Chapter Text
lethe
what if
nico di angelo
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Bianca is shoved into the river first.
The river wasn’t pretty. It had faces streaming through its current, its roars were no more of it smashing against the rocks then screams for help. There were bodies at the bottom and pairs of shoes left on the riverbank.
Bianca fights against the water for a few seconds, but Nico watches as her eyes widen underwater but close just as quickly. Bianca is... different when she’s picked out by the lawyer, who grabs Bianca’s arm and pulls her out just as roughly as Bianca was thrown in. Bianca was soaked to the bone with her clothes dripping milky white water onto the ground around her, her smile was the one she always wore when something hadn’t gone her way. Something settles in Nico’s stomach that made him feel like he swallowed a rock.
Something wasn’t right.
The lawyer came toward Nico next, and Nico stepped back once to avoid her. “W-What’s this river called?” He sputtered out, staring at Bianca from over the lawyer’s shoulder. He didn’t know what was wrong with the river, he didn’t want to come out like Bianca did.
The lawyer hissed.
(Nico had a feeling she wasn’t actually a lawyer.)
“Lethe,” was the short answer, and Nico didn’t have time to move away again before two clawed hands grabbed his shoulders and shoved him in.
The river burned.
It felt like there were hands grabbing him and nails dragging across his skin. The river got into his mouth, eyes, drowning him, and kept screaming in his ears, “Forget! Forget!”
Nico didn’t want to forget- he didn’t even know what he was supposed to forget.
(It was almost that easy, for Nico to give it the insignificant memories, the ones where if he had to give up any, he’d gladly get rid of them. The river made him forget his favorite color, the last meal he ate, useless memories it wants, but it didn’t push for all his memories and it only pushed for a few, so Nico let it have those. Nico thought it was just that easy. It wasn’t. )
The lawyer grabbed him by his leg, and Nico could breathe again.
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The hotel feels like a dream, and Nico thinks it is.
His room he shares with Bianca, with two beds and a view, is too nice to be real. He didn’t know how he got there, he didn’t know what day it was, but whenever he asked Bianca she shrugged as well.
“I don’t know,” became a familiar answer.
It could have been a week, probably a month (Nico thinks it’s a month) of running around and having fun. Everyday there seemed to be something new, and people were always coming in, but never leaving.
(Nico thought it was quite peculiar, but never mentioned it.)
There were new games to play, a waterslide (had that always been there?), movies and food and drinks- when the lawyer comes to get them, the same one who pushed Nico and his sister into a river for some reason Nico still can’t decipher, he doesn’t want to leave with her.
Bianca is on his side.
The lawyer just hisses again, that same strange hiss that makes his arm hair stand up, and she grabs Nico and Bianca by the shoulder and leads them out. He doesn’t remember what came next. Perhaps they were in a car? Plane? It was all a fuzzy blur, but then suddenly Nico and Bianca were at a military school in Maine (weren’t they in New York before? He wasn’t sure) and then the lawyer was gone.
Boys are on one side, girls on the other, and Nico and Bianca separated.
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It doesn’t take long for Nico to be set on edge.
The lights are nice, very nice, nicer and brighter and more clean than any Nico has seen before, in Italy or New York or otherwise. There’s some kind of clock on his bed that has numbers instead of a face, and there’s a cord connecting it to the wall that Nico can plug and unplug and which seems to turn the clock on and off, and Nico’s just as confused about the switches on the wall as he is the slits that admit heat and air on the floor and ceiling.
(It’s a good thing that he had his own room.)
They haven’t started school yet, but he has a tourguide come to his room, a kid his age, with a name and face forgettable. He’s shown around the school; the classrooms, the gardens, the cafeteria, and Nico wants to blurt out so many questions but he holds his tongue.
His gut hadn’t failed him yet, and he figured asking “What are those strange contraptions on the walls?” would make him stand out far more than he’d like.
Nico’s brought to the library, and while Nico is lost among the books, his tourguide leaves him.
It’s probably for the best.
Nico sits down at the table in the back, with three fictional books he had picked out, and started to read. He’s five sentences in before he stumbles on an unfamiliar word- he doesn’t know if it’s some new slang or what, so he wanders around the library looking for an Italian-English dictionary (Bianca had picked up the language easier than he had) and ends up stumbling onto the librarian and the newspaper section.
He takes one look at the date of the newest paper in the librarian’s hands, and turns back to the shelves, towards the history section.
(He wondered if the date August 23, 2010 was just a joke, but he just knew it couldn’t be.)
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Nico stops Bianca that night at dinner, and pulls her to the library.
“Nico, what are you doing?” She asked him quickly, in Italian, glancing over her shoulder at the girls huddled by the entry staircase.
“Do you know what today’s date is?” Nico demanded, showing her his table full of history books that he admittedly hadn’t read more than a couple sentences in. He just wished they were in Italian.
Bianca gave him a funny look. “What does it matter?”
“It’s 2010.” Nico breathed. “Bianca, it’s 2010.”
“And?” Her forehead wrinkled.
Nico’s mouth dropped open, and his own eyebrows furrowed together. “We’re in the future! Somehow we’re in 2010, and that explains so much of it, doesn’t it? Like the lights, the drinks, what those strange machines were in the dining room-” His hands waved around, the more excited he had got. “I don’t know how we got here, are we even here? But this is strange-”
“Nico, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He froze. “What?”
“We haven’t time traveled.”
“What?” Nico repeated just as blandly.
“Nothing like that has happened.” Bianca shook her head, glancing over at him before back at the door. “We’ve always been here. We’ve lived our entire lives with those things, Nico.”
“But then what about Mamma?” Nico got angry. “How can you say that? The building exploded and then Babbo sent us with that lawyer and now somehow we’re here-”
“Mama died in a car crash!” Bianca slammed her hands on the table. “We don’t have a dad!”
(Was it the Lethe that did this?)
Nico was speechless for a couple of seconds, just long enough for Bianca to breath out loudly and turn on her heel towards the door.
“We were born in 1998 and 2000, Nico. Whatever you’re doing that’s making you think otherwise, stop it.” She left, slamming the door of the library behind her.
Nico looked down at the books in front of him, and gathered them up his arms.
“Can I check these out?” He asked quietly to the disgruntled librarian, who had watched them the entire time, although not understanding what their fight was about.
“History books?” One eyebrow flew up. “Interesting read.”
Nico gave her a closed mouth smile. "Just curious."
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Lethe, Nico found out, was the River Lethe in Greek mythology. It was the river of forgetfulness and concealment.
(It was all very suspicious.)
There was a lot that he had to remember.
There was even more that Nico had to learn about the past century.
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When school started, Bianca kept up easily. It was almost like the information the teachers were sprouting out was just automatically inputted into her brain. She knew algebra, geometry, the history of the Vietnam War, Harry Potter, the discovery of evolution and even the polio vaccine.
When Nico heard about that from her, when he briefly stopped her and asked her about her classes, his brain short circuited. There was no polio vaccine.
School began the day after their fight, and Nico was having trouble keeping up.
Math came easily for him, and math was logical. Math didn’t change. Numbers were the same in every century. History was the United States history, and although Nico was clueless about a lot of the finer details, he knew some of it from what his mother and father had told him on the brief times they’d touched upon the subject. Literature, English, wasn’t too bad. Short stories by people who were younger than him yet sixty-five made his head hurt, but there was always something he could grab onto with dear life and stay with that to make it through the book.
Science had him in tears.
He knew everything up to 1940- all the scientific discoveries, all the finer laws- Maria was a busy singer with a lot of money to her name that she used on her kids, and Nico remembered his lessons with his tutors like they were weeks ago.
(Technically, to him, they were less than two months ago.)
Nico knew penicillin. It was the newest thing that was going to save millions of lives. But then there was something called DNA, and the polio vaccine, and cellular reactions; cloning, a new planet, dark energy, and stem cells, and Nico set his head in his hands the second he heard of humans on the moon, and waited until he heard the dismissal of the bell.
It wasn’t possible, it couldn’t be possible, and yet it was.
Nico felt reality hit him like a brick wall.
This can’t be real.
This can’t be possible.
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Nico’s next door neighbor was a boy with red hair and freckles and a terrible habit of stuttering, but Nico found him enjoyable to be around none the less.
His name was Anthony and he played Mythomagic, and Nico looked at the game and at his old history textbooks that he couldn’t quite read, not with the lack of translator, and decided to play. Nico thought this was one of his better moves.
There were things like attack points, and skill levels, and Nico didn’t care quite so much about that as he did listening to Anthony go on about the Gods and Goddesses.
“So what about Hades?” Nico asked.
“Hades is s-super powerful!” Anthony squealed. “He’s the Lord of the Dead, and he rules the underworld!”
“Underworld?”
“Yeah! T-There are a bunch of places where the dead go- like p-punishments and islands where you can be reborn- that’s what I’ve read a-anyways.”
Nico’s gut stirred. “Any rivers down there?”
Anthony’s forehead wrinkled. “I m-mean, there could be?” He seemed curious for a second, before taking out something small and rectangular from his pocket. Nico’s eyes widened substantially at it, as Anthony caught him looking at it.
“I k-know, cool isn’t it?” Anthony beamed. “My m-mom got me the newest version before I c-came to school.”
“That’s nice of her.” Nico said blankly, eyes still trained on the small device.
Was that a phone? You could ask questions to a phone? Was it an operator?
Anthony touched a couple buttons- there were no real buttons, not like a typewriter, but he seemed to be searching for something on it. Nico almost wanted to look, but he had a terrible enough headache as it was. There was a second where Anthony was reading something, before he nodded to himself. “A-According to this site, there are rivers in the Underworld!” Anthony seemed pleased. “There’s Cocytus, P-Phlegethon, Styx, Lethe, and Acheron.”
“Fascinating.” Nico mumbled.
“I think it is.” Anthony put away his phone. “S-So what were we t-talking about? O-Oh! Hades! I l-like him, he’s pretty cool you know-”
Nico couldn’t remember what his dad’s name was, and Nico thought that was awfully suspicious.
(Maybe the Lethe took more of his memories then he thought.)
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Nico spends the free time after school on his second day in the library.
He stumbles around the empty library for an hour, looking at all the dusty tall books that he’d never make a head or tail of, before he resigned defeat and went up to the librarian and asked, “Excuse me, do you have any Italian to English dictionaries?”
The librarian peered at him from over her small nose, and she looked almost like the lawyer for a second with that stare (Nico half expected her to start hissing), before she turned to the odd giant machine in front of her and typed something in.
(It was like an advanced typewriter, Nico figured, but he made a mental note to himself to researching the inventions of the past century.)
“We do happen to have one.” She glanced at him. “You’re in luck. I’ll grab it for you, it’s in the back on the top shelf.”
Figures.
Nico watched her as she grabbed a ladder and took a thick black book off the shelf, the words on it’s spine rubbed off with age, and Nico thought with both amusement and bemusement, this book is probably younger than me.
She handed it to him and went back to the desk, picking up the newest newspaper (August 25, 2010) and went back to ignoring him.
Nico was fine with that.
He took the book with him back to his room, after using the small checkout station that was next to the librarian’s desk (it took him a few tries), and sat down on his bedroom floor with the first history book in front of him, and began to read.
Three hours got him three chapters in, and half of the things he read about the war made it seem so far away.
He knew Mussolini. He met the man, at one of the galas or balls his mother sang at or was invited to, and he couldn’t connect the smiling man who shook his hand and made his mother blush to the man who murdered thousands and was subsequently shot to death, then stoned, spat upon, hung up, and defaced. It made it seem unreal, farfetched, that the soldiers he saw everyday outside his window in Venice were simply things he dreamt up. It made the war seem unreal, to hear about that happening eighty years later and not being able to do anything.
Nico didn’t even know what he could do.
There wasn’t anything he should do.
(It began to sink into Nico that he was alone, in a new day and age, and nothing before mattered anymore.)
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He moved through his classes like a zombie, rarely seeing Bianca except at meals because she was too caught up in her newfound friends to pay her younger brother any attention.
Nico spent most of his time around Anthony, during classes and meal times. Anthony chattered on most of the time, mostly about Mythomagic, which Nico had taken to like a moth to a flame. Anthony had given Nico his old set of cards and figurines and they often had impromptu sessions of playing the game that a couple of their classmates, like Jared and Charlie, had sat in on.
Time seemed to move slowly at the school, compared to the seventy years Nico had spent inside the hotel. Everyday dragged on and on, with more time spent sleeping through class after staying up late at night struggling to translate the heady books.
A week went by at school, although it took centuries for Nico, when Bianca came into Nico’s room one night after dinner.
“You need to apply yourself to school.” She said, glancing at the Mythomagic cards on the floor, and the history books under his bed. Nico was curled up on top of the covers with Relevant Inventions of the Past Century in his lap. “The principal came up to me asking if I could talk to you about your schoolwork and participation.”
Nico blinked. Why did the principal just ask me directly? “It’s doesn’t matter.” Nico dismissed. “I’m doing fine, I’d say, except for history and science.”
Bianca sighed. “Why are you doing so badly in science?” She questioned. “You were so good at our last school.”
Nico froze. “Our last school?”
Bianca nodded. “The one in New York. After our parents died in the car crash, remember? We were sent to that school, and we spent time exploring New York. Don’t you remember the National Gallery?”
Nico did. He could recall memories of running through the halls and getting lost in the subway, exploring the tourist parts of New York City, but he couldn’t remember the boarding school.
Did the Lethe take this away?
He stopped. “You just said our parents died in a car crash.”
“They did, I've said this before.” Bianca let out an exasperated sigh. “Are you going to talk about being in the future again? Nico, you can’t just-”
“Bianca, earlier you said we didn’t have a dad. We’ve never known our dad. How could he have died in a car crash with Mamma?”
Bianca’s mouth opened, and shut. She stared at him for a few seconds, before she responded, “I… don’t know.” She shook her head. “I can’t remember correctly. Anyways, don’t you remember our boarding school?”
“No.” He answered blandly.
“You don’t?”
“No, just as you don’t remember our parents, I don’t remember the school.” Nico stared at her hard. “Bianca, something is wrong. You've got to realize that this is just-” Nico trailed off.
Bianca leaned against the door. She hadn’t stepped foot into the room once, and Nico could feel the suffocating distance between them that he didn’t know if he could breach. “Something is wrong?” She repeated, glancing up at the ceiling. Her mouth was pulled tightly and her shoulders tensed as she seemed to realize something. “Nico, something is wrong. This doesn’t feel right. There's too many inconsistencies-”
“I know.”
“Then what’s wrong?” Bianca asked the air between them.
Nico hesitated. She won’t believe you, just like before, his gut told him, and Nico bit his tongue as he told her, “I don’t know.”
(It was lonely without Bianca.)