Fic: The Children of the Moneywort Tree [Percy Jackson and the Olympians][3/4]

[antistar_e]

<-- back to previous part

After she hangs up with Jason, Hazel goes to take a shower, because she usually saves treating her hair on the weekends when she has more time, and when Nico next goes into the bedroom to hunt for a spare bike chain for Holly in the thing-a-gummy box underneath the bed, she's sitting there at the foot of it, toweling at her head.

She watches him rummage for a moment, and then she says, "Nico."

And something in her voice, something in the way she says it, deep and serious like someone putting a name to a country they haven't seen in years, makes Nico put the box down and cross to her side of the bed as if summoned from the ground like bones.

She reaches for his hand, and Nico grabs hold.

"Can you promise me something?" she starts, and he's already nodding before she's even finished with the question.

"I'll try," he allows.

Hazel bites at her lip, towel on her lap and damp patches showing through her shirt from the shower. This close, the smell of her shampoo is overwhelming; Nico tries not to lean into it, watching her eyes tick around the room, plainly searching for the right words.

Finally, she begins, halting, "When -- when you go up for judgment," and his fingers tighten over hers compulsively. Nico di Angelo has two weeks to live. "Promise me you'll ask them for reincarnation."

"What, you don't think that after all I've done for them, they won't just give me a one-way ticket to the Elysian Fields and be done with it?" he mock-pouts. "I'm insulted."

Her eyes crinkle up seemingly against her will, and Nico feels so earth-shatteringly glad. See? Look at that. I made Hazel smile, he thinks proudly, to anyone it might concern. Life's not so bad when you can make Hazel smile.

"Promise me," she says again, gripping him tightly. "Beg, plead, bargain with whatever you have to -- just get a reincarnation. Just get yourself back here, somehow, and I will find you, wherever you are, wherever you wind up. I'll find you. I'll --"

It's easy, then, to drop to the floor between her knees, gathering her up into a tight hug that's more like a beating, hard and bending, and her arms go around his neck the way sailors will throw anchors into a dark and fathomless sea.

"That might be a little hard," he points out, low. "I could wind up anywhere, as anyone."

"I'd still find you," she says against his ear. "My bones would know you anywhere. We're made of the same earth."

Never in a million years would he have idea what he could say to that, and eventually, they let go. Nico gets up and sinks onto the bedspread beside her. The thing-a-gummy box dips towards them, and he catches it before it can tumble to the carpet. She picks at the washing instruction tag on her towel. Their bedroom is painted a bright, summery yellow like the yolk of an egg, and the midmorning sun comes through the windows at such an angle that it casts shade at a slant, shallow pools for Nico to dip his fingers in, always in reach. The wind catches at the branches of the gum tree outside, changing the geography of the shadows within and sending them dancing. Nico's lived in this room longer than he's ever lived anywhere in his entire life.

"Do you remember," Hazel says suddenly. "What it was like in the beginning? That first year with Holly?"

"Oh, gods," Nico mutters, and she laughs, because that about sums it up. "I'm still amazed we didn't kill her. How did we not kill her? I think everything we could possibly get wrong, we got wrong at least once --"

"Do you remember, when she was … what, six months, and she got her head stuck in --"

"I really try not to," Nico interrupts her. He's pretty sure that out of everything he's ever done in his entire life, it will probably be that incident that he's going to have to explain in front of the three judges when he dies. He can already picture the way Shakespeare will fold his hands across his podium and ask, and how exactly did the squid become involved in all this? "Mostly I remember not having the faintest clue what to do. Here I was, with this brand-new baby and absolutely no supplies, and I'd somehow gotten my sister mixed up in --"

"You did not. You disappeared. I came to find you. I found you with Holly and I stayed. I don't know how many times I have to tell you it was that simple."

"-- in it and we were being hunted all the time."

"Yes, well, I hear the Underworld gets pretty upset when you steal something that belongs to it," Hazel says, heavy on the irony.

"She wasn't dead!" Nico protests. "Why does nobody believe me when I tell them this? I didn't just suddenly get a craving one morning and decided to steal a baby out of Charon's boat! She was alive. I brought her back to the mortal world where she belonged. And … and …" he falters. He's lying to himself: he knows exactly why the Underworld has a problem with the way he cradled baby Holly in his arms and said, she's mine, she's mine, I am never letting her go and you're never getting her back.

Hazel doesn't say anything for a long moment.

Then she leans her damp head against his shoulder and murmurs, very quietly, "I'm so glad I got to meet her."

"Me too," he answers, and feels her smile.

-

On Monday, Nico goes to pick Hazel up from work at five like he usually does. This time she's consulting at a fancy puppy boutique on the other side of the civic center that caters mostly to the super-rich and the pets they pamper. They sit in rush hour traffic and complain about how much they hate talk radio, getting more enthusiastic about it as they go. Nothing brings people together faster than mutual dislike of a third party.

When they turn onto the hill at Moneywort Ave, they stop mid-sentence, because something is very wrong.

Holly's waiting for them, standing out in the driveway. Behind her, the door to Katie's apartment hangs open, the "Ring Bell: If No One Answers, Pull Weeds" sign swinging on its hook. She rushes up to their car as soon as it bumps over the uneven pavement, one hand on the driver's side door even before Nico can get the car turned off.

"What?" he goes, taking his foot off the brake and trying to untangle himself from his seatbelt at the same time; Hazel reaches over and slams the car into park before they crunch straight through their stairwell. "What is it?"

"It's -- it's -- Katie," Holly sobs, fisting her hands in Nico's sleeve. "You left to get Mom and I went downstairs like I'm supposed to and I found her --"

Inside, everything's dark and quiet -- not even the UV lamps for Katie's orchids are on, and Nico's pretty sure those were set on an automatic timer. Holly leads them straight through the back, to Katie's bedroom.

"Oh, di immortales," Hazel swears from behind him.

"What's happening to her?" Holly says at the same time, sounding small and very frightened.

She's there, on the ground, neatly spread out on her back like all she'd done was lay down to get a tan. Her hair's gone the color of soil, moldy and damp, and her feet and hands have already sunk out of view, buried in the earth of her bedroom floor. Roots grow forth, still marked with the sigils of capture and protection, wrapped around her chest like a straitjacket. Moss covers the hollows of her body; her collarbones and eye sockets, the divot between her lips.

Nico glances back over his shoulder. In the half-light, he can see that Hazel's gone very pale, her mouth moving soundlessly as she works through the facts in front of her; that this has nothing to do with Gaea, it doesn't, but Hazel's seen the earth devour too many people for it not to be her first, immediate, frightened conclusion.

"You think we can do this?" he asks her, quiet.

She tilts her head, listening. Then she rolls up the sleeves of her suit jacket, stepping out of her ballet flats so that the soil seeps through her nylons as she presses her heels into the ground.

"We got this," she says.

"Holly, stand back," Nico warns, and she does one better than that, clambering up onto Katie's bed so that her feet aren't touching the ground at all. She isn't crying anymore; of course she isn't, her mom and dad are here. They were gone and now they're back and that's what good parents do, right? They fix things.

He adjusts his stance and reaches out. He senses Hazel, now standing at his elbow -- he can feel the uprush of power spiraling through her body because it's so similar to his own. Hades and Pluto might wear different faces, but they come from one legend, and Hazel's right: his bones would know hers anywhere, they're made from the same material. Nico and Hazel could crack fissures and move continents -- they're earthshakers, and it's probably why they've always gotten along so well with the Demeter cabin, hostilities regarding the whole Persephone thing notwithstanding.

He feels her reach back in that space between the physical and the shadow, and then they move in synchrony, hands outstretching to grab the earth and rip it apart.

The ground shakes and ruptures, Holly squeaks, and the roots binding Katie shred apart like paper.

As soon as they break, Katie comes awake with a gasp like she's surfacing from somewhere fathomless and deep. Her hands starfish out, and Nico and Hazel each grab one, hauling her upright. Loose dirt trembles off of her like sands tumbling from an hourglass, and with the finality of slamming a coffin lid closed, Nico and Hazel pack the earth behind her, shoving it deep down into the dark.

All in all, it takes about thirty seconds.

Between them, Katie tips, knees buckling, mumbling even as they catch her, supporting her weight between them, "woah, woah, dizzy, black spots, what just happened?" and Nico glances over the top of her head and says, "I forgot how well we worked together."

Hazel replies, "We haven't had to, knock on wood," and Holly scoots out of the way as they lower Katie onto the bedspread.

"Holly, can you --" Nico starts, but she's already moving, hopping down and hurrying out of the room. She returns with water, filled too full in a double-walled thermos with a cheery ocean theme from Whole Foods, and a white Vidalia onion, leftover from when they kept some on hand for Nico after one of his spells. They're very grounding, onions.

Katie drinks the water and bites gratefully into the onion, grimacing as the sharpness of it hits her empty stomach, making it cramp.

"Does she have the disappearing sickness, too?" Holly asks worriedly.

"I think," Hazel spreads her toes out along the fissure where Katie'd been laying, her nylon stockings smeared with dirt. She considers. "I think Katie was overexerting herself. She was trying to work a spell too big for her."

"Sorry," says Katie around a mouthful of onion, without sounding very sorry at all. "I'm possessive."

"Katie --" Nico starts, because he isn't worth this.

She shrugs with a fierce jerk of her shoulders, signaling that line of conversation is over and it hasn't even started, and then she pats the bedspread beside her. Holly immediately crawls over, letting Katie bundle her against her side, pressing her close in reassurance.

"Hey, little shrub," she says gently, rubbing her cheek against the top of Holly's curly head. "Look, I'm all right. I'm sorry if I scared you."

"It's okay," Holly murmurs, even though it clearly isn't.

-

Percy makes a point of asking after Holly, every single time.

It doesn't matter how hungry, how tired, how broken and serrated he is when he escapes Tartarus again, he always asks. Even the very first time Nico saw him, before he knew what was going on -- this suddenly seventeen-year-old Percy with the monster-colored eyes standing in aisle five between the laundry detergent and the dish soap, the first words out of his mouth were, "Oh, hey, Nico, there you are, I need to borrow your washing machine if you've got a moment. How's Holly doing?"

Another time, as they watch Holly on her stomach on the carpet, clicking around on Katie's laptop at some interactive program that helped her learn the genus order of reptiles while rain drums steadily against the eaves, he asks, "Does she know?"

Nico doesn't have to ask what he means.

"She knows she's adopted, so to speak," he says mildly. "We're not yet at the age where it's going to cause her any existential problems. As for her being a half-blood, well," he shrugs.

"How do you know she's a half-blood this time?"

"She has to be," Nico says, though this was before Katie spilled the beans on Holly's minor displays of power. "There's no other explanation. When her mother died, she went with her to the Underworld, unconsciously. Mortals can't do that."

"There are so many things she is already," Hazel comments quietly, startling them both; they hadn't realized she'd been listening. Cajun music plays lowly from the other room, a soft beat Nico's tapping his foot to without realizing it. "There's still a lot of Holly left for us to meet. We'll worry about the half-blood part when we get to it."

Monday turns out spectacularly, one of those clear-skied September days that feels like a second coming of spring, a crisp, cooling reminder that seasons come and go and this one's almost over, did anyone notice? Nico drives to pick Holly up from school with the windows down, and his eyes go dry and scratchy because he keeps refusing to blink them, wanting to see everything at once; every toss of the green branches in the breeze, the sunlight winking off the storefronts downtown, the shocking blue of the late-summer sky (that color will not exist in the Underworld, Nico needs to memorize it now,) the sight of children in their short sleeves and open-toed sandals racing across the school grounds. It's almost paralyzing, the thought that this is the last time he'll ever see these things.

Holly's on the steps, backpack dragging low against the backs of her knees and her hair unraveled from the plait Nico had wrestled it into.

When she sees Nico, she waves good-bye to the older student she'd been talking to, taking the steps in a long leap. The girl tucks her books against her chest, watching her go; her pigeon toes point towards each other, her uniform skirt hanging to mid-shin, too long for her short frame and fitting horribly. The school had been a Catholic one before a fire in 1979 gutted it, and they tore the skeleton of it down afterwards to build a district school instead, one that would be up-to-date with the fire safety codes. A memorial plaque hunkers atop the steps, copper plating oxidizing in the weather.

Holly clambers into the passenger seat, and Nico glances again at the ghost atop the steps and says, "Holly, do you know that that girl's dead?"

In the process of tucking her backpack into the footwell, she stills and looks at him cautiously, reacting both to his tone and the words themselves, the way children do.

"Yes," she says, yanking the door shut behind her. "But she's not mad about it or anything. I made sure to ask," she justifies.

Nico pulls away from the curb, keeping one eye on his mirrors, watching the afternoon sun crest the side of the building and hit the schoolgirl, smudging her away until she goes completely translucent -- an unsure impression of movement, like trying to squint into the light of a single streetlamp to see if there's rain falling.

"Can you always tell?" he asks, breaking away from the sight and craning his neck to check for oncoming traffic as he leaves the school parking lot. He trusts the shadows under the car to let him know if any living children are about to get underfoot. "If the person you're talking to is dead?"

"Sometimes, if they're wearing something really strange," Holly answers. Nico nods; that's usually his first indication, as well. "But sometimes it's harder, and I forget and say hello and they have to put their finger to their lips," she demonstrates. "To remind me that I'm with other people, who don't see them like I can."

There are six ghosts in town that Nico knows of -- no, seven, he corrects himself, remembering the man with the harmonica sitting outside the mechanic's shop, the one that hadn't realized he was dead yet.

He tries to be friendly with all of them. Pride bubbles momentarily in his chest, because it seems like Holly's following in his footsteps.

"How come they're stuck?" she wants to know, stretching forward in her seat with the enthusiasm of finally having the permission to talk about this, belt pulling taut across her chest. "Shouldn't they go straight to the Underworld?"

"They should," he stresses. People slip through the cracks in every bureaucracy, death included. His dad never had any patience for the games, scandals, and intrigues that the rest of Mount Olympus was so famous for because he was constantly, constantly kept busy, trying to keep the Underworld more-or-less organized, leaving it to his minions to clean up on the surface world. Nico cleared the malevolent ghosts out of town when he and Hazel moved into the upper story at 1740 Moneywort Ave, leaving only the strays who didn't mind their predicaments so much, and who liked Holly. Nico's fond of people who like Holly, even when those people are deceased.

He props his elbow on the window. "A lot of them can only materialize in a certain place. For your friend --"

"Betsy," Holly supplies.

"For Betsy, it's the place where she died. It isn't always so -- and for some ghosts, the only place they can appear has nothing to do with their lives at all."

"And some appear in a place only when a certain person is there," she finishes for him.

"Right."

"Do you have any dead friends?" she asks curiously.

"A couple," says Nico, careful. "Have you seen me talking to people that your mom can't see?"

She thinks about it. Then her eyes widen, September sun catching in the dark color of them. "Oh."

That afternoon, he takes her to the park, because it's that kind of day. Clearly intrigued by this change in routine, she leaves her bag in the car and trails after him, past the picnic tables and the busy barbecues, the neighborhood leagues in their mismatched jerseys fighting on the muddy pitch, out past where even the jogging path curves down safely towards the stream. They hike uphill through the trees instead, sunlight filtering through the boughs above them, until the manicured park grass gives way to brambly undergrowth and the sound of the town echoes like the faraway murmuring of a TV turned low in another room.

Nico listens; the shadows glancing off the trees, the dark undersides of last fall's leaves, the little overturned bones in the earth, until he finds a good spot and comes to a halt.

She stops, too, eyes roving from him up the tree beside him and back to him. She waits.

"I'm going to show you something," he tells her. "And I want you to see if you can do it too, okay?"

She nods.

He crouches down, a movement she immediately mimics with an expression on her face, like, okay, so far so good. He chuckles at her, folding his hands over the dirt like a supplicant and then opening them like he's cracking the spine of a book for the first time.

"Oh!" gasps out of Holly with the suddenness of a stone thrown into a pool, as a small, decimated nest materializes out of the ground, loose particles of soil shivering off of it.

"Watch," murmurs Nico, touching each small collection of bones like he's reading the braille on every skeleton.

Power vibrates inside of him, like a bee's nest that's been shook up, a pop bottle turned entirely to fizz. Nico's never been able to quite describe what it feels like, because he's lived with it almost his whole life, but the best he's been able to come up with is that feeling power like that, using power like that, feels a lot like that the first time you listen to a song that just knocks you out, lays you flat, leaves you feeling a little wrong-sized in your own skin. Music does that. It's a lot like magic, in that regard.

Slowly, with his power extended to her -- he has no idea if she can sense it, the way he and Hazel have always been able to sense each other's, or if she'd recognize it if she does -- he knits together the first baby bird.

"Here," he says when he's done; in the cradle of his palms, the tiny skeleton squeaks, trembles, and rights itself with an ungainly flop. Its bleached-white beak parts, coughing out another high sound.

Holly is completely enthralled.

Shoving her messy hair out of the way with the flats of her hands, she leans in close, her eyes very wide and very bright.

"Can I do that?" she murmurs, holding out a fingertip towards it. The corpse of the baby bird nips at it, questioning.

"I think you can," Nico replies, feeling so achingly fond of her that he's almost sore with it, like he's been beaten and bullied, all the soft places inside his chest bruised with feeling. "I think you're a necromancer, like me."

She cuts him a sharp look, a closing steel trap of a glance, biting off the word he just gave her -- a name for everything inside of her that had never been named before.

"Will I be able to do this --" she gestures. "With everything dead?"

"Start small," he warns her. "Baby birds. Mice. Spiders in the sink. You can pull it like a muscle, trying to do too much at once, and it hurts -- how do you think I got all this grey hair?" he tugs on it to make a point, and she snorts. "They wear out eventually, because no magic is permanent, but the closer you can match the size of the bones to the soul you pull inside of it, the longer it will last."

"So this …"

The baby bird croaks.

"A frog," Nico admits. "It was the closest soul I could find. But you'd be surprised, how big souls can be sometimes, crammed into tiny bodies."

Holly watches the reanimated skeleton in Nico's hands, then glances at the scattered bones still left in the nest.

"I want to try," she says determinedly.

Every day of that week, and every day of the next, Nico takes her out to the park after school and they practice raising the little dead until they have to leave to go pick up Hazel. The second week, they graduate to the pet cemetery, and Nico sits on the low fence surrounding the pound and the connected plot of oft-overturned earth and watches Holly flash in between memorial stones, chased by the small bones of puppies, the yellowed winking of birds, grinned at with the permanent Chesire grins of dead cats.

She shrieks with laughter when one catches the hem of her jeans in its jaws, and Nico loves her with all his heart.

-

"How come," Percy asks, sitting on the toilet seat and letting Nico dab at the deep cuts on his chest with antiseptic. "Every single time we think we've found another way out of Tartarus, we always appear where you are?"

"What do you mean?" Nico hedges, folding up the alcoholic wipe and lobbing it towards the trash. It's the dead of night -- Holly's asleep, and Hazel's boiling water for herbal tea in the kitchen.

He knows exactly what Percy means, he just doesn't want Percy to think about it.

"Annabeth and I -- we get that time runs differently in Tartarus, and that's why whenever we escape, we come out fifteen years in the future. But what we don't understand is the location. When, like, say, Medusa comes back, she could appear anywhere in the country, but I've never come out further than a hundred yards from you, not once, and it's the same with Annabeth and Hazel." He studies the top of Nico's head, bent close to his skin; the weight of his gaze is a physical thing. "Why?"

Because you could punch our tickets if you wanted to, Nico thinks. That's one way to get out of Tartarus permanently; make an exchange, send us there instead.

He peels back the plastic packaging on one of those heavy pad band-aids.

Technically, we should be there already. Hazel's already died once, and I … He presses the band-aid down, sealing it on, and darts a look up at Percy's face, and the quiet, almost peaceful expression there, like he isn't really concerned what the answer is or how badly he's injured, he's just happy for the break. I'm the one that let you fall.

"Tea's ready," Hazel says quietly, appearing in the doorway. "Um, it's one of Katie's herbal blends, so. It's probably a little strong."

"That's fine, I'll take anything," Percy says. "Not a lot of food in Tartarus."

Nico watches him curl his hands around the mug she passes over, and thinks, The monster in you knows it -- it's in the way your eyes follow me sometimes.

-

Annabeth comes out a few days later, and whatever got Percy must have gotten her too, because the left side of her face is swollen, red, and her lip's busted, flecking blood down to the collar of her shirt. She frightens the neighbor, appearing out of nowhere in the shadow of the gum tree, not far from where she was doing yoga among her silent audience of nativity figures. She brings over an ice pack, and Nico, Hazel, and Annabeth all thank her, yes, yes, we'll be fine, no, we don't need to call the police, until she leaves and they can talk about what really happened.

"Nothing's broken," Nico tells her. He can feel the shape of her skeleton under her skin, and the ache in her bones makes his echo in the phantom, but he can't sense a fracture anywhere. "You'll have a pretty impressive bruise, though."

"Thanks," she says absently. "Is Percy --"

"You missed him by a couple days, he's fine," Hazel assures her, low and soothing.

"Okay, cool," she stands, brushing the mud on her hands off on her jeans. It doesn't seem to help, because they're just as dirty. "His injuries didn't look that bad, but sometimes it's hard to tell. And you knows how guys are such babies about pain."

Elsewhere in the house, they hear the front door open and Holly's excited footsteps running through to the kitchen. She runs right back out again; Nico and Hazel exchange an amused look.

"Hey," Annabeth turns her grey eyes on them with the intensity of a hunting owl. "Can I ask one of you guys for a favor?"

"Yeah, sure," Hazel answers for them both, tucking the first aid kit away under the bathroom sink.

"Can one of you drive me up to Whittemore? I think it's only forty-five minutes away from here, right? And anyway, they've got that library that claims it's got the largest collection of ancient Greek and Roman source texts outside of the Mediterranean. I wanted to use one of my stints topside to go take a look, I think there might be something there that can help Percy and I get an answer on how to escape."

He looks at Hazel. "Don't you --"

"Yeah, Latoya's coming to pick me up at five. I don't know how late it's supposed to run -- last month, we were done by eight, but we changed computer systems, remember, so I think we have to sit through a FAQ about that."

"I'll do it, then," he turns back to Annabeth. "But I reserve the right to shoot you in the face if you Hulk out and try to eat me."

"Deal," she looks away from them at last, and Nico suppresses a shiver. It doesn't matter how often he sees her younger version, it's never going to stop being weird; he'd forgotten what her eyes looked like.

In the car, he has to show her how to fasten her seatbelt, apologizing, "Sorry, the car's Hazel's, and it's, like, forever old."

"You're forgetting, I think, that what's 'forever old' to you is still in my future. I've never seen seatbelts like this. What do I --"

"Well, here -- oh, there, you got it."

They sit in the driveway for another moment, the sun beating down on them from above and somebody laboring up the hill on a bicycle behind them, while Nico studies the directions they wrote down, each letter written and then shaded heavily at the bottom so create a weighted look, so they don't dance so much on the page.

She huffs a laugh suddenly, leaning back in the passenger seat, and when he glances over at her, her body language is removed, closed off.

"Look at me, turning to Nico di Angelo for help. Like he's a grown-up. I … I need a moment to let the weirdness pass."

Nico dutifully gives her a moment.

She looks at him again with those bird-of-prey eyes, longer and more thoughtful. "You are, you know. An adult. How did that happen?"

"Same way it happens to anybody else, Annabeth." He tosses the directions onto the dashboard, suddenly feeling very, very tired. "Somebody needed me to be one."

As if on cue, a delighted shriek sounds out from the yard, and the next moment, Holly appears at the window, where she stops and dances from foot-to-foot with excitement. Smiling, Nico rolls it down for her, and she pokes her head in to say, "Hi, Dad, hi, Annabeth, look, look, isn't she gorgeous?"

"She" is a small, black snake, probably driven out of its burrow by Katie's reconstruction, which Holly has captured with a paper plate.

"Very cool," Annabeth says approvingly.

"Do you know what kind of snake it is?" Nico asks her.

She opens her mouth, and then frowns, glancing down again. The snake pokes its head over the edge of the plate, tongue tasting at the air, and seems to decide further investigation isn't worth it, because it curls back around. They all watch the shift of the muscles on its underbelly.

"No," Holly reluctantly admits.

"Tell you what. How about you take a picture of it, and then you and Katie can look it up together later this evening, all right? That way, you can let it go right now, so that it can get on with its day."

"I suppose." Very carefully, she turns around and walks slowly back towards the house.

The sun's in their eyes for most of the drive, and Nico has to stretch his neck for the sun visor to do him any good; Annabeth gives up, pulling at her seatbelt so she can turn around to face Nico. She talks -- mostly in that way that's just talking to herself while Nico happens to be in the general vicinity -- about her and Percy's latest theories on how to get out of Tartarus and stay out, for good, and what exactly she's hoping to find by making one dyslexic adult and one dyslexic kid-turned-monster take a trip to the library.

Nico, of course, can neither confirm nor deny anything she runs past him, and eventually she gets so frustrated that she shouts, "Fine! Be that way, maybe next time we'll just kill you and be done with it!"

They don't say anything for the next five miles.

Nico thinks about the way Percy sat in his wheelchair in the middle of his thriving restaurant and said, Annabeth figured it out our first month down there. But you're wrong, it was never an option. He shifts his grip on the steering wheel, uncomfortable. Between them, the radio plays something middling from the current top 40; a piece by one of Apollo's daughters, if he's not mistaken, the way Apollo's daughters always get hit songs before the world decides that's enough, let's not give teenage girls too much power.

He glances at Annabeth sidelong. She's pulled a stack of papers out of the glove compartment, idly glancing through them, her profile hard and sharp. From this angle, her bruised cheek looks horrible, her split lip black. She and Percy spent two years in Tartarus before they came out roughly a month after they went in. All that time spent searching for a solution that wasn't, Let's make Nico and Hazel switch places with us.

"What's this?" she asks suddenly.

He steals another glance. She has a small sheet of paper in hand, turned towards him. He squints at it; the writing is small and cramped, and --

"Oh," he says. "Oh, crap on Ganymede's dish, I completely forgot. I have to pay that ticket."

It's the one from his car accident, the one he and Holly were in right before he learned of his death sentence, and, you know, somehow it had completely slipped his mind.

She glances at it again, distractedly. "What?" she goes. And, "What, no, not that. You married her?"

He is completely confused for the span of about ten seconds, before he remembers: the issuing officer had made a note off to the side on the ticket, highlighting that Nico di Angelo and Hazel Levesque were married and covered under the same insurance despite having different last names.

"Yes?" he goes, blinking some. He'd thought Annabeth knew this. They live together. Holly calls them Mom and Dad. Granted, the younger versions of Percy and Annabeth might be a little preoccupied and oblivious, but surely they hadn't managed to miss that small little detail? Besides, they'd always been really chill about Nico and Hazel faking marriage in order to create a hypothetically stable space for Holly to grow up in.

Although, they'd been chill because they already knew it was going to happen.

They knew it was going to happen because Annabeth's finding out right now.

"You married her?!" she yells again, volume climbing, and there's a note to it that strikes through Nico as hot as if his insides had been coated in phosphorus and she'd lit a match. "You married Hazel?"

The urge to say "yes!" flares through him, defiant and proud, because they've been married for eight years and godsdamn, nobody's died or gotten eaten and Holly's turned out all right so far, and if you don't think that's the tightest shit ever, you can get out of Nico's face.

But he swallows it down. He's surprised at how mild his voice comes out sounding when he says, "Annabeth, if you want to get technical, Percy's your uncle."

"That's not --"

"Correct me if I'm wrong, but you stick your tongue in his face pretty regularly."

She makes a frustrated noise. "You know that's not -- Nico, you don't date inside your own cabin, you just don't!"

"Hazel's from the Roman camp," Nico points out.

"Oh my gods," she gets out, like she cannot fathom why Nico's being so difficult about this, like he's deliberately missing her point. Which he totally is, because it's a little late to make a fuss about this. "Don't you get it? That's like saying there'd be nothing wrong if Jason and Thalia got married."

"Well, no, that'd be wrong because Thalia did that whole 'I pledge to be celibate because boys are gross' thing and also I think Jason's got that weird boner for Uncle Sam, you know?"

"Stop that!" Annabeth twists her whole body around to face him now, straining against her seatbelt. "Nico, she's your sister! You call her your sister! She calls you her brother! You don't marry your sister!"

And at that, Nico brakes and swerves onto the highway shoulder. He punches the emergency flashers as soon as the car judders to a stop, the sudden absence of the sound of wheels on asphalt deafeningly obvious. It won't matter if anybody passing them turns around to look: they won't see anything, because Annabeth's a monster and monsters are shrouded in Mist.

She waits, her hands braced on the dashboard and the seat back, tension wire-thin through her body like she's the one afraid of him.

He has the gun. He has the celestial bronze bullet. He could, if he wanted.

"The only thing I have ever wanted," he says, as quiet as gravedirt, as quiet as funerals. "Is a family. The only thing I have ever wanted is to give my sister a family. Safety. Security. Two parents. Everything we never had. I have done that. That is something Hazel and I created, together. And if anybody, anybody, tries to take that away from us or somehow suggest that we don't deserve it, after everything we've done --"

As his voice gathers force, Nico feels the ground react too, trembling beneath the car; pebbles levitate to window level, and darkness gathers around him, shadows thickening like they're swelling with rage. He can feel it inking into his eyes.

"-- I will bury them," he promises, in a voice like an earthquake, like the desolate collapsing of caves.

-

Leo tries to convince him that what he really wants to do on his last night on earth is set off fireworks, because if he's going to go out, he better go out with a bang.

"Like, literally."

"Leo …"

"No, man, but really. If you're going to die, don't you want your daughter to remember how fun you are?"

"By setting off fireworks inside city limits and then falling over dead? Yeah, no, we're going to permanently scar her for fireworks for the rest of her life."

He spreads his hands. "Hey, man, if you change your mind, I know a guy who sells them cheap out of a tent on the highway. They're legit --"

"Leo."

"-- trust me, I'm a son of Hephaestus, I know shoddily-made explosives when I see them and these aren't it. They are def something you gotta experience before you kick it."

"You don't know a guy. You can't possibly know a guy."

"Is that what you're choosing to focus on from all of that? I think it's a great plan."

"Your great plan is going to wind up with somebody getting arrested."

"Well, if it does, it won't be you, because you'll be --" he crosses his eyes and sticks his tongue out of the side of his mouth, pantomiming dead.

Nico finishes cataloging inventory and starts back up the aisle towards the front counter, drumming his clipboard against his thigh. Outside, on the street, a bus whines to a halt against the curb, and Nico cranes his neck to get a look out the window. It pulls away again without letting Hazel off, and he sinks back onto his heels, checking the clock. It's her lunch hour. Is she coming today? He hopes she is -- there's plenty of day-old sandwich fixings he's just going to need to toss, anyway.

Leo makes a rude noise from behind him. "You're pathetic," he says, with great affection.

He slinks back behind the counter. "And who are you going to tell?"

Leo, of course, knows exactly what's bothering him. "Oh, bro, pero, she loves you crazy loco too. You two are that stupid-in-love couple that still eat lunch together, almost a decade into your marriage. I don't know what else to tell you."

Nico tosses him an amused look, ignoring the flutter of feeling that licks at the bottom of his heart, like he'd brought it too close to an open flame. "And you're basing this relationship advice on …"

"Fifteen years of being an expert in the language of ladies," he replies, shoving his hair back off his forehead in a supposedly suave gesture.

Nico snorts. "An expert in what now? You've been dead for fifteen years."

Leo just shrugs a shoulder at him, like, touche. The noontime sun comes pouring in through the window, highlighting the half-price loaves of bread on the end display and shining straight through Leo's body as clear as if he was made of glass. "Maybe I just want to say thanks," he says. "For being my friend all these years of my afterlife. See you around, bro." And in the space of a single blink, Leo fades from view entirely, leaving nothing in his place but sunshine and the smell of burning oil.

-

The day before he dies, the very last night Nico di Angelo gets to spend on earth, Katie comes up and they eat waffles and cereal out of coffee mugs for dinner, and spend the rest of the night on the carpet in the front room, playing Mythomagic the long way, on a board that Hazel found tucked away in storage ("I knew there was no way you got rid of it," she laughed at him, shoving his gleeful face out of her way,) while Holly complains loudly about how inefficient it is. She plays Artemis as she always does, and sweeps the board of all the other Olympians.

After Katie leaves, they get ready for bed, and Holly piles into Nico and Hazel's blankets with them. They wrap the comforter around them, all of them fighting for the warmest leg room and the least amount of bony elbows, and then Holly settles her weight against the headboard and reads to them out of the book she has to read for school. Anne of Green Gables seems a bit dense for the third grade, but Holly copes with it just fine, words lining up for her in their proper order, and Nico and Hazel listen to her steady voice. It's a strange feeling, both pride and jealousy at once, to listen to your child be better at something than you are.

They fall asleep like that; Nico on one side of the bed, Hazel on the other, Holly between them.

When Nico wakes briefly in the middle of the night, the light's still on, Holly's slumped against her mother's shoulder, and the book is jack-knifed around her hand. He removes it, turns off the light, and smooths her hair down.

The twenty-first day, the last day of Nico's life, progresses much like any of the others did. Hazel sticks close by, not quite hovering but clearly nervous, and Nico thinks about trying to reassure her, but he's too anxious for it to do much good, probably. He keeps seeing the Fates in his mind's eye, their moody mumbling and shuffling around on their rock and the easy way they complain like they're hoping to medal in it like an Olympic sport, and wonders when they're going to pull his string taut and cut it, as dispassionately as if he's anybody else.

It's amazing, how many things can kill you when you're thinking to look for them.

Morning progresses into afternoon, afternoon into evening, and as the sun sets, they decide to eat dinner outside on the patio with all of Katie's plants and the shadow of the gum tree. It looks like Nico's going to get a chance to set off those fireworks after all.

Holly, of course, is thrilled.

"It's not even 4th of July!" she shrieks, running around the packages and inspecting them, mouthing the warnings to herself.

Katie comes out to join them ("if you're going to do this, then somebody better provide adult supervision," she remarks dryly, and Nico deadpans back at her, "let me know when they get here,") and they're in the middle of trying to decide what they want to cook up for dinner when a taxi pulls up outside. Its engine is old and doesn't tolerate the hill very well; its brakes squeal.

They don't think anything of it, until a familiar voice calls out, "Hello? Nico? Hazel?"

It's Percy.

Caught mid-sentence with Hazel about the pros and cons of microwavable corndogs out of the freezer, Nico swings around and glares violently at Katie.

Looking surprised and deeply wrong-footed, Katie catches his glare and immediately starts shaking her head. "I didn't tell!" she protests, holding her hands up. "Nico, I swear, I promise on the River Styx, I didn't tell him!"

Curious and drawn by the raised voices, Holly drifts over. Hazel sets down the fireworks packaging she'd been wrangling, rounding the corner of the patio by Katie's tomato plants and calling down the hill, "We're up here, Percy! Do you want to try to tackle the hill, or do you want to come through the house?"

"The house, I think," Annabeth's rough voice calls back. "But we need two people to lift his chair up the steps."

Hazel's already setting off down the hill before she's done speaking.

"Is that Percy and Annabeth?" Holly asks.

Nico nods. "Do you think they know --" starts the part of him that's still fourteen, always fourteen, lost and desperately alone and wanting, expecting, waiting for Percy Jackson to rescue him, because that's what Percy Jackson does. The adult part of him catches the sentence by the throat, choking it off. Percy's done enough. Percy and Annabeth have both paid enough, mentally and physically, and now it's Nico's turn.

"I don't know," Katie answers quietly.

A few minutes later, Annabeth pushes Percy out onto the patio, Hazel holding the door open for them and Percy directing Annabeth with his voice, easy with the routine of it. Annabeth's hair is wound into a cone atop her head, held in place with a dark coral-colored starfish pin (Percy must have done it,) and a picnic basket perches in Percy's lap, swollen with self-importance.

Holly flies at them. "Did you bring us dinner?" she goes, delightedly. "From your restaurant?"

"We did!" Percy confirms, laughing when Holly reflexively flings her arms around his neck and hugs him tightly. He leans over the arm of his wheelchair to hug her back. "All the good stuff."

"Lobster?" Holly presses, naming the rarest delicacy that exists in her eight-year-old world.

"With plenty of butter," he promises. "And cake, and, of course, a whole pot of shrimp jumbalaya for the lady of the house," he nods to Hazel, who blinks back at him, looking touched and a little helpless, caught out of time, almost ninety years and thousands of miles away from her mother's New Orleans table. He grins around at them all, easily catching Holly and Katie and Hazel and Nico in the beam of it, loving and warm and so very Percy. "Who's hungry?"

After that, there really doesn't seem to be anything to do but fetch plates and silverware and eat. Nico and Hazel set up the fireworks, Holly sneaks a second piece of cake, nobody tattles on her, and she talks excitedly to Annabeth, narrating everything that's going on around for her.

"Wait," Annabeth says, clasping a fork to her chest in surprise, her grey-wreathed Athena eyes fixed pointedly ahead at nothing. "Your dad has grey hair?" Her tone turns teasing. "When did he become such an old man? Describe it to me."

Holly is more than happy to.

"Traitor," Nico calls to her, and they both laugh back at him.

At his elbow, Percy murmurs, "I'm so glad you found her."

"I was always meant to find her," Nico replies without thought, then glances down. Percy's eyes crinkle back at him, and Nico shrugs. "Raising her seemed like the least I could do, after all she did for me."

"I never doubted it," he replies.

The sun sinks out of view completely, leaving only a violet-smudged sky visible around the profile of the gum tree, and discussion follows about whether or not there's enough clear sky to even set off fireworks, or if perhaps they should relocate. The cons of relocating is that it would take quite a lot of time; Hazel's car can't accommodate all of them and Percy's wheelchair.

"Well, so long as you don't aim at my tree, I think I can protect it," says Katie. "Or stop it from blowing up. Or burning down. Oh, please don't aim at my tree."

"How safe did Leo say these fireworks were?" Hazel asks dubiously.

"Leo didn't mention safety at all."

"Figures."

"Come on!" Holly's eager voice rises out of the grass. "Let's set them off already!"

Nico crosses the lawn to her, picking his way carefully around the boggy sinkholes and carrying the matches in his hands. "Ready?" he asks.

She tosses him a look, like, duh!

He grins, kneels down, and lights the fuses.

The sound is spectacular and sets off a round of howling dogs up and down the street -- they probably should have warned the neighbors -- but the sight is even better, neon color blossoming in rings and starbursts against the dark of the sky. Holly dances around him, returning again and again to hug him around the waist.

He squeezes her back. On the patio, Hazel surreptitiously moves Annabeth's drinking glass within range of her searching hand without drawing attention to herself for doing it, Katie's sitting in the lawn chair with her knees drawn up, one hand absently playing with her anklet. Percy, seemingly always aware of where Nico's eyes are, catches his look and smiles. Nico turns back to watch the sky, full of food that had been cooked with love and surrounded by the people he loves the most, which is why he doesn't see the figure that materializes at the edge of the property. Not immediately.

"Hey," says Holly with a frown, just as another fuse burns down. She points. "Is that Percy?"

Nico looks. The firework launches.

It dashes itself across the sky. The light of it reaches them first, a bright flash of it that etches the entire yard into color-lit visibility, showing the uneven earth, the patchy grass, and Percy, the younger version, the one that still has use of his legs, standing by the fence with his back to them. His shirt is orange, his shoulders tense.

And then the sound hits.

It explodes, booming percussion that hits like a physical blow, the way really good fireworks do, and since Nico's already looking over there, he sees Percy startle, jumping clean out of his skin and whipping around.

His eyes bug out, enormous, panicked, and frightened, and his hand is already moving before he's entirely completed the turn.

Percy, Percy who has lived in Tartarus for two years, Percy who's been trained to react quickly, to fight without thinking, to make life-saving decisions in the space of a single second, Percy hears a sound like the world ripping apart, like being attacked, and answers. Riptide arcs flawlessly out of his hand.

His aim is perfect.

It's like being struck with an SUV all over again. Nico's world pinwheels. The ground unbalances underneath his feet, although really he's the one that's been sent reeling, gravity turned meaningless and laughable. Pain detonates in every part of him, as if it was him, up there in the sky and blown to bits.

The matches slip from his fingers, scattering into the grass. Somehow, this is what concerns him the most. He needs to light the rest of the fireworks.

The fuse of the last one he lit burns down. He touches his fingers to his sternum, and cannot stop himself from looking.

Riptide skewers him completely, his whole body curved reflexively around it like an insect curling around a pin. It hurts, Nico thinks distantly. He feels like a speck, a small planetisimal floating around the corrosive, radiating heat of the sun, lost in its bulk. That's what this pain is like, and he's this inconsequential thing squinting against it, complaining, it's bright.

The firework launches.

And then Holly starts screaming.

Light convulses overhead, painting the yard in stark light one more time: Holly's mouth, caught open in a rictus, her eyes a mousetrap of horror; Percy on the other end of the yard, fingers still outstretched in the shape of a throw, a dawning on his face when he sees the target he hit, and the burn of monster red in his eyes doesn't quite erase the awareness, the terrible, terrible collapsing of his mouth into the shape of a no.

Then he jerks, limbs going askew. He staggers to the side, and jerks again.

Two daggers pin him, one in the ribs, one in the neck, and he disintegrates into Mist with that expression still on his face -- the look of someone who just committed murder.

Nico looks over. On the patio, Annabeth stands with a third celestial bronze dagger in hand, waiting for Percy to tell her where to aim. Her mouth is a hard line, sightless eyes a strange, starlit color, and beside her, Percy's mouth forms over the words, too late. Nico can't hear them, but he knows they're said, and he nods back solemnly, because that makes sense. Percy and Annabeth didn't need to be told that Nico was going to die today; they already knew. They didn't come to be here in his last moments or to say good-bye. They came to stop it from happening.

They knew it was going to happen because it had already been done.

Percy Jackson knew Nico di Angelo was going to die today because Percy Jackson was the one who killed him.

That's fair, Nico thinks.

His legs begin to wobble, knees disjointing like they'd become too soggy to hold him upright, and it's a curious sensation, the buckling, like it's happening to somebody else entirely.

Nico falls, and then, seemingly from nowhere --

Hazel catches him.

Everything returns to real time: the boom of the firework in the sky, the curl of smoke across the night, obscured by the halo of Hazel's wild hair. Holly's still caught on that first horrible scream, and in the next moment, as Hazel gathers Nico close, staggering both of them to support his weight, Katie appears and snatches her up.

"Dad!" Holly's voice cracks, and it feels like every bone in Nico's body breaks from the blow of it. "Dad!"

"Hol --" Nico tries, and chokes. Blood fills his throat, a copper-tasting stopper. He coughs wetly against it. "Hol --"

"Dad! Dad!" Two figures, barely visible, one very small and struggling desperately. "Let me go! Let me go! DAD!"

"Holly." Katie's voice sobs out. "Holly, baby, no, don't look."

She barely has the strength to speak, but she has the strength to hold Holly to her, to carry her away from where Nico's blood is pulsing across Hazel's lap and knees with his every heartbeat, and that's the important part. Holly should not have to see him die. That should never be a memory she has to carry.

Hazel rocks them both back and forth. Riptide, of course, vanished when the younger Percy did, and she keeps one hand pushed to where it was, but blood bubbles up around her fingers, a ceaseless wellspring.

"You can't die," she tells him, like it's an order. Tears blink from the corners of her eyes, hard and sharp as diamonds. She curls her body against his. "You can't, you can't, do you hear me?"

She is very comfortable.

"You can't die. We have coffee mugs, Nico di Angelo. We have coffee mugs."

We do, he thinks proudly. How many half-bloods can say that?

"You can't die on me, not after we've come so far. We have our own coffee mugs, Nico. We made that."

"Nico!" Holly's voice cries, bird-like and breaking. "Nico!"

"Nico," Hazel's voice echoes. His skeleton feels like it's coming undone, pulled in two different directions: Holly reaching for him from one side of the yard, and Hazel grounding him to her here, both of them trying so desperately to keep him. "Nico, please don't die. Please."

I hope I get to see you again, he wants to tell her. I hope I reincarnate soon, and that you find me, like you promised you will, that I get to see you grow old and Holly grow up, even if maybe I don't recognize you. Maybe someday we'll reincarnate together, in bodies that aren't a battlefield, aren't pawns in somebody else's war, where we'll be free to be husband and wife as well as brother and sister, properly this time.

But he doesn't get to say any of it.

Somewhere far below, a Cutter named Atropos positions her scissors over a short, silvery thread. The scissors slice down, and the thread halves.

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