Chapter Text
and i don't get much sleep most night
i'm seeing you in every dream
Day 1 | 5 AM
Will would love to say he had woken up painfully early to attend his patients, but he actually never went to bed. He had spend the night sitting —sprawling, rather— on the least uncomfortable chair in the infirmary, forcing himself to stay awake. Kayla and Austin had been worried when he had sent them home early to come back in the morning, but Will had his reasons. Plus, he could handle this. He had taken a coffee about one hour ago when it became too much. It was true that it hadn't help as much as he thought it would, but he was managing. He could feel in his veins that the sun would rise soon, and then he would have a whole new day and the promise of a new night in which maybe he could allow himself to sleep.
They had 32 patients staying overnight. About 10 of them were likely going to be dispatched after they woke up. Some of them needed bed-rest for a few days, but should not… They should be fine. They had three serious cases: a rather young camper from Cabin 5, one of the girls from Cabin 11, and Nico di Angelo. Nico fucking di Angelo. Will still didn't know how to feel about his presence in his infirmary.
Cecil had shown up earlier on the day just to tease him about it, but the place had been too full and Will too busy for him to stay too long. Wouldn't it be great, Will had thought resentfully as he finished stitching an Aphrodite camper and watched Cecil walked out the door, to have a life more like his? He'd felt unfair right after. Cecil had served both wars too, on the front lines rather than at the infirmary. Some years ago, when they had been hardly 13, Cecil had raised his sword against his own siblings. Will didn't have a right to complain or be jealous. Stitch the fucking cut, Solace, he'd told himself before resuming the task at hand.
Will would have tomorrow to talk about Nico di Angelo. Well, maybe he would have to wait some more days before things calmed down at the infirmary, but at some point he could go back to pretending the war hadn't happened and that his life was normal. He hoped Chiron would read the room for once and cancel Capture the Flag on Friday. It had been ages since he had had a Friday night to himself. I mean, it's not like we have class, Lou had told him when he had mentioned it, Friday's not that special. She wasn't wrong, but that didn't make him dread Fridays any less. He should ask Chiron to cancel it, really, lest he had his irresponsible as fuck campers opening their fucking stitches and overexerting themselves and filling his infirmary to the brim again.
I will have Capture the Flag cancelled, he told himself, and I'll spend the night with Lou and Cecil and we'll do whatever they want… Will never had energy to think of plans, just get himself pulled into whatever the other two had planned when he could. What would he like to do, if he could choose? He wasn't sure. What would they want to do? They had gone stargazing last time, perhaps they could repeat. He could ask the Athena kids for a PC to watch Star Wars. Will was pretty sure he had earned it, but it wasn't like they hadn't also earned it. They'd been at the front lines, too, and though he wasn't sure where that left him in their makeshift army hierarchy, Will figured they were above him.
I'm not even a soldier, he thought. His hands were still bloodied, though. Never his blood, never the enemy's. Just his siblings' and friends'.
A loud sound woke him from his musings. His eyes followed it, landing on the bed they had given to Nico di Angelo. The boy was shaking badly, kicking the sheets and hitting the mattress with every turn he gave. When Will woke up to him, he could hear him muttering nonsense in distress. A nightmare.
"Hey, hey…" Gently, he pulled his hands around Nico's arms to stop him from turning around, and rocked him as softly as possible to get him to wake up. "Wake up, di Angelo, it's not real. Wake up."
In the dark, he couldn't see if Nico had opened his eyes, but he felt him stop moving and taking a deep, deliberate breath. He was awake and safe, which made the five hours of staying awake and stressed on Will's end worth it. The feeling comforted him for about one second before Nico began to panic.
"Hurts, hurts, hurts…"
"Shhh, 's okay," he whispered, trying not to wake up the others. "You gotta tell me where."
Nico retched instead of replying, which Will didn't appreciate. Well. He appreciated it more than he would have appreciated Nico actually vomiting, and that had to count for something. He had managed to sit up and was now supporting himself with his… hands was a bit of an overstatement, but he guessed there was no better term for the shadowy, spectral things icingly holding onto Will's arms. He gagged once more.
"Does your stomach hurt?" he asked, not knowing what to do. Will tried his best to shine the tiniest bit possible, just enough to see Nico's expression better. It seemed he was crying. "Tell me what's wrong. I'm here to help."
Nico's eyes looked around, terrified, before he replied: "I can't be here."
Will's heart clenched. He had feared nurturing him to health just to be told Nico couldn't stay. He never stayed for long at the camp, much to Will's dismay.
"It'll only be some days," he said, ignoring the bitterness in his mouth.
"I need to be outside." It sounded desperate, almost like begging. It took Will by surprise. "I can't breathe. I'll…"
"I'll take you outside," Will interrupted him. It was one thing to have Nico heal and leave camp, it was a very different thing to have Nico shadow-travel and… He didn't want to think about it. "Can you walk?"
"I need to go outside, Will, I'll…"
He probably shouldn't be making stupid decisions at 5 in the morning, because Nico wasn't the only camper he had that needed intense care, but that didn't stop him.
"We'll go outside." As he spoke, he rushed to open one of the windows so that he could hear if anyone else woke up. Nico tried to leave his bed, but his knees buckled as soon as he stood up and he fell right back on the mattress. "Nico, wait, I'll carry you."
Will tried to let the fact that giving a piggyback ride to his crush of years was not giving him any excitement not bother him. He just almost died, he reminded himself, of course you're not twirling around about this. It took little effort to take them outside. For the amount of physical activity he did in comparison with other campers, Will had strong arms, built over years of carrying heavy supply boxes and wounded campers. It didn't help that Nico hardly weighted anything. It wasn't that he was a light-weight, which, if the clear signs of malnutrition were anything to go by he probably was. Rather, Nico barely felt corporeal. Will desperately wanted to not freak about it, but he had never treated anything remotely similar and he had no clue how he'd go about it.
When he dropped Nico onto the soft grass in front of the infirmary, under the window he had left opened, the boy took a shaky, deep breath and seemed to calm down at least for a second. Will didn't dare to say or do anything beyond sitting by his side. He shot a look at Nico. He looked like shit, with his curly hair greasy and unkept, the heavy bags under his eyes, and his scars and bandages visible under the thin shirt they had given the overnight patients. Not to mention, he still looked worryingly close to ghostly. He looked… He looked less like the kid Will had spotted during his first months at camp and more like the kid that had come back after the battle of the Labyrinth: hurt in a way that one could never fix. Will knew the look because he too had looked the same way after the Labyrinth.
If Cecil saw them right now, he'd laugh at Will and tell him that he really didn't see the appeal. Will would have to agree that, like this, Nico wasn't precisely attractive, but there was still something about him that lured him in. Once word had gotten around that Nico was a son of Hades, Will had thought it made no sense, because the boy he had met was nothing like he imagined Hades and his domain to be. He had understood it later in life: Nico was a haunting presence, one he only ever caught in glimpses of faint light but still stayed with him, messing with his head.
"I'm sorry I woke you up," Nico spoke after a while.
His eyes were not on Will, but on the starry sky above them. Will copied him, directing his gaze upwards. It was always bad to look at patients, knowing he was seeing them at their worst and that neither him or them could do anything to avoid it.
"I wasn't asleep," he said truthfully. Nico scoffed in disbelief. "I need to be awake if anything happens."
"I am sorry I was the something that happened."
"It's alright. That's what I was staying up for." He didn't tell Nico about the dark part of him that had been happy his vigil hadn't been for nothing. "Do you feel better?"
"Yeah. It was just a nightma…"
He was interrupted by a loud growl coming from his stomach. Will's eyes went back to him. Nico had a hand protectively holding his tummy.
"Are you hungry?" Nico shoot his head no, but his stomach roared again. "When was the last time you ate? Not ambrosia, something normal."
"I don't need anything."
"I have a Nature Valley," he said, taking the bar out of his shorts pockets and showing it to him. "It sucks ass, but it's really filling. You should really…"
Nico swatted it away from his hand, not hard enough to hurt Will, but definitely enough to shock him. His breath was growing heavy once more. "I don't want to eat."
Will didn't know what to do. He had never had a camper that refused food, especially not someone that had clearly been starving not so long ago.
"Nico." He knelt to grab the Nature Valley of the ground. "I'm not going to force you to eat right now, but you have to at some point." At that, the other boy just groaned and threw his head back. Will started to talk again, not wanting to linger on the way his Adam's apple shone under the moonlight. "Otherwise, I have to tube-feed you, and you don't want that."
Uncomfortable silence sat between them for a few seconds before Nico spoke again.
"What's the difference?"
Will swallowed, hearing the underlying question in his words: why don't I want that? He found that he really didn't have a clear answer other than he didn't want to operate Nico. He'd never tubed someone and wasn't sure he knew how to do it. He'd had to ask Chiron, but if Nico refused to eat for too long Will would have little chance to practice. Of course, he couldn't say any of that.
"You would have to go through surgery." That was usually enough for the rest of the campers, but Nico didn't seem convinced. "And I am not sure I could do it in your current state."
Nico glanced at his hands. He looked like someone had selected 30% opacity on him. In the dark, it was kinda hard for Will spot parts of his arms.
"How long would it take? Before you can do it."
"Between getting the supplies I need and making sure the conditions are optimal, maybe about two weeks," Will lied.
It wasn't really up to code, but he wanted to see if he can convince Nico to reject the surgery. What he got instead was another groan. Nico put his head in his hands, fingers getting mixed up in his curls and almost disappearing. Maybe actually disappering. Will wasn't sure.
"So I have to eat either way?"
"Yeah," Will tried to sound like he didn't like the option, like he understood what Nico was going through. In his defense, he actually had no way of actually knowing what was going on in his head or in his body.
"If you did the tube thing, I wouldn't have to eat ever again?"
Now, that was too much. He had heard hope in his voice and it was more terrifying than some of the stuff he had seen at the infirmary earlier.
"Can you tell my why don't want to eat?" he asked, trying to sound soft and not concerned or scared.
"No," Nico replied.
Every instant of Cecil telling him there was no way Nico could be as good as Will made him out to be flashed before his eyes.
"I can help you if you tell me," he tried. Will softly nudged Nico. "Come on. I won't tell Austin and Kayla. It's just between us."
He hoped Nico could hear the clear we're friends hidden in his words. Maybe friends was a generous term: they had been together for a while when fighting the Romans, Will had been stealing glances at Nico over the past three or four years... It wasn't really the strong friendship Will had longed for since Nico had arrived at camp that winter ages ago, but it was a start, and maybe he could manifest it into existence.
Brown eyes looked into his. In the time they had spent together during battle, Nico hadn't struck him as particularly hard to read, but all his attention was now focused on the dark bags under his eyes, preventing him from understanding how the boy felt at all.
"I…" Nico started. Will looked tenderly into him, wanting him to keep going, but the other looked down without finishing the sentence. "I'm sorry," he spoke softly. "I can't."
The lack of answer irritated him, but Will still replied a false: "That's alright."
There was no response from Nico for a while. Will dared not to break the silence. The coffee he had taken earlier is failing him, because he feels too tired to think of anything relevant to say. It's like a high school crush making me nervous, he told himself. Nico stood by his side, one of his barely there hands scratching at the bandages around his shoulder. They were bloodied up, he'd have to change them in the morning. He looked tired.
"You should go back inside," Nico told him.
Will couldn't. He shouldn't have left to begin with, but now he was stuck with Nico. He wasn't really sure what he was going to do if he shadow-traveled away, but he felt being around him was enough to prevent Nico from trying. He also doubted Nico would be able to walk inside by himself, brittle as he was right now. Plus, alone time with Nico was the thing he had been craving the past four years. Will was going to seize this opportunity.
"I can stay for a bit. It's a nice night." It was the same temperature as every other summer night in Camp Half-Blood: tolerable even if you don't have a hoodie, unless you stand too close to the sea. "Unless you're tired."
"I don't wanna sleep," Nico replied. Will didn't like that coming from him, but he wasn't the right person to fight him on it.
"It might not be a nightmare this time." The scoff that followed made it clear that it was always a nightmare. "I can change your bandages now if you want. It might make them less itchy."
"It's not itchy." The lie was obvious. He had only stopped scratching at them once Will had commented on it. Still, he didn't call him out on it. "You're probably too tired to do anything. Are you switching with your siblings anytime soon?"
"Nope, just me," Will replied.
"Does Chiron make you do this?" The easy thing would be to lie and say that, indeed, Chiron was being extremely unfair to Will and forcing him into vigil. However, the boy began nodding in response before he could stop himself. Nico's eyes shot wide open. "Why do you do it?"
Will tried to shrug in a way that was remotely convincing as he answered: "Just like to make sure everyone's alright."
It was the truth. Nico didn't need to know that, out of the sixteen campers that had died in the Battle of Manhattan, one of them had died overnight in their —Will's, because Michael had died by that point and Kayla and Austin had both been fighting— makeshift infirmary. He expected Nico to roll his eyes and tell him he was doing too much, like Cecil would, or to tell him to forget about it and go sleep, like Lou would.
"You're a good guy," Nico said instead.
For the first time since he had last slept, Will allowed himself to smile.
Day 1 | 11 AM
Somehow, Nico managed to sleep in late in spite of the hustle and bustle of the infirmary in a busy morning. A bunch of the campers had already been dispatched, and they had had volunteers from other cabins coming in to give those who hadn't breakfast. Nico's waited in a nightstand by his bed. Will had his eyes set on it from where he sat in front of a camper with a broken arm, his mind wondering what he would do if he refused to eat again.
"I cannot give you ambrosia and call it a day, so you gotta come here every morning and ask us for a quarter of a square, got it?" Could Nico even physically eat? Had the shadows taken enough of him to leave his digestive system undone? "If we are not here, you can hit Cabin 7 or ask Chiron. Either way, the ambrosia is just so it heals faster, so don't panic if you skip a dose."
"How long till it heals?"
"Somewhere between two weeks and a month." A movement from Nico's bed caught his attention. The boy was rising up from sleep. "No need to tell you to avoid strenuous activity, right?"
"Oh, man… Camp's not fun without that."
Nico had emerged from under the sheets. He looked slightly better than yesterday, more rested. His eyelid were clearly stuck together with sleep.
"If you have a mortal family you can safely return to, you're free to do so, but I cannot give you ambrosia to take with you. If not, I get camp can be boring with a broken arm, but you should take it as an opportunity to rest your body and mind."
The words tasted like hypocrisy in his mouth, his sleepless night giving them a sour aftertaste. The feeling quickly turned to jealousy when Kayla stopped by at Nico's bed and placed his breakfast tray on his lap. That should've been me, Will wanted to scream. His siblings knew he liked Nico, it was unfair to not let him treat him. Whatever. Unfairness was better than an unefficiently run infirmary, and he was busy with the person in front of him.
Eventually, Will managed to send them home and, after a very quick and not thorough look around, determined he could go talk to Nico again. He wasn't sure what he was going to say. Other than the rehearsed "Gods above, just rest" speech he had been using on campers all morning, words were not coming easy to him, perhaps as a consequence of his lack of sleep.
"Hey," he started. "How you feeling? Slept alright after, you know…?"
Nico looked up at him. The heavy bags under his eyes hadn't gotten any less dark, but he still nodded. Will didn't know how much he trusted him to be sincere on that, but it wasn't like he could do anything about Nico's sleep quality. He just nodded back in acknowledgment before his eyes went to the untouched breakfast in front of the boy. It was clear Nico wasn't going to make any effort to make the food any less untouched.
"Want me to change your bandages?"
"Sure," the other immediately replied, seemingly happy to have an excuse to not focus on his food. He presented his arms to Will, where the blood had caked up against the gauze, and looked at him expectantly.
"Actually, I was wondering if you want to come into my office."
Some beds ago, Kayla stiffened before looking around and giving Will a sly look and an annoying wink. Luckily, Nico wasn't facing in her direction.
"You've got an office?" The boy said as if surprised. Then, he added: "What for?"
"You don't have a patient sheet, and I'd like to…"
"No, what do you have an office for? You're not a real doctor."
Will's entire body tensed. Around him, he could hear the sound of everyone else in the room suck in a breath. Austin had dropped the scalpel he was holding, and its impact against the floor was deafening.
"I'm a nurse," he said. Technically, Nico was right, and it felt wrong to have the patients left in the infirmary look at him as if he had just insulted Will. He wanted it known that there was no lie being spoken. However, it didn't mean the reminder that he was not an actual doctor didn't hurt. On one hand, it always felt like a confirmation that he wasn't good enough. On the other, Will didn't want to think about how no matter how much he did for his patients, he still didn't have a title to show off for it. You're not doing this to show off, he told himself. "Office is a loose term. It's a storage room and where we keep our important papers and all of that. You wanna come or not?"
Nico was scratching at his bandages again. "Yeah, sure."
"Can you walk?"
At that, the boy frowned, even though he had had no problem having Will carrying him last night. He placed the tray with his food on the nightstand by his side and stood up. Just like they had some hours ago, his knees buckled under his weight. For a second, Will feared he would fall, but Nico managed to avoid it by clinging to him instead. His bright orange T-shirt bent under the places where his hardly visible fingers were clutching at. Fearful his grip wouldn't last for long, Will tried to help support him, placing an arm around his back and a around his arms.
They were hugging. He was hugging Nico di Angelo, something he had imagined would make the day it happened the best day of his life. How wicked it was that it followed so short to some of the worst days of this life. Whatever, it wasn't like that was what he had imagined. Will was regretful to admit he had thought about it many, many times, enough to create a myriad of images about it: Nico winning Capture the Flag in one of the very rare occassions Will participated and running to hold him, Nico and him walking back to their cabins one day after the bonfire and him admitting he had been wanting to hug Will since he'd first seen him, as a casual hello in a future that would never happen…
The reality was so disgustingly like every other day, so clearly an extension of his nightmarish role as camp doctor —nurse—, that it made Will want to cry in disappointment. He just wanted something nice for once, something to be about who he was and not about what he did for others. With Nico being such an unusual sight at camp, he had allowed himself to entertain the idea that he'd seen him as more than his role in it, but it was clear that the Fates had had other ideas in mind.
"I'll carry you," he whispered, hoping it would be audible over the increasingly loud breaths of Nico.
"No!" he said in another whisper, rushedly. "Not in front of everyone…"
"No one's paying attention to you."
Nico looked up as if to confirm what he'd said. His eyes were shiny with fear, which Will didn't understand. He had never struck him as someone that cared about what others thought of him, and he had admired him for that. It was weird to reconcile the Nico that refused to wear the camp uniform, that didn't care about using Mr. D's favoritism towards him to his advantage, that for a long time had only shown up to camp as a last resource in wars were everything was lost, with the boy desperately clinging to him as he looked around to ensure no one was judging him.
"Do you carry other patients?"
"All the time."
That seemed to be the selling point Nico needed, for a few seconds later he was on the bed and, then, jumping onto Will's back for a quick ride to the office. He had even made sure to grab onto Nico's breakfast tray and leave it on his desk, in hopes he could get him to eat something. He opened the door to his makeshift office with his foot and walked them inside, dropping Nico as gently as possible on the desk and placing his food next to him. When there was no retort about him having brought breakfast with him, he took it as a small victory.
Will stretched his back and went to retrieve an empty patient sheet. He wondered whether Nico thought they also weren't professional enough to need those. It was true that camp had managed pretty well without them, because the head medic usually had a good memory for the information. The problem had been the three head medic changes in the span of about one year. That had fucked them up. Will had spent the last two weeks before the Roman's arrived making sure that everything was in order, in case Kayla had to take over him. He was glad he could start to forget about that for, hopefully, some years.
"Okay, so. Full name's Nico di Angelo, right?" he asked after sitting on his desk chair. "In case we gotta, I don't know, do some administration stuff with the mortal world."
"It's Niccolò," he replied. Before Will could ask for help with the spelling, Nico spoke again: "You can keep it as Nico, though. I'm legally dead."
"Right." Will nodded to suppress a facepalm. Once in a while they got legally dead campers, something they seemed to find really amusing but that he, Chiron and the rest of counselors knew to be administrative hell the moment they got tired of camp. He took a red post-it from his stationary drawer and placed it on the top of the sheet. "Date of birth?"
He technically didn't need that either for a legally dead camper, but the Aphrodite cabin insisted everyone had their birthday's celebrated, and that was the easiest way to get everyone's.
"January 28th," Nico started. "Need the year?"
The Aphrodite kids would probably appreciate it. "Sure."
"It's, uh… 32, I think. 1932."
Will nervously clicked his pen on and off as he considered the words. 1932. He didn't know Nico that much, but he was pretty sure that was not the kind of joke he would attempt. Will tried to find a feasible explanation, but found himself distracted. Is he like 80?, his mind rambled, am I into an elder? Cecil and Lou were never gonna let him live that down.
"It's, uh… See, there's this one hotel-casino in Las Vegas that like makes it so you don't age? Well, no, I think you age. It's just really fucking slow. I was there two weeks."
"And you came out…?"
Will was about to add a joke about the phrasing when he realized that Nico had been raised in the 30s. He bit the inside of his cheek to avoid collapsing onto the table at the implications. Wasn't his luck just wonderful? His hand went back into the drawer, finding a random paper to scrunch up for relief. I have a crush on one guy and he's from the fucking 30s. Fuck me.
"Uh… Summer before I came here. The first time," Nico told him. "Well, you probably don't remember. I left very quickly."
He looked embarrassed, eyes looking down and avoiding Will. He didn't understand why he would be ashamed. He, too, had wanted to disappear when his siblings had died, and he had been older than Nico when it had happened. Often, he had wondered what Nico had been doing in the time between his first week at camp and the labyrinth. Will knew he could probably ask, probably would have to at some point for the sake of the sheet, but he couldn't bring himself to change topics so coldly when Nico looked like he had just confessed to some deadly sin. He could even tell he'd be hiding his face if his arms weren't see-through.
"Of course I remember," he told him, trying to cheer him up.
Immediately, he regretted it. Very few people remembered much about Nico's first arrival. After all, he had been overshadowed by the Hunters', which were a much rarer sight than another Cabin 11 recruit. After he had run away, many campers had started to spread rumors about him that Will had never paid much mind to. Perhaps, it was because he had been much more impactful to Will than the Hunters, but the memory of Nico di Angelo had not faded from his mind.
"You do?"
Will nodded. Nico had been a cheerful kid when Will had first watched him from afar. He remembered hearing him approach the older Cabin 11 kids asking if they wanted to play Mythomagic, and he remembered asking Lee if he could teach him to play. By the time he had learned enough to play without Michael telling him what cards to use, Nico had already left camp. Will remembered he had had a tantrum that day when Lee had asked if he wanted to play Mythomagic after the bonfire. He had thrown his cards at him and climbed into his bed like his whole world had ended. Another one of his siblings, a girl not much older than him that had been lost to the battle of Manhattan, had whistled he had a crush and there had been some laughter before Lee had told everyone to shut the fuck up. Lee never cursed, and Will remembered feeling special that he was doing it to help him out.
"Yeah! How old would you say you are?"
"Fifteen?"
"Gotcha."
By his birthday, he scribbled "turns 16" in big letters. He decided to check "male" and "he/him" without asking, not wanting to risk getting some transphobic reaction to further ruin his week. Man, he's never going to see me as a guy if he finds out, he thought to himself. He swallowed around the knot in his throat. Maybe he had to move on from his crush on Nico.
"Any allergies?" Nico shook his head no. "Blood type?"
"I don't know," he replied.
"It's alright, we have enough O neg if you need to receive anything. We'll test it when you're…" The words more physical died in his mouth. "Further along your recovery. What vaccines do you have?"
"Uh…"
"Do you know when you last got one?"
Please, dad, don't let it be the 30s, don't let it be the 30s, don't let it be the 30s. He pulled out the laptop they kept in the infirmary and quickly Googled a timelime of vaccine discovery. Polio had only gotten a vaccine in the 50s, measles in the 60s. Even for the ones before that, he had no idea how available they had been upon discovery or if Nico's family had had access to them. What if between-wars Italy was full of anti-vaxxers? He looked up at Nico, who was still formulating his reply. His frown curved in a mix of annoyance and concentration that made Will want to kiss it away for one second before he could pull himself together again.
"So?"
"I don't…" Nico scratched at his bandages. Will had to change them stat. "I don't remember."
"It doesn't have to be exact," he tried to help, noting the hesitancy and discomfort in his voice. "I won't get mad if you get it wrong or if it was a long time ago. I'll probably have you get dupes of everything you can get dupes of just to make sure, but we can wait for that. Just make sure not to catch tetanus in the next two months, it'd save us a lot of trouble."
Nico smiled faintly. "Will do."
It was clear he wasn't going to give Will an estimate of his last vaccine, so he wrote down "HEAVILY UNVACCINATED" and left it as that.
"Have you ever been hospitalized? Or anyone in your family?"
"I don't know. Not in the past five years."
Will tutted. Vaccines were one thing to forget about, he figured. He hardly remembered anything from his first ones other than being scared of the needle. He certainly hadn't learned or cared about what it was he was getting until he had gotten the HPV one some months before going to camp. Hospitalization, though, struck him as something very difficult to forget about.
"Did you receive any sort of head injury during your time in the casino or directly afterwards?" he asked, trying to see if he could find an explanation from the apparent lack of memories.
"No," Nico said. Then, he deadpanned: "I drank from the Lethe."
Will stopped clicking the tip of the pen. He had hoped Nico wouldn't notice his reaction, but the sudden silence in the room was deafening even to him. He put the patient sheet down. Sure, two thirds of Nico's life down the drain were absolutely detrimental for any administrative or archival task, which sucked for him… But he could only imagine how it must be for him. He wanted to reach out a hand for support, but he doubted that would help. After all, he thought pained, they weren't even friends, not enough for his presence to comfort Nico in any relevant way. All he could do was do as he had done for the last 5 years: watch from afar.
"You don't remember anything?"
"Hardly anything," Nico explained, as if that made it better. "There were things I remembered. My name. Uh… I didn't forget how to talk. It wasn't like starting from zero like it is to other people. I think children of Hades have a bit of resistance."
"Are you sure?"
He lifted a phantasmal hand to make a "so-so" gesture.
"I can't tell you any of the classes I went to in Italy," he started, "but I remembered dates and facts that have to be from History. I still knew how to pray. But I didn't remember my mother or my father, or the war, or any friends I had had."
Will nodded as he tried to imagine how that would be. He wouldn't have been able to live without his mother. Maybe if he lost his memories of her he could manage, he guessed, but he couldn't really phantom the idea of forgetting about his mom when for so long she'd been all he'd ever had. Growing up a demigod was, in most cases, growing up orphaned or with a single parent. Naomi Solace was the second case, and Will felt like forgetting about her would be just like forgetting about himself as a whole.
"I am sorry to hear," he said sincerely. "If, uh… If you ever need to talk about it…"
"I don't," Nico said immediately. "Not anymore, I think."
The words clearly held a lot of meaning to him and not to Will, who listened confused but still nodded.
"Alright? Well, since you probably don't know a lot of what I am asking you, I'd advise to just keep things very light for the foreseeable future until we can run tests on you," he started. "It shouldn't be hard because you're on doctor-mandated rest either way."
"I thought you were a nurse." Will took a deep breath as subtly as possible, which apparently wasn't enough, because Nico noticed and quickly added: "I'm sorry. Is that bad?"
"Look, it's…" It's whatever, he wanted to say. After all, out of everything happening in the infirmary, his self-identification as a nurse or doctor was always the least important. Still, he was aware his eye was twitching at the situation, and, in rare fashion for him, allowed himself some minutes to explain things to Nico. "I'm not a doctor 'cause I'm sixteen and I've never stepped in a high school. But, to all effects, I work as both doctor and nurse… Well, I volunteer as both for camp, and I have been doing it since the battle of Manhattan, so everyone agrees that I get to be called doctor."
"Ah," was Nico's initial reply. "I didn't know that."
"I figured. No hard feelings."
Will kept his mouth shut after, not wanting to add a comment about how he might have known if he had stayed at camp for longer. He had no idea what Nico had been up to between wars, but with him being a child of the big three and with having been trusted by the Seven to bring back the Athena Parthenos, it didn't take a genius to guess it had been important stuff. No need to whine about his absence.
"Do you have everything you need in your cabin?"
"Yeah, a bed and stuff," Nico replied.
"No." Will shook his head. "I mean like clothes and stuff. Soap and shampoo. A toothbrush."
"Ah? No, I don't." Some silent seconds passed between them before he spoke again. "I usually do, by the way. I travel with it. I just lost it at some point."
"That's alright," he said genuinely. He'd never judge a camper for their hygiene upon returning to camp. It was never their fault that they had to travel light, or that their things had to get sacrificed. "If you want, I can take off your bandages now, and you can take a quick shower in the Big House's bathroom before I change them again. How's that sound?"
"I don't have other clothes," Nico pointed out. "Or a towel."
Still, Will had seen the way his eyes lit up at the idea of a fresh shower, so he could guess that he was just making sure he had everything he needed for one rather than delaying it. How long had his and Reyna's quest been? Will had never been on a quest, but he could hardly stand the feeling of filth attaching itself to his skin during a long shift at the infirmary.
"I will grab you a camp shirt." He didn't miss the way Nico's nose scrunched at that. He had only seen Nico in camp clothing on the first week he had been there, and he hadn't thought much about it. Now that he was familiar with his grunge aesthetic, Will could understand that a bright orange tee was not very fitting for him. He was sure he'd still look great —as great as he could look when he was recovering from a near-death experience—, but he understood the feeling. "Well, I will ask Connor if he has something you can borrow. He seems about your size. And I can see if there's pants your size in the camp store. And there should be towels in the house, so don't worry 'bout that."
Nico's eyes were still shining when he thanked him, which made the butterflies inside Will's stomach twirl around. It felt like such a victory to have the boy of his dreams look at him like he had just handed him the world in a silver spoon that it almost hurt to ruin it.
"Do you think you can have some breakfast while I go get everything?"
He reacted in the way Will had expected: body tensing, gaze darkening as he retreated into his seat, as if he had just been threatened. Will pursed his lips, looking at the breakfast. Greek yogurt with nuts and, on the side, a small piece of chocolate.
"Would you rather something else?" Nico shook his head no. "Anything, really."
"I… No…"
His voice sounded so small and terrified that Will immediately wanted to find whoever had caused this problem and scalpel them to death. He frowned.
"Is it your weight?" he asked.
"Huh?" Nico looked up.
"Are you afraid you'll put on weight if you eat? Are you trying to lose some?"
"What? No," the other replied immediately, as if Will had suggested something stupid.
His disbelief made it clear he was being honest. Will gave a sigh of relief, hardly regretting the fact that Nico clearly noticed his reaction. He wasn't really sure what he was gonna say if Nico said yes. He had never had a patient with anorexia, and he wasn't sure he would be able to treat it properly.
"Can I know what it is, then?" Nico shook his head. He had had a slight hope that in the six hours that had happened since yesterday the boy would have changed his mind, but clearly he hadn't. "Why not?"
Nico shrugged. "It's embarrassing."
And Will could hear that he meant "mortifying." There was clear humiliation to be heard in the way Nico's voice broke towards the end of the word. He had no idea what to do to make him feel better.
"Hey," he tried, "you just saved the fucking world. You're a hero, Nico, really. Whatever you are gonna say is not about to change that."
For a short moment, there was a slight change in the way Nico held himself together. The tension dropped, as if he had just taken a breath deep enough to decompress and bloom in front of Will.
"Can I shower? I'll tell you, I swear… Just, later?"
He didn't really know if he could trust Nico on that, but the change in body language had given him just enough hope to nod his head and let it slide. Sure. Later.
"Of course," Will told him. "Can you walk to the bathroom?"
"Can I try?"
His brain immediately translated it for him: Will you catch me if I fall?
"Sure! Here, let me do the bandages first," he said before grabbing a pair of scissors from the drawers on the desk.
He walked in front of Nico, who just held his arms up wordlessly. Will stared, trying to see if they seemed more or less corporeal than yesterday at night. It was hard to tell, he settled with as he pressed the scissors to the gauze and started cutting. He wasn't sure what would happen if the dull end of the blade came into contact with Nico while his arms were so ghostly, so he made sure to be extra careful. One hand held the underside of his left arm as best as he could with the lack of physicality, making sure he didn't move, while the other cut away as he intensely stared at the process, not wanting to get distracted for a single second.
When he was done with both arms, he looked up at Nico. The boy's doe eyes seemed bigger than ever, open in something that wasn't quite surprise and definitely wasn't fear. He seemed to be holding in a breath, and if it weren't for a slight blush covering his cheeks, Will would have feared he'd made him uncomfortable. Instead, all he could think about was that he had made Nico di Angelo blush.
Raised in the 30s, his mind shouted at him, has hardly ever talked to you, threw your Nature Valley to the ground…
He let you carry him, his heart supplied instead, and asked for seconds.
"Stretch them for a bit. Let's get to the bathroom."
Day 1 | 7 PM
The infirmary is the emptiest it has been in a while, just him, Nico and the other risky patients, both of which are recovering at a nice pace. Nico sat on his bed, doing nothing. He had gotten some visitors, namely different members of the Seven, with Jason having spent the longest time. Now, he seemed exhausted from interacting and had gone back to resting. The other two girls had asked Will to borrow the computer, and were now sat on the same cot watching whatever tweens watched these days. On his end, Will was meant to be at dinner, but he had decided to wait with them in case anything happened and then quickly go grab leftovers. Kayla and Austin had tried to convince him to go to the bonfire, but he didn't feel confident leaving his campers alone during what was simply leisure time for him.
"Hey," Nico called from his cot, distracting Will from the book hed' been trying to read. "Can you come here?"
Will walked to him without hesitation.
"Are your arms alright?"
Maybe the clean bandages were influencing his opinion, but his arms were starting to look better. Nico nodded before holding both of them out. He was still see through, but at least he was steering in the right direction.
"Yeah."
"Good. What did you want?"
"Are you busy?" he asked, even though he had spent the last half an hour watching Will do nothing other than read. He shook his head no. "Can I go outside?"
"For a walk, or just…?"
"I'm too tired," Nico replied. "I just. I need fresh air."
"Sure." He waited for a bit for the boy to leave the bed. When he didn't, Will realized he wasn't just too tired for a walk, but too tired to walk all together. "Here, I'll help."
For the third time in the past 24 hours, Will carried Nico di Angelo out of his bed, trying not to think about how little he weighted and how much he liked holding him. They sat together on the grass, back against the infirmary walls. It was almost a repeat of last night, with the only differences being the sunlight —Nico looked just as good under the sun as he did at night, or maybe even better— and the fact that both of them seemed way less strung out.
"I can leave the window open. Just call when you want me to come back," Will told him, standing up even though he didn't want to. It's hopeless, he thought to himself as he cleaned his pants.
"Oh," Nico mumbled. "I thought you would stay."
A hand went to scratch nervously at his neck. "Do you want me to?"
A nod from Nico was all it took for Will to sat back down. He threw his head back, letting it rest against the paneling of the building. In spite of himself, his body relaxed, letting go of the tension he had been holding for the past… He didn't even know when he had last had a moment of respite. For a while, both of them remained quiet. Usually, Will would have tried to start up a conversation, but he had spent the last days so overstimulated he just couldn't break himself to break the silence.
A butterfly flew past them and landed on Nico's knee. Will desperately wanted to look at the image and find it idyllic, but he found himself stuck on the clear signs of malnutrition in his legs. He didn't know if it was the sole reason why the boy was struggling so much to walk, but his legs definitely looked unhealthily thin.
"Can I have some ambrosia?" Nico asked, as if guessing what Will was thinking about.
"Hm." It had proved to be the only thing he'd successfully eat, so he felt inclined to reach into his pocket and give him a square. "You can have a dot. I can't have you becoming an addict." There was no direct disagreement, but he noticed how Nico straightened his back and frowned. "That a problem?"
There was another instance of silence between them, in which Nico pulled his knees up and started to scratch at his neck or bandages. Will decided not to press him.
"I was captured in June," he started after a while. Will sucked in a breath. "It wasn't a quest per se, but I thought I would be able to go into Tartarus fix the Doors of Death on my own. I don't know what it was a good idea." The last remark was mostly to himself, as if rushing it out would make Will overlook the fact he had been into Tartarus. "Gaea's forces got me and used me as bait for Percy and the rest. They put me in this…" His hands moved around, representing some sort of enclosure. "These two titans put me in a cell, but it was just a jar, so there wasn't any air and they wouldn't give me food."
His heart clenched. As a doctor, he was amazed that Nico had survived both Tartarus and Gaea's torture. The part of his brain wired for fixing and healing kept trying to think of a possible explanation, but there was no medical data he could apply that made his survival make sense. The rest of him couldn't care less about the logistics of it all, too busy thanking the Pantheon for the fact Nico had made it out alive. If they had been closer, he'd reached for a hug.
"How'd you make it?" he whispered instead.
"I… Ugh." A small tear had fallen for his eyes, which had gotten wetter as he recounted the story. Nico swept it away angrily. "I had these pomegranate seeds from Persephone. Only children of Hades can eat them and survive. They, uh…"
His eyes became hazier. Will scooted closer to him, grabbing his hand and squeezing it.
"It's okay," he mumbled close to his ear. "You're here now."
"I had to go into a death trance."
Nico breathed the words out as if he was running out of air. His chest had started to rise up and down uncomfortably fast. Will had no idea what a death trance was, but it wasn't the moment to ask. He tried to move away, not wanting his presence to become a reminder of his imprisonment, but Nico's hardly there fingers clang at his hand and tugged until they were together. They were face to face, meaning he could see the tears that had started to fall down his cheeks.
"Can I hug y…?"
"No!" he shrieked.
"What do you need?"
The boy looked around in panic, still hyperventilating. After a few seconds of rushed breathing and confusion, he zeroed on Will again and threw himself at him, arms surrounding his body and pressing his head to his chest. Oh, Gods, Will thought when he felt his heartbeat growing faster. He didn't dare hug Nico back, not when it would have sent him further into his flashback, but he had no idea what to do. He kept his arms pinned to his body, surrounded by the boy's arms. For the second time in his life, he was getting a hug from Nico di Angelo, and the situation was the worst possible one for it.
"It's alright," he said. "It's over now, Nico. You're outside now. You are alive." The words got a whimper from the boy, and Will figured that a death trance must be dangerously close to what it sounded like. "I promise, you made it. You're alive and not in danger anymore. You can breath just fine, see? Do it with me?"
He forced himself to quiet down so he could breath at an even pace, only speaking to direct Nico as the boy copied him. After a while, Nico got the hang of it on his own, and Will started to add little encouraging remarks: "there you go!," "one, two, there, perfect," or "you're doing so well." He stopped hyperventilating, eventually, but his crying remained adamant. Will pulled him away, carefully lifting his head to dry some of his tears.
"It's over, Nico. You're with us now. They won't hurt you again. You made it."
"I was so stupid," the other replied before burying his head on Will's chest again.
"What? Nico, we are all alive thanks to you. Nothing you did was stupid."
"It was!" A fist tapped against the boy's chest, but Nico didn't have enough strength for it to actually hurt. "It was all avoidable and I…"
"Shhh… It wasn't, Nico. It happened for a reason."
The words tasted bitter in his mouth. For a bit, he was the one trapped in the past, with Chiron repeating the sentiment to a younger version of him that was still mourning the boys that had taught him to suture a wound and tie his shoes.
"It was my fault that Percy and Annabeth fell."
"You had to be there," he spoke. "You needed to take the statue."
Will couldn't help to feel like he was lying. He was no one to know what parts of Nico's pain had been fate and which ones had just been pain for the sake of it. It made no difference to the Gods, though. Maybe it was all the same, he thought but didn't dare say.
"What matters is that you are here now. I got you."
"The statue's here," Nico whispered against his chest, seemingly too tired to keep crying. He was still shaking. "I'm useless now." Before Will could add anything to make him think otherwise, he scoffed: "Look at me."
"What do you mean?"
"Solace, for the love of God, I can't even eat."
"Nico…"
The boy pulled away to look at Will directly, eyes red from crying and mouth bent in a sarcastic grin. "What good am I now?"
"There's nothing left to do," he told him. Purposefully, he ignored the part of his brain that reminded him that while everyone else in camp was free now, he still had to serve the infirmary. Discharged or not, many campers had become disabled in the past days, and they were going to need him. Even then, he was always needed. "You can rest now. It's all healing from now onward. Your duty's done."
Nico didn't reply. Instead, he hugged around his chest again, his ear resting where Will's heart drummed nervously for a while. At least he was calm now, even if it meant that Will now had nothing else to focus on other than his giddiness at the embrace. Every rational thought of his was chased immediately by something stupid. I guess he's claustrophobic, his mind would say before his heart followed with OHMYHE'SHUGGINGMEAGAIN. While he figured he should pull them away before he got a heart attack, Will couldn't bring himself to.
"A death trance makes you basically dead," Nico spoke after a long period of silence. He was still close to Will. "It's pure survival mode, pushed to an extreme. You hardly need air. In return, you can't do anything else, but you feel everything. You can't feel or hear your pulse because your heart will only beat a handful times a day, and when it happens, you feel it like a muscle you haven't used in ages being stretched to the max. And you know that it'll only feel more and more sore when it beats the next time."
"You don't have to tell me," Will whispered. "Don't hurt yourself. You told me so much already. I'm so grateful, Nico."
"I'm scared it'll be the same with every other food. I can't talk myself out of it."
"Alright. We'll think of something, alright? We'll find a way to fix this. You'll eat food again, I promise. Oh! The ambrosia, right. I'll give it to you…"
"Does it really have to be so little?" Nico groaned. "Grains and small things like that… It's really scary."
"Right," Will acknowledged after mentally kicking himself. "Do you have the same problem with drinks? We can go back inside and I can give you some water with nectar in it."
"Can it be warm milk?" Nico asked. Right after, he rolled his eyes. "I sound like a baby. Forget it, water's fine."
"I'll get you warm milk." If he had to be stuck in the drink realm of nutrition for some time, Will was going to make sure he had the best stay possible. "You wanna wait here while I go fetch some?"
"Sure." With that, Nico separated their bodies definitely. Will mourned the loss as he stood up, just to have his heart jump in his chest when the other boy spoke again. "I wish I could go with you."
"We'll try tomorrow, okay?"
He nodded. "Okay."
Will walked away, his pulse beating fast in his ears as the memory of their hug burned itself in everyone of his nerves and his mind racing at the fact that he somehow had to survive two more days.