Archive of Our Own ^beta

bianca is having another meltdown. the living room has suffered most of it: couch and coffee table tipped over; the cushions, magazines, and mail ripped apart; what little décor had been torn down. little red fingerprints dot the surfaces and outline the sporadic path she blew her whirlwind through. bits of broken glass and ceramic lie on the floor. some of it is so small it is reminiscent of glitter.

mamma’s crying comes muffled through the walls. there is a puddle of vomit by the bathroom door and the air is eye-wateringly sour with bile and liquor. an official-looking letter is half-soaked in the mess. gentile signora maria di angelo, le scrivo riguardo ai nostri figli –

over it all, a layer of smoke looms from the kitchen. something blackened and sopping wet forms a lump in a frying pan that now sits in the sink, desolate. yet another thing bianca has tried to make. another thing she has ruined. the remnants of the dollar-store cook book are soaked and forming paste on the countertop, the rest of it torn up and fluttered around the apartment with the other papers.

it’s overwhelming. it’s normal.

nico wheels his little green wagon into the apartment, mindful that none of the grocery bags topple out. he leaves it by the door. keeps his shoes on. doesn’t take off his bicycle helmet just yet. he can’t be certain that bianca is finished throwing projectiles – never at him, but that’s not to say he’s never been caught in the crossfire before. (the little nick in his hairline proves it.) she is just… sometimes so overtaken in her fear, her frustration, that she is like enyo – tossing her torch and razing everything to the ground.

he could burn hot like that too if he really wanted. but he had a feeling something like this would happen, so he just carts his wagon through the fray and leaves it parked in the kitchen. he’ll put the groceries away later. bianca will most likely take priority.

all the bloody fingerprints make him itch. some of them will be a pain to scrub from the walls. they lead him to his sister, his more-whole half, who is crouched outside the bathroom door. her hair is singed at the ends. her face is pressed into her knees. shivers run through her like a dry kindling. in short: the signs of a meltdown are all there, and all the wind in her sails has died down, left her shrunken and smaller than she’d been however long ago she’d been raging.

the bloody spots are still tacky. nico gives it about five minutes.

“i told you this would happen,” he sighs.

no response. this is also normal. nico carefully curls his fingers around the girl’s upper arms, pulls her to her feet. she falls into him limply, legs refusing to hold her weight – like a puppet with its strings cut. mamma has so many special pairs of scissors in her hatbox.

“i did,” nico continues, “i said ‘she won’t listen to you, or at all. she doesn’t hear anything. she’s as good as dead’.” as natural as breathing, he hooks bianca’s arm over his shoulders; his right side moving against her left. just like they had been born. perhaps unnatural, then; they were never meant to be apart and moving as his own unwhole self feels cumbersome. or maybe that’s just how it feels to lug around deadweight. precious deadweight. better-half kind of deadweight. deadweight all the same – so perhaps it is a good thing that nico knows what to do with dead things. knows how to rekindle fire. “did you listen? no.”

then, as he shuffles into the tiny bathroom, he allows himself a moment of lament. “nobody ever listens to me. this is how ghosts are, you know? not listened to. one day, something bad is going to happen, bianca. i know it. will you listen then?”

no response. enyo has had her fill, and eris has no fire to fuel.

nico puts bianca’s limp hands in the tiny sink, and begins the normal routine of scrubbing away all the blood from the grooves in her palms, from the bends in her fingers, from beneath her fingernails. most of the injuries are shallow without need for stitching. he is diligent. with superhero bandaids carefully applied to each tiny cut, nico presses feather-light kisses to every single one, before dabbing little dollops of vanilla-scented lotion on the tips of her fingers to mask the remnant tang of blood. she’ll like that, when she comes back to him.

he leaves her curled in a ball in the linen closet. it’s time to start putting all the pieces back together again.

percy punches a mirror after a nightmare, and nico feels the phantom pressure of his old bicycle helmet around his temples.

they are not the same. nico feels so small regardless. he feels like he can barely reach the sink, let alone see into it without standing on his tip toes. this is not actually the case. he rinses glass shards out of percy’s knuckles. grabs a tweezer from his shoddy little pocket-sized first-aid kit he keeps in the lining of his jacket, because glass glitter is sparkly but cause for infection.

they are not the same. percy doesn’t let loose guttural screeches that make his throat raw. percy doesn’t tug at his hair. percy doesn’t wail or hammer his fists on the wall or throw furniture. those are, in fact, the very things he avoids doing; percy’s nightmare did those things. had him waking up with a strangled gasp. had him shivering through tears. percy has spent a lifetime learning to be quiet.

nico wishes he could reach into percy and unspool that tightly-wound ball of grief in his chest. pull it out like a thread, repurpose it; maybe a sweater, maybe a blanket to keep him warm. stir something into motion with it, like bianca used to do, when she was fiercely-golden eris and finding ways to bring things to life.

his thigh aches. his retainer tastes metallic. They are not the same.

“nico?”

“yes, pesce?”

a wet sniffle. Percy’s swollen knuckles shift under his hands. fingers flexing. his socked feet whispering against the faux tiles. the air moves with him. all of it chafes and leaves a raw-pulsing awareness between them. “do you think i’m a bad person?”

they’re the same though, in this.

and just as if percy were bianca – because like this, they are both so vulnerable and scared of themselves – nico takes a minute to give the question the thought it deserves. Not much of a minute, mind you.

“no.”

he can feel percy’s eyes on him. he knows that percy wants more, just like bianca always wanted more. sometimes nico wishes he was enough. Hopefully this time around, nico will be enough, and percy will stay.

he tries again. “no, you’re not a bad person. you did what you had to do in order to survive.” a pause. the words are so hard to find; how do you answer a person who won’t believe you, no matter what you say? even after all this time, nico is no closer to figuring it out. so he tries again, and again, all his words jumbling together with a reference to kellin’s poetry and it lingers for your whole life, because somehow he needs to show percy that he isn’t alone. that he isn’t the only one who feels this way. that he is far from abominable, monstrous, bad.

“you are one of the kindest people i know,” nico assures. he has finished ridding percy’s hands of glass and blood. one of them needs stitches, so nico plucks a length of thread and a sewing needle and makes do. nico needs a smoke.

and, because percy is not entirely like bianca, it seems that he begins to listen. it is a feeling nico will maybe never get used to. (how pathetic it is that just a glimpse of attention has him tingling with warmth all over. to be heard. believed. the things normal people get. maybe percy makes nico feel normal. maybe that’s somehow important.)

“so are you,” percy mumbles.

nico slaps a gauze-patch over the stitches. he doesn’t say anything else.

he knows a lot of things. just as all universal knowns follow: you can’t boil people like water to make them pure; there are kinds of death that don’t end in funerals; nico is not a good person. he knows this, knows the variables, like he knows all else. nico is, by extension, not kind or gentle, just like you also can’t burn or melt people, and just like all the other ways that people can die.

it’s some ‘last sext’ type shit. a truth i have always felt. bianca had always liked that one. 

“so are you,” percy says again. stronger. he’s looking at nico, he’s got the kind of eyes hemmingway would’ve loved to write about, and he’s looking at nico with his green-blue-sorrow eyes, like he knows exactly what nico’s thinking. (in them, nico sees achilles’ fierce love. the kind of love that causes typhoons. the kind of love a man kills for. should percy listen, nico will guide him away from any kind of hector.)

they pack up. check out. head to the truck. mrs o’leary trots around the parking lot and relieves herself on a straggly patch of grass and leisurely nibbles at her breakfast in the backseat. percy sits in the passenger seat as he always does, nursing a three-day-old bottle of pepsi and chewing on handfuls of trailmix. nico, diligent and perhaps a little obsessive, makes sure to leaf through their receipts at least three times.

the papers are chaotically organized in a way that only makes sense to him. piles of gas station and dollar-store receipts bound together with a clothespin, jotted records of every place they’ve stayed in be it an overnight parking lot or motel. scribbled pieces of math for every cent they spend. nothing left behind. nothing that could trace back to them.

he remembers how bianca used to organize all her dream road-trips like this. more neatly, but the intention was the same. notepads dedicated to tallying-up the spending total. abused google map on the family computer to jot down a detailed series of directions from state to state to state. (cucciolo, do you wanna go to death valley or joshua tree national park? he wishes they’d never gone to california at all.) nico abuses the atlas they have, old and beat up before bianca ever bought it for ninety-nine cents – where bianca’s gel pen isn’t scrawled all over it, nico’s own chicken-scratch appears. and just like bianca, he fills notepads with painstaking directions.

their next stop is fritch, texas. it’s a few hour’s drive away. it’s on the way nico is taking to oregon, just like percy asked, because there is nothing percy could ask for that would be too much. he’ll just avoid california while he does it.

“do you wanna stop by amarillo?” he finds himself asking. “there’s a national park, down in palo duro. it’s real nice this time of year.”

percy blinks at him slowly through heavy-lidded eyes. nico leans across the console and kisses him right between them, then again on his nose, a third time on his lips, and percy mouths a yeah, okay. take me away.

so nico does.

the day draws long. percy spends most of it trying to feed him the last of their strawberries and cream – like, like the romance novels and all that, right? he snorted, and nico couldn’t think of anything to say so he’d eaten up the strawberry and the cream and channeled a little bit of helen to lick percy’s fingers clean. just as he knew, percy sputtered and went pink around the ears. looked away. looked back. crooked a grin, told nico to pull over; having sex with percy is different than cashing in sexual favors. it’s fun. it wastes time in a good way.

except there is a pit in nico that is reaching a fever pitch. the itching embers had begun sometime around the sunrise, left him short of breath.

something is coming. keep an eye out.

he’d done just that. got them back on the road, trundling along in the sweltering heat, asked percy to light his cigarettes and to turn the ac on and play the music he always likes. mrs o’leary’s bowl is refilled every half-hour just before it goes tepid. summer in texas calls for less than jorts. it calls for stripping down to your underwear and baking. they don’t do that.

percy takes his shirt off, though. bares all his cigarette burns and broken glass scarring to the sun. pulls open the overhead window. rolls the windows down. he prods nico to speed down the deserted roads with that achillean smile. that kind of smile, it teases you, goads you. (it makes sense that percy would be like bianca sometimes. they were friends. achilles bore a shield with enyo and eris embossed on it. nico knows this is an expected development, he knew it would hurt, so he thinks about shakespeare’s february face, cold cold cold, and the steam presses against his lungs until he can sigh it all out.)

no matter the weather. texas is hot, but california was hotter, and nico is hotter still. for now, he’ll frost over. focus on the roads. on his chicken-scratch directions. on the wind in his hair. howling in his ears. percy’s laughter over it all. mrs o’leary’s head hanging out the window.

the pit burrows soul-deep when they pass a road sign guiding them to an interstate. don’t turn onto route eighty-six. keep following two-eight-seven. unruffled, nico does just that. slowly, something in him unclenches, simmers.

when they stop for gas, percy stays in the car. which is normal. their new normal, but normal anyway. nico enters the gas station shop alone, humming to himself as he grabs two cans of monster energy and a tub of ice cream. some boot-leg ben&jerry’s. megacookie. whatever that means. it’ll melt within the hour. it’ll be finished quicker than that.

the shopkeeper is languid in the heat. nico fixes a small little smile on his face. an echo of gentleness. the smile he used to practice on his neighbor and the lady at the grocery store. the shopkeeper eats it up, doesn’t even blink twice at him despite the fact that nico can see his own face scowling back at him from the poster pinned to the corkboard behind them.

wanted. if you see these two boys, report to your local authorities.

have a good day, sweetheart, the shopkeeper says. they slide across the pack of marlboro nico bought. their glasses are half an inch thick, their eyes beady with crowfeet, their smile framed with jowls. perhaps it is cruel of him to take advantage like this. oh well. nico smiles again, nods, and saunters out. his ears are tuned to the radio.

“it has been four weeks since the brutal murder of gabe ugliano, and trails are running cold for suspects percy jackson and nico di angelo. officer brunner has pushed forward his suspicions of there being more to the case than meets the eye, stating, quote, ‘it’s looking more and more like a desperate form of self-defense.’ with no witnesses to confirm this, matters only become more complicated –“

he smiles to himself. back in the car, percy cracks open a can gratefully and glugs half of it all at once. from there, saguaro cacti and dunes roll past; the sun rises rises rises. open skies for miles. percy looks lighter. sounds lighter. he’s got a smile around every word, his braces glinting in the sunlight. “what’s palo duro like, love?” he asks.

love. it does something to him. something good, something that balms the ache in his thigh, that lets nico leave behind the dark and take a step out into the sun. it’s new. it’s good. everything with percy is good. makes nico think that maybe he can be good too, in the moments where he forgets himself; maybe he is more than a begging to be believed, maybe he is more than a helmet-wearing boy that tried to tell paris to leave helen well enough alone. more than the boy who cleaned up the ashes.

bianca sits in the glove compartment. nico says, “kind of like the rest of the desert, but it’s nice. the air’s cleaner.” it’s not where my lesser ajax is, nico doesn’t tell him, so anywhere is better than there. instead he adds, “i think you’ll like it, pesce. bianca always wanted to go there.”

their silence is gentle. then percy asks about his more-whole half, and nico answers. it is nice to be listened to.

“we’re like puzzle pieces,” bianca murmurs.

it is dark. the moon is a silver sliver between the curtains. bianca sits to his right, her shorts hiked up like his own, revealing their thighs. he can’t see it, but he doesn’t have to. he knows what they look like. they are both matchstick-thin with knobbly knees and crisscrossing scars across what paltry flesh they do have. and, right where they meet, bianca’s thigh fills the puckered divot in nico’s like the curving pieces of a puzzle.

he will remember this a year later. bitterly, achingly, angrily. he will be sitting in this exact spot on bianca’s bunk, legs dangling a few feet off the floor, tracing a cold finger over the place where bianca slots against him, makes him whole, makes him more than a whisper. nico will have grown by then. will have outgrown a girl who stopped growing with him.

he will think about the lie of shelby mahurin; how death really could take her away from him, souls bound or not. he will feel betrayed. he will feel only a strike away from a blaze.

for now, he tilts his head one way, and then the other. “…yes,” he says, knowing that she likes to hear it, “we fit together nicely.” youre more of me than i am, he almost says. but she wouldn’t listen. she’d call him paris. he knows he’s not paris, but sometimes he’ll look at mamma. at her empty eyes. he’ll start to believe it. post-partum depression isn’t the same as choosing a girl over his homeland… or maybe it is. he chose bianca. he’ll choose percy. only bad things can come from reaching for wild things, be it enkindled eris or tempestuous achilles.

“we’ll always be like this, cucciolo, we’ll be together forever and –“ he doesn’t hear the rest. he is suddenly cold and alone. ghostlike and empty and unwhole again, as bianca tears herself from him and hops down onto the floor. the moonlight beams on her silhouette – the whipcord braid, the arch of her feet, the boney line of her spine.

then her feet are pounding on the wood as she chases a sound nico had also heard. the creak of a rotten door and rusted hinges. the waning of weight on old floorboards. it stutters in time with his heartbeat; how bereft he is, as his twin dashes to their mother.

“mamma! mamma? are you awake?” the hope in her voice is painful. is beguiling, like she is trying to coax a response. bianca is entirely strife. playful, mischievous, whatever will catch their mother on fire and bring her to life.

“mamma was a lump of ash,” nico tells percy, “already used up. it killed bianca, i think, long before bianca killed herself. you know? you remember, how mamma would just sit.”

the scene dances in front of him, a splash of white light playing on the black lake of memory. nico following bianca, his tired feet sore from a day of begging and selling, coming to a stop in the kitchen. the kitchen he loves as best he can; wagon tucked under the space where the dish washer is meant to be, all the spices stacked on the lower shelves, the cutlery –

the kitchen light bathing the room in yellow. bianca no longer cajoling and hopping around endearingly on her tiptoes. switched out for the meaner side of eris, the golden kind, the kind that tore people apart. beneath it, enyo, a cruel streak reveling in cornering mamma while she strikes for any kind of response. and underneath enyo, a quiet, despairing oizys. “are you even listening to me?!” bianca calls. she waves her hands in front of mamma’s face. stomps her feet. her eyes are widening in the way that nico knows entails a meltdown.

mamma reaches around bianca for one of the liquor bottles in the cupboard. “look at me,” bianca hisses. “i am right here! mamma!”

“let’s go back to bed,” nico tells her, “mamma isn’t going to respond. she’s – she’s somewhere else, it’s not worth wasting your energy.” something is coming. something is coming. that same feeling he always gets when bianca seeks out their mother’s attention. the stabbing, striking heat in his chest. the hairs rising on the back of his neck. his ears perked for any telling sound, eyes snatching up any sign.

it’s the same thing he has been telling her for months. years, even. bianca has ignored him each time. called him names, sometimes. their attitudes towards their mother have always been something to set them apart. bianca is stubborn and chaos, desperate to draw out any sign of life, of love; nico is tired. it’s times like these where he chastises himself for getting too comfortable. complacent.

he is not enough for bianca. not enough for mamma. he isn’t a reason for anybody to come back, to never leave at all. “so bianca, she’d grabbed a knife. i thought… she’d been talking about it for a while, about killing mamma if she didn’t start paying attention to her – to us, i mean. i was hoping she was just being dramatic. it was like what john green said in ‘turtles all the way down’.” my mother’s footsteps were so quiet i barely heard her leave. “it just took a while for bianca to realize she’d even gone at all. an’ then she did…”

like always, nico had put the pieces back together. tried to. in killing mamma, bianca had carved out a part of herself. it left bianca misshapen. difficult to fit against in a metaphorical sense. and then a literal sense, too, since bianca threw herself into traffic. then nico had nobody to fit in the hole she left in him.

percy doesn’t tell him you couldn’t have known, though, for which nico is grateful. percy calls nico cassandra enough to understand the depth of it. nico knew. nico had hoped to delay the inevitable, like an idiot.

well, maybe percy doesn’t agree with that last part. “i don’t think it was your responsibility to… to stop it, nico.”

nico snorts. “you make me sound like her keeper.”

there’s a pause. when nico glances to the passenger seat, away from the memory in the windshield, percy is chewing his lip. he’s cute like that. all scrunched-up eyebrows. eyelashes brushing his cheeks. the baby-blue bands of his braces stark against his mostly white teeth. against the pink swell of his lip. reminiscent of oscar wilde’s besotted musings. it’s less cute when percy blurts out: “well – it always seemed that way. you were always… you were like my mom, with bianca.

and i love bianca, i do! i did. but you always were cleaning up after her, ‘n i remember you were always, always, i dunno. just. doing everything. everything, love –“ that damned endearment, he can’t keep the smile down even as he has to look away – “and that’s not fair on anybody. you were looking after her even when you were babies, basically.”

“who else was going to, pesce?”

“that’s not the point. it shouldn’t have been you.”

nico holds his breath. he looks back out the windshield, no longer a red-slick kitchen with a frantic bianca, but miles and miles of red sand and creosote bushes whizzing past them. he tilts his head one way. then the other. he blames the metallic taste in his mouth on his retainer. “that… sounds like that matters to you.”

percy rakes a hand through his hair. mrs o’leary whines, nudging their elbows with her cold nose. percy uses that hand to scritch behind the dog’s ears, before latching onto nico’s. their fingers lace together. “of course it matters to me, nico.”

he bows forward like he’s trying to meet nico’s eyes; in his peripheral, percy is cast in a blue shadow with orange-lined sunlight that catches his nose and forehead through the skylight. that boyish, freckled face, wearing a far too adult earnesty.

“we – you’re my cassandra,” he breathes it out with a reverence that threatens to make nico melt.

“i love you, nico.” what the fuck does he do with that? “obviously i care about how fucking – fuckin’ hard-done-by you were.” another breath. “are.”

“it’s not a contest –“

“i know it’s not a contest, nico! just – just let me have this.” his fingers are slowly getting crushed by percy’s grip on them; it takes him a second to remember he’s driving. that he’s not in an alley or in some stranger’s bed or – or even back at that slumped little shack, fake-laughing his way through some gross old man’s pickup lines, allowing himself to be led by the hand by an ol’ fashioned man like me to bed as he waits for a moment to strike.

best keep that to himself. percy doesn’t know the things nico has done. that nico deserves everything he gets and worse. (percy worries about his hands being stained, scrubs them religiously, tries to keep them clean in a desperation that hurts like the bone-deep ache in his thigh. nico’s fingernails will always have another’s blood beneath them.)

he’s driving. percy is holding his hand. mrs o’leary lays with her chin on her paws, amber eyes worriedly switching from one of them to the other, back and forth, her tail thumping anxiously on the backseat.

breathe in. breathe out. ignore the itch.

“okay,” nico relents. he hopes he sounds calm. “okay, okay. i didn’t mean to… demean you, percy.” because that’s the root of the matter. percy feels like he’s not being helpful enough, is trying to acknowledge nico for all that he’s doing. like it’s a big deal. like it matters. like it’s a hardship. once again, he finds himself wishing he could unwind that ball of doubt in percy; this time it’s more like a gnarled fishing line caught on deadwood and fishbones and rotten boots.

nico will take the time tonight to figure out how to cut it all loose. for now, he smiles, rolling the truck to a stop. he blows his bangs out of the way as he leans across the console, using their linked hands to draw percy to him. he whispers something; it’s sappy and doesn’t even reach his ears, but percy flushes and he’s gorgeous and beautiful and leaning in.

kissing percy is as good a distraction as any. it helps that nico loves percy too.

another list that nico keeps is hidden in a pocket he sewed into the sleeve of his old bomber jacket. he’s too big for it, but he carried it along as some kind of memento. it’s a sean glatch kind of situation, nico thinks, how all the blood is quickly becoming smeared into an almost-romance, a devotion.

or, he proposes to himself, it is more like a marguerite duras scenario. to make her happy, i would invent god if i had to. percy is somebody nico can’t think to summon a limit for.

maybe it’s the same thing. a blend. a combination of the two.

nico throws a careless smile at the man lingering at the fresh produce. he’s got short scruffy blond hair and a nick in his upper lip. blue eyes that set the pit in nico’s chest on fire. all his hair is on end. every movement feels watched. he and percy are across from the man, and his achilles plasters himself against nico’s back while he reaches to inspect a navel orange.

neither of them is very subtle.

there is something coming. nico knows. nico knows this like he knows texas is hot and california is hotter. like he knows that this man trailing them around the supermarket isn’t his lesser ajax. no matter how similar the colors are. peach skin. red sand. pale blond hair. glaring sun. striking blue eyes. sweltering heat. this man is not him.

percy buries his nose in nico’s hair, arms winding around his waist. bianca’s almond and vanilla shampoo is still a fresh scent, if not slightly heat-damp, because this is a southern summer and it takes the weather as a competition. nico hates the bible belt.

“what does he want?” percy whispers.

nico plucks up a few more oranges. puts them in a mesh bag. places them in the basket hooked over his elbow. he hums. “i don’t know. maybe some more grapes? or we could grab some of the canned stuff. pineapples sound good.” (he’s capping them at fifty bucks. so far they’re at twelve bucks and ninety-five cents. it’s not too bad. all the in-season fruit is on discount.)

percy lets out a frustrated little nose. it rumbles in his chest, against nico’s back; he doesn’t mind it, not really, he feels almost… safe, if he were to describe it. but percy will not dirty his hands any more if nico has a say in it.

something is going to happen.

yes, because nico will make it.

he sends percy with the basket to the canned section. simple instructions: peaches, pineapples, yams. anything sugary and sticky and sweet. percy almost questions him but something on his face must’ve told the boy to keep his questions to himself. for that, nico is thankful.

he starts towards the bathrooms. poorly disguised footsteps amble after him, stopping every now and again as the man pretends to look at something or other.

it is early morning on a thursday. nico wonders just who the man thinks is going to bother speaking out. surely nobody – because nobody ever does, because this world is full of cowardice and ignorance. it is this kind of world that people like nico, cruel and bad, take advantage of. he saunters without care.

then swivels on his heel to pin the man with a look.

they stare at each other. nico tilts his head one way. then the other. cocks his hip out. crosses his arms. his hair falls away from his eyes, so nico offers a slip of a smile. his voice is saccharine as he asks, “can i help you?”

there is a bright-white burning sensation in his chest. danger danger danger.

the man seems taken aback. nico’s not sure why. he’d been following them around since the fridge section; he didn’t think he was going to go undetected, did he? apparently so. “i – no. i mean. yes. yes, you can. or – well, i mean… i can help you, actually.”

nico blinks. puts on a confused little pout. waits the appropriate amount of time, before letting out a befuddled huff of laughter, shifting his weight from side to side. “i’m not sure i’m following, sorry. help?”

no, no, i’m fine. don’t worry, i just, i fell.

are you sure? i can get you help –

look. drop it, boy scout. i don’t need help. i’ve got it.

oh.

boy scout.

california.

the superman figurine he’d torn off the diorama when…

he blinks.

jason coughs. he’s gone red, glasses slightly crooked, scrubbing the back of his neck with his hand. “i… yeah. maybe – maybe it’d be better if we talk somewhere else? with your friend. or not! that’s fine too, i don’t want to impose, but i’d really like to help –“ and he’s got some kind of sense after all, with a nervous glance to the security camera hovering above them – “you seemed… lost, when you pulled up earlier. i know the area really well.”

nico feels helen leave as soon as she’d came, scraped empty and left hollow now that there are no swords to blunt or accusations to wave off. he is, as percy loves to say, all-cassandra. watching. waiting. a million different thoughts flashing across his mind, only to be subsumed under the protective blanketing that smothers all of it into a blissfully silent darkness. there is no fire. there is no spark. he is cold cold cold and he will do anything for percy.

his default frame of mind.

he knows jason won’t hurt him. he hates that he remembers him. hates that there is a piece of california that has found him. nico winds himself down, before slipping on another demure little smile, bobbing his head. “okay, then. sure. let’s go find my friend, and…” he nods his head back towards the store at large.

nico isn’t sure if he’ll be adding jason to his list yet. he is sure is that he will if he has to. that’s what all the little tally marks on that list are, anyway. jason will be his thirteenth if need be. but that’s a thought that can wait. it lingers on the periphery.

he has the keys to the truck in his pocket. nothing else. he made percy tuck the switchblade into the waistband of his jorts, hidden by his shirt. nico should really invest in – in something. he makes jason walk in front of him as a compromise.

they find percy looking at a wall of tinned goods without really looking. he perks up too quickly to have actually been engrossed. as soon as they are close enough, percy’s hand slips into his, has nico pulled closer until they are side-by-side. percy’s thigh brushes the divot in nico’s. it aches. it warms.

jason looks even more nervous. percy squints at him, eyebrow arched. “who’s this?”

“he’s…” how to say this, how to say it in a way that percy will understand without giving too much a way. how to retell this story without being in it. nico bites his lip. “he’s athena. do you remember?”

jason looks lost. percy doesn’t. that is what matters. percy looks owlish, actually. then something dark passes over his features. his hand rubs circles in nico’s shoulder blade like he can sooth away all the hurt. it’s a sweet gesture. 

“okay,” percy says. “okay. i’m nico’s,” he introduces plainly. “percy.”

the blond nods slowly. “jason.”

nico knows this will not last. a silent truce has passed in favor of whatever jason thinks he can give them and whatever percy thinks nico gets out of it – neither will be particularly much, he knows, but the startling change in pace has him struggling to immediately catch up. nothing about it screams trap. nico slips percy’s switchblade up his hoodie sleeve anyway.

they check out with only half their shop. it totals to thirteen dollars and a quarter, which nico jots down in his notes. he rounds up a new total of the cash they have left. stuffs it all in the backpack-of-important-things, stuffs the backpack under the driver’s seat, then goes through the motions of clipping on mrs o’leary’s leash and collar and tying her to one of the rungs in the bed of the truck so she can get some fresh air and water. all the while, percy leans against the driver’s door, standing on the step-up. nico has a feeling he likes being able to look down at jason.

nico thinks it’s a sick twist of fate that running is what allows all of his ghosts to catch up with him.

his hands itch. he stuffs them in his pockets. he places himself between jason and percy, even as his chest tightens at the notion, and tilts his head with the same slight smile. tries to make it look inviting. hopes to god he isn’t as obvious as he feels.

“i know you’re the guys there’s a warrant out for.” jason throws his hands up placatingly. everything is fast-paced, harsh-whispering, eyes wildly looking around like he’s afraid of somebody overhearing them. nico knows there won’t be. the sun has barely crested over the buildings. all the shadows are purple and the sky burns a streak of red into violet like a waterline. “i’m – i promise, i swear to god, i’m not gonna turn either of you in. i don’t know everything, i know, but i don’t doubt that you two are good people.”

ha. universal known number three: nico is not a good person.

jason’s sincerity piques percy’s interest. plucks at the strung-taught part of himself that is so laden with grief and guilt and sadness; nico knows that this will probably be the pivotal moment. the thing that will get percy to climb himself out of the desolate pit. to start moving forward. so, even as nico burns and boils and melts and even still does not purify, he lets jason keep talking. hears him out. it is the least nico can afford.

“there’s… those two officers, right? d-something and brunner, they’ve been combing their way through, basically, and i just – i wanted to let you know. i don’t know where you’re headed, but amarillo is off-limits for you right now.” those electric blue eyes find nico’s. he hates it. jason licks his lips, slowly lowering his hands to wring them out instead. “i don’t know what tipped them off, if you got recognized, or what.”

percy bristles. he wants to object. he probably wants to put his face in his hands and start crying, for lack of any better way to let out all his stress. he doesn’t, though.

he just steps closer to nico, linking their pinkies – jason’s eyes are drawn to it. nico can’t make out the expression on the blond’s face. it feels important. 

nico nods slowly. he shifts his weight from one foot to the other, threading his fingers to the base of his scalp and tugging. pull. pull. pull. this… changes things. has he been slipping up? has he stopped being diligent? has he gotten complacent?

why. pull. didn’t. pull. he. pull. know?

“thanks,” he murmurs, voice sugarsoft, clinging desperately to the composure of helen. he itches. “that’s – that helps a lot. thank you, jason.” how can i make it up to you? how can i pay you back? do i owe you? anything. anything for percy’s safety.

percy’s in front of him. percy’s leaning down, looking at him with worried eyes, and nico doesn’t know what to say. his throat feels so dry. he’s so hot. his vision blackens around the edges like something charring – one minute he’s standing, the next his knees are bowing out and he’s being guided to sit.

maybe percy was right, when he said they were going to drown. nico has let a hole in the ship go amiss, and now they are sinking, now they are surrounded, now they’re caught in an undercurrent careening them towards the rocks. something in him finally snuffs out and he feels drained, dropping his head onto percy’s shoulder.

what the fuck was he thinking.

bianca would know what to do. she’d find a way to trail her fingers through his messy self, snag on something that would rouse the life in him – not to a point of spitting, no embers sparking, but he’d be breathing and cool and collected and ready with a plan.

he doesn’t know.

how strange, to have the rug pulled from beneath you. he… didn’t know. investigations opened in amarillo. the place they are heading next. ‘don’t turn onto route eighty-six. keep following two-eight-seven’. is that what that had meant? to not go to amarillo at all? fritch? everything in him churns and itches and burns. he hates it. uncertainty gnaws at him, leaves him prickling, numb, overwhelmed, desensitized all at once.

his eyes sting. there is a lathery metallic taste in his mouth. “percy?” he whispers. it sounds far too loud.

through the nothing, there is a hand that cups his cheek. it’s warm. the good kind of warm, a gentle distraction, something unequivocally good and kind about that hand. it is not so warm that it strikes him. nico curls his fingers around it.

“i’m here, love,” percy’s voice floats by, “just, just take a breather. you’re okay.”

opening his eyes after each blink is becoming difficult. holding himself up is the equivalent of holding onto a knife; it brings about a deep pain and he’s slipping.

for now, nico believes him. he lets go.

receding into himself is the feeling of falling into nothingness. wind rushing past him yet no louder than a whisper. the feel of air moving around him, of life continuing beyond him, and having no care for it. everything here is faded and darkening the longer he falls. it’s not a new sensation. it leaves him bereft of all feeling. no cassandra here: no knowing. no helen, either: no running. no paris, no apollo or ajax, no achilles, no eris or enyo or oizys, no athena. no nico.

there’s only empty thought and a reflection of light on the dark lake of memory. nico sinks to the very bottom.

it’s not the first time he’s done this. it won’t be the last. he’s pretty sure it scares percy each time this has happened, but there’s little to be done for it – hardly anything to prevent it, really, because breathing and grounding techniques slip away like water off a duck’s back. the only relief is to float away; to go adrift in the nothingness, to let go of the knife, to watch the worry flutter away like all the receipts nico has clipped together in his backpack. being so far away from himself isn’t exactly safe. nothing is. it’s cold here, though, which is all he can really ask for. owen’s war poems could weep.

this disconnect brings him closer to what he imagines death to be, more so than any petite mort ever has. a total quiet, a colorless nothing. though this doesn’t quite ring true either, he supposes.

bianca would probably call this drowning. would tell him about the baptism lines of wollan’s ‘girl is asked about herself for the first time’, about how the girl drove home from her own baptism fully believing i had narrowly escaped drowning – of course a poignant line, the entrapment of religion and all the rosary beads mamma had looped around her bed posts and how the empty bottles made god feel all the more like a bedtime story. she had done exactly that, once, in one of the scant lucid breadths between razing cities to the ground and wallowing in the ashes.

he'd been rinsing the blood from her ragged fingernails; her frail hand in his own, her fingertips red where his were blue. a cotton swab soaked in peroxide dabbing at all the familiar scrapes and cuts from thrown glass and grizzly splinters. she always somehow found something new to break. she’d sounded it herself, broken, as she began to spin her own fantasies around the idea of cutting out mamma’s tongue just to watch her fight back in other ways.

all nico had thought about then was the dying line. how it was ‘a good magic trick’. how maybe the girl in wollan’s poem was onto something; the impermanence of death when thought about, how none of it is tangible, real, so maybe nico could hold off on his protests a little longer because, surely, bianca is being hyperbolic once again. not serious. couldn’t be – who would want to commit a crime as sacrilegious as matricide? who would even think of it with a lick of genuine interest? and maybe that was nico’s own fault. not listening to the heat striking through his chest, the hair rising on his neck, the whisper of danger he got just from looking his more-whole half in her hardened chestnut eyes.

then again, it was also his fault that mamma was how she was, so maybe he should’ve raised his voice more. let vindicative eris scratch until she was satisfied, until enyo could come and chase after the blood. said it’s not worth it, bianca, you either let this go or i’ll find a way to make you because licking love off of knives is no way to live. should’ve figured out a way to make her listen. should’ve listened himself.

it’s a novel concept, looking into yourself and finding a stranger. looking into that half of you that took a chunk of your thigh, took a strip of your hip, took the kindling for a fire and all the matches and the lighter fluid – took and took and took and then told you when you could warm your hands on that heat; looking into all of it, loving it anyway. what’s novel about it is when nico no longer loved it at all. when nico ached. when nico felt the claw marks on his bones, from where bianca tried to devour him in the womb, and then from where she had wrenched herself away from him.

so she told him about what wollan must’ve really meant in the line about lion tongues and fighting with teeth, about how it’s a line of desperation surging from a place of neglect. an allegory for a daughter searching for love from a cruel mother. nico remembers staring at her, wondering when his more-whole half had stopped including him in this pain.

‘sometimes, i imagine dying and it feels like driving home’, the girl in wollan’s poem said. nico thinks that home is an abandoned smokestack fuming with ghosts and that driving there is much the same as returning to the grave he should never have been birthed from. nico thinks that home is a slaughterhouse that sliced him open and stuffed him full of ice to snuff out what little potential for fire he had.

nico knows that home is really with percy, of whom he has drifted so far from, back into the arms of a bianca that looked through him and spoke over him and blamed him for the torch that burnt down troy. nico should probably return home.

it happens in increments. first the weight of returning to his body: the pins and needles in his hands and feet; the swollenness of his head, so full of black memory water; the pounding behind his eyes that could be from the harsh midmorning sunlight or the dehydration or the effort of trying to summon tears that won’t come. then it’s the dryness of his mouth and the stiffness in his back. existing is a heavy burden.

his mind comes back to him in pieces that fit about as well together as broken glass. which is to say there are pieces missing here and there, tiny bits of glass glitter that make themselves known in the most inopportune moments – when you are vulnerable, when you are sore and aching, to then bite at you. overall, he is manageable. there are pieces of himself that he is never getting back. pieces of himself that he has come to terms with losing.

the final part slots into place: all of this, for percy. for his safety. breath returns to him. thought. vision. feeling. mrs o’leary is a furry weight pressed worriedly into his side, her wet nose against his temple and her heavy panting in his ear. percy’s voice wobbles to him through a haze. most likely the sweet nothings that he can never keep to himself. anything to try and anchor nico. it’s sweet. it’s not exactly what nico needs.

when nico resurfaces, he is armed with a plan and entirely too hot.

he makes sure to pay more attention to news outlets. the newspaper piles in gas stations. the radio when he goes to pay for gas. the dingy little televisions in the motels they stay at. few and far between as they all are getting. nico keeps to too many long roads to keep the radio on in the truck; too much of it is white noise that raises his hackles when they are speeding through miles upon miles of red sand and saguaro cacti.

they had said goodbye to jason soon after nico’s bout of heat exhaustion. it’s shameful to admit that watching jason go was a relief. the part of california that found him, drifting away again. out of his life. hopefully to never return. all these ghosts, nico thinks, and nowhere to hide. this doesn’t mean nico is ungrateful, obviously.

they avoid amarillo without a problem. it will take a bit longer to reach colorado. both because of the detours and the more frequent breaks percy makes him take. as nico had predicted, the heat exhaustion on top of the dissociation episode had left him rattled down to the brackets of his braces. oh pesce, he’d soothed, lips against the rabbiting pulse in the boy’s neck, i’m here, it’s okay. i’m not leaving again anytime soon, i promise.

nico intends to keep that promise.

especially when he strolls back to the truck after he forks over fifty bucks for a second cooler. fifty bucks was the discount. nico keeps a limp out of his stride, rinses his mouth out with the last of his tepid red bull, pops a breath strip into his mouth.

across the gravel, through the tinted windscreen, percy is hunched over. face in his hands. shoulders up to his ears. the truck shakes when mrs o’leary squirms to fit her head between the front seats. her whines sound worried when nico gets close enough to hear them; so does percy’s sobbing.

choked, guilty sounds. nico’s dumping the cooler in the bed and rummaging through their supplies before he can put it into a full thought. he knew percy would crack again eventually. he’s been too high-strung not to. now that the danger has subsided, percy’s defenses are breaking down. at least, that’s what nico assumes. it likely isn’t something he can fix. something that he can unspool from percy, keep locked somewhere so far that percy won’t feel it ever again. he knows it’s not that easy.

so nico does the second best thing: opens the passenger door, sets the chilled water bottle on the step-up, and gently places his hand on percy’s knee. the boy sniffles. “pesce? what’s wrong?”

many things, nico knows.

percy’s swallow is thick in the quiet. another swallow. stammering inhale. he scrubs his eyes with his hands, but keeps his head down as he fingers through his hair. (it’s getting scruffy already, nico thinks. maybe it’s time to cut his hair again, they’ll do it together. something to distract percy with. a thought for another time.) “n-nothing,” percy grits out, “noth-nothing, nothing, it’s. i’m. i’m fine.”

nico blinks. he reaches up to unwind percy’s fingers from his hair. brings percy’s knuckles to his mouth to press a small kiss against each one. he waits waits waits, and is rewarded: “okay – it’s kind of. i don’t know. i miss my mom.” another sharp breath. like he’s gulping for air, like he’s drowning. at nico’s encouraging hum, percy continues. “i miss her so much. a-and you, i just. was scared, i’m sorry.”

nico blinks again. he nods after a moment – missing sally makes sense. she was a hardworking, loving, honest woman. who wouldn’t miss that? being scared makes sense, too. nico hasn’t exactly cultivated a safe environment for them, despite trying to keep percy’s best interests in mind. these things make sense: homesickness, grieving, mourning, missing stability and mothers and all the other things they’ve lost.

one thing doesn’t make sense. “what are you sorry for, pesce?”

wet sniffle. pulling a hand away to rub his eye once more, then clutching at nico’s sleeve like he’s going to vanish. nico knows that grief does strange things to people. twists them out of shape. stretches them thin, wrings them dry, knots them all up inside. maybe the guilt is an extension of that – a sorriness for being this way, for the never-ending tears and the weight their heavy heart has on more than just themselves. nico knows that could be part of it. percy doesn’t understand that he deserves this time to cry out all his pains. that he has a right to all his feelings.

nico doesn’t know what to do with what percy is really sorry for. no cassandra or helen will help. there’s no finesse in cassandra’s knowledge, heard or unheard, only a callous certainty. helen is a mirage at best. worlds away from comfort. and nico… has never been enough.

percy says he’s sorry for being just another mess for him to clean up, and nico thinks maybe they aren’t worlds away after all. he lets slip a small smile. tries to keep the bewilderment out of his voice. he’s not sure he does a good job. “you’re not… just something for me to clean up, percy. you’re my best friend. i care about you. i know it’s all… a lot –“

“you’re doing j-just fine.”

“it’s not a contest,” nico sighs. then grimaces. “i’ve… cried sometimes, too. it’s nothing to be ashamed of, y’know? you’re not a burden to me just because you have feelings, pesce.” it’s not the point. nico doesn’t know how to address the point. he rubs circles into percy’s hands. it all feels so inadequate. how do you sooth a sore achilles?

“really?” percy asks.

“really what?”

the boy reaches for the water and takes a sip. “that you cry too. you just – you always seem so… together. i feel like i’m keeping you ba-back.”

nico hasn’t cried once. he thinks the reasons for that are pretty obvious. still, he nods. he pulls a packet of advil from the cupholder and presses two into percy’s palm. “it’s not fair to yourself to just bottle everything up. you’ve been through a lot, percy.”

“i guess.” percy slumps forward, words garbled a little as he shoves the pills into his mouth. sip. sip. sip. he presses his forward into nico’s shoulder. “i miss her so much.” 

for a moment, nico forgets who they’re talking about. he rests his cheek against percy’s head. hums. reaches up to pluck the little photo from the passenger visor, placing it carefully into percy’s lap. “i miss her too,” he says. “sometimes talking helps. people aren’t – they don’t die, not really, if we have stories to remember them by. right?”

sally peers up at her son from the blurry photograph. the important features are all there. her smile. the squint around her eyes. a little percy there with her, not yet achilles as his demise knows him to be, but a sweet boy with hemmingway eyes. bright. alive. percy, from here-and-now, brushes his fingers reverently over the glossy paper. as if it’d crumble under a rough touch. like how he’d treated his mother when she was still alive: precious and unfailingly delicate. “who did you pawn that quote off of, huh?”

“nobody, this time. but if you want one, there’s thomas campbell’s ‘to live in the hearts of those we leave behind is not to die’. how’s that for speed, pesce?” he leaves percy to ponder it. jogs around to the driver’s side and slipping in. he starts the ignition.

a wet scoff for his troubles. “that’s so fuckin’ tacky.”

nico slips his retainer out of his mouth so that percy can feed him melon chunks later. it rattles around in the empty cupholder. “it is. you like tacky.” nico knows he does. for a fact. just from the way percy is perking up, looking down at the picture of his mother. less tears. more soft-eyed sighing. “so talk.”

and percy does. nico is once again fascinated by how grief holds people, how it deforms them, how it turns them different colors. on percy, grief is like an amputation. he can see already; knows, with all the ounce of cassandra that he can muster, that percy will adjust soon. he just has to be patient.

sally had always been good at patience.

a few nights later, they are lounging in the bed of the truck. this is their last night in texas. colorado calls for nico in his dreams. arid plateaus. white-capped mountains. lush forestry. river canyons. there is already a route scrawled out on his notepad that sits on the dashboard; meticulous, with every detailed plucked carefully from the myriad of warning bells and tentative agreements that licked at the heat that won’t seem to leave him alone.

for now, it is just them and mrs o’leary. the moon is a watery apparition dancing on the river they’re parked on the bank of. somewhere out in the flats a coyote heckles. the air is hot with a breeze that runs through their hair and chills the cooling sweat on their backs. it’s a nice night. urgency is a slumbering horror that refuses to rouse no matter the sticks that poke it. here, nico can lean back against percy’s chest. here, the throb in his thigh is absent. here, they’re just as they’ve been pretending to be; two boys, their dog, and a whole country to explore. it’s a nice thought. a nice thought for a nice night. something painfully domestic. the very least that nico could offer his achilles.

he imagines it’s something like that for percy, too. that it’s nice, not having a drunken step-father to be wary of, to be beaten by, to be left bloody and battered by. that, this far away from home and all its horrors, it is nice to pretend. perhaps even easy.

nico feels so hot.

percy’s breath huffs against his crown. the boy’s fingers drumming lazy beats against his hip. he’s been squirming for the past ten minutes, something clearly on his mind if not on the tip of his tongue; nico waits. waits. waits.

the sky has shifted from a pinkish twilight into a deep evening blue by the time the words float themselves into the air. when they do, nico wonders just how long this has been weighing on his friend. if it is one of the things that matter more than they should. “is your… ajax still around, love?”

he lets it sit there for a long moment. doesn’t pause his petting of mrs o’leary’s thick fur. blinks away the full-body itch that writhes under his skin. he knows what has brought this up. what has made percy find the words now, if not before, if he ever would; jason. athena, in all that he struck the lesser ajax down, but did not kill him. (not that nico can blame him. would’ve preferred to never see his face again, to live on, to not ever speak of it ever again. everywhere he goes is full of ghosts.)

‘ajax’. because they’ve always talked in metaphors. likened each other to stories, to characters so alike each other, because how do you put into words a horrible inevitability, an all-encompassing rage, a love, a grief, of boys so young? (nico has not felt so small in such a long time. every fiber of his being feels like wood catching fire.) children. so, like children, they resort to stories.

some stories are gruesome and not meant for children. “yeah,” nico mumbles. he finds himself turning, curling himself into percy’s side. if he is small enough. quiet enough. perhaps he can hide there forever. “but he’s not something we need to worry about. he’s – it was a while ago.”

percy’s arms come around him. it’s like home.

he thinks that’s it. that there’s all there is, that they’d reached the bottom of percy’s curiosity. neither of them says anything else that night. not about – about – they talk about other things. their voices are barely higher than the breeze. sometimes percy gives him the gentlest smiles and leans in, dotting closed-mouth kisses along his temple. other times, there’s something murmured into his hair. like it’s only for them to hear. only for them to know.

nico wakes up the next morning. he knows, blinking sluggishly at the crumpled paper in percy’s hand, that last night was not all there was to it.

it is his bodycount paper. the paper he has folded so many times. kept hidden in the lining of his old too-small jacket. the sun is a bleeding line that hesitates on the horizon. like it’s afraid to rise. afraid to shed light on what percy has found. nico... is simmering. his chest is burning. danger. danger. danger.

percy’s silhouette shifts. the weight of his gaze makes nico itch. when he realizes nico is awake, he reaches over without a word; the feel of his fingers through nico’s choppy hair shouldn’t be so soothing. not with that paper in his hand. not with that look on his face – the sadness, the anger underneath. nico breathes through the seizing in his chest. forces himself to sit up. lets percy shuffle until he is wound around nico like an octopus. (it feels like a balm. like all percy can think of is comfort, of keeping him close. no matter what the paper means. no matter how it marks nico’s impurity, no matter how hot he burns.)

danger. danger. danger.

percy’s voice in his ear: “we can make sure he’s gone, if you wanted. like i did with gabe.”

“you wanted to go to orgeon,” nico finds himself saying back. he knows it’s no longer about oregon. about respite. he knows that something has pulled percy to the very edge of his pit. back to the surface. knows that achilles has found the fuel for his fire – and that nico is sparking like a match. knows that they are a disastrous combination like this. futilely, he insists. “it’ll be safer there. this – it’s about getting away, percy. we’re just gonna fuck it up if we get overzealous.”

nico… selfish, and terrible, and universally known to be a bad person; he wants percy’s hands to stay clean for a little longer. it costs so little. it is easy when grief and guilt hold you in a shakespearian kind of madness. percy is not held by that madness. nico thinks maybe he is just mad in the other sense.

angry.

percy slips his arms around nico’s chest. right where he burns the brightest. “it’s not about that anymore.” he rests his chin on nico’s head. content to watch the sunrise. like this is a normal day. a normal conversation. like they are two boys and their dog.

maybe that’s really all they are.

“c’mon nico,” percy whispers. “i’m listening. you know what i hear?” a pause, and that breathless quality never means anything good. percy squeezes him harder. “i hear that there is somebody that hurt you. and you know that we can do something about it. that’s what this is all about. what – what running was about. you told me it’s not a bad thing. to – to do what i did, what bianca did; we’re not bad people for getting rid of the people who hurt us.” there is something coming.

nico has always given percy what he wanted. this time is no different. it’s some terry pratchett type shit. before you can kill the monster, you have to say its name – gabe ugliano is now officially dead. who’s next?

it’s the kind of thinking that razed cities to the ground. of course, nico thinks, of course percy would be a little bit like bianca. they had been friends, after all. it’s a bittersweet thought. that percy, achilles, maybe eris, and now apparently the poseidon of cassandra’s woeful tale, would care so much. would try to strike nico just right. to find some way to goad a proper ending; no goodbye, no funeral. a departure from this bitter period of their lives with nothing more than blood. (that’s always the way the heroes end up going out, isn’t it? everything stained red. percy: a hero with the wild wild grieving rage; a boy who still wears braces with blue brackets. neither are innocent.)

nico thinks all the torch-bearers maybe felt like him, once. paris. cassandra. helen. they are all dead. but not before they burned.

“okay, pesce,” he sighs. put-upon like it’s a chore. like it’s not agreeing to running into the arms of the enemy. like this is not something that will kill them in a way that won’t end with a funeral.

“okay, love.” percy kisses his cheek. “downstream we go.”

KILLERS FLEE STATE, CASE ONLY GETS COLDER

Suspects Percy Jackson and Nico di Angelo have reportedly escaped New York state and led investigators on a wild goose chase, with little trace to keep up with. Witness reports are lacking, though hope has been found in most recent update in Wichita Falls, Texas, as well as a body presumed to be connected to a missing truck: a neighbor filed the victim missing last week, as well as the appearance of a mysterious vehicle with a Manhattan license plate.

This opens up a new series of concerns, however, as officer ‘D’ connects the victim to Ugliano’s murderers. Officer Brunner is quick to defend that it is “entirely plausible” this could’ve been an act of self-defense. Others aren’t as lenient.

Are Jackson and di Angelo as innocent as Brunner hopes? Or are they truly cold-blooded murderers out for blood in this seemingly unprovoked attack? The jury’s out for this one, with social media split both ways as the Ugliano’s case gains more and more traction. At the bottom of it all, one can only wonder: who’s next?