Chapter Text
October 1953 to June 1971
Nico left the hospital at the bottom of a vast abyss. He was trapped in a small dark jar, with no sustenance other than a handful of pomegranate seeds, tying him to the shadowy depths of hell. The jar had two holes, up by the handles.
Out of one spied a beautiful golden haired young man, who whispered words of love and condolences.
The other showcased a delicate baby, demanding Nico’s attention and love.
Bianca Maria di Angelo is born on the day her mother died, her dark hair slick with sweat, her skin ashen with lost blood.
The doctors say it was hemorrhages. They didn’t know why. Nico’s sister entered the blackness from the twilight sleep of ether, a cocktail of chemicals filling her head with smoke until her last breath. Physically, it was violent, bloody, and terrifying. Mercifully, Bianca wasn’t aware of any of it.
Bianca cried when she was torn from her mother, afraid and alone. She was placed in her uncle’s arms, salt water the first thing she ever tasted, taken from her mothers womb and placed into a vale of tears. Bianca di Angelo I never held her daughter.
When Bianca’s mother was buried, she wore her best dress. It was white, with black polka dots and a flared skirt that laid flat in the coffin. It was meant to swish and swash as she walked and danced, not stay confined in an oak wood box for all of eternity.
Her aunt’s husband held her as she was lowered into the ground, her cousin in the other one of his broad arms.
She went back home with her frail Uncle Nico.
Nico and his special friend Will lived in a two bedroom apartment. Bianca was usually in Will’s arms, receiving a bottle, as Nico cried.
“I should have done something,” he’d wail, night after night.
Night after night, Will replied in his sunshine tenor, “There was nothing you could’ve done.”
Nico sings lullabies to Bianca long into the night, voice light and rough and sweet. “Stella Stellina", "Ninna Nanna,” and, his favorite, “Farfallina Bella e Bianca.” From a young age, Bianca seemed to recognize her own name, cooing when her uncle sang it to her.
Bianca was a peaceful baby, all things considered. She seemed to understand that her uncle needed cheering up. She started laughing at only two months old, far before all the other babies in her parenting class.
Nico is the only man at said parenting class, with all of the mothers around him gushing over his sweetness for taking in his dead sister’s infant.
He smiles a thin lipped smirk. Some of the women, red lipsticked mouths matching their Revlon-red nails, try to set him up with their single friends, and he repeats “it’s the bachelor’s life for me.”
Will says Nico’s different after Bianca died. Nico agrees. It hardly seems like he should be still named Nico di Angelo. It hardly seems like the sun still rises in the East and sets in the West. It only seems like the moon is gone from the sky, and that all the stars are dimmer. He had never known a life without his older sister, his protector, and he had never wanted to. Yet nevertheless, she left suddenly, with gushes of blood and overly pale skin.
He barely gets better as Bianca gets older, lovelier, more poetic. He reads her Emily Dickinson poems in a soft voice he uses only at home. He teaches her traditional Italian cooking, the type he made with his sister at the di Angelo family restaurant.
Bianca calls them Uncle Nico and Uncle Will, even though they are the only parents she’s ever known. Sometimes, they go to public pools, and Bianca twirls through the air as they toss her between them, splashing and laughing, skin gold in the blooming sun.
They fight over how to raise her, sometimes. Will says they should tell her everything— about where her father is, about his and Nico’s unconventional lifestyle.
Nico wanted to keep the innocent look in her eyes intact. They don’t tell her until one early release when she was in high school, when she walked in on them kissing. No amount of explanation could remove that from her memory.
In June of 1971, they held a small ceremony in their apartment. They cut a cake and celebrate 20 years of being together with their daughter, with Hazel, Frank, and Kayla. The kids aren’t there, but Nico doesn’t mind. He just feels like maybe, for once, the love he feels doesn’t need to be shameful, even if he had to keep it secret. And it hurts that Bianca isn’t there to celebrate with them, but Nico only cries for an hour, before his girl knocks on his door with a cannoli from his favorite bakery, and he takes the moment to compose himself and be the father she needs.
It’s nice, Nico thinks, that he gained the family he always considered to be impossible— a committed relationship with the person he loves, and a child he would live, die, and kill for. He just wishes he could have the family of his own in conjunction with the family he was raised with. With Bianca the first. With the sister who held him when their mother died, and protected him from the jeers of anti-Italian all-American boys in the schoolyard.
With each passing year, Bianca’s memory doesn’t fade, but it softens. At each holiday as Bianca grows, Nico reminisces on holidays with his sister, on Panettone and La Befana, and the first time he went trick-or-treating in the US. Bianca had so carefully designed her witch costume, sewing it with her tiny child hands. Nico hadn’t cared, only cutting holes in his old sheets. They weren’t even white, and Bianca teased him relentlessly for being “the most colorful ghost in Manhattan.” As he walks down memory lane, his heart doesn’t break, but snags like a zipper on fine satin.
He learns how to function, with Will and Bianca by his side, a family not plagued by ghosts, but haunted all the same, communing with the spirits and weaving the souls of those they had lost into a blanket to protect themselves from the cold.
Through the dark and gray days, Will and Bianca were Nico’s sun, managing to shine through every cloud.