PJO: The Ties That Bind | Chapter 1: Everything Can Change
So! I hope this isn't premature, but I think I may actually be ready to start posting this. Well - maybe not really ready, but as I've got a lot of the beginning written and pretty much the whole thing planned out, I'm going to start anyway because I've had this bit written for at least a month and it's killing me just sitting there. XD; I'm going to aim for a chapter a week (I know I was faster for the most part last time, but I'm not sure how this will go so I make no promises lest people get angry and take up sticks against me or something). This will definitely be crossposted on Fanfiction.net, and possibly on one or two of the PJO Livejournal comms; I feel kind of weird posting a third fic in such an epicly long series, but there do seem to be more people interested in fanfic lately so maybe I should give it a go...
Anyhoo~ This is the third installment in my crazy Percy/Nico universe of really long fics. Story 1 is Too Strong A God and Story 2 is The Age of Heroes. I think pretty much everyone here knows that, but just in case. :D; You don't really have to have read the first two fics to figure things out, as this first chapter is actually 90% recap (in the spirit of the books), but it might help, as for the most part Percy's just making references rather than explaining everything. :D;
This one is back to Percy's POV, which should seem more normal. XD; (Also it's rather useful for obfuscation, muahahaha~) We'll start it out at PG-13, and see what happens. Spoilers for pretty much the whole series, since by now I'm rewriting the last book and incorporating a couple aspects of it in the process.
Also, I'm going for this crazy musical theme or something. XD; We'll see if I can stick with it. Finding songs to fit later chapters is easy as anything, but it's hard for the setup!
Okay. With no further ado! Chapter 1~ :D
The Ties That Bind
Chapter 1: Everything Can Change
Everything can change when you least expect it
Can’t change what you can’t control
Gotta learn how to just let go
- Everything Can Change (Spectacular!)
I used to think that Camp Half-Blood was a busy place during the summer months when there were just the normal camp activities going on: archery and sword practice, campers taking turns on the climbing wall that tried to burn you to cinders if you couldn’t scramble up it fast enough. Barbecues and bonfires and singalongs and camp-wide games of capture the flag.
Now I had to admit that I really missed those days. Sure, we still had a lot of those things - there was still archery, sword fighting, and races up the climbing wall. But now there were also field medicine classes taught by the older members of the Apollo cabin, and Pegasus combat flight training taught by yours truly. There were even crash courses in weapons repair taught by Charles Beckendorf, the head of the Hephaestus cabin, whenever he wasn’t busy in the camp forges making as many shields, swords, knives, and spears as possible. Capture the flag had been renamed stop Kronos’ advancing army; it was a much more grim experience than it had used to be.
Silena Beauregard and a couple of kids from the Aphrodite cabin were even holding classes on “How To Look Your Best While Vanquishing Monsters” in the evenings, which I can’t say I thought were overly helpful but maybe that wasn’t the point. There were enough unpleasant, back-breaking things to do during the day; I couldn’t begrudge anyone who wanted to sit down and listen to the most fashion-savvy kids in camp tell them how to beat up dracaenae without breaking a single nail.
After all, we were preparing for a war.
Okay, I guess I’d probably better start at the beginning. Only it’s not really the beginning, because that was a really long time ago now - four years, in fact, back during the summer when I was eleven and I met my first satyr and took my first field trip into the Underworld. Now I was fifteen, and I’d been to the Underworld more times than I cared to recount (at least three). I’d even died once. It hadn’t been pleasant. I’d gotten off on a technicality in the end, but I wasn’t really willing to push my luck a second time. Neither was Nico. And when one of the most important people in your life (read: serious boyfriend), who just so happens to also be the son of Hades, says he’s worried about you dying, you tend to agree with him. It’s just the best choice to make, really.
Of course, Nico was worried about a lot of things these days - not the least of which was the prophecy that a sixteen year-old child of either Zeus, Poseidon, or Hades, was supposed to make some kind of decision that would either preserve the world or end human existence as we knew it. Given that the only living daughter of Zeus (Thalia) had elected to never age past fifteen and the son of Poseidon (being me) wouldn’t turn sixteen until a little less than a year from now, the fact that Nico had gone from being the twelve year-old son of Hades to the sixteen year-old one in a matter of minutes last month had catapulted him into a spotlight I knew for a fact he didn’t want. And it had been wearing him down, little by little. Maybe no one else noticed, but I wasn’t just anyone else.
I was the boy who shared my cabin - and my bed - with Nico di Angelo, and I’d seen enough sides of him in the past two years to notice the cracks in his façade. Nico had this funny way of showing absolutely everything on his face when he thought he was doing just the opposite - or, at least, when you knew what to look for. For example: right now, when he was sitting on the bed next to mine, which he’d appropriated for himself when we’d returned from Boston three weeks ago. It was more to have a space of his own than anything - after all, we slept in the same bed, whichever of ours it was, but Nico hadn’t had a lot of things for himself since I'd met him so I had no problem letting him take up as much room as he liked. After all, there was no one else to claim it - I lived alone in the Poseidon cabin most of the time, except for when my half-brother Tyson, who’s also a Cyclops, decided to stay at camp. But he was currently helping our father out in his forges beneath the sea, so it had been just me in cabin three until Nico moved in.
Now, let me point out that it’s not exactly normal for a kid to stay in a cabin that doesn’t belong to his, shall we say, divine parent. In fact, there are rules pretty much against it and even if there weren't, it would probably have been a pretty glaring faux pas. The gods take their honor pretty seriously, and they tend to get pissed if you don’t respect them. There were twelve cabins at Camp Half-Blood, one for each of the twelve major Olympian gods: Zeus, Hera (mostly for show, since she valued family and marriage and didn’t go around having kids with mortals), Poseidon, Demeter, Ares, Athena, Apollo, Artemis (again for show; she doesn’t have any children, being a maiden goddess), Hephaestus, Aphrodite, Hermes, and Dionysus. If you didn’t know which branch of the tangled family tree your apple fell from, you stayed in cabin eleven with the Hermes kids, since their father was the patron god of travelers.
You might notice there was no cabin for - that’s right: Hades. Nico had been sleeping on the floor of the Hermes cabin since he’d arrived at Camp Half-Blood two years ago, though admittedly he hadn’t always spent a whole lot of his time at camp. But ever since we’d gotten back from the rather huge ordeal that had turned Nico into the sixteen year-old star of the prophecy, he’d announced that (contrary to the aforementioned camp rules, etc.) he would be staying in my cabin. Chiron, the camp activities director, hadn’t really been in a position to argue with him about it at the time.
Naturally, I didn’t really have a problem with this. In fact, it was a pretty sweet deal - I mean, why wouldn’t I want to share a cabin with my boyfriend? It meant no sneaking around, which we probably would’ve tried to do anyway so at least this way it saved us the trouble. And the only other space I’d shared with Nico was my mom’s apartment in Manhattan, which might be bigger than cabin three but it didn’t always feel like it; my room there certainly wasn’t as spacious as the cabin, and so there was plenty of room for two teenage boys to spread out without having to worry about anyone complaining about the mess (well, except for Annabeth when she came to do rounds. Then we got an earful). On top of it all, my dad had told us himself that he didn't mind us being together, and he hadn't tried to kill or even so much as trip Nico over the doorstep since he'd moved in. So we figured we were on pretty solid ground.
Anyway, back to the point I was trying to make - Nico was sitting on the bed, socked feet pulled up underneath him as he read a current issue of TIME Magazine. It was taking him forever, but that’s not because he was only in the seventh grade. It was because he - like every other half-blood child of the greek gods - was dyslexic and had ADHD, things that were useful if you wanted to read ancient greek messages from the gods or stay alive during a battle for your life, but not so useful when you were trying to read a news article and the tiny-print letters kept dancing around the page like they’d had too much to drink.
Most people probably would’ve thought the frown on his face was due to his difficulty with the magazine article, but that wasn’t it. Well, sure, it was a little bit of it - but most of it was the way he’d clashed with Clarisse LaRue today during sword and shield drills, like he did practically every day. I could see his argument with her in the hunch of his shoulders and the creases on his forehead and the way he was biting his lip, worrying the skin with his teeth and it was going to start bleeding if I didn’t do something to interfere, and soon.
“Hey,” I said, taking a break from trying to decide which of the clothes on the floor were dirty and which were clean to sit next to him on the bed and bump shoulders. “Don't let her get to you.”
Nico glanced up at me, still frowning slightly. “Who?”
I rolled my eyes. “Clarisse. You're still thinking about that fight you had this afternoon. You do it practically every day,” I said, reaching over to squeeze one of his arms, “and it's not like she doesn't deserve it, but you don't deserve to let it bother you so much.”
Nico looked at me for a minute, silently, before he finally said, “That's just it. I... don't really remember what we were arguing about.”
I laughed a little at that. “The usual - why should you bother remembering every time you guys argue?” There were only so many insults they could throw back and forth, though the level of vehemence did seem to grow every time. After all, Clarisse didn’t trust Nico and she wasn’t okay with him suddenly being the kid the prophecy was supposedly about. And Nico didn’t like Clarisse because she was a bully who rarely thought about anyone but herself, hot-tempered and easy to set off, just like her father - Ares. I couldn’t really blame him - Clarisse was probably my least-favorite person in camp.
But Nico was shaking his head. “If it happened this afternoon, you'd think I'd still remember it. But I don't. I don't even remember half the stuff I did today.”
“The days do all kind of blur, sometimes,” I offered, but now I was starting to feel a little uneasy. If it was bothering Nico so much, then it might be more than just the tedium of repetition. “What exactly do you mean when you say you can't remember?”
He shrugged. “Just that. I don’t really remember arguing at all. I know it happened… it’s the same with a lot of stuff. I thought maybe I was just tuning things out, but…”
Now it was my turn to frown. “Wait, how long has this been going on?” Why hadn’t he said anything? What if it was some horrible side effect of whatever Medea had given him that had aged him from twelve to sixteen in a matter of hours? Who knew what that stuff had been, or what else it might have done to him?
Okay, I know I was just jumping to conclusions. But the truth was, we didn’t know how Medea had aged Nico, just that she had - and that everything had changed when she’d done it. Honestly, I’ll tell you that I wasn’t all that disappointed about not being the “chosen one” or whatever - prophecies kind of creeped me out and I didn’t like the way they made your life sound pre-ordained, especially when they came true (and they always seemed to, one way or another). And making a decision that would save or destroy Olympus was kind of a big deal - who wanted that sort of responsibility? To tell you the truth, not me.
But not Nico, either. I knew he didn’t put much stock in the gods, and who could blame him? Just like almost every other half-blood I knew, he’d been abandoned by his godly parent and left to fend for himself in the mortal world. But it wasn’t just Hades that had abandoned Nico. When he was so young that he couldn’t even really remember her, his mother had died, which left him and his older sister Bianca doubly alone. They’d been passed from lawyer to lawyer, and somehow they’d spent decades inside a magical hotel (I’ve been there, it’s real), where to them it had seemed only like days - weeks - until they’d finally emerged into a world that had pretty much left them behind half a century ago. Shortly after Grover had located the two of them at a military school and we’d helped them escape certain death (nothing new to a half-blood), Bianca had been swayed by the immortal lifestyle of Artemis’ huntresses and pretty much left Nico behind to start a totally new life of her own. I knew she hadn’t really meant it that way, but that’s what pretty much happened.
And then she’d died on a quest to save Artemis not more than a few days later. Nico had felt completely alone, and I knew he’d blamed me for a long time. He’d even tried to bring his sister back from the dead (obviously it hadn’t worked). He didn’t really feel like he fit in at Camp Half-Blood, and the lack of a cabin dedicated to his father only seemed to underscore that. Being the son of Hades, no one seemed to like or support him much - I guess the rift between his father and the rest of the gods kept most half-bloods from seeing what kind of a person Nico really was: kind, thoughtful, and really damned cute if you managed to catch him at it. (Recently, my brain supplied oh-so-helpfully, he’d also gotten pretty freaking sexy.)
Oh, sure, he could be sullen and bratty and selfish just like anyone else - moreso, probably, because everyone expected him to be that way. He tended to wear all black (and hey, it looked good on him) and his hair was always mussed and he was really good at frowning pretty much all the time. But it was all just an act, and anyone who got close enough to him (like me) knew it. He’d been left behind his whole life, whether it was by his parents or his sister or the half-bloods at camp, and he’d learned not to get too close to people. He’d stopped caring what they’d thought of him - or, at least, he’d tried.
But he’d let me get close to him, and he’d let himself get close to me. And that meant a whole lot. I tried to let him know it as often as possible. I couldn’t name the one reason I fell for Nico; I just liked him and that was good enough for me.
But here I was, thinking long and hard about stupid stuff like that while Nico was sitting next to me and shaking his head again in answer to my question. “I don’t know… a while. A couple of weeks, I guess.”
I stared at him, totally forgetting my reverie. “Weeks? And you didn’t think it might be important to mention it?”
“It wasn’t really obvious!” he pointed out, putting the magazine down, now that he’d obviously given up trying to read the article. “I mean, when you forget things, it’s not like you remember that you forgot them! I just started realizing it a couple days ago, but I think it’s been going on a lot longer that that.”
I sighed, wanting to let him know that I wasn’t really mad at him. But I was worried. “Do you think it’s maybe due to the concussion?” He’d gotten a pretty bad concussion fighting single-handedly against Kronos, and it had taken almost a week of bedrest before Michael Yew (the head of the Apollo Cabin and pretty handy when you need a medic) would let him go through an entire day’s regimen of drills.
“I dunno. Maybe. I guess maybe it started after then. But I feel fine otherwise,” he said. He sounded like he was starting to regret telling me, but I didn’t want him to do that at all because this really was important. Nico didn’t like it when I worried about him, but that didn’t mean he didn’t need me to do it. Someone had to worry about him, after all.
“We should tell Chiron - or at least Michael,” I amended, when Nico started shaking his head after the first four words were out of my mouth. I know he didn’t have a lot of faith in Chiron or Mr. D - after all, they were adults just like all the ones that had left him - but I did. Well, I had faith in Chiron, at least. Mr. D was another story. He wasn’t around much, anyway. The gods were all arguing up a storm (sometimes literally) on Olympus these days. I guessed the news that the prophecy was going to be fulfilled earlier than they’d thought had upset the gods just as much as it had us. I hadn’t heard much other than what Chiron said in offhand comments, but I knew it was getting bad. The late summer thunderstorms that rolled in from the west were more tense and more charged, somehow, than storms usually were. Zeus was not happy.
Well, why should he be? After all, he and Hades had pretty much the biggest grudge between them that two brothers could have. He’d banished his brother to rule the Underworld forever - how did you just get along after that, when one of you was stuck with the dead while your other two brothers ruled the sky and the sea? I didn’t like Hades at all, but sometimes I wondered how much of the way he was, he’d become because of what his brothers had done - even if one of those brothers was my dad.
Sometimes I wondered how much of what Nico had used to be had been because of what his own father and mother and sister had done to him. I mean, he was different now. Something had changed in him, ever since he’d shown up on the fire escape and Mom had given him blue cake on my birthday. And it had kept changing ever since that night, when he’d said he’d liked me and I said I’d liked him and we’d given the whole boyfriends thing a try - and then discovered that we couldn’t imagine living apart ever again. Nico was such a big part of my life now that it was hard to imagine things without him here. Sometimes I wondered if he felt the same way about me. But then all he had to do was push me over onto my back on the bed and kiss me senseless and I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he did.
Sometimes I wondered how much of what Nico was now, was because of me. I wasn’t sure whether that made me feel selfish or stupid, so I tried not to think about it, but sometimes I just couldn’t help it. I’d never asked him, but then I wasn’t sure if he’d even have an answer for me if he’d wanted to give me one. But whatever the reason, I was glad of who he was now. And I wasn’t going to let anything happen to him if it was in my power to stop it. And possibly beyond.
“I don’t need a doctor,” Nico was saying now, scowling softly and I could tell he definitely regretted telling me. “I’m fine.”
“No, you’re not,” I said calmly. “And I really think you should just talk to Michael about it. It can be in private, okay? You don’t have to advertise it to the entire camp.”
He was still looking at me sideways, lips turned down almost in a frown. “What about Chiron?”
I sighed. “I won’t tell him if you don’t want me to,” I said. “Not,” I added, “unless it really is life-threatening. Then you know I’d have to tell.” I leaned in, suddenly wanting to kiss the frown off his lips. I wanted to make the problem just go away, just like I wanted to make all those other things go away - all the fights with Clarisse, all the drills and the weight of the world and the big decision it was now up to Nico to make. I didn’t want Nico to have to face any of it, but at least if he did, he wouldn’t be doing it alone. He had to know that by now.
His lips yielded to mine, and he hummed a little as his fingers fisted in my shirt and he pulled me closer so I had to lean kind of awkwardly across him to keep kissing. But I didn’t really mind the position at all. A couple of minutes later, he kicked the TIME Magazine off the bed and slid down onto his back and pulled me down on top of him; he whispered something against my mouth that sounded an awful lot like, “I know.”
I didn’t know quite which part of what I was trying to do he knew about, but I was starting to suspect it might have been all of it.
Anyhoo~ This is the third installment in my crazy Percy/Nico universe of really long fics. Story 1 is Too Strong A God and Story 2 is The Age of Heroes. I think pretty much everyone here knows that, but just in case. :D; You don't really have to have read the first two fics to figure things out, as this first chapter is actually 90% recap (in the spirit of the books), but it might help, as for the most part Percy's just making references rather than explaining everything. :D;
This one is back to Percy's POV, which should seem more normal. XD; (Also it's rather useful for obfuscation, muahahaha~) We'll start it out at PG-13, and see what happens. Spoilers for pretty much the whole series, since by now I'm rewriting the last book and incorporating a couple aspects of it in the process.
Also, I'm going for this crazy musical theme or something. XD; We'll see if I can stick with it. Finding songs to fit later chapters is easy as anything, but it's hard for the setup!
Okay. With no further ado! Chapter 1~ :D
The Ties That Bind
Chapter 1: Everything Can Change
Everything can change when you least expect it
Can’t change what you can’t control
Gotta learn how to just let go
- Everything Can Change (Spectacular!)
I used to think that Camp Half-Blood was a busy place during the summer months when there were just the normal camp activities going on: archery and sword practice, campers taking turns on the climbing wall that tried to burn you to cinders if you couldn’t scramble up it fast enough. Barbecues and bonfires and singalongs and camp-wide games of capture the flag.
Now I had to admit that I really missed those days. Sure, we still had a lot of those things - there was still archery, sword fighting, and races up the climbing wall. But now there were also field medicine classes taught by the older members of the Apollo cabin, and Pegasus combat flight training taught by yours truly. There were even crash courses in weapons repair taught by Charles Beckendorf, the head of the Hephaestus cabin, whenever he wasn’t busy in the camp forges making as many shields, swords, knives, and spears as possible. Capture the flag had been renamed stop Kronos’ advancing army; it was a much more grim experience than it had used to be.
Silena Beauregard and a couple of kids from the Aphrodite cabin were even holding classes on “How To Look Your Best While Vanquishing Monsters” in the evenings, which I can’t say I thought were overly helpful but maybe that wasn’t the point. There were enough unpleasant, back-breaking things to do during the day; I couldn’t begrudge anyone who wanted to sit down and listen to the most fashion-savvy kids in camp tell them how to beat up dracaenae without breaking a single nail.
After all, we were preparing for a war.
Okay, I guess I’d probably better start at the beginning. Only it’s not really the beginning, because that was a really long time ago now - four years, in fact, back during the summer when I was eleven and I met my first satyr and took my first field trip into the Underworld. Now I was fifteen, and I’d been to the Underworld more times than I cared to recount (at least three). I’d even died once. It hadn’t been pleasant. I’d gotten off on a technicality in the end, but I wasn’t really willing to push my luck a second time. Neither was Nico. And when one of the most important people in your life (read: serious boyfriend), who just so happens to also be the son of Hades, says he’s worried about you dying, you tend to agree with him. It’s just the best choice to make, really.
Of course, Nico was worried about a lot of things these days - not the least of which was the prophecy that a sixteen year-old child of either Zeus, Poseidon, or Hades, was supposed to make some kind of decision that would either preserve the world or end human existence as we knew it. Given that the only living daughter of Zeus (Thalia) had elected to never age past fifteen and the son of Poseidon (being me) wouldn’t turn sixteen until a little less than a year from now, the fact that Nico had gone from being the twelve year-old son of Hades to the sixteen year-old one in a matter of minutes last month had catapulted him into a spotlight I knew for a fact he didn’t want. And it had been wearing him down, little by little. Maybe no one else noticed, but I wasn’t just anyone else.
I was the boy who shared my cabin - and my bed - with Nico di Angelo, and I’d seen enough sides of him in the past two years to notice the cracks in his façade. Nico had this funny way of showing absolutely everything on his face when he thought he was doing just the opposite - or, at least, when you knew what to look for. For example: right now, when he was sitting on the bed next to mine, which he’d appropriated for himself when we’d returned from Boston three weeks ago. It was more to have a space of his own than anything - after all, we slept in the same bed, whichever of ours it was, but Nico hadn’t had a lot of things for himself since I'd met him so I had no problem letting him take up as much room as he liked. After all, there was no one else to claim it - I lived alone in the Poseidon cabin most of the time, except for when my half-brother Tyson, who’s also a Cyclops, decided to stay at camp. But he was currently helping our father out in his forges beneath the sea, so it had been just me in cabin three until Nico moved in.
Now, let me point out that it’s not exactly normal for a kid to stay in a cabin that doesn’t belong to his, shall we say, divine parent. In fact, there are rules pretty much against it and even if there weren't, it would probably have been a pretty glaring faux pas. The gods take their honor pretty seriously, and they tend to get pissed if you don’t respect them. There were twelve cabins at Camp Half-Blood, one for each of the twelve major Olympian gods: Zeus, Hera (mostly for show, since she valued family and marriage and didn’t go around having kids with mortals), Poseidon, Demeter, Ares, Athena, Apollo, Artemis (again for show; she doesn’t have any children, being a maiden goddess), Hephaestus, Aphrodite, Hermes, and Dionysus. If you didn’t know which branch of the tangled family tree your apple fell from, you stayed in cabin eleven with the Hermes kids, since their father was the patron god of travelers.
You might notice there was no cabin for - that’s right: Hades. Nico had been sleeping on the floor of the Hermes cabin since he’d arrived at Camp Half-Blood two years ago, though admittedly he hadn’t always spent a whole lot of his time at camp. But ever since we’d gotten back from the rather huge ordeal that had turned Nico into the sixteen year-old star of the prophecy, he’d announced that (contrary to the aforementioned camp rules, etc.) he would be staying in my cabin. Chiron, the camp activities director, hadn’t really been in a position to argue with him about it at the time.
Naturally, I didn’t really have a problem with this. In fact, it was a pretty sweet deal - I mean, why wouldn’t I want to share a cabin with my boyfriend? It meant no sneaking around, which we probably would’ve tried to do anyway so at least this way it saved us the trouble. And the only other space I’d shared with Nico was my mom’s apartment in Manhattan, which might be bigger than cabin three but it didn’t always feel like it; my room there certainly wasn’t as spacious as the cabin, and so there was plenty of room for two teenage boys to spread out without having to worry about anyone complaining about the mess (well, except for Annabeth when she came to do rounds. Then we got an earful). On top of it all, my dad had told us himself that he didn't mind us being together, and he hadn't tried to kill or even so much as trip Nico over the doorstep since he'd moved in. So we figured we were on pretty solid ground.
Anyway, back to the point I was trying to make - Nico was sitting on the bed, socked feet pulled up underneath him as he read a current issue of TIME Magazine. It was taking him forever, but that’s not because he was only in the seventh grade. It was because he - like every other half-blood child of the greek gods - was dyslexic and had ADHD, things that were useful if you wanted to read ancient greek messages from the gods or stay alive during a battle for your life, but not so useful when you were trying to read a news article and the tiny-print letters kept dancing around the page like they’d had too much to drink.
Most people probably would’ve thought the frown on his face was due to his difficulty with the magazine article, but that wasn’t it. Well, sure, it was a little bit of it - but most of it was the way he’d clashed with Clarisse LaRue today during sword and shield drills, like he did practically every day. I could see his argument with her in the hunch of his shoulders and the creases on his forehead and the way he was biting his lip, worrying the skin with his teeth and it was going to start bleeding if I didn’t do something to interfere, and soon.
“Hey,” I said, taking a break from trying to decide which of the clothes on the floor were dirty and which were clean to sit next to him on the bed and bump shoulders. “Don't let her get to you.”
Nico glanced up at me, still frowning slightly. “Who?”
I rolled my eyes. “Clarisse. You're still thinking about that fight you had this afternoon. You do it practically every day,” I said, reaching over to squeeze one of his arms, “and it's not like she doesn't deserve it, but you don't deserve to let it bother you so much.”
Nico looked at me for a minute, silently, before he finally said, “That's just it. I... don't really remember what we were arguing about.”
I laughed a little at that. “The usual - why should you bother remembering every time you guys argue?” There were only so many insults they could throw back and forth, though the level of vehemence did seem to grow every time. After all, Clarisse didn’t trust Nico and she wasn’t okay with him suddenly being the kid the prophecy was supposedly about. And Nico didn’t like Clarisse because she was a bully who rarely thought about anyone but herself, hot-tempered and easy to set off, just like her father - Ares. I couldn’t really blame him - Clarisse was probably my least-favorite person in camp.
But Nico was shaking his head. “If it happened this afternoon, you'd think I'd still remember it. But I don't. I don't even remember half the stuff I did today.”
“The days do all kind of blur, sometimes,” I offered, but now I was starting to feel a little uneasy. If it was bothering Nico so much, then it might be more than just the tedium of repetition. “What exactly do you mean when you say you can't remember?”
He shrugged. “Just that. I don’t really remember arguing at all. I know it happened… it’s the same with a lot of stuff. I thought maybe I was just tuning things out, but…”
Now it was my turn to frown. “Wait, how long has this been going on?” Why hadn’t he said anything? What if it was some horrible side effect of whatever Medea had given him that had aged him from twelve to sixteen in a matter of hours? Who knew what that stuff had been, or what else it might have done to him?
Okay, I know I was just jumping to conclusions. But the truth was, we didn’t know how Medea had aged Nico, just that she had - and that everything had changed when she’d done it. Honestly, I’ll tell you that I wasn’t all that disappointed about not being the “chosen one” or whatever - prophecies kind of creeped me out and I didn’t like the way they made your life sound pre-ordained, especially when they came true (and they always seemed to, one way or another). And making a decision that would save or destroy Olympus was kind of a big deal - who wanted that sort of responsibility? To tell you the truth, not me.
But not Nico, either. I knew he didn’t put much stock in the gods, and who could blame him? Just like almost every other half-blood I knew, he’d been abandoned by his godly parent and left to fend for himself in the mortal world. But it wasn’t just Hades that had abandoned Nico. When he was so young that he couldn’t even really remember her, his mother had died, which left him and his older sister Bianca doubly alone. They’d been passed from lawyer to lawyer, and somehow they’d spent decades inside a magical hotel (I’ve been there, it’s real), where to them it had seemed only like days - weeks - until they’d finally emerged into a world that had pretty much left them behind half a century ago. Shortly after Grover had located the two of them at a military school and we’d helped them escape certain death (nothing new to a half-blood), Bianca had been swayed by the immortal lifestyle of Artemis’ huntresses and pretty much left Nico behind to start a totally new life of her own. I knew she hadn’t really meant it that way, but that’s what pretty much happened.
And then she’d died on a quest to save Artemis not more than a few days later. Nico had felt completely alone, and I knew he’d blamed me for a long time. He’d even tried to bring his sister back from the dead (obviously it hadn’t worked). He didn’t really feel like he fit in at Camp Half-Blood, and the lack of a cabin dedicated to his father only seemed to underscore that. Being the son of Hades, no one seemed to like or support him much - I guess the rift between his father and the rest of the gods kept most half-bloods from seeing what kind of a person Nico really was: kind, thoughtful, and really damned cute if you managed to catch him at it. (Recently, my brain supplied oh-so-helpfully, he’d also gotten pretty freaking sexy.)
Oh, sure, he could be sullen and bratty and selfish just like anyone else - moreso, probably, because everyone expected him to be that way. He tended to wear all black (and hey, it looked good on him) and his hair was always mussed and he was really good at frowning pretty much all the time. But it was all just an act, and anyone who got close enough to him (like me) knew it. He’d been left behind his whole life, whether it was by his parents or his sister or the half-bloods at camp, and he’d learned not to get too close to people. He’d stopped caring what they’d thought of him - or, at least, he’d tried.
But he’d let me get close to him, and he’d let himself get close to me. And that meant a whole lot. I tried to let him know it as often as possible. I couldn’t name the one reason I fell for Nico; I just liked him and that was good enough for me.
But here I was, thinking long and hard about stupid stuff like that while Nico was sitting next to me and shaking his head again in answer to my question. “I don’t know… a while. A couple of weeks, I guess.”
I stared at him, totally forgetting my reverie. “Weeks? And you didn’t think it might be important to mention it?”
“It wasn’t really obvious!” he pointed out, putting the magazine down, now that he’d obviously given up trying to read the article. “I mean, when you forget things, it’s not like you remember that you forgot them! I just started realizing it a couple days ago, but I think it’s been going on a lot longer that that.”
I sighed, wanting to let him know that I wasn’t really mad at him. But I was worried. “Do you think it’s maybe due to the concussion?” He’d gotten a pretty bad concussion fighting single-handedly against Kronos, and it had taken almost a week of bedrest before Michael Yew (the head of the Apollo Cabin and pretty handy when you need a medic) would let him go through an entire day’s regimen of drills.
“I dunno. Maybe. I guess maybe it started after then. But I feel fine otherwise,” he said. He sounded like he was starting to regret telling me, but I didn’t want him to do that at all because this really was important. Nico didn’t like it when I worried about him, but that didn’t mean he didn’t need me to do it. Someone had to worry about him, after all.
“We should tell Chiron - or at least Michael,” I amended, when Nico started shaking his head after the first four words were out of my mouth. I know he didn’t have a lot of faith in Chiron or Mr. D - after all, they were adults just like all the ones that had left him - but I did. Well, I had faith in Chiron, at least. Mr. D was another story. He wasn’t around much, anyway. The gods were all arguing up a storm (sometimes literally) on Olympus these days. I guessed the news that the prophecy was going to be fulfilled earlier than they’d thought had upset the gods just as much as it had us. I hadn’t heard much other than what Chiron said in offhand comments, but I knew it was getting bad. The late summer thunderstorms that rolled in from the west were more tense and more charged, somehow, than storms usually were. Zeus was not happy.
Well, why should he be? After all, he and Hades had pretty much the biggest grudge between them that two brothers could have. He’d banished his brother to rule the Underworld forever - how did you just get along after that, when one of you was stuck with the dead while your other two brothers ruled the sky and the sea? I didn’t like Hades at all, but sometimes I wondered how much of the way he was, he’d become because of what his brothers had done - even if one of those brothers was my dad.
Sometimes I wondered how much of what Nico had used to be had been because of what his own father and mother and sister had done to him. I mean, he was different now. Something had changed in him, ever since he’d shown up on the fire escape and Mom had given him blue cake on my birthday. And it had kept changing ever since that night, when he’d said he’d liked me and I said I’d liked him and we’d given the whole boyfriends thing a try - and then discovered that we couldn’t imagine living apart ever again. Nico was such a big part of my life now that it was hard to imagine things without him here. Sometimes I wondered if he felt the same way about me. But then all he had to do was push me over onto my back on the bed and kiss me senseless and I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he did.
Sometimes I wondered how much of what Nico was now, was because of me. I wasn’t sure whether that made me feel selfish or stupid, so I tried not to think about it, but sometimes I just couldn’t help it. I’d never asked him, but then I wasn’t sure if he’d even have an answer for me if he’d wanted to give me one. But whatever the reason, I was glad of who he was now. And I wasn’t going to let anything happen to him if it was in my power to stop it. And possibly beyond.
“I don’t need a doctor,” Nico was saying now, scowling softly and I could tell he definitely regretted telling me. “I’m fine.”
“No, you’re not,” I said calmly. “And I really think you should just talk to Michael about it. It can be in private, okay? You don’t have to advertise it to the entire camp.”
He was still looking at me sideways, lips turned down almost in a frown. “What about Chiron?”
I sighed. “I won’t tell him if you don’t want me to,” I said. “Not,” I added, “unless it really is life-threatening. Then you know I’d have to tell.” I leaned in, suddenly wanting to kiss the frown off his lips. I wanted to make the problem just go away, just like I wanted to make all those other things go away - all the fights with Clarisse, all the drills and the weight of the world and the big decision it was now up to Nico to make. I didn’t want Nico to have to face any of it, but at least if he did, he wouldn’t be doing it alone. He had to know that by now.
His lips yielded to mine, and he hummed a little as his fingers fisted in my shirt and he pulled me closer so I had to lean kind of awkwardly across him to keep kissing. But I didn’t really mind the position at all. A couple of minutes later, he kicked the TIME Magazine off the bed and slid down onto his back and pulled me down on top of him; he whispered something against my mouth that sounded an awful lot like, “I know.”
I didn’t know quite which part of what I was trying to do he knew about, but I was starting to suspect it might have been all of it.