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New York in late December has that particular hush that feels almost deliberate, as if the city is trying on someone else’s personality for the night and isn’t sure the shoes fit. The snow helps; it softens the sirens and the impatience, settles on taxi roofs like a benediction no one asked for. Nico breathes in air so cold it tastes metallic, watching it bloom pale and ghost-like in front of him.
The lights along Sixth Avenue blink in uneven rhythm, gold and red and white, cheerful enough to feel mocking. He tells himself he’s only out for a walk because the apartment felt too tight around him, too full of the things he hasn’t had the energy to put away, but the truth is he’s been restless for weeks. Restless and stupidly sentimental and trying very hard not to think about the fact that this is the first Christmas he’s spending alone in what used to be their place.
Will is on the other side of the world now. Quite literally. Australia. Summer. Sunlight that arrives with the aggression of a spotlight. Christmas barbecues and warm pavements and skies that don’t understand the concept of melancholy.
Nico imagines Will stepping out of some airy rented flat into heat that clings like breath, squinting up at a sky too bright to look at straight on. It should be comforting to think of him warm and golden and thriving, but Nico hates how easily he can picture it; hates that his mind curls around the image like a bruise being pressed.
They’d promised long distance wouldn’t break them. They said it in the half-messy, half-hopeful way people do when they think saying it enough times will make it true. And maybe it could have been — or at least, Nico tells himself that on nights like this — but things had already been fraying before Will boarded his flight. Unspoken things. The kind you only notice in hindsight, tiny fissures beneath the paintwork. A hesitation here, a silence there, weekends that felt shorter and conversations that felt longer. Nothing dramatic. Nothing cruel. Just that slow, unbearable drift a relationship does when both people are too tired to admit the shape of what’s changing.
His friends had tried, of course. Jason sending a steady stream of texts that were half encouragement, half threats to drag him to brunch. Hazel leaving a little box of cookies outside his door with a note written in her looping, earnest handwriting. Piper calling every few days with that bright, relentless warmth she uses like a crowbar. Even Leo had shown up once, carrying a broken heater he insisted he could fix. Nico had opened the door, stared at the heater, stared at Leo, and simply said, “Why me?” Leo shrugged and said, “Because you’re the only one who doesn’t yell when I blow fuses,” which was demonstrably untrue.
None of it actually reaches him. Not really. Nico accepts the help because it’s offered, because it would feel rude not to, because saying no would require energy he doesn’t quite have. He ate the cookies eventually. He let Leo tinker with the heater until it wheezed back to life in a way that felt temporary and faintly ominous. He sent Jason replies that were short but reassuring, the verbal equivalent of a nod across a crowded room.
And then the door closed again, and the apartment exhaled into quiet.
It isn’t dramatic, the loneliness. It doesn’t crash in or demand attention. It settles instead, thin and persistent, like cold seeping up through the soles of his boots. Nico has learned the geography of it by now. Which chair feels worst to sit in. Which corner of the kitchen still carries the ghost of movement, a remembered presence brushing past him on the way to the kettle. He avoids the bedroom until he has to, and when he finally gives in, he sleeps on his side of the bed out of habit, as if the other half might still matter.
Snowflakes cling to his lashes. He wipes them away with the back of his hand, annoyed at how delicate the gesture feels. Winter suits him, or at least it suits the version of him that has learned not to flinch at being alone. He wonders if summer suits Will the same way — if Will feels lighter there, sun-warmed, unburdened. He wonders if the distance was a relief for him, an escape hatch disguised as a job offer.
Nico stops beneath a streetlight that flickers once, almost theatrically. It washes his breath in a halo of pale gold. The city looks like a postcard from a place he remembers better than he inhabits. Quiet but not peaceful. Familiar but not kind. A place built for someone who isn’t him.
He pulls his scarf tighter and keeps walking. The night is cold enough to sting, which is something like comfort. And if he pretends hard enough, he can almost believe the silence beside him isn’t a ghost but simply empty space.
***
It had been their first Christmas together in the apartment, the kind of cramped pre-war walk-up with radiators that hissed like judgmental old men and windows that rattled whenever the subway passed. Will had insisted they buy a real tree, even though Nico claimed to be allergic to sentimentality and pine sap, and even though they’d had to drag the thing ten blocks through slush while Will laughed the whole way, cheeks red from the cold and eyes bright with that reckless optimism Nico had never learned how to trust.
“You’re such a liar,” Will said, breathless, when Nico muttered that he was going to develop a rash from emotional manipulation. “You love this.”
“I love nothing,” Nico replied, deadpan, tugging the tree out of a snowbank. Will only grinned like he’d discovered some new species of affection hiding behind the words.
The living room smelled of resin and citrus—Will had sliced oranges for drying and hung them in the branches with twine, claiming it made them look “rustic,” which Nico privately suspected was American for “we forgot to buy proper decorations.”
“They look good,” Will insisted, stepping back to admire them.
“They look like we mugged a fruit stall,” Nico said, but his voice had softened in a way he hoped Will wouldn’t notice.
The lights were soft, an uneven gold that pooled in the corners and made the shadows look gentle for once, and Will had put on some ridiculous playlist that swung between old crooners and modern nonsense he insisted was festive. Nico pretended to hate all of it. He pretended to roll his eyes at Will’s dancing. He pretended not to watch him with that quiet, startled ache he’d never quite known how to name, the one that felt like standing at the edge of something holy.
Will caught him staring once and wiggled his eyebrows. “You’re obsessed with me.”
“I’m assessing your coordination so I know how to describe the body to emergency services,” Nico said, which only made Will laugh harder.
The radiator was doing its best to impersonate a forge, so they’d cracked the window an inch, enough for cold air to slip in and mix with the warmth, enough for snow to collect in the frame. Will kept brushing past him—always some excuse, always reaching for something on the far side of the sofa, always touching Nico in a way that could almost be accidental. A hand at his waist. A shoulder brushing his. The kind of touches that made Nico feel both steadied and unmoored, dizzy in the way only happiness could manage.
They were wrapping presents—Nico catastrophically, Will with clinical precision—and Nico kept laughing at how Will folded the paper like he was performing a delicate surgical procedure.
“Nobody needs corners this sharp,” Nico complained, watching him crease the edge with exaggerated care.
“Some of us have standards,” Will said, inspecting his work.
“At Christmas?” Nico teased. “Tragic.”
At some point Nico had stolen the tape, holding it out of reach and making Will chase him around the living room, both of them tripping over the tree stand, nearly knocking the whole thing over while Nico wheezed with laughter, absolutely no survival instincts whatsoever.
“Give it back,” Will warned.
“Make me.”
Will caught him by the wrist near the radiator and pulled him back in, heat rising from both metal and skin, and Nico looked at him—really looked at him—with that breathless, earnest devotion he knew Will never quite knew how to handle except by leaning in, forehead touching Nico’s, the moment suspended like a lantern caught in the air.
Outside, sirens wailed in the distance, muted by snow. Inside, everything softened. Will was still wearing the stupid sweater with the embroidered reindeer Nico claimed to despise, and his curls were a mess from static, and the whole room seemed to fold around them, smaller and brighter and impossibly gentle.
“You’re staring again,” Will murmured, though he sounded pleased about it.
“Shut up,” Nico said quietly, which in that specific language they spoke meant I’m happy. I’m terrified. Don’t move.
Will kissed him then, slow and a little clumsy, smiling against Nico’s mouth like he couldn’t believe he was allowed to touch him. And Nico, who had built entire cities out of silence and distance, let himself melt for once. Let the warmth take him. Let the world be simple in that fleeting, incandescent way where the only thing that mattered was the person breathing against his lips.
It had been their first Christmas in their home. Their first tree. Their first night where Nico realised that love—real love—wasn’t the dramatic, operatic force he’d imagined in his loneliest years. It was this. Stupid ornaments and terrible playlists and Will laughing so hard he couldn’t breathe. Ordinary magic. Domestic miracles.
Memory held it like a photograph: Will’s hands still cold from the tree, Nico’s pulse too quick, the window cracked open just enough for snow to whisper in, the whole world resting gently around them for a single, irretrievable night.
***
Nico tries not to picture him, although of course he does, because what else is there to do when the night has gone thin and the city has run out of distractions. Will should be asleep by now, or waking, or somewhere between the two in that bright Australian morning he chose instead of this cold, familiar dark. Nico keeps forgetting that the day divides them. He reaches for his phone sometimes and has to remind himself that Will is already living in a different time, a different season, a different life altogether.
He wonders whether Australians even bother with real Christmas trees or if the heat kills the pine before anyone can pretend it’s festive. He imagines Will sweating through a half-buttoned shirt while fake snow sprays across shop windows, the whole holiday rendered strange and faintly ridiculous under a summer sun. Maybe Will laughs at it. Nico hopes he laughs at something.
He lets himself think, briefly, that Will might be with someone — a colleague, a neighbour, a sun-bright stranger who doesn’t mind the distance or the silences, someone who understands how Will folds himself inward when he’s overwhelmed. Nico tries to be generous about it. He tries to be adult about it. Mostly he just feels that small hollowness open beneath the ribs, the one place winter always gets in.
He wants to hear Will’s voice, the easy warmth of it, the way it could soften entire days. He wants the simple, stupid comfort of hearing him say his name. But he knows a call would shatter something he has been trying, impossibly, to keep intact. If Will said hello — just that — Nico isn’t sure he’d survive it. He’d fold, he’d falter, he’d fall straight back into orbit around a sun that moved a hemisphere away and left him frozen here.
So he keeps walking. He keeps breathing. He keeps pretending that wanting something has never hurt him more than having it.
And somewhere on the other side of the world, it is hot, and bright, and afternoon, and Will is living a day that Nico will never see.
***
The Christmas party had already swollen past its intended guest list by the time Nico and Will stepped through the door, the kind of warm, chaotic crush that only the Seven could host without burning the building down. Piper had strung garlands across every beam with theatrical disdain, Hazel had conjured some miracle of table décor that looked like a Renaissance still life, and Percy—predictably—had spilled mulled wine down the front of his jumper within the first five minutes.
Will’s hand found Nico’s automatically, threaded neatly between the spaces as if he’d been built for it. The apartment was overheated from too many bodies and the oven working overtime, but Nico let himself lean into the warmth, let himself be tugged toward the noise and the light and the kind of friendship that felt almost mythic in its loyalty.
“Look at you two,” Piper called from the sofa, where she sat perched like a smug ornament, drink glittering in her hand. “Matching sweaters. I told you it would happen eventually.”
Will laughed, a low, soft spill of sound that brushed along Nico’s jaw. “They’re not matching,” he protested, though they absolutely were—variations on a theme: Will’s a warm sunrise red, Nico’s a darker wine that caught the fairy lights and turned them somber.
“They’re complementary,” Annabeth corrected, sweeping past with a tray of gingerbread shaped like Medusa. Her hair glowed gold under the lights; her grin was sharp enough to cut. “Which is worse, somehow.”
Jason arrived at their side like a particularly earnest Christmas angel, clasping Nico’s shoulder with the enthusiasm of someone who had absolutely been into the mulled wine. “Tell me you’ve tried Hazel’s gingerbread. Tell me, Nico.”
“I tried it,” Will said, leaning forward conspiratorially. “He said it was good. Which, from Nico, is basically a sonnet.”
Nico rolled his eyes and elbowed him lightly, but Will took it as an excuse to slip an arm around his waist, fingers warm against the knit of his jumper. The party hummed around them—Leo and Frank were arguing about whether tinsel was a fire hazard, Piper was performing a dramatic reading of a gift tag, Percy and Annabeth were dancing off-beat near the tree—but Nico’s world had narrowed to the press of Will’s body against his side, the steady drum of his heartbeat just beneath the fabric.
“You’re enjoying yourself,” Will murmured, voice low enough to be swallowed by the music. “I can tell.”
“I’m tolerating myself,” Nico corrected. “The rest is luck.”
Will huffed a laugh, smiling against Nico’s temple as if he couldn’t help it. “You know you’re allowed to admit you’re happy.”
Nico didn’t answer; he didn’t need to. Will’s hand tightened at his waist, gentle, grounding, and Nico felt something bloom in the hollow of his ribs—warmth, anticipation, a kind of aching gratitude for the way Will looked at him, even in a room full of people who loved them both.
“Come on,” Will said suddenly, tugging him toward the kitchen. “Before Percy breaks something expensive and the night is ruined forever.”
“What makes you think that’s inevitable?” Nico asked, letting himself be pulled along.
Will tipped his head toward the living room, where Percy was currently demonstrating an extremely optimistic spin near the tree. “History,” he said.
Hazel intercepted them at the doorway, cheeks flushed pink with laughter. “You two look disgustingly cute,” she announced, handing them candy canes that sparkled unnaturally. “If you kiss under the mistletoe, I swear I won’t even tease you.”
“You absolutely will,” Nico said.
“I absolutely will,” she agreed, beaming.
Will slid in closer, shoulder brushing Nico’s as he unwrapped the candy cane with methodical care. “For what it’s worth,” he murmured, voice dipping low, meant only for Nico, “I’d kiss you anywhere.”
Nico swallowed, heat ghosting up the back of his neck. “You already do.”
Will’s smile widened—bright, honest, devastating. “Yeah,” he said. “I really do.”
Somewhere in the other room, someone cheered. Someone else dropped a glass. Music shifted, laughter swelled, and Nico, in the middle of all of it, let himself believe—for a suspended moment, fragile and shimmering—that this was what forever could feel like.
***
It hits him without warning, the way memories always do, sharp as cold metal and just as unkind. The echo of that long-ago room rises in him again—laughter blooming against the walls, music shifting in warm waves, someone cheering far too loudly, someone else dropping a glass with theatrical despair. He remembers the lights as soft and gold as breath. He remembers Will’s hand at his waist. He remembers the way the world seemed to gather itself around that moment, as if time had been instructed to behave for once.
Snow drifts past him in pale ribbons, catching the streetlamp glow and scattering it, as if even the weather is trying to imitate the way light broke over Will’s smile that night. Everything looks delicate tonight—too delicate—like one wrong breath might crush the whole world into powder. The snow keeps falling, thin and weightless, and Nico has the unhelpful thought that this is what remains of a life after love ends: a fine dust of memory settling on his coat, cold against his skin, melting almost immediately.
In that old room he’d believed in something solid, something with shape and structure. Now he walks through a city where things shimmer only because they’re breaking apart as they fall. He closes his eyes for a moment, just long enough to feel the ache of it sharpen, and he wonders how he ever mistook something so temporary for anything like permanence.
The music, the laughter, the warmth—he can still feel the ghost of it, flickering through him like the tail end of a dream. But the night around him is quieter than it should be, softer and emptier, and the distance between then and now feels immeasurable, a whole glittering life stretched thin into the space of a breath.
***
Nico emerged from the bathroom towelling the last of the cold tap-water from his face, the mint still sharp on his tongue, and stopped dead in the doorway. Will was sitting up in bed—hair a mess, shoulders bare, covers pooled low around his hips—with the expression of a man who knew he’d done something ridiculous and was proud of it. Above his headboard, dangling precariously from a bit of red ribbon and what looked, alarmingly, like a spare command strip, hung a sprig of mistletoe. It swayed slightly in the draft from the radiator as if waving hello.
Nico blinked. Slowly. “Absolutely not.”
Will’s grin widened, bright and insufferably pleased with himself. “It’s tradition.”
“It’s tacky,” Nico muttered, stepping into the room though every instinct told him not to encourage whatever this was. “And I know for a fact that isn’t mistletoe. That’s—what is that? Parsley?”
“It’s holly,” Will said, too quickly to be convincing, “it’s decorative.”
Nico arched an eyebrow. “Holly has red berries. That is a garnish.”
Will only lifted his chin, defiant. “It’s the spirit of the thing, death boy. You’re supposed to kiss me.”
“And you’re supposed to understand basic botany,” Nico said, crossing his arms, though the warmth spreading through his chest made the gesture pathetic at best. He could feel the room softening around them—the lamplight pooling gold, the rumpled sheets, the faint scent of sugar cookies Will had baked earlier in the evening. It all conspired to weaken him.
Will patted the mattress. “Come here.”
Nico stayed exactly where he was. “No.”
“Come here,” Will repeated, voice dropping into something lower, something that curled at the edges like invitation. “For research.”
“You’re unbelievable.”
“And you love me,” Will said, with that unbearable serenity of someone who knew he was right.
Nico rolled his eyes, but the betrayal was that he was smiling, helplessly, stupidly. “Fine. But if that stupid branch falls on my head—”
“It won’t. I used two strips.”
“That doesn’t make me feel better.”
Will only held out a hand. Nico crossed the room slowly, refusing to be rushed, refusing to let Will see the way his pulse had begun to trip over itself. When Nico reached the edge of the bed, Will’s fingers slid against his wrist, gentle and warm, guiding him closer until Nico was standing directly beneath the counterfeit mistletoe. Will’s gaze flicked up, triumphant, then back to Nico’s mouth.
“You’re insufferable,” Nico said softly.
“Seasonally insufferable,” Will corrected. “It’s festive.”
Nico meant to shove him. Or at least to snark something biting enough to salvage the last scraps of his dignity. Instead, Will leaned forward, slow and sure, the kind of movement that didn’t jolt or demand but simply happened—like sunrise, like habit—and Nico felt the tension tug sharply through him, threading desire with something quieter, heavier, impossibly tender.
Their noses brushed first. Then Will’s breath warmed Nico’s cheek. And then, finally—inevitably—Will kissed him, with an ease that made Nico’s knees loosen and his thoughts scatter, mint and warmth and the faint taste of laughter between them. Will shifted, deepening the kiss, one hand rising to the back of Nico’s neck, steady and deliberate in a way that made the whole room tilt.
Nico inhaled sharply, the sound escaping before he could catch it, and Will’s answering exhale told him exactly how much that reaction cost him. The mistletoe—or parsley, or whatever—hung above them, swinging slightly as if approving the escalation.
Will murmured something low against his mouth, half-teasing, half-wanting, and Nico felt the ground give way beneath him in the best possible way as he climbed into the bed, letting the covers and Will’s hands and the warmth between them close over the scene like the start of a promise neither of them had yet dared to articulate.
Everything after that blurred softly at the edges—laughter dissolving into breath, breath dissolving into touch—and the lamplight glowed steady and gold, holding the moment intact as the rest of the world slipped soundlessly out of view.
***
Nico walks without really seeing the street ahead of him, the cold thinning into a kind of quiet ache beneath his ribs, the sort that makes the whole city feel hollow in sympathy. Loneliness sits bone-deep tonight, not loud or dramatic, just a slow, deliberate emptiness spreading through the places where Will used to fit. He hasn’t been with anyone since him; hadn’t even tried.
He tells himself it’s because he’s busy, or tired, or uninterested, but the truth is simpler and far more humiliating. Will was the only body he ever learned by heart—mapped every freckle, memorised every line of muscle and softness, understood every rise of breath better than he understood his own. Being held by him had felt like slipping into something inevitable. Anything else now feels counterfeit.
Jason keeps insisting he should “put himself out there,” and Piper agrees in that gentle, pitying way that makes Nico want to disappear into the nearest subway grate. Frank offered to set him up with someone from work; Hazel keeps sending names he pretends to consider. He listens, nods, promises nothing, and then goes home alone, lying awake in a bed that feels too big, the sheets cold where someone’s warmth should be. He knows they’re trying to help. He knows they think he’s stuck. They’re not wrong.
But whenever he tries to imagine letting someone else close—letting someone else touch him, see him, breathe against his throat—something twists sharply inside him, a refusal so instinctive it feels carved into bone. He isn’t ready. Maybe he’ll never be ready. Maybe Will took something with him when he left, something Nico can’t name without flinching.
And underneath the grief sits that quiet, simmering anger he pretends he’s risen above—the frustrated, stunned disbelief at how easily Will slipped out of the life they built. Not cruelly, not deliberately, but with that unbearable softness that hurt worse than distance ever could. Nico hates how the memory of it still burns. Hates how, even now, in the cold, he can feel that slow undoing like a bruise that never quite healed. Hates that loving someone this deeply means he can’t outrun the wreckage they left behind.
He wants to forget. He wants to forgive. He wants to stop feeling like he’s standing alone in the ruins of something that was once warm and bright. But mostly—gods, mostly—he just wishes it didn’t still hurt this much.
***
It had started, stupidly enough, with the calendar open between them on the kitchen counter, the New York dusk pressed grey and heavy against the windows, the apartment warm with the scent of gingerbread Hazel had dropped off earlier. Will leaned his elbows on the counter as if bracing for impact, already frowning at the dates, already anxious in that earnest, infuriating way Nico both adored and wanted to shake him for.
“We should book Texas soon,” Will said, voice pitched toward casual, although nothing between them had ever really been casual. “Flights are getting ridiculous.”
Nico toyed with the corner of the tea towel, smoothing and unsmoothing the same crease because it was easier than looking directly at him. “We went last year,” he reminded quietly, not accusatory but not gentle either, and he could feel the immediate stiffening in Will’s shoulders, the prelude to retreat. “And the year before. And the year before that.”
Will blinked at him as if Nico had just shifted the floorboards under his feet. “My mom’s alone,” he said, too quickly, too tightly, the words spilling like a reflex he hadn’t interrogated. “It’s Christmas. She doesn’t have anyone else.”
“And Hazel asked us to go to my dad’s with her and Frank,” Nico countered, lifting his eyes at last, “and Persephone’s been trying, you know she has, and it matters to them that we go. I want to go.” He hesitated, softer now. “I thought you wanted to, too.”
Will exhaled, but there was no relief in it. “It’s not that I don’t,” he said, rubbing the bridge of his nose like he could erase the conversation by smudging it away. “It’s just—it’s your dad, Nico. And Persephone. They’re… intense.”
Nico’s jaw tightened before he could stop it. “They can be,” he said, carefully, quietly, dangerously. “But they’re not who they used to be. And you know that. You were the one who told me not to give up on them. You were the one who said it mattered.”
Will’s eyes flickered, guilt and worry tangling together. “And it does matter,” he said, quieter now, defensive but unsure. “I just—every time I picture it, it feels like walking into something I don’t know how to stand in without screwing it up.”
“You don’t even try to picture anything else,” Nico shot back, sharper than he meant to be, because the hurt was already there, waiting. “You decide how it’s going to go before it happens. You always do. You always assume the worst.”
Will straightened, colour rising to his cheeks, not defensive so much as cornered. “I’m not assuming anything,” he said, voice tight with that familiar, earnest frustration. “I’m just saying it’s complicated. You’re asking me to walk into a situation that already makes you tense and pretend it doesn’t.”
Nico’s breath caught, then steadied. “It’s better,” he said, and he hated how fragile the admission made him feel. “He’s trying. I’m trying. You could try, too.”
Will closed his eyes for a moment, palms flattening on the counter as though grounding himself. “I am trying,” he murmured, and he sounded so tired Nico almost reached for him. “But it doesn’t change the fact that my mom will be alone if we don’t go.”
“She wouldn’t be,” Nico said, too quickly, the words carrying more hope than he’d meant to show. “She could come with us. We always go to her. Every year. Why is it so impossible to imagine it the other way around, just once?”
Will hesitated, looking away, scratching at the back of his neck the way he did when unease curdled into something sharper. “My mom in that house?” he said finally, the question fraying as he spoke it aloud. “Your dad’s going to catalogue her in five seconds flat, and Persephone’s going to give that polite little smile she uses when she’s already made up her mind.”
“You don’t know that,” Nico said, quieter now, but no less firm.
Will’s shoulders lifted and fell in a helpless shrug. “Maybe not. But I know how she gets. She’s loud and a little chaotic and she overexplains when she’s nervous, and people like your family—” He stopped, grimacing. “They don’t always know what to do with that.”
“And my family’s what?” Nico asked softly, the gentleness edged enough to draw blood. “Untouchable? Unforgiving?”
“No,” Will said immediately, hands lifting as if to ward off the accusation. “Gods, no. It’s just—he hasn’t always been good to you. And I don’t know how to sit in a room and pretend none of that ever happened.”
Nico swallowed, the truth of it pressing painfully close to the surface. “We’re not pretending,” he said, more stubborn than before. “We’re moving forward. That’s not the same thing.”
Will didn’t answer. Not really. The kitchen seemed to draw in around them—gingerbread and dusk and old compromises thick in the air—and Nico watched the moment slip sideways into something neither of them had learned how to name yet: love pulled thin by history, care sharpening into fear, two people wanting Christmas to mean the same thing and carrying very different ghosts into the room.
***
Nico walks faster now, the cold threading itself through the seams of his coat, the city thinning into the familiar streets near his building. It’s quieter here, softer somehow, as if the snow has decided to muffle even his thoughts, which would be a kindness if they weren’t already circling the same worn tracks. Every time he thinks he’s exhausted the inventory of heartbreak, something new surfaces — some stupid, petty argument he’d forgotten, some small crack in the foundation that had felt insignificant at the time and now gleams in hindsight with that terrible clarity breakups grant too late.
He remembers how easily they used to fight over nothing. Over dishes left to soak overnight, over the thermostat, over Will’s eternal optimism meeting his own caution at the wrong angle. Over how Will always hummed under his breath while he worked, off-key and infuriatingly cheerful. Over Nico’s habit of retreating into silence when he was overwhelmed, which Will sometimes mistook for disapproval. They were so gentle with each other most of the time that the smallest misstep felt seismic, as if tenderness made them brittle rather than resilient. Two people clutching their own histories a little too tightly, hoping love alone would soften the edges.
And then there were the bigger things, the real fractures — like the job in Australia. Will had told him about it with a kind of breathless reverence Nico had only ever seen in him when he talked about medicine, about the way bodies worked and failed and recovered. A research position with clinical work at a teaching hospital in Melbourne or Sydney — Nico can’t remember now, or maybe he can and just doesn’t want to, because remembering the name of the city feels too much like acknowledging its gravity.
There had been funding, mentorship, the promise of work he’d never get to touch in New York, entire fields opening beneath him like constellations. Will had tried to play it down at first, calling it “interesting” and “maybe worth considering,” but Nico had seen the light in his eyes and known — knew even then — that this wasn’t an opportunity so much as a calling.
It’s strange how melancholy sharpens memory. How grief turns even the absurd moments into relics. He thinks now of the way Will would leave half-written patient notes scattered across the coffee table, and how Nico would pretend to scold him while quietly stacking them in chronological order because he liked the thought of Will’s hands touching them next.
He thinks of the nights Will would stay up too late studying, too stubborn to rest, and Nico would sit across from him at the kitchen counter just to keep him company, both of them half-asleep but unwilling to break the spell of shared space. None of it was perfect. None of it was ever going to be simple. But it was theirs.
Now the distance between New York and Australia feels less like geography and more like a metaphor for everything they couldn’t bridge. Will didn’t choose to leave him; he chose a life he’d worked for since he was a child. And Nico didn’t choose to stay behind; he simply couldn’t uproot himself again, not after spending years stitching himself into this city, its winters, its rhythm. Love isn’t always enough, even when it’s real. That’s the part no one warns you about.
Snow gathers on his eyelashes, melts warm against his skin. He realises he’s almost home, though the word feels unsteady, as if it belongs to another lifetime. He wishes — not for the first time — that heartbreak were something tangible he could set down on the pavement and leave behind. Instead it trails him like a second shadow, quiet and close, reminding him of every version of the life he lost.
***
Will had kept talking about Christmas like it was a problem he could solve if he just approached it from the right angle. Not in a loud way, not even in a particularly hopeful one, but with that soft, persistent brightness he used when he wanted something badly and didn’t quite know how to admit it yet. He’d gesture at shop windows strung with lights and say things like it always feels different this time of year or people are nicer when it’s snowing, as if the season itself might lean in and do the work for him. Nico walked beside him, hands shoved deep in his coat pockets, listening with the careful attention he reserved for things he was afraid of wanting too much.
They weren’t together then. That was the rule, unspoken but mutually observed, a narrow line neither of them crossed even when it felt ridiculous not to. They were something adjacent, something orbiting. Late coffees that stretched into hours, shoulders brushing in crowded rooms, the way Will would look at him sometimes like he was about to say something important and then think better of it. Nico told himself he imagined it. He was very good at that.
Snow had started coming down in earnest somewhere around Ninth Avenue, thick enough to soften the city without quite silencing it, flakes catching in Will’s curls and on the shoulders of his coat. The streetlights threw a pale gold across the pavement, turning everything briefly unreal, and Will had laughed, breath fogging in the air, like the weather itself had just delivered a punchline. “See?” he said, gesturing broadly, almost tripping over a slush-covered curb. “This is what I mean. It’s like the city wants to show off.”
Nico had snorted, pretending not to notice the way his chest tightened at the sound of Will’s laughter. “It’s cold,” he said. “That’s not magic. That’s physics.”
Will grinned at him, undeterred, eyes bright in that way that made Nico feel like he was standing too close to something warm. “You say that now,” he replied, tugging his scarf tighter around his neck, “but give it a few weeks. Christmas has a way of sneaking up on you.”
Nico almost said does it, but swallowed it back. He had the strange, uneasy feeling that if he spoke too plainly, something fragile would crack. Instead, he watched snow gather along the edge of the pavement, listened to the distant wail of a siren muffled by the weather, and let himself imagine—just briefly—that Will was talking about something specific. That Christmas might mean something to them. That it might be the excuse Will was looking for, the permission slip he hadn’t quite written yet.
It was when they stopped under the awning of a closed bakery, the windows fogged and dark, that Will noticed Nico shivering. He frowned, as if the idea genuinely offended him, and stepped closer without thinking, close enough that Nico could smell soap and cold air and something faintly citrusy. “You’re freezing,” Will said, already unwinding his scarf.
“I’m fine,” Nico protested automatically, though his teeth betrayed him.
“Humour me,” Will replied, tone light but hands steady as he looped the scarf around Nico’s neck instead, fingers brushing his jaw in a way that was absolutely not accidental and somehow still deniable. The wool was warm, absurdly so, carrying the residual heat of Will’s body, and Nico went very still, acutely aware of how close they were standing now, of how easy it would be to lean in and ruin everything.
Will stepped back first, as if realising all at once what he’d done. His ears were pink, whether from cold or something else Nico didn’t dare guess. “There,” he said. “Better.”
Nico nodded, unable to find his voice for a moment. The scarf smelled like Will. That felt dangerous. “You’ll be cold,” he managed finally.
Will shrugged, hands shoved into his pockets, smiling in that crooked, hopeful way that suggested he didn’t much care. “Worth it.”
They stood there for another beat, snow drifting between them, the city holding its breath. Nico had the overwhelming sense that this was a hinge moment, something quiet and small that would matter later, that he would replay in his head long after it had passed. He wondered if Will felt it too, if this was what Will had been circling all evening with his talk of magic and seasons and Christmas coming like a promise.
If Will was waiting for him to say something.
Nico didn’t. He was afraid of being wrong, afraid of wanting more than was being offered, afraid that naming the thing between them would make it disappear. Instead, he tucked his chin into the borrowed scarf and let the warmth sink in, walking beside Will through the falling snow, both of them pretending—carefully, tenderly—that this was just how friends behaved, that there was nothing shimmering and unresolved in the space between their shoulders, nothing at all that might one day break his heart.
***
Nico stops under the awning of a closed bodega and lights a cigarette with fingers gone stiff from the cold, cupping the flame as if it might run from him too. The first drag burns, sharp and grounding, and he welcomes it in the way you welcome pain when it’s at least honest. Smoke curls into the air, dissolving almost immediately, and he thinks—bitterly, helplessly—about how easy it would be to call. About how his phone is already warm in his pocket from the weight of his hand resting there, like it knows what he wants before he does.
He wants to hear Will’s voice. Just that. Just the sound of it, familiar and unfairly comforting, the way it always softened on his name. He tells himself it wouldn’t be harmless, that there is no such thing as harmless between them anymore, not when his chest still tightens at the memory of Will laughing, not when every quiet moment still leaves room for the shape of him. If Will called, Nico knows he’d answer. He hates himself a little for that knowledge. He hates Will a little for having left it there, this open wound disguised as restraint.
Pride keeps him still. Pride, and something darker underneath it—anger that has nowhere productive to go. Anger at the way Will had chosen distance and inevitability and career with the same earnest conviction he once chose Nico. Anger at how reasonable it all sounded, how impossible it was to argue with opportunity and timing and the way life insists on moving forward whether you’re ready or not. Nico exhales smoke and thinks about how unfair it is that wanting someone can feel indistinguishable from losing them.
He tells himself not to call. Tells himself it would undo him, that the sound of Will on the other end of the line would crack something he has spent months trying to keep intact. And yet there is that other thought, quieter but relentless, threading through the anger and settling deep in his chest: what if Will called first. What if Will missed him enough to break the silence. What if hearing his voice hurt, but hurt in a way that reminded him he had once been chosen.
The cigarette burns down too fast. Nico watches the ember glow, then dims it against the wall with unnecessary force, like punishment. He doesn’t call. He doesn’t move either, just stands there in the cold, smoke clinging to his coat, heart split neatly between wanting Will to stay gone and wanting him to reach out anyway, between the dignity of silence and the ruin of answering.
***
It had been one of those nights that pretended to be about nothing and was, in fact, about everything.
December had crept up on them that year, not softly but with teeth—deadlines piling, the city sharp with cold, the apartment permanently dim because the sun seemed to clock out by mid-afternoon. Will had been working too much, the kind of too much that hollowed him out without leaving obvious bruises. Hospital shifts bleeding into research meetings, emails answered at midnight, Christmas cards still blank on the dresser because he kept meaning to get to them and never did. Nico had been tired in a different way, the bone-deep kind that came from carrying the practical weight of things: rent paid down to the cent, utilities argued over, groceries calculated, the unglamorous mathematics of building a life with another person.
It started with the heating.
The radiator in the bedroom had been making that familiar, maddening clatter, coughing and knocking like it might give up entirely out of spite. Nico crouched beside it with a wrench, sleeves rolled up, jaw tight with concentration. Will hovered uselessly near the door, still in his work clothes, coat not yet shrugged off, scarf half-unwound, staring at his phone as another message lit the screen.
“You’re going to strip the bolt,” Will said, not unkindly, but already tired.
“I’m not,” Nico replied, equally not unkind, equally tired. “It’s fine.”
“It doesn’t sound fine.”
“Neither does it when you touch it,” Nico said, glancing up. “Remember last time?”
Will huffed a laugh that didn’t quite land. “I was improvising.”
“You were panicking.”
“I was exhausted.”
There it was. The first crack, thin as ice.
Nico straightened, wiped his hands on a towel that had once been white. “So was I.”
Snow slid softly against the window behind them, the kind that made the city feel temporarily hushed even as it melted into slush below, grey and ugly and tracking itself through the hallway no matter how carefully Nico wiped his boots on the mat earlier. The apartment was too warm again. The radiator rattled like it was holding a grudge. Somewhere in the walls, a pipe made a sound that suggested it was considering bursting purely out of spite.
Will looked up then, irritation flickering across his face before being swallowed by something heavier. “I know that,” he said, too quickly. “I just—”
He stopped himself, shifted his weight, his eyes were rimmed red in a way Nico recognised too well—not the raw aftermath of tears, but the kind of exhaustion that lived just behind them, simmering and corrosive, the look of someone who had been holding it together for so long that the effort itself had become a kind of injury.
“You just what?” Nico said, because the silence had stretched too long and because he already knew what lived on the other side of it.
Will didn’t answer. He stood there with his coat still on, scarf hanging loose, shoulders slumped in a way that felt less like exhaustion and more like defeat, his gaze fixed somewhere just past Nico’s left ear. Not avoidance, exactly. More like looking directly at Nico would require a version of himself he didn’t have access to anymore.
Nico exhaled slowly. The sound came out tired, not sharp, already worn down around the edges. “You’re home late,” he said at last. Not an accusation. Not even really a question. Just naming the shape of the evening.
Will let out a breath that might have been agreement and might have been the last thin thread holding him upright. He crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed without taking his coat off, elbows braced on his knees, phone still in his hand like he’d forgotten how to put it down.
“Long day?” Nico asked, carefully, because care had become muscle memory.
Will laughed once. The sound was sharp and hollow, like something striking bone instead of humour. “Define long.”
That was how it always started. With jokes that weren’t jokes. With words doing less work than tone, and tone doing too much.
“I forgot it was your turn to call about the internet,” Will said suddenly, eyes flicking to the small stack of envelopes on the nightstand. “We got another notice.”
Nico felt his jaw tighten before he could stop it. “I didn’t forget,” he said, keeping his voice level by force alone. “I just haven’t had a chance yet.”
Will’s shoulders rose and fell. “It’s always ‘I haven’t had a chance,’ Nico.”
It wasn’t the bills. It wasn’t the cold. It wasn’t even Christmas, looming and relentless, demanding cheer neither of them had the strength to manufacture. It was that sentence, said flatly, like a verdict.
“I’m working too,” Nico said, heat creeping in despite himself. “I’m not just—home.”
“I didn’t say you were.”
“You implied it.”
“I’m pulling twenty-hour shifts,” Will said, words tumbling over each other now that the door had opened. “Back-to-back. I’m on call half the time. I’m exhausted.”
Nico let out a short, brittle laugh before he could stop himself. “Right,” he said. “And I guess that means whatever I’m doing doesn’t count. Because I’m not a doctor.”
Will flinched. “That’s not what I meant.”
“But it’s what you keep saying,” Nico replied quietly, the volume dropping instead of rising. “Every time you come home like this.”
Will’s mouth opened, then closed. He looked suddenly young, suddenly cornered. “I’m not trying to—” He broke off, pressed his palms to the counter, breathing through it. “I’m just so tired.”
“So am I,” Nico said quietly. “I’m tired of budgeting around your schedule. I’m tired of planning everything around your exhaustion. I’m tired of feeling like I have to justify my own job in my own apartment.”
Silence spread between them, thick and heavy, broken only by the radiator hissing its disapproval.
Will stared at the wall for a long moment. “You know this isn’t permanent.”
“That’s what you said last Christmas,” Nico replied, immediately wishing he could take it back.
Will flinched. “That’s not fair.”
“Isn’t it?” Nico crossed his arms, cold despite the heat. “Because it’s starting to feel like this is just… us now. You disappearing into work. Me trying not to resent it.”
“I’m doing this for us,” Will said, and there it was—the phrase that always landed like a weight on Nico’s chest.
“I didn’t ask you to,” Nico shot back. “I never asked you to carry everything like that. You chose it.”
Will’s voice rose, finally. “Because someone has to be responsible here!”
Nico went still. The words rang out too loud, too sharp, hanging between them like something broken.
“Oh,” he said softly. “So that’s what this is.”
“That’s not—” Will stopped himself, eyes squeezing shut. When he opened them again, whatever fight he’d had left seemed to drain out. “I can’t do this tonight.”
“Do what?” Nico asked.
“All of it,” Will said, gesturing vaguely at the apartment, the radiator, the bills, the unsaid things hanging in the air. “I haven’t slept properly in weeks. I’m running on fumes. I just need one night where nothing is wrong.”
Nico laughed, a short, humourless sound. “That’s not how it works.”
“I know,” Will snapped, then winced. “I know. I just—Gods, Nico, I come home and it’s always something. I don’t get to put it down.”
“You think I do?” Nico shot back. “You think I get to clock out of worrying because you’re tired?”
They stared at each other then, the familiar lines of each other’s faces suddenly sharp, distorted by exhaustion and December and too much love with nowhere safe to land. Nico could see it even as the argument gained momentum—the way Will’s shoulders curled inward when he was overwhelmed, the way his mouth flattened when he was trying not to say something he couldn’t take back.
“I can’t be everything,” Will said, quieter now, the fight draining out of him and leaving something raw behind. “I can’t be the provider and the fixer and the boyfriend who always has it together. I’m failing at all of it.”
“You’re not failing,” Nico said automatically, even as something inside him bristled. “But you’re not here. Not really. You’re always halfway gone.”
Will looked at him then, something like hurt flashing across his face. “That’s not fair.”
“Neither is this,” Nico said, and gestured again, helplessly. “Neither is pretending Christmas is going to fix anything just because there’s tinsel on the windows.”
That one landed.
Will went very still. “I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to,” Nico said. “You keep acting like if we just get through December, everything will magically feel lighter.”
“And you keep acting like it’s already broken,” Will shot back. “Like we’re one missed payment away from disaster.”
“Because we are,” Nico said, and his voice cracked despite himself. “Because that’s what it feels like.”
The room seemed to shrink around them, walls inching closer, the radiator hissing like it was eavesdropping. Neither of them noticed when the argument stopped being about money or heat or sleep and started being about fear—about what happened if this version of them was the permanent one.
Will swallowed, jaw working. “I can’t have this conversation tonight.”
Nico nodded, too quickly. “Fine.”
Fine turned out to mean Will taking his pillow and phone and disappearing into the living room, the sofa already half-made from earlier procrastination. Fine meant Nico standing alone in the bedroom, listening to the familiar sounds of the apartment rearranging itself around absence. Fine meant lying awake long after the lights went out, staring at the ceiling while the radiator finally, mercifully, fell silent.
They didn’t say goodnight.
It was the first night they slept in separate beds, and neither of them knew yet how much it would haunt them—the quiet of it, the space it made, the way the apartment seemed to remember it even after they tried to forget.
***
Nico lets himself into the apartment and the door shuts behind him with a softness that feels almost cruel. The place is warm in that stale, pre-set way, heat clicking on and off according to a schedule that hasn’t been touched since Will left, as if the apartment itself refuses to acknowledge the change. His keys land in the bowl by the door. His coat goes over the chair, not hung, because habits die slower than love.
The hallway stretches ahead of him, narrow and dim, familiar in the way a scar is familiar. He walks it anyway. Every step feels measured, deliberate, like he’s pacing out a distance he already knows by heart. The floorboard by the bathroom still creaks. The light in the living room flickers before it settles. None of this is new. None of it is kinder for being expected.
He moves through the rooms without turning on more lights than necessary, letting shadow do what it wants. The couch still holds the faint shape of a body that used to sprawl there without thinking. The bookshelf looks wrong, one side too sparse, the careful balance broken. Nico stops, fingers brushing the spine of a book Will loved and never bothered to alphabetise, and feels something tight and hot press behind his ribs. Not grief. Not exactly. Something slower. Something patient.
This is the part that hurts the most — not the leaving, not even the distance, but the way the apartment remembers them as a unit and refuses to update the record. He lives inside a past tense that keeps asserting itself in the present, each room insisting, you were here together, as if that should still mean something actionable.
Nico leans his forehead briefly against the doorframe, eyes closed, breath shallow. There’s a version of the night where he reaches for his phone. Where he doesn’t even unlock it properly, just brings it up in his hand like a reflex, like muscle memory masquerading as hope. He can picture it too clearly: the familiar cadence of Will’s voice, warmth threaded with distance, the way hearing it would undo him quietly, thoroughly, without spectacle.
He doesn’t do it.
He stays where he is, jaw set, anger flickering up not like fire but like friction — small, persistent, wearing. Anger at the silence. Anger at the restraint it takes to maintain it. Anger at himself for wanting something he already knows the cost of. He has survived worse than this, he reminds himself, and the thought lands hollow because surviving is not the same as living, and he is tired of measuring his life in tolerable losses.
Somewhere in the building, someone laughs. A door closes. Pipes knock. The world continues, indifferent and intact.
Nico straightens, exhales, and keeps moving through the apartment, carrying the weight of what didn’t last and what still lingers anyway. He tells himself — not for the first time, not for the last — that wanting is not the same as reaching, that silence can be a choice instead of a punishment.
Still, the thought circles, stubborn and unkillable: how easy it would be to let the night break him, how hard it is to keep himself whole.
***
There are other moments that surface too, uninvited, not quite memories so much as impressions, jagged little slides clicking past in no particular order, each one catching on something tender before slipping away again.
Will in the doorway of the apartment in late December, snow already melting into his curls, cheeks pink from the cold, holding a paper bag of takeaway for the second time that week, grinning like he’d brought Nico a miracle instead of lukewarm noodles. Nico pretending to scold him, voice dry and unimpressed, even as he cleared space on the counter, even as he reached for plates without thinking, muscle memory already rewriting irritation into care.
The first time Will kissed him beneath Christmas lights strung badly along the fire escape, uneven and flickering, the wiring clearly unsafe, both of them freezing and pretending not to notice, breath fogging between them in soft, startled clouds. Will laughing into Nico’s mouth because he always laughed when he was nervous, because joy came out of him sideways, and Nico standing there with his hands fisted in Will’s coat, thinking with a clarity that scared him half to death, this is it, isn’t it, this is the moment everything changes.
A fight in January over nothing at all — socks abandoned on the radiator, an alarm that hadn’t gone off, a morning already ruined before it started. Will snapping, immediately horrified by his own tone, apologising too fast, too clumsily, Nico too tired and too proud to take it right away. The two of them standing back to back in the same room like it had suddenly shrunk, like love didn’t stop space from turning sharp when you weren’t careful with it.
Will coming in from the street and pressing his cold hands against Nico’s neck just to hear him yelp and complain, grinning when Nico swore at him in Italian, acting affronted, never moving away. Nico letting him every single time.
An argument at a Christmas market over whether mulled wine was “basically sangria,” Will cheerfully, indefensibly wrong about it, Nico deeply offended on behalf of several countries at once, both of them laughing too hard, words tangling, outrage dissolving into warmth until they’d lost track of what they’d even been disagreeing about, drifting through the crowd shoulder to shoulder, fingers brushing like punctuation neither of them dared emphasise.
Bills had spread across the bed one night, December dates circled in red, the paper thin and accusing against the duvet. Will had rubbed his face, palms dragging down over his eyes, murmuring calculations under his breath as if saying them softly might make the numbers behave. Nico had watched the muscle jump in Will’s jaw and understood, with a dull, settling weight, that love did not make money disappear, did not make exhaustion courteous or fair.
Will had fallen half-asleep on the couch on Christmas Eve, the television murmuring to itself, tree lights caught in his lashes like something deliberately gentle. Nico had draped a blanket over him and then lingered there far too long, standing in the low glow of the room, thinking with a quiet, absurd intensity that he should memorise the angle of Will’s neck, the slack trust of his hands, as if foreknowledge might be useful later.
There had been another fight. Then another. Quieter this time. Words worn thin with use. Tiredness doing the talking where patience used to live. Apologies offered too early or too late, landing wrong despite the care behind them, skidding across the floor instead of settling where they were meant to.
He remembered a moment in early December, years ago, when Will had looked at him across a crowded room, the air thick with noise and heat and strangers, and said, almost shyly, “Next Christmas, let’s do it right.” Nico had nodded like he understood. He hadn’t. He had only wanted the next part. The continuation. Whatever came after.
Summer had always belonged to Will. Nico knew that, accepted it even. Summer was open windows and reckless plans and skin warmed without permission, light that asked nothing of him except to be endured. Winter belonged to Nico — quiet, contained, survivable, the season of retreat and control. But Christmas had felt like something else entirely. Cold and warmth braided together. Snow pressing at the windows, lights glowing stubbornly inside. A small, deliberate summer built in the heart of winter, a place where both of them fit without having to explain themselves.
It all spun past like that, a carousel that never quite stopped turning — joy and tension, warmth and fracture, lights blurring into shadow and back again — and Nico, watching it go, knew the worst part wasn’t that it ended, but that for a while it worked, imperfect and brilliant and fragile as it was, and that knowledge kept circling him now, relentless, asking to be remembered even when he’d already said goodbye.
There had been so many Christmases layered over each other that Nico sometimes couldn’t tell where one ended and another began. Just flashes of light and warmth, arguments that softened into kisses and kisses that, with time, curdled quietly into silence. A relationship built in seasons, bending under their weight.
And threaded through all of it — always — there had been that sense of motion. Of being carried forward whether they were ready or not. Round and round. Love insisting on momentum even when neither of them knew how to stop.
Christmas had felt like a pause. A held breath. A small suspension where summer and winter briefly shook hands. The rest of the year had never quite forgiven them for believing that could last.
***
Nico is standing by the window the room holding its breath around him, when his phone begins to ring. The sound is small but absolute, cutting through the silence with surgical precision. For a moment he doesn’t move. Pride rises first, sharp and automatic, followed by something softer and far more dangerous that knows exactly how to undo him.
He lets it ring once more. Twice.
When he answers, his voice betrays him anyway, quiet and careful and pitched lower than it has any right to be, as if speaking too loudly might shatter what little steadiness he has left.
“Hello,” Nico says, and the word carries all the snow and light and longing of the season with it, a single syllable suspended between everything he’s lost and everything he still wants, waiting to see which way it will fall.