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Will couldn’t remember ever having a dream before he turned eleven. People always insisted that he had to dream, that he just might not remember anything about them, but Will was certain that he would remember. Dream where important, they were what connected you to your soulmate, so if he wasn’t having dreams, did that mean he didn’t have a soulmate?
He went to camp without ever having had a dream in his life, but within his first month of living in the Apollo cabin, he finally had a dream. His dream self had walked toward the canoe lake where he saw a dark-haired boy sitting on the end of the dock. The boy had playing cards in his hands, and was explaining the game he was playing to one of the Naiads.
Will woke up before he reached the boy.
He told his brother Lee about the dream as soon as he woke up, hoping that Lee could explain to him what it meant that he’d finally had a dream after so long. Lee was excited for him, telling him was it meant for someone to have a soulmate, and how the boy in his dream had most likely been Will’s soulmate.
“The next time you have a dream,” Lee told him, “try to talk to him. Find out his name, where he is, those sorts of things. Try to find him, so you can be together.”
The next time Will dreamed, it was almost exactly the same, but he still wasn’t able to talk to the boy. Things continued like this for the next month as the year started coming to an end, and Will met a new camper named Nico. He looked similar to the boy in Will’s dreams, but since Will had never gotten a chance to see the boy’s face, he couldn’t be sure.
Before Will could try to get to know Nico, the boy ran away from camp.
And then the nightmares started.
Ghosts came to him in his dreams, holding him back from interacting with the boy, telling him that he was interfering with the gods’ plans by trying to bring the boy back to camp. Most of his dreams were of underground places where the hallways twisted together into a maze and the walls were always closing in around him. He would wake up, shouting in fear, almost every single night.
It came to the point where he was afraid to sleep at night, afraid of the monsters that tried to attack him, and afraid for his soulmate, who was sharing these dreams. It was because of this that Lee brought Will to the Hermes cabin one day, waking up a sleeping camper by the name of Clovis, who Will hadn’t had the opportunity to meet before then. Lee explained the problem of Will’s nightmares to Clovis, who claimed that he could help Will to control his dreams.
Will didn’t believe that it was possible, but after a few times that Clovis put Will to sleep and talked him through the process of editing and changing his dreams, Will felt confident to be able to do it himself. He was still terrified of the ghosts and monsters that haunted his dreams, but he knew he could fight them off, if not for himself, then for his soulmate.
Will slept easier each night, knowing that he was helping his soulmate sleep as well. He wasn’t sure how he could tell, but he knew that his soulmate felt more relaxed, less anxious and stressed since Will had been chasing the monsters out of their dreams. Soon enough, Will had discovered that he didn’t have to wait for the monsters to appear before he chased them away, but could keep them from appearing altogether.
Finally, after almost three years of keeping his dreams safe, Will saw his soulmate’s face. He was pale and skinny and looked so fragile, but the fierce light in his eyes told Will that he was anything but.
He was Nico, the boy he’d seen at camp so long ago.
Will took Lee’s advice, and asked Nico to sit with him. They went to a beach - Nico told him that this beach was in Spain, that he’d been there during that day - and watched a sunset that didn’t seem like it would ever end. Their sleeping only overlapped for about two hours, meaning that their dream was cut much shorter than Will would have liked, but Nico had told him that he was coming back to camp - for the first time in years, Will would see his soulmate in person again.
Their dreams became longer and longer as Nico came closer - he looked exhausted even in sleep, and blamed it on carrying the Athena Parthenos across the world, but he still brightened up whenever he could see Will.
Then, Will was preparing for battle, the second in his life - he was a medic, he would never be sent out on quests, so the Battle of Manhattan and the battle that was about to begin were the only fights he would ever be a part of. He hoped.
He was scouting out the battlefield, trying to spot the enemy army from the top of Half Blood Hill, when he saw someone very familiar, instead.
Nico was there. In person. Right in front of him. But they had more important things to handle than their first real meeting as soulmates.
Will just prayed that Nico survived the battle.