Fic: The Children of the Moneywort Tree [Percy Jackson and the Olympians][1/4]

[antistar_e]

11. I didn't want to fail at love like our parents.
12. You made the nomad in me build a house and stay.
- 34 excuses for why we failed at love, warsan shire

Nico's sitting in the middle of the intersection with his blinker going steadily and his elbow propped against the window, smothering a yawn and trying to make a left turn onto Lysimachia Dr., when it happens again.

No, he thinks, a hot, thick surge of fear bubbling through his gut, but it comes upon him so suddenly there's nothing he can do: a sinking feeling, like nodding off in front of the TV in the early evening, a falling sensation that starts in his chest and weighs down his limbs. He clutches compulsively, hands tightening over the steering wheel like he's clinging to the side of a cliff, but as he watches, his fingers go transparent right in front of his eyes.

The world starts to fizz away at the corners, like static on a badly-tuned radio station.

No! he thinks.

And then --

"Dad!" shrieks Holly, and Nico jolts, coming back to himself so suddenly his ears pop with the pressure.

Everything processes at once, shutter-fast: the feeling of the steering wheel slipping from his hands, the movement of the car underneath them as they breech into oncoming traffic, and headlights, too too too close!

Nico flings his arm out, pressing Holly back into her seat just as metal crunches into metal.

Sound explodes inwards as the glass on the passenger side shatters with the impact, sprays of bright light falling into the interior of the car, and Holly screams and Nico's entire world narrows down to that sound. The full extent of his thought process immediately becomes, Holly is scared, and Holly needs to not be scared, and then there are shadows everywhere, ballooning out to form a cushion between her body and the console. Their seat belts do the rest, catching them in a chokehold as their bodies leap forward to meet them.

And then.

Silence.

No. Not quite. The car engine's still running, and Nico spiders his fingers over the dashboard to feel the hum of it under him.

He turns to Holly. "Are you all right?" he gets out, still with one hand flat to her chest.

She swallows compulsively, her eyes enormous and as dark-colored as a lonely room, and her face is pale with shock, but she nods. Nico looks her over anyway, leaning across the seat to pull her arms forward and check them for scratches, but the shadows are gone and they did their work well. She won't even bruise. "Lean your head forward," he murmurs, and when she obeys, he ruffles her hair to shake the glass out of it.

Outside, where sounds are just starting to filter in, a car door slams and a voice calls out shakily, "Hello? Is everyone all right over there?"

That'd be the other driver, the one who hit them, and Nico calls back the affirmative. "Does anyone need an ambulance?" he wants to know.

"I'm -- I'm good, I think. but I'll call the cops. We need to c-clear this out of the road, right?"

Nico unbuckles his seat belt. The movement makes pain flare all along his sternum, and he hisses: he'll have an incredible L-shaped bruise tomorrow. He checks again to make sure Holly's all right, and then he gets out. The other car is a beige-colored SUV, sitting up on the median with a dented hood, but to be honest, it's Nico's car that took the brunt of the damage, being more of the Toyota tin-can variety and not built like a brick. The other driver is a few years younger than he is, with out-of-state plates that suggests to Nico's he's here for university, and he doesn't seem to remember the procedure for car accidents anymore than Nico does. His eyes keep skittering to Holly's shattered window, the dark duck of her head.

"She's fine," Nico says, as Holly's fingers appear and flick a bit of glass out onto the street.

"You turned right in front of me, dude, I -- I couldn't --"

"Yeah, sorry about that," Nico says vaguely, because he refuses to think about what just happened. "The sun was in my eyes. That's a horrible intersection to try to make a left turn from."

The cops arrive, followed by a road crew to sweep the glass away.

"Do you have insurance?" one asks, once Nico delivers his version of what happened and hands over his license. It's state-issued, has his real name on it, and says his date of birth was 1997, and the cop writes the details down without the slightest flicker of suspicion.

"Uh, yeah. I mean, my wife does -- hang on --" At a loss, he goes to the passenger side, and when the crumpled door doesn't open, he sighs and leans in through the window to pop open the glove department and go looking for their insurance papers. Holly watches him, and he gives her knee a shake and goes, "hey, stinker," and she makes a face at him.

"This part is boring," she informs him.

"Yeah," Nico goes with an indescribable kind of relief. If Holly's already bored, then she's definitely fine. "That's kind of how it goes. Something exciting happens, and then you have to fill out paperwork on it."

He hands over his insurance information. The cop holds it up to the light, squinting. "This your wife?"

"Yeah," Nico sticks his hands in his pockets.

"Her last name's different from yours."

Nico's eyebrows hike a little. "She kept her maiden name," he explains, carefully, confused as to why that even needs to be spelled out. The cop grunts, and sets out on filling out that onto the accident report. There's no place to mark that the insurance is filled out in Hazel's name and her husband is covered to drive the car despite the different-looking names, so the cop makes a note of it off to the side. Finally, Nico gets all of that back, and a ticket for reckless driving that he looks at and then resolutely decides to not think about yet, and the cop flicks a look at their car. "It still run, or do you need a tow?"

"It's fine," Nico says, itching to get out of here.

The cop casts another dubious glance at the dent in the passenger side, then visibly decides not to give a shit. It helps that Nico's got that kind of face: he never grew out of his lanky, teenage slouch and his permanent sneer of a mouth, and his bruised, sleep-smudged eyes that make people want to be done with him before they even start. Nico has never stopped looking like someone you wouldn't trust with your kids.

He gets back into the car. It starts when it turns the keys in the ignition, and Holly says, "Dad?"

"Yeah?"

"What's lysa -- lysee -- ly --"

"Lysimachia?" Nico flicks a look at the street sign, which wobbles back and forth under the force of a wind that sweeps through the interior, lifting Holly's hair and stirring the ticket in Nico's hand. "You know, I'm not sure exactly. I think it's a type of plant. You can ask Katie when we get home."

"Okay," she goes, agreeable, and settles herself against the bulge the passenger door now makes into her space.

Nico drags a deep breath into his lungs, and exhales gustily, glancing sidelong at her like she's a touchstone and then to the door and then he lifts his hand off the steering wheel and looks at it. His skin stretches over the bony knobs of his knuckles, perfectly opaque.

That's never happened while you were awake before, says a tiny voice in the back of Nico's brain. It sounds like Bianca, and she sounds worried.

-

At 5:30, Nico gets back into the newly-minted wreck of a car with a sympathetic pat to the dashboard, and goes to pick up Hazel from work.

Her last appointment of the day is some Internet start-up downtown, so Nico rolls down the driver's side window to match the broken one on the other and lets the wind rush over his face as the scenery changes from the residential to the storefronts. Downtown built up around what used to be a suburb of a neighboring city, and there are still some visible hold-outs; quaint little houses tucked in between chrome-faced florists and for-rent office spaces.

When Nico pulls up to the curb, he has no trouble spotting Hazel through the glass by sheer virtue of the fact she's the only one inside wearing a suit jacket. The door's propped open onto the sidewalk, so Nico steps inside.

Like most Internet companies Nico knows, this one's taken minimalism to a whole new level: the floors are cement with planks connecting the unfinished doorways. The walls are bare and unpainted with the plaster marks still showing. The only functional furniture in the room are the high-top bar tables, the extension cords snaking around each work station, and fans that beat the heat around uselessly. Hazel's standing in the middle of it, talking to a bald-headed girl in a frayed CWS shirt. It takes her a moment to notice him, and her eyes crinkle up in greeting, a split second before they slide past him and see the car. The expression freezes and cracks.

"Excuse me," she says to the business owner, stepping around her.

"Nico, what happened to the car?" she goes, completely horrified, and her widening eyes tell him she's jumping to the worst conclusion: a manticore or the fist of a giant.

He shrugs. "A left turn on Lysimachia," and watches her relax fractionally, easing back onto her heels. The accident wasn't Olympian in nature.

"That's a horrible intersection to try to make a left turn from, are you crazy? No, wait, are you all right?" She grabs his collar and pulls, revealing the red mark standing out against the pale of his throat. Another thought occurs to her, and her fists clench, pulling the fabric taut. "Holly?"

"We're fine," Nico reassures her. "Holly isn't even scratched." He quirks his mouth at her. "The car is a different story."

"I don't care about the car," Hazel dismisses that thought with a flick of her hand.

"Can you fix it?" he wants to know.

This earns him an unimpressed look, a tilt of Hazel's head and a wry pull to her mouth, an expression so familiar to Nico he thinks it's ingrained onto his eyes, so he'd recognize it even if he took a dive in the river Lethe and forgot his own name by tomorrow; he'd still know this look. "Of course I can fix it. It's metal, isn't it? Although," she amends. "We'll have to get somebody else to fix the glass. I can't do glass -- it's made with sand and fire, so it's more a Hephaestus thing, all I get is this … ringing every time I try to work with it. Hey, Lydia!" she turns her head. "Is that everything you needed?"

"Yeah!" goes the bald-headed girl, lifting a hand in acknowledgement from where she's already become ensconced behind a screen. "Girl, thanks for all your help today, you're a star!"

"Oh, please," Hazel hikes the strap of her bag up higher on her shoulder.

"No, really, hang on -- Tracy, hand me -- thank you," and Lydia approaches them, a palette of memo stickers in her hand, like the kind Nico remembers from the military school he attended in Maine that one year, where stickers were the only reward system, unless you count being allowed to talk at lunch a reward, because they lost those privileges so frequently it kind of felt that way. She sticks a gold star to Hazel's cheek.

"There," she says, and Nico admits it looks good there, where it catches at the gold in Hazel's eyes, the streaks of it in her hair. "Thanks again, Ms. Levesque."

And, because it just feels like the thing to do, Nico grandly offers her his arm, which she takes with a roll of her eyes, but she let him escort her out the door with dramatic flourish.

“How was your day?”

“Less destructive than yours,” Hazel says tartly. “Although! I did run into Annabeth.”

“Oh." That sobers him up a little. "Which version?”

“Younger,” says Hazel grimly.

"I'm sorry."

Her hand squeezes his elbow in acknowledgement.

Out on the curb, he unlocks the car and then stands back, letting Hazel climb in through the driver's side.

"You look nice today," he tells her, and cringes as soon as it's out of his mouth, because of course he has to say it when she's rumpled from shifting herself and her bag over the center console and arranging herself, pulling the hem of her pencil skirt down her thighs.

She shoots him a sardonic look, and he makes a helpless gesture back at her, like, you know what I mean! She's got her hair pulled back, a few coils pulled loose to frame her face, and she's wearing her nicest top under her jacket: the silky purple blouse that Piper found for her at a sample sale in New York City a couple years ago. And because she's still the politest person he knows -- and this is taking into consideration that the majority of Nico's authority figures in childhood were bellhops -- she says, "Thank you," even as she's giving him a serious side-eye.

"Are you going to wear that?"

Nico looks down at himself, and finds nothing out of the ordinary. "This is what I usually wear," he says.

She blinks at him, and then, with a note of incredulity to her voice, "Nico, parent-teacher conferences."

"Oh, di immortales!" Nico almost hits the brakes and remembers himself at the last moment. He settles for scraping his hands through his hair and running them over the steering wheel, a nervous tic. "That's tonight?"

"Yes," Hazel sighs.

"It's a Thursday! Who in Hades schedules anything important on a Thursday?"

"Teachers," his sister says patiently. "For parent-teacher conferences."

"I do need to change, don't I?" It would really only be a matter of slipping himself sideways through a patch of shadow underneath the elementary school awning, and pulling on something that looks less like … well, less like he'd been in a car accident today, but there's something unsettled shifting around in his stomach, something that says if he tries to shadow-travel right now, something worse is going to happen than falling asleep at the wheel.

"Never mind, but you're going to need to turn around, since this isn't the way to the school. And for gods' sake, don't take the left turn onto Lysimachia, go around and take the roundabout."

"Yes, dear," says Nico, feigning meekness, and she rolls her eyes so hard the whites show, but she's grinning.

When they reach the school, Nico slips into the office to borrow their phone so he can call Katie and ask her to keep an eye on Holly until they get back, since he'd been anticipating just picking up Hazel and going straight home.

"I know. She told me already," Katie sounds amused. "I love how she remembered and you didn't. A+ parenting, Nico di Angelo."

"Oh, gods, you're fired from life," Nico mutters, and hangs up.

This is the third parent-teacher conference that Nico and Hazel have attended at this school, and when Holly's homeroom teacher introduces himself to them and invites them to sit with him in a circle on the rug like the students do -- which they do with varying degrees of awkwardness, it's pretty hilarious and Nico definitely would have come out just for this -- he's surprised to realize that he's a familiar face, someone Nico's seen before.

It's … unsettling, how much that unsettles him.

Parent-teacher conferences are still a relatively new concept to them. When Holly was in the first grade and brought home the first summons to one, Nico legitimately had to call up Sally Jackson and ask her what they were and if it was something to be worried about, because Hazel had gone to that freaky segregated school and Nico … well, Nico. Sally had laughed at them, not unkindly, and said that yes, of course, parent-teacher conferences were fine and a perfectly normal thing. They were just a way for teachers and parents to size each other up like jackals, trying to determine which one was more likely to screw up a child's development.

That's not funny, Nico had said into the phone, while Hazel made various wide-eyed faces at him. You're not funny, and Sally laughed harder.

When they meet the teacher one-on-one, Nico doesn't realize just how preoccupied he actually is until Hazel's sharp elbow deliberately finds his ribs. He jumps guiltily, because, oh, right, now would be an ideal time to convincingly play-act the husband.

Casually, he reclines, stretching an arm across the back of Hazel's chair; she relaxes into the touch, seemingly unconscious. Holly's teacher narrows his eyes at them, squinting like he's trying to place Holly in one of their faces.

" -- a delight to have," he's saying. "And I personally have noticed that Holly has a very caring personality. Other students aren't afraid to come to her for help, and in my experience, that's a hallmark of future success."

"Is she …" Hazel starts, and twists the ring on her finger nervously. "Does she get distracted at all, during lessons? Like, have you noticed her constantly needing to shift focus, or having trouble concentrating?"

"Not that I've noticed," the teacher says easily, and then, because he doesn't need it spelled out, "Do you think she might be attention deficit?"

"We both have it," says Nico quietly, and the teacher's eyes jump to his, startled, because it's the first time he's spoken. The pen drops from his fingers like it jumped, and he quickly picks it back up again. "We're both ADHD," and Hazel nods. "It runs in families."

"Holly hasn't displayed any such markers in my classroom," the teacher assures them. “But sometimes it takes awhile to manifest itself. I’ll keep an eye out, Mr. and Mrs. --“ he glances down at the spreadsheet on his tablet, and corrects himself. “… er, Mr. di Angelo and Ms. Levesque. It says here that you’re an accountant?”

This last is directed at Hazel, who straightens her shoulders unconsciously.

“Yes,” she says. “I’m a financial manager for local businesses, but I most closely work with area entrepreneurs and their start-ups; I counsel them on fiscal forecasting and their ad revenue,” she gestures. “So and so forth. Tax season is a very busy time of year for me,” she finishes, wry, and Nico smiles to himself, leaning their shoulders together.

It’s their inside joke, that accounting is a career field she probably has an unfair advantage in -- after all, she’s the daughter of Pluto, the god of wealth and riches, and 75% of the world’s wealth is electronic these days. Nico jokes that she’s going to start rearranging bank accounts in her sleep and cause a world crisis.

Don’t joke, Hazel groaned. It was bad enough when I created cursed jewels when I was upset.

When the teacher flicks his eyes to Nico expectantly, it’s all Nico can do to keep the sarcasm out of his voice. “I’m a greengrocer.”

“Ah,” says the teacher, and Hazel’s elbow makes a shallow dig for Nico’s ribs again.

“I have a very flexible schedule, which allows me to finish with the day’s work in time to pick Holly up from school,” he amends.

“Well, one of the things that shows very clearly in Holly’s interactions with her classmates is just how supportive her home environment must be,” the teacher says, smiling at them. The timer on his desk rings, and they rise in unison, shaking hands and saying farewell.

-

This can all be found on official record: Nico di Angelo, born in 1997 in the state of Nevada and adopted by Sally Jackson and Paul Blofis at age fourteen, has a current home address of 1740B Moneywort Ave. He and his wife, Hazel Levesque, who was supposedly born in 1998 in the state of California but whose record seems as strangely spotty as her husband’s, have lived there since the birth of their daughter, Holly, who is now in the third grade.

What official record doesn’t show is this:

1740 Moneywort Ave is a split house about three-quarters of the way down a very steep hill. It's the kind of hill that kids break their necks trying to skateboard down without helmets, the kind car engines have to scream their way up with tremendous effort, the kind they always skid down when the roads are rain-slick.

The house sits in the shade of an enormous silver dollar gum tree, which has far outgrown the property size. Its roots are infiltrating the foundation, creating huge sinkholes in the yard where rainwater collects and turns boggy. Given that the erosion of the hill’s loose soil is threatening all the neighbors' houses, most people are astonished that the house hasn’t washed away in a heavy rain yet.

Nico thinks it’s more a matter of knowing the right demigod.

Katie Gardener owns the place, and she rents out the second floor to them, because demigods stick together, and the gum tree’s no threat to them when she’s around. She lives downstairs in 1740A, which has nearly been entirely swallowed by the hill, and there’s a sign on her door that says in cheerful bubble letters: “Ring Bell. If No One Answers, Pull Weeds.”

Holly must have been waiting by the window, because when they bump their way into the driveway (it’s cracked unevenly in places -- again, the roots) she flings open the door and comes running out to meet them in her footie pajamas.

“Did you like him? Was he nice to you?” she demands anxiously. And, “Hi, Mom! Woah, when did you get a sticker!”

“I got it at work, for a job well done,” Hazel replies, bending in order to accept a hug from Holly, who pokes at the sticker on her cheek and smooths it down where it was starting to peel up. Nico picks up Hazel's bag and slings it over his shoulder. He waves a hand in thanks to Katie, who waves back and shuts her door.

“-- and yes, he was very nice,” Hazel’s saying, taking Holly by the shoulders, spinning her around and giving her a little push towards the stairs. “Did you know what he said to us?”

“What?” Holly says excitedly.

“He says that if you keep doing as well as you’ve been doing on your spelling tests, it’s very likely you’re going to pass with an A+!”

The staircase up to their front door is rusty, with cheap whitewash that flecks off onto their hands as they climb; their feet have rubbed marks into the paint to make a very clear left-right-left outline that they repeat unconsciously each time, Holly in the lead, Hazel’s bushy head following.

Holly’s still talking as they let them into the house, and Hazel looks back.

She frowns. “Nico?”

Nico surfaces with a gasp, his ears popping like he’d crossed a mountain to get here, still at the bottom of the steps. He wavers, unsteady on his feet, and the staircase jolts a little in his grip as Hazel lurches in his direction with a sharp cry of "Nico!", like she’s going to try to catch him.

“I’m fine!” Nico says quickly. “I’m just -- I’m dizzy, I think I might have hit my head in the accident today.”

She pauses uncertainly. Holly’s watching, too, and that steadies Nico even more.

He gets himself under control. “You two go on ahead. I’m going to catch my breath out here.”

“Are you sure? You looked --“ Her mouth makes a funny shape. “You got weirdly translucent, like papery, like someone squirted you with a squirt bottle.”

“Well, that’s charming. How come with strangers it’s all, ‘oh, yeah, I’m an entrepreneur’s guardian angel’ and with me, it’s ‘oh, you look like wet paper’?”

“Yeah, you’re fine,” Hazel says dryly, but she lingers for a beat on the top step, before herding Holly inside.

Nico sinks down, leaning his forehead against the railing. He presses a hand flat to his chest, which aches like it’d been stretched like elastic. He studies himself in the blueish light coming from Katie’s porch light, but he’s completely opaque again.

He breathes in and out, head tilted up to the cloudless sky, and allows the fear to bubble up inside of him.

-

It started four months ago, right after the Winter Solstice. He was trying to do something ridiculously mundane, he remembers, like run Hazel her lunch or something -- he slipped sideways through shadows, and then immediately everything went wrong. It felt sticky, tacky, clinging to him like the residue of an adhesive, like he wasn’t going anywhere at all, and for the very first time, Nico wondered if maybe he could get caught in that in-between place, trapped in darkness forever.

But he went through, and managed to shake it off, thinking he was just too tired to be shadow-traveling.

And … well, you know what they say about denial, but Nico had always felt at home in the shadows. They whisper to him, they tell him what’s behind closed doors and behind people’s backs. They warn him about pitfalls and traps, and they let him teleport between them. Nico’s been like this since he was ten years old, and to lose control now feels a lot like he’s got sea legs that are collapsing under him. It's like drowning must feel like to Percy -- impossible.

Except that’s exactly what’s been happening: when he’s least expecting it and thus is the least prepared to defend himself, Nico’s been … slipping away.

There’s no other word for it. It’s like a window cling that’s lost its stick, like rain sliding in droplets down a window, like bones sinking into earth.

It’s never happened while he was awake, though. And then it happened twice, and once, Holly almost got hurt because of it.

That. Nico can’t accept that.

He’s still thinking about it in the morning, while he’s standing in front of the window and probing absently at the places on his chest that haven't quite blossomed into full, impressive plum colors. The coffee has almost finished percolating when something clatters loudly in the living room and he startles.

“-- ow! Holy hellhounds, that wasn’t there before, what the hell.”

Nico relaxes back onto his heels and smiles to himself, turning away from the window to fetch a second mug from its hook above the sink, this one with a chipped lip and the school crest for Goode High School printed on the side. Outside, the slate-grey sky is starting to lighten with dawn, and somewhere, the birds are singing in anticipation.

He pours coffee into each mug and holds the second one out just as Percy appears in the doorway, hopping on one foot with his knee crooked up to his chest so he can inspect the red mark on his shin.

“Hey, Nico!” he says, and then immediately shushes himself when he notices the time. The girls are still asleep.

“Caffeine?” Nico offers.

“You are a hero among heroes,” Percy says happily, taking the mug from him and turning towards the fridge. “Is creamer still on the second shelf?”

“Third. Holly’s got some … experiment of some sort on the second shelf, I didn’t ask. Just … don’t sniff it, whatever you do.”

“You know,” says Percy when he surfaces. His hair’s long and knotted on one side of his head, tucked behind his ear like he’s forgotten it’s there, and his clothes are ragged, unwashed, but not -- as far as Nico’s able to tell in the predawn -- torn or bloody anywhere. He would guess Percy’s about seventeen today. “You’d think giving hyper kids caffeine would be a bad idea, but it really isn’t. Stimulants help us focus. Sometimes. Depending on our levels of medication, I guess.”

“That sounds dodgy, out of context,” and Percy tilts his mug at him, like, point.

They sip at the coffee in silence for a moment. Outside, somebody’s car heroically tackles the incline, a heavy whine that persists for several long seconds.

“Heading to work?” Percy asks, flicking him a sideways look.

“Yup,” Nico agrees. Then, “Percy, what’s the oldest you’ve ever seen me?”

“Nico,” Percy fires back, not in the least bit caught off guard by the question. Nico wonders if he warned himself it was coming. “What’s the oldest you’ve ever seen me?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“Exactly. What makes you think I can, either?”

Nico sighs, and something understanding and a little sad creeps into the edges of Percy’s expression.

“Why do you ask?”

Because I want to know what I outlive, and if what I outlive is this. I want to know if this shadow thing is something that’s going to kill me. But because the king of shadows is also a king of deception and misdirection, all he says out loud is, “No reason. Curiosity, I guess.”

Percy accepts that, because Percy’s blind spot has always just been conveniently Nico-shaped. He follows him around for what’s left of his morning routine, finishing off his coffee and asking about the various things that are new to him (“Oh, this is adorable. Did Holly make this?” “No, I did!” “Oh.” “What do you mean, adorable? It’s manly as hell.”) They talk quietly, although Nico does catch Percy glancing hopefully at Holly's door. Percy likes kids, he remembers. Percy wanted to take Annabeth and run away and marry her in California, nest with her, and spawn like happy little fish. Then Tartarus happened.

Finally, Nico can’t put it off any longer, or he’s going to be late to work, and he slips into the bedroom to unlock the safe, moving quietly so as to not wake Hazel.

When he comes back out, Percy's flipping through their newest coffee table book: a National Geographic collection of astonishing rock formations. He sighs wistfully and sets his mug down. “Oh,” he goes, like something just occurred to him. “I have an answer to your question.”

“Oh?” Nico shakes a single celestial bronze bullet into his palm.

“Yeah, it --“ he raps at his skull with his knuckles.

“Okay,” says Nico, who has a feeling this might be a continuation of a conversation they haven’t had yet.

Percy seems to come to the same conclusion at the same time, because he explains, “You asked me -- or you will ask me -- which hurts less, being shot in the heart or shot in the head. I’m telling you, for real, head’s less painful. Maybe it’s ‘cause I have less time to process it, I dunno.”

“Oh.” Nico chambers the bullet into the gun, clicks it through. “Good to know.”

Percy’s eyes crinkle. Even through his brave, sad, Percy-ish smile, the threat has registered, and his pupils swell darkly like expanding stars, before they thin into slits and flare shockingly red, blazing in his head like brimstone.

“I’ll see you soon,” Nico promises, then lifts the gun, aims, and shoots him cleanly between the eyes.

-

“It’s probably a midlife crisis, dude,” Leo tells him solemnly, leaning against the counter with one elbow braced in order to study the scratch tickets being advertised underneath the glass. “And that’s why your powers are going all loco. The only way to cure it is to buy a hot red sports car.”

His fingers keep playing around the edge of the dish of pennies that sit by the cash register, like he's contemplating which scratch ticket to get.

“I’m twenty-eight,” Nico replies drolly.

Leo looks up and flashes him a quicksilver smile. “That’s pretty middle-aged, for a half-blood! Man, who am I kidding, that’s elderly, who in Hades thought you would have lived that long. Look!” he abandons the penny dish and reaches across the cash register, plucking at Nico’s hair like he’s picking dandelion seeds. “You even have the grey hair!”

Nico's hair turned silver in places the same year Holly was born, a spray of it appearing at his temples seemingly overnight, as if his body had abruptly realized that it was, in fact, seventy years older than it thought it was. Katie jokes that fatherhood is what did it. It's true, Nico tells Holly every time Katie brings it up. She'd started off wide-eyed, but now the familiar teasing just makes her roll her eyes. I saw you and aged decades on the spot.

It really could be worse, he thinks. He can handle a little silver in his hair.

“I would rather be prematurely grey than prematurely bald.”

“Bro, I’m going to laugh so hard when you go bald. You’ll have to tell me what it’s like. I, of course, being the paradigm of masculinity, will never know,” Leo spreads his hands out modestly.

“Get out!” Nico laughs, and Leo steps back with a bow. Above his head, the security feed flickers a little bit.

Nico works at the grocer kitty-corner to the high school. He opens the store every morning at five, handles inventory and delivery, and shift changes at one. Sometimes Hazel will come and join him on her lunch break or if she has a free spot in her schedule, sitting behind the counter with him as he makes them both sandwiches with yesterday's deli meats. Oftentimes, she steals his stool, her simple black ballet flats swinging above the floor, her legs snapping out to trip him whenever he came close. Nico's found that having her there lends him an air of respectability, which reassures the little old ladies coming in for their morning shopping, because otherwise Nico keeps catching them eyeballing him like they’re the ones worried about being mugged, instead of the other way around.

His most frequent costumers, though, are high schoolers trying to palm Snickers and packs of gum, which whisper gleefully to Nico from inside the shadowy recesses of their pockets.

“Hope you feel better, man!” Leo calls on the way out the door, passing a young woman clutching a thermos on her way in. “And it’s just some creepy dead-raiser flu thing!” Which makes Nico chuckle, and the woman gives him a funny look.

-

"Dad, are you sick?"

The voice comes from directly in front of him, close enough to be alarming because Nico didn't sense any kind of approach -- his eyes pop open, but it's just Holly, leaning over the arm of his lawn chair with her whole face contorted into a concerned frown. Her mouth's parted so that he can see the little white nubs of her front teeth where they've just started growing in, and the dark empty spaces in her gums where her outside incisors used to be. Holly said that a boy at school punched her and that's how she lost those teeth, but Nico's pretty sure she just locked herself in the bathroom and twisted at them gingerly until they came loose. Holly tells the punching story because Katie calls her "metal" for it.

Metal as hell, little shrub, she says solemnly, offering Holly her fist to bump, and Holly beams, gummy, completely ignoring Hazel in the background: Stop calling my kid a shrub, Katie.

"Holly, it was just a sneeze," he says, and then considers it. "Well, I guess I could be sick. In that case, here, have some germs."

He makes a show of trying to smear his palms all over her face and she screeches, darting away.

The backyard is golden with fading afternoon light, grass growing in resilient clumps where the ground pretends to be even. Their next-door neighbor is doing yoga out on her front porch, wearing lavender biking shorts with a matching mat. She has a full nativity scene in her front yard that she keeps up year-round, only swapping out the Baby Jesus in his cradle for the appropriate holiday of choice -- a pumpkin for Halloween, a pink bunny for Easter -- and since her yard overlooks theirs, Nico wonders if he can ever properly settle in for an afternoon nap without the feeling of a plastic Virgin Mary watching him serenely. This is one of the benefits of being descended from the Greek pantheon, Nico thinks: he doesn't have to make any sort of effort to understand anyone else's religion.

Holly circles around again. "Seriously," she emphasizes, with great impatience, and then waits.

"Of course I'm not sick, Holly. I'm fine."

"What about what happened in the car?" she fires at him.

"That's not going to happen again," Nico says immediately, and when Holly just squints at him, he takes the time to remember every adult or god who ever lied to him and corrects himself, gentling his tone, "Okay, it might, but --"

He reaches out, sitting up straight in the Hawaiian-print lawn chair that had been a tongue-in-cheek wedding present from somebody whose name shouldn't even be mentioned because he's a jerk, and she comes over instantly, taking his hands in hers. They're tiny, and a little dirty from playing in the yard, which due to all the sinkholes is muddy at best and downright swampy at worst, and early September definitely qualifies as "worse." Her nails are painted a bright Halloween orange -- Hazel must have helped her, because the paint is crooked on her nondominant hand, sloppy like she'd done it herself, but the paint on her other hand is neat and clean.

He chews at the inside of his cheek, flitting his thoughts back and forth, trying to land on the right words to put together. What would Sally Jackson say?

"It might happen again," he says slowly. "But trust me, I will never let it happen at a time that would put you in the slightest bit of danger."

"Okay," says Holly with easy faith, because she's never come to harm before and doesn't have the experience or the imagination to tell herself what that'd be like. Nico's kind of proud of that, actually: he thinks between his childhood and Hazel's, they have a monopoly on fear, pain, and misery, and don't need to pass it down. "Is it …" she tries. "Some kind of disappearing sickness?"

"I don't know," says Nico honestly. "Do you think your mom knows?"

"I haven't asked," Holly replies thoughtfully, and they both pause, listening to the sounds of Hazel in the driveway, where she's got herself in a pair of corduroys ("don't judge! I'm a smith by genetics, I can dress like one if I want to,") and is currently working on coaxing the dents out of the car.

The car was always Hazel's, ever since she was sixteen. That thing's as loyal to her as an entire camp of Romans would be to their praetor. Nico's perfectly okay with giving them their privacy.

Also, they don't want Holly seeing her using her powers. They never use their powers in front of Holly if they can help it: it's not that they don't trust her, and Holly's closing in on the age where she might be able to grasp the concept of secrecy and Olympus, but Nico and Hazel are probably being selfish, not wanting to open her up to that world. Because the more she's able to see, the more other things can see her.

Holly looks like she's going to ask something else, but then Nico feels another sneeze come up and lets it go as dramatically as possible, and the conversation dissolves into a lot of shrieking and chasing and the neighbor watching with amusement from her yoga mat.

-

This time, it happens while Nico's falling asleep, the two sensations too similar to each other to be distinguishable, and one moment Nico's thinking about whether he should use whole wheat or white for Holly's sandwich tomorrow (the voice in his head that sounds disturbingly like Demeter tells him whole wheat, obviously, but Holly likes white bread and Nico's inclined to spoil her) and whether he's taking up too much of Hazel's side of the bed, and the next, he thinks, no! and flails out with a sick lurch like he's missed a step in the dark, trying to wake himself up.

It's too late.

Nico vanishes.

And Nico sinks. He's aware of something blurring by him, too fast to make out, like he's looking at it through the window of a moving car -- not like it's scenery slowly drifting by, but like it's debris right up next to the roadside.

He lands flat on his back with a solid thud. Completely winded, he gulps uselessly at the air with stunned lungs, trying to breathe around the detonation of pain radiating through his every limb. Even his fingernails felt the impact, it seems like.

He's lying among rough stone and loose pebbles, which accounts for how much that landing hurt. It's like stepping on a Lego in the dark, except with his whole godsdamn body.

"Eurgh," he says, just to let the universe know what he thinks of that, and gingerly pushes himself up onto his elbows.

As he does so, he realizes he knows exactly where he is. Underneath him, a winding footpath snakes onwards, downhill, towards where a small cluster of skull-headed harts pick at the stones, their antlers gleaming like bone-white streaks jaggedly carved against the rocky backdrop. In the distance, the Gates of Alsofodel loom like a mirage. There's no obvious source of light, and yet everything is lit just enough to show that the Underworld is pale grey, tomb-like, and mind-bogglingly big.

He almost laughs. All he's done, really, is travel from one home to another.

He gets to his feet, brushing himself off. Further down the road, he can make out the shape of three women sitting on a flat stone discus the same size as a kiddie wading pool, and makes his way down to them.

The Fates sit side-by-side, cross-legged and wearing t-shirts printed with a design that, when they're lined up like they are, forms the shape of a moray eel that looks like it's wriggling every time they shift around as they work. There's Clotho, the Spinner, Lachesis, the Disposer of Lots, and Atropos, the Cutter.

Atropos is closest, digging around in a battered shoebox with Hermes' winged sandals printed on the side, so Nico shoves his hands in his pockets and addresses her first.

"Yo," he goes.

For his thirteenth birthday, she'd given him a small collection of voodoo dolls wrapped in twine from her sister's spool, and had shown him where to stick pins to cause the largest amount of pain. It'd been rather touching, as far as birthday presents from the Underworld went.

"Oh, no," says the Cutter without looking up. "You're early. I can't abide people who don't stick with their appointments."

"Um," says Nico eloquently.

She surfaces with a pair of kindergarten scissors, which she chomps together like jaws until she's satisfied, and sets the box down, pushing it out of the way with the ball of her foot. The movement makes her ankle unhinge, bending unnaturally in the wrong direction, and then it settles back into shape with a faint crunch of rearranging bones.

Her sister pulls a threat taut, silvery with light and very, very short, and without fanfare, Atropos leans over and snips it. The two ends of the broken thread leap in opposite directions, coiling up, and the light dies. Somewhere in the distance -- or maybe just in between his own ears -- Nico hears the ghoulish wail of a child, abruptly cut short.

Something nudges at his elbow, startling him. But it's only one of the harts, nosing interestedly at Nico's pockets in search of something to munch on. Nico pats its skeletal nose absently: the harts stand at shoulder height, too slender to resemble stags but also too broad to look like antelope. Their skin is dry and flaky like a moth's, and sitting regally atop their shoulders, they've got empty skulls in the place of heads, with thick plates for foreheads and twisting antlers -- hence the name, skull-headed hart. Demeter created them out of gravedirt and the shells of sunflower seeds, Nico learned, as a sort of belated wedding present for her daughter.

Atropos turns back to him and brandishes the scissors. "Come back when it's your turn."

Nico blinks. "I -- what?"

Lachesis speaks up then, her voice rasping out of her like ash tumbling out of an urn. "You --" she starts, and licks her thumb in order to flip a few pages ahead in the great tome that sits on her lap. "You are Nico di Angelo, the only living son of our keeper and master, the lord of the Underworld, the steward of the Dead. Are you not?"

"Yes." But they know this already. At those formal banquets Hades was always putting on for no reason Nico could fathom (other than he was sure banquets were something Zeus and Poseidon did a lot, therefore he, Hades, must have them as well,) Nico always relegated himself to sit with the Fates for lack of an official kid table. They were old, and crotchety, and complained about everyone, and Nico had adored them with all of his shriveled child heart.

"Hm," says Lachesis. She and Atropos study him for a beat. Clotho spins relentlessly on, oblivious, and at Nico's feet, the hart finds a smooth pebble to crunch between its teeth.

Then Lachesis says --

"You have twenty-one days left before we cut your thread, Nico di Angelo, the self-professed king of ghosts. Come back then."

It's strange, how Nico still feels like he's falling, like the earth has swamped out from under him, except there's nowhere further to go. He's fallen as far as he can, and yet, somehow, there's an endless black chasm that opens inside his head, and Nico tumbles silently down.

-

Sometimes, Nico forgets.

For seconds, minutes, sometimes whole hours, Nico will forget. Forget about Olympus, forget about monsters -- he can't forget about his powers, of course, because that's like forgetting he has arms or legs: the shadows that tell him what's behind locked doors and the skeletons that speak from their unmarked graves by the railroad tracks and the ghosts he finds sometimes in innocuous places. But he'll forget that not everybody can do those things, either.

He'll forget, those times he and Hazel are walking back to their car some uneventful day or another, Holly swinging her weight between them with one hand in each of theirs, that there are still half-blood children out there, half his age and dying.

Hazel and Percy and the others, they stopped everyone from dying, because that's just kind of their thing, but that didn't stop half-bloods from being Olympus's most expendable currency.

So Nico forgets, sometimes, that that life still affects him.

(Then Percy or Annabeth show up, or something horrible happens, like the Disposer of Lots telling him that he only has twenty-one days left before he dies for good, and Nico remembers again.)

Nico has twenty-one days before Atropos, who still gets him unique (and kind of morbid) birthday presents every year, takes a pair of scissors to his life line.

Twenty-one days. Twenty-one days is three weeks.

He's going to miss Holly's ninth birthday.

He's going to --

Okay, focus. Focus, Nico.

The clock on the microwave says it's 4:03 in the morning. He needs to go to work. He needs to take the car, because he doesn't think he can shadow-travel in this state: usually short distances like home to the grocer's only leave him a little fatigued, but if Nico shadow-travels right now, he's going to break into a hundred little pieces. He knows it. Or worse, fade out again.

Nico stands at the counter, a full pot of coffee waiting on the burner, and does nothing.

It's not hard to figure out what happened. Hazel would call it a Roman sense of fairness. Nico thinks it's just the gods being dicks, because hey, no need to change the status quo on account of him.

He traded years of his life like currency, buying favors from the Underworld, because if there's one thing a child like Nico thought he had plenty of, it was time. He traded it for the power to control Minos (and what a crappy choice that turned out to be, one point for buyer's remorse,) for the power to contact Bianca before she passed into her first reincarnation, far out of his reach. He traded a decade to bring Hazel back to life, and then Holly in her turn. He traded it to suspend himself in chrysalis, that week that Arachne held him hostage before Hazel and the others did a stupid thing and rescued him. He traded it to close the Doors of Death.

You can't cheat Death, after all. You can only give it more of your time.

If he kind of, sort of assumed the gods of Olympus (his father) might have pardoned his debts on account of him, you know, helping save their collective asses, well …

Well, that was probably really dumb.

-

It's not that he's afraid to die. Not really.

That'd be weird, him fearing death, like Thalia fearing heights (which she does anyway,) or Percy fearing drowning. So it's not that. He knows the Underworld like the back of his hand: he lived in Erebus for a whole year at his father's palace, and after Bianca chose a second chance at life and went where he couldn't follow, he spent a lot of time out in the silence of the Fields of Alsofodel, where he found Hazel and unthinkingly decided to try again -- a decision that, ironically, turned out to be the perfect lynchpin in the plan to defeat Gaia, who knew. He's walked almost the entire length of the River Styx, from the riverside port where Charon docks to the place where he watched Percy submerge and pay the price for invincibility, to where the Styx plummets into Tartarus at the Elosian Ascent.

He's always known what's coming.

Somehow, it's not even surprising that this is how it happens, with all the quick and gleeful shadows of the world trying to pull him down into the earth, like they know he belongs in a grave and it's just a matter of time.

-

I'm never going to see Holly grow up. The thought is inescapable, a shadow all its own, always in pursuit of him and daring him to face it. I'll never know if Katie ever finds her biological father. I'll never meet Percy and Annabeth's kids. I'll never see Hazel grow old and get married for real, to someone who isn't me, and the pain in his chest feels like an earthquake, hard crusted plates cracking and shifting, leaving him fundamentally changed.

-

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