fic: Eye Of The Beholder [PJO, Nico/Rachel, PG-13]
Title: Eye Of The Beholder
Characters/Pairings: Nico/Rachel
Rating: PG-13
Summary: In Nico's opinion, Rachel Dare owns the ugliest chair in the universe. But he supposes it's not all that bad.
Notes: For aimmyarrowshigh who deserves all the fluff and fic today.
Eye Of The Beholder
Rachel’s favorite armchair is the most hideous piece of furniture Nico has ever seen. He doesn’t know where she got it - probably some garage sale in Alphabet City or a second-hand shop in Willamsburg when she went through her brief hipster stage during college (oh who is he kidding, she’s still a hipster) - but he’s never seen anything quite like it and he’s seen a lot of hideous chairs and couches. The Underworld hasn’t updated its furniture since the Black Death and his father has an incredibly morbid sense of style.
“Oh, but Nico, that end table is just darling!” Alecto had cooed when he complained for the millionth time about the furnishing in his room. “I collected the femurs from the corpses myself.”
Talk about nightmares forever.
But Rachel’s armchair is something entirely mortal and impossibly ridiculous.
Depending on the time of day, it’s either the color of mashed up peas or yellow pus, and it’s covered in disgustingly bright pink flowers and some orange blob that might be a bird, he honestly can’t tell. It’s overly large and wide, like it was made for someone three times Rachel’s size, and it’s shaped like something that escaped from a fun house. Rachel says he gets this expression on his face whenever he looks at the chair without her in it, like he wants to throw up all over the place. He snapped back once that he’d throw up on the chair, but it looked like someone had done it already.
Even if it’s hideous, at least the chair is comfortable. It’s Rachel’s favorite chair to read in. She loves hooking her legs over the side to give herself more room, and she always has a stack of books on floor so she has a visual reminder to get through her to-read pile before buying more books. And the seat’s big enough that she can pull him down and share it comfortably with him, if she wants to (and she usually does).
For all that he hates that damn chair, Nico rather likes reading with Rachel in it. The intimacy that it offers is different from the sort they engage in in their bedroom - not that two don’t collide every so often. Nico’s made it a point to go down on Rachel in the chair as often as he can because seeing her long, bare legs dangling over one of the chair’s arms riles him up like nothing else.
But when they read together, legs tangled over the edges, arms all akimbo and her back to his chest, he can feel the vibration of her heart beat and the tremble of her laughter when she comes across something particularly witty. There’s the warmth of her body through her various sweaters and paint flecked tank tops that keeps him warm better than any of her blankets, and he can count each freckle on her cheek and down the side of her neck when she falls asleep on his shoulder, book dangling loosely in her hand. It makes Nico feel homey, and that’s not something he gets to experience a lot.
So yeah, her chair is uglier than a Minotaur’s backside and sucks big time, but - like most things in his life - when Rachel Dare’s in it, it’s not all that bad.