Sometimes Nico just sits.
Will, squirming, lets him.
“I don’t know what you’re hoping to find,” he admits, one day. The sun is out, but it is cold; Nico wears a sweater over his camp shirt, and had borrowed Will’s least offensive flannel. Goosebumped skin peels through the holes in his jeans. “On me, I mean.”
Nico blinks, slowly. His mouth is hidden in his arms, tucked into his bent knee.
He has huge, dark eyes. Brown, will supposes, but really they’re black; black like river mud, black like crumbling ash, black like polished stone. Black like the deep dark bottom of the well, so far down you can see yesterday’s reflection. Black like the stars so far up they blink at the child-age Earth.
“I’m not much,” Will explains, or tries to. His shoulders draw back like a string has been pulled between them, the hilt of his humerus brushing against the fleshy end of his earlobe. “To — look at, I guess. Or anything.”
Nico blinks. Will exhales, quick and sharp.
He’s itchy, he realizes, at the back of his neck and under his chin, heated blood churning and pressing until the skin bubbles with irritation, nerves sparking. He pinches at the side of his neck.
Nico hums again. There is the tiniest of separations, Will notices, between his pupil and his iris. Only if you — look. If you stare, searching for flakes of gold, of amber. They’re there. Will’s sure of it.
Nico reaches out, slowly. He waits for the weight of Will’s breath to return, for the pound of his heart to calm somewhere near normal; the tip of his fingertip is cool and rough, sword-rough, and in its tracing path across his nose and down the sides of his cheek leaves a trail of ice and pricking needles.
“You’re interesting,” says Nico, quietly. He pauses on the jagged, rounded scar off-centred on Will’s cheek, dug through two years ago, trying to piece together fragments of a skull. He presses his narrow fingertip into the outline, inspecting the contrast. “I like you.”
The coarse wind blows, and Will shivers. Nico’s steady shoulders twitch in the cold, and his finger moves with them.
There is no smile to be seen with half his face masked so tightly. But there is a flash in his sky-black eyes, like a strike of gilded lightning, like the flaming arm of solar flare; it burns, for a moment, in the dark space behind Will’s eyelids, and he takes the time to memorize it. To stick it in the walls of his memory, like glued-on attic wallpaper.
“Good.” He pulls back, tucking his hand back against the curve of his neck. He nods, once, graphing Will’s exhales “Good.”
