Fic: But Sunday's Coming, Percy Jackson and the Olympians
Title: But Sunday's Coming
Fandom: Percy Jackson and the Olympians
Word Count: 3,000
Rating: PG
Warnings: Spoilers for Titan's Curse. Oh, and dead people. And run-on sentences. Lots of them.
Bianca di Angelo had been out of commission for over sixty years. Being immortally dead wasn't all that different.
Just no Mythomagic. No Nico.
The first night in the Underworld, on sheets with ivory faces creased with compassion, Bianca cries herself to sleep.
.
She spends a lot of time thinking. Sometimes, she even thinks she remembers her mother. (Ridiculous, of course. There's no way she could.)
She closes her eyes and thinks of Halcyon days. There is a beach, and a brother, the edges of his toes ridged with fine white sand and his hands are sticky with sugar and shaped like starfish. She watches, remorseless, as a wave surges in and knocks him over.
She imagines it is a beach for rich white tourists, and their kids play alongside them, and they are dressed in stupid frilly suits with orange floaties perched on their arms, looking like salmon in their sunburns. She imagines she and Nico are in diapers, nothing more, and she imagines their mother comes to get them as the sun sets, but she can't picture what the sky looks like -- some nondescript shade of orange, perhaps, because who cares? There will be sunsets as long as there is an Earth, a sun, and proper gravitational sway, but Bianca only got a limited amount of time with her mother -- nor can she picture what her mother is wearing, because she doesn't know how a hotel outfits its staff. She has never been in one (the Locus doesn't count. She never saw the staff, except for the bellhop, and she doesn't think very highly of him, anyway, a man who catches his flies with honey and keeps them like a thousand little bugs on a collection board.)
So she imagines a home instead, and this is much better. Her nostrils are filled with the scent of black beans and soft, homemade tortillas and the heavy, baking heat of a desert she doesn't know the name of, and the jerky laid out in strips on the windowsill, on tea towels threadbare and printed with a kind of flower she doesn't recognize.
It is a warm night (it always is, even this close to the sea) and they lie in the complete dark, Bianca and all her baby fat nestled between her mother's thin, sinewy arms, and Nico tucked against her back. Occasionally, he would sneeze upon inhaling too much girl hair. She imagines a tunic, the stitching wide and rough like a burlap sac, hand-embroidered by her mother's mother with red butterflies and blue birds, but one of the butterflies is too big and it gives her mother's breasts a lopsided look
There might be earrings, bauble-shaped things, and the hair is heavy and dark and not unlike a horse's mane underneath her fingertips and against Nico's nose and mouth, a thousand spindly black arms embracing them, but no matter how hard she tries, she cannot picture her mother's face. There, maybe, the bow of a smile or the fan of her eyelashes, but it's too fleeting and her features don't blur, they just aren't there.
.
And then the details fly from her head on hummingbird wings and she smells nothing but death, and one stinking question.
What kind of woman do you have to be to attract the attentions of the Lord of the Dead?
.
There is a room in the Fields of Punishment that is nothing but 360-degree mirrors, and Bianca ignores the huddle of the woman in the center of the room (she looks vaguely like that woman from the TV show, the one who said "shut up!" like she thought it was a compliment), and she studies herself.
She has looked upon her father's face, and she tries to find him in hers. She thinks that maybe she could recreate her mother's face from the pieces of hers that don't belong, but it isn't working. There, she has the same arc to her forehead that her father does, but you could show her a dozen men who might just have her forehead. It doesn't tell her anything.
"Do you think..." she had dared to ask him. "That she ... could I..."
His eyes, unfathomable and eerie if they weren't -- maybe, maybe, maybe -- her own, creased with sympathy. "No, child. She has moved on. I could not find her for you, even if I wanted to."
.
She doesn't remember dying; she doesn't think it was especially painful. She wonders if that's a benefit of being Hades's daughter.
She dies, and Charon startles so bad at the sight of her that his Dior sunglasses nearly fall of his head, but he leads her silently to meet her father. She takes his hand, like she is five and not fifteen and Artemis's Hunter, and they walk along the shore of the River Styx. As they do, he tells her everything from Greek mythology (but it's not mythology, not anymore, history, her family ancestry) that she hadn't gleaned from Nico's card game and Percy Jackson's ill-conceived rescue attempt, his voice dry with humor and raspy like a chain-smoker.
There's a lot. They walk for a while. But that's the thing about the River Styx; promises never really die, so it never really ends.
She misses them, strangely enough, for all that she barely got any time to get to know them. She finds that as time passes, their faces never really fade, and every time she thinks of them pain stabs at her stomach, because they are up there, trying to save the mortal world (oh, and how strange and idyllic it seems now!) and immortal worlds together, and she's just down here, waiting.
But there's a lot of waiting going on in the Underworld.
There is Thalia, and Grover, and Zoe Nightshade who smelled like campfire ashes and the kind of water that has been left stagnant in a fountain too long, and Percy Jackson who talks like he's telling a story and he's rushing to get to the end, if only to prove that there is one, and she thinks that out of all of them, he's the one that needs the biggest break.
(She never really met Annabeth, not for real, but she thinks she'd've liked to. She wonders, in the quietness of her heart, where everybody asks the questions they fear the answers to and thus would never ask, if Annabeth hated her mother for not being important enough for the prophecy to have been about her. She would have made a good Hunter, Bianca thinks, but she has heard the way Annabeth's name sounded in Percy's mouth, and knows it never would have happened.)
.
Persephone touches her gently, fingertips barely brushing the crown of her head and Bianca holds herself perfectly still, letting her thick, dark hair (Mexico, black beans and dust) fall through the queen's fingers.
Persephone touches her like she forgives her.
Forgives her for what? Bianca has never lifted a finger to harm another soul (except the ones that were trying to kill her first.)
But. Oh. Wait. She exists.
And suddenly, she understands exactly what it means to be a half-blood, and it takes the breath right out of her, and her head fills with static.
She understands how Luke's hatred could be so potent that she can feel it all the way down here, and at her feet she hears her brother's blood cry out. She understands why Thalia's mouth got tight at the sound of thunder and why Percy's eyes went down at the corners whenever people started talking about gods. She understands, now, how none of the heroes ever had a happy ending.
Everything a hero does, things ten times as dangerous as what other children their age do, serve no other purpose but to justify their right to live.
God. That sucks.
.
She is playing with Cerebus, his yellow fangs dripping around his red rubber ball and she is grateful for the color, and then there is a familiar face catching at her eyes, like a broken seam or chipped paint, shuffling along the EZ Death line.
Bianca's heart has broken once already, the day she said good-bye to Nico and he turned his cheek to her, but she feels it leap into her throat and break again, so that the blood runs hot and streaming down her throat and her voice is constricted and painful when she says, like an animal lost in the dark and reaching, "Percy Jackson."
His eyes snap to her, the darkest end of the greyscale. They widen, and his lips move, and she begins to cry because nothing comes out but a rustle like the sound of tissue paper that's in chocolate boxes and gift bags from Tiffany's.
He is dead, and he is not sixteen.
He is not sixteen.
She moves for him, and maybe it's because he's a half-blood or because she is a daughter of Hades, but when she hugs him he is solid and cold under her hands and when she presses her face to his, kissing his cheek, he smells of ashes and tortillas and sea brine. It is only when she pulls back that she realizes she has never, in the few days she knew him, seen him look so ... at peace.
(She is angry, too, for he is dead and that means it is Nico who must make or break the prophecy, and Nico couldn't even put his shoes on the right feet without Bianca's help.)
Abruptly, she knows she has looked upon her mother's face. It is here, in Percy Jackson's eyes -- that peace. The rarest thing in the world (the most simple thing in the world.)
And then he's gone, gone where she cannot follow, even if she wanted.
She hopes he finally gets some rest.
.
There are battles, and some of them are enough make the roof of the Underworld quiver, but Hades just takes his broom and pounds on it and tells them to shut up already, he couldn't concentrate what with them trying to bring about World War III and all.
Bianca sees other faces, faces she knew from a world that's all a bit too distant now, but none of them are important. (She does see the bellhop of the Locus Casino, though, waiting his turn at judgment from Eleanor Roosevelt, Shakespeare, and Gengis Khan, and wonders what that might mean.)
As these things do, there comes a day, without warning, that she walks into her father's throne room and there is Nico, on one knee.
She almost doesn't recognize him, because he's gotten a lot of sun and his hair is longer than it's ever been, and that shouldn't be enough to fool her because she all but raised him, and she should notice something like his back is straighter or his jaw is firmer or there's something about the would-be war haunting his eyes, but then she's running for him and that all doesn't matter.
It cannot be ignored, though, when he picks her up and spins her around so that her feet go swinging like a circus ride, that he is seventeen and she hasn't aged past the day she died. She wonders if that will take something from her identity, to no longer be the big sister.
But she thinks Bianca di Angelo is a bunch of puzzle pieces, all brown and funny-edged and nothing's ever going to really fit, and she isn't going to see the big picture because she's too busy hunting for straight edges. And Hades calls her 'daughter' and the dead don't call her anything, because what does Bianca di Angelo mean to them? (And that's all right, she thinks, because most days, what does Bianca di Angelo mean to her?)
Nico sets her down, but he holds on, hands at her waist and under her elbows, and she can feel the ruptures on his lifeline, the calluses on his palms, and he holds onto her like he has worked too hard to ever let her go again, and she is astonished, because Nico spends half his energy avoiding work.
Then it clicks, and she gasps, looking from him to Hades, who is looking very old upon his throne. "It's over?"
"It's over," Nico nods.
Funny. You would have thought, after a war, something would have felt different.
"Did we win?"
He arches a sardonic eyebrow (and nobody does a sardonic eyebrow better than a son of Hades.) "We're still stuck with this world and these gods, if that's what you mean."
"Hey," Hades interjects, but Bianca bursts out, "Did you save the world?"
Nico smiles enigmatically. "No."
She is floored, and for a moment, she appreciates the feeling. There is little mystery about the Underworld, and it has been a long time since she has been surprised by anything. "But, Thalia ... Percy ... who?"
"Tyson." She just blinks at him. That is one name she hasn't heard, pressed from mouth to ear along the lines of the godling dead. Nico laughs. "Well, actually, he's more Grover's age, but Cyclops don't really have a very good sense of numbers. Tyson turned sixteen whenever he wanted to; anything for Percy, he said. The prophecy was about him. You should have seen Luke's face. Gods, it was the last thing anyone was expecting."
"So," says Hades, his voice dry as the desert dust she was buried in, raising his arm in a grand gesture. "Crisis has been averted and Olympus is saved, up until next time my brothers take each other's toys."
.
"And remember," he said, very gently nicking her chin, and she smells Mexico. "Don't look back."
.
The River Styx fights her. She is going the wrong way, it sings to her, sounding so bitter and sad and heavy that her mouth clouds with tears. She pushes her pole through the water, leaving swirls like soap. She is going the wrong way. She is supposed to float towards death, not away. She is not Charon.
Shh, shh, she hums. I am a daughter of Hades.
But nobody leaves the Underworld once they arrive, the river cries, child-like. No one.
Don't look back, Bianca.
Nico sits in front of her, leaning out over the prow like a figurehead (feminine, she thinks, and giggles despite herself.) He is not looking at her, but he is talking, and the relish in his voice makes her stomach churn. She never wanted war. She wanted her mother's peace. Her father is not the God of the Dead (that's Orcus, she's met him, nasty fellow) but the God of Wealth. Wealth is supposed to make you comfortable.
Bianca has never been comfortable.
"Luke's dead, of course. Did I mention that? I don't think I did. Well, not really dead. His dad kind of showed up last minute and saved him. It's about the only nice thing Hermes has ever done for him, keeping him from just dying and turning him into something useful." He laughs. "He got turned into an island, Bianca. An island! Small one, brand new. But someday, they say, people will live there. It might even be a new haven for half-bloods. Assuming Poseidon lets Luke stay. Grover said he would, though. He's not going to risk having Hermes for an enemy.
"Oh, man! Bianca, you should have seen Poseidon after his son got offed. Dude, I thought he was going spare Kronos all the trouble and end the world himself. So much for not getting involved in the affairs of half-bloods. But, Bianca. If Percy Jackson couldn't even save you, then how was I supposed to trust that he was going to do the right thing, if it had been him in the prophecy? I'm really glad circumstances took care of that."
There is something in his voice, then. Something Shakespeare told her to watch out for. Something Susan B. Anthony said she never wanted to hear in a human being's voice. But it's there, in Nico's, and something horrible occurs to her. She steps to his side.
"Nico," she says, very softly.
"Hm?"
"Whose side were you on?"
He is silent a bit too long. She looks at the gleam of his teeth and the curve of his cheekbone as he turns it to her, again, but this time, her heart doesn't break. It just settles, stone-heavy, inside her chest. She takes his hand, regardless, and she notices with some surprise that it is darker than hers, the skin around the nails stained black as if encrusted with sable sand, while her hand is slender and the knuckles ivory white. They have the same freckle, though, smack dab in the center of their index fingers.
She wonders if they got that from their father (but Hades doesn't seem much like a freckles person.) Maybe, then, they got it from their mother.
She thinks of half-bloods, of mortals, of Zoe Nightshade who was thrown into the stars, of Luke who justified his right to live, of Thalia who will never turn sixteen, of Annabeth whom she has never met, of Grover so in love, of Percy Jackson who just died. No constellation, no island, no tree. Just died.
"What's the first thing you're going to do?" Nico asks, giving her hand a small shake to bring her back.
"Hm?"
"This is the first time you've been up to the mortal world in two years. What's the first thing you're going to do?"
She studies him, the only thing in her ears being the steady rush of her own blood and the silence of his watch, and she doesn't see Hades in his face. Nor does she see her mother. That's her face; her nose, her almond eyes, and yes, her forehead. And that's all that really matters, isn't it?
Bianca smiles. Doesn't look back. "I think I'm going to watch the sun set."
Fandom: Percy Jackson and the Olympians
Word Count: 3,000
Rating: PG
Warnings: Spoilers for Titan's Curse. Oh, and dead people. And run-on sentences. Lots of them.
Bianca di Angelo had been out of commission for over sixty years. Being immortally dead wasn't all that different.
Just no Mythomagic. No Nico.
The first night in the Underworld, on sheets with ivory faces creased with compassion, Bianca cries herself to sleep.
.
She spends a lot of time thinking. Sometimes, she even thinks she remembers her mother. (Ridiculous, of course. There's no way she could.)
She closes her eyes and thinks of Halcyon days. There is a beach, and a brother, the edges of his toes ridged with fine white sand and his hands are sticky with sugar and shaped like starfish. She watches, remorseless, as a wave surges in and knocks him over.
She imagines it is a beach for rich white tourists, and their kids play alongside them, and they are dressed in stupid frilly suits with orange floaties perched on their arms, looking like salmon in their sunburns. She imagines she and Nico are in diapers, nothing more, and she imagines their mother comes to get them as the sun sets, but she can't picture what the sky looks like -- some nondescript shade of orange, perhaps, because who cares? There will be sunsets as long as there is an Earth, a sun, and proper gravitational sway, but Bianca only got a limited amount of time with her mother -- nor can she picture what her mother is wearing, because she doesn't know how a hotel outfits its staff. She has never been in one (the Locus doesn't count. She never saw the staff, except for the bellhop, and she doesn't think very highly of him, anyway, a man who catches his flies with honey and keeps them like a thousand little bugs on a collection board.)
So she imagines a home instead, and this is much better. Her nostrils are filled with the scent of black beans and soft, homemade tortillas and the heavy, baking heat of a desert she doesn't know the name of, and the jerky laid out in strips on the windowsill, on tea towels threadbare and printed with a kind of flower she doesn't recognize.
It is a warm night (it always is, even this close to the sea) and they lie in the complete dark, Bianca and all her baby fat nestled between her mother's thin, sinewy arms, and Nico tucked against her back. Occasionally, he would sneeze upon inhaling too much girl hair. She imagines a tunic, the stitching wide and rough like a burlap sac, hand-embroidered by her mother's mother with red butterflies and blue birds, but one of the butterflies is too big and it gives her mother's breasts a lopsided look
There might be earrings, bauble-shaped things, and the hair is heavy and dark and not unlike a horse's mane underneath her fingertips and against Nico's nose and mouth, a thousand spindly black arms embracing them, but no matter how hard she tries, she cannot picture her mother's face. There, maybe, the bow of a smile or the fan of her eyelashes, but it's too fleeting and her features don't blur, they just aren't there.
.
And then the details fly from her head on hummingbird wings and she smells nothing but death, and one stinking question.
What kind of woman do you have to be to attract the attentions of the Lord of the Dead?
.
There is a room in the Fields of Punishment that is nothing but 360-degree mirrors, and Bianca ignores the huddle of the woman in the center of the room (she looks vaguely like that woman from the TV show, the one who said "shut up!" like she thought it was a compliment), and she studies herself.
She has looked upon her father's face, and she tries to find him in hers. She thinks that maybe she could recreate her mother's face from the pieces of hers that don't belong, but it isn't working. There, she has the same arc to her forehead that her father does, but you could show her a dozen men who might just have her forehead. It doesn't tell her anything.
"Do you think..." she had dared to ask him. "That she ... could I..."
His eyes, unfathomable and eerie if they weren't -- maybe, maybe, maybe -- her own, creased with sympathy. "No, child. She has moved on. I could not find her for you, even if I wanted to."
.
She doesn't remember dying; she doesn't think it was especially painful. She wonders if that's a benefit of being Hades's daughter.
She dies, and Charon startles so bad at the sight of her that his Dior sunglasses nearly fall of his head, but he leads her silently to meet her father. She takes his hand, like she is five and not fifteen and Artemis's Hunter, and they walk along the shore of the River Styx. As they do, he tells her everything from Greek mythology (but it's not mythology, not anymore, history, her family ancestry) that she hadn't gleaned from Nico's card game and Percy Jackson's ill-conceived rescue attempt, his voice dry with humor and raspy like a chain-smoker.
There's a lot. They walk for a while. But that's the thing about the River Styx; promises never really die, so it never really ends.
She misses them, strangely enough, for all that she barely got any time to get to know them. She finds that as time passes, their faces never really fade, and every time she thinks of them pain stabs at her stomach, because they are up there, trying to save the mortal world (oh, and how strange and idyllic it seems now!) and immortal worlds together, and she's just down here, waiting.
But there's a lot of waiting going on in the Underworld.
There is Thalia, and Grover, and Zoe Nightshade who smelled like campfire ashes and the kind of water that has been left stagnant in a fountain too long, and Percy Jackson who talks like he's telling a story and he's rushing to get to the end, if only to prove that there is one, and she thinks that out of all of them, he's the one that needs the biggest break.
(She never really met Annabeth, not for real, but she thinks she'd've liked to. She wonders, in the quietness of her heart, where everybody asks the questions they fear the answers to and thus would never ask, if Annabeth hated her mother for not being important enough for the prophecy to have been about her. She would have made a good Hunter, Bianca thinks, but she has heard the way Annabeth's name sounded in Percy's mouth, and knows it never would have happened.)
.
Persephone touches her gently, fingertips barely brushing the crown of her head and Bianca holds herself perfectly still, letting her thick, dark hair (Mexico, black beans and dust) fall through the queen's fingers.
Persephone touches her like she forgives her.
Forgives her for what? Bianca has never lifted a finger to harm another soul (except the ones that were trying to kill her first.)
But. Oh. Wait. She exists.
And suddenly, she understands exactly what it means to be a half-blood, and it takes the breath right out of her, and her head fills with static.
She understands how Luke's hatred could be so potent that she can feel it all the way down here, and at her feet she hears her brother's blood cry out. She understands why Thalia's mouth got tight at the sound of thunder and why Percy's eyes went down at the corners whenever people started talking about gods. She understands, now, how none of the heroes ever had a happy ending.
Everything a hero does, things ten times as dangerous as what other children their age do, serve no other purpose but to justify their right to live.
God. That sucks.
.
She is playing with Cerebus, his yellow fangs dripping around his red rubber ball and she is grateful for the color, and then there is a familiar face catching at her eyes, like a broken seam or chipped paint, shuffling along the EZ Death line.
Bianca's heart has broken once already, the day she said good-bye to Nico and he turned his cheek to her, but she feels it leap into her throat and break again, so that the blood runs hot and streaming down her throat and her voice is constricted and painful when she says, like an animal lost in the dark and reaching, "Percy Jackson."
His eyes snap to her, the darkest end of the greyscale. They widen, and his lips move, and she begins to cry because nothing comes out but a rustle like the sound of tissue paper that's in chocolate boxes and gift bags from Tiffany's.
He is dead, and he is not sixteen.
He is not sixteen.
She moves for him, and maybe it's because he's a half-blood or because she is a daughter of Hades, but when she hugs him he is solid and cold under her hands and when she presses her face to his, kissing his cheek, he smells of ashes and tortillas and sea brine. It is only when she pulls back that she realizes she has never, in the few days she knew him, seen him look so ... at peace.
(She is angry, too, for he is dead and that means it is Nico who must make or break the prophecy, and Nico couldn't even put his shoes on the right feet without Bianca's help.)
Abruptly, she knows she has looked upon her mother's face. It is here, in Percy Jackson's eyes -- that peace. The rarest thing in the world (the most simple thing in the world.)
And then he's gone, gone where she cannot follow, even if she wanted.
She hopes he finally gets some rest.
.
There are battles, and some of them are enough make the roof of the Underworld quiver, but Hades just takes his broom and pounds on it and tells them to shut up already, he couldn't concentrate what with them trying to bring about World War III and all.
Bianca sees other faces, faces she knew from a world that's all a bit too distant now, but none of them are important. (She does see the bellhop of the Locus Casino, though, waiting his turn at judgment from Eleanor Roosevelt, Shakespeare, and Gengis Khan, and wonders what that might mean.)
As these things do, there comes a day, without warning, that she walks into her father's throne room and there is Nico, on one knee.
She almost doesn't recognize him, because he's gotten a lot of sun and his hair is longer than it's ever been, and that shouldn't be enough to fool her because she all but raised him, and she should notice something like his back is straighter or his jaw is firmer or there's something about the would-be war haunting his eyes, but then she's running for him and that all doesn't matter.
It cannot be ignored, though, when he picks her up and spins her around so that her feet go swinging like a circus ride, that he is seventeen and she hasn't aged past the day she died. She wonders if that will take something from her identity, to no longer be the big sister.
But she thinks Bianca di Angelo is a bunch of puzzle pieces, all brown and funny-edged and nothing's ever going to really fit, and she isn't going to see the big picture because she's too busy hunting for straight edges. And Hades calls her 'daughter' and the dead don't call her anything, because what does Bianca di Angelo mean to them? (And that's all right, she thinks, because most days, what does Bianca di Angelo mean to her?)
Nico sets her down, but he holds on, hands at her waist and under her elbows, and she can feel the ruptures on his lifeline, the calluses on his palms, and he holds onto her like he has worked too hard to ever let her go again, and she is astonished, because Nico spends half his energy avoiding work.
Then it clicks, and she gasps, looking from him to Hades, who is looking very old upon his throne. "It's over?"
"It's over," Nico nods.
Funny. You would have thought, after a war, something would have felt different.
"Did we win?"
He arches a sardonic eyebrow (and nobody does a sardonic eyebrow better than a son of Hades.) "We're still stuck with this world and these gods, if that's what you mean."
"Hey," Hades interjects, but Bianca bursts out, "Did you save the world?"
Nico smiles enigmatically. "No."
She is floored, and for a moment, she appreciates the feeling. There is little mystery about the Underworld, and it has been a long time since she has been surprised by anything. "But, Thalia ... Percy ... who?"
"Tyson." She just blinks at him. That is one name she hasn't heard, pressed from mouth to ear along the lines of the godling dead. Nico laughs. "Well, actually, he's more Grover's age, but Cyclops don't really have a very good sense of numbers. Tyson turned sixteen whenever he wanted to; anything for Percy, he said. The prophecy was about him. You should have seen Luke's face. Gods, it was the last thing anyone was expecting."
"So," says Hades, his voice dry as the desert dust she was buried in, raising his arm in a grand gesture. "Crisis has been averted and Olympus is saved, up until next time my brothers take each other's toys."
.
"And remember," he said, very gently nicking her chin, and she smells Mexico. "Don't look back."
.
The River Styx fights her. She is going the wrong way, it sings to her, sounding so bitter and sad and heavy that her mouth clouds with tears. She pushes her pole through the water, leaving swirls like soap. She is going the wrong way. She is supposed to float towards death, not away. She is not Charon.
Shh, shh, she hums. I am a daughter of Hades.
But nobody leaves the Underworld once they arrive, the river cries, child-like. No one.
Don't look back, Bianca.
Nico sits in front of her, leaning out over the prow like a figurehead (feminine, she thinks, and giggles despite herself.) He is not looking at her, but he is talking, and the relish in his voice makes her stomach churn. She never wanted war. She wanted her mother's peace. Her father is not the God of the Dead (that's Orcus, she's met him, nasty fellow) but the God of Wealth. Wealth is supposed to make you comfortable.
Bianca has never been comfortable.
"Luke's dead, of course. Did I mention that? I don't think I did. Well, not really dead. His dad kind of showed up last minute and saved him. It's about the only nice thing Hermes has ever done for him, keeping him from just dying and turning him into something useful." He laughs. "He got turned into an island, Bianca. An island! Small one, brand new. But someday, they say, people will live there. It might even be a new haven for half-bloods. Assuming Poseidon lets Luke stay. Grover said he would, though. He's not going to risk having Hermes for an enemy.
"Oh, man! Bianca, you should have seen Poseidon after his son got offed. Dude, I thought he was going spare Kronos all the trouble and end the world himself. So much for not getting involved in the affairs of half-bloods. But, Bianca. If Percy Jackson couldn't even save you, then how was I supposed to trust that he was going to do the right thing, if it had been him in the prophecy? I'm really glad circumstances took care of that."
There is something in his voice, then. Something Shakespeare told her to watch out for. Something Susan B. Anthony said she never wanted to hear in a human being's voice. But it's there, in Nico's, and something horrible occurs to her. She steps to his side.
"Nico," she says, very softly.
"Hm?"
"Whose side were you on?"
He is silent a bit too long. She looks at the gleam of his teeth and the curve of his cheekbone as he turns it to her, again, but this time, her heart doesn't break. It just settles, stone-heavy, inside her chest. She takes his hand, regardless, and she notices with some surprise that it is darker than hers, the skin around the nails stained black as if encrusted with sable sand, while her hand is slender and the knuckles ivory white. They have the same freckle, though, smack dab in the center of their index fingers.
She wonders if they got that from their father (but Hades doesn't seem much like a freckles person.) Maybe, then, they got it from their mother.
She thinks of half-bloods, of mortals, of Zoe Nightshade who was thrown into the stars, of Luke who justified his right to live, of Thalia who will never turn sixteen, of Annabeth whom she has never met, of Grover so in love, of Percy Jackson who just died. No constellation, no island, no tree. Just died.
"What's the first thing you're going to do?" Nico asks, giving her hand a small shake to bring her back.
"Hm?"
"This is the first time you've been up to the mortal world in two years. What's the first thing you're going to do?"
She studies him, the only thing in her ears being the steady rush of her own blood and the silence of his watch, and she doesn't see Hades in his face. Nor does she see her mother. That's her face; her nose, her almond eyes, and yes, her forehead. And that's all that really matters, isn't it?
Bianca smiles. Doesn't look back. "I think I'm going to watch the sun set."