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The problem with Tartarus, Nico grimaces, is how easily it could’ve been a home to him in another world.
He pushes his way through shrouded succulents, prickly with pall and poison, unconcerned by the bloody slashes across his thighs and sickly-yellow ooze already festering at the edges of each open wound; he’ll heal in a moment anyway, once the shadows send sanguine strength spinning through his veins.
Distractedly, Nico drowns out a distant part of his brain that sounds like Percy after Bianca died, that sounds like Hades when he parted the earth to support his son against Kronos, that sounds like Hazel every time she talks to Nico. That voice, so full of hope and horror, is shouting now, banging and scratching and tearing itself raw against the bars of his compartmentalization. Something is wrong , and it wants Nico to know — to notice.
Nico doesn’t care. His bones have calcified this quiet numbness, and his body saps strength from the hellscape of Tartarus, and his heart glitters red like a pomegranate’s shell. He survives.
At this rate, the voice will not.
There’s no time in Tartarus, Nico muses.
All at once dire and languid, he scrambles forward towards the end of a mission he doesn’t remember starting then loses track of hours and days watching shadows drip and dribble into each other. With no way to follow the passage of time nor a reason to care, Nico meanders until a creature seeking satiation for their ravenous hunger attempts to avail him of his soul or skin for a snack. Beyond the routine adrenaline of battle, there’s no more strategy to pore over, no goal he’s reaching for. Mostly, his mind stays quiet enough, caught in the terminal terror of tracking monsters until exhaustion forces him to rest or risk shattering where he stands.
Sometimes he thinks about sunlight.
There’s something immensely comforting about the weight of the River Cocytus ebbing and flowing over his body; Nico is no son of Poseidon, blessed with neither the adoration-affection-adulation that comes with being Percy, nor control over the tides that wash over his face, but this is his domain; the river of lamentation licks a steady soothe over his skin and obeys his will.
Nico wonders if Tartarus has consumed his sanity; there’s no sense in missing what he never had. As he drags himself ashore, the river shimmers and shifts with iridescent silver, and the wailing takes on a new pitch. As something — someone? — flickers into view on the riverbank, Nico pulls out his sword and pretends not to notice the way his hands tremble around the Stygian Iron.
There’s no time to deal with his exhaustion, or his fear, or his hopelessness. As he looks up to where the sky should be, Nico knows there’s no time at all.
He cuts his gaze back down as a spirit solidifies and strides across the crushed-glass-sand towards him. Focus.
The blade swipes straight through the man, who doesn’t even attempt to dodge. Nico gapes, something sharp pressing at the edges of his mind. It feels uncomfortably close to having feelings again, and he widens his stance, grounds his feet even as glass crawls up into his shredded sneakers.
Then he drops his sword entirely.
Nico’s voice wavers, warbles. “You’re supposed to be dead!”
He wants to laugh, or maybe cry — it’s been so long since he was afraid of the dead. He’s not afraid of this one, either, except for what it could mean for his friends aboveground.
His friends, if he has any left. Or any at all.
Luke’s colors are bright and clear even through the silvery sheen draped over him; Nico hates the way blond hair and blue eyes make him miss beaches, bright skies, being home.
“I am dead, kiddo. Sorry to startle you.”
"Why are you here?"
Luke laughs; Nico would have expected it to be drier, humorless, but Luke's eyes crinkle at the corners and the scar across his cheek crumples softly. "Didn't you know, angel? I'm the worst kind of monster."
Nico knows that it's his sister who was always the angel, the good girl, the person who saved him. Coming from this traitor specter's lips painted pink with kindness and catharsis, Nico believes it could mean him too.
“You know who I am?”
Luke cuts a look to Nico, and it stings — Nico hasn’t remembered pain in weeks, or maybe months, but he does now and wishes he could forget again; his whole body aches and moans with the layers of injuries he’s been patching over with blackened faith and toxic optimism.
When Luke speaks, Nico — always steady at every turn, unsurprised and unfaltering at each new nightmare — flinches back: “You’re the unsung hero, kid. The fallen angel.”
He’s stumbling, ankle half-twisted in his panic and desperation to escape the implications of those words. “What the fuck would you know, traitor?!”
Nico ends up with shattered glass cutting into his palms, leaning back on his hands with his feet kicking in the river. Luke is splayed out beside him and Nico would be jealous of the way he lounges without a care for the shards glinting in and out of view in the shadowed light but for the way his chest has been flayed open by the revelations Luke’s just dumped in his lap.
He can deal with the cuts — what are a few more at this point, anyway?
Luke had an answer for the venom Nico had spit at him; somehow, neither of them had expected that.
“The devil’s always been in the details, hasn’t it, kid?”
Nico still remembers Luke alive, even if he’d been out of camp and leading Kronos’ army by the time Nico had stumbled back into time. He’d been all summer sun and smirking coolness, laugh lines and freckles and tossing little kids up to the sky because they’re sure he’ll catch them then breaking hearts with careless fingers.
Nico isn’t oblivious, either — sound travels through shadows and it’s hard not to eavesdrop. He knows Luke was the face of the camp before Percy came along: the person with open arms and an empty bed waiting for every new camper, the one who’d been around long enough to point out every shortcut through the woods and push aside the worst weapons in the shed. He’d known every nightmare and phobia of every camper, paid attention enough to bring just the right sugar to keep the horrors at bay.
He just hadn’t expected any of that to matter when he was contending with a titan of a moral crisis. He hadn’t expected Luke to keep caring, and he hadn’t expected Luke to notice him in the midst of a war he was losing.
Maybe he should have.
Nico isn’t brave enough to ask what Luke means — not now. Not anymore. He isn’t a snot-nosed kid anymore, brash and bold and full of questions whose answers were little more than smoke and shade. Maybe it’s something about the wisdom of age, if death could be considered aging, but Luke seems to know what Nico’s not asking anyways.
“I noticed you, okay? It was hard not to — I mean, Kronos insisted on it, with a new child of the Big Three and all, but you were… you were just a kid, Nico, and you brought up a third side to this war we hadn’t thought we’d have to contend with. You betrayed a camp you barely knew then fought off the machinations of Minos through your grief and rage to save your friends who’d refused to save you."
“They saved me.”
Nico doesn’t mean to interrupt — didn’t do it consciously, but what was conscious about him these days? But he had to say it. He couldn’t take the praise for a kindness he hadn’t shown.
None of this is true, but that in particular is a lie, and it scratches as he tries to swallow the words Luke spilt.
Luke glances away. “They gave up on you, Nico. They didn’t want you — they were afraid of you, and what you meant. But mostly they saw you, all black clothes and broody attitude, and decided you weren’t worth trying to know.” Nico tries to follow Luke’s gaze, wondering if there’s a threat on the horizon he should know about. There isn’t; Luke just won’t look at him. “Percy was charming and easy to like, even as a prophecy child. They gave him a chance.”
Nico doesn’t know what to say. He’d long given up on the dream of having anyone say anything half so true out loud.
Watching Luke now, Nico feels every minute his age — 14 years old and tumbling through shadows, haunted by the ghosts of war and death; 84 and still bright eyed, crumpling mythomagic cards between his fingers to make space for hope.
May had looked different before Nico stepped into the light of her home; the rot creeping over peanut butter still seemed more alive than anything that crept through the shadows and the ashes had settled like glitter on cookies, unknowable through the hazy grey filter of darkness that slipped over Nico’s eyes. How often had he been there lurking, watching this woman cook and sew for a boy who was never coming home? How often had she burnt and bled her fingers dry to fight for a chance to give him?
Instead, she’d lost whatever sanity she had left for herself.
Maybe with it, she’d taken Luke’s last hopes. Nico doesn’t want to imagine it, recoils at the seductive temptation. It feels like sin to see his own mother falling prey to the bleak hopelessness of this Greek tragedy, but what other choices did humans have against the gods? Their deaths were a punishment against a friend; their lives were a punishment against their own selves.
May had shone in the darkness, sewing a driveway paved with comfort for her child to walk through on his way home — and then Nico stepped out into the light, saw the grim and the grimy, learned about Romans and their auguries, and wondered.
What had May seen, that she’d sewn and torn and sewn again so many creatures?
She’d defied the Fates for her son, made her own prophecy again and again, tearing it open in the hopes that this time she’d made him a better ending. She’d wanted him to be loved by the Fates if the Fates wouldn’t let him be loved by her.
Did Luke know? Did he die feeling unseen as Nico is living now?
Nico feels 14 and old, 84 and young, so lonely in this wasteland hell and so loved by the people who left him to rot here. Nico considers his hand, shrouded in shadow, wrapped so tightly the tendrils twist up his arm and sink into his skin until they throttle his veins and entomb his heart. Nico clenches his power closer to him, pulling from his stomach until his ribcage caves in, and pulls a little harder to keep himself safe.
Nico considers the boy next to him and lets go of every shadow.
Pain rushes through him; hunger and exhaustion chase fast on its heels. This is everything Nico hadn’t let himself feel for months now, and he wishes on the bones that glitter in the darkness that he hadn’t. He breathes that wish to the river — then lets its agonizing waters swallow the thought.
“Why do you still remember me, of all people?” Sense and Luke himself have told Nico that he was a threat to Kronos, that Luke had his orders and strategies, and if Percy fell before 16 it would be Nico the Fates would look to, so Kronos did too.
The river swept its waters with hushes and wails, but the hope had made its home in his bones and encased itself in the steady cell of quiet numbness, and now it rushes through his blood — an urgent tattoo with every heartbeat, a rushing almost too loud to be heard over.
Luke looks away. “I… I don’t know. I was supposed to watch you, y’know,” he stumbles, and Nico’s heart sinks. There are no shadows left to catch it or cushion its fall; he bruises. The heartache is a revelation to Nico, who still tingles with the reminiscence of feeling now that it has returned. Unconcerned, Luke continues. “But you were my hope, I think. That someone like me — like you, like us — could be rescued by themselves. You were left for dead and still you came quietly to hell if it kept your friends safe. I was left for dead and I killed them.”
“I’m sorry I called you a traitor.” The words come like blood to his lips, impulsive but not ingenuine.
The air shimmers as he shrugs. “I was one. Kid, I’m the devil who fell first. ” Luke is nonchalant in a way that’s too cool to be true, and Nico’s breath catches on a sob.
He knows now, what might drive someone made of sunlight into dancing with demons to keep his siblings safe. “Not to us. Not really.”
The worst of Tartarus is not the monsters, not the hunger and the debilitating fatigue. It is not the isolation that squalls and slashes at the edges of his mind like a parasite. It is not the torture, or the poison, or the danger. It is the shades of the people who should’ve lived long enough to be his friends haunting this hell, condemned by the very people they’d wanted to save.
The voice in Nico’s head is frantic now, drowning out the paranoia and anxiety and isolation that have shredded every coherent thought he could have had. It sounds like Percy when he trusted Nico to carry him through the shadows, like Hades when he watched his son step into hell and begged him to stay home safe instead, like Hazel when she woke up to her mother dead and a brother as lost in time as she was. It sounds like Bianca telling him to let go of his anger and Akhlys when she praised him for his perfect misery. It sounds like Luke, brave and brash and broken under the love of gods who saw themselves in their children and recoiled at what they had created.
The voice tells him his friends have never noticed who he is and what he wants to be; the voice tells him to demand the affection he is owed. The voice tells him he was stupid enough to taste hellfire; the voice tells him he was set aflame and strong enough to swallow anyways. The voice tells him he is dying in hell; the voice tells him to survive .
He’s come as far as he can now. His friends will come, and there’s nothing left to do but live.
Nico breaks his heart in two and swallows a pomegranate seed.