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The rain soaked through Nico’s clothes more by the moment as he dashed through the forest, only able to get through the experience because of the pure adrenaline fueling him at the moment.
“Will! Are you—” Nico cut off as he stumbled over a twig on the floor of the forest around all the damp grass, the flashlight in his hands dropping to the ground.
Nowhere close to spotting Will.
It could just take a little bit more time to find him, it was fine, it was okay, he was going to find Will.
Well, he may have lied to himself a little bit there.
By the time night fell over the forest, Nico is curled up in a ball against a tree, shivering because of his fully soaked clothes and dripping hair, likely not going to be able to fall asleep at any point, not even close to having a guess of the time other than knowing it’s vaguely night, and sobbing, having already accepted that he probably won’t find Will at this rate.
***
Will laughed as Nico corrected his pronunciation of an Italian word. Since summer had started, Will had been making somewhat of an effort to learn some Italian.
Nico didn’t know for what reason, but he didn’t really mind it. It was funny how much he mispronounced some words that seemed simple to Nico, but he supposed that was what growing up knowing Italian did.
“You know,” Nico started, the smile fading from his face as he thought of the mountain that seemed to be the root of all his doubts. “You really were missing on that mountain for a whole week, Will. Don’t remember a thing?”
“Not in the slightest,” Will answered, taking a bite out of the popsicle in his hand. Nico also had one, it’d probably start dripping underneath the heat of the sun if he didn’t pay attention to it.
“It’s been half a year, and you still can’t think of a thing from then?” Nico asked, albeit a bit hesitantly. Honestly, he was more scared of the topic of the time Will had been missing for than Will himself was scared of it.
Will rolled his eyes, but followed it with a bit of a smile to give Nico. “How many months will it be until I stop getting bothered about this by everyone?”
“Oh, wow, Will, complain about how people were worried for you,” Nico replied, pushing Will’s head down with a ruffling of his hair to avoid getting that stupid, bright grin in his direction.
“Stop that, you’ll mess up my hair,” Will complained as he swatted Nico’s hand away, fixing it himself for a split second before looking back at Nico with a smug look. “Did you get all lonely without me, Neeks?”
“No,” Nico answered with a huff, looking out into the distance in front of where they sat rather than looking at Will.
“You are so lying, I bet you were crying over how much you missed me, and—” Nico pushed Will’s head back down to cut him off midsentence, Will grumbling, “Again?”
A pause of silence, though not awkward or anything, fell between the two of them, Nico’s eyes flicking over the surroundings before he finally spoke again. “You mind if I ask you something a little weird?”
Will smiled with over emphasized sweetness at Nico, batting his eyelashes. “Awww, Nico, are you finally going to confess your love for me?”
“I’m not,” Nico deadpanned, silence once again taking the pause between words.
“I’ve been thinking since you came back. But, a lot about this one specific thing. Just—”
Nico swore that everything seemed a little bleaker as he struggled to properly phrase the words. “You aren’t Will, are you?”
The smile dropped from Will’s—whatever he was—face, shock flickering in his expression before he managed, “Hmm?”
Nico didn’t say anything more, waiting for an answer. The extended silence was filled with the noise of the drips of the melting popsicles.
“How’d you…” Drip. It was as loud of a sound as the whispered words. “ You weren’t supposed to be able to figure it out. I thought I copied him perfectly.”
Drip. Something weird looking happened, Nico isn’t sure if he can trust that he isn’t hallucinating or something at the first sight of it. It’s just a little, black, gooey tendril of a kind in the thing’s eye.
He didn’t have much time to dwell on what it is before he was brought into a gentle hug by it. It felt exactly how it did with Will.
Crying, now. Nico was on the verge of doing so too, but this thing was desperate. “Please, don’t tell anyone.”
A small tear fell from Nico’s eye. Made the same sound as the dripping of the popsicle.
This felt real.
This not actually Will version of Will. Not–Will. It was some...thing, that had been posing as him for months.
The way it pleads with him sounds like Will’s voice.
It’s embrace feels like Will’s.
This thing smiles at him like Will would.
Will’s not here anymore, Nico reminded himself. He bled out in the forest that day months ago.
This is close.
Maybe close enough.
Nico's selfish enough to want it just because it's close enough to Will. That's shitty of him to do, he knows, but it relieves the pain in a way. He shouldn't, but he's going to.
“...Alright,” Nico agrees, his voice a shaky, quiet murmur. “I won’t tell a soul.”
It moves back just a little, meeting Nico’s eyes. It looks just like normal Will again, like nothing happened at all just now. Back to the middle of a normal conversation between two friends.
Nico manages a small smile that doesn’t feel genuine whatsoever like the ones Will used to be able to get from him, wiping the tear off his face.
“Nice to meet you, Will.”
***
Will stood outside, waiting for Nico as he exited his house in the morning.
They always walked to school together, it was one of the most consistent things in Nico’s mind. It felt different, though, now having a whole weird arrangement with some thing.
“You really should cut your bangs, you know, they’ll get in the way of your sight soon enough,” Will mused as Nico got up to start walking with him.
“Shut up, we don’t even have time for this,” Nico replied, walking a few steps ahead Will. He turned back and gave him a bit of a smile that felt more genuine than the one yesterday that made Will look a little flustered. “We’ll be late.”
As they walked on, Will got the opportunity to get talking about something completely random that he'd obviously been wanting to talk about. Will loved talking. Nico did not. Apparently the love for yapping translated very well to the thing posing as him.
Nico’s focus was completely on him.
And it felt like he only noticed more of the inconsistencies when he paid this attention, it only made it worse.
This is better than not having him here, Nico. Way better, he reminded himself every time he resonated on the differences.
***
No one at school could ever recognize the difference like Nico had. Fuck, it’d taken him months to actually figure out he wasn’t just unreasonably paranoid after the whole experience that’d happened.
They went through the school day pretty quickly, nothing sticking out in his thinking about the day for most classes.
During music class, they were learning a choir song for some event thing—or whatever, Nico hadn’t been paying any attention, he’d been more distracted observing Will—and throughout the class, it was a more noticeable thing.
Nico’s Will wouldn’t have tried to actually make the singing sound good. He’d just go along with it, too distracted by other things like he easily was.
This Will sang along, like a perfect student during that class.
This felt like being nitpicky.
During study hall, they were told that they were just going to watch a movie they’d already seen, like, five times in class before.
If Nico remembered right, it was some kind of tragic straight love story type of movie. Cheesy too.
He was painfully bored during the class.
When he glanced over to Will, and saw how he seemed like he was actually enjoying this movie, it felt off again.
Because his Will had seen this movie so many times, and they made fun of it during class every year without fail.
Nico’s Will would be just as bored as him.
Near the end of the day, later, when they were with Annabeth, she seemed to be studying Will’s actions just a little bit.
Nico found it odd at first, but then he realized she might only having a bit of the thought process he’d had when Will originally ‘came back’ alive.
That couldn’t be great. She wouldn’t bother to actually figure out what it was. It was too nonsensical for people to really believe, even if it was true.
***
“Oh, wow, that’s good,” Will decided as he took a bite of the food the two of them had already gotten so many times before.
It felt wrong, to see what was basically the experience of Will retasting the food.
“You can remember stuff, but it’s still new, I guess,” Nico pointed out, taking a bite of his own food to distract himself from thinking too much of the first time he and Will had gone to this place.
“Yeah, I can recall the memories perfectly, but I can’t actually remember the legitimate experiences behind them,” Will explained. “I was never properly alive to begin with. This is my first time experiencing the whole life thing.”
“What are you, a ghost?” Nico asked wryly with a sigh of almost amusement.
“Don’t really know, to be honest. But I bet I’m something kinda cool. Ghost, though? Doesn’t really feel right,” Will said, his gaze moving from Nico to over his shoulder.
Nico turned to follow his gaze to a cat—they knew the cat a bit well. He’d always seemed to favor Will over Nico by a lot.
Obviously, Will knew that, based off how he reached out to the cat.
The cat hissed and ran away.
“Quick cat, huh?” Will said casually, shrugging.
Nico nodded, a bit more taken off guard by that. “Well…anywhere else in town you wanna go right now?”
“Oh, we’re hanging out?”
***
Will’s focus was now on a dragonfly that had flown onto his bag, and seemed set on staying there until further notice.
“These ones are different from dragonflies in, like, fall, right?” He asked curiously as he stared down the dragonfly.
“Yeah. I don’t really remember the whole thing with seasonal types of dragonflies, though,” Nico hummed, taking the opportunity of Will’s distraction to observe him.
This is wrong, isn’t it?
What even is this thing?
Fuck, this thing doesn’t even know what it is, Nico, how do you expect to figure that out?
That’s not Will, Nico, it isn’t your Will.
It looks just like Will, but it isn’t.
It’s something else.
This is so messed up.
So are you for going along with it, Nico.
This is terrifying.
This makes no sense. I’ve got to be going crazy.
“Nico? You went all silent,” Will said as he trailed behind the slowly walking Nico.
“It’s nothing, really,” Nico sighed.
Even if he’s a fake, I want him to stay.
***
“Will is really dead, isn’t he?” Nico asked when they weren’t far from his home on the way back, though the question didn’t seem to catch the person who was asked it off guard much.
Will nodded. “He’s still got a warm body and a pulse, but, yeah. Dead.”
Nico turned to face him. “Did you—”
“No!” Will cut him off, clearly not wanting to give Nico the chance to even consider that being a possibility. “When I came across him, he was already about to die. All I can really, properly remember is that when I found him, he was on the verge of death, and I kind of just…ended up like this.”
They both stopped once they were just about at the entrance of Nico’s house, Nico himself not going inside yet, just standing in front of the doorway with his back turned to Will.
“See you tomorrow, Nico,” Will said, taking a step or two forward.
“Wait,” Nico blurted, successfully getting Will to freeze in his tracks. “I—Do you like me?”
He wasn’t asking if Will liked him, he was asking if whatever this thing was liked him.
“Yeah,” Will answered, seemingly not going to add anything more but then saying, “I like you a lot.”
He’s never said that before. Never, not once.
“Well, if you do, never leave me again,” Nico said, sliding the door shut behind him.
***
Nico had already had difficulty falling asleep the past few nights. He tossed and turned, sheets falling half off the bed almost every night.
But at least it wasn’t anything really worse than Nico simply hating staying still.
Tonight, when he fell asleep, rather than it being an escape from all the things going on with Will, and how much it plagued his mind, it did exactly the opposite.
Haunt his mind.
“Nico.” Will smiled softly, leaning his head back enough to look at Nico
“What’s that look for?” Nico muttered, a little flustered by the utter randomness of it. Will was just like that sometimes, and Nico could not bring himself to get used to that kind of casual affection in how he acted towards Nico constantly.
Being deprived of affection for a good chunk of your childhood and then being friends with someone who was constantly super sweet to you was, unsurprisingly, a very flustering thing.
“Nothing,” Will answered. “I just like looking at you.”
“That’s stupid, Will,” Nico said drily, but the tone was countered by the little fond smile on his face.
Well, at least sometimes Nico would get the chance of having a dream that included happy memories like that. But more often than not, it played out more like a nightmare sequence.
Will was just out of Nico’s reach. He should just reach out his hand, and take Will with him away from that mountain that ruined everything.
“Will,” Nico said simply, just like how Will always said his name. It wasn’t accompanied by a smile, only an expression that fit that of a person who was on the verge of a mental breakdown constantly.
“Yes?”
“Come with me?”
“To where? You wanna go somewhere fun on this mountain? They have a lot of trails, must be able to find something entertaining.”
“No,” Nico could barely get out his words, he wanted to rush them and get Will away from here. “Not the mountain. Off the mountain. Anywhere you’d wanna go that isn’t here. Just…not here.”
Will dropped his hand and Nico knew it was too late for him to even try convincing the dream version of Will. Like convincing him would do anything. He never would. Even if he got close, it wouldn’t happen. Nico’s dreams were torments, not a happy escape.
Nico got up out of the bed in a cold sweat, the sun pouring through the window as he looked out of it in hopes of seeing the real Will outside of it.
Well, the substitute for a real Will that he could convince himself really was Will once in a while.
He was such a bad person for that.
The only thing he got out of his brief look out the window was being poured in sunlight. The sun just reminded him of Will.
He drew the curtains closed.