The last thing Will destroys is --
The last thing Will destroys, is.
He picks, flowers, once. Fidgeting.
He watches Anthracnose bloom from the cratered burns in the centres of his palms and devour the things up to the tips of their petals, leaves curling in blackened rot.
"You get quiet, sometimes."
Will faces him. Nico watches carefully, eyes blank. Will wonders if he learned that from his cautious father, from the undead that kept him company. He stares back, and prays his own eyes are ice.
Nico smiles. Small, quick, fleeting. Amused.
He burns with questions. This, he cannot have learned from his father -- Will remembers a boy, dark-eyed and mischievous, wide-mouthed and non-stopping. He remembers the winter afternoon and Lee muttering to himself, scowling, about a motormouth worse than Will's. He remembers crouching by the entrance of the ampitheater, breath caught in his lungs. He remembers wild, cackling laughter, and cheering sons of thieves.
That boy resurfaces, sometimes.
"Are you thinking?" Nico grimaces as he says it, shrinking back; but it is too late, and Will has acknowledged him. "Of -- something, I mean. Working something out."
Will places his head on his knee. "I'm thinking," he agrees softly. "I wish I wasn't."
"How anti-intellectualist of you."
Will cracks a smile. "Yes. You've cracked my master plans -- once the rest of this foolhardy camp has succumbed to my brainwashing, I will easy control the complacent masses."
"I think I have to kill you," Nico says sagely. His eyes sparkle, like granite. "Your threat is too great."
Will tries to hide the panic in his face. He does not succeed, because Nico frowns.
"Hey," Nico says, hand outstretched. "You --"
Will scoots back, pressing his back to his bunk. His heart thunders, his pupils shrink.
"Ha," he says, weakly. "You got me."
He turns so his forehead touches his patellae, and breathes carefully through his mouth. He stays there until Nico stops staring.
He hides his fevered palms in between his thighs.
Sometimes Will thinks he was destined to die at four, in penance. He should have choked on his own disease, his own plague; but he did not, and the only thing that died in him was the sparking flame Prometheus gifted them all, blown to matted ember in the stalk of his chest.
Instead his brothers watched his shame bubble out of his mouth, circle him in clouds of spores, and they lied for him. They clung to his bloody hands and pushed him behind them. And then they were slaughtered, as were the punished firstborns, for the crime of their knowing existence: Will, marked, stood on their shrouds and ashes.
He smells of guilt, he thinks. Of guilt and germ and rot. He hides it, in all the antiseptic he can bathe in, in all the ethanol he can consume. But his breath still stinks of it and his lying tongue burns. He is tall, removed from those around him; they cannot see the sores in his mouth or the inflammation of his throat from years and years of choking hands. Bandages hide the bright red spots up and down his arms. Burn scars cover his blackened fingernails.
But the tallest obelisks are swallowed by the length of their shadows. And nothing can hide from Fate, from the servants she sends to collect for her.
Nico gets closer, and closer. His hands are cool compresses on the hidden sores on Will's skin. It is relief, as he is never felt it.
"Connor is cute," Will blurts, one day, catching Nico looking. He swallows, hard, and the wail of his failures -- his victims -- echo louder than the crack of his heart. "He's, uh. He's into boys, you know."
Nico snorts. "Connor is into money," he says, turning away. He meets Will's eyes with a grin. "He found out I have an infinite credit card and proposed on the spot. He wept when I turned him away."
Will fights the urge to sigh. He is unsurprised that Connor is a gold digger -- if anything he kind of respects the commitment to the bit -- but he just wishes --
He's not blind, Will. Or maybe he is and it's just that Nico is so obvious. He is always -- looking, always, when Will is standing, when he is slouching, when his hands twitch and when they are shoved into the hollow of his chest, hunched over at the campfire. Will can feel the pinprick of his gaze when he is startled into laughter and when he climbs out of the cabin in the middle of the night, gasping, and crawls onto the sun-warmed roof to face the stars. He watches and he touches, featherlight: Will's elbow, the shell of his ear, the sensitive small of his back.
He guards, too. This one Will has noticed the most. When Will cannot find the breath to fill his lungs, or when his hands shake too badly to thread the suture needle, Nico stands like a shadow two paces ahead of him. And the whispering voices that follow Will's every stumble are glared into mute, mum terror. And the aching tired muscles of his back go lax.
Will wishes, with all the audacious hoping he has left, that Nico cared about that kind of thing.
Will realizes, abruptly, that he has automatically leaned into Nico's gentle touch. He wrenches forward, bile rising in his throat -- if Nico is offended, he does not show it.
But he does not move his arm. His big, sky-black eyes watch him, round and steady, until Will forces his breathing to even.
"I have something to tell you."
The souls on Will's shoulder screech so loud he flinches.
Death! they cheer. Death! Death! D --
Nico watches him critically. "You know, I think."
"I can't," Will blurts, and hunches in on himself. "I can't, I'm not --"
"Into boys?" Nico finishes. He does a good job of hiding it. The hurt. He keeps his hand light and careful on Will's wrist, thumb brushing over the edge of his bandages, and a safe distance between them. Friendly. He has more strength than he realizes. It is only in the smallest twitch of his mouth, that it is obvious, in the watery gleam of his dark, dark eyes.
He inhales, quick and short. No exhale comes after.
There is an easy escape, here.
He cannot tell a lie. They burn him, coming up his throat, and are always shroud in smoke and warning. His father has many domains and it is the job of his heirs to reflect them: Lee had healing, and charm. Michael had the gift of the shot. Cass had prophecy, Diana poetry, Kayla her bow, Austin his music. Dozens more that Will met and loved and who died before him carried on dance, light, education. Will's father is a warm, bright man: he shines upon his children and endeavors to make them beacons among their peers, laughing, trustworthy fortune-tellers and music-makers.
But there is more to the Sun than warmth and light. The Sun brings dry desert, and heady drought; the Sun cooks and it burns and drains a man's sanity out of his ears and onto the sizzling sands. The Sun is all-loving, and it is unforgiving. For every one hundred children there must be one to represent his father's shame, his rage, his fear; for every one hundred children one must coil the snake in which the Sun will meet His end, devoured and digesting. For every one hundred children there must be one who is marked, who is covered in rotting, rancid scales. Will has been shadding as long as he has been alive. For every hubric act of divine grace he forces he must match in decay from the bottom of his own soul. When he opens his mouth, his truth is obvious, it is evident: when he speaks, lies burn him, as they bolster the devil. Will cannot tell a lie.
But he can nod, if someone guesses. If someone presumes his silence for contempt or his neglect for dismissal, he is not beholden to their correction. He cannot lie, but obstruction is outside of his father's domain, and he has no responsibility for it.
Nico watches him, heartbroken. Hand still stubbornly extended, beating muscle bleeding with every pump.
He could nod. He could say: sorry, and squeeze Nico's hand. He could take one step backwards and let his hand fall.
"Ton angélon," Will chokes out. His hand twitches, in Nico's hold; Nico frowns and brings up his other hand to match, squeezing until the spasms stop. "You are celestial, Nico, you are breathtaking, you're --"
Nico inhales sharply. He blinks once and his eyes open wide, brown in the gold of the sun; amber, cassiterite, quartz. The bow of his perfect lips drops, slightly, mouth in a perfect, shocked little O. Will blinks and a crown of thorns digs into his marble temples; he shakes his head and necrosis climbs up his sharp jaw.
"I ruin everything I touch," Will says, hoarse. "I destroy -- all that is innocent, all that angels breathe life into." His heated hands glow, under bands of cotton; green pulses through his eyes and his pores, and he flinches wrenching them away. "There is nothing of me worth holding, Nico."
Will is expecting nothing because he has forbidden himself from imagining it. Or, he is expecting rejection. He is expecting disgust.
He cannot say in good conscience that he is expecting offense.
"I'm going to smack the shit out of you."
He opens his squeezed shut eyes. He sees Nico's hands, first. Still gentle. And then his narrowed eyes, his sideset jaws.
The failures resting on his shoulders are silent.
Will stares, breathing heavy. His hands twitch.
"You think," Nico begins, and stops himself, breathing out through pursed lips. "You think I -- care? That you've lost people?"
"It's more than that," Will says, desperately. Nico takes a step forward and all the thousands of souls on Will's head scream, at once; he flinches, shoulders aching, hollow stomach scraping against the shake of his spine. "Nico, you guide people, you shepherd them --"
"And you save them from me!"
Nico takes another stubborn step forward and Will can't turn away fast enough, he cannot duck out of his strong fingers on either side of his chin and can't pull away from his magmatic, furious eyes.
"Death is inevitable," Nico says calmly, firmly. "Some deaths cannot be prevented. I'm -- making my peace with that, Solace. I am not the plague I think I am." Will makes a low, groaning noise. Nico smiles sadly. "You are not to blame for your mistakes, either."
Will realizes, abruptly, that he will never be able to say it.
He is not sure who has designed this. It could be the shame, balling solidly in the back of his throat; it could be his many victims, coiling tightly around his neck. It could be his father's warning hand: grow out your hair, child. Keep your marked forehead to yourself.
He swallows, and pulls back. Nico lets him, dark eyes narrowed and curious, head tilted. In the Hades cabin there is nothing for him to destroy -- there are bones, and stones, and raging fires -- but the only lively thing is Nico, and he is doing a fine enough job on his own trying to wiggle under Will's stained palms, drying to swim close enough to the blood he is drowning in to choke to death on it.
Instead, he picks at the yellowed bandages. It takes time, to unroll the layers, but the cotton piles at his feet, and his forearms are bare: layered, upon unflinching burn scars, are varicella spots, EB blisters. Open, weeping sores, cracked skin and inflamed blisters. A spot, where the first drop of Lee's blood hit his skin, that is black and rotted. A patch of reddened rashing that wraps around his elbows.
Nico lurches. Will tucks his arms quickly away.
"I'm contagious," he says, softly. He ducks down and scoops up the bandages, stumbling fingers pressing them back against his skin. "I'm okay, in small doses. But loving me is -- poisonous." He always struggles to tie the last strand. He is not, for all his trying, ambidextrous, and his right hand is clumsy along the cut of his wrist. He blinks aware the moisture in his eyes and yanks on it, frustrated -- he has to leave, quickly, before he can endure the humiliation of Nico's horror, of his disgust. But if he leaves his arms uncovered than someone will -- see.
They'll see, and they'll know.
Deathdeathdeathdeath, murmur his spirits.
"Stop," says Nico, voice cracking and hoarse. Will squeezes his eyes shut, as his voice gets clearer. "Will, stop it."
"Please," Will begs. "Don't tell. I'm careful, I promise, I can -- I can keep it under wraps, I can control myself --"
He is surprised, again, by Nico's sob. By the balm of his cool fingers on the heel of his hands and the contained unit of his weeping.
"Those look like they hurt," Nico whispers, lump in his throat. He traces his fingers, slowly, over the criss-crossing bandages, removing them carefully. Will, stunned, lets him. He peels them all off and stands, on hand on either wrist, turned so he can inspect the scarred and infected insides. "Gods, Will, this -- you must be in agony --"
He is, he supposes. Or: he always has been. But it is quiet most mornings, and the ache is dull by evenings. The pressure of elasticized cotton is as familiar as the weight of a t-shirt.
"I can handle it," Will insists. He tugs, but Nico holds firm. "It is penance, anyway. There was none of this -- before."
Before he watched his cousin burn into the air. Before he heard his brother's back crack clean across Manhattan. Before he poisoned dozens of demigods, as hurting as any other, for the crime of pain and anger. Before he pieced together the fractured pieces of Lee's skull. Before the shriveled crow cawed three times, beady eyes reading the black rot of his soul.
They came one by one by one.
Slowly, Nico walks him back, until his tailbone hits his bed. He presses, gently, on his aching shoulders; Will sits, bewildered, and watches him flit away, watches him sink into the shadows and appear halfway across the room, with an armful of new bandages, first, then a tube of cream, a jar of nectar.
"Nico," he says, quietly.
"Shut up," says Nico hotly. There are still tears in his eyes, and every fifth breath shudders. "Just -- sit down and be quiet."
Will sits. The roar, even, of the dead, is only simmering; curious as he is.
Nico is gentle, when he heals.
Will takes the nectar. "It won't work." He drums his fingers against the glass. "These are -- marks, Nico." He exhales. "Punishments."
It tastes like cloying sweet. It always does. Like a strawberry on the wrong side of soft, like the underbrush of autumn. It does not fix the viruses who have made home in his systems -- he knows the sound of them dying -- but it does, for a moment, ease the ache.
"You're dumb," Nico says, when he has finished. His voice is short, eyes hard. "For -- the best medic in centuries, you're fucking stupid."
"Comes with the self-destructive tendencies," Will says drily. "Takes one to know one."
"That -- okay, fair. Fair. But." He tilts Will's face to meet his eyes, softening. "That means you have to listen to me, okay. I know what I am talking about." He pulls down the collar of his shirt, stretching down to his sternum. Will inhales, sharp -- where there should be skin, and muscle, there is nothing but dry, gnarled ribcage, right in the patch of space around his beating heart. Nico breathes slowly, heart slowing. He releases the shirt and Will stares through it, eyes wide.
He kneels by the edge of the bed. "I'm marked, too."
Will takes his hands when he offers. The shouts of his victims scream: death! Death! Look what you have done to him!
But the ice cool of Nico's hands reminds him: not everything is yours.
"We can be outcasts together," Nico suggests. He quirks a smile. "Something very Greek about that, I think."
A bubble of hysteric laughter escapes Will's chest. "Like -- Patroclus."
"And Achilles long after."
Nico's breath is warm against the scarred skin of his knees. He stays there, eyes soft, hands gentle around the ring of Will's wrists. He doesn't seem to mind Will's twitching, or the awful, palliative smell of him. He seems drawn to it, actually, breathing deeply.
"I'm scared," Will admits, voice small. "I don't want to hurt you."
Nico inclines his head. "I'm half-dead anyway." He squeezes gently. "You'd have to try pretty hard."
The last thing Will destroys is --
Will is going to be destroying things for a long time.
There will be other wars. Battles. There will be moments, when there is screaming, when Will's lungs coil in his chest, and smoke pours from his mouth. There will be moments when the herbs he picks wither and die in his hands.
Deathdeathdeathdeath, wail the voices.
Will inhales. The clean air settles deep in his ruined lungs, sweet and cooling.
"Try," Nico says, jaw set. "Me. Us. You -- loving, I mean."
Will nods. The pressure lifts from his throat.
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