Chapter Text
Nico wakes up to a coughing fit.
When he opens his eyes, Hazel’s standing over him and he’s convinced that he must be dying, because hasn’t Hazel left with the rest of the Romans already?
“Are you okay?” the thing that might be a shade of Hazel asks. Nico doesn’t know how to respond to that.
His throat burns, and the bottle of dubiously-flavoured water is still standing on the table, but he lets the cough run its course, tearing through his throat and making it feel like his lungs are on fire.
Somehow in the midst of this he manages to sit up, coughing into his elbow because even he’s learnt that coughing when someone’s in the room (even though he doesn’t think this can count as a room) is impolite. He just barely has the mind to start counting down three, two…
The curtain is pulled to the side and Will steps in, another water bottle in his hand. “Everything okay, Gloomy?”
Some part of Nico feels like it’s cross with Will, but either his mind is too muddled by the coughing fit or it was just his emotions being stupid again, because the feeling feels foreign. Will’s fine. He’s literally just doing his job. While being overly nice, which makes him feel weird.
He coughs harder and if he was anyone else he would have probably shown a thumbs-up to Will to make him less concerned. As it stands, Nico is not that kind of person, so he just tries to give an odd kind of shrug that must convey something to Will, because he gets closer, but doesn’t touch.
Nico can appreciate that.
His mouth feels wet, and there’s something wet sticking onto the skin of his elbow. When he looks down, the spit there is tinged pink.
Will seems to have seen it, too.
“That doesn’t look so good,” he says, and he sounds surprisingly calm. Nico doesn’t understand how he is; to most people coughing up blood is a sure-fire sign of tuberculosis. Nico’s been the Underworld judge of at least one person with tuberculosis, so it must still be around now.
Finally the cough seems to die down. Will turns to rummage through the set of drawers, coming back up with a flat wooden stick. Pulling two gloves out of the holder on the wall, he steps up to Nico. “Can I have a look at your throat?”
That feels strangely intimate, and he rasps out that much, which makes Hazel come up on his other side to hold onto his arm. She’s so warm.
“Well, if there’s a wound, it would be nice for me to see it,” Will says patiently. “I can’t treat wounds I know nothing about.”
“You can’t treat these wounds,” Nico says, and wow, his voice is really shot. “They’re from the river of fire. Nectar, ambrosia and unicorn draught won’t touch them.”
“We tried everything to get him, Annabeth and Percy to stop spitting blood,” Hazel says. “The only thing we seemed to figure out was that they might heal on their own as long as they’re not bothered.”
“Which is hard when the wounds probably itch,” Will agrees.
Nico huffs. Try burns like hell.
Will gestures for him to open his mouth, and so Nico reluctantly does. He has to make it up to Will for his terrible mood earlier, and this seems like an okay way to start.
The wooden stick presses down on his tongue and suddenly he’s transported back to that medical appointment he’d been to to be cleared to leave Italy to go to the States. The doctor there, too, had used one of these sticks, checking his throat, looking for anything abnormal that would make it impossible for him to leave the country. With Bianca only barely recovered from her tuberculosis, it had been more anxiety-inducing than Nico remembered it being in the moment.
In hindsight, Hades must have had a hand in getting them their clearances, with Nico’s own recovered polio and Bianca’s still-weak lungs.
By the time he’s able to leave the memory (and it had been a weird one, with him looking at himself in third-person, observing the appointment from afar) the only evidence that the wooden stick had been in his mouth is the dry and slightly fuzzy feeling on his tongue.
“You were gone again,” Will notes, and somehow he’s summoned the clipboard out of nowhere. Does he keep spares in the drawers just to seemingly magic them out of thin air? “We’ll have to keep an eye on that.”
Nico doesn’t answer, but this time it’s less because his mood’s in the pits again and more because he just doesn’t know how to respond to the statement. He’s more than aware that he’s ‘dreamy’— the term both his mother and Hazel had used for him —but even he doesn’t know what it comes from. The modern world must have an explanation for it (they have an explanation for everything, they probably even know how to cure polio at this point) but Nico’s never bothered to actually find one. Maybe he should have dedicated some of his non-existent free time to it while he was homeless and trying to keep Percy alive.
Ha.
“Are you sure it’s okay for me to leave?” Hazel asks him, still holding onto his arm. “I’m sure I could convince Reyna and Frank to—”
“You belong with your Camp,” Nico says, reaching up to hold onto her in return. His hands are freezing cold compared to hers, but she hasn’t given up on touching him, so maybe it’s okay for his freezing skin to touch her. “We’ll see each other.”
He’d almost said that she doesn’t belong here, which makes him remember that he doesn’t necessarily belong here, either. But Hazel has a home, with her Camp. She’s got a position of leadership, a family with the fifth cohort and a boyfriend to pay attention to. Nico doesn’t want to ruin this.
“Reyna and Frank are outside,” Hazel says. “They both wanted to say goodbye to you. Is that okay with you?”
Nico wonders if this what it feels like to be wanted. Reyna he can understand; their trip across half the world had done wonders for bonding, and even before that, they’d had this understanding, especially after Jason had gone missing. But Frank, who is too good for this world? He doesn’t understand what Frank wants with him.
“Is it wise to leave the entire legion without both of its praetores?” Nico asks her. “That sounds like it could get chaotic.”
Hazel smiles. “Romans are different from Greeks. Besides, the centurions have control of the legionnaires. Though, they’re probably all getting antsy. I can’t imagine that driving all the way over here was much fun, and so the thought of going on another cross-country road trip cannot be that appealing.”
“Doesn’t sound very fun,” Will agrees. “I was on the road for a couple years. Long driving days leave you with all kinds of aches and pains. Sights are pretty, though.”
“I’d rather take Arion,” Hazel says. “But as one of the centurions of the fifth cohort, I have to be responsible.”
Nico, personally, is of the opinion that Hazel should be able to do whatever she wants, but she does have a point.
“I’ll go grab Reyna and Frank,” Hazel says. “They’re waiting right outside of the infirmary.”
“Arion?” Will asks quietly as Hazel steps out.
“Really fast horse,” Nico explains. “She tamed him during a quest right before the Argo arrived at Camp Jupiter.”
“Really fast horse…” Will mutters, clearly thinking about where exactly the horse slots into the Greek Pantheon. “I get that it’s a Greek myth kind of horse, but I’ve never been much of a horse person. My cousins, sure, they grew up on a ranch, but not me.”
“Neither,” Nico agrees. “The first time I saw a horse in real life was on Geryon’s ranch and those weren’t normal horses.”
Will shrugs. “Name’s not known to me, I fear. Another Greek myth guy?”
Nico scowls. He hopes that Geryon’s in the deepest recesses of the Pit, never to reform in the mortal world. “Percy killed him.”
“Well, based on that tone, I’m glad I missed him,” Will says, turning as the partition curtain is pulled to the side, revealing Hazel once again, with Reyna and Frank standing behind her. Reyna, as always, is dressed in her usual battle gear. Frank is dressed slightly more casually, wearing a purple Camp Jupiter hoodie and jeans. Despite this, he seems far from the fumbling, uncertain guy Nico had met all those months ago at Camp Jupiter.
“Nico,” Reyna greets. “You’re looking better.”
“I’ve been in here for two days,” Nico says, and despite the intense look she’s fixing him with, he manages to maintain eye contact with her. “I don’t feel much different.”
But that’s a lie. He’s actually slept, and the block Mr D had put into his mind to protect him from the worst of the horrors seems to have done something. Not constantly feeling like he’s going to faint is a bonus, too.
Reyna smiles, and only one side quirks up. She’s still uncomfortable, in the presence of a person she doesn’t know well. Nico’s only seen her real smile once, and he doubts he’ll see it again anytime soon. “Well, new clothes already do a lot. The tropical shirt didn’t suit you.”
Frank stays further back, and Nico’s already resigned himself to the fact that Frank still doesn’t like him, when he pulls something out from behind his back. “I remembered out conversation in Venice. It was the last one at the Camp store.”
The box Frank hands him is bigger than he remembers, made of a glossy thick paper covered in orange, brown and purple illustrations.
“It’s the Africanus Extreme expansion deck,” Nico says in disbelief. He remembers this already being expensive in his time, and he shudders at the idea of what it must cost now. Admittedly, he does have his allowance from Hades, but even then … it’s not something he’d ever thought he’d see again. “Frank, you…”
Frank rubs his forearm, making the fabric move back and forth. “I know. There’s nothing that’ll ever make up for how we treated you, and for all you did for both camps. But I remembered our talk on Mythomagic, and when I saw it at the Camp store, well…”
That’s the second Mythomagic item he’s received today. The booster packs from Hazel are still laying on the table next to the bed.
“Thanks,” he says, and it feels so insufficient. How does he begin to express his gratitude to a gift he never expected? “Hazel thought the same thing.” A pause. “You’re a good match.”
Once he says it, Nico realises that this is the first time he’s properly acknowledged their relationship. It’s almost odd to him to see his sister dating, but it’s easy to tug on the feeling in his chest and recognise that he’s happy for his sister. She deserves the world, and Frank seems to be a good start.
“I unfortunately have nothing to bring you,” Reyna says, stepping forward and up on his side to hold onto his hand. She’s not as warm as Hazel, but her grip is steady. “I wanted to thank you once again for bringing peace to our people. Let it be known that you are always welcome at Camp Jupiter. And don’t worry about making it to the Senate meetings. If your perspective is needed, we will get in contact.”
Nico’s almost forgotten about his part-time job. “You know that the position as Ambassador of Pluto was all a ploy to let me infiltrate the camp, right?”
“And now it’s a legitimate position,” Reyna says. “Your perspective will always be valued, Nico. I hope you recover fast.”
Then she steps back, and with one look to Frank, they say their goodbyes and leave. Hazel’s quickly by his side again, grabbing onto his hand. It’s almost warm now. “I’ll see you.”
“I’m always an Iris message away,” Nico tells her. “If anything happens. I’ll be there.”
“But no shadow travelling!” She stares him down, and unlike with Reyna, Nico has to look down on her nose. His sister can be intimidating. “If something happens, I’ll come pick you up with Arion. Can I hug you?”
It’s awkward to pull her into the hug and he still feels gross from the coughing fit early, but that doesn’t seem to stop her in the slightest. She smells nice, and Nico can’t even find it in himself to care that her curls are getting all up in his face. It’s another proof that she’s alive.
The hug seems to last ages, but finally she pulls away. Her eyes seem a little shiny, but her smile is wide as she steps back. “I’ll see you.”
“See you,” he echoes. And just like that, Hazel’s gone, the partition curtain pulled shut behind her to once again give him and Will some privacy.
Will looks up from his clipboard, frowning. “My notes are in Estonian again. I thought I told Lou Ellen to leave them alone.”
Nico frowns. “Sorry, Estonian? I didn’t know you spoke Estonian.”
Will throws his hands up, exasperated. “I don’t. She just likes playing pranks on me. It should wear off in an hour or so, but until then, my notes are useless.” He pulls a stack of sticky notes out of a pocket on his cargo shorts. “I’ll just have to take my notes on this for now, until my notes go back to a nice and legible Ancient Greek.”
Nico wonders what they do if a camper is hospitalised, how they explain the Ancient Greek notes. Then he realises that a camper probably doesn’t live long enough to see a hospital if it’s dire enough.
Depressing.
“For your back,” Will says, clearly itching to move on. “I’ll close my eyes as you undress. I’ll sit behind you and you’ll get pain relief again since I’ll probably have to cut into you a fair bit.”
Nico opens his mouth to respond, but Will beats him to it. “Remember what I said about not everything needing to be painful? This is one of those instances. But if you’d like, you can pick between the local anaesthetic I used last time— the one I smeared on your skin —or taking a Tylenol and waiting half an hour for it to kick in. With the Tylenol you’ll still feel everything I do, but it shouldn’t register as hard. With the lidocaine the pain won’t be felt at all, but you’ll feel the pressure. Both is unfortunately not an option.”
It’s hard to decide. One of them requires Will’s (admittedly gloved) hands to touch him and offers more pain relief, while the other works less effectively, but would mean he’s not touched more than absolutely necessary.
“I’ll take the first one,” he decides. Will will have to touch him anyway, so him rubbing something into his skin won’t even matter.
He hopes.
“Lidocaine it is,” Will agrees. “I think it would be an advantage to let you shower first — it’ll soften the skin up and make the splinters easier to recognise and pull out. Like I said, depending on how deep they are I might have to cut you open and stitch the wounds shut. It’ll give you a couple more scars, but I promise my stitchwork is impeccable.”
“What’s one more scar,” Nico mutters, mostly to himself, but loud enough for Will to hear him. It seems to make Will sad, because his smile dims and he reaches out a hand to hover above Nico’s — the same hand Hazel and Reyna had held earlier. They seem to like his left hand a lot. He doesn’t know why; there’s nothing special about it.
“Y’know,” Will says. “I know how they say that every scar has a meaning and a story, a purpose or whatever.” Will pauses for a second and his expression changes. “I think that’s bullshit, actually. Sometimes scars are pointless and meaningless. I hate it when people say that your scars shape you, because sometimes it’s just not true. My point is, Nico, yeah, you might be adding a couple more scars to your frankly very impressive collection by me pulling out those splinters— even on your hands when we get the glass out even though palm tissue heals really well —but you don’t have to feel like those marks define you in any way. It’s okay to just forget that they exist.”
It almost sounds like Will is talking from experience. The thing is that Nico agrees with him. Plenty of his scars are pointless, the result of being stupid and reckless and not caring for his own wellbeing. None of them save for one are self-inflicted (and he knows that both Percy and Annabeth had worried about that for a while).
Because at one point Nico had considered it, to externalise the pain from losing Bianca by carving into his own body. The realisation that all of his weapons had caused almost permanent wounds had quickly deterred him from it.
The only exception had been his first summoning, back when he’d been a stupid kid more aware of the Catholic religion than the Greek pantheon, when he’d dropped his own blood down on a crudely-drawn summoning circle after slashing his palm with his small Stygian iron blade, trying to call forth anyone— or anything, he’d been desperate —to guide him. The answer had been Minos, who despite being incredibly evil, had actually taught him about his powers.
“I’ll go grab some cling film for your bandages,” Will says. “Brb.”
He ducks past the partition curtain and Nico stares after him. Beerb? He’d thought he was fluent in English, especially after growing up bilingual and spending years in the States. But just like the other seemingly nonsensical noises Will’s made over the course of him being in the infirmary, Nico feels lost. It’s not like he can just ask.
The Mythomagic expansion deck is still in his lap, with a catoblepas and a leontophonos staring up at him. He remembers burning all of his cards years ago. It had hurt, and he’s aware enough to know that it had been self-destructive, an attempt at killing that happy kid who delighted in just having fun.
“You’ve gotten a lot of Mythomagic stuff today,” Will notes, suddenly back to haunt him. “Picking the game back up again?”
“I don’t know,” Nico says, honest. He picks up the box and deposits it on the side table. All that’s missing to make it a proper hospital side table is half a dozen get-well-soon cards and an obnoxiously pink bouquet of flowers. No thanks. “It’s a kids game.”
“We’re all kids here,” Will says, picking up his clipboard from the stool to check if it is, in fact, still in Estonian. “Most of us aren’t even able to drive a car. It’s okay to have quote-unquote ‘childish hobbies’. In fact, I’d consider it healthy to have the ability to just tune out from the horrors of being a demigod and have something to interact with that is fun.”
Nico wonders what Will does that’s just relaxing, and he comes up with nothing. He doesn’t know Will very well, and the gaps in his knowledge are getting increasingly obvious.
“So what I’ve got here is cling film,” Will says, brandishing the cardboard tube at him. “I’m going to wrap it around your bandages so you can take a shower without getting your scratches wet. You don’t have to wash your hair or anything, the most important thing is just that you sit there for a while under the hot water to make your skin a little more receptive to getting a million splinters out of you.”
“That’s cardboard,” Nico says, deadpan.
Will laughs, bright as bells. “The cling film’s inside of here. Do you mind pulling up your sleeves? I just need to wrap this around you a couple times to ensure that water doesn’t get in there. I just disinfected and rewrapped your wounds this morning, so this should prevent you needing me to dig into your wounds again.”
He obeys and Will ends up at his side, opening the cardboard tube to reveal what looks like a solid rod of somewhat-translucent plastic. Then Will pulls at it and a thin sheet is revealed.
“I just need to sit under the water?” Nico asks, because while he did hear Will, it feels counter-intuitive to go to the effort of showering just to not do any of the shower things.
“Yup, you’re just gonna marinade in there. If you want, I’ll even give you a shower cap so that your hair won’t get wet. I can’t imagine that drying your hair was much fun with those wounds.”
Nico shrugs, taking care to only move the half of his body that Will isn’t currently wrapping like an environmentally unconscious mummy. No need to make Will’s job harder than it already is. He still looks exhausted. “I don’t know. Annabeth did it for me.”
Will makes a noise, and the wrapping moment pauses before Will seems to summon a small pair of scissors out of nowhere to snip at the film. “That was nice of her.”
It had been, and it had been nice and gentle in a way Nico hadn’t received since … since Bianca, probably. The fact that she’d also stayed in front of him so as to not trigger whatever the fuck is wrong with his brain had also helped.
It’s funny, because up until now, Nico had just not … considered Annabeth as much as Percy. She’d been the thorn in his side, competing for Percy’s attention with him (and he knows that this had been a competition that only he’d been privy to, he’s not stupid). Up until Annabeth and Percy had fallen into the Pit, he’d somehow just not been too concerned with her.
The Pit had changed everything.
The thought of another two demigods stuck down there, one of them had been the demigod Nico had been obsessed with years, the one he’d risked being killed ten times over for defending? And the most important person in his life? It had made him almost sick multiple times over, which in turn had made the panic in his chest ramp up to a fever pitch, which then had led to reality blurring around him as he’d been trapped in his thoughts.
“All done,” Will announces. “Be careful getting your shirt off when you’re in the bathroom. I did try to make it tight enough that it shouldn’t fall down when you move, but in the case that it does, just leave it and we’ll fix it when you’re out of there. Do you want me to tell you when it’s been like ten minutes or do you just want to marinade in there?”
“As long as you don’t come in there,” Nico says. “I like my privacy.”
“I can put in a divider so the shower is completely obstructed from the doorway,” Will says. “I don’t think me knocking on the door will let me be heard over the sound of the shower. You’ll want to have the water pressure pretty high. It should be a little therapeutic, too.”
“I’ll feel like a plant being watered too much,” Nico grumbles. “Persephone turned me into a daisy once for watering her garden once.”
It had been just around the time she’d come to terms with the fact that he existed and realised that it wasn’t a slight against her. Nico doesn’t think she likes him, but even the tenuous peace they have now is aeons better than being turned into a random flower whenever he’d ventured too close to Hades’ palace. The watering had been an attempt at assigning him ‘normal kid chores’. Somehow, despite all of the plants being Underworld species, he’d managed to kill several of them.
Which had led to the daisy punishment.
“Y’know,” Will says, and his tone’s funny. Nico can’t identify exactly what the intention’s supposed to be, but it’s not hostile and that will just have to do for recognition purposes. “I’ve heard that normal punishments are time-out or no dessert. Not being turned into a non-sapient plant.”
“She’s new to the stepmother thing,” Nico says. “Considering the last kid of Hades was Mussolini, she wasn’t too interested in the entire demigod thing. Never has been, but that really made up her mind. The knowledge that Hades had three demigod children within a three-year span, two of them with one mortal really set her off.”
“Like a Disney villain stepmother,” Will decides. “She hasn’t made you separate peas from ash yet, has she?”
Nico doesn’t remember many fairytales, having forgotten almost all of the ones told to him as a child and not having found the time (or want) to discover them again. But this story he does know.
“She’s not like the stepmother from Cenerentola,” Nico says. “She’s just … different.”
Will laughs. “That’s a way to put it. I don’t have a godly step-parent. Apollo’s a well-known bachelor. Or a mortal step-parent, to be honest. My ma has confidently declared she ‘needs no man’ and no one’s gonna fight her on it.”
Nico frowns. “Who would stick their fingers in what your mother does?”
Will drops the clipboard down on the side table, and it clatters like it’s trying to say something about the unfair treatment. “She’s a singer. Pretty famous, if you like alt-country, at least. A lot of the country industry is still pretty conservative, so there are some people who thinks she should get married. Same people who thinks her having a child out of wedlock being equivalent to burning babies on a bonfire. She’s always been fiercely independent, and having a child with a god didn’t change that.”
“She sounds cool,” Nico says. It’s true; his mother had also been talented in the arts. He can vaguely remember some of her paintings being displayed … somewhere. It makes him wonder if they’re still there, somewhere, or if they didn’t survive the war.
That makes Will smile, broad enough for dimples to show up on his cheeks. “She is. I miss her something awful, but that’ll make our reunion all the better. She’s got another break in November. Maybe we can hang out then.”
“I hope so,” Nico says, and he finds that he means it. Just because his mortal family’s dead and gone doesn’t mean that he has to be some kind of family hater. When he’d shown up outside Percy’s bedroom two years ago to crash his birthday party, he’d been genuinely happy at seeing Percy enjoying something normal for once. The fact that Percy had then invited him in and let him partake in the festivities had added to it. Sally Jackson, despite only hearing of him, had let him into the warmth and allowed him to stay as long as he’d wanted, going so far as to offering for him to stay the night. The Nico of two years had been entirely unable to handle that kind of niceness and the moment the party had livened up again, he’d been out of there, melting into the shadow in the corner of Percy’s room and appearing somewhere in Quebec.
“Well, no use worrying about it,” Will says, wheeling back and slapping his thighs. “Off into the steam box with you, di Angelo.”
Nico scoots ungracefully towards the edge of the bed and curses as he slips down from the bed. How embarrassing to be saved by grippy socks of all things.
“I’d like you alive,” Will says, and it sounds like he’s trying to avoid smiling. “It would be more than embarrassing if you broke your neck falling off the bed. Can’t do revolutionary healing magic here if my charge takes the most inconvenient way to see his own father. I promise, once you’re cleared for shadow travel you can go wherever you want.”
It feels like Will’s reading his mind. Hadn’t he had the exact same thought about the shower tiles just a few days ago? “Not planning on dying,” he mutters. “It wouldn’t exactly lessen my workload.”
“Shelving that discussion for later,” Will says. “Because that’s kind of concerning, not going to lie to you.”
Nico shrugs. “I’m employed. Half the kids at Camp are, too. It’s nothing new. At least I get paid for it.”
“Shower,” Will says, attempting to look strict. Nico can’t help but smile at how desperately he’s failing. “We can talk about the child labour later.”
“So, the child labour,” Will says as Nico pulls the curtain to the side. “You can tell me all about that while we get those delightful splinters out of your back.”
Nico scowls, but there must be something seriously wrong with him; the expression doesn’t seem to do anything. Back in the day, it had scared the likes of Percy Jackson and whatever that new personality of Jason was called again — Jay? But Will doesn’t seem to be the least perturbed, which means that Nico must have lost his edge. Peaked at fourteen, how embarrassing for him.
“Yes, yes, you’re very scary,” Will says, and he sounds almost amused. “Now, would you like anyone else here while I poke at you? You can request anyone and Connor will hunt them down for you. You remember Connor, right?”
Nico doesn’t think that anyone could forget Connor Stoll. He remembers his first day at Camp, showing off all of his holo Mythomagic cards to Connor while his older brother Travis had tried to convince him that poker was a much better game. Bianca had never let him play poker at the Lotus Casino, but now that … now that everything’s settled down again, he wouldn’t mind playing a round against them.
“I’ll be fine,” Nico says, because he’s not weak, and it’s not like Will is all that threatening.
… which isn’t true. He remembers having to hunt down Will after the end of the Battle of Manhattan, almost glowing with rage and grief as he put all the demigods he could to rest. The glowing had been literal, with a haze that Nico typically associates with gods (and especially Apollo) dancing around him and catching the sunlight. He’d been almost too bright to look at.
Especially when he’d healed him and he’d turned bright as a tune had fallen from his lips, not recognisable to Nico. He’d been acerbic then, rejecting Will’s attempts to heal him beyond that little bit of reading his vitals. Because Will had reached into the spot right next to his soul and done something, pulling something out of him. It had almost hurt.
Will better not attempt something like that again while he’s in the infirmary; Nico doesn’t know much about healing magic— the domain of the dead has always been his forte —but even he knows enough to be aware that when Will’s touching someone and humming, he’s drawing on the power of the gods to heal.
With a small start, Nico realises that he might actually care about what happens to Will.
“If you’re sure,” Will says, pulling him out of that train of thought. Good. He can consider that later, or preferably never. “Well, get onto the bed and pull off your shirt. You can cover your chest with the blanket. I’ll cut off the cling film first. I did that so tightly it shouldn’t stay on you forever. It’s not gonna do any damage if it does, but I don’t want to risk trapping any stray humidity inside your bandages.”
Nico doesn’t have a choice but to obey, and with only a little bit of difficulty (doing anything is hard when you’ve lost a lot of muscle mass; if he has to resort to the pomegranate seeds ever again it’ll be too soon) he manages to get back onto the bed. He looks back, just in case, only to find Will not only to be covering his eyes, but also turned towards the wall with the cabinet.
It might be a mercy to let Will stare at the cabinet forever. Nico had discarded the single-use shower cap in the bathroom bin, and a single look in the mirror had almost sent him running for the hills; even while on the road he’d had access to a brush and while he hadn’t actually known of any ways to properly deal with his hair, it had looked way better than it does now. It’s going to mat again if he doesn’t get his hands on a brush.
Hard to believe that it’s been two months since he fell into the Pit and lost his bag. Like so much else, it had been a remnant of Bianca; a bag she’d picked out for him in D.C, saying that the colour had matched well with the clothes he’d been wearing as Alecto had watched them from the entryway of the store. Even if it hadn’t been black, he’d stuck with it, carrying it everywhere and patching it up with stolen thread and yarn.
It hadn't seemed like a priority to pick up a new bag in Europe, and whenever they'd landed, all he'd seen were tacky black and coloured bags repeatedly inscribed with the name of the city in 'artistic' white letters. Anything but that.
Not that he'd had anything to put in the bag, after all.
Pulling the camp shirt off after only having it on for a maximum of three minutes feels almost stupid, but Nico hadn't been about to walk through the entirety of the infirmary with his chest exposed. First of all, he's bruised to Hades and back, and secondly, just, just no.
"Tell me when I can turn around," Will says. "Take your time; I don't want you to risk aggravating any injuries."
Nico pulls up the blankets to cover his chest and tries to think back to the last time he was this exposed in front of anyone else. At Westover, he and Bianca had been allowed to share a room (another influence from his father, most likely), and to save time they had often showered together, Bianca helping him with washing his hair and making sure that he soaped up properly. He has enough memory now to know that they'd done that as kids, too, sat in the big tub in the bathroom while their mother had washed their hair and booped their noses before pouring almost-too-warm water over their heads.
Bianca hadn't remembered that, hadn't, to the best of Nico's knowledge, ever recovered any of the memories that they'd lost when dipped in the Lethe. He doesn't know how strong the blessing of Artemis had been, but perhaps it had given her some insight into their situation, some deeply-ingrained instincts given more context.
"You can turn around now," Nico says, and tries to beat down his heart's attempts at speeding up. Will notices everything it seems, had noticed his 'blood pressure spiking' when they'd talked about that. There's no way he won't notice everything his heart does when he lays his hands on Nico's back.
Will sucks his breath in between his teeth. "Well, I'll tell you something for free, Nico, your back qualifies as some real high quality abstract art. The diversity in bruise colours really is very impressive. How many times did you say the mast collapsed again?"
"Lost count," Nico says, and he's composed enough to not hiss as Will's ungloved hand digs into what must be an extra nasty one. It's a deep ache, one that feels like it's piercing through his body. "I think Leo had a tally hung next to the steering wheel."
"'Lost count'," Will echoes, and his stupidly warm hand retreats from Nico's back. It leaves heat behind, and Nico almost worries that his skin is disturbingly cold to Will. "Well, that's promising. I can almost not see your spine through all of the bruising."
"Is that a good thing?" Nico asks, and it's more genuine than he intends, because if it was up to him, bones would always be good. But he knows that Will is a medic and the ability to see bones clearly might mean something entirely different in medical speak. Two different worlds.
"I mean..." Will drags out the vowel in a way that very clearly indicates that it's not a good thing. "On one hand, I shouldn't be able to see your spine clearly — it sticking out too much is either a sign of scoliosis, that's to say an unnatural curvature of the spine, or from being pretty underweight. Which you are, it's just more than the bruises stand out more."
"Funny what starving does to you," Nico says drily.
"I'll start disinfecting your back now, and then I'll apply the lidocaine gradually," Will says. "It'll be cold and might smell. You should tell me more about that, by the way. It'll be a real help in figuring out how to treat you."
Nico stays silent. He doesn't want to talk about the bronze jar, or about his time going through Hell. He wonders why the name of that place has suddenly become so taboo in his mind. When he'd been taken to Salona to face Eros, he'd been able to speak the name of the place so easily, to stand brave in the face of Love. And now, now that he's back in a place that by all accounts should be mostly safe, it's like just speaking the very name of the place, or even thinking about it too hard, will send him into some kind of fit.
Is this what insanity looks like?
"I'll start cutting now," Will warns. "I'm gonna start on your top left and work my way down the left side before continuing on the right. I'll butterfly you shut as I go and then when I'm all done I'll go back and stitch the deeper wounds. Don't worry, I'll use dissolvable thread so that I won't have to go back over them other than to ensure that they're healing appropriately."
The first cut feels like deep pressure, and then there's the sharp sensation of what must be tweezers digging into his flesh and grabbing onto a splinter. It makes a quiet, disgusting quiwflorp noise as it's pulled out, but Nico stays still and doesn't shudder despite really wanting to.
"It's clear to me that you've been starved," Will says. "You indicated as much a couple days ago. But I need to ask … was it self-inflicted?"
Was it? There had been nothing to eat in Hell, apart from drinking from the river of fire (and just by thinking about it it feels like the lava is dribbling down his chin and all over his shirt). Putting himself in a coma for a week with the pomegranate seeds had been the only way to not suffocate. In that regard, it had been self-inflicted, but not in the way that he knows Will is referring to.
"No," he ends up saying. "There wasn't … there wasn't a lot to eat."
'Wasn't a lot to eat' is so woefully insufficient. Even on the Argo II, where he'd had access to the magic food plates from Camp Half-Blood, capable of summoning whatever food he might have wanted, and with the cupboards in the galley filled to the brim with a variety of snacks, from dates to Cool Ranch Doritos, he hadn't been capable of eating. Hazel had bribed him with grapes, with small foods to get anything into him.
And the trip across the world with the Athena Parthenos hadn't been any better.
"I see," Will says. "See, the reason I can tell is because you've got a lot of muscle wasting. I bet that wielding your sword felt harder and heavier after, well, that place. Essentially, your body was receiving so little nutrition it started eating at your muscles when there was no body fat left to go for. It's why your bones stick out so much; you have no reserves."
Nico glances down at his arms. It’s not that he doesn’t have muscle; in fact it’s more so that he doesn’t have any fat. His arms are skinny and ugly, with lean muscle stretching the transparent skin. He can see every single of his own veins, dark blue and purple against his exposed tendons. The stark white of the bandages wrapped around his upper arms doesn’t make him look any tanner. In fact they seem to make him appear even paler than he is.
It’s almost impossible to believe that only four years ago his skin had been olive and healthy-looking.
On one hand, the pale skin seems to be ‘in-line’ with his fashion style, if the Aphrodite cabin is to be believed, but on the other hand it feels like his skin washing out is something of an affront to his cultural heritage. Admittedly he’d been not even eight when he’d left Italy, but there’s a distant memory niggling at the back of his brain, where his mother had mentioned something about skin-lightening products.
“How has eating been for you the past few days?” Will asks, and there’s another disgusting noise as another large splinter is pulled out from what feels like just underneath his left shoulder blade. “That one was really impressive. Almost two inches long.”
“It’s been fine,” Nico says. Really, he’s waiting for the other shoe to drop, to realise that he can’t eat after all. That he’ll be sick and it’ll all come up. Maybe it’ll choke him and kill him. That sounds realistic.
“Just fine?” Will prods, clearly trying to get him to talk more. “If you’re not happy with the selection, I’m sure we can find you something different to eat.”
The food is fine.
"It's not like my standards are high," Nico says. "Being homeless..."
He doesn't elaborate. The memory of getting sick right after running away from camp, hiding away in a shadow in the New York public library trying to keep warm, clutching onto his bag not unlike a stuffed animal, is still fresh in his mind.
"You've been struggling for a long time," Will says. "I hope you'll be able to stop running now."
Nico isn't sure.
He's not the angsty pre-teen he used to be. While there's plenty of angst left in him, it's now embraced by more positive associations of the people he's met and interacted with. Drawing on the isolation almost feels a little harder, almost like tiny shadow copies of the Seven and Reyna (... and Will?) are standing around the depression inside of him, warding him against the worst of it. He wouldn't classify any of it friendship, not yet (does he even know what friendship is meant to feel like?), but it almost feels a little easier to breathe with the knowledge that maybe people have actually got his back.
"Annabeth swore on the Styx that I'd find a home here," he says, and he doesn't wince as the scalpel is basically stabbed in right next to his spine, between the eight and ninth rib. He's going to show the not-quite-pain who's on top. "I don't want her to suffer from breaking that promise."
Will hums. "Almost done with your left side. I'm trying to also go for the small splinters, because I'm a little scared that your body will try to absorb them properly. It would be a bad look if you're ever hospitalised. And y'know, integration can be a slow thing. You don't have to become best friends with everyone at camp within the first week of being free from the infirmary."
"I don't think I can be hospitalised," Nico says. "Legally I died at the start of the war. I don't have a modern birth certificate and the one from 1932 probably got destroyed at some point. Can you even go to a hospital with no insurance?"
"You can," Will says, "but it's terribly expensive because the health insurance and healthcare situation here in the States— pardon my words —sucks ass. I wish we had a functional universal healthcare system like, I don't know, Norway or whatever. But no, the rich have to get richer while the poor, and let's be real, even the middle class, suffer and drown in debt."
Nico doesn't remember exactly what the healthcare situation had been like before he'd moved. He knows he'd been in a privileged situation, coming from money and having access to good healthcare when the pertosse and polio had caught him in the same year. While homeless, well, he'd gotten by.
"Sorry," Will says, patting Nico's back. "I get a little passionate about healthcare access. It's a scam, is what it is."
"You're fine," Nico says automatically. "Isn't the United States one of the richest countries on earth? Can they not afford to give healthcare to everyone?"
"Oh absolutely they can," Will says, and despite the bite in his tone he stays as gentle as he can, picking splinters out of Nico's back. "The issue isn't whether they can, it's the question of giving a flying fuck about the population. For being all about freedom, the rich and powerful sure do like keeping the poor and disadvantaged helpless."
Nico's suddenly grateful for the free, unlimited healthcare that both Camp Half-Blood and Camp Jupiter offers. Not to mention the magical healing.
"Doing good so far?" Will asks. "I'll put a bit more lidocaine on your back now and then I'll start on the right side."
"It doesn't hurt," Nico admits. "But it's a weird sensation."
"Getting stuff pulled out of you? Yeah. I had glass removed from my elbow when I was younger, and it didn't feel good. Even through the analgesic you still feel the pressure. Glass' pretty fine unless it's jagged shards, but wood must suck pretty bad. The splinters so far have been relatively smooth, but I'll warn you if I find something bad."
Somehow his thumb has ended up in his mouth again, and Nico briefly apologises to Will in his mind for having done this exact thing with far dirtier hands.
"You're not in pain, are you?" Will asks a few minutes later, breaking the comfortable silence. "Don't think I can't tell you're biting at your thumb again."
"I didn't notice it happening," Nico says, feeling the need to defend himself. "It just happens."
"I'm not mad," Will says, pausing his movements. "I know I sounded kinda harsh about it yesterday. Really, I do like it when people have healthy coping mechanisms, but in the grand scheme of things biting at the skin around your nails or the nails themselves isn’t the worst. Just make sure you don’t bite your nails too short and it should be fine. And that your hands are clean when you do it. That’s to say, don’t go digging a grave only to stick your hand in your mouth.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever dug any grave on my own,” Nico says, and trying to think back on it is interesting. “I think I always had a skeleton doing the job for me. Maybe except for the first time, and maybe the second, but that’s before I really knew I could do anything but split the ground open.”
“Y’know,” Will says, and there’s another disgusting noise of a splinter being pulled out of him. It stings a little, but Nico’s not about to tell Will that. It barely even pings in his mind. “Most people don’t dig any graves ever, but I guess it checks out for you.”
“In my defence,” Nico starts, and the thumb in his mouth is making him mumble. His teacher back in Italy would have had his head for talking like this, but maestra Piras is long dead and can’t haunt her. She’s floating around the Fields of Asphodel, identity lost to the masses, waiting for … something. “That wasn’t a Son of Hades thing. That was a burying my sister kind of thing.”
“Oh.”
Will stops again, and Nico tries to not get annoyed. He’d really rather not sit here half-naked any longer than necessary, and if Will’s going to take thinking breaks every time he feels bad about something, they’re going to be here for a long time. Nico’s well aware that he’s got not only a bad case of foot-in-mouth-syndrome, but also that he’s unnerving and unsettling. There’s always the chance that Will is put off by him, and has just done a decent job at covering it up.
With Apollo also having some dominion over theatre, Nico wouldn’t be surprised.
“I’m sorry,” Will says. The movement starts again, but it feels almost careful. “I didn’t mean to imply … sometimes my big mouth gets ahead of me and I say stupid things. You saw what I did to Annabeth. It’s my stupid brain. I’m sorry, Nico, I really am.”
Few people have ever apologised to him in his life, and Will handing him an apology so genuine and so quickly after the slight feels novel. It doesn’t matter that Nico hadn’t even been offended by Will’s assumption; there is some manner of truth to it, after all. He is the creepy son of Hades who summons ghosts and zombies and skeletons for the fun of it. It’s only logical to think that he would also dig graves for various reasons.
“It’s fine,” he says, and strangely enough, Nico means it. The sudden mood shift that seemed to come with situations like this in the past is nowhere to be seen, and it feels almost foreign to remain in control of his own emotional reactions. “There’s a stereotype.”
“It’s not your fault that the stereotypes are sometimes stupid,” Will argues. “If you’d listened to what they were saying about you— because teenagers and children are dumb as fuck —you’d think you were some kind of vampire, drinking blood and killing for fun. Sometimes stereotypes are based on offensive caricatures. I got, well, not bullied per se, when I got to Camp, but there was definitely a lot of teasing because I’m Southern.”
“Never drunk blood,” Nico says thoughtfully. “I don’t think it’s medically advisable. And that’s shitty of them, I’m sorry.”
It’s the kind of apology that slips out of him, born from years of behaviour classes and being expected to be well-behaved in any kind of public situation. It’s easy to dismiss it as an expected kindness, but Nico thinks that this apology especially, he means.
“Please don’t drink blood,” Will agrees. “You may be a demigod, and that makes you more resilient than mortals, but I still wouldn’t recommend it. And no eating raw meat either. I don’t care how ‘safe’ it is when it’s prepared, you can chase me with something like steak tartar. The risk of getting sick might be small, but I’m not pushing my luck. And you, a child of the Big Three, absolutely should not.”
Nico frowns. He knows that Will can’t see it, but it’s important to him that he’s ‘externalising his emotions’ or whatever bullshit someone talked about while he was on the Argo II. “What’s beef tartar got to do with being a Big Three child?”
There goes another splinter.
“Well, you seem to have the worst luck ever,” Will says, and he pulls his hands back as if to count off on his fingers. “Your entire situation, your sister, Percy losing his mother at twelve and being Quests Georg, Thalia being turned into a literal tree, Hazel … well, I don’t know much about her, I’ll admit. And Jason probably has some messed up backstory, too.”
Nico has seen the twelve lines marking Jason’s skin, and knows that that can only mean one thing. He also knows that every recruit, save for Hazel (because he’d brought her directly to Camp Jupiter), had to go through Lupa’s training to be deemed fit. Which means that Jason had completed that training and made his way from the Wolf House down to Camp Jupiter. He assumes that one or multiple of the wolves guided him. Who lets a four year old toddle alone from one place to another?
And who leaves a toddler at the hands of a wolf pack?
“Maybe you have a point,” Nico concedes. “But I still don’t see how it’s connected.”
“So my point is that if anyone would contract something like bovine tuberculosis from eating raw beef, it’d be one of you,” Will finishes. “Make sense?”
“No,” Nico says, and the disbelief he’s feeling makes him hack out something that might have been an attempt at a laugh. “You’re … you’re insane, Solace.”
Will laughs, and it echoes off the wall. Nico swears that the shadows on the wall get a little paler. “Oh, you’ve seen nothing yet, di Angelo. I plan on sticking around, so you’ll see plenty of where that came from.”
“Can confirm, he’s literally insane!” some female voice calls from behind the partition curtain. “Just get him started on Star Wars and you won’t hear the end of it.”
“Lou Ellen!” Will says, and he might not have been speaking too loudly, but to Nico, who is sitting less than two feet away from Will, feels like he’s standing directly in front of the big speakers they used at the Westover school dance. The name keeps reverberating around his mind even after Will’s continued yelling something, all the while not stopping his controlled, medically-responsible mutilation of Nico’s back.
Nico doesn’t say anything about Will’s volume, because while he can be acerbic and rude, he’s not impolite. The fact that Will has a scalpel perfectly aimed at his spine doesn’t have anything to do with the situation.
Thankfully, Will seems to realise it of his own accord.
“Sorry,” he offers, and that’s the second apology Nico’s received. It’s not even lunch.
“You apologise so much,” Nico says. “Doesn’t that get old?”
“Hm?” Will’s moved to the lower right part of his back now, and the painkiller seems to be wearing off a little. On his personal pain scale, ranging from the pain of slicing his palm open to do his first summoning to Lycaon tearing into his biceps, shredding the skin and flesh like paper, this doesn’t even register. “No, not really. It’s good bedside manner to be apologetic when you’ve messed something up. ‘Sides, I like being nice. It doesn’t cost me anything.”
“I think you could stand to be a little less nice,” Nico says. “It’ll only get you into messed up situations.”
Will laughs. “You’re right, death boy. But I’m not going to become a grouchy and mean person just because the world beats me down. That’s not a jab at you, it’s just my personal philosophy. I’m not about to push it on anyone else. There, all done. I just have to stitch a couple deeper wounds shut and cover those with bandages. The rest I’ll rub some unicorn draught on. Would you like a break?”
Nico moves, allowing himself to assume the same position he had when Will had stitched up his werewolf scratches, knees up against his chest. He grabs the pillow and hopes that it won’t get stained with blood when he goes to nap later (not that he knows for sure if he’ll be made to take a nap, it just seems likely, is all). “Ready for anything you can throw at me, Solace.”
Will’s laugh … is pretty nice, all things considered.