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Nico doesn’t remember the fall.
Sometimes, he dreams of hitting the ground, but when he wakes the memories are foggy and distorted, so he can’t confidently say he fully remembers that either.
He does, however, remember the drag.
Tartarus had wrapped it’s wicked fingers around his thin ankle and pulled, and he knows that at first he fought it. He remembers kicking wildly at nothing, shrieking Hades’ name in his desperation, flipping onto his belly and digging his fingers into the earth. He remembers the muted sting in his right hand as his two middle nails ripped up from their beds, and yet he still clung, his mind a frantic montra of i don’t wanna go i don’t wanna go i don’t wanna go—and then, he remembers the other voice.
It picked its way into Nico’s tumbling thoughts, hardly a whisper at first. It infiltrated his panic and soothed his fear. Comforting and sweet, it lulled him until his bloodied hands dragged, useless and still, over the ground. He was enveloped in this voice, warm like Hestia’s—and as he drew nearer to the lip of the pit, it sounded so much more like the distant memory of his mother’s.
Nico remembers going fully limp. And then the dirt slipped away beneath him, and the world was a vacuum of black.
000
The next thing Nico can recall is flipping from his back to his hands to vomit, and then laying curled on his side, waiting for the dizziness to subside. Looking back, he feels naive. He’d had no clue where he was or how long he’d been there, and he’d been too nauseous and disoriented to care. He remembered wanting to go back to sleep.
That, he thinks, is what brought him so suddenly to his senses; the jarring realization that whatever trance he’d been in, it wasn’t sleep. His eyes snapped open, his breathing instantly quickening. He unfolded himself slowly and dared to glance at his surroundings.
Hellish red clouds and black, insect-like trees—Nico knew what this was. He closed his eyes, shuddering. The memories of his struggle came to him in pieces as he’d sat and collected himself. He remembers feeling gut wrenching rejection at Hades’ absence, and then utter humiliation for calling on him in the first place.
Trivial, childish worries. He knows now that none of that mattered.
The next moment Nico remembers clearly was turning onto his trembling hands and knees in a weak attempt to stand, and seeing his impact in the earth below him.
His own blood arced out around him in a halo, already dried. There was an extra gunshot of red where his skull had hit the ground. Nico stared at this, his mouth dropped open, before reaching to touch his scalp. He checked his hands for fresh blood and found none. He combed his fingers frantically through his hair, searching for the injury, but there wasn’t one.
He’d recalled at that moment being twelve years old and desperate, willing to trade his soul for his sister’s or perhaps, willing to join her. He recalled being rejected by death himself.
He wondered if it had somehow happened again; if he still couldn’t even die right.
But this was not a failed negotiation, and Nico was not immortal. This defied the laws of nature.
He remembers sitting back on his haunches, readjusting internally as his world tilted on its axis. By all means, his revival was unnatural and deeply wrong. His slip into Tartarus should’ve been his closing chapter, and perhaps his soul would’ve been hoisted over Thanatos’ warm shoulder and carried home to Hades.
But with the Doors of Death opened and unguarded, Nico was stripped of even this simple mercy. And now Tartarus sprawled out in front of him for miles, its horizon fuzzy and the dome of its sky oppressive and immense.
He remembers sitting there that way for a long time.
000
He was blessed with little memory of his first death. This blessing did not extend to the rest.
He’d been battling a group of empousi, whittling their number from four to three to two. Just as he sliced his third opponent to dust, the last one lunged—slashing his thigh open with her claws. Nico doesn’t remember reacting beyond impaling her skull with his sword, but he does remember how quickly the blood soaked the front of his black jeans. He is convinced that the next four minutes were the most panicked of his short life. Adrenaline threaded through his veins as he pressed his hands to his gushing leg in a feeble attempt to save himself, hyper-aware that his eyelids were growing heavy, that his vision was swimming, that he felt cold and weak and so utterly exhausted. He remembers leaning back against the wall of the rocky enclave, his breath stuttering as he panted, his wet hands slipping to the ground.
It was excruciatingly slow, his body shivering as it failed him.
And then it was over, and he was gasping awake. There was no evidence of his death beyond the new hole in his jeans and the stains.
He remembers being angry. He remembers there being tears, and screaming, and throwing something pointlessly to topple something else. He remembers cursing Hades’ name.
He also remembers, achingly, praying later that night. Sheltered from the oppressive heat in the shadows of a small cave, he remembers laying curled on his side, his filthy hands clasped tight in front of him, praying desperately for Hades to look for him. To come for him. He prayed and promised that he’d be a perfect servant. He promised he’d be a better son.
If an answer came, Nico does not remember it.
000
Nico remembers growing accustomed to the cycle.
He grew familiar with the feeling of his body going into shock. He became jaded to the taste of his own blood.
His quickest was basilisk venom; it nipped him, his vision tilted, and suddenly he was waking up again. His most painful was being crushed between the wall of a cliff and a lopsided boulder.
The most embarrassing was tripping on a rock. He slipped and managed to impale himself on his own sword. A group of spirits had been watching. It was a difficult moment.
Each aftermath was the same; Nico would gasp life back into his lungs, having no way of knowing how much time had passed or how exactly he had returned. He’d stand slowly, shake off whatever dust or dirt he could and he’d trudge on. There were no scars—only the phantom of pain, and the leftover blood between his teeth.
There were other encounters, too, in between the deaths. Nico doesn’t remember these as clearly; he knows he met a few ancient Greek spirits, a chimera, a minor deity who followed him for about half a mile to taunt him. They all blend together in Nico’s mind, an amalgamation of bleakness.
He remembers feeling shocked when the giants ambushed him, and almost welcomed the emotion; it was a brief spark of excitement amidst the monotony of death. He fought the first one as fiercely as he could through his exhaustion, knowing he wouldn’t be able to kill it, but it was small compared to the other monsters he’d seen; maybe he could knock it out and slip away, maybe he could—
He wasn’t prepared for a second giant to lunge forward from the shadows and snatch his wrist in a bruising grip, lifting him easily off the ground. Nico screamed through gritted teeth as the giant shook him, forcing him to drop his sword.
“Look at this ickle one,” the thing said fondly, shaking him again. Its palm enveloped his entire forearm. “Were you gonna get my brother and I with your needle?”
Nico kicked out at it, screaming to be let go. He remembers the grip on his arm tightening, his wrist snapping with little resistance. He remembers gasping, screaming again, and going limp. The giant just cooed softly and passed him from one hand to another, wrapping a huge palm around his torso. “Did I break your little arm, pet?” It took Nico’s hand between its fingers and rattled it experimentally. Nico shrieked.
“Ah,” the giant said. “Whoops.”
Its brother growled at them. “Break the other one,” it snarled. “He cut me.”
“No, no,” the second argued, “He’s supposed to be unharmed until the Kalends.”
Nico tried to calm his hyperventilation as they bickered back and forth, his arm pulsing with pain. He remembers thinking it could be worse, he could still be pinned by that boulder. Or talking to Ahklys. It could be worse, he thought, as one giant handled him like a toy and the other urged for him to be killed. It could be worse. It could be—
“Gimme that thing!” the first giant barked, grabbing at Nico. The second giant swung him out of reach.
“You have to be gentle with it!” It chided its twin, “It breaks real easy, like a little bird.”
It cupped Nico close to its chest, cradling him like a small, wounded animal—which, Nico supposed, he sort of was. The thought made him giggle deliriously.
“Look at it, it’s already broken. Let’s kill it and find another.”
Even now, Nico’s brain sometimes plays those words back to him—broken, broken kill it find another, broken, it’s broken—and even now he remembers squeezing his eyes shut, trying so hard to find it in him to be angry, to be offended. He remembers wanting to deny it. He remembers not being able to.
“This is the one she wanted, so this is the one she’ll get. We can’t get another.” The giant looked down at Nico and furrowed its brow. “But I suppose, if you promise to be gentle, you can hold it while I get the jar.”
If he had been more awake, Nico might’ve wondered what the hell any of that meant, but as it were, his brain was sludge fueled by fear and adrenaline alone. He scrambled frantically as the exchange took place, but he couldn’t escape either twin. Now alone in the grip of the first, more murderous brother, his body locked up, paralyzed by panic. The giant held him up with both hands, pressing his arms to his sides. It gave him a leering smile. “How would you like to come with us, ‘ickle one’?”
Nico spat his blood into its face.
The giant reared its head back, but didn’t let him go. Instead, it readjusted its grip to hold him still with one hand, the other clutching the top of Nico’s head.
“Bait or not,” it rumbled, its eyes dark with hate, “I can’t stand half bloods.”
Before Nico could scream, the giant twisted his body one way and his head the other, and once again the world went dark.
000
When Nico awoke again, the ground was smooth and cool and the air was stale. His neck was stiff and sore. He took in a full, shaking breath and sat up, squinting fruitlessly through the pitch black. Vaguely, he heard voices; one deep and rumbling, the other panicked and weepy.
“She’ll notice!” it sobbed, “It’s all bent wrong, she’ll notice you killed it!”
“That’s why it’s in the jar,” the other answered, “until we find a new one.”
Giants.
This is what startled Nico into standing—and whacking his head on the ceiling. He blinked in the dark, rubbing the back of his head and reaching tentatively above him. Metal. And the walls around him; metal, and the smooth, cool ground too—all metal, and now Nico was beginning to hyperventilate all over again, the lack of light a viscous taunt. Why don’t you shadow travel away, son of Hades? Why don’t you run, like you always do?
But his powers were useless here.
Nico remembers sobbing and beating the walls of his prison with his fist, screaming to be let out, when suddenly light burst in around him, illuminating his surroundings. He was in a giant bronze jar, and the cork at the top had just been opened.
In peered the eye of a giant.
“It’s alive!” it cheered, its booming voice shaking the walls of Nico’s cell. “I thought you killed my pet, but it’s alive in there!”
“Move,” the other demanded, and a purple eye replaced the green one. Nico stared back, trembling under its gaze.
“Lich,” the giant whispered, blinking at him. “How did you wake back up?”
Nico does not remember answering.
Then the giant stepped back, and the cork was squeezed back in over the opening, and Nico was sealed away in the darkness again.
000
He doesn’t remember the fall, but sometimes he dreams of hitting the ground.
He wakes gasping, just as he did so many times before, and swings wildly at nothing. The air around him is dark and hot, but his body is shivering, wired with adrenaline. His neck is stiff and sore. And next to him, a body moves to take both his wrists in a tight grip. Nico screams to be let go. The grip tightens, and Nico knows soon his arm will break, he’ll be shaken like a doll—
“Nico, do you hear me?”
He blinks, freezing at the voice.
It’s low and comforting, warm like Hestia’s. He doesn’t want to be tricked again. He wants to kick it away, but it edges closer, asking him to look.
He blinks in the dark, panting, searching for a face.
“I’m right here, Nico. You see me? I’m right here.”
Through the smog of Tartarus, Nico does see him. His blue eyes are tired but focused, like he was just pulled from a deep sleep, and he’s holding Nico’s wrists loosely.
Nico feels warm tears slip down his filthy, soot-covered face, but when the boy reaches up to wipe them away, there is no dirt on his fingers. When the boy—Will, his sludgy brain supplies—replaces his hand on Nico’s wrist, it does not hurt.
“Breathe with me,” Will says, and Nico does, and the air is sticky and humid but it does not suffocate him. His eyes adjust to the dark, and there is moonlight seeping in through his cabin window.
“There you are,” Will says gently. He smiles at Nico, and Nico is too tired to smile back, but still he nods his heavy head. Here I am, he thinks.
“Can I touch you?” Will asks, and Nico nods again and allows himself to be tucked under Will’s chin. It’s warm here, and soft, and Nico can trace Will’s stupid tattoo with the tips of his fingers.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
Nico doesn’t feel the need. Another dream about a fall he doesn’t remember, another attack against someone who doesn’t exist. He brought little pieces of Tartarus back with him and now every once in a while they spill out onto the floor. There’s nothing left to say.
Instead, he turns his head and presses a kiss to Will’s shoulder, and Will returns one to the middle fingers of Nico’s right hand, lifting it gently to his lips.
Nico remembers it hurting there once. He remembers it stinging as he planted himself firmly into the ground, and called out for someone who couldn’t hear him and wouldn’t come—but right now, he uses the same fingers to trace a boy’s tattoo, and none of it hurts. There is no bite, no impact in the earth where he lay. The world does not tilt. He tastes no blood.
All he can feel is warmth.