It starts really…really stupid.
The Apollo cabin is having a movie night. Will’s DVD collection is bigger than his textbook collection, which is saying something, because he is a nerd. They baited Nico with a pirate movie: then, when he was comfortable and moon-eyed and unable to keep his mouth shut for a good twenty minutes after the end credits, they started phasing in the rom-coms.
Evil. Manipulators, the lot of them; so incapable of lying that they’re masters of bending the truth. Nico would leave, except they literally barricaded the door and keep all the lights on so there are no shadows for him to duck into (something he should have questioned from the very beginning, but unfortunately as soon as the Pirates of the Caribbean theme started playing, his reasoning skills hopped on a train and fled back to the Lotus Casino in 1938. So).
“This is stupid,” Nico grumbles, not that anyone is paying him any attention. Every single one of Will’s siblings stares at the TV with their chins in their hands, completely ignoring any and all of Nico’s (very valid) criticism.
Not that it stops him. “This is less realistic than Davey Jones,” he insists, largely just so his grievances are Known and Aired Out. The leading man says something stupid and cheesy, and three seperate doofuses in his company genuinely swoon. Nico scowls as hard as he can, pulling a blanket over his head. “Idiotic and cheesy.”
Nico pointedly isn’t following the plot — not that there is one — so he has no idea what’s going on. He squints. The leading man is wearing some ugly suit, too tight, and the leading lady collapses tearfully in his arms, thanking him about something.
Will sighs dreamily. Nico scowls harder.
“When is it my turn,” Will laments.
Kayla reaches over blindly and pats him on the head. She ends up more smacking him gently and lovingly on the face, but Will doesn’t seem to mind.
“Don’t we all want to know.”
“You don’t understand,” Will says dramatically. He flops backwards, hands flailing. Nico peeks over from under his blanket. His Head Medic camp shirt has ridden up in his dramatics, showing a sliver of skin. Nico flushes and intentionally looks away, focusing on his friend’s face.
“When will a rich, attractive older man come waltzing in here and offer to put me through med school, huh? When will my dream come true?”
Nico is 90% sure that Will is joking, but without his permission, be blurts out —
“You’d run off with some guy you don’t know?”
“Without hesitation!” Will cries. He yanks himself back upright, making Nico jump, arms thrown up and forehead creased. “You know how broke I’m gonna be when I’m done school?”
Nico doesn’t answer, but Will doesn’t wait for one.
“Very! I grew up on a pullout couch, which, I love my mom, and I love our apartment, but I want — I want —”
With his long, lanky limbs and flushed face, he begins to remind Nico of a kettle. He refrains from pointing this out. His siblings, on the other hand, openly snicker at him, dividing their attention between the movie and throwing popcorn at their eldest brother’s head.
“I want an Alaskan King! And — a mahogany desk! With lots of drawers! And windows! Floor to ceiling windows! And a rooftop garden!”
He glares playfully at his siblings, who are all giggling now, pointing fingers at them all.
“Lemme tell you right now. A man walks in here offering me that and a cheque for any school I want and it’s over for you people. I’m gone. You can fend for yourselves.”
“Yeah right,” Austin snorts, disbelieving. He reaches over and pinches Will’s thigh, cackling when he squawks. “We can’t even get you to leave the infirmary at the end of your shift. You’re stuck here forever, Rapunzel.”
“Just you wait! My prince will come!”
“As if he even wants a prince,” he hears Kayla whispering to a giggling Gracie, who responds with a cheeky, “Not when he’s got a king!”
Nico doesn’t know who they’re talking about, but the fact that there’s someone — his vision goes green. He has to tamp down a genuine snarl which is — ridiculous. And out of nowhere.
He cuts another glance to Will, who is still muttering petulantly. Every few minutes, he hears something about an “open floor plan” and “high pressure showers”.
He gets a very, very stupid idea.
The first mistake (because that’s what it is) is easy to explain away — the Hades cabin is still under renovation.
“Please,” Will is begging, eyes big and pleading and painfully, beautifully blue. “Please? I’ll bring movies! And Yan’s Wii! And get Cecil to lend me some of the games he — uh, acquired! Pretty please!”
Nico has to bite back the you could be toting a pack of Lastrogonian giants with you and I’d still let you in that so desperately wants to come out of his mouth.
“Bring snacks and I’ll consider it,” he says instead.
Will beams. His eyes nearly squeeze shut, when he smiles like that, and there’s nothing Nico can do about the sharp inhale that rips through his chest. He blinks the spots away from his eyes, everything suddenly a little brighter, covered in golden sunlight.
“Yes!” Will cheers, pumping his fist and jumping up and down like a lunatic. Nico is so endeared that it aches something awful in his chest, and his cheeks smart from the size of his smile. “Sleepover! After my shift, di Angelo, I won’t be late!”
“I lock my doors and set a skeleton guard to watch it at eight,” he warns with a throat suddenly dry. “I mean it, Solace. I’ll sic the harpies on you.”
Will laughs as he jogs towards the infirmary, clearly not believing him. Nico watches him go the whole way, jumping when a hand lands on his shoulder.
“You,” says Drew Tanaka, blowing a bubble with her gum, “are a humiliating case, di Angelo.”
He shoves her, scowling. His face feels sunburnt. “Shut up.”
He absolutely does not spend the day moping after the infirmary, despite whatever rumours Drew’s lying mouth might spread. He has a job, thanks. He runs three separate sword fighting classes, and the younger kids are insane, so he doesn’t have time to be distracted.
Not that he is. But. Hypothetically, if he were to be distracted, he isn’t. Yeah.
He sits with Percy and Jason at dinner, distractedly wolfing down his food. Some kind of barbecue. He is not paying attention.
“No, Jase, we can say whatever we want, he’s not listening —”
“If he decides to stab you I am going to let him —”
“What’s going on?” Nico interrupts, looking up for the first time.
Percy smiles angelically, placing his hands under his chin.
Jason bangs his head on the table.
“I’m gonna…leave,” Nico says, slowly. “Y’all…do whatever you’re doing.”
“You said y’all,” Percy says gleefully. “You said y’all.”
Nico flushes hotly. “I did not. Shut up before I summon Jules-Albert to run you over.”
Percy cackles. Even Jason laughs. Nico throws his plate at them as he stomps away, sprinting extra quickly past the infirmary for no reason at all.
Time seems to slow down after dinner. For all Nico knows, it actually does. It wouldn’t make a difference. By the time there’s a knock on his cabin door, the sun has well past set, and Will is smiling sheepishly.
“I didn’t hear my shift alarm,” he says, the second Nico opens the door.
Nico sighs. He bites the corner of his mouth, hard, so it doesn’t do something stupid like turn upwards or something.
“There’s ADHD, and then there’s you, Solace.”
Will leans into his personal space and presses an over-exaggerated, smacking kiss to his cheek before he can stop him. Nico goes scarlet.
“But you love me anyway!”
There are no thoughts left in Nico’s brain to refute him. The only thing shaking around up there are alarm bells and KISS! KISS! KISS! KISS! KISS! repeated over and over again like a gong.
“Hngh,” he says, intelligently. Will doesn’t seem to notice, striding confidently right into the cabin.
“I brought the Wii and movies and stuff, like I promised, and I’ve been saving this chocolate I bought last time I went into the city — woah, when did that get here!”
Will freezes in the middle of the cabin, gaping. Nico nearly walks right into him.
‘That’ is the giant, brand-new bed tucked snugly in the far right corner — an Alaskan King.
Nico clears his throat, shrugging.
“Remodelling, remember? The coffin beds had to go. And no one else but me sleeps here, so. Hazel has her own bed on the other side.”
He gestures to the other corner, where Hazel’s — smaller — bed sits, empty, coral pink comforter straightened neatly. Will barely even glances at it.
“What! But I thought you already renovated the beds —”
Will squints at him for a moment. Nico squirms, trying to hold his gaze. He’s not lying — they were temporary. Of course, he only made the decision that they were temporary a week ago, but. Well. Truth is truth.
Evidently, Will decides that he isn’t going to get a real answer out of Nico or he doesn’t care to get one, because he quickly turns away and, with a running start, jumps and sprawls himself on the gigantic bed.
“Oh, gods,” he groans, and oh, gods, indeed, is Nico ever going to get a fucking break or is his face just going to be stuck like this all the time. “Gods, Neeks, I am going to move in here. I don’t even — look! I can stretch all the way and I don’t touch the edge!”
“I see that,” Nico says weakly. His shirt has ridden up again. Nico bites back the confessing comment he wants to make about undershirts and how Will should invest in them.
“Man, I feel like I could pass right out,” Will sighs, eyelashes — they are so long and so blonde who decided that who gave him that right — fluttering shut. He grabs on of Nico’s pillows and curls around it, content. Nico stares. And stares.
After too much time has passed, Will cracks an eye open, smiling slightly. “Well, don’t just stand there, Death Breath. Bed’s more than big enough for us both, now. Get over here.”
Miraculously, Nico does, managing to unglue himself from the floor and look anywhere but the long, languid stretch of Will’s body.
(They play four straight hours of Mario Kart — or, rather, Will spends four straight hours losing. When they finally fall asleep, they’re so far apart on the giant bed they might as well be in different countries — but Nico wakes up in the middle of the night with his arms around Will’s waist, and practically throws himself on the ground for the rest of the night.)
The next thing he does is just…embarrassing.
“I think you look hot,” Mitchell, Piper’s brother, assures him kindly. He pats Nico’s flaming cheek. “Honest. And it’ll work wonders! Will’ll be struck.”
“Why do people keep saying that,” Nico croaks. “I don’t even like him!”
With Mitchell’s unwavering — if teasing — assurance, Nico finds the courage to step out of the Aphrodite cabin and into the waning sun. He’s grateful he waited until after the summer ended to do this — the fewer people around the witness, the better. His reputation is hanging on by a string as it is.
A wolf-whistle rings out the second he steps off the porch, making him scowl. Cecil, unfortunately, is far too used to being on the receiving end of it and does not even flinch.
“Looking spiffy, Ghost King!”
“Bite me,” Nico growls back, and is only aware of the trap he’s walked into when Cecil gleefully says, “I believe that’s Will’s job, actually —”
He wisely scampers away before the skeleton Nico summoned can murder him.
The second he’s out of sight, Nico slumps.
“Aw, jeez, aren’t you a sight for sore eyes! Lemme tell you the gar-bage I had to endure tod — Nico?”
Nico whips up to face the voice. Will stands a few feet in front of him, unmoving, wearing his scrubs today — heavily stained, yikes — and his favourite pair of ratty cargo shorts. The expression on his face is oddly inscrutable.
“Are you…going somewhere?”
“Yeah,” Nico says, flushing and repeating himself when his voice cracks three separate times. “Yeah, I’m. Um. Ambassador of Pluto duties, you know. I’m expected in New Rome in a couple hours.”
It’s not quite the truth — he is going to be in New Rome in a couple of hours, but his reason for being there is fabricated. Literally.
“I didn’t know you were visiting today.” Will steps forward, almost trance-like. His eyes are glued to somewhere around Nico’s chest, and he reaches out — hesitantly, although he’s never been hesitant to touch Nico in all the time he has known him — to brush his fingers over Nico’s collar. “This isn’t what you usually wear.”
Nico swallows. No, it is not. Usually, his Ambassador of Pluto uniform is his black toga. (It still is. If he was actually on duty and showed up in anything else, several Romans would have his head. Good thing he’s full of it.) But right now, he’s wearing a tailored, black silk suit made by hand by some dead Byzantine seamstress whose name Nico could not pronounce if he tried. Diamonds glitter in the lobes of his ears, freshly pierced, and his rings are more polished than usual.
“Special occasion today.”
Will doesn’t say anything for a long moment. His hand still curls at Nico’s collar, millimeters away from his neck, heat boring into his skin.
“You clean up nice.” An expression Nico can’t name flits across his eyes, and Nico’s breath catches, and then he’s grinning, too-wide and teasing, reaching up to dig a hand through his hair. “But maybe ditch the hair gel, Wilbur Robinson, and just let —”
“Gah! Get off of me! You’re the worst!”
Will stumbles back as he shoves him, weak from laughter, and Nico’s stomach flips.
The third thing is maybe the most ridiculous out of all of them — and almost gets him killed.
“I’m starving,” Will complains, apologizing to the random New Yorker who just walked into him. (Nico rolls his eyes. Will would get eaten if Nico wasn’t here — he is too soft for the city. He’s gonna get shoved into a puddle or something; he’s so unwilling to elbow his way through a crowd that Nico has to hold his hand so as not to lose him. Definitely not a city boy, that’s for sure.) “And we don’t have to meet Argus for another two hours — can we stop for food? I want something fried. Desperately.”
“I guess so,” Nico sighs, pretending to be more put-out than he is. Will doesn’t buy it for a second, rolling his eyes hard enough to hurt.
“C’mon, Nicholas Hoult. There’s gotta be a diner around here somewhere, and I still want to go shopping after this.”
He lets Will pull him around, even though they’d probably get somewhere faster if Nico leads. Will stops every three seconds to listen to a busker, or observe particularly interesting graffiti, or attempt to pet a pigeon. It shouldn’t be cute, it should be embarrassing because Will truly never gets out, but it is — endearing. A little. Even if Nico can feel his stomach eating itself.
Will brightens when he finally stumbles across some gaudy, mint-green painted, hole-in-the-wall family restaurant, beaming back at Nico like he won a sparring match rather than stumbled upon somewhere to eat. But his eyes are squished shut, the way they are when he’s genuinely excited, and some early January snow dusts his golden hair, and his nose is red from the cold, and it’s just —
They find a booth tucked in the back corner. Will slides in next to Nico, not across from him, and it makes him — flush, for some reason, cheeks glowing as bright as Will’s massive, dorky scarf.
The waitress brings them sodas. Nico doesn’t remember ordering them, but it’s cherry coke — his favourite — so he must’ve. Will has a water, because he’s annoying and pretentious, and he tries to blow his straw wrapper at Nico but he’s too fast and catches it. Will pouts.
He’s balled up the wrapper as tiny as possible and flicks it at Will’s face before he can stop him, except it hits him in the — eye, and Will shouts in surprise, and Nico jumps and rushes to apologise but he’s laughing too hard for it to be sincere, and Will scowls playfully at him, and Nico bangs his knee on the rickety table trying to move it and it only makes him laugh harder, and Will cracks soon, too. And he can’t sing for shit but his laughter is musical, low and baritone and a little raspy on the edges, like the country music he loves so damn much. And all the laughter gets sucked right out of Nico’s lungs as he watches him, bright-eyed, red-nosed and freezing, still wearing his stupid parka even though it’s barely below forty degrees, and he is suddenly achingly truly and obviously the most beautiful thing Nico has ever seen in his life, and he thinks oh, no. But it doesn’t hurt.
(After the diner, they go window shopping, and Nico feels like he can’t function. His chest aches with new knowledge that he doesn’t know where to put. New York air is disgusting but Will smells like eucalyptus and sunshine, always, and the look on his face when they pass a dusty antique shop is blinding. He’s rambling about old anatomy textbooks and gods knows what else and Nico nods along with a stupid, endless smile on his face that he couldn’t tamp down if he tried.)
(In the back of the shop there’s a big, ancient, beautiful mahogany desk. It has a divot for an inkwell and more drawers than Nico can count. It’s nine hundred dollars. Nico pulls out the credit card his father gave him for emergencies, buys it before Will can stop him, and shadow travels all three of them — himself, Will, and the unbelievably massive desk — back to Cabin 13, passing out immediately after to the sound of Will’s shout.)
(His father is the first thing he sees in his dreams, arms crossed, legs tapping.)
(“I believe I told you that card was for emergencies,” says the Lord of the Dead, “not crises over cute boys.”)
(“You were down so bad you kidnapped your wife instead of talking to her like a normal person,” Nico blurts, and immediately wishes he would melt into shadows.)
(He wakes up to another arms-crossed, foot-tapping figure: Will lectures him for two and a half hours. He times it.)
(But Will does all his paperwork in the Hades cabin, now, skin glowing amber under the Greek fire torches, often falling asleep on the smooth wooden surface. He hasn’t spent a night in the infirmary in months. Often, if Nico can wake him, he’ll crawl into Nico’s massive bed, curling all six-two of him into a ball around the centre and puffing tiny little snores into his pillow.)
(His cabin smells like eucalyptus and sunshine all the time, now.)
He tells himself that this will be his last thing.
It takes him four separate times to muster up the courage. It’s — humiliating, is what it is, and he’s never been a coward except for maybe about this one thing.
“Dude,” says Katie Gardener, the fifth time he walks by her cabin without saying something, “this is getting embarrassing. Pull yourself together.”
“I’m — pulled,” he defends, wishing he didn’t get red so damn easy. “And — what are you doing here? Aren’t you supposed to be at college, or something?”
“College ends in April, stupid,” she says, as if Nico has more than a fourth grade education and would somehow know that. He refrains from sticking out his tongue because that is Undignified, and clearly he is the more mature one of the two of them. “What do you need, flowers for Will or something? You don’t need to bother. He likes dandelions.”
“I know what flowers he likes,” Nico snaps, and wallows in immediate despair as she snickers. He should consider having Will remove whatever part of his brain is responsible for Stupid, Emotional Outbursts. Or just get a lobotomy. Whatever’s faster, honestly.
“Please don’t make me say it again,” he begs.
Perhaps college has somehow made her merciful — which he doubts, anyone who sustains a relationship with Travis freaking Stoll stopped worrying about mercy long ago — or perhaps he truly is that pitiful. But she relents, rolling her eyes and muttering something about stupid teenagers and refusal to communicate, blah blah blah. Nico knows he’s a mess. He would appreciate it if everyone else politely pretended he wasn’t. She comes back minutes later with a truly massive bucket of soil, a handful of gardening tools, and several packets of seeds.
“Well, you don’t have a lot of space for it, kid, seeing as your cabin is kind of tucked —”
“I want it on the roof,” Nico interrupts. He manages to keep his face in check. “Uh, that would make the most sense, anyways. It’s flat and I can get there easy and — yeah.”
She narrows her eyes at him. Years of Hermes cabin pranks have left her with a truly magnificent BS detector, but after a moment she sighs.
“Whatever, kid. Let’s go. Nothing will grow for a couple months, anyways.”
The last thing is what, eventually, gives him away.
The issue is that camp is crowded in the summer. And, really, he would have gotten it done in the spring, except he needed help — he needed an architect.
And he only really knew one, and her school year was kind of packed.
“You want,” says Annabeth slowly, “to entirely restructure your cabin.”
Nico squirms. “I just want to change the windows,” he mumbles.
She stares at him, fingers steepled, for what feels like ten solid minutes. At minimum.
“Kid —” Nico scowls, she is barely three years older than he is and technically almost a century younger — “installing floor to ceiling windows in your cabin will restructure it — entirely.” She pulls out a paper and pencil out of, as far as Nico can tell, absolutely nowhere, and begins to sketch. “There are foundations here, see? So everything has to be moved and reorganized to keep the structure standing. I can’t just, like…knock out the wall. It doesn’t work that way.”
Nico slumps. “So it’s not possible?”
“I didn’t say that,” she snaps, offended. “I just said it won’t be easy. Gimme a couple hours, I’ll have blueprints.”
She barely hears him as he thanks her, nose already pressed to the paper. Nico smiles at her anyway. She’s the best and brightest of them for a reason, after all, and he appreciates her help.
The walk back to his cabin is a surprisingly pleasant one. A lot of his friends (which, woah) are finally back, and Nico is realising he’s missed them, and it’s nice to see them again. It’s also nice to see camp as busy as it is, as much as he likes the quiet chill of the winter months. All the cabin doors are wide open as people sweep out the dust, shake out sheets, air out the staleness that has been locked inside some of them for months. Chatter fills every corner, and the air smells like strawberries.
His small smile widens as he approaches his own cabin — the flowers he and Katie planted a few months back have started to bloom, and with them comes the memory of Will’s gasping excitement when he’d seen them, the smile that lit up his face. They’re regular plants, but Katie — enchanted them, somehow, protected them; even when Nico is having his worst days, they don’t wither. (And they keep growing, too. Nico has taken to picking a flower every morning and leaving it in his (Will’s) desk — to brighten up the room, on paper, but the flower always ends up whenever Will is by the end of the day. (And, more often than not, tucked behind his ear, locks of golden hair caught among brightly coloured petals; a crown of his own making.)
The cabin is empty when he walks in, unsurprisingly considering how often Will is usually locked in the infirmary for the first week of camp.
(He’ll be back tonight, to do his paperwork before heading back to his cabin. Nico’ll have to be sure he actually makes it back to his cabin — Chiron has been turning a blind eye, because Will needs more sleep and Kayla and Austin can handle themselves, but the little kids need their counsellor. Well, most days.)
Nico stands in the door and realises: things have changed.
Maybe a silly thing to think. But — a year ago, this place was unliveable. Dark, and dreary, coffin-shaped and miserable, it was no wonder it had never felt like home. But the sight of Hazel’s bed (and the sketchbook she left on it last time she was here) fills him with warmth, and the windows are always open, now, so even the air feels lighter. Dozens of Will’s textbooks are strewn around the room, Lou Ellen’s jacket hangs on the back of the desk chair, a deck of cards is sprawled on the floor. A sun lamp is plugged into the wall. Nico’s giant bed is unmade. He’s got laundry peeking out of the closet doors, and he needs to clean his bathroom. A pair of obnoxiously patterned flipflops sit by the door.
It looks lived in. It looks like somewhere that can be lived in, and most of all, his friends — Will — have been living in it with him.
He swallows the lump in the back of his throat, stepping in and shutting the door behind him.
It takes him time to tidy up. He leaves Hazel’s sketchbook where it is, along with most of Will’s stuff — although he shoves a couple textbooks in random drawers when he trips over them. He puts the rest of his friends’ stuff by the door so he doesn’t forget to return it, and makes his bed (which, frankly, he hardly does, because it’s a massive pain — he tucks in one corner of the mattress cover and has to freaking summon Jules Albert to get to the other. But it was worth it). He barely makes it to dinner, too distracted to hear the horn.
“Finally,” bursts a voice sometime around nine, throwing open the door and flopping on the bed. Nico smiles, setting down his game and running light fingers through Will’s frizzy hair. He groans, leaning into it.
“I hate the first week of camp!”
Nico snorts. “No, you don’t.”
“Yes I do! It’s miserable! It’s all —” he contorts just face, mocking — “‘Will, do this.’ ‘Will, do that.’ ‘Will, I forgot how hard the climbing wall was and incinerated myself.’ ‘Will, we need you to treat the group of kids Clarisse beat up.’ Will, Will, Will! Constant!”
“How dare they take up all your time,” Nico says, grinning.
“Right! They should be less — I dunno, disastrous! I am one person! I can only be pulled in so many directions at once!”
Despite all his complaining, the slightest of smiles pulls at Will’s mouth — as Nico would expect. He’s exhausted and perpetually overworked, sure, but there’s nothing in the world Will relishes like being needed.
“I just —” He sighs, leaning further into Nico’s touch. Nico’s throat goes dry. “Man, I’m so glad we have this place to ourselves. It’s the only privacy I get. Sometimes I just wanna close the blinds and never come out, you know?”
“And it’s — nice, in here. Smells like you. And it just, well —” He smiles, broad and soft, and, suddenly, Nico understands his father on a level he never thought he would. If Will looked him in the eye and asked him for all the riches under the Earth, asked him to defy Zeus, asked him to rule the dead — Nico would bend time and space to do that for him. He understands, abruptly and wholly, why loving mortals ends in tragedy, why the gods promise more than they can give. He wants to give Will everything. “I like when it’s just you and me sometimes,” he says, softly. “It can be nice to disappear.”
There’s so much love bursting out Nico’s chest he doesn’t know what to do with it. He feels like every part of him is screaming his affection, every molecule is straining to meet with Will’s. He’s dizzy.
“I,” he starts, then freezes again. He doesn’t know what — what. Every thought he’s ever had hits him at once, and he can’t pick one out, can’t think with all the clutter in his head.
“I have to. Cancel. My plans. With Annabeth.”
There is something here, something charged, something about to change — and Nico is losing it. He panics.
“I asked her to restructure the cabin!” he shouts, startling Will. He squeezes his eyes shut instead of looking at those wide, wide blue eyes. “To! Make. Floor to ceiling windows.” He waits a bit. “Apparently you can’t just bust down the wall. You have to. Restructure.”
It’s silent for so long Nico is half-convinced Will left, if it weren’t for the faint sound of him breathing and the heat Nico can always feel leeching off of him. He peeks his eyes back open.
“Why?” asks Will quietly when their eyes meet.
Nico swallows. It takes several tries to moisten his throat enough to speak. “Why what?”
“Why do you want to…have floor to ceiling windows?”
“Same reason I wanted this massive bed,” he admits, quiet, whispering, near silent. “Same reason I — changed my Ambassador uniform. Same reason for the desk and the —” he stumbles over his words, blushing — “the garden and the flowers and — this, right now.”
“Nico,” says Will, very very quietly.
“I just. Well. You were joking, you know? And, gods, it’s been a year, now, but I think you were telling the truth? A little bit? And anyway, I want you to have the things you like, and —”
“Nico,” Will says again, louder this time, a particular quality to his voice Nico can’t name. He falters.
Nico doesn’t even have the chance to be offended. He doesn’t even have the chance to think. Before he can rationalize the situation and connect the dots in front of him, Will’s hands are sliding into his hair, his face is inches away, and then they’re kissing.
Will tastes like Blistex, like mint gum, and like the breath he sighs into his mouth. His eyes are closed, and for a full six seconds before Nico recovers enough to close his, he has the best view of his pale, fanning eyelashes that he’s ever seen — long enough to think: oh, this is a child of the sun. He smells familiar and — intoxicating. Nico never wants to know pure air again, never wants to move without the brand of Will’s over-heated hands on the back of his neck. Never wants to forget the rough scrape of Will’s chapped lips, the tiny little sounds and sighs he makes every time Nico moves their mouths, the slightest curl of his lips when he smiles, unable to hold it back. The rapid beat of his heart, pressed against his own chest.
“Nico,” he says again, slightly more urgent, pulling away just enough that their lips still brush every time he speaks, “Nico, I love you to death.”
“I would do anything for you,” Nico chokes out. He meets Will’s eyes and tries to — communicate it to him, tries to beam his thoughts into his head. “I would — move the moon and stars for you, do you understand that? Do you know how precious you are to me? My tesoro,” he says, feeling Will’s breath hitch. “Il mio cuore. Il mio cuore battendo, sole.”
For a second Nico frightens himself. He’s never spoken words like that to anyone in his life — not his mother, not Bianca, not Hazel, nobody.
But Will’s smile is radiant. And he still holds Nico, gently, and says over and over, “You are the best thing that has ever happened to me.”
Something slots back into place in his chest.
