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“Sometimes I think if nobody spoke to me, I'd never speak again.”
― Alice Oseman, Radio Silence
***
Reaching for overcast happiness under sunlit skies; grasping falsified friendships, arm over arm and flickering beneath an orange fire; clawing at some shimmering mirage of maroon hues softening into yellows, twined fingertips and laugher floating among Long Island’s waves, washing up on the surf — Nico was familiar with the concept of it all.
He was also familiar — intimately — with the shortcomings of hoping, the weight of empty darkness and what it felt like to bear it alone.
It was easier, in the end of it all, to stop reaching, to stop grasping and clawing — to radiate nonchalance so strongly it almost became true. Almost.
***
Nico’s summers had never been great — plasticky sunshine glaring down, burning into flimsy double braids — though he admitted he recalled those in Italy as his favorites. Ice cream melting down his chin, daring and teasing at the itchy collar of the shirt his mother had worked so tirelessly to bleach clean for him. Bianca’s jolting tinkles of laughter flitting in and out, drifting between stucco and concrete before losing itself to the wind. Wide, youthful eyes catching on a shiny new Vespa scooter, cherry red and gleaming, as the body attached weaved across bridges and pushed thick curly hair back with one hand and something about the world seemed to shift.
All day was spent wandering around the city, drifting through smaller towns and shadowed alleys. The point of it all was to just be , to exist in the uneasy space trapped between him and Bianca and weighted silences because the words wouldn’t come, couldn’t come, not then. To make someone new out of his uncomfortable skirt and unruly hair under an unmarred sunrise. To slip into a new person and leave him behind as the sky fell and the stars bore down.
With cobblestones that warmed him through the soles of his shoes and his sister by his side, Nico had felt he could brush the clouds with the pads of his fingers if he stretched his arm up far enough, could stumble home and his father would be there, waiting, with an apology on his lips, could fall and fall and never stop, could hold hands with a boy, could be a boy.
He was careful to leave that character — that unrealistic boy with rounded corners and easy trust at his core — stuffed into corners, folded within shadows to sit until it faded completely.
***
The 1930s weren’t built for boys like Nico, for boys that dressed like girls but tugged at their skirts and school sweaters as though something was fundamentally wrong. Retrospect would lend that perhaps this was because something was fundamentally wrong, that his youthful insistence should not have been disregarded, that all the people like him deserved voices, too.
It was suffocating — flat-ironed collar, thick ribbon, choking satin. Bianca, smile pressed harshly into olive cheeks and obviously floundering under the hostile role of diligent older sister, tried to help. She tried.
The issue: it was 1938 and Italy was not built for boys like Nico, for boys that didn’t exactly look like one but loved them all the same. Nico and Bianca were but children, standing tip-toed and wide-eyed on the precipices of war, of tragedy and calamity, of safety crumbling beneath the bitter weight of weaponry.
Bianca reassured him that they wouldn’t be needed in the fight, that they were children, and that girls couldn’t serve anyway, silly . She joked — quietly, soft and rushed, matched by the flit of her eyes from roof to roof, corner to corner, as though someone would be lurking between each loose stone — about how all they needed to do was hurry to fix their sloppy knitted stitches and brush up on their prayers.
The streets seemed darker then, even during the daytime when the sun hung low overhead. Blinding; close enough to touch, to burn up. Nico’s eyes darkened, too, and the ribbons slipped from his braids so he wore his hair loose, shoved behind his ears and falling back over his shoulders. They stopped playing, stopped racing the stars home each night, stopped abandoning versions of themselves in alley corners.
Nico was half certain he’d accidentally left his real self behind, that the person who remained in him was little more than a fragment of a soul, imprisoned in an incorrect body, being poisoned from the inside out.
Sometimes he wondered if Bianca had caught whatever he had, when her eyes would blink shut for a second too long and he was afraid, somewhere in the back of his mind and creeping closer by the day, that she’d never pry them open again. That her last views would be a city mourning a war that hadn’t yet come and a brother she didn’t yet know.
He was afraid to tell her. For fear of spreading his poison, his sickness, he told himself. Pounded it into the aching space behind his eyes until they crossed. He didn’t believe it, not for a second.
He was afraid to tell her. He was afraid of losing his sister. It was Italy and it was 1938 and Nico wasn’t anything he should’ve been. Any way Bianca reacted would’ve been fair, he told himself. He didn’t even try to believe himself this time.
Ultimately, he didn’t have to, not directly. In the middle of the night, stars scattered lazily across the sky, Bianca had shifted to face him in the thick darkness of their bedroom. She’d whispered a name he’d struggled against for years, and Nico flinched back like a wild animal, cornered.
Her shoulders stiffened, and Nico couldn’t decide whether this was protective or aggressive. He averted his eyes, glaring down at his whitened knuckles, at the thin sheets wrinkling between them.
“What’s going on?” And Nico hadn’t heard Bianca sound so shaken in years, months, days, hours. His lips twisted around forbidden syllables, around words too jagged to exist aloud without cutting him up inside first.
He’d never done this before. There was no frame of reference, no guide to snatch up and peruse for minutes, decades. He wondered, fleetingly, if anyone had done this before, if others. . .if others like him existed at all. If he was a freak of science, an abhorrence of nature to be earthbound and forgotten about.
He existed, though, he had to remind himself. Nico existed, between four thin walls and in the same space as a reluctant elder sister, the two of them, together.
So, he spoke. His voice was shaky, raspy from misuse and heavy with fear. He trembled. Words — incomprehensible masses of them — tumbled from within him, and the venom burned his tongue as he spit them out.
Bianca was still. The air seemed to shift around her when her shoulders pitched and she drew in a deep sigh. She looked Nico solidly in the eyes, more serious than he’d possibly ever seen her. Steady. Weary in a way a sister shouldn’t have to be.
“You can’t tell her. Mamma. You can’t tell her, she. . .she’s stressed as it is.”
Nico squared his shoulders. Bianca’s eyes fell shut. This wasn’t a celebration, wasn’t a time to peel back a square of foil, ever so carefully, to reveal rich chocolate beneath. This wasn’t a time for smiling or laughter. It was much too late; much too dark out. They were much too old (they were children).
It wasn’t a celebration. It was an agreement. A tacit thing, at that, non-negotiable because it couldn’t be, because Nico shouldn’t exist and Bianca shouldn’t support him. And neither of them could be entirely honest with their mother, anymore.
In the end, it didn’t matter all that much. Guilt was hard to find when the world was splintering on its axis, a sister and her clandestine brother hanging on for dear life. It was hard to find when their mother was caught up in the storm.
It was easy to find when there was no Mamma to lie to anymore.
***
When Bianca stepped into the portable silver tent, Nico’s legs ached with the urge to follow her. He couldn’t. He wouldn’t. The Mythomagic figurine he clutched between numb fingers stabbed into the creases of his palm.
***
Nico di Angelo knew how to keep a secret. He may have been young and naive once, stupid enough to feel his heart leap at the sight of Percy Jackson and acknowledge it, to hate himself for it, to let words spill unbidden and cracks split the earth — but he knew when to stay silent, when and how to dissipate into shadow. It was like any demigod instinct, he supposed wryly. Built for survival.
***
They hadn’t known about him at Camp Half-Blood. Camp Jupiter was no different. He was the mysterious Ambassador for Pluto, an elusive boy with a smile like ice and a sword of iron; a boy , no questions asked.
He wore a black toga over a tee shirt and, beneath that, two thin arcs curved upwards against his chest. No one needed to know, so they didn’t.
It was easier, somehow, to accept being a boy than it was to accept liking boys. It was inherent; it always had been. He was Nico and he was a boy, and he had been since 1938 in back alleys of Italy, pleated skirt and button-up shirt lost to the towering darkness where two shadows converged; since scuffling along the Lotus Casino’s plush carpeting for years that passed as days, loose hair swinging behind him and scratching when it rested against his neck; since Westover Hall’s linoleum and Sally Jackson’s fire escape; since a quiet room with his sister, thick with guilt and heavy with nerves; since forever , essentially.
Liking boys, on the other hand. . .it didn’t exist. It couldn’t exist. It was forbidden, a sick thing his childhood friends scoffed at, fanning their foreheads and averting their gazes. It wasn’t allowed, until it was.
Until it was the twenty-first century and Nico had stepped out of the Lotus Casino into a new world, an entirely new existence with stale air that ruffled his hair where it stopped, abrupt, at the base of his skull. Until, suddenly, there were laws and protests and celebrations; dark hallways and empty classrooms and a reluctant hand in his. Until New York, until Camp Half-Blood, until. . .Percy Jackson barged into his school, his home, his life, and promised to keep his sister safe. Until he broke that promise.
Until Bianca didn’t come back and joy didn’t exist anymore, he wouldn’t allow it to. It festered around him, a disease present even through the depths of a war — perhaps more so , fueled by desperation and falsified security, trust snapped over a body, a blade. He made himself untouchable, raised iron walls from the ground and cocooned himself in. Fled when this was insufficient.
When his father led him to Camp Jupiter, Nico assured himself he wasn’t disappointed. He didn’t have friends at Camp Half-Blood, not really. They liked him while he was useful, smiled warily across the pavilion, but their fear would only permit respect for so long. It was a matter of time until they recognized him for what he was — in every sense of the term.
He didn’t have friends, he didn’t care, there was nothing to miss, no one to miss him . He repeated it so much — mantra or prayer or lie — that he came astonishingly close to believing himself.
And then Percy Jackson himself showed up, orange shirt ripped and faded and familiar , goddess in his arms and lacking crucial memories. Nico’s throat constricted, no longer with want but with fear — of what this boy could do to him, a demigod of his caliber uninhibited, of what he would do when his memories inevitably returned and he learned Nico had lied to him.
Percy remembered Annabeth, because of course he would, and Nico carved a smile into the flesh of his face, blinking slowly and assuring Percy that no, this was the only camp for kids like them, there couldn’t possibly be anywhere else. It was the same as insisting to casino staff and the fury who dragged them out that it had always been Nico and Bianca, brother and sister, obviously . Mantra, prayer, lie.
He met the challenge with steel eyes, unwavering, ages nine and fourteen and daring someone to counter him, poorly channeled rage icy, fire in his veins.
It was Italian summers, burning up illicit versions of himself, every night on a different street corner but under the same stars (except there was another lie, because it wasn’t the same — it couldn’t be. He was missing the most secret part of himself, that which he should have hidden away and buried deep long before any harm could brush against it, but he was a fool, dumbstruck and graceless, and then Bianca was gone).
He was just a boy, just Nico without Bianca, but he’d fought enough to own even that. Naivete was a flammable thing, he’d learned. Mantra. Prayer. Lie.
***
Nico had feared love since before he knew it wasn’t a tangible thing, before he knew it was evasive and disastrous, before he was familiar with its true malice.
He’d watched his mother struggle, caught between blinding faith and sedentary reason, glaring out the window as if contemplating what she’d say to Nico’s father when — if — he returned, how hard she’d need to cry to make him stay.
He felt Bianca, restless with her hand in his, and knew with shocking lucidity that he was holding her back, that she hadn’t asked for a sister-who-wasn’t, hadn’t at all desired a chattering extension of herself she was forced to supervise while their mother fell apart.
If love was simply pain absolved under the farce of family, of obligation , it didn’t sound special. It sounded deceptive.
Occasionally, though — horribly — his thoughts would flit higher and higher, catching on stucco roofing and chasing stray strands of clouds, and Nico would think that if he were ever loved, truly and unflinchingly and unconditionally, he would crack apart.
Because if someone were to love him in that quantity, in that way, how would his heart bear it? Was it feasible that it could withstand it all — an organ against unbridled wanton emotion?
Nico didn’t think so. Something must happen, he thought — flowers blooming from arteries, starbursts cracking from bone marrow. Irrevocably changed. A love like that couldn’t leave the body unmarred.
It was a terrifying prospect. At that age, Nico hadn’t been strong or brave enough to fight, so he’d run.
There was no running from Cupid.
“ I’m not afraid of a love god, ” he’d said. Lie. He could recognize this one as he spoke it without conviction, cracked and transparent in the sticky air. His knuckles were stark white.
The ground withered at his feet, blades of grass swaying away from him. He was going to collapse, be sick, scream until his lungs snapped and his secrets spilled over. Nico locked his knees and waved Jason off.
I am the god of love. I am never fair . Nico wanted to laugh, a wild, maniacal thing that would have to wrench itself free from his chest. Love wasn’t fair and it wasn’t easy. He clamped his mouth shut, ignoring Jason’s curious eyes as they scanned him, a military leader searching for weaknesses in his ranks; a friend measuring out his concern, to the ounce.
“Show yourself!” Nico had screamed, longing for anything else but to look upon Love, to see the deity who saw a boy, young and already out of place, and decided to bathe him in more misery, force him to swallow back unimaginable sorrows and live through it all.
An admission: that he cared — about Jason, about the quest, about the fate of society. It tasted like metal in his mouth, cold and sharp. “It’s me you want.”
Tell him.
Tell him you are a coward.
Tell him the real reason you ran.
Tell him.
Tell. Him.
Tell .
And Love split Nico down the middle, just as he’d anticipated decades previous, readied him for slaughter in the country of his mother and his sister, of his family and the lies they coexisted within.
He cracked, split, shattered apart at Cupid’s feet, at Jason’s, became unnamed rubble in a sea of other ruins. To be forgotten, lost in time. Not again — he screamed, a guttural, curdling thing that darkened the sun at its perch, clambered through the clouds until they scattered, bore his pain for this all-consuming world of two attempted heroes and one vindictive god to see, to witness unapologetically, to judge .
Distantly, numbly, Nico knew what Jason would be seeing. Images flashed through the corners of his mind, a film on fast-forward that Nico had seen too many times to be affected by. He couldn’t lie to Cupid, but he could still lie to himself.
Nico saw himself, attacking the waves of his hair with rusted metal scissors, holed away in a tiled bathroom. His hands shook. In the mirror, his eyes were reflected red and swollen.
Next, a mountaintop in Maine, Percy Jackson in action, Bianca alive. A silver tent, like liquified moonlight, staring back at him. The shift of his foot as he almost followed her, almost abandoned himself to cling to her. Turning away and seeing Percy and believing things could be fine for him as Nico, as a boy, as Bianca di Angelo’s little brother. He believed Percy could protect him.
Percy and Nico in the dining pavilion, a crack in the stone, in a boy, in a childhood. Skeletons that wouldn’t harm either of them. Wouldn’t. Couldn’t. Nico ran.
More and more and more of these, unending pain he’d lived through once already. Cupid’s laughter, low and languid, in the background of it all.
“I left Camp Half-Blood because of love,” he choked out, throat raw. “Annabeth. . .she—”
Cupid chided him. Jason pretended to understand. Mental iron rose around Nico, his expression twisting on his face until he could force it into something neutral.
Love was to be feared. He knew that, he’d known that. Forcing the words out, though, was a new kind of pain, a new kind of fear. Nico had survived Tartarus. This was worse.
“I—I wasn’t in love with Annabeth.” And Jason was speaking, filling empty spaces in the air between them with meaningless sentiments, working out the hilarity of Nico’s disastrous existence like it was simple, like it all made sense. Nico couldn’t gather his voice enough to scream again, so he kept speaking instead.
“I hated myself. I hated Percy Jackson. I had a crush on Percy. That’s the truth. That’s the big secret.”
When he swallowed, his throat was dry and his breaths thick. Cupid's eyes were still on him, pervasive and unrelenting. Jason. . .Nico couldn’t look at him. Not yet. Not with what was still to come.
He wanted to argue that this had nothing to do with love, that there had been a mistake and Nico had corrected it, had learned to live within and without it. It was futile; he knew what Cupid would argue — that it made his love so venomous, so toxic, and hadn’t he wished it away from himself (wished himself away) because of it more than enough times? Love and hate were opposites, parallels, lovers, he knew. One could become the other in the blink of an eye, the sharpness of scissor blades, the flash of unlived decades.
He wasn’t going to — he refused to — concede, admit to Cupid that he wasn’t a real boy , because that wasn’t true. Years and battles and loneliness had taught him to be unapologetic in this aspect of himself, at least. A love god who had taken too much from him couldn’t have that, too. It would leave Nico untethered again, scalded under the Italian sun after leaving too much of himself behind, except this time he hadn’t given it up, hadn’t run from it. It had been stolen from him.
“I’m transgender. There. Happy now ?”
He ignored Cupid’s empty sympathy.
Scepter in hand, Nico regarded Jason, assessing. Glaring despite himself as Jason attempted to reassure him that their friends — if that’s even what they were — would support him anyway. He scowled.
“I don’t feel that way anymore. I mean. . .I gave up on Percy. I was young and impressionable and I—I don’t. . .” Mantra. Prayer. Half-truth.
Favonius had warned Nico against letting anger rule him. In the ruins of Salona, with Jason Grace attempting to reassure him and Cupid’s presence lingering on the lazy breeze, Nico decided he’d do whatever the fuck he wanted. His anger didn’t rule him; he wielded it.
***
Nico had complied when Will Solace had ordered him to three days in the infirmary — partially because Will had seemed so affronted and partially because Nico was genuinely exhausted.
But then, there, with Will demanding he check Nico’s injuries for signs of infection, Nico had felt himself stiffen, pain-forged iron rising to clamp heavily around his heart. Cupid had forced him to become more diligent, more careful. Never again would someone force Nico out of himself.
Will noticed, apparently, because his expression shifted, morphing from a sort of forced relaxation to aching, beautiful, terrible something . Apprehension, maybe. “Is it. . .is it me? Because that’s fine, I can find another healer, or. . .or I can try to track down Coach Hedge, I know you traveled with him. . .” he stiffened suddenly, regaining some of himself, and Nico felt somehow calmer at the sight of Will acting normal around him, not treating him like some washed up porcelain doll.
Something in his chest, long buried and shaped like fear, like caution, twitched. Nico ignored it in favor of listening to what Will was saying. “You need to get checked over, just like everyone. Death magic doesn’t, y’know, prevent you from dying, sunshine.”
“Don’t call me that.” Reflexive, automatic, guilty . Nico felt color warming up his neck, but Will’s smile only quirked up at the corner.
“Only if you tell me why you’re so resistant to me helping you.”
“It’s not. . .” Nico tried, frustration leaching into his speech as he shifted uncomfortably. “It’s not you. I just have a history with. . .I have a lot of scars, okay.” Mantra. Prayer. Half-truth.
Will looked like he wanted to speak, but Nico kept going, fighting to keep his voice steady. “I’m a guy.”
“Yeah. . ?” Will looked perplexed, like this was obvious. Nico supposed it was to him. He relished in the thought, temporal as it was.
“My scars aren’t all from monsters, Will.” This was pushed through gritted teeth, thin on the summer air.
For a second, Will’s eyes flicked down, glancing somewhere along Nico’s arm, fingers twitching at his sides, before something seemed to click. His head snapped up, recognition flushing his features. “Oh, you mean like top surgery?”
And Nico should have expected Will to know — he was a healer , after all — but it still sent something in him spinning, careening towards the heart he’d caged off, always careful to avoid after cobblestone escapism and snow-capped mountains and Cupid and— Will’s smile, the tilt of his words, shot a crack through it all, pulling at something tight within Nico, beginning its unraveling.
He cleared his throat and muttered his assent, which startled a short laugh out of Will. Nico thought fleetingly that he would do anything to make this boy laugh, which was idiotic because he wasn’t even yet sure how Will would react to him. He tried to picture that laugh as something cruel, something vindictive and expressed with intent to harm , but he couldn’t comprehend it. Cruelty didn’t fit Will Solace. He hoped (mantra, prayer, truth) that he was right.
“Thanks for trusting me with that, Nico.” He blinked up. Will was leaned a bit to one side, favoring his right leg, hands hanging off the pockets of his cargo shorts. His smile was still present, but it wasn’t teasing like before. It had become something soft, something inexplicably easy .
Happiness, Nico thought suddenly, didn’t need to be sunlit skies or empty alleyways, it didn’t need to be something hollow, something figurative. He wondered if he could find it, parts of it, in the figure in front of him, ruffled hair and something like acceptance glimmering in his eyes.
***
“All I know is that I’m here. And I’m alive. And I’m not alone.”
― Alice Oseman, Solitaire