Happy holidays, gwendolyn12! Sorry it's a little late, hope you still enjoy. I chose a couple of my favorite elements from your two wishes, so here's some Jason and Nico friendship and Nico and Hazel sibling interaction.
Leo’s idea of a birthday gift to Nico was a mechanical miniature skeleton that randomly burst into flames and chased the son of Hades up a tree, all while chanting “Happy 15th, or technically 81st” over and over.
“Oh, man, I’m so sorry, dude!” Leo groaned, smacking his forehead. “It wasn’t supposed to attack you, seriously! Here…just lemme…uh…” There was an explosion, and the boy was knocked backwards several feet, landing on his butt ungracefully like that guy in the viral Youtube video Percy had showed Nico earlier. After learning that di Angelo didn’t know what the website was, Percy had insisted on spending hours clicking through videos of cats doing weird things, Autotuned songs about certain days of the week, and strange dances nobody could really get the hang of.
“Thanks, I guess, Valdez, but next time can we just stick to the argyle socks and Hallmark cards?” Nico swung his legs over the branch, eyeing the charred ground with trepidation. Almost getting burned to death was not the best start to his fifteenth-or-eighty-first birthday by any means, but it still beat being teamed by both a gorgon and a hydra like last year. At least this time around he wasn’t almost-dyingin a painful way. It was nice to catch a break once in a while. (READ MORE)
“What are you guys up to?” came a new voice from behind the towering oak Nico was currently perched on. Oh, no. Suddenly he wished he was getting beaten up by the monsters instead. For the sake of Hades, why couldn’t he ever catch a break?
“J-man!” Leo cried. He was getting a habit of calling everyone “Frankster” or “the Hazelski” or something lame like that. Only Nico didn’t get a nickname, because even the kid who strapped Wii controls to a war ship wasn’t dumb enough to do that.
Jason Grace stepped into Nico’s line of vision, unfortunately. In the January sunlight, his blond hair gleamed. He was wearing an annoyingly worried expression, his brow furrowed and mouth in a grim slash. “You guys okay?”
“We’re fine,” Nico said loudly, when he really wanted to yell GO AWAY!
Jason was too perfect. He was too caring, too attentive, too everything, and Nico hated him for it. The son of Jupiter—Zeus now? Who knew?—was the only one who knew the secret. That was the worst part.
“You sure? I got you a birthday present…”
Nico dug his nails into his palms in frustration, but feigning indifference, he shrugged. “Oh. Okay.”
Jason produced a rectangular box wrapped in gold foil and shook it in what he must’ve thought was an enticing manner, but what really looked like his limbs had been electrocuted. “Come on, give it a chance.”
“Yeah, dude, I’m sure it’ll be almost as awesome as my gift,” Leo chimed in unhelpfully, rubbing soot off his nose.
Sighing dramatically so he would come off more upset than he really was, Nico pushed himself off the tree, landing hard on the balls of his feet.
“You might want to open mine in private,” Jason said, handing over the present.
Leo pretended to look hurt. “What is the big secret you’re hiding from the Super-Shizzle Valdez? Is it a secret unicorn diary filled with your rainbow macho doodles? Or a weapon of mass destruction that also happens to play Ping-Pong wicked well? Or—“
“Shut up,” Jason advised him.
“It’s cool, J-man, I was just leaving anyway.” Leo lightly punched the taller boy in the stomach and then strutted away in an exaggerated “haters gonna hate” fashion.
Rolling his eyes, Nico tugged at the tape on the foil. He wasn’t the kind to just rip open the gift, and being careful about preserving the wrapping was a good way to delay the actual realization of the present, since he was starting to get a bad feeling about what it was.
“Dude, stop stalling,” Jason said, just as the last piece of foil fell away.
Nico didn’t respond. He was too busy being speechless over what Jason had given him.
Once he had found his voice, he choked out, “You—you—a book—I’m dyslexic—and a book on how to—no way—I’m not going to—who do you think—“
“Hey, I flipped through it, there’s actually some really good tips in there,” Jason said, grinning. “You know. If I were into other guys.”
“I don’t like Percy that way anymore…!” Not one-hundred-percent true, but it was close enough. And anyway, it was pretty obvious Percy liked girls.
“So you can find yourself a new boyfriend,” Jason said, as if this actually made sense.
Suddenly, someone cleared their throat behind them. Both boys whipped around, Nico blushing furiously, Jason gone very pale.
Hazel Levesque stood there, arms crossed. She was holding a birthday present of her own, a candy-red bag that was luckily too small to hold a book.
Nico held his breath. How much of that conversation had she heard? He hadn’t told Hazel anything about his own romantic inclinations, too afraid she’d shun him—this kind of thing was a disease back in the ‘40s, after all—and he couldn’t risk losing the only person in the world he knew for sure cared about him.
But then she grinned and enveloped him in a warm hug with “Ha, like I didn’t see that coming, big brother,” and Nico decided that maybe he had gotten a break after all, just this once.
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