Work Text:
1:35 AM
New York
Onyx eyes stared up at the night’s sky that was of the same colour. He laid down spread-eagle on the roof of his apartment, letting the cold wind bite at his skin and whip his hair. It was a metaphor, you see. Life is the wind, and he’s… well, he’s him. Life is bitter and unrelenting, but despite the chill and burn of the too-cold Winter paradigm, he lets it cut through the cracks in his bones and freeze over all his depths and shallows.
He believes that his stoic front is a sign of being strong. He believes that pushing away his inner turmoil is a mark of handling his priorities well. He believes that ignoring everything that goes both around and within him is proof of knowing what is best for him.
But most of all, he believes he is broken.
It wasn’t the conventional kind of broken that just about everyone throws out like it were as natural as saying “the sky is blue”; neither was it the kind that D-list authors have a penchant for romanticizing – no. In its most basic, raw form, Nico di Angelo is broken. Like how an old record player still catches the light’s glares in its polished wood but barely wheezes out the last lines of a song filled with squeaks and scratches; or an antique guitar with missing strings and remains perpetually out of tune; or the cracks in the walls and pavements that lets the city breathe.
His skin is marred with those scratches, his strings are wearing thin and the sound of his inner-demons singing is like the moment the pendulum falls from its grace and lets the glass case of emotions shatter. His veins are the snaking, interweaving tendrils of black and white (it seems that life really is just) that runs across the city of his very being. He is broken, and there was absolutely no way to fix the human soul.
Nevertheless, he thinks he is okay.
“I thought I would find you here,” a voice rang through the air, the only thing that was, to his ears, louder than any New York cabs or clubs could compete with.
Nico looked up and wasn’t quite surprised to see a blonde figure stepping out of the shadows as if he were some kind of creature of light. Perhaps he really even was.
Jason Grace, in all his son of Jupiter glory, decided to drop by his apartment again probably only to realize that no one was technically home. But all technicalities aside, the guy found him, and he’s here, and Nico can’t believe his perseverance.
It’s almost been six months since Jason first decided to burst through his rickety doors and announce that he was there to take Nico home back to Camp Half-Blood. The son of Hades was eating a take-out Chinese dinner at that time, so imagine his surprise when the door suddenly swung open only to reveal an old comrade babbling on about impromptu getaways and jabs at his AWOLness for the past year and a half while he was eating his pork stir fry.
Apparently the resident golden boy’s abode, and has been for almost a week, was the same apartment complex Nico just happens to live in. Neat.
At first, his unannounced visits were a mild nuisance, until it became too bothersome and intolerable that Nico decided to give Jason a piece of his mind. When the Ghost King came to the long-overdue realisation that yelling would do no good, he opted for brute force, which failed just fucking fantabulously, since, if you haven’t noticed, if the two would ever have a wrestling match, Jason superman Grace would come out as the victor.
After the fourth month of Jason’s unrelenting efforts to convince him that Manhattan wasn’t exactly the safest place for a lone demigod, and a child of the Big Three of all things, Nico accepted the fact that yes, a certain obnoxious son of Jupiter wasn’t going to budge at all, and no, he can’t really do a thing about it by then.
But a hundred and twenty-two is a lot of days, so it was pretty much inevitable for the two to get to talking about certain things. They started out simple: “What’s your favourite colour?”; “Black.”; “How are you feeling today?”; “Okay.”; “What did you eat for lunch?”; “Uh.”, and then one day when the dark-haired demigod got home from uni, the blonde was once again sitting on his couch, a pensive look on his face.
“I’m home,” Nico said drily. Jason did not look up, which was a little refreshing, if not concerning. Usually it was him doing all the greetings, asking the other about how his day went and if he’s already eaten dinner or some shit. Instead, he kept staring at Nico’s coffee table, flipping his phone in his hands over and over, a nervous habit of his that the son of Hades picked up on for quite a while now.
Nico dropped his bag unceremoniously on the floor, kicking it out of the way. He eyed the blonde warily as he made his way towards his tiny kitchen. Taking an apple out of the fridge, he bit into the fruit with a satisfying crunch. Jason has still yet to acknowledge his presence.
The silence irked him, for some plausible reason will be sure to forthcome, so his way of starting a conversation came in the form of – “Farmers always say that rain around the moon means rain soon,” he said. This time, Jason turned his head to him, baffled. But that didn’t really stop him. “In some parts of England, rum is used to wash a baby’s head for good luck,” he continued. “Mrs. Rowling is the only author ever known to have earned a billion dollars through a writing profession.
“Some scientist once fell in love with a pigeon once, and contrary to popular belief – that is, yours – I actually exist.”
Jason stared at him, eyes slightly wide. “Hi.”
“Cut the crap, Grace. What’s bothering you?”
He’s been very vocal nowadays compared to past instances. And maybe it was all because of a stupid, meddlesome, son of Jupiter, or some other reason he has yet to ponder over. But not tonight. Not after one grueling bio exam.
“I… So you know how I’ve been crashing here in the middle of the night?”
“What?!”
“Oh shit wait, you didn’t? Anyway… I hear you screaming at night all the time and I figured that… would you like to tell me about Tartarus?
And for some inexplicable reason he did. He had to tell someone someday. And this particular person would have been the most favorable option. It was eating him from the inside and he hadn’t even known that it was not until after he’s sputtered out some sort of barely comprehensible sob story that he tried watering down, but one glance from Jason’s electric blue eyes, he just thought fuck it and got pretty blunt.
After that the blonde held him every night as he slept fitfully, woke up cold and screaming but almost immediately was encircled by a stump of warmth that turned out to be Jason’s arm encircling his waist as he brushed the bangs off Nico’s face. He’s never felt more safe, and for the first time, he let himself be vulnerable with the knowledge that someone else was there to fight his monsters away now.
In the morning Nico makes them waffles and bacon, and on Sunday’s Jason likes to visit Rosie’s Diner for their breakfast.
That was their routine for the most part.
And that was their lives.
“You know,” Nico starts, “You can’t really fix me.” The son of Jupiter raises and eyebrow at this. “I’m serious, I know what you’re doing and I appreciate it, but you can’t fix what can’t be fixed, it doesn’t work that way. So you either stop, or I run away from you, too.”
Both knew it was a lie since they knew at this point it would be exceptionally difficult to live without the other, however pathetic it sounds. But truth rings, and it’s futile to deny something that is entirely a fact however angle you wish to look at it.
“I’ve never outright announced that my goal was to fix you,” Jason shoots back. “But I can’t deny that I want to do something. I know you’re hurting, Nico, we all are. You just happen to have received the shorter end of the stick and that’s why I’m here.
“There may not be a certain way to glue what has been already turned into shards and shrapnel, but I’m holding out for something to salvage.”
Nico regards him with curious eyes and he inches closer to the teen. “Do you really believe that?” His breath tickled the blonde’s cheek and he shivered involuntarily – and it wasn’t from the cold.
“You’ve never been a lost cause to me, di Angelo.”
Nico leans in to brush a chaste kiss to his forehead and even the slightest of already muffled city noise is drowned out by the thudding of their hearts in rhythm with each other.
Thud, thud. I’m right here.
Thud, thud. I’m staying.
And Nico finds himself starting to believe that maybe there really is something left to salvage from the debris of his life after all.