Fic: Tell No Tales, and Fanmix: Necromantic, Percy Jackson
Title: Tell No Tales
Fandom: Percy Jackson and the Olympians
Characters/Pairings: Nico/Bianca, Percy
Word Count: 5,800
Done for amnesty over at pjo_fic_battle. Prompt was: Nico/Bianca, whisper. Also did a fanmix for the prompt: Nico/Bianca, necromantic, found at bottom of the post! Oh, incest, hello, I have missed you. *pets*
I meant for this to be dark, and it tried, but the humor just kind of happened while I wasn't paying attention, so this skirts the edge of macabre. My bad.
Unbeta'd. You can also read this @ AO3.
He's standing in aisle 8 with the handsoaps and the body wash, trying to remember if it's Dial he likes the smell of better, or Irish Spring, which has cooler packaging, when a ninja pops out of nowhere and tries to kill him.
He'd like to tell you that's unusual, but it isn't. There's this sanctity, though, about a man choosing his bar of soap that should not be disturbed, so he isn't really expecting it. And it's a crap ninja, anyway: it knocks over a thing of Head&Shoulders when it jumps over the shelves and comes at him with a sword. One of Hephaestus's older models, then, before he started equipping them with the Olympian version of OnStar and a sense of balance to put the WiiFit to shame. This was like the AOL version of that.
Still. Nico doesn't exactly have a free hand to fend the thing off with, so mostly he's left with watching it come at him and taking a moment to think, ruefully, that this is a really uninspiring way to go. Live fast, die hard, in a grocery store with an advertisement for 2-for-1 chicken breast going over the loud speakers.
And then Bianca's there, her body a solid barrier between him and the ninja, and she makes the softest exhaling noise when the sword plunges in up under her ribs.
Seemingly surprised, the ninja looks down, where the hilt of its sword crunches up against her chest. Bianca looks at it, too.
Sighs.
Backhands the ninja so hard its head comes off its shoulders, wires sparking and body crumpling with a hollow, mechanical sound, nothing dangerous about it as it disintegrates. She huffs, ever so faintly, and turns to Nico with her mouth in the thinnest line.
Bianca hates Hepaestus and his robots, which seem to have a taste for di Angelos the way someone would have a taste for eggs done exactly the same way every time. One of them in a hundred-mile radius, and it would find them.
She puts a hand to her ribs, where he can see the torn skin through her shirt, and huffs again, barely enough force in it to move a mobile. The rip's going to spread like a crack in a windshield until there's no saving it, which sucks because he knows Bianca likes that body, and besides, it's new.
"Thank you," he tells her, belatedly, and she nods, simple as that. She takes his hand, weaving her fingers in between his like they used to, on their way home from preschool in silver-buckled shoes, holding hands so they could cross streets safely.
"So," he says. "Dial or Irish Spring?"
+++
Every time Bianca wears out a body, he makes her a new one.
Like abused furniture, her bodies don't heal themselves, so when she gets stabbed by rogue mechanical ninjas, the wound never closes up. She walks too long and too far in the wrong pair of shoes, and the soles come off her feet. A papercut, and she eventually sloughs off most of a finger. Tugs too hard while she's brushing her hair, and eventually her scalp peels away, raw and bloody. Nico doesn't really mind, but Bianca's prissy and modest like a Victorian and somehow equates showing a bone with flashing her private parts, so when she starts to whine, he finds a morgue.
Selection is limited, based on the narrow time window between death and embalming at the funeral home, and some bodies are just too far gone to be pieced back together, though Nico's gotten pretty good at the Humpty-Dumpty thing.
Bianca likes to stick to what she knows: girls, young, dark in skin and hair and eyes, and when she looks at them, her gaze goes brittle at the corners and her mouth wobbles like the surface of water and he allows her that sadness, the regret that anyone had to die young, because he doesn't: he's glad when they find a body that resembles what Bianca used to be, regardless of who had to die tragically in order for her to have it.
They switch bodies; the discarded husk lying on the morgue table, the new one animated. Nico sews her inside with stitches like train tracks, closing up the skin over her heart with a spool of thread stolen from the Spinner's wheel, and brushes his hand over every available inch of flesh. Where he touches, putrefaction stops, because rotting bodies are messy and, ultimately, counterproductive, and if he can't give her her own body back, at the very least he can give her another one that works properly.
Sometimes, there aren't a lot of choices: she's been a white-haired old lady, an Indian man with a bullet hole above his heart, an Iraq veteran with a missing leg, and the illusion is never perfect: she's warm to the touch, her blood bright red when her skin's flayed open, but her eyes are sunken and underlined in bruise colors, her skin an awful sickly grey, and they attract stares sometimes, in check-out lines at grocery stores, because she looks two minutes away from dropping dead (oh, hey!)
It's not enough to make him stop, switching her soul from body to body like he's changing batteries, because he'll take Bianca even like this.
Nico was ten years old when she died, leaving him with absolutely nothing in an unfamiliar world. He was fifteen when his dead sister was resurrected. He'd already lived longer than she ever got the chance to, and hell if he was going to spend another day without her.
+++
They don't talk.
They don't really have a choice in the matter. It's not that they won't talk. It's that they can't.
Or, Bianca can't. It's the price, or something, of being dead. Non-negotiable. Nonrefundable. A human being's voice is its most valuable possession, second only to life itself, and it must be given up in order to gain admittance to the Underworld (as if, you know, dying wasn't enough in the first place.) Nico's seen them, crowded in Charon's boat, mingling in the lines awaiting judgment, the shades murmuring to each other like rustling leaves. Maybe the dead can understand each other, but they'll never be able to talk to a mortal again.
So when he sewed his sister into a body for the first time, he hadn't been all that surprised when she touched her fingers to her throat and shook her head in mute sympathy.
It breaks his heart a little bit, that he'll never hear the sound of Bianca laughing, teasing him, or hushing him when he wakes up at night from dreams of bone soldiers, but only a little bit. She doesn't wear his sister's face, and doesn't speak with his sister's voice, but it's amazing, how little that really matters. She's here. She's with him. She's his Bianca, and the rest...
He can live with the rest.
They make do. They weren't talkative even to begin with: in childhood, Maria taught them to be seen but not heard. At the military school, talking without permission was punishable with after-school detention and potato-peeling (it wasn't a particularly creative military school,) so they got used to communicating with raised eyebrows and minute movements of their hands. They can have whole conversations, just with their eyebrows and a little interpretive miming.
It's not about the discussion, though. Being together's the important thing.
Everything they do is wordless, instinctive, two separate limbs operating under the orders of one brain. They debate and decide in the space of a dark-lashed look, a tilting smile; this town or the next, sleep or keep walking, hamburger or McNuggets, which station to listen to on the handheld radio swinging from Bianca's free hand like a sandpail (playing the greatest hits of the 80s, 90s, and today -- all of which are new to them.)
One of the first things they agreed on was that, under absolutely no circumstances were they ever going to wear black. That's just ... beating a dead horse with a four-inch thick piece of dead wood. Even without the crayola-color clothes, they'd always be able to find each other in a crowd.
And that's what it's like now. Nico has been alone; more alone than most people can even comprehend. Alone in an unfamiliar time, an unfamiliar place, discovering the power to crack the earth for skeletons, chased by the shadow of a prophecy, and having absolutely no one to turn to. Every minute he spends with Bianca drives away the shadows of those years; her shoulder bumping his, her rustling tissue-paper voice reassuring him when he staggers away from a dead body, her toes pressed to the back of his calf when they sleep. Talk is cheap compared to that.
Other people take the time out of their personal lives to catch up with their family. To Nico, the time he isn't with his big sister doesn't count as time at all.
+++
Percy is the first to track him down.
Of course he is, because Percy has this needle set in his brain that automatically wakes up and spins to, Nico is doing something stupid. Go and tell him he's a pain in the ass and stop him. So naturally Percy does just that, because he has no off switch on that kind of stuff, and Nico is needy and Percy needs to be needed, and somewhere in the middle it balances out to a surrogate big-brother relationship and while Nico's annoyed by the whole thing -- because hey, who likes having someone older than you turning up and telling you what to do, like, ever -- he's also glad to know that there's at least one living person who gives a shit what he's up to.
"30 deaths in half as many states," he throws at Nico's back like a challenge, and Nico freezes. Percy's is one voice he will always be able to recognize, even in an industrial district in the middle of nowhere. "And seventeen bodies mysteriously hopping morgues, like they've been sleep-walking."
Nico hip-shifts his weight, doesn't turn around. "If you want to say something, Percy, just say it."
Bianca's inside the Burger King across the street, getting them something with a lot of salt and some curly fries. He wonders if he can telepathically tell her to stay put, and if he could, if she would listen.
"They're not monsters. You're murdering people, Nico. Innocent, mortal people."
He spins around. Percy's right behind him, and he has the gall to look ... betrayed, like Nico's doing it just to hurt him.
Nico laughs at him. "And you don't feel it?" he demands, voice slick and eager, because Percy doesn't get it. Nico's just the errand boy. "Crawling all up inside you in your sleep? The power. Why do you think there was a pact, hm?" He takes a step forward, and another, crowding into Percy's space. His palms are itching. "Why do you think we're always the first to die, us, the children of the Big Three? Because we can't stand it. We go crazy, quicker and faster than any of the others, and you just know they'll put us down like dogs when that time comes."
And it's about then that Percy grabs him, too fast for Nico to even follow, grabs him and throws him up against the alley wall, the impact sharp enough in his head and shoulders to make him gasp breathlessly with pain, but this isn't unusual -- Percy's thrown Nico around before, why break with tradition. It's what family does.
"Don't fuck with this shit, Nico!" he half-yells, voice grinding out like it's painful to even say anything. "Seriously, man, do you even know what the hell you're getting into?"
"Let me go," Nico replies, which is stupid because Percy tightens his grip, just to be contrary, and Nico tries not to let his eyes roll back, because it hurts.
It hurts, and Percy doesn't know it hurts because he doesn't get hurt anymore, thanks to Nico and the River Styx, and he forgets what hurts other people. In his fury, his fingers are vice-like around Nico's forearms, tight and relentless, worse than even the most desperate, grabby corpse, and no matter how Nico twists, it only drags at his skin like an Indian rug burn.
Then, beside him, a whisper, a soft hissing breath that might be a name, and Bianca appears at Percy's side. She lays her fingers on his elbow and pulls, gently, asking without words if he would please let go of her brother. Nico is pinned between the wall and Percy's body like a bug on a collection board.
She makes a noise, something between a hum and a murmur, unmistakably, we're all right. Her mouth and eyes are smiling, sympathetic and knowing, and Percy may only have known Bianca for a couple days, but he can still recognize her smile even in a different face: he jolts in surprise against Nico. Seemingly against his will, his eyes dart upwards towards the night sky, finding Zoe Nightshade among the stars.
One preserved dead girl, two preserved dead girl. Both of them died in front of his eyes.
Bianca gently tugs on him again, and he lets go of Nico, whose knees give out without a lot of dignity. Feeling flares in his arms, pain bright.
"Yeah," Percy goes uncomfortably, looking between the two of them as Bianca drops down next to her brother, hands stroking his hair and shoulder; whatever she could reach, up until his fingers closed over hers, holding them still. "Yeah, I guess -- you're just --" he breathes out slowly. "Just. Okay. Just, don't be a stranger, man. Come stop by sometime if you ever go back to New York, yeah? My mom'd be glad to know I got friends outside of Annabeth and Grover."
Explain this, he's saying without actually saying it, lest it sound like caring. Come and explain this so I can take responsibility and make sure you're okay.
"Yeah, all right," Nico nods, hiding his reddened skin from sight and not intending to do anything of the sort, and his sister keeps on smiling.
It's August, blisteringly hot and staying that way like it's being choked, but Nico wears long sleeves for two weeks.
+++
Bianca always keeps her fingers on him, somehow.
The way mortals need to breathe, Bianca needs to touch him. Her fingers chase his when he groggily combs them through his hair in the morning, she presses her nose into the dip between his shoulder blades while they're sleeping, she smoothes his shirt down over his hips when they're standing together on street corners. If he's not within reach, her eyes follow him wherever he goes, a weight in and of themselves. It's like she doesn't trust him not to disappear if she turns away.
It's not wholly unreasonable, he supposes. The first time in their entire lives they were separated, she died and he didn't even get to hug her one last time, or hear her say, be good now, okay, munchkin.
Now he's the one with a life to lose and she takes on the role of guardian angel.
The touching isn't odd. He remembers curling up with her for naps on the chaisse in their mother's hotel room, his head tucked under Bianca's chin like it'd been meant to fit there. She's been within arm's reach his whole life; she'd even taken him to the dance, that night in Maine when everything fell apart, and it wasn't until years later that anyone ever actually explained to him that it wasn't natural, that sisters do not take their brothers to middle school dances.
And by then it'd just seemed silly. He'd been tricked by a vengeful king, played like a puppet by his father, baptized Percy Jackson in the River Styx and watched his skin burn, and he could call hellhounds with a whistle and summon skeletons with a snap of his fingers, and somebody was going to tell him that the only bright point in his life (the way his sister watched out for him, the memory of her hand stroking his head, the simple, warm knowledge of being loved) was wrong?
No.
No and never.
Two months after she was resurrected, they stumbled right into the middle of a Hunt, the Hunters of Artemis running some quarry or another to the ground.
Terror, shock white all the way down to his bones, made him reach out, grab Bianca around the wrist, as if the moment the Hunters disappeared, sprinting off on the horizon, his sister'd be going with them, the same as she had before.
Bianca jerked, and then turned into him, burrowing her face against the fabric of his coat so that they couldn't see her face, see her eyes and recognize her. He felt her mouth moving against his chest, saying something, but he couldn't make it out. She reached into his pocket, pulling out a fountain pen he liberally borrowed from a bank teller found dead in the men's bathroom a Thursday ago, and then pushed the sleeve of his jacket up until she had enough of his forearm to write on.
We can't let them catch us. Ever.
He nodded, knowing this. "We'll keep running," he promised, the best he could offer her.
She pulled back long enough to give him a patented big sister look, the one that said he was missing the point entirely. They can't want me, she wrote into his flesh, underlined it, and the implication she was trying to make struck him like a brick to the face.
That was the first time; Nico was fifteen and a little too young for every single part of it, but he was fifteen and growing, his stomach a yowling, hungry maw all the time and his limbs stretching out like they had somewhere else to be and everything hurt, everything ached every moment of the day, and he spread his body over his sister's borrowed one and they figured it out together, like it was just some new game they were trying at the Casino, and made her undesirable to Artemis, a girl ruined, and even Nico knew the significance of what they did: out of loyalty to the goddess and out of loyalty to him, Bianca chose her brother.
What had started as a need became a want so fast it felt like another growing pain, aching inside of him, dull and hollow and ever-present. He didn't know his body, but she found every part of it and made it her own, and Nico was lost from that point on.
Bianca needs to touch him, keep her hands on him so she can feel his heart still beating, a whump and a silence, like it's waiting for an answer from hers, which doesn't beat at all.
A bare mattress in a railroad flat, swamped with the muggy summer heat that slips into the crevices of their clothes and lingers in the small of their backs, and Bianca lays a kiss on the angular slide of his hip, lingering and thoughtful.
He's half-dazed into sleep, but startles right out of it when she bites down, hard enough to break the skin.
"Ow! Wha --" he starts, but she silences him with a hand pressed over his sternum, fingers splayed five-point and warm against his pulse. With the other hand, she traces the trickle of blood that wells in the creases made by her teeth, the expression on her face both joyed and wistful in one.
He tugs on her wrist until she gives in, and he pulls her up his body to get to her mouth, kissing I'm alive into the swell of her bottom lip and the bow of her upper lip like Morse code. When she kisses back, it's fervent, something said over and over again as she kisses his mouth into slack compliance, obedient and mindlessly open underneath hers, and that's when he realizes that it's his name. She's whispering, Nico, pressing it into his flesh again and again like she needs him to keep it safe.
And he does.
He does.
+++
There's a funky, 50s-style movie theater across the street from the post office in this wannabe saloon town somewhere more south than west, and it looks like it hasn't seen anything up and coming since Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. When they pass it, they notice it's showing posters for Tim Burton's Corpse Bride. Bianca elbows him in the ribs, her eyes alight with humor, and he says, "Yeah. Yeah, all right," because dude, you don't say no to irony when it smacks you in the face.
And yeah, it's kind of hilarious, what with the macabre humor being so far up their alley it was drinking milk out of a saucer on their front step, and afterwards, Nico takes his sister's hand and professes his wedding vows and gives her a ring made from his straw, and she giggles without audio and pretends to toss her bouquet, and he scoops her up into his arms and carries her over the threshold out into the night, much to the amusement of the lone kid manning the ticket booth.
A couple days later, they track down an older man sitting by the railroad tracks, turning his empty prescription bottle over in his palms. The rush from killing him staggers Nico a little bit, leaves his mouth filmy like soap suds from the chemical taste and his mind buzzing like he'd stayed in the shower too long. He looks for his sister, automatic and knee-jerk and necessary as breathing, and finds her a little ways down the tracks.
As he watches, she unearths a mini-graveyard, full of the man's pets -- the only thing he ever drew comfort from. She lifts her eyes to his, her mouth parted, fragile with hope.
Nico builds her a dog out of bones, a creature with flat, yellowing hips and shoulders like dinner plates and a wedge-shaped head, a long, graceful curving spine and an easy lope. It looks a little like the dog from Corpse Bride, only with fewer Silly Putty maggots and a friendlier expression.
Bianca is completely enamored. Nico is enamored of Bianca being enamored, and the dog is here to stay.
+++
This is what they do.
They walk -- town to town, city to city, state to state, along broken freeways and meandering rivers, down famous boulevards and through suburbs that are as identical in upstate New York as they are in Chicago as they are in endless Montana. They don't really need any other form of transportation, not when Nico can shadow-travel when they get tired. This is what he did, that year between Bianca's death and the battle in Manhattan; pushed himself into shadows all over the country (plus a few accidental trips to China) just to see what he could shake up in there.
They disappear off the map, moving across the country like manifest destiny. She's been through it once, of course, dying in a desert somewhere between Arizona and New Mexico, Colorado and Utah, but it's not like she had time to stop and look at the sights, too busy with sacrificing her life for people she barely knew.
Even before that, shipped from DC to Nevada as children, Nevada to Maine, Maine to New York without explanation, and nobody ever stopped and asked them what they wanted, or where they wanted to go. So now they go everywhere.
This is what they do: Thanatos, god of death, has been toying with mortals lately; the lonely, the depressed, those who get caught staring out windows on slate-sky days and wishing they were just a little bit smarter, a little bit more resourceful, a little bit thinner, wishing they could rewrite their lives. The only way to rewrite life is to erase it.
This time, it's a high school, an all-boys private high school that's ritzy and expensive enough to have its own crest, if the front doors are anything to go by, and you're not allowed in the building without being buzzed in by security, but Nico walks right up the front steps and then is inside, like the click of a projector slide, no evidence for the time in between. Bianca is on one side, the dog trotting gracefully at their heels as they blur out of the shadows in the front lobby.
There's the murmur and whir of the table-top fans, a distant drone of a teacher yelling facts like volume will make it more interesting, another class bubbling up laughing at something. In the hallway, alone, a boy sits with his back against the lockers. His head is bowed, his uniform shirt untucked and his shoes scruffed. He made a deal with Thanatos.
Nico, who walks between the mortal world and the Underworld as easily as train tracks, is just the errand boy.
The kid looks up, adolescence still rounded in the shape of his face and a secret held captive between the lines of his lips, and Nico nods at him like he understands. Nods and then throws a leg over the boy's thighs, straddles his lap. Takes his face, turns it up to the florescent lighting, the pale hollow of his throat catching white and blue-veined. The boy sighs into him as Nico seals their lips together, and sucks his soul out. It comes with a rush and a wail, a dizzying, tumbling kaleidoscope of emotions and memories that aren't his, and then is gone, to wherever Thanatos keeps them in their little amber-glass bottles all in neat little rows like fireflies. All that's left is the aftertaste on Nico's tongue.
They all taste differently.
He stands, legs trembling coltishly, and leaves the corpse behind, thunking dully back against the lockers. He feels Bianca step up to him like she's moving through water; a ripple in the air preceding the brush of her fingers to his temple. He turns to her automatically, like he always does, doesn't even care if the school security camera captures this, because murder is Nico's trade.
Nico kills people, and Thanatos pays him with the lease on Bianca's soul. He can borrow her, so long as he keeps doing these little jobs.
His fingers come up, seeking the warmth in his sister's cheek, knuckles brushing a loose curl of hair where it's gotten caught in between her lips. She looks at the expression on his face, and then stretches up to him, wordlessly offering him her mouth.
He kisses her until the taste of death is gone from the back of his throat.
+++
It's six months after Percy finds him that the first of the half-bloods track them down.
There are four of them, travel-weary and wearing torn armor, like they'd stumbled across more than a few monsters on their way to him. It had to be a little anticlimactic, finding them; a sixteen-year-old boy who needs a haircut, a grey-skinned girl, and a dog made out of bones.
They stare at each other across a Safeway parking lot, a half-filled cart return between them. It's a clear, still night; Nico can hear one of them whispering to herself, some half-beat of an oracle's rhyme, and knows in that instant that they're here on a Quest.
One of Hephaestus's, maybe, in revenge for the ruined mechanical ninjas: he recognizes the girl in the front -- Pearl, who became the de facto second-in-command of her cabin after the death of Charles or whatever his name was, that one guy, right before the battle for Manhattan. She's brilliant, and had offered to help when he was building the Hades cabin, without him having to work up the courage to ask.
A few of the others he can vaguely place -- Nathan, a son of Apollo (come to think of it, were there any girls in the Apollo cabin?) who'd filled out in surprising ways over the years and is probably taller than him, from what he could tell across the parking lot. To his left is a daughter of Persephone, whose grin glints whitely in his direction; Nico's never liked her, mainly because she thinks the fact their parents are married is an excellent excuse to pick on him endlessly, and her sense of humor tends to run more Home Alone than he can stadn. The fourth he doesn't recognize at all -- she looks way too young to even be on a Quest, doesn't even have one of the beaded necklaces most campers wear. With the exception of Nathan, they all have swords drawn.
"A little out of season for duck-hunting, isn't it?" he asks, tone light, holding onto his sister's hand. He's not worried. He can shadow-teleport them out if it looks like it's going to get ugly. "I hope you're not still on a Summer Quest; you're running a little late."
"We're sorry, Nico," says Pearl. Her voice has the same rough, ashy rasp most Haphaestus kids have from bending over the forge all day. Even so, she speaks softly, like she's gentling a frightened animal. "We have no choice."
"That's lame," is his immediate response. "And a cop-out. There's always a choice. Just because --"
He cuts off, because there's a familiar thwop sound, and, before he can really realize that it's Nathan, notching an arrow to the bow Nico didn't even notice he was carrying, he's already let it fly.
"No --!" he begins, abortively, but it doesn't matter, because it wasn't aimed at him.
Bianca gasps, the sound so faint it's like the beat of a butterfly's wings, but Nico will hear it in his nightmares until the day he dies. She staggers against him, the arrow sunk true right into her heart, the feathered end still quivering from impact.
There's a breathless moment, a moment so poised it's like every clock forgets to tick because it can't move forward, it can't, and then it does and Bianca's tumbling, but it's not Bianca. It's just a dead body, a rotting corpse, celestial bronze arrow sticking out of its stitched-up chest like a bull's-eye, and Bianca's ... Bianca's ....
Nico screams. He screams and he pushes with all his might against the knowledge, against the sudden emptiness, the absence he can feel like it's its own weight, because she can't. She can't be gone. She can't have been sent back to the Underworld. No, no, no, nononononononono. NO.
He can't. He can't, he can't, he cannot, physically cannot lose his sister again.
The earth splits. It quakes and shivers and trembles underneath him, like it's trying to get away, like it can't stand to touch him, and Nico keeps screaming -- out loud or inaudibly, he doesn't know. The ground shatters, drowning him out.
He stands, slowly, only peripherally aware of the dog by his side, head thrown back in a soundless howl. There's a power inside of him like nothing he's ever felt before, terrible in its scope and endless like a road with no vanishing point. He feels like he could stretch his hand out to either side, and bring each corner of the world crashing together, like he could fold the continent like he was shutting a book. The world is shaking underneath his feet, but he barely even notices.
He doesn't know how long he goes on like that: he snuffs out Nathan, and Pearl, and the other two, their deaths as meaningless to him as the brush of raindrops in a storm.
He closes his eyes and he summons her.
He reaches out and he calls for her, calls every single corner of every single shadow of every single space in the world, the spaces between spaces, because this, this is his love for his sister, and it runs so deep you could toss a coin in it and never hear it reach bottom.
Behind him.
A whisper.
+++
And it's stupid, it's so fucking stupid to think that anyone has the right to tell them they can't have this.
From the very beginning, someone's always been pulling the strings, yanking them around. Zeus, bringing the hotel down on top of their heads to teach his brother a lesson. Alecto, dragging them from DC to the Lotus Casino and then to Maine, no word of explanation. Artemis, saying, you are young, you are beautiful, you are brave, leave your brother and live an immortal life. Percy, Chiron, Pearl, saying, you can't, you can't you can't have her back. Minos, saying, you can. Hades, lock and key in his fingers, a collar of prophecy heavy around Nico's throat. Thanatos, his collection of bottled souls and his words, your heart is only half a beat without her.
Push, pull. How can we use the di Angelo siblings to our own end today?
He's sixteen years old, old enough to make something for them.
They are above and outside of the law. They don't exist. Officially, Bianca and Nico di Angelo died in the too-hot July of 1942, in Washington, DC, with their mother, Maria. You can't charge the dead with murder, with breaking and entering, with theft, with loving their sibling enough to do all of the above.
No one is going to tell them they don't deserve this. His sister, his big sister, whom he followed with blind adoration and faith until she left him to find a mind of his own, his sister and her hands stroking the knobs of his knuckles and her mouth brushing his ear and the knee-jerk way she puts herself in front of a sword for him; all his, it all belongs to him, and every part of him belongs to her.
Everything he's done, he's done for her.
There is no one more important than Bianca, not in life, in death, in every shadow in between. It's been her. It's always been her.
No one else matters. And that. That's the moral of the story.
He is the reaper, the ghost king with a crown of sun-bleached bones; he builds her a new body carefully, lowering her into it as if she was a baby into a cradle, newly baptised. He drops to his knees in front of her and kisses every bit of skin he can reach; light, brushing touches up her shins, on the insides of her knees and wrists, and wherever he touches, he seals her in, stops her decay. Power shivers in every inch of his skin. He'll keep her. Nothing in this world -- or any world, mortal or immortal -- is going to stop him from keeping her.
Bianca's fingers card through his hair, gentle and stroking, like they've done every single day of his life, long as he could remember. He looks up at her. Her mouth forms over his name.
Love of my damn life, he thinks, pushing himself up so he could kiss her, her mouth warm and sweet and tasting -- not like the only thing he has left, but the only thing he has worth keeping.
The First Cry in Hades (Guilty) }{ Pierrot 01.
(not english)
Happy Phantom }{ Tori Amos 02.
and if i die today i'll be the happy phantom / i'll go chasing the nuns out in the yard
or will i see you dear / and wish i could come back
Touched }{ VAST 03.
the demigods and hungry ghosts / and my god knows i'm not at home
The Shoal Cave }{ PokeRemixStudio 04.
(instrumental)
Underground }{ The Sounds 05.
let's go back to the underground / how could i know it was the last time i would see you?
i could always try to reach you / and it's pumping through my veins
Hang You From the Heavens }{ The Dead Weather 06.
i don't know if i should let go you / or if i should keep you
i'd like to grab you by the hair / and hang you from the heavens
Backdrifts (Honeymoon is Over) }{ Radiohead 07.
we're rotten fruit / we're damaged goods / what the hell, we've got nothing more to lose
Black Cat Bones }{ Laika 08.
ain't it lonesome, ain't it sad / i was the only happiness he ever had / by indian rivers, the vows were said / in a red devil's dress i was wed
the keys to the kingdom are lost and gone / and i'm left to die alone / (you realize what's done is done, it's far too late to be saved)
The Last Cry in Hades (Not Guilty) }{ Pierrot 09.
(not english)
} download .zip here {
Fandom: Percy Jackson and the Olympians
Characters/Pairings: Nico/Bianca, Percy
Word Count: 5,800
Done for amnesty over at pjo_fic_battle. Prompt was: Nico/Bianca, whisper. Also did a fanmix for the prompt: Nico/Bianca, necromantic, found at bottom of the post! Oh, incest, hello, I have missed you. *pets*
I meant for this to be dark, and it tried, but the humor just kind of happened while I wasn't paying attention, so this skirts the edge of macabre. My bad.
Unbeta'd. You can also read this @ AO3.
He's standing in aisle 8 with the handsoaps and the body wash, trying to remember if it's Dial he likes the smell of better, or Irish Spring, which has cooler packaging, when a ninja pops out of nowhere and tries to kill him.
He'd like to tell you that's unusual, but it isn't. There's this sanctity, though, about a man choosing his bar of soap that should not be disturbed, so he isn't really expecting it. And it's a crap ninja, anyway: it knocks over a thing of Head&Shoulders when it jumps over the shelves and comes at him with a sword. One of Hephaestus's older models, then, before he started equipping them with the Olympian version of OnStar and a sense of balance to put the WiiFit to shame. This was like the AOL version of that.
Still. Nico doesn't exactly have a free hand to fend the thing off with, so mostly he's left with watching it come at him and taking a moment to think, ruefully, that this is a really uninspiring way to go. Live fast, die hard, in a grocery store with an advertisement for 2-for-1 chicken breast going over the loud speakers.
And then Bianca's there, her body a solid barrier between him and the ninja, and she makes the softest exhaling noise when the sword plunges in up under her ribs.
Seemingly surprised, the ninja looks down, where the hilt of its sword crunches up against her chest. Bianca looks at it, too.
Sighs.
Backhands the ninja so hard its head comes off its shoulders, wires sparking and body crumpling with a hollow, mechanical sound, nothing dangerous about it as it disintegrates. She huffs, ever so faintly, and turns to Nico with her mouth in the thinnest line.
Bianca hates Hepaestus and his robots, which seem to have a taste for di Angelos the way someone would have a taste for eggs done exactly the same way every time. One of them in a hundred-mile radius, and it would find them.
She puts a hand to her ribs, where he can see the torn skin through her shirt, and huffs again, barely enough force in it to move a mobile. The rip's going to spread like a crack in a windshield until there's no saving it, which sucks because he knows Bianca likes that body, and besides, it's new.
"Thank you," he tells her, belatedly, and she nods, simple as that. She takes his hand, weaving her fingers in between his like they used to, on their way home from preschool in silver-buckled shoes, holding hands so they could cross streets safely.
"So," he says. "Dial or Irish Spring?"
+++
Every time Bianca wears out a body, he makes her a new one.
Like abused furniture, her bodies don't heal themselves, so when she gets stabbed by rogue mechanical ninjas, the wound never closes up. She walks too long and too far in the wrong pair of shoes, and the soles come off her feet. A papercut, and she eventually sloughs off most of a finger. Tugs too hard while she's brushing her hair, and eventually her scalp peels away, raw and bloody. Nico doesn't really mind, but Bianca's prissy and modest like a Victorian and somehow equates showing a bone with flashing her private parts, so when she starts to whine, he finds a morgue.
Selection is limited, based on the narrow time window between death and embalming at the funeral home, and some bodies are just too far gone to be pieced back together, though Nico's gotten pretty good at the Humpty-Dumpty thing.
Bianca likes to stick to what she knows: girls, young, dark in skin and hair and eyes, and when she looks at them, her gaze goes brittle at the corners and her mouth wobbles like the surface of water and he allows her that sadness, the regret that anyone had to die young, because he doesn't: he's glad when they find a body that resembles what Bianca used to be, regardless of who had to die tragically in order for her to have it.
They switch bodies; the discarded husk lying on the morgue table, the new one animated. Nico sews her inside with stitches like train tracks, closing up the skin over her heart with a spool of thread stolen from the Spinner's wheel, and brushes his hand over every available inch of flesh. Where he touches, putrefaction stops, because rotting bodies are messy and, ultimately, counterproductive, and if he can't give her her own body back, at the very least he can give her another one that works properly.
Sometimes, there aren't a lot of choices: she's been a white-haired old lady, an Indian man with a bullet hole above his heart, an Iraq veteran with a missing leg, and the illusion is never perfect: she's warm to the touch, her blood bright red when her skin's flayed open, but her eyes are sunken and underlined in bruise colors, her skin an awful sickly grey, and they attract stares sometimes, in check-out lines at grocery stores, because she looks two minutes away from dropping dead (oh, hey!)
It's not enough to make him stop, switching her soul from body to body like he's changing batteries, because he'll take Bianca even like this.
Nico was ten years old when she died, leaving him with absolutely nothing in an unfamiliar world. He was fifteen when his dead sister was resurrected. He'd already lived longer than she ever got the chance to, and hell if he was going to spend another day without her.
+++
They don't talk.
They don't really have a choice in the matter. It's not that they won't talk. It's that they can't.
Or, Bianca can't. It's the price, or something, of being dead. Non-negotiable. Nonrefundable. A human being's voice is its most valuable possession, second only to life itself, and it must be given up in order to gain admittance to the Underworld (as if, you know, dying wasn't enough in the first place.) Nico's seen them, crowded in Charon's boat, mingling in the lines awaiting judgment, the shades murmuring to each other like rustling leaves. Maybe the dead can understand each other, but they'll never be able to talk to a mortal again.
So when he sewed his sister into a body for the first time, he hadn't been all that surprised when she touched her fingers to her throat and shook her head in mute sympathy.
It breaks his heart a little bit, that he'll never hear the sound of Bianca laughing, teasing him, or hushing him when he wakes up at night from dreams of bone soldiers, but only a little bit. She doesn't wear his sister's face, and doesn't speak with his sister's voice, but it's amazing, how little that really matters. She's here. She's with him. She's his Bianca, and the rest...
He can live with the rest.
They make do. They weren't talkative even to begin with: in childhood, Maria taught them to be seen but not heard. At the military school, talking without permission was punishable with after-school detention and potato-peeling (it wasn't a particularly creative military school,) so they got used to communicating with raised eyebrows and minute movements of their hands. They can have whole conversations, just with their eyebrows and a little interpretive miming.
It's not about the discussion, though. Being together's the important thing.
Everything they do is wordless, instinctive, two separate limbs operating under the orders of one brain. They debate and decide in the space of a dark-lashed look, a tilting smile; this town or the next, sleep or keep walking, hamburger or McNuggets, which station to listen to on the handheld radio swinging from Bianca's free hand like a sandpail (playing the greatest hits of the 80s, 90s, and today -- all of which are new to them.)
One of the first things they agreed on was that, under absolutely no circumstances were they ever going to wear black. That's just ... beating a dead horse with a four-inch thick piece of dead wood. Even without the crayola-color clothes, they'd always be able to find each other in a crowd.
And that's what it's like now. Nico has been alone; more alone than most people can even comprehend. Alone in an unfamiliar time, an unfamiliar place, discovering the power to crack the earth for skeletons, chased by the shadow of a prophecy, and having absolutely no one to turn to. Every minute he spends with Bianca drives away the shadows of those years; her shoulder bumping his, her rustling tissue-paper voice reassuring him when he staggers away from a dead body, her toes pressed to the back of his calf when they sleep. Talk is cheap compared to that.
Other people take the time out of their personal lives to catch up with their family. To Nico, the time he isn't with his big sister doesn't count as time at all.
+++
Percy is the first to track him down.
Of course he is, because Percy has this needle set in his brain that automatically wakes up and spins to, Nico is doing something stupid. Go and tell him he's a pain in the ass and stop him. So naturally Percy does just that, because he has no off switch on that kind of stuff, and Nico is needy and Percy needs to be needed, and somewhere in the middle it balances out to a surrogate big-brother relationship and while Nico's annoyed by the whole thing -- because hey, who likes having someone older than you turning up and telling you what to do, like, ever -- he's also glad to know that there's at least one living person who gives a shit what he's up to.
"30 deaths in half as many states," he throws at Nico's back like a challenge, and Nico freezes. Percy's is one voice he will always be able to recognize, even in an industrial district in the middle of nowhere. "And seventeen bodies mysteriously hopping morgues, like they've been sleep-walking."
Nico hip-shifts his weight, doesn't turn around. "If you want to say something, Percy, just say it."
Bianca's inside the Burger King across the street, getting them something with a lot of salt and some curly fries. He wonders if he can telepathically tell her to stay put, and if he could, if she would listen.
"They're not monsters. You're murdering people, Nico. Innocent, mortal people."
He spins around. Percy's right behind him, and he has the gall to look ... betrayed, like Nico's doing it just to hurt him.
Nico laughs at him. "And you don't feel it?" he demands, voice slick and eager, because Percy doesn't get it. Nico's just the errand boy. "Crawling all up inside you in your sleep? The power. Why do you think there was a pact, hm?" He takes a step forward, and another, crowding into Percy's space. His palms are itching. "Why do you think we're always the first to die, us, the children of the Big Three? Because we can't stand it. We go crazy, quicker and faster than any of the others, and you just know they'll put us down like dogs when that time comes."
And it's about then that Percy grabs him, too fast for Nico to even follow, grabs him and throws him up against the alley wall, the impact sharp enough in his head and shoulders to make him gasp breathlessly with pain, but this isn't unusual -- Percy's thrown Nico around before, why break with tradition. It's what family does.
"Don't fuck with this shit, Nico!" he half-yells, voice grinding out like it's painful to even say anything. "Seriously, man, do you even know what the hell you're getting into?"
"Let me go," Nico replies, which is stupid because Percy tightens his grip, just to be contrary, and Nico tries not to let his eyes roll back, because it hurts.
It hurts, and Percy doesn't know it hurts because he doesn't get hurt anymore, thanks to Nico and the River Styx, and he forgets what hurts other people. In his fury, his fingers are vice-like around Nico's forearms, tight and relentless, worse than even the most desperate, grabby corpse, and no matter how Nico twists, it only drags at his skin like an Indian rug burn.
Then, beside him, a whisper, a soft hissing breath that might be a name, and Bianca appears at Percy's side. She lays her fingers on his elbow and pulls, gently, asking without words if he would please let go of her brother. Nico is pinned between the wall and Percy's body like a bug on a collection board.
She makes a noise, something between a hum and a murmur, unmistakably, we're all right. Her mouth and eyes are smiling, sympathetic and knowing, and Percy may only have known Bianca for a couple days, but he can still recognize her smile even in a different face: he jolts in surprise against Nico. Seemingly against his will, his eyes dart upwards towards the night sky, finding Zoe Nightshade among the stars.
One preserved dead girl, two preserved dead girl. Both of them died in front of his eyes.
Bianca gently tugs on him again, and he lets go of Nico, whose knees give out without a lot of dignity. Feeling flares in his arms, pain bright.
"Yeah," Percy goes uncomfortably, looking between the two of them as Bianca drops down next to her brother, hands stroking his hair and shoulder; whatever she could reach, up until his fingers closed over hers, holding them still. "Yeah, I guess -- you're just --" he breathes out slowly. "Just. Okay. Just, don't be a stranger, man. Come stop by sometime if you ever go back to New York, yeah? My mom'd be glad to know I got friends outside of Annabeth and Grover."
Explain this, he's saying without actually saying it, lest it sound like caring. Come and explain this so I can take responsibility and make sure you're okay.
"Yeah, all right," Nico nods, hiding his reddened skin from sight and not intending to do anything of the sort, and his sister keeps on smiling.
It's August, blisteringly hot and staying that way like it's being choked, but Nico wears long sleeves for two weeks.
+++
Bianca always keeps her fingers on him, somehow.
The way mortals need to breathe, Bianca needs to touch him. Her fingers chase his when he groggily combs them through his hair in the morning, she presses her nose into the dip between his shoulder blades while they're sleeping, she smoothes his shirt down over his hips when they're standing together on street corners. If he's not within reach, her eyes follow him wherever he goes, a weight in and of themselves. It's like she doesn't trust him not to disappear if she turns away.
It's not wholly unreasonable, he supposes. The first time in their entire lives they were separated, she died and he didn't even get to hug her one last time, or hear her say, be good now, okay, munchkin.
Now he's the one with a life to lose and she takes on the role of guardian angel.
The touching isn't odd. He remembers curling up with her for naps on the chaisse in their mother's hotel room, his head tucked under Bianca's chin like it'd been meant to fit there. She's been within arm's reach his whole life; she'd even taken him to the dance, that night in Maine when everything fell apart, and it wasn't until years later that anyone ever actually explained to him that it wasn't natural, that sisters do not take their brothers to middle school dances.
And by then it'd just seemed silly. He'd been tricked by a vengeful king, played like a puppet by his father, baptized Percy Jackson in the River Styx and watched his skin burn, and he could call hellhounds with a whistle and summon skeletons with a snap of his fingers, and somebody was going to tell him that the only bright point in his life (the way his sister watched out for him, the memory of her hand stroking his head, the simple, warm knowledge of being loved) was wrong?
No.
No and never.
Two months after she was resurrected, they stumbled right into the middle of a Hunt, the Hunters of Artemis running some quarry or another to the ground.
Terror, shock white all the way down to his bones, made him reach out, grab Bianca around the wrist, as if the moment the Hunters disappeared, sprinting off on the horizon, his sister'd be going with them, the same as she had before.
Bianca jerked, and then turned into him, burrowing her face against the fabric of his coat so that they couldn't see her face, see her eyes and recognize her. He felt her mouth moving against his chest, saying something, but he couldn't make it out. She reached into his pocket, pulling out a fountain pen he liberally borrowed from a bank teller found dead in the men's bathroom a Thursday ago, and then pushed the sleeve of his jacket up until she had enough of his forearm to write on.
We can't let them catch us. Ever.
He nodded, knowing this. "We'll keep running," he promised, the best he could offer her.
She pulled back long enough to give him a patented big sister look, the one that said he was missing the point entirely. They can't want me, she wrote into his flesh, underlined it, and the implication she was trying to make struck him like a brick to the face.
That was the first time; Nico was fifteen and a little too young for every single part of it, but he was fifteen and growing, his stomach a yowling, hungry maw all the time and his limbs stretching out like they had somewhere else to be and everything hurt, everything ached every moment of the day, and he spread his body over his sister's borrowed one and they figured it out together, like it was just some new game they were trying at the Casino, and made her undesirable to Artemis, a girl ruined, and even Nico knew the significance of what they did: out of loyalty to the goddess and out of loyalty to him, Bianca chose her brother.
What had started as a need became a want so fast it felt like another growing pain, aching inside of him, dull and hollow and ever-present. He didn't know his body, but she found every part of it and made it her own, and Nico was lost from that point on.
Bianca needs to touch him, keep her hands on him so she can feel his heart still beating, a whump and a silence, like it's waiting for an answer from hers, which doesn't beat at all.
A bare mattress in a railroad flat, swamped with the muggy summer heat that slips into the crevices of their clothes and lingers in the small of their backs, and Bianca lays a kiss on the angular slide of his hip, lingering and thoughtful.
He's half-dazed into sleep, but startles right out of it when she bites down, hard enough to break the skin.
"Ow! Wha --" he starts, but she silences him with a hand pressed over his sternum, fingers splayed five-point and warm against his pulse. With the other hand, she traces the trickle of blood that wells in the creases made by her teeth, the expression on her face both joyed and wistful in one.
He tugs on her wrist until she gives in, and he pulls her up his body to get to her mouth, kissing I'm alive into the swell of her bottom lip and the bow of her upper lip like Morse code. When she kisses back, it's fervent, something said over and over again as she kisses his mouth into slack compliance, obedient and mindlessly open underneath hers, and that's when he realizes that it's his name. She's whispering, Nico, pressing it into his flesh again and again like she needs him to keep it safe.
And he does.
He does.
+++
There's a funky, 50s-style movie theater across the street from the post office in this wannabe saloon town somewhere more south than west, and it looks like it hasn't seen anything up and coming since Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. When they pass it, they notice it's showing posters for Tim Burton's Corpse Bride. Bianca elbows him in the ribs, her eyes alight with humor, and he says, "Yeah. Yeah, all right," because dude, you don't say no to irony when it smacks you in the face.
And yeah, it's kind of hilarious, what with the macabre humor being so far up their alley it was drinking milk out of a saucer on their front step, and afterwards, Nico takes his sister's hand and professes his wedding vows and gives her a ring made from his straw, and she giggles without audio and pretends to toss her bouquet, and he scoops her up into his arms and carries her over the threshold out into the night, much to the amusement of the lone kid manning the ticket booth.
A couple days later, they track down an older man sitting by the railroad tracks, turning his empty prescription bottle over in his palms. The rush from killing him staggers Nico a little bit, leaves his mouth filmy like soap suds from the chemical taste and his mind buzzing like he'd stayed in the shower too long. He looks for his sister, automatic and knee-jerk and necessary as breathing, and finds her a little ways down the tracks.
As he watches, she unearths a mini-graveyard, full of the man's pets -- the only thing he ever drew comfort from. She lifts her eyes to his, her mouth parted, fragile with hope.
Nico builds her a dog out of bones, a creature with flat, yellowing hips and shoulders like dinner plates and a wedge-shaped head, a long, graceful curving spine and an easy lope. It looks a little like the dog from Corpse Bride, only with fewer Silly Putty maggots and a friendlier expression.
Bianca is completely enamored. Nico is enamored of Bianca being enamored, and the dog is here to stay.
+++
This is what they do.
They walk -- town to town, city to city, state to state, along broken freeways and meandering rivers, down famous boulevards and through suburbs that are as identical in upstate New York as they are in Chicago as they are in endless Montana. They don't really need any other form of transportation, not when Nico can shadow-travel when they get tired. This is what he did, that year between Bianca's death and the battle in Manhattan; pushed himself into shadows all over the country (plus a few accidental trips to China) just to see what he could shake up in there.
They disappear off the map, moving across the country like manifest destiny. She's been through it once, of course, dying in a desert somewhere between Arizona and New Mexico, Colorado and Utah, but it's not like she had time to stop and look at the sights, too busy with sacrificing her life for people she barely knew.
Even before that, shipped from DC to Nevada as children, Nevada to Maine, Maine to New York without explanation, and nobody ever stopped and asked them what they wanted, or where they wanted to go. So now they go everywhere.
This is what they do: Thanatos, god of death, has been toying with mortals lately; the lonely, the depressed, those who get caught staring out windows on slate-sky days and wishing they were just a little bit smarter, a little bit more resourceful, a little bit thinner, wishing they could rewrite their lives. The only way to rewrite life is to erase it.
This time, it's a high school, an all-boys private high school that's ritzy and expensive enough to have its own crest, if the front doors are anything to go by, and you're not allowed in the building without being buzzed in by security, but Nico walks right up the front steps and then is inside, like the click of a projector slide, no evidence for the time in between. Bianca is on one side, the dog trotting gracefully at their heels as they blur out of the shadows in the front lobby.
There's the murmur and whir of the table-top fans, a distant drone of a teacher yelling facts like volume will make it more interesting, another class bubbling up laughing at something. In the hallway, alone, a boy sits with his back against the lockers. His head is bowed, his uniform shirt untucked and his shoes scruffed. He made a deal with Thanatos.
Nico, who walks between the mortal world and the Underworld as easily as train tracks, is just the errand boy.
The kid looks up, adolescence still rounded in the shape of his face and a secret held captive between the lines of his lips, and Nico nods at him like he understands. Nods and then throws a leg over the boy's thighs, straddles his lap. Takes his face, turns it up to the florescent lighting, the pale hollow of his throat catching white and blue-veined. The boy sighs into him as Nico seals their lips together, and sucks his soul out. It comes with a rush and a wail, a dizzying, tumbling kaleidoscope of emotions and memories that aren't his, and then is gone, to wherever Thanatos keeps them in their little amber-glass bottles all in neat little rows like fireflies. All that's left is the aftertaste on Nico's tongue.
They all taste differently.
He stands, legs trembling coltishly, and leaves the corpse behind, thunking dully back against the lockers. He feels Bianca step up to him like she's moving through water; a ripple in the air preceding the brush of her fingers to his temple. He turns to her automatically, like he always does, doesn't even care if the school security camera captures this, because murder is Nico's trade.
Nico kills people, and Thanatos pays him with the lease on Bianca's soul. He can borrow her, so long as he keeps doing these little jobs.
His fingers come up, seeking the warmth in his sister's cheek, knuckles brushing a loose curl of hair where it's gotten caught in between her lips. She looks at the expression on his face, and then stretches up to him, wordlessly offering him her mouth.
He kisses her until the taste of death is gone from the back of his throat.
+++
It's six months after Percy finds him that the first of the half-bloods track them down.
There are four of them, travel-weary and wearing torn armor, like they'd stumbled across more than a few monsters on their way to him. It had to be a little anticlimactic, finding them; a sixteen-year-old boy who needs a haircut, a grey-skinned girl, and a dog made out of bones.
They stare at each other across a Safeway parking lot, a half-filled cart return between them. It's a clear, still night; Nico can hear one of them whispering to herself, some half-beat of an oracle's rhyme, and knows in that instant that they're here on a Quest.
One of Hephaestus's, maybe, in revenge for the ruined mechanical ninjas: he recognizes the girl in the front -- Pearl, who became the de facto second-in-command of her cabin after the death of Charles or whatever his name was, that one guy, right before the battle for Manhattan. She's brilliant, and had offered to help when he was building the Hades cabin, without him having to work up the courage to ask.
A few of the others he can vaguely place -- Nathan, a son of Apollo (come to think of it, were there any girls in the Apollo cabin?) who'd filled out in surprising ways over the years and is probably taller than him, from what he could tell across the parking lot. To his left is a daughter of Persephone, whose grin glints whitely in his direction; Nico's never liked her, mainly because she thinks the fact their parents are married is an excellent excuse to pick on him endlessly, and her sense of humor tends to run more Home Alone than he can stadn. The fourth he doesn't recognize at all -- she looks way too young to even be on a Quest, doesn't even have one of the beaded necklaces most campers wear. With the exception of Nathan, they all have swords drawn.
"A little out of season for duck-hunting, isn't it?" he asks, tone light, holding onto his sister's hand. He's not worried. He can shadow-teleport them out if it looks like it's going to get ugly. "I hope you're not still on a Summer Quest; you're running a little late."
"We're sorry, Nico," says Pearl. Her voice has the same rough, ashy rasp most Haphaestus kids have from bending over the forge all day. Even so, she speaks softly, like she's gentling a frightened animal. "We have no choice."
"That's lame," is his immediate response. "And a cop-out. There's always a choice. Just because --"
He cuts off, because there's a familiar thwop sound, and, before he can really realize that it's Nathan, notching an arrow to the bow Nico didn't even notice he was carrying, he's already let it fly.
"No --!" he begins, abortively, but it doesn't matter, because it wasn't aimed at him.
Bianca gasps, the sound so faint it's like the beat of a butterfly's wings, but Nico will hear it in his nightmares until the day he dies. She staggers against him, the arrow sunk true right into her heart, the feathered end still quivering from impact.
There's a breathless moment, a moment so poised it's like every clock forgets to tick because it can't move forward, it can't, and then it does and Bianca's tumbling, but it's not Bianca. It's just a dead body, a rotting corpse, celestial bronze arrow sticking out of its stitched-up chest like a bull's-eye, and Bianca's ... Bianca's ....
Nico screams. He screams and he pushes with all his might against the knowledge, against the sudden emptiness, the absence he can feel like it's its own weight, because she can't. She can't be gone. She can't have been sent back to the Underworld. No, no, no, nononononononono. NO.
He can't. He can't, he can't, he cannot, physically cannot lose his sister again.
The earth splits. It quakes and shivers and trembles underneath him, like it's trying to get away, like it can't stand to touch him, and Nico keeps screaming -- out loud or inaudibly, he doesn't know. The ground shatters, drowning him out.
He stands, slowly, only peripherally aware of the dog by his side, head thrown back in a soundless howl. There's a power inside of him like nothing he's ever felt before, terrible in its scope and endless like a road with no vanishing point. He feels like he could stretch his hand out to either side, and bring each corner of the world crashing together, like he could fold the continent like he was shutting a book. The world is shaking underneath his feet, but he barely even notices.
He doesn't know how long he goes on like that: he snuffs out Nathan, and Pearl, and the other two, their deaths as meaningless to him as the brush of raindrops in a storm.
He closes his eyes and he summons her.
He reaches out and he calls for her, calls every single corner of every single shadow of every single space in the world, the spaces between spaces, because this, this is his love for his sister, and it runs so deep you could toss a coin in it and never hear it reach bottom.
Behind him.
A whisper.
+++
And it's stupid, it's so fucking stupid to think that anyone has the right to tell them they can't have this.
From the very beginning, someone's always been pulling the strings, yanking them around. Zeus, bringing the hotel down on top of their heads to teach his brother a lesson. Alecto, dragging them from DC to the Lotus Casino and then to Maine, no word of explanation. Artemis, saying, you are young, you are beautiful, you are brave, leave your brother and live an immortal life. Percy, Chiron, Pearl, saying, you can't, you can't you can't have her back. Minos, saying, you can. Hades, lock and key in his fingers, a collar of prophecy heavy around Nico's throat. Thanatos, his collection of bottled souls and his words, your heart is only half a beat without her.
Push, pull. How can we use the di Angelo siblings to our own end today?
He's sixteen years old, old enough to make something for them.
They are above and outside of the law. They don't exist. Officially, Bianca and Nico di Angelo died in the too-hot July of 1942, in Washington, DC, with their mother, Maria. You can't charge the dead with murder, with breaking and entering, with theft, with loving their sibling enough to do all of the above.
No one is going to tell them they don't deserve this. His sister, his big sister, whom he followed with blind adoration and faith until she left him to find a mind of his own, his sister and her hands stroking the knobs of his knuckles and her mouth brushing his ear and the knee-jerk way she puts herself in front of a sword for him; all his, it all belongs to him, and every part of him belongs to her.
Everything he's done, he's done for her.
There is no one more important than Bianca, not in life, in death, in every shadow in between. It's been her. It's always been her.
No one else matters. And that. That's the moral of the story.
He is the reaper, the ghost king with a crown of sun-bleached bones; he builds her a new body carefully, lowering her into it as if she was a baby into a cradle, newly baptised. He drops to his knees in front of her and kisses every bit of skin he can reach; light, brushing touches up her shins, on the insides of her knees and wrists, and wherever he touches, he seals her in, stops her decay. Power shivers in every inch of his skin. He'll keep her. Nothing in this world -- or any world, mortal or immortal -- is going to stop him from keeping her.
Bianca's fingers card through his hair, gentle and stroking, like they've done every single day of his life, long as he could remember. He looks up at her. Her mouth forms over his name.
Love of my damn life, he thinks, pushing himself up so he could kiss her, her mouth warm and sweet and tasting -- not like the only thing he has left, but the only thing he has worth keeping.
The First Cry in Hades (Guilty) }{ Pierrot 01.
(not english)
Happy Phantom }{ Tori Amos 02.
and if i die today i'll be the happy phantom / i'll go chasing the nuns out in the yard
or will i see you dear / and wish i could come back
Touched }{ VAST 03.
the demigods and hungry ghosts / and my god knows i'm not at home
The Shoal Cave }{ PokeRemixStudio 04.
(instrumental)
Underground }{ The Sounds 05.
let's go back to the underground / how could i know it was the last time i would see you?
i could always try to reach you / and it's pumping through my veins
Hang You From the Heavens }{ The Dead Weather 06.
i don't know if i should let go you / or if i should keep you
i'd like to grab you by the hair / and hang you from the heavens
Backdrifts (Honeymoon is Over) }{ Radiohead 07.
we're rotten fruit / we're damaged goods / what the hell, we've got nothing more to lose
Black Cat Bones }{ Laika 08.
ain't it lonesome, ain't it sad / i was the only happiness he ever had / by indian rivers, the vows were said / in a red devil's dress i was wed
the keys to the kingdom are lost and gone / and i'm left to die alone / (you realize what's done is done, it's far too late to be saved)
The Last Cry in Hades (Not Guilty) }{ Pierrot 09.
(not english)
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