Stories [Working Title, CC Appreciated]
Title: Stories
Rating: T
Word Count: 486
Characters/Pairing: Past Hades/Maria, Nico and Bianca platonic. Not really a shipping fic.
Summary: Does God damn all liars?
Author's Notes: Set Sightless!verse, but really no AU to it other than that Maria doesn't know Hades is... Hades.
Warnings? Uh, if you think Hades/Maria is true love, you probably won't like this. Other than that, not much.
Stories
By Neko Kuroban and Sister Grimm Erin
Text by Sister Grimm Erin
Bianca Sofia di Angelo remembers her mother.
Oh, no, she did not recall everything. She had lost some of Maria di Angelo’s face, most of her walk and mannerisms, and almost all of her bedroom, but she remembered the woman’s character and personality all too well for someone who had been dipped in the river of forgetfulness.
Sometimes Bianca wonders if she’s forgetting something positive about the woman’s personality. Whether she’s missing a moment where Maria brushed her hair or let her smell her perfume or even smiled, just once, at her daughter.
But Bianca decides somewhere along the way it’s okay to be selfish and go on hating Maria di Angelo in private. To hate her for bearing the children of the King of the Dead and not even knowing it, hate her for dying and not even screaming so Bianca would know what was happening in the next room, hate her for being a pretentious whore, a kept woman who played at being a lady, hate her for not heeding the warning the woman Bianca now suspects was Persephone gave her, and above all, hate her mother for not giving a damn about any of those things, no matter how closely they involved her children.
But strictly in private, only in her own thoughts.
Because at their room in Westover, Bianca weaves countless tales of a mother they never had but always wanted to Nico (a different person entirely than her brother Domenic Ermete had been), and he believes her because he has nothing else. And why would he want to contradict her idyllic stories? They are perfect and easy and ultimately seductive.
Bianca tells him they had a mother named Sofia. She tells him that their mother had baked an entire cake for him on his third birthday from scratch. She tells him they lived in Paterson, New Jersey, a town of cobblestone streets they had only visited relatives who brimmed with disapproval in. She tells him that their father came home every day from work to smile no matter how tired he was. She tells him they had a dog and a house rather than a stylish, chilly apartment in Las Virgenes following a less stylish D.C. counterpart.
Bianca tells him of flowers and smiles and sunshine. She tells him of a kindly grandmother. She tells him so much, so often, that she nearly believes it herself. Or at least, she wants desperately to believe it.
One day, her brother turns to her and asked if the amnesia would last forever, or if he might someday remember.
Bianca told him her grossest lie yet. “I don’t know, Nico, but I hope you do,” she says, hugging him gently and hoping He does not damn all liars.
When she dies, she will wonder if God was finally striking her dead.