heavy door is pushed back closed, cutting off the last of the low light from the Greek fire torches outside and the whistling of light wind. Someone feels around for a light switch, and, upon finding none, shrugs and pokes Leo until his nose catches fire, guiding him around until all the lamps and fairy lights have been located and turned on. Someone else — Annabeth, he guesses — begins instructing mattress placement, directing a crew to dig through his closet for linens. A comment about how spacious it is now that he’s not in it pops into his mind and he shoved it back down. He will not make light of the situation. He won’t.

“What the fuck,” he reiterates, louder this time.

Nobody answers. A faucet starts running in his background, and he hears the flip of a drachma.

“If nobody answers me in the next ten seconds I’m going to reanimate Andre the Giant and have him bodily throw y’all out. He will not be gentle. He will —”

“Y’all count,” they all say at once. Percy, gleefully from the bathroom’s running faucet, calls, “I’ll keep track! Remember if it goes over twelve I win!”

Nico snaps his mouth shut, ears burning.

Why has he remained at camp, again? He trained with Achilles and Patroclus. He learned how to read with Literal Shakespeare. Alan Turing taught him math. Not successfully, or anything, but still. He has no bearing here. He could be anywhere he wants to be, and for some reason he is putting up with unrepentant disrespect.

Nico four months ago would smite them. Nico five months ago would turn them to shadows for their insolence. Nico a few weeks ago, even, would have at least sulked off into the forest to cool of for several days.

Here he stands, Nico of tonight.

Unmoving in the centre of his sieged cabin.

No Andre the Giant raised.

No terrors inflicted.

Hardly even a threat.

What the shit.

“What love does to a young lad, eh?” Piper says, patting him condescendingly on the head. He aims a kick for her knees, which she unfortunately dodges, cackling and scampering away. He surges after her.

“I am several decades older than you, you little snot, what are you even talking about —”

“Older and uglier, you wrinkly ass bitch —”

“Guess who’s gonna be ugly when I remove the flesh from her body —”

“Ha! Catch me first, shrimp arms —”

“It’s working! I got it!” Walking very carefully, not unlike a toddler holding a too-full open cup for the first time, Percy steps out of the bathroom, faucet finally off. In his cupped hands is a quickly spinning vortex of sink water, letting off a fine mist. A prism taped to the side of his forehead refracts a rainbow into it. “Say hi, Hazel!”

“Hi,” says Hazel, waving from her surprisingly solid connection. She meets Nico’s eyes, grinning. He matches it immediately, dropping Piper out of the headlock he had her in.

“Hey,” he says, ignoring Piper’s dark muttering and promises for revenge. “You look eager.”

“I am eager. I heard we’re having a sleepover and talking about boys!”

“…You heard what.”

Percy shucks off his shoes, stepping gingerly over Jason and plopping right in the middle of the mattress pile, legs crossed. Nico realises for the first time that he is wearing pattered Superman pajamas, which is frustratingly endearing. He shifts the water vortex so that Hazel’s projection faces him.

“I’m so pumped,” he says earnestly. “I’ve never done this before. I’m so intrigued. Do we talk shit? Is that how it’s done? Is there swooning? I have a plan if there’s swooning.”

“We’ll get there, Seaweed Brain.” Annabeth brushes a hand through Percy’s hair as she walks by — somehow dignified, which is impressive, Nico has never seen anyone wobble over a mattress elegantly before — and presses a kiss to his forehead. He leans into it. “Ease into it.”

“Yeah,” Hazel snickers. She sticks her tongue out at Nico’s glare. “Don’t spook him.”

Nico throws his hands up. “Don’t spook me, she says. Heaven forbid anyone tell me what’s going on.”

“Well, you’re trying to court that boy, right? The cute one with the motormouth?”

Crazy how two sentences can reach down your throat, grip onto your beating heart, squeeze out your soul, drag it from your body, still pulsing, and leave it to actively shrivel on the floor next to your withered, fetal-positioned body to the audience of your cackling friends. Genuinely wild.

There’s a woman who wanders around the poplar fields of his father’s kingdom and has for tens of thousands of years — longer than even his father. Legend says she is the first user of language as it is understood in modernity. Nico may have to beat her up the next time he sees her. Or, well, try, ‘cause she’s jacked, but her crime cannot go unpunished. How dare she introduce the curse of language upon the human race.

“Which one of you,” he croaks, voice cracking more than Jason’s old man joints when he sneezes, “you — fuckers, told my sister about — about.”

If he says his name he’ll die. Like Voldemort except not stupid.

When he looks up, all five of them hold their hands proudly in the air.

“It was more of a conference call,” Jason explains. “And it was less ‘us telling’ and more us calling to say hey, Hazel, Nico keeps shutting down every time this particular person smiles at him, and then Hazel went oh, is it the medic boy he keeps rambling about when he calls me, and we went yeah, totally, can you elaborate on the rambling —”

“Cool.” Nico scrambles to his feet, brushing off his sweatpants, tucking his sword under his arm. “I’m going to go drown myself, if y’all will excuse me.”

He barely makes it one quarter step away from the stupid fucking mattress pile.

“Initiate part two of the plan!” Annabeth hollers.

“Y’all count!” Percy yells.

Without waiting to be chased, Nico sprints for the door. Immediately a fireball is launched at the handle before he can reach, melting it. He veers for the window, but a gust of air slams it shut, and a shining dagger pins the lock in place. In his final desperate dive for the nearest shadow, Piper sprints over — curse her long legs — and tackles him to the ground, rolling them both towards the nearest light source.

“Every single one of you —”

“Ow! Teeth away! Teeth away! Don’t make me muzzle you!”

“—except you, Hazel, never you —”

“Jason! He’s fuckin’ — his nails are clawed into the doorframe, help me!”

“—will be facing me in judgement day! And I shall not be lenient!”

“Quit trying to bite me or I’ll beat you up again!”

“No! Suffer!”

Conveniently, a spot on the uncomfortable floor has been left free of mattresses and pillows and beddings so that Nico and Piper can claw the shit out of each other properly. He lands a good hit on his collarbone, but she jams her heel into his ribs when he foolishly leaves his left side open. He manages to pin her arms to her sides with his legs, but she mirrors the move and squeezes her thighs around his neck.

“Do you usually just let them kill each other?”

“Oh, yeah, don’t worry about it. They didn’t get to spar yesterday so they’re a bit pent up, they’ll be fine soon.”

“…Must be a Greek thing.”

“Don’t you guys have Violence Fridays?”

“Uh, not quite.”

“We have war games,” Jason explains, “but there are generally repercussions for aiming for one’s jugular.”

Annabeth frowns. “Well, that seems flawed. How do you children ever learn to defend themselves?”

“If I recall correctly, by surviving to adulthood.”

“Touché.”

Knowing the scolding he’s about to get is going to be fierce, Nico rolls them both towards his (thankfully untouched) bed, sinking them into the shadows under it and popping up on top of Jason’s reclining body. As he planned, the combined chaos of Jason’s screech and Piper’s nausea gives him just enough leeway to kick himself free and scramble away behind Annabeth. Not that she’ll usually protect him, but he has a feeling that she has an itinerary and is therefore invested in keeping them on task.

“Okay,” she says, holding Piper back by the forehead — success. “Piper, put the nails away. Nico, quit making faces at her or I’m gonna let her claw you. Go sit on opposite ends of the mattress pile.”

“You’re not the boss of me,” they both say, immediately cowering and Annabeth’s glare and scampering to do as asked.

“Thank you. Alright, everybody grab a blanket and gather around. Nico, is there a — thermostat in here, or something?” She tightens the skull-patterned blanket (that she stole from his closet like the thief that she is) around her shoulders. “It’s freezing.”

Nico sniffs haughtily. “I prefer to have my external environment the internal temperature of my soul.”

He smiles smugly to himself at the chorus of boos that echo around him. That was a good one. He feels no shame.

“You should,” Percy tells him seriously.

“Stick your finger in a socket.”

Annabeth tosses an overflowing binder into the centre of the mattress pile before they can really start to go at it.

“Be quiet and behold,” she says grandly, “the plan.”

Nico stares at it dubiously. “The plan.”

“Yes, the plan.”

“Say plan one more time and I’m chewing the floor.”

“You’re such an odd person.”

“Having your fucked up ghost mentor put you in a labyrinth to be hunted for sport by his monster friends for ‘training’ will do that to you.”

Will once told him that he reverts to making people uncomfortable via depressing personal anecdotes when he is nervous. Startlingly perceptive for someone who, in the same breath, asked Nico if he could bring his siblings to the picnic Nico had planned in the strawberry fields for them, alone, at sunset.

“Just — open the binder, oh my gods.”

Huffing, Nico does.

It’s less intimidating than it looks. The heavily doodled title page reads OPERATION: WOOING WILL, which is embarrassing, but the rest of it is as cleanly professional. Several sub chapters including plans A-L, gathered information, outside input, sources, and hand-drawn diagrams are neatly organized and typed out. It’s even in dyslexia-friendly font. Truly a work of art. Too bad Nico is considering incinerating it.

“It’s not even gonna work,” he mumbles, pointedly avoiding the six pairs of eyes watching him. Well, five, Leo walked in the cabin and immediately got distracted by something else. He’s been poking at a pile of bronze for the past forty minutes at least. “He’s — unplannable.”

“Nothing’s unplannable.”

“He is. He doesn’t — think about things. In the same way.” Nico traces his fingers over a page titled Dropping Hints — How Begging Someone To Go Out With You Has Changed In Seventy Years. “You and me’ll see someone go out of their way to make life easier on somebody and know they’re — crushing, or whatever. But Will goes out of his way for everybody, all the time. It’s not odd for him.”

“Can’t you just tell him? Outright?” Hazel asks. “I mean, he told you, didn’t he?”

“That’s different.”

It isn’t, really. Nico could tell him. He could walk up to breakfast tomorrow and just blurt it out. Same words, even. I think you’re gorgeous.

He wants to. He wants Will to know, wants his bright eyes to go wide and his nose to go red and his voice to go quiet as he says, really? And Nico wants to feel the goosebumps that cover his arms when he rubs his thumb over the inside of his wrist and says, yes. Wants to watch him shiver as he says, you make me feel safe, you know. Watch his golden eyelashes flutter as he adds, wanted. Safe and wanted.

“It has to feel right.”

———

#i wanted to finish so bad but it’s like 1am i gotta be up in five hours #oh well #pjo #percy jackson and the olympians #hoo #heroes of olympus #pjo hoo toa #solangelo #nico di angelo #nico di angelo & the seven #annabeth chase #modern courting #my writing #fic #longpost

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