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Nico could swear that he’d been there before.
Maybe not at that time of day. The shadows bounced awkwardly off the sheets of scrap metal onto the black asphalt. The rows and rows of tires and once-glimmering bronze on the ground looked gaunter, somehow, older, more like they were afraid of something and less like they’d been visited often. Maybe not previous to the explosion that made the place even messier— definitely not, if the grooves in the earth had anything to suggest, looking like they’d been there for decades. Eons, maybe. Forever. They looked as a part of the junkyard as the scars on his shoulders looked in his flesh, which was to say very much so.
Maybe he hadn’t ever seen the junkyard so dark. Maybe Nico had visited in a dream, instead. But it had been before. It was before.
His shoes barely made prints in the fresh dirt as he walked, almost as if to say that the ground had been marred by things stronger than him. It tried to taunt him, make him feel lesser. Nico wasn’t particularly easy to provoke, these days, and kept walking.
The one light was easy to see amongst all the black. It shone like a fire, all flickering variations on the ground, on dirt, on grass, in the sky. When he sat down beside it, it was cold, white and grey instead of orange and yellow. Desolate instead of warm. Wrong. There was no presence of Hestia in it, and Nico did not look for her.
“This place is shit,” said Jamie Foster, right beside him, right where he wasn’t before.
When Nico didn’t reply right away, Jamie leaned forward and tried to flick one of the sticks at the base of the bonfire, to make it topple or something similarly disastrous. Nico tried not to see the disappointment bubbling up under Jamie’s skin when his fingers went right through the wood.
That was the thing about dead people. They always wanted to effect the living world. It was almost as if they had forgotten how cruel the living world could be to people, whether they were living or not.
Nico shrugged. He could taste sulphur and electricity in the air.
Jamie curled up, up, a stone’s length from the ground, now. He stretched, as if there were muscles to get tense, and suspended his body over Nico. “You’re not fun,” Jamie complained, his eyes like the black buttons from one of Bianca’s old raggedy ann dolls, the same vacancy in them, the same inky smudges beneath them. Like stitches, maybe. Or eyelashes.
Then, more nonchalant than it should’ve been, “You should’ve killed yourself.” It sounded disapproving, like when Mamma realized that he had snuck a zeppole while the batch was still hot and burned his fingers, or when Hazel learned that he tossed the sandwich she gave him off of the Argo II instead of eating it.
Nico felt annoyed, but not angry. It fizzled out before it manifested, pins and needles deep in his chest instead of the want to punch straight through Jamie’s dumb only-kind-of-there face. Jamie Foster had hung himself from a rope in his uncle’s barn during the Great Depression. Jamie thinks killing yourself is the solution to everything. If his body had veins, there would be antifreeze in them. Rubbing alcohol. Hair tonic.
He shrugged again, crossing his legs and making his face all kinds of cross, too. He stared straight up into the groove between where Jamie’s spine was bulging out and stretched tight to his skin and where the rest of his neck was. It created a weird wishbone look, like he had some kind of skin tumor, or maybe a really big blister. The illusion of a superficial blemish was ruined by the way his head cocked just a bit too far to the left to be possible, like an owl, peering and preening.
Nico voiced this thought, in the way that you make small talk when you have all the time in the world and are bored of it already.
Jamie laughed, tilting his head so abruptly down that it was almost as if he was reenacting his death, and told him that there were owls watching him when he died, probably. There was a big nest in the rafters. A lot of mice in the countryside, a lot of them very big and fat. They lived off of the bodies. The people that starved to death after buying too many stocks with too much credit.
Sharp like a knife, angular and mean, showing off his canines. Jamie Foster’s grin, Nico decided, was much more unkind than his scowl.
The not-fire flickered on dutifully, almost colder than to begin with. At the other side of the junkyard, a ruined silver jacket shone even-more-silver in the light of the moon, the last bits of what was an arrow buried underneath it.
There was no body left.
Will Solace noticed Nico only about half the time, which was more than most people. At least more than most of the people that Nico used to talk to. His smile was still a knife, but it was a butter knife, not a sword. Nico couldn’t recall a moment where Will had ever picked up a sword, and he sort of liked it that way.
Nico couldn’t recall a moment where Will and he had ever really spoken before the second war. He sort of liked that that way, too.
When Will noticed him, it came with a pop of OH! in his eyes, as if he forgot that Nico existed at all when he wasn’t looking directly at him. A lot of the time, it was when he was busy. He would smile sheepishly at Nico, as if to say that he would get back to him when there weren’t so many people with broken legs, flus, second degree burns. But then Nico didn’t exist when Will wasn’t looking directly at him, and the promise was mostly forgotten at the end of his work day.
Sometimes, though, Will was only shooting arrows, and he could spare a few moments to notice him more clearly. Nico became a radio feed instead of a glance at a to-do list, still grainy, maybe, but more recognizable. Less of a sliver. Less fleeting.
Will’s work days were most days, or all days, at least until his siblings threw him out of the infirmary and exiled him to a full 24 hours of relaxation. As it was, when he wasn’t working, all of his siblings were. All at the same time, to make up for him not being around to help.
Which is to say, when Will wasn’t working, he was the only one at the archery range.
That’s when Nico liked to show up, flicker back into the existence that only came about when Will’s eyes were trained on him. He just sat back and observed the projectiles popping through the air, particularly enthusiastic but ultimately aimed badly. Nico appreciated it more than most people. A monster not shot in the jugular would still go down with seven arrows in its chest, regardless of what vitals those arrows didn’t manage to hit.
Nico sat and watched for longer than he should’ve, until the air went from tasting blue to tasting pink and the shadows told him it was almost night time. He was in the midst of considering leaving the Apollo cabin a tip that Will was still overworking himself, just in a different way, when Will finally OH!ed and went to sit down next to him.
His skin looked dewy and metal flashed on his crooked teeth when he smiled. His palms were probably sweaty, honestly. No good for holding. It would be gross. Nico looked down at his own palm and he could see at least part of his shoelaces through it, only ‘at least part’ because it was still light out.
His skin looked greyer than usual. Was skin supposed to do that? Jamie Foster’s skin was grey. Octavian’s was as well, even when he was all flushed and sweaty. Hazel’s had been, too.
Nico looked up, and Will had leaned over, eyebrows raised slightly in a way that meant he was looking for a reply. Nico must’ve zoned out, so he lowered his head a bit in apology and asked him, polite as he knew how to be, to repeat what he said.
This was not the correct response. Nico knew it immediately, because Will’s mouth twisted in the way that meant he was biting the inside of his cheek. In the way that meant he was concerned, vaguely, but wasn’t quite sure what he should be concerned about.
Will’s hair had the consistency of a loofah, puffing up above his forehead and distracting Nico from the sudden intensity of his eyes. Nico kind of wanted to pat at it, but that, of course, would open up Will to being allowed to pat at his hair. Nico did not want his hair patted. He kept his hands to himself.
Will Solace spoke again. This time, Nico knew he had not zoned out, but the words still came out fuzzy, like they were covered in lint, or maybe like there was lint in Nico’s ears. Will’s words were popped bubbles, spilled juice on a driveway, the gurgling of blood in the mouth of someone dying of a stab wound.
Nico smiled reassuringly, in the way he knew was not at all reassuring, and he put a hand on Will’s bare calf, just above the little tip of white sock peeking out from under his sneakers. There was no warmth there, though a little part of Nico’s mind reminded him that there should be.
Will frowned, his dimples and his braces suddenly gone from existence. Nico wondered where they were. He wondered if they were in the same place he went when he disappeared, too.
“—stay here,” said Will, his voice cutting back in mid sentence. It might as well be a full sentence, anyways, because it was all they seemed to talk about when Will was worried.
Still, Nico blinked, tilted his head, and Will sighed sadly, repeated. “I don’t think it’s healthy that you don’t just stay here,” said Will, conveniently forgetting that he conveniently forgot that Nico was a thing when he wasn’t at Camp Halfblood, wasn’t in Will’s direct line of sight. His voice sounded a little pleading.
Nico smiled real small, his eyes going all fabric-soft and pitying, like he knew Will’s should’ve been doing for him. Will did not mean anything bad. He was just misinformed. He thought Nico still lived on the streets, rummaging through trashcans for meals and stealing shirts from the discount bin at Walmart and getting roughed up by wanna-be gangs of mortal teenagers.
Nico did not dispute his assumption. Instead, he said, “I don’t think I really can be healthy anymore.”
“What? Yes, you can. You look better already.”
Nico did not look better already.
“I don’t think that’s true,” he reasoned, but in a weak voice quick to relent to an argument that they often had and that he never managed to win.
Will’s smile was dazzling, all gaps between white teeth and titanium shining in the sun, his eyes turning syrupy. “You just don’t see you the way I see you,” Will said, fiddling with the collar of his orange t-shirt instead of reaching for Nico’s hands, like that would make the sentence seem more platonic.
Nico smiled, but he wasn’t feeling very happy. He didn’t think Will often saw him at all.
There was nothing different in how he was around Percy and Annabeth. They were the same, too. In the way that Will could think of him when he was looking at him, they could think of him at all times, but not see him.
Like flipping a switch, almost. Like noticing an absence, a gap in a room full of people. Like letting a girl fall off a cliff, or letting a girl explode inside a junkyard. They just never noticed him at all. All what-if and could-be and we-should’ve-remembered-him-more but they still couldn’t notice him, even when they were staring him dead in the face.
The same actions, same reactions, same untruths. Just mildly different circumstances, and, even then, they weren’t off by much.
Nico was not looking for them when he found them. At least, he didn’t think he was. Maybe the built in GPS in his feet never stopped looking for the only two people he used to know, back when he was eleven or twelve or ten or five, a kid. Maybe he just wanted to see if the oldest people he remembered at least kind of remembered him back. Maybe he just wanted to see if they ever would.
Percy and Annabeth were really Percy&Annabeth, as always, pressed so tight to each other's body and so uncompromising in their togetherness that they became one single high-functioning entity. They were on the dock, two pairs of tanned calves in the pretty lake water, two pretty thighs squeezed up together, knocking knees.
Nico thought of the story about soulmates, wondered if Percy&Annabeth were reverting back to how they were before becoming two people. He had never really seen them as two people, though. They’d always been Percy&Annabeth. Nico hadn’t met them early enough to meet them separately. They had already become each other.
He sat down next to the two of them. The dock was wide enough for all three of them to sit comfortably, even with Nico having his legs curled up under himself. A good two feet between them, he wasn’t in danger of brushing up against Percy, only the opposite. Nico stared out at the lake instead of the couple beside him, imagining it as the ocean instead, imagining that it was so much bigger than itself.
For what it was worth, he didn’t feel bad pretending like he was ignoring them. They hadn’t looked at him, either.
Percy&Annabeth laughed to each other beside him, not talking in whispers, not being private. They still felt too intimate, like he was eavesdropping, and he felt a bubble of shame work its way up under his ribs. He pressed a thumb to his ring finger, wishing that he still had the skull ring from Bianca so that he could twist it nervously, wishing that it hadn’t fallen off his finger every time he tried to put it on, wishing that he hadn’t left it in a drawer in the Hades cabin for some future sibling to find.
He didn’t belong there, with them. He was sure he shouldn’t be there.
The sun shone down on their hair, glistening gold and comfortably warm. The bags under their eyes made them look powerful, like heroes, like they sacrificed and still came out on top. Their skin was scarred and soft, faces unbelievably handsome and yet just like regular people, unable to be picked out from a crowd at the mall. They were so wonderfully, incredibly, spectacularly alive. Cozy in their humanness. They looked like orange t-shirts, like the smell of fresh laundry, like action figurines still in the packaging.
Nico was never very good at math, but he knew that one plus one would never equal three. One times zero would never equal anything, and that was okay too.
He kicked at the dirt. Nico did a lot of kicking at the dirt, but not because it was entertaining. It wasn’t, really. The dirt was already messed up. It was dirt. It wasn’t like you could break it. The toe of his shoe flapped up and then back down onto his sock, far into the process of falling off. It made no noise when it came back, which made Nico angrier, more frustrated. Jason Grace waited a little off to the side, all quiet concern and undying patience.
Jason’s hair wasn’t as short as it used to be, fluttering down onto his forehead and up over his head in little tufts, no longer cropped close to his skull. The scar on his lip was intimidating. The straightness of his back was intimidating. The broadness of his shoulders was intimidating. Even the godsdamned glasses on his face, lopsided at the bridge and only half on his face, were intimidating.
Nico used to be intimidating, he was sure, back when he was all brittleness and hard edges. He wondered where all of that sharpness had went. He wondered why it it had all turned to ash and fallen off.
“It was for the best,” said Nico, indignantly, trying to channel the bite that he didn’t have. “There wasn’t another option, not for me. I’ve told you this, Jason.”
Jason’s face went all slack, like Nico had taken all of his potato-sack hope and thrown it right down into a cellar. He knew that they had had this conversation before. He knew that there wasn’t anything he could say to make this right, to change Nico’s mind. The only thing he could do was make him feel guilty about it.
“You really should’ve said goodbye, first,” Jason tried, reasonable, softly prodding.
“I didn’t want to.”
“Nico, come on.”
“No.”
“The least you could’ve done was visit.”
“No one wanted me to come back. Not in that way.” Nico wanted to punctuate his point with a bitter laugh, but, Styx, he was so tired. He settled for wrapping his arms around his torso instead. Defensive, yes, but also comforting. All soothing the regret that was rising in his stomach, holding it down with his forearms before it could make its way out his mouth. Besides, he was visiting. All he was ever doing was visiting.
Jason opened his mouth, thought through the motions, made a detailed plan, closed it. Opened it again. Breathed. Said, “You shouldn’t have left in the first place.”
It didn’t take long for the silence between them to become dark.
He stood up, quickly, as if at attention, and Nico marvelled at how much of a soldier Jason could still become if he thought that someone might want to wage war on him. When Jason turned around and walked away, it looked like a tactical retreat. Even if he was doing it because he thought he had won the battle, even if he had done it because he felt like he wanted to spare the other army.
Nico didn’t lie, knew how much lies could ruin a person. Everything he said was the truth. Save for the occasional ‘i’m-okay’ and ‘it-doesn’t-hurt-anymore,’ everything he said was the truth. Even if he said it so matter-of-factly that people thought he was just joking and laughed like he told a particularly funny one, even if he laughed when he said it, too, everything he said was the truth.
“I didn’t leave,” said Nico, sincerely, genuinely, but Jason was already gone.
There was a sort of sluggish way that Reyna worked through her day, went through the motions, that Nico recognized. It was all strong, hard shoulders and straight back tied around half-lidded eyes and loose arms. Her cloak was absent, having been covered in blood in a desperate attempt to save someone. The new one had been ordered, but must not have come in yet.
She was ready to have a meltdown, he knew. Nico was proud that she was able to take the walk towards it so steadily. There was nothing about Reyna that he did not admire, did not wish to become. Reyna was so older-sister that it hurt him in his adoration.
Reyna opened the door to her and Frank’s office calm and dignified, stepping in with just as much of it, and then slamming it frantically, the first step to her getting rid of all of her stress. She walked straight past Nico, who was hit with a familiar pang of loneliness, to sit down at her desk.
Her ancient chair creaked in the ancient room with its tall, ancient ceilings. It seemed so much bigger now that there were people in it.
“Nico?” she called, voice wavering, projecting through the room like she needed him to hear her. Nico’s mouth curled up, slightly. She couldn’t see him, sure, but he could at least trust Reyna to know when he was there.
“Yes?” he said. There was a chance that she just couldn’t see him, but could hear him anyways. Not a big chance, but it was still a chance.
A pause.
She sighed, seeming kind of disappointed, to which he was disappointed. “You’re with Hazel right now, aren’t you?” she asked the walls, the ceiling. Nico paused, thought. He must be with Hazel right now, at least in spirit. He made a mental note to check, or, at least, do it later.
“I’ll get back to you on that,” he said, sheepishly, even though he knew she couldn’t really hear him, now. He sat down next to her, his seat at the same level with hers, even though there was probably only ground beneath him. He was fading so bad that nothing in the plane of existence really mattered to him.
He wondered why he wasn’t in the place where he went when he shadowtravelled, where all of the voices whispered and it was pitch black and loud and cold and alone. He wondered, but not too hard, and not for too long, because he was grateful that he wasn’t there, and his Mamma didn’t raise him to look a gift horse in the mouth. Though, maybe, she hadn't really raised him at all.
When Nico turned back to her, Reyna was looking at the large pile paperwork at the side of her desk, seeming as calm and collected as ever if not for the clench of her jaw. “This,” she said, almost amicably, “is the worst.”
She reached out a single finger towards the tower and tipped it over and off, the whole thing toppling onto the floor soundlessly.
Jamie would’ve liked that, Nico thought, and then he admonished himself for thinking so presently about a dead kid that hadn’t existed for a long time. “It sucks,” he agreed, out loud, even though it didn’t really matter if he said so or not.
Reyna stared at the mess of paper on the floor for a while, like she saw through it. It looked like what happened when people saw Nico, both before and after he started fading. It looked like empty fear, or like some creature was gnawing at her small intestine, inside of her, inside out, all topsy-turvy. Nico rested a single hand on her shoulder, his fingers only curving the slightest bit. His hands were very small, he realized, and Reyna’s shoulder was very big.
Almost immediately, almost like it was his doing, Reyna relaxed. She turned to look at her shoulder, then up at the wall behind Nico, straight through his face.
“Nico,” she said, “if you’re here, tell me.”
“I,” he said back, disgruntled, “am trying.” Then, without knowing if there was anything else he could do, he leaned over the desk, using the new sensations he didn’t understand to make all of the the papers on the floor move the tiniest bit. Reyna looked at them, brow furrowing, then glanced to the floor-to-ceiling window in the room to see if it was open at all. Nico stopped moving the paper.
A pause, again. Longer. It seemed like a lot of talking to Reyna was pausing, but maybe it was just a part of talking to him, instead.
“Nico,” Reyna said. She blinked, slowly, in a way that would look dumb if it were not on Reyna, and instead just looks calculating. “If you’re here, do that again.”
Nico blinked, slowly, in the way that looked good on Reyna but looked dumb on him. He moved the papers again.
“Oh,” said Reyna.
“Yeah,” said Nico. “Hi, I’m here.”
The next second, her eyes were tearing up. Reyna glanced back down at the desk, as if looking at anywhere else would make the tears spill out. She closed her eyes, because not doing so would make the tears spill out. She breathed in heavily to calm herself, in a way that was just as familiar to Nico as breathing regularly. Reyna was all eating ice cubes, all brain freeze, all cold calculation, all frozen in fear, but she wasn’t not human.
“I’m sorry,” she said, which confused Nico, “I failed you.” That confused him even more, because he was pretty sure he had failed her. If Reyna was ice and reliability, Nico was failure and warm-hot shame. A burning in the tips of your ears and a sinking feeling in your chest. Drowning in tropical water and then managing to wake up, somehow, even though you never planned to. Never wanted to.
“That isn’t true,” he said.
“I failed you. I promised to get you back safely, and I failed you.”
“You got me back, though.” Nico pressed his hand insistently onto hers, curling his not-there fingers into her very much present ones. It wasn’t that they weren’t together, just that they were overlapping from different places, right on top of the other. She was his friend, and he would not leave her behind. “I’m right here. You know that I’m right here. I’m just sick.”
Reyna did not respond, did not apologize again. The blank look returned, like staring at paper on the floor. Instead, this time, it was directed at him. Blank eyes stared through blank flesh stared through blank skull stared through blank brain, right out through the back. She stared even past Nico, towards the wall behind him and through that, too. If Nico looked in her eyes, he would be able to hear all of her thoughts. Her irises had become holes.
“Reyna?” he asked. She did not reply.
He let himself out.
Nico felt tired, aching, whittled down to his insides and then beaten with one of the broomsticks that Suora Giuseppina kept in the Sunday school room just for that purpose. Bianca wasn’t around to curl her thumb around his pinky, this time, nor was Mamma around to yell her heart out at the lady who hurt her baby son. It was just him, just bruised bones.
I’m right here, he thought, not speaking it out loud like he did for Reyna, this place too silent, too sacred, his bony knees making only the slightest of indents in the bed beside his sister. I’m right here, it’s okay. I promise.
He stared helplessly at her tensed back, curled up over her knees. He could count every single one of his sister’s vertebrae through her shirt, revealed by her position, so tight, so stressed. Her sobbing had stopped two and a half minutes ago. Five minutes ago, the retching. It was an hour ago that she started crying, and she had only just worn herself out.
Nico didn’t usually think with numbers, not for anything. Time was no good for a boy that was ripped from his own and spit out somewhere unfamiliar, into a different one, somewhere maybe more safe and maybe more unsafe, but definitely more alone. Right now, though, it was all that was keeping him occupied, and he was alone no matter what, so it didn’t matter.
It would be different if Hazel had different powers, of course. As much as she was linked to death, she did not have any dominion over the dead. If she did not know earth like her own calloused knuckles, maybe. If she could not control metals like she could control her own body, maybe. Maybe if she was more unlucky, more lucky. Maybe less of each, in different ways.
She could realise everything was alright, even with her amount of losses, even though she had friends found dead on the battlefield, despite it all. Sit up, stop crying, flash her beautiful smile again.
Or not, Nico thought, less hopeful. He had death powers, and, even then, he had not been able to accomplish the same. Bianca was not a fresh cut, but she was sore with scabbing over, again and again.
Maybe grief was just impossible to live with, then. Regrets were stronger than hope, for both the living and the dearly departed. All curled wire, feet in baretraps, gnawed off arms. Time like a circle, but still no turning backwards— you have to make it through all the shitty stuff just to get back where you started, even if you had only taken one step forward.
He lied back on the bed as she spread out, twisted the kinks out of the gentle slope of her back. Nico wondered if she even still saw him, if only in the incomplete, wish-fufillment way that Will Solace still saw him. He was only a foot away from her, then, which made him think that, no, she couldn’t. The pain was a tsunami, flowing over itself, making everything less clear and more misty. Misty like fog, yes, but also misty like tears in eyes. Misty like sobbing.
Nico’s head tilted backwards, calculating his next course of action, and then he threw it away. There were no calculations to help with comforting someone. Primal emotion could only be helped by primal instinct.
Nico’s first instinct was to curl towards her, push his nose into her now-lifeless hair. Even if she couldn’t really see him, she knew to push her head slightly forward, just an inch, so that it could rest non-feelingly where his shoulder was supposed to be.
The emptiness in his chest widened into a chasm. He hoped that she wouldn’t accidentally roll over and fall in while she was sleeping. Nico resolved to not fall asleep, then, just in case. Not that he could, not really, not in the way that most people could. All he could do was cease to exist for a bit. He hoped it was still a nice thought, even if it didn’t count.
With how transparent his shoulders were, her face wasn’t obstructed at all. Her skin was rubbed off at her cheeks and temples, scratched away by her breaking, her downs. Little crescent moon shapes faded beneath her eyes and just above her jaw. Dried tears crusted, Hazel smelling like salt and hopelessness instead of copper and the rosey cream she rubbed on her hands and shoved in Nico’s face, like, Look! I just bought this! It’s called ‘hand cream!’ Isn’t it great?
Hazel sat up, her form wavering slightly from how weak she was. She stood from the bed, pulled on a threadbare sweater—Frank’s, he noted, unsurprised—and sat cross-legged on the floor by the window. She looked like a little kid, not eighty or ninety, and her shoulders sagged with undeserving loss of innocence.
Nico did not go to sit with her, only sat up in her bed too and watched her watch the outside. Camp Jupiter campers walked around much past the window, little purple dots in the distance. They were so far away, but he could hear their laughter from where he was sitting. It echoed through the room, bringing even more recognition to the swamped feeling inside of it. It was like laughter during a funeral. It just didn’t fit, not yet.
“I miss you,” said Hazel. Nico started, alarmed, pitching backwards in surprise. He almost fell off the bed, but didn’t, because that would’ve been embarrassing. Also, not funny. Also, terrible.
He could see her reflection in the window. She stared blankly, but, at the same time, seemed to stare right at him. Her eyes were more flat than liquid gold, her skin more flaky than soft, cheeks more concave than full.
“I miss you,” said Hazel, again, but it seemed like a different sentence, and like she hadn’t said anything before it. Different stresses, maybe, a different person spoken to, a different person meant by ‘you.’ Hazel had a lot of ‘yous,’ by now, and none had seemed more or less dreadful than the last, because that’s just how Hazel was.
She swallowed, eyes watering visibly again, and Nico rushed to her side to cup her cheeks. He tried to turn her face to him, so he could kiss her on the forehead and she could see how much she meant to him from just his eyes alone, but, no. Hopeless. Worthless. His hands moved nothing, falling through her head. He clenched his fists, and his fingers fell through his palms.
Nico’s knees seemed lower than the plywood floors, like they had sunk into it and were instead resting on the plain foundation beneath it.
Hazel curled her nails into her cheeks again, making new crescent marks. “I miss you so, so much. This isn’t fair.”
He realized, all at once, like a shock, that she was speaking to him. Nico had known she was speaking at him, of course, since he was the only other person in the room, but that wasn’t the same thing. He hadn’t known he was one of the ‘yous.’
He hadn’t known, or he hadn’t wanted to be one of them.
Suddenly, he felt very angry at himself. Being angry at the whole universe because it hurt his little sister was hard, because it invoked all of his atoms to participate. Being angry at himself, specifically, because he was the one who hurt his own little sister, was worse. He was angry at himself like a black hole is angry at a sun, like a black hole is angry at another black hole, like a sun is angry that it became in the first place. It was the whole of him, that anger. Every part of him that loved Hazel, which was every part of him, period, hated himself.
Hazel sniffled beside him, eyes shutting tiredly. She looked exhausted. “You could have just stayed here.”
Nico wasn’t so sure, anymore.
Jamie was not sympathetic. “She’s going to kill herself, dude,” he said, his hand shoved into the bonfire carelessly, knowing that it wouldn’t hurt him but wanting to try, anyways. Just in case.
Nico thought of a year ago— tasted vomit in his mouth, felt it on his clothes. Froth between his teeth and gums, tasting like too many thrown-up pills and too much alcohol. A failed attempt felt like defeat, collapse, was harder to wash down than the feeling of stomach acid in his mouth.
“Shut up,” said Nico.
“You never do your chores, anymore.”
“I’m busy,” Nico lied. He had been pretending to fiddle with the cuff of his jacket. It had all been very entertaining. This was a nice graveyard, and he had been in a lot of graveyards.
Nico’s stepmother sat down across from him, especially elegant in the way only sitting on a tombstone and still managing to look put-together can do. He kicked his feet out a bit, heels of his shoes scuffing at the worn ‘T’ in ‘Born so Young, Taken too Soon,’ whatever that meant.
She studied him pensively in the intimidating way only mothers and therapists can do, looking exceptionally irritated even with a neutral expression. She felt much closer, smelling like peppermint and hay and how the sun feels on pale skin. When Persephone spoke to him, he usually didn’t listen too closely. His usual didn’t seem like an option right now, so he didn't know what to do.
He thought she was here to chastise him for not helping out more, like he used to, more handy mule than son. That she’d say his father already had too many migraines without Nico not doing his work.
Nico was only very rarely right about his stepmother.
“You need to stay somewhere,” Persephone insisted. There was a beauty mark just above the side of her lips. It moved when she talked. A flick of her hand turned Nico’s eyes to her stony eyes, instead of where they were ignoring her at the corner of her mouth. “You need to make a decision, choose where you belong, and then actually stay there.”
Nico was surprised, but Nico also didn’t like staying places. He stayed quiet.
Persephone’s lips curled down a bit, seemingly more frustrated. “There aren’t any other options. You’re fading yourself out even more, like this. Soon there won’t be anything left of you—spreading yourself too thin, too little of you in too many places.” Nico blinked at her, wordlessly, equal parts confused and annoyed at her telling him what to do.
She sighed frustratedly, more like a groan, sounding a lot like her handmaidens. “You are not ill from shadowtravelling, Nico,” she said.
Nico stopped. He stared at the little frayed edges of her knitted green sweater. He was suddenly very aware of the fact that he was not breathing.
“I know," he said. Then, “I don’t want to talk about it.” Angry lines curled around his see-through fingers, white scars against greying skin.
When Persephone looked at him, he did not look back. His gaze dropped down to the ground, and wondered where his body was buried beneath it. If it was buried at all.
He barely heard her stand up, walk over. Felt a bigger hand take his, warm and comforting, solid. It pulsed in his hold. Nico would do anything for that hand, suddenly. The thought was not as alarming as it was soothing. Stability felt good for death things, even if it only ever came with orders.
Nico stared up at her, helplessly, frantic. Persephone was not smiling, but her eyes had softened. She looked at him like he was hers, a baby bird with a broken wing. Her hands were the shoebox, her steady grip the lid closing shut on top of it.
He froze. Admitted. “I don’t know where to go. There’s so many places to be.”
“You can’t be with everyone,” she said, as if he wanted one Nico for every person in the world, helping best they could with their corporeal bodies and scarred hands.
When he looked distressed at the thought, her expression turned to pity. He would’ve turned bitter at that if he were alive, because bitterness was all he knew. As a ghost, though, all he knew was pity, slow molasses in his veins, behind his eyelids, numbing the fresh cuts deep in his chest.
There was no more blood, but the hole was still there. As a wound, and as an emptiness, like wanting to die while already dead, like wanting to stop existing when everyone else was so sure you already didn’t.
“Where would you like to go?” she asked, barely a whisper. Only the suggestion of sound, as if any more would startle him.
Nico thought. He remembered the taste of hair tonic, gaps between teeth, thighs against thighs, telling the truth and not being heard, chewing on ice, raw skin. Pink eyes. Wetness on cheeks. Crying.
“Home,” said Nico.