Chapter Text
“You’re not real.”
The darkness threatens to swallow him in the hazy red atmosphere of Tartarus. Oily black shadows stretch out towards him; creeping tendrils of pure malice.
He tries to get away from them; these shadows won’t help him jump. They will imprison him in this place. They will capture him, swallow him up and never let him go.
He runs a few steps away from them before stumbling, and the shadows catch up to him. He was right. These shadows don’t feel familiar and comfortable. They feel like dead people as they wrap themselves around his arms; cold, heavy and smelling horrible. The smell of rot that pervades the noxious air of Tartarus won’t ever leave him.
“You’re not real,” the voice of the omnipresent Tartarus hisses again and Nico gives up struggling. He isn’t real. How do his struggles to save the world matter when he isn’t real; when any of this isn’t real?”
He stops struggling as the shadows push him into the bronze jar. The hissing of Tartarus is now accompanied by the cackling of a couple of giants.
He isn’t real anymore.
Nico wakes up screaming. He feels something wrapped around his stomach and is terrified. This isn’t real. He’s still in the pit with the shadows wrapped around him, pulling him into their clammy embrace. He screams again, desperate tears flowing down his face, ripping himself away from the weight around his belly and falls face first onto the floor. White electric lights turn on and he’s shaking.
This is another one of those hopeful illusions that Tartarus gives him, only to rip that hope away from him and leave him sobbing and broken. Like the one in which Bianca woke him up and he had breakfast with her and Mama. Now Tartarus was tricking him into thinking that he was back in his cabin.
Black hair looms in front of him. He feels warm breath on his face and then he notices a pair of washed out, sea green eyes. Great, now Tartarus was giving him illusions about the one person Nico could never have.
Nico turns his head, avoiding meeting the eyes of the illusion in front of him; he couldn’t be weak, just because there was a fake Percy in front of him. The real Percy was on the Argo 2.
If he looks a bit carefully, then even through his tear blurred and shaking vision, he can notice how everything around him is split into thin strands of unreality. If he swung his sword, all the strands would be split and this illusion would end. Tartarus couldn’t fool him forever.
Then warm hands touch his face and the face in front of him comes into focus. Percy’s lips seem to be moving, but he can hear only a slight humming sound.
The hands move from his face to his arms, where they rub gently against his skin: tender, fake caresses. Panicking again, Nico jumps away from the hands, out of their poisonous reach, trying to escape the place where he has been cornered. He needs his sword. He needs it if he ever wants to escape this place.
Percy steps back, holding his palms up to show that he held no weapon or anything else that can hurt Nico. Nico wraps his arms around himself and holds on tight.
Percy moves forward again, slowly, trying not to spook Nico again and now his soft voice makes it past the humming.
“- I’m not going to hurt you. Nico, this cabin, it is real. I am real. You’re not in Tartarus anymore. You made it out. You have been away from Tartarus for months now. It’s been a long, long time since you were in that place. You’re here now, in cabin thirteen, in Camp Half-Blood. You have been here for a long time.” As Percy says this, he slowly moves closer to Nico and his hands are hovering over Nico’s shoulders now.
He murmurs, “Is it okay if I hold you Neeks?” Nico nods, a barely perceptible movement of his head and Percy places his hands on Nico’s shoulders, he rubs a circle there and moves his hands downwards, and wrapping them around the boy’s shaking form. He picks Nico up and places him in his lap. Nico snuggles up to Percy’s chest and places his head over the older boy’s heart. His heartbeat calms down Nico’s and slowly the strands that seemed so scary melt back to form a smooth, unbroken reality.
Nico’s shaking stops after gods know how long and then his breathing evens out. He pulls back a bit and looks at Percy. “Thank you, Percy.”
Percy smiles, before lightly bopping Nico’s nose and kissing it, “You’re welcome Nico.”
Percy’s smile turns softer and then he presses his lips to Nico’s and his heart is thumping against his rib cage again, but this is good, it’s the good thumping, the kind that cements reality for him and anchors him to it.
The sensation of Percy’s lips feels familiar but new at the same time –
Nico pulls back and falls flat on his ass.
He looks around and goddamit! God- fucking- dammit!
The strands of unreality come back into focus and Nico wakes up with a sob, absolutely alone in his empty bed, with Percy’s side of the bed cold, and unbearably empty.
It takes not even three minutes for the panic to set in.
He starts trembling and then he can’t breathe and he can’t see through the tears in his eyes and it hurts, it hurts, it hurts.
It hurts to be perpetually alone. It hurts to be almost an orphan. It hurts every time he thinks about Bianca. It hurts every time he thinks of how he told her to leave him alone the last time he saw her. It hurts to see the hickeys on his skin and then see Percy walking around happily and proudly with Annabeth. It hurts to see them be generally happy together and him being constantly unhappy and miserable. It hurts when Jason tells him to get over Percy. He knows Jason doesn’t mean to hurt him, but what does he even know about unrequited love?
It hurts when he sees his ribs stick out of his skin and his wrist bones jut out in such an ugly manner. It hurts when he isn’t able to pick things up, because even now, there are days when he is more shadow than skin and bone and muscle.
It hurts when he wakes up screaming and sobbing and panicking because some stupid fucking gods, who are perfectly capable of fighting their own wars make their children fight in these wars. It hurts when he thinks he’s still trapped in Tartarus.
But most of all it hurts when he dreams that Percy is his. While someone so beautiful and glorious could never be with someone as ugly and pathetic as him.
He curls up into a ball, throwing the sheets away from him and tries to hold himself together, hoping that it would prevent him from shattering into pieces, wondering if that hadn’t happened already.
After twenty minutes of shaking and crying and trying to hold his screams inside, he gets up on shaky legs and goes to find the box he had kept in his closet. He needs this. He craves the sensation on his body again, consequences be damned. He opens the box, eyeing the sharp pieces of metal he had kept inside it. He chooses one of them and goes to the bathroom and does it again. And again. And again. Till he is a bleeding mess whimpering pathetically on the floor; till he slowly loses consciousness.
As everything blurs and darkens, he hopes that this time he dies.