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Will hated Nico’s shadow travel.
That wasn’t fair to him, but it was true. It was the cause of many sleepless nights ever since they had met two years ago when Nico nearly killed himself over the statue. While it was useful in uniting the two camps and defeating Gaea and all that, it nearly killed him. So yeah, Will hated Nico’s shadow travel.
Every time that Nico shadow travelled too much, like when they accidentally had that incident in Venezuela (they didn’t talk about it), he passed out. It was harmless most of the time, but when they were getting attacked by monsters, it was unfortunate.
Not to mention the way that Nico just became a shadow when he overexerted himself. Will was a medic, so he obviously knew that that was a bad thing. He needed to be able to see and touch his patient in order to know what was wrong with them, but Nico when he was literally being translucent and intangible didn’t help. At all.
Besides, Will was a child of the light, a son of Apollo. The darkness and shadows and Ghost King thing might suit Nico very well, but it just wasn’t him. No thanks. Very sunshine-y over here, thank you very much.
The side effects of shadow travelling far outweighed the good it did, so only when it was absolutely necessary (and no, Nico, going to Camp Jupiter so you can see Reyna right this second is not an emergency) did Will like it. That was putting it mildly.
Considering all of the previous experiences that Nico himself had had with shadow travel, it surprised him every time whenever he saw evidence of his significant annoyance (read: boyfriend) over exerting himself. After all, he was the one that was exhausted and fading whenever he did that, but for whatever reason, Nico never paid his warnings any attention. Unless Mr. D backed them up, but even then, the resistance was there.
“Nico! Did you shadow travel again?” he asked concernedly, seeing the glaringly obvious shadows hanging off of Nico’s band t-shirt. Will had gotten it for him last winter solstice, and it was obviously well-received. Of course, now the shirt was in ribbons, as demigods never really got to keep any shirts for long. Monsters always slashed them up, unfortunately. “Did you get attacked?”
Nico scowled. “A monster managed to get inside the barriers. There was a new camper, son of Demeter, playing by the strawberry fields. He was lucky that I was there.” He shook his head. “But no, I didn’t shadow travel.”
“Really?” Will asked, raising his eyebrows. It was a half-hearted attempt. Nico had long stopped trying to hide evidence of his shadow travelling, instead nonchalantly owning up to it. (He had yelled at him, “Just because you’re a medic doesn’t mean you can control me like a child!” Nico was right, of course, and so the nagging had lessened).
He shrugged, wincing as he did so. He was already seated on one of the raised cots in the infirmary so that Will could take a closer look at the wound through the shadows. “I don’t know. There was just one of them, but I’ve no clue what it was. Probably related to those Stymphalian birds, though, with the beak and talons.”
“Mhmm,” Will hummed, half-listening as he tried to get a better feel for the wound. “This is so strange. Are you sure that you got scraped?
“Very.” He held up his bloody hand as proof.
The shadows started to quickly dissipate, and Nico and Will both peered down in shock. “Is it… gone?”
In place of the bloody lines of scrapes that Will was expecting, there were three slivers of scars, a shade lighter than Nico’s skin.
“Huh.”
-
Will checked up on the scars for a few days after, despite Nico’s insistence that there really was nothing there (“Will get your hands away ! They’re so cold !”).
But if there was nothing there, then why were there shadows? The ADHD part of Will’s brain just couldn’t give up on the mystery, the unknown of it bothering him all the time. Whether he was cleaning the infirmary, eating dinner, cutting bandages, it was constantly on his mind.
He supposed there were worse things to have stuck on your mind, like Apollo’s horrible singing from the time he was a mortal, but he wasn’t about to give it up just yet.
He was going to figure this out.
-
Will got his chance to see the shadows at work again after one of Nico and Percy’s sparring sessions. They were the only two on par with each other, seeing as Jason was in Camp Jupiter at the moment. It was summer, and Percy was home visiting, apparently.
Nico didn’t dodge one of Percy’s blows in time, so Riptide cut him a bit, leaving a decent-sized gash on his arm where the armor didn’t cover. Will, who was watching on the sidelines, immediately jumped in to stop the sparring.
“Medic coming through,” he said, although the others parted for him anyway. “Of course this happens again, Neeks.”
He tried not to glare at Percy, who was rushing apologies at Nico. Nico looked like he was about to murder somebody, although whether it was Percy, Will, or the armor was undecided. “It’s fine, Percy,” he muttered. “No one’s about to die.”
“That’s debatable,” Will said under his breath. Although Percy didn’t catch it, Nico did, sending him a look. Will, being smart, ignored it.
“Weird,” he said, noticing the shadows pulling at Nico’s skin again. “Has this happened all the time?”
He shook his head. “This only started to happen about a few weeks ago. It’s never for anything small, just the bigger things.”
“Like the time with the claws on your side,” Will remembered.
Percy just looked between the two of them, confused. “What? Are the shadows healing Nico, or something?”
“They can’t be healing him, that’s ridiculous,” Will immediately dismissed. “Remember the state you were in right after the whole thing with Gaea.”
Nico glared. “Yeah. You kidnapped me for three days.”
He rolled his eyes. “I’m the medic. I was doing my job. Anyway, the point was that you were fading because of your exhaustion. It’s a miracle that you pulled yourself together enough to survive it. Unless…”
Will gave Percy a critical look. “Does water heal you all the time?”
He nodded. “I mean, it does that whenever I want to, usually.”
“But it sometimes does it on its own,” he realized. “Maybe it works the same with Nico and the shadows. When you were fading, it was almost like…”
“I was getting healed,” Nico finished, and took a look down at where the slash was. The shadows had disappeared, leaving behind a barely visible mark that would probably fully go away within the week. “Huh.”
-
Will was starting to get an idea of how Nico’s new-found powers worked. You would think after a few years knowing he was a demigod that all his powers would have been “activated,” so to speak, but apparently you learn new things every day.
The shadows weren’t completely harmful, and now he had a grudging respect towards them. It seemed that, like Percy’s water healing abilities, the shadows could only heal Nico. They found out the limits through trial and error, learning that it didn’t work for anyone else when Will asked Nico to try it on a daughter of Hecate who had gotten in a scrape with Cecil. Nico was unsure of what to do, do little finger wiggles/waves over the slice above her knee, but nothing happened.
When it was healing Nico, though, it really only seemed to work for open wounds. Bruises and exhaustion wasn’t really affected all too much but it, although after fading, Nico seemed to feel a bit better overall. The damage caused by sword or daggers or monster claws healed up right away, though, which was a relief for Will. He had far too much to worry about to have to patch up his boyfriend after every tussle with a monster. Considering he was a child of Hades, he seemed to get into those a lot.
-
After one of the solo quests that Nico went on (barely quests, really, more like errands for his father), he was fading. Rapidly and to the point where there were sunlamps on him 24/7. For whatever reason, despite the fact that the shadows had, over the past few weeks, proven to heal Nico, they weren’t doing anything.
Or, more accurately, they were present, but Will just couldn’t find anything wrong with him. He had run every test possible that he could do, both mortal and otherwise, but there wasn’t anything out of the ordinary.
He was sitting on the chair next to the cot Nico was lying on, feeling the exhaustion of the past week wash over him. Even if Nico didn’t show up on the brink of death (again), there were so many people that had gotten seriously hurt in such stupid ways. Demigod ways, really, considering how many of them thought that doing a backflip off of the lava wall was a good idea. He really had to speak to Chiron about getting that removed. Or getting a pay raise.
Oh wait. He didn’t get paid. “You really have to wake up now,” Will said softly. “I’m sure Cecil wants to paint your cabin a bright purple, so if you keep sleeping, there’s nobody stopping him.”
No response.
“I know Sleeping Beauty came out after your time, so there’s really no reason to copy her,” he tried to joke, but it fell flat. There was no sarcastic response, no biting remark.
He just wanted his boyfriend back.